The Original Sexy Beast

There are also pieces that belong in the show only by poetic association. There are neo-classical late 19th-century canvases—Young Hercules Drawing His Bow by Toussaint Dubreuil—along with a skull of the notorious fake Piltdown Man, for instance. There are copies of She and King Solomon’s Mines by that other jungle fabulist, Rider Haggard, references to Walt Disney’s Jungle Book, Peter Jackson’s King Kong and a poster for La Belle at la Bete at the Folies Bergeres.

Yes, the language of the texts is sometimes overexcited—Tarzan is an ancient hero. He is the brother of Hercules and the stepbrother of Romulus and Remus—and Boulay is not exactly inventing the wheel when he makes the case that pop culture, OK low culture if you like, at its most powerful draws on the well as high culture. But it is an exhilarating, if giddying show. And the visual evidence he has assembled includes such great stuff as an ad for Lavazza —The Italian Espresso Experience, which channels the aforementioned Romulus and Remus; a sequence showing Marlene Dietrich emerging from a chunky gorilla suit in Blonde Venus; and a 2009 spot for Guerlain’s L’Homme, in which we see quick cuts of a tiger, a lion, an ape, and a creeper-ready jungle guy. This happens to be by Jean-Paul Goude, the designer, who shot a picture of disco diva Grace Jones for New York magazine in 1978 which turned her into a gay icon, and that was when Manhattan truly was a “stone jungle.”

Toward the end of the show, Boulay, clearly not one to miss a trick, pays tribute to Green Tarzan. Nor is this a flight of fancy. In one of the movies he protects the elephants from creepy white hunters. “Tarzan is set up in contradiction to the idea of a lion tamer,” Boulay says. “He has a real relation. He doesn’t hunt for pleasure.” Or as one of the wall texts puts it: Of all the superheroes Tarzan is the one with the greatest power to save the planet. High, low, this is no time to be choosy.

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Anthony Haden-Guest writes a weekly column on art collecting for the Financial Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Times (London), and many other publications. He is the author of several books, including True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World. He lives in New York and London.