"L'élément fluid": Magnetism, Radioactivity and Hélène Dufau's Transformism

Amidst fiery debates in the Chamber of Deputies over the Separation of Church and State, French Fine Arts Director, Henry Marcel, commissioned Clémentine-Hélène Dufau and Ernest Laurent to paint four panels each for the Salles des Autorités at the New Sorbonne on art and science with no reference whatsoever to religion. Unlike Laurent's choice of Philosophy, Eloquence, History and the Poesie, Dufau chose to paint the new Republican religion of Science and more specifically, such Lamarckian disciplines as Geology and Zoology, as well as such Neo-Lamarckian ones as Radioactivity and Magnetism. While connoting interspecies relationships alongside hydrogeology, meteorology, volcanology and the environmental conditions conducive to universal attraction and spontaneous generation, in Dufau's panel coupling Radioactivity and Magnetism as a possible tribute to Marie and Pierre Curie, the male personification of Magnetism seems to be embraced by female Radioactivity engendering what Marie Curie called "radiation électromagnétique." Consistent with Lamarck's theory on the dynamics of fluids responsible for the transformation of living organisms, Dufau abandoned the defined contours and clear colour zones used for her posters and paintings of Feminisme, and regenerated bodies. Deploying a language of fluidity likened to that used in Albert Besnard's l'Electricité and his La Vie renaissant de la mort, critics singled out her vaporous atmospheres, prismatic light, refracted rays, "les forces radiantes de la nature" and "l'élément fluid" with forms appearing in a state of flux and metamorphoses just like Henri Bergson's "becoming". By focusing upon these panels at this polemical point in the Republican propagation of evolutionism, this paper will explore whether Dufau, like Besnard, developed a Transformist aesthetic in order to convey the tenets of Transformism.