Hence the Mona Lisa represents everything that feminism cannot explain about woman’s carnal magnetism, which for millennia has fascinated or repelled men across the spectrum of sexual orientation. Mona Lisa’s silence is hypnotic and profound. She exists in another dimension, a twilight zone where anatomy is destiny. She is untouched by politics, careers, or social ambition.
Already renowned as a genius, Leonardo completed relatively few paintings. He was the prototypical Renaissance man with perhaps too many interests. His voluminous private notebooks were packed with botanical and anatomical drawings and with diagrams of mechanical devices real or fantastic.
The Mona Lisa, begun as a commissioned portrait in 1503, may be hauntingly juxtaposed to Leonardo’s shocking notebook sketch of a fetus huddled in the womb, from which the wall has been peeled like the skin of an orange. It’s as if Leonardo’s Promethean intellect could not bear the baffling complexity of female procreative power.
Certainly, the Mona Lisa obsessed its maker, who could not let it go. The monastic (and probably gay-tending) Leonardo worked on it for four years and then carried it with him to France, where he died in 1519 in the employ of the king. Hence the presence of this Italian masterwork in the former royal palace of the Louvre, where the Mona Lisa is exhibited like a holy monstrance to which pilgrims flock from all over the world.
The lady of the painting is placidly posed in what was then a conventional way: she sits in a carved armchair with her back to what was normally a window. But at some point Leonardo removed the framing wall, so that she seems enthroned on a high, exposed parapet.
Her rippling, silky garments are like a soft nest from which rises the white expanse of her plush maternal bosom. Her figure, with its decorously crossed hands, forms a stable pyramid, but there is something unsettling about the heavy, egg-like head, which, if one looks long enough, seems to detach itself and swivel on a serpent’s neck.
The Mona Lisa is subdued in color and misty with sfumato—the murky “smokiness” that Leonardo introduced to oil painting and that would spread to inky depths in Caravaggio and Rembrandt. Ambiguity cloaks the corners of the lady’s browless, bulging eyes and mouth, so we must wonder what she is thinking. She is literally and figuratively veiled.
This face with its penetrating stare and smugly suggestive smile appears again and again in Leonardo’s paintings—sometimes on women like St. Anne, the mother of Mary, and sometimes on men like Bacchus or St. John the Baptist. It may belong to the unwed peasant mother from whom the infant Leonardo was taken away, if we follow Freud’s inspired guesses about the artist’s tortured psyche.
The aesthete Walter Pater saw Mona Lisa as a “vampire,” a dark goddess who had lived many lives through history. Marcel Duchamp drew a Dadaist mustache on her to signal her androgyny and his patricide, the disdain of impatient young artists with the burden of the past.
That the Mona Lisa as a vision of woman is not wholly benign is shown by the stark moonscape of rocks and water that opens out behind her. She may be content, but she promises us no pleasure gardens of love. She is ripe and florid yet closed and ungiving.
And the painting’s distant horizon lines are oddly mismatched. Viewers who pause, transfixed, before this supreme European icon are subliminally feeling the ground give way, as they are propelled backward to the primeval, ruled by cruel mother nature.
* [The Sunday Times (U.K.), April 18, 1999. Several sentences deleted in print for space have been restored.]
43
PICASSO’S GIRL BEFORE A MIRROR*
Over the last twenty-five years, feminism has had a dual impact on the understanding and practice of art history. First, it has inspired a systematic effort to recover neglected female artists of the past and to focus special attention on those of the present. Second, it has subjected major male artists of the canon to a critical reassessment that makes gender issues central to their lives and work.
There is legitimate disagreement about the success of this enterprise. I feel that the hasty broadening of the canon, while laudably motivated, has too often produced an indifference to questions of quality, permanence, and historical accuracy. Furthermore, gender, however important, is not the ultimate determiner of art and thought, and it should not be used antagonistically and reductively to diminish great achievement. The ill effects of this latter feminist tendency can be seen in the shockingly widespread denigration of Degas, Picasso, and Duchamp, who have been labeled misogynist and overtly ostracized.
