Day one of Fridays at the MAM was all about Women of Interest.
My husband, Adam, and I got there right as they opened at 10am. We were alone in this fleeting hour snatched away from our children, our lives, and our piles of work.
I love everything about the museum, including the parking garage:
I love the feeling of driving into the belly of a whale (which is what the architect was going for). I love the soft lights and arching ribs. I love parking our gray minivan in a spot near the door of the museum. But all of that is just prelude. As soon as we step inside, I catch my breath. I love the coils of white marble that curve into circular staircases. I love how my boots sound on the marble as we ascend to the ticket counter. I love the quirky art students, with their short-short bangs, black glasses, and serious eye liner who scan my membership card and give me an admission sticker. I love that moment right after we get our stickers, when we turn away from the counter and pause. This unspoken moment of "what next?" can determine the whole tenor of my day. Inevitably, I look up.
And that is a step in its own way. I am instantly reminded of cathedrals, skyscrapers, and ambition. I am reminded of sky, steel, and my love of Ayn Rand heroes as a teenager all at once.
"I want to go in there," Adam tells me, pointing to the feature exhibition, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: The Treasures of Kenwood House, London. And, so we step out of cathedral space and into gallery space.
The art in this exhibition is really more Adam's wheelhouse than mine- he likes sweeping pictures of ships, columns, and other Neo-classical type art (this is the man who wants to build follies in our backyard someday, sigh).
I like the dark corners where history, art and literature intersect. Here's a good example: This is a painting by Anthony van Dyck, of Princess Henrietta of Lorraine with a page (1634). Princess Henrietta of Lorraine Attended by a Page, 1634 Oil on canvas.
Not my favorite painting, with all its overt and weird race and class elements (and remember what I was saying about short-short bangs?), but what peaks my interest is this fact: this painting was owned by the unlucky Charles I. When he lost his head in 1649, this painting disappeared. According to the card at the exhibit it was not acquired by the Kenwood House until the late 19th century. So my question: where was it? Who was holding on to this giant painting while Parliamentarians called for the blood of royals in the 17th century? Where did it go in the time after the Restoration? Did playboy Charles II bring it back? (I can't imagine him loving this one). Who had it? What basement/attic/back room was it hanging in before it emerged as a star of the exhibition?
Besides these dark corners, I am also always drawn to people on the margins of society. Like prostitutes. I love paintings of prostitutes because of the unique place they held in society. Because of the risks they could take. Because of the dare they offered. Take Kitty Fisher for example. It was Kitty's beauty that caught my eye, but her allegory that made me pause. This is famous courtesan, Kitty Fisher, painted as Cleopatra, by Joshua Reynolds.
In this painting, she's dropping a pearl in wine, just like histories most dangerous Cleopatra did.
Here's the legend according to the British Museum: "As the story goes, Cleopatra invited Mark Antony to compete with her in providing a banquet, boasting that whatever he spent she would outdo him. When it came to her turn, Cleopatra simply removed a splendid pearl earring and tossed it into a goblet of wine in front of her. According to Pliny, the pearl magically dissolved in the wine, which Cleopatra then drank. But for the protests of the onlookers, including Mark Antony's, she would have followed with the pair, which, like the first, was worth 100,000 sesterces." (http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/online_tours/egypt/cleopatra_history_to_myth/william_kent_after_carlo_marat.aspx))
As I look at this painting, I'm also reminded of Emile Zola writing about Nana:
"Thereupon Nana became a smart woman, mistress of all that is foolish and filthy in man, marquise in the ranks of her calling. It was a sudden but decisive start, a plunge into the garish day of gallant notoriety and mad expenditure and that daredevil wastefulness peculiar to beauty. She at once became queen among the most expensive of her kind. Her photographs were displayed in shop windows, and she was mentioned in the papers. When she drove in her carriage along the boulevards the people would turn and tell one another who that was with all the unction of a nation saluting its sovereign, while the object of their adoration lolled easily back in her diaphanous dresses and smiled gaily under the rain of little golden curls which ran riot above the blue of her made-up eyes and the red of her painted lips. [...} There was a nervous distinction in all she did which suggested a wellborn Persian cat; she was an aristocrat in vice and proudly and rebelliously trampled upon a prostrate Paris like a sovereign whom none dare disobey. She set the fashion, and great ladies imitated her."
Emile Zola, Nana, Chapter X.
Here's E. Manet's 1877 Painting of Nana, just for some cross-talk between these works:
***
As I turned away from Kitty Fisher and thoughts of Nana, a girl in the gallery caught my attention.
She was young, lovely, and wearing a shockingly inappropriate (for 10am) skin-tight, off the shoulder black elastic dress with slouchy boots. It was just enough on the side of revealing that it made me pause. She was clearly not a prostitute, but in every way she was Kitty Fisher or Nana reincarnated in a time and place where she could dare to wear what she wanted. It amused me to no end to see this girl-- did she know she was being watched?-- pause in front of the mirrored vanity that marked the transition into the exhibition gift shop. As she stood in front of the mirror, she let her hair down from a ponytail, and shook it out. She turned her profile from side to side and preened, oblivious to the old man shuffling past her. She was totally caught up in her own reflection until we walked past, and her eye caught mine as she glanced quickly at Adam.
I longed to capture this moment of life and art reflecting each other (sorry for the mirror pun), but the moment passed almost as quickly as we did. She turned back to the mirror, we turned away from the trinkets in the gift shop.
***
With only 20 minutes left of our Friday at the MAM, we ambled and stumbled into something we didn't even know we were looking for. There's an "Art goes to the Movies" exhibit at the MAM, which I wanted to check out for a friend whose Aspegian 2nd grader with is determined to be an animator.
There we found the last and darkest of the day's Woman of Interest; one of my earliest favorite, marginal, misunderstood women: Maleficent.
As in Disney's dark villainess from Sleeping Beauty. Just the way her name rolls off my tongue delights me. When I was a girl-child, she was my favorite anti-princess.
Poor girl, all she ever wanted was to be invited to a party. She didn't get what she wanted, so she took action. She used her brain to think of a curse that was bound to ensnare; she gathered her minions (goblins whose inspiration was the fevered imagination of painter Hieronymus Bosch); and then she retreated to her fortress to listen to Beethoven's 9th (as a child, this was the music of darkness to me because of this movie) brood, and practice turning into a dragon. Badass.
I love all the pointy angles in this sketch-- from Maleficent's chin, to her horned hat (which is distinctly devilish compared to the heart-shaped versions of this medieval hat), to the angles of her clothing.
Clearly this is a woman with edges. Beware.
And we'll end the first Friday there. With the knowledge that in times gone by, Women of Interest were prostitutes or witches (as Bettleheim or anyone who studies fairy tales has pointed out).
Women on the margins are dark, dangerous, daring creatures. They steal hearts, they are beautiful, they are sharp. They wound.
And I am entranced by their narratives every single time.
See you next Friday.
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