Pissing Figures

Lebensztejn is one of France's best-kept secrets. A world-class art historian who has lectured and taught at major universities in the United States, his work has remained almost entirely in French, his American audience limited to a small but dedicated group of cognoscenti.

First introducing the Manneken Pis—the iconic little boy whose stream of urine supplies water to this famous fountain and is also the logo for a Belgian beer company—the author takes the reader through a semi-scatological maze of cultural history. The earliest example is a fresco scene located directly above Cimabue's Crucifixion from around 1280 at the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, in which Lebensztejn's careful eye locates an angel behind a pillar urinating through a hole in his garment. He continues to navigate expertly through cultural twists and turns, stopping to discuss Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1968 film Teorema, for example, and Marlene Dumas's 1996-1997 homage to Rembrandt's pissing woman. At every moment, Lebensztejn's prose is lively, his thinking dynamic, and his subject matter entertaining.

In this short and poignant cultural history, readers will not only find the care for detail that has made Lebensztejn into one of the greatest European art historians, but also the rebelliousness that makes him one of the most interesting intellectuals of our time.