It is intolerable that a turbulent genius like Pablo Picasso, who is rivaled for invention and productivity only by Michelangelo in the history of world art, should be hauled up like a schoolboy and held to account for his untidy, bohemian sex life. Two hundred years ago, Romanticism definitively rejected the didactic neoclassical view that art must elevate and that the artist must set a moral example. Picasso’s gargantuan oeuvre demonstrates not that he hated and demeaned women but that he was awed by and obsessed with female sexual power, which he observes, engages, and transmutes in all its modalities from motherhood to prostitution.
Two works in particular express for me Picasso’s complex attitude of envy and admiration of woman’s daunting autonomy. As one of the avant-garde masterpieces of the century, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is familiar but still terrifying. In the pagan shrine of a brothel, five statuesque nude goddesses or priestesses, wearing tribal masks and staring blankly with cold, entranced eyes, welcome supplicant man into a fractured paradise garden of crystal shards and ashy fruit. Their breasts are hard and razor-edged, like armor plate; their legs are mannish and colossal, one a forbidding stump that seems part tenderloin, part cleaver. Low in the foreground looms, as a ruddy melon slice, the castrating blade of the crescent moon. This pleasure palace is a harem as inferno, from which no visitor escapes.
The second painting, Girl Before a Mirror (1932), has been widely reproduced but less discussed. Owned by the Museum of Modern Art, it has recently gained greater visibility through a somewhat free reproduction on imported coffee mugs. Since it shows woman not in her contemporary manifestation as successful careerist but rather in her most ancient archetype of solitary, pregnant divinity, we must wonder whether the painting’s emerging popularity is not partly due to dissatisfaction and fatigue with feminism’s increasingly strained redefinitions of gender.
Girl Before a Mirror is staged in another secret shrine, this time a boudoir where a woman, like Narcissus, gazes enamored at her own image in what seems to be a shadowy, rippling pool. The painting’s calm grandeur comes from Picasso’s conviction that he is apprehending woman’s essence, something that current social constructionism—the theory that we are totally shaped by our environment—denies has ever existed. But academic theory is often wildly removed from everyday human reality. I submit that Girl Before a Mirror does indeed capture something universal and eternal about woman, which feminism, if it hopes to prosper beyond the millennium, must more honestly acknowledge.
A specific woman is recognizable in this painting: the sharp, classical nose and very modern, blonde bob belong to Marie-Thérèse Walter, who became the married Picasso’s discreet mistress in 1927, after he spotted the athletic and voluptuous seventeen-year-old on a Paris street. We know her primarily from his many abstract, often convoluted paintings of her sleeping, as well as from a sculpture group of monumental archaic heads. Described as “sweet” and “placid,” Marie-Thérèse bore Picasso a daughter in 1935; her influence waned with the decade. Forty years later, she committed suicide.
Pablo Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror, 1932. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Girl Before a Mirror shows woman as Venus, Eve, Madonna, and witch. Creating and embracing her own reflection, she is like a painter gesturing toward an easel bearing an ovoid tondo rimmed with a rainbow. Behind her is a harlequin-pattern wallpaper, adorned not with the misty mauves of Picasso’s Rose Period but with
the garish, hallucinatory red and chrome-yellow borrowed from Gauguin by Matisse, who also likes to set his dreamy women against clashing decorative grids.
The patches, streaks, and halo of lime and apple-green represent the fertility of nature, also suggested by the dense, tapestry-like background. Picasso’s Eve is herself the tree of knowledge, her breasts and swollen belly hanging like heavy fruit. She has become her own god, to whom she offers ritual homage amid kaleidoscopic walls of stained glass, reminiscent of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. We see into the magic circle of her womb with the X-ray eyes of the artist, who, like every man, is in exile, doomed to hover at the periphery of woman’s solipsistic consciousness. For Picasso, even the sexually possessed woman is finally impenetrable.
