Gabrielle Petit

Yes! Someone made a nice bid for the marble fireplace I put on e-bay the other day. This is quite exciting, two more days to go. I also bid on some objects myself. I placed a bid on several postcards related to the First World War, a subject I am interested in professionally. My favourite war heroine, Gabrielle Petit (1893-1916), is on three of the cards. (http://www.ww1-propaganda-cards.com/gabrielle_petit.html).





She has a statue on the Place St. Jean in Brussels. The statue was erected in 1923. A friend / art historian who specialises in female sculptors, told me lately that Petit was probably the first contemporary woman to get a statue in Belgium. Only in 1923!! Imagine that! She's not a queen, nor a noblewoman.. just a poor shop assistant who happened to be shot by the Germans for alleged espionage! There's something curious about the postcards that were made of her statue in the 1920s. Several versions exists. Of course the picture is taken from more or less the same vantage point (people buying the postcards want to see her face, right - moreover, the buildings in the background ask for symmetry), but the background/foreground is different. Different people are standing around the statue to look at it - or to not look at it (in one postcard, there are no people in the picture). In one of the cards there's even some policemen safeguarding the statue. Some people are touching the statue, others are looking at it from a distance. On some postcards there's a flower piece at the foot (what may suggest the picture was taken at the inauguration or a special commemoration), in others there isn't. There's no objectivity here, the pictures always seem to tell more than they intend to. This is something I really want to look into. At first I thought statues could only be photographed in very similar ways, but thanks to my friend-art historian I'm starting to see the nuances.

Recently a Belgian writer, David Van Reybrouck, wrote a historical novel about the women who modelled for this statue. (as Gabrielle Petit was shot by the Germans in 1916, she couldn't model herself). The book is titled 'Slagschaduw'. I bought the book only last week, and I still have to read it. It promises to be another fascinating thing since the author mixes fact and fiction. Another issue I'm particularly interested in.