Sunday, December 9, 2018

Women Variously Defined in Tangible Artifacts

Thomas Anschutz
A Rose
1907
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Anonymous Italian potter working in Viterbo
Jug with Finely-Dressed Woman
ca. 1430-40
tin-glazed earthenware
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Albert Bartholomé
The Artist's Wife Reading
1883
pastel
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"More perfectly than any other fairy-tale, Snow White expresses melancholy.  The pure image of this mood is the queen looking out into the snow through her window and wishing for her daughter, after the lifelessly living beauty of the flakes, the black mourning of the window-frame, the stab of bleeding, and then dying in childbirth.  The happy end takes away nothing of this.  As the granting of her wish is death, so the saving remains illusion.  For deeper knowledge cannot believe that she was awakened who lies as if asleep in the glass coffin.  Is not the poisoned bite of apple which the journey shakes from her throat, rather than a means of murder, the rest of her unlived, banished life, from which  only now she truly recovers, since she is lured by no more false messengers?  And how inadequate happiness sounds: 'Snow-White felt kindly towards him and went with him.'  How it is revoked by the wicked triumph over wickedness.  So, when we are hoping for rescue, a voice tells us that hope is in vain, yet it is powerless hope alone that allows us to draw a single breath.  All contemplation can do no more than patiently trace the ambiguity of melancholy in ever new configurations.  Truth is inseparable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come." 

– Theodor Adorno, from Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, published in German in 1951, translated by E.F.N. Jephcott and published in English in 1974

Franz Antoine
Young Woman in a Dotted Dress
ca. 1850-70
albumen silver print from glass negative
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Lorenzo di Credi
Portrait of a Young Woman
ca. 1490-1500
oil on panel
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Jacques-Louis David
Young Woman of Frascati
ca. 1775-76
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Anonymous forger of Johannes Vermeer
Young Woman Reading a Letter
ca. 1925-27
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Ancient Greece
Head of Aphrodite
3rd century BC
marble
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Govert Flinck
Young Woman as a Shepherdess
before 1660
oil on panel, transferred to canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Aubrey Beardsley
Young Woman Surrounded by Briars, Lightning, and Roses
(illustration for Le Morte d'Arthur)
1893
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

from Artist and Model

He will set her to work. She listens, stares,
Puts on the masks. Why not? the flesh
Accommodates, and welcomes home the wanderer.
All ports are one port; the door opens, the bed's
Page blank. Another mask. Another, here
In the cave where she remains to furnish
The world to her keeper's cell, subjects
For the endless busyness of mind and hand.
Smiling a myopic squint of mouth,
Taking his peek-a-boo of masks for
The gestures of her inwardness, confessions,
Expressions, and lays back her head
For abandon or tilts her elbow for offense . . .

– Irving Feldman, published in Poetry (1963)

Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier
La Capresse des Colonies
1861
marble and bronze
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier
The Jewish Woman of Algiers
1862
marble and bronze
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Léon Davent after Parmigianino
Young Woman in Antique Dress
1540
etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Edmund Charles Tarbell
Across the Room
ca. 1899
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Anonymous designer
Women's Government Relief Dress and Belt
1930s
cotton
Philadelphia Museum of Art