Padrão de Resposta

In The Smile Revolution in eighteenth-century Paris, author C. Jones considers how the display of teeth in Western portraiture made a brief appearance with Madame Vigée Le Brun’s work in 1787, but remained quite a minority taste until the Smile Revolution had been completed by the mid-twentieth century. According to Jones, this was a complex process involving both culture and science. While France led the first Revolution, the USA was in the vanguard of the later period.
Even though Le Brun ended the virtual prohibition of the display of teeth in portraiture, this practice did not have widespread influence at the time. There may have been some portraits of women, but it was considered inappropriate for men to show their teeth. The only movements that actually embraced the open mouth in their art were the expressionists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists, as an expression of either mockery or despair.
Le Brun’s work did help to make Mona Lisa’s smile popular, as it was considered a more gentle way of smiling. In Western Art, open mouths were associated with extreme passion, insanity or vulgarity, as is attested by Caravaggio’s paintings of social marginals. Queen Victoria was famous for her serious portraits, and the only painting in which she displayed her teeth was a personal gift to her husband, and remained private during her lifetime.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the display of teeth in portraiture started to emerge once again, especially in the work of female artists. Portrait photography was initially slower to adhere to the new fashion, mainly due to technical reasons pertaining to the time required for exposure, which prevented spontaneous smiles.
However, besides technological change, a cultural shift was also required. In the eighteenth century, the Smile Revolution was triggered by the cult of sensibility, whereby people wanted to identify with their heroes in the novels of the time. In the twentieth century, the emergence of film was crucial to encourage the process of identification with celebrities and the characters they portrayed. With Hollywood, the film industry started to promote smiling images of movie stars, which made the display of teeth more popular, until it became the norm. Nevertheless, this also led to a cultural reaction in the 1960s when postmodern artists such as Andy Warhol depicted the smiling figure as a replicable piece of art, questioning the taste and the appeal of mass art through satire.