Women, Aging, and Art: A Crosscultural Anthology 9781501349409, 9781501349430, 9781501349423

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Illustrations
Plates
Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Introduction
Notes
Chapter 2: Alchemy’s Old Wives
Notes
Chapter 3: Silenced, Sidelined, and Even Undressed: Old Women in Seventeenth-Century Religious Art
The Gradual Demotion of a New Testament Prophetess
Old Sibyls Outnumbered as Well as Outlasted by Young Ones
Naked Heresy
Notes
Chapter 4: Anger, Envy, and Aging: Early Modern Transgressive Old Women
Notes
Chapter 5: Frans Hals’s Portrait of an Older Judith Leyster
Notes
Chapter 6: Old Maids: Images of Elderly Servants in Early Modern Europe
The Tichborne Dole
John Riley’s Bridget Holmes
Katherine Elliot
Alice George41
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 7: Portraits of Power: Masks of Northwest Coast Matriarchs in the Nineteenth Century
Haida Contexts
Women and Haida Worldviews
Masks and Masking Practices on the Northern Northwest Coast
Historiography of Haida “Labret” Masks
Ceremonial Masking Practices
Portrait Masks
Jenna Cass/Jilaa Quns
Early Fur Trade on the Northwest Coast
St’iitga (Labret)
Women in Trade
Portraits of Power
Notes
Chapter 8: Paetini and Vaekehu: Change and Aging in the Portraits of Marquesan Matriarchs
Paetini
Vaekehu
Notes
Chapter 9: Old Woman/New Vision: Lucia Moholy’s Photographs of Clara Zetkin
Notes
Chapter 10: Sculptor, Hostess, Witch: Louise Nevelson’s Boxes
Notes
Chapter 11: Museums and the Missing Women of Sande
Masks and the Mutilation Debate
The Women and Art of Sande
Initiation in Exhibitions
So Where Are the Old Women?
Absent Bodies, Missing Stories: The Colonial Legacy
The Contemporary Exhibition: Why FGM Belongs in the Art Museum
Solutions?
Notes
Chapter 12: Aging and Feminist Art: Joan Semmel’s Visible Bodies
Notes
Chapter 13: Darkness of Girlhood and Lightness of Aging: Miwa Yanagi’s Transcendental Old Women
Introduction
Dichotomous and Circular Womanhood: Young and Old
Darkness of Girlhood and Lightness of Aging
Performing Old Women
Epilogue
Notes
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Women, Aging, and Art

Women, Aging, and Art A Crosscultural Anthology Edited by Frima Fox Hofrichter and Midori Yoshimoto

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States 2021 This paperback edition first published 2022 Selection and editorial matter © Frima Fox Hofrichter and Midori Yoshimoto, 2022 Individual chapters © their authors, 2022 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover Image: Semmel, Joan, Transitions, 2012, oil on canvas, 70 x 90 in. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York © Joan Semmel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hofrichter, Frima Fox, editor. | Yoshimoto, Midori, editor. Title: Women, aging, and art: a crosscultural anthology / edited by Frima Fox Hofrichter and Midori Yoshimoto. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020037938 (print) | LCCN 2020037939 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501349409 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501349416 (epub) | ISBN 9781501349423 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Older women in art. | Aging in art. Classification: LCC N7630 .W664 2021 (print) | LCC N7630 (ebook) | DDC 700/.4522–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037938 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037939 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4940-9 PB: 978-1-5013-7939-0 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4942-3 eBook: 978-1-5013-4941-6 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.



Dedicated to all the young women who may be anxious about wrinkles and to all the old women who know better

Contents List of Illustrations viii Preface xi Acknowledgments xiii

1 Introduction  Frima Fox Hofrichter and Midori Yoshimoto 1 2 Alchemy’s Old Wives  M. E. Warlick 17 3 Silenced, Sidelined, and Even Undressed: Old Women in 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Seventeenth-Century Religious Art  Zirka Z. Filipczak 35 Anger, Envy, and Aging: Early Modern Transgressive Old Women  Jane Kromm 49 Frans Hals’s Portrait of an Older Judith Leyster  Paul Crenshaw 63 Old Maids: Images of Elderly Servants in Early Modern Europe  Diane Wolfthal 73 Portraits of Power: Masks of Northwest Coast Matriarchs in the Nineteenth Century  Megan A. Smetzer 89 Paetini and Vaekehu: Change and Aging in the Portraits of Marquesan Matriarchs  Carol Ivory 105 Old Woman/New Vision: Lucia Moholy’s Photographs of Clara Zetkin  Vanessa Rocco 121 Sculptor, Hostess, Witch: Louise Nevelson’s Boxes  Johana Ruth Epstein 135 Museums and the Missing Women of Sande  Susan Kart 149 Aging and Feminist Art: Joan Semmel’s Visible Bodies  Rachel Middleman 167 Darkness of Girlhood and Lightness of Aging: Miwa Yanagi’s Transcendental Old Women  Midori Yoshimoto 183

List of Contributors Index

199 202

Illustrations Plates 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Hans Baldung Grien, The Ages of Woman and Death (detail), c. 1541–4 Nicolaes Maes, Old Woman Asleep, c. 1655 “Harvesting Spinach” from Tacuinum Sanitatis, late fourteenth century Alvaro Pirez, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, early fifteenth century Fra Bartolomeo (Baccio della Porta), Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 1516 Peter Huys, Enraged Woman, c. 1570 (a) Frans Hals, Portrait of a Painter (Jan Miense Molenaer?), c. 1652. (b) Frans Hals, Portrait of a Woman (Judith Leyster?), c. 1652 Gillis van Tilborgh, Tichborne Dole, 1671 Swabian, Birth of the Virgin Kaigani Haida artist Mask, carved ca. 1825 Louise Nevelson and Moon Garden, New York, 1958 Mende people, Sowo-wui, dance mask (ndoli jowei) of Ligba rank, midtwentieth century Joan Semmel, Recline, 2005 Joan Semmel, Flesh Ground, 2016 Miwa Yanagi, My Grandmothers: Mika, 2001 Miwa Yanagi, Café Rottenmeier, during Festival Tokyo, 2010

