Witches and wicked bodies
Sept 4, 2013 1:38:43 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Sept 4, 2013 1:38:43 GMT -5
Greetings, once again, from kleines c. I trust that all is well with all of you. Writing in the FT, Rachel Spence reports that a Scottish exhibition revels in wickedness and grotesque taboos.
National Galleries Scotland - Modern Two (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art) - Witches & Wicked Bodies
From a feminist perspective, the news that John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia” and John William Waterhouse’s “The Lady of Shalott” came top in the recent poll of favourite British masterpieces was disappointing. The fact that these two hapless women – one of them dead, the other headed that way, both felled by unrequited love – captured the nation’s heart suggests that passivity is still a vote-winner when deciding who’s the fairest of them all.
The exhibition about witches at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is in essence a voyage through male titillations and terrors. But it was impossible not to feel cheered by such a panoply of women, proud in their perversity and uniformly potent, especially as the final section unveils the female artists – Kiki Smith, Paula Rego, Ana Maria Pacheco – who have reclaimed history’s most persistent bad girl for their own. Rachel concludes thus:
FT - ‘Witches and wicked bodies’, Edinburgh
I propose some toast: to witches, wicked bodies and all of you! Three cheers from kleines c and the gang (whatever you are drinking)!
National Galleries Scotland - Modern Two (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art) - Witches & Wicked Bodies
From a feminist perspective, the news that John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia” and John William Waterhouse’s “The Lady of Shalott” came top in the recent poll of favourite British masterpieces was disappointing. The fact that these two hapless women – one of them dead, the other headed that way, both felled by unrequited love – captured the nation’s heart suggests that passivity is still a vote-winner when deciding who’s the fairest of them all.
The exhibition about witches at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is in essence a voyage through male titillations and terrors. But it was impossible not to feel cheered by such a panoply of women, proud in their perversity and uniformly potent, especially as the final section unveils the female artists – Kiki Smith, Paula Rego, Ana Maria Pacheco – who have reclaimed history’s most persistent bad girl for their own. Rachel concludes thus:
" ... As a champion of Enlightenment clarity, Goya scorned the witch as a figment of fevered Catholic imaginations. Yet he still painted terror with medieval glee. On loan from London’s National Gallery, his oil painting “A Scene from the Forcibly Bewitched” (1798) shows a cleric who has stumbled into a witch’s bedroom frantically lighting his lamp while demonic donkeys rear out of the dark behind him in a spooky medley of white-tipped noses and blade-sharp hooves.
One possible danger when feminism reclaims the figure of the witch is that irony cancels out the shiver factor which is essential if the politics are to catch fire. Paula Rego never falls into that trap. Her etching “Straw Burning”, from the Pendle Witches series (1996), inspired by Blake Morrison’s poetry cycle about the 17th-century Pendle witch-hunts, figures a stocky, stiletto-wearing bride about to be consumed by flames as her occult menagerie dances around her.
Rego, the Portuguese-born heiress to Goya’s ambiguous Iberian darkness, scratches and shades her heroine with a graphic majesty to rival her predecessor. The bride may be doomed but her dark arts will live on in those devilish creatures."
One possible danger when feminism reclaims the figure of the witch is that irony cancels out the shiver factor which is essential if the politics are to catch fire. Paula Rego never falls into that trap. Her etching “Straw Burning”, from the Pendle Witches series (1996), inspired by Blake Morrison’s poetry cycle about the 17th-century Pendle witch-hunts, figures a stocky, stiletto-wearing bride about to be consumed by flames as her occult menagerie dances around her.
Rego, the Portuguese-born heiress to Goya’s ambiguous Iberian darkness, scratches and shades her heroine with a graphic majesty to rival her predecessor. The bride may be doomed but her dark arts will live on in those devilish creatures."
FT - ‘Witches and wicked bodies’, Edinburgh
I propose some toast: to witches, wicked bodies and all of you! Three cheers from kleines c and the gang (whatever you are drinking)!