Card Number 7, cut-out from banner advertising the Opera Gloves series (G29) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes 1885 - 1895

Curator: So, what do you make of this oddity? It feels Victorian-whimsical and unsettling all at once. Editor: A peculiar composition! The stark, glove-like form feels so imposing, especially contrasted against that delicately rendered portrait... Tell me more about the piece itself. Curator: We're looking at a cut-out from an Allen & Ginter cigarette advertising banner, dating somewhere between 1885 and 1895. It’s named “Card Number 7, cut-out from banner advertising the Opera Gloves series (G29)." It seems to be some sort of colored pencil and print combination. I think this particular advertisement lives at the Metropolitan Museum. Editor: Opera gloves! I see it now—the hourglass shape, the suggestive openings… Is that supposed to be flesh peeking through, implying bare skin beneath the glove? A daring little detail, really. And the color palette… almost a premonition of Art Nouveau in its delicate ornamentation. Curator: The juxtaposition is pretty heavy-handed, isn't it? A kind of fetishized presentation of upper-class women from the Gilded Age: contained and objectified simultaneously, almost a snuff card, like death being embraced by this fashion portrait. It is giving me some major side-eye here. I also note it’s from a cigarette company! Who decided to put a proper portrait in such close context to addiction, violence, death, cancer…? How very morbid! Editor: Morbid indeed! However, what about seeing this as more playful, rather than sinister? The miniaturized portrait seems less like a real woman, more of an icon – packaged luxury and refined beauty reduced to an consumable, purchasable image for the growing bourgeois. The gloves are but the holders for such. Curator: Interesting point. It certainly shifts my perspective on it. But that knowing gaze of the woman in the portrait keeps me hesitant. It feels like a winking subversion of those very values, packaged by and sold from these tobacco purveyors. Maybe there's just something inherently contradictory about the whole era that manifests itself perfectly here. Editor: Contradiction might be the key element. Looking at it one last time, what resonates most is that ambiguity between art and commodity. Something we're probably still grappling with today.