• By CAROL ANNE BLITZER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jan 26, 2009 - Page: 1D - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Adelaide Russo is fascinated by comparisons.

The LSU professor of French studies and comparative literature has spent a good part of her academic career studying comparative relationships.

Her most recent comparative project is a book, “Le peintre comme modèle du surréalisme à l’extrême contemporain” (“The Painter as Model: From Surrealism to the Extreme Contemporary”).

The book, which examines the relationships between French poets and visual artists of the late 19th century and the 20th century, earned Russo the 2008 Modern Language Association’s 16th annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Literary Studies.

The association describes itself as “the largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities.” The purpose of the organization, established in 1883, is to promote “the advancement of literary and linguistic studies.”

Russo’s book is one volume in a series by different authors called Perspectives published by Septentrion.  Books in the collection are devoted to interdisciplinary studies on 20th-century literature.

From reading and research, Russo came to realize that many of the French poets of the period covered in the book had also written significant art criticism.

“At this time in history, France was in the forefront of the visual arts,” Russo said. “I had done a lot of work on surrealism. I discovered that the surrealist poets, every one of them, had an interest in the visual arts.”

The book actually developed from an essay Russo had written on the writer Michel Leiris, who in his autobiography describes his experiences as a spectator.

Leiris had seen one of the first performances of “Parade,” a famous French ballet that premiered in Paris in 1917. The costumes and sets were designed by the artist Pablo Picasso.

Picasso’s backdrop was a painting that depicted a Pegasus character in the ballet in two different ways — as the strong mythological winged creature and as a scrawny, weak version. The dancers portrayed both characters in the ballet.

“As Leiris viewed the ballet, he was projecting an image of himself into the figures of this painting,” Russo said. “What he wanted to be was a great winged horse. What he saw himself as was the broken down old creature on the stage.”

Russo said that she realized that what Leiris was doing was exactly what a figurative painter did when he attempted to reproduce a model. “It always produced a sort of third thing,” she said.