Figures 1.1 Ancient Rome, Statue of an Old Woman, 14–68 CE 1.2 Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, c. 1599 1.3 Hans Baldung Grien, The Ages of Woman and Death (detail), c. 1541–4 1.4 Nicolaes Maes, Old Woman Asleep, c. 1655 1.5 Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Barbara Holper, the Artist’s Mother, 1514 1.6 Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Bourgeois, 1982 1.7 Mary Beth Edelson, Some Living American Women Artists, 1972  1.8 Faith Wilding, Waiting, 1972 2.1 “Harvesting Spinach” from Tacuinum Sanitatis, late fourteenth century 2.2 “Woman Distilling Plant Essences,” title page from Michael Puff von Schrick, Von den gebrannten Wassern (Strasburg, 1474)  2.3 “Three Women Distilling Herbal Remedies” from Stefan Falimirz, O Ziotach i o moczy gich (Crakow: Florian Ungler, 1534) 

xiv 3 4 5 7 10 11 11 16 22 23

 Illustrations ix 2.4

“Gathering Plants and Distillation in a Garden” from Hieronymus Brunschwig, Medicinarius (Strasburg: J. Grüninger, 1512)  2.5 Baldung workshop(?), “Three Female Witches,” from Hieronymus Brunschwig, Das Buch zu Distillieren (Strasburg, J. Grüninger, 1519) 2.6 “Two Witches Brewing” from Ulrich Molitor, De laniis et phitonicis mulieribus (Strasburg: Johann Prüss, 1489)  3.1 Alvaro Pirez, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, early fifteenth century  3.2 Fra Bartolomeo (Baccio della Porta), Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 1516  3.3 Philippe de Champaigne, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 1648  3.4 Agostino Duccio, Cumaean Sibyl 3.5 Anonymous, Heresia in Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, 1603  3.6 Jan Baptiste Collaert, after Peter Paul Rubens, “Allegory of Church History,” title page for F. Labata and G. Stanyhurst, Thesaurus moralis (Antwerp, 1652)  4.1 Attributed to Hendrik Goltzius, Labyrinthe of Errant Spirits (Den doolhof van de dwalende gheesten) (Jan Cloppenburgh, Amsterdam, 1610)  4.2 Jacques Callot, Avaritia, The Seven Deadly Sins series, c. 1618–25  4.3 George Glover, Avaritia, The Seven Deadly Sins series, 1625–35  4.4 George Glover, Invidia, The Seven Deadly Sins series, 1625–35  4.5 Peter Huys, Enraged Woman, c. 1570  4.6 George Glover, Choller, from The Fowre Complexions, c. 1630  4.7 Frederik Bloemart, after Abraham Bloemart, Het Tekenboek, pl. 103, 1650–6  5.1 (a) Frans Hals, Portrait of a Painter (Jan Miense Molenaer?), c. 1652. (b) Frans Hals, Portrait of a Woman (Judith Leyster?), c. 1652  5.2 (a) Hans Holbein, Portrait of Lord Guildford, 1527. (b) Hans Holbein, Portrait of Lady Guildford, 1527  5.3 Jan Molenaer, Self-Portrait as a Lute Player, c. 1636–7  5.4 Judith Leyster, Self-Portrait, c. 1630–3  5.5 Judith Leyster, Self-Portrait, c. 1640–5  6.1 Gillis van Tilborgh, Tichborne Dole, 1671  6.2 John Riley, Bridget Holmes, 1868  6.3 John Riley, Katherine Elliot, c. 1487–8  6.4 Bernard Lens II, after M. Powell, Alice George, mezzotint, National Portrait Gallery, London, c. 1670  6.5 Swabian, Birth of the Virgin  7.1 Kaigani Haida artist Mask, carved ca. 1825  7.2 “Haida Indians in dancing costume: New Year’s masquerade at the Skidegate mission, Queen Charlotte Islands, 1891.”  8.1 Map of Nuku Hiva showing locations and tribes  8.2 “Woman of Nooaheevah,” from Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean by Capt. David Porter in the United States Frigate Essex in the years 1812, 1813, & 1814, vol. II, 1815

25 26 27 34 37 38 40 42

43 48 50 51 53 55 57 58 62 64 66 67 69 72 76 79 80 82 88 95 104

108

x 8.3 8.4

8.5 8.6 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 10.1 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 12.6 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5

Illustrations Ernest Auguste Goupil, Quini [Queen] de Noukoohiva, 1838  Louis LeBreton, La Princesse Patini [Paetini] (original drawing, 1838), from Jules Dumont D’Urville, Atlas pittoresque, Voyage au Pôle Sud et dans l’Océanie, sur les corvettes L’Astrolabe et La Zélée exécuté par ordre du Roi Pendant les Années 1837–1838–1839–1840 sous le commandement de M. Dumont-D’Urville (Paris, Gide et Cie., 1846) Pierre Loti (Louis Marie-Julien Viaud), Reine Vaékéhu [Queen Vaekehu], January 1872  Alfred G. Mayer, Vaekehu