Others were silly teenagers who had associated with German soldiers out of bravado or boredom. A large number of the victims were prostitutes who had simply plied their trade with Germans as well as Frenchmen, although in some areas it was accepted that their conduct was professional rather than political. Many French people as well as allied troops were sickened by the treatment meted out to these women accused of collaboration horizontale with German soldiers. In Villedieu, one of the victims was a woman who had simply been a cleaner in the local German military headquarters. In Cherbourg on 14 July, a truckload of young women, most of them teenagers, were driven through the streets. In mid-June, on the market day following the capture of the town of Carentan, a dozen women were shorn publicly. Once a city, town or village had been liberated by the allies or the resistance, the shearers would get to work. This "ugly carnival" became the pattern soon after D-day. There was a strong element of vicarious eroticism among the tondeurs and their crowd, even though the punishment they were about to inflict symbolised the desexualisation of their victim. And threats of head-shaving had been made in the resistance underground press since 1941. In Brittany it is said that a third of those civilians killed in reprisals were women. Yet resistance groups could also be merciless towards women. Quite a few had been petty collaborators themselves, and sought to divert attention from their own lack of resistance credentials. But many of the tondeurs, the head-shavers, were not members of the resistance. It may seem strange that head-shaving, essentially a rightwing phenomenon, should have become so widespread during the leftist liberation euphoria in France in 1944. (The most famous victim in fiction is Maria, the lover of Robert Jordan in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.) Those on the extreme right had convinced themselves that the left believed in free love. And during the second world war, the Nazi state issued orders that German women accused of sleeping with non-Aryans or foreign prisoners employed on farms should also be publicly punished in this way.Īlso during the Spanish civil war, Falangists had shaved the heads of women from republican families, treating them as if they were prostitutes. After French troops occupied the Rhineland in 1923, German women who had relations with them later suffered the same fate. Shaving women's heads as a mark of retribution and humiliation was reintroduced in the 20th century. During the middle ages, this mark of shame, denuding a woman of what was supposed to be her most seductive feature, was commonly a punishment for adultery. In Europe, the practice dated back to the dark ages, with the Visigoths. The punishment of shaving a woman's head had biblical origins. It is impossible to forget Robert Capa's fallen-Madonna image of a shaven-headed young woman, cradling her baby, implicitly the result of a relationship with a German soldier. These show the fate of women accused of "collaboration horizontale". But among the cheering images there are also shocking ones. This success was replicated in Paris, where the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale was headlined by Germaine Richier’s L’Echiquier.T he 65th anniversary of the D-day landings this week is an occasion to revisit joyful pictures of the liberation of France in 1944. The excitement continued into the first week of July, where the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale achieved outstanding results in London, including for Aboudia’s Untitled - setting a world auction record for the artist. Continuing the following day with exceptional works and results, the Impressionist and Modern Art Day and Works on Paper Sale was led by Paul Gauguin’s Vue de Rouen. Followed by the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale and 20th/21st Century: Paris Evening Sale, outstanding results were achieved by Claude Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, effet de brume and Nymphéas, temps gris, Yves Klein’s 1960 Anthropométrie de l’époque bleue (ANT 124) and Sculpture éponge rose sans titre, (SE 207), Jeff Koons’s Balloon Monkey (Magenta) and Pierre Soulages’ Peinture 143 x 202 cm, 4 décembre 1970, amongst other remarkable works. In celebration of the cultural dialogue between London and Paris, the headline auctions led the series on 28 June, starting with Marc Chagall, Colour of Life: Works Formerly from the Artist’s Estate – where several of the fresh-to-market works soared far above their high estimate. This June, 20th/21st Century: London to Paris sales achieved a combined total of £252,508,225 / €292,400,126 across live and online auctions.
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