The most stunning device in Girl Before a Mirror is the Cubist treatment of the face as sun and moon as well as evolving life phases. The cool, pure virgin becomes the mature, fleshy adult radiating sultry eroticism and daubed with rouge and mascara. Both see their future: a crone hooded in mourning violet and midnight-blue, Demeter weeping for lost Kore. The mirror as emblem of vanity is also a memento mori. The chalky, lidless skull of wintry mother nature is capped with a bloody shark fin, rising out of a Charybdis-like vortex of swirling waters.
The girl is garbed in a ribbed corset or flashy, flapper-era bathing suit. Its horizontal lines suggest both the layering of a landscape and the iron girders of a tower, which rises like an obelisk to a pyramid crowned with the mystic eye of the sun god. Her dark twin, with withered thorax and twiggy pubic pitchfork, also has a mystic eye or royal uraeus—a bulbous Spanish olive stuffed with pimiento, resembling both a bursting seed and fat male genitalia. Nature is shown as a self-regenerating cycle of birth and death. Woman clones herself. In this Annunciation, beneath a sliver of sky-blue window, woman originates, salutes, and accepts her biological destiny, spun out as a silky skein or web of arterial red draped across the picture.
As flat and ornamented as a Byzantine icon, Girl Before a Mirror is packed with mythological meanings and witty sexual puns. Feminism has yet to produce an artistic statement about woman equal to this in magnitude or poetic suggestiveness. Picasso’s fascination with women was deeply rooted: compare the multiple faces of this painting to his 1895 pastel and 1923 oil of his brunette mother, Maria, in right and left profile. Picasso’s blonde mistress had his mother’s name and his mother’s face, which ruled his inner world.
* [“Looking at Art: Picasso’s Women,” ARTnews, January 1996.]
44
MORE MUSH FROM THE NEA*
Last week, after Jane Alexander announced her resignation as its chairman, the National Endowment for the Arts released a 194-page report, “American Canvas,” summarizing her four trying years of stewardship.
With her intelligence and classy poise, Ms. Alexander won respect from both sides in the protracted congressional battle over whether the NEA would live or die. She made budgetary concessions and deftly defused tensions, notably by dropping grants to individual artists to avoid controversies like those over homosexual sadomasochism and sacrilege in the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.
Alas, “American Canvas” is a clumsy, incoherent document that casts doubt on whether Ms. Alexander or her staff ever fully grasped the deepest issues in the attacks on the NEA. As a cultural historian and arts educator who favors expanded government support of the arts, I am appalled by this mushy, meandering, and visually ill-designed report, which can only confirm the worst suspicions of the agency’s archconservative opponents.
By “American Canvas,” the agency appears to mean not an American art work but an American duffel bag or circus tent: its photograph of two children admiring their painted clown faces in a hand mirror at a Los Angeles arts festival demonstrates the kind of narcissism and fake populism that suffuse chatter about the arts in this country. Is recreational face-painting really the “cultural legacy” Ms. Alexander says we must “transmit” to the future?
Skewed summaries of the NEA report by The New York Times and The Washington Post took the politically correct party line that, in her tour of the fifty states and her six regional forums, Ms. Alexander had uncovered a pernicious elitism that separates artists from the communities they should serve.
This is sheer propaganda. The real problem facing the arts in America is not simply the dominance of mass media (which the report annoyingly sneers at) but the degeneration of standards in our Playskool model of primary education, in which everyone is an artist, without the discipline of technical mastery. Instead of protesting this feel-good relativism, Ms. Alexander endorses it (saying that we need “active participation rather than passive observation” in the arts)—which is exactly why she was never able to whip up public pressure on Congress.
The gravest problem with “American Canvas” is its cowardly refusal to engage the NEA’s fierce critics, who deserve to have their morality-based arguments fairly recorded, digested, and answered. Ms. Alexander has squandered a splendid opportunity to present a substantive apologia for the arts and their high meaning in history.
But her report speaks with a forked tongue. It pays lip service to homespun traditional values while pushing the usual limousine-liberal agenda of soggy multiculturalism or “diversity” by quota, without true scholarship. It calls for “lasting works of art” yet reduces art to everyday “self-expression”—including birthday parties!
The report claims on one page that the arts “embody family activities and values” and yet, twenty pages later, scornfully attacks “the tyranny of the majority” in Charlotte, N.C., where an arts council was denied public funds for “supporting homosexuality,” in a production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (which the report elevates to “masterpiece” status). Whether independent, commercially successful plays need government subsidies is not considered.
As a professional actress, Ms. Alexander may have been too drawn to a free-form, hand-holding, ensemble model of the arts and less sympathetic to the slogging, unglamorous mission of restoration and conservation of fine-art objects and anthropological artifacts, which most Americans would deem worthy of government support. The report pictures but makes only passing reference to an American Indian “Tsimshian longhouse” and “historic adobe churches,” which constitute our genuine national heritage.
The NEA got into trouble when it tried to underwrite original work by contemporary artists, selected by a cliquish, costly bureaucratic process. In a 1995 speech at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, another actress, Barbra Streisand, declared: “All great civilizations have supported the arts,” Well, yes and no. Great civilizations only support arts that celebrate their greatness. With their eyes on personal glory, the pharaohs and Medici princes sure weren’t commissioning “subversive” art.
Since Romanticism, much important art has been oppositional, critiquing political, religious, or artistic norms—which is why so many artists starved and won only posthumous fame. But let’s get real: no self-respecting avant-garde artist should be on the government dole. Hollywood liberals who support cutting-edge work should be putting their ample money where their mouths are by endowing private arts foundations.
The NEA must serve the citizenry as a whole and cease operating as a partisan political tool. This report is strongest when it promotes the role of the arts in both rural and urban renewal—as is shown in Philadelphia by Mayor Ed Rendell’s visionary plan for the Avenue of the Arts, where I teach.
But the report brazenly ignores the worst excesses of the art world—the cynical, university-bred jargon of post-structuralism and postmodernism, which has infected art magazines and exhibition catalogs and helped destroy public confidence in and appreciation of art. All of Jane Alexander’s roses can’t hide that skunk. In America, the Left as well as the Right—Stalinism as well as Puritanism—has abused art.
A better NEA strategy might have been to offer bol
d new proposals. For example, we need coast-to-coast educational radio stations devoted to classical music and jazz history. Aspiring young artists deserve college scholarships comparable to those given athletes. Economically disadvantaged students should be sent abroad on grand tours of European museums and archaeological sites in Mexico, Egypt, and India. Major folklore museums documenting American Indian culture must be built in every region of the country. Local libraries need massive revitalization and expansion as culture centers, sanctuaries from the mean streets and shopping malls.
The American people will support the NEA when the agency shows that it knows the difference between a wise investment and a politicized penny arcade.
* [Review of “American Canvas,” report by the National Endowment for the Arts at the departure of director Jane Alexander, The Wall Street Journal, October 24, 1997.]
45
DANCE: THE MOST FRAGILE OF THE ARTS*
What attitude does mainstream America have toward dance, and why should dance professionals care? As someone who monitors the media closely, I have become increasingly disturbed about the low reputation of the fine arts with the mass audience to whom the powerful medium of political talk radio caters. Conservative hosts and callers regularly deride modern art as a scam and dismiss artists as frivolous, elitist, immoral, sacrilegious, and anti-American.
These attitudes have real-life consequences when local or state governments curtail or cancel arts funding outright as a wasteful extravagance. Even in Philadelphia, with its resident symphony orchestra and ballet and modern dance companies, City Hall last year shockingly eliminated its Office of Arts and Culture. Nationally, there has been an alarming trend for the cutting of arts programs from public schools, which disastrously affects working-class students whose families cannot afford private lessons.
Provocations Page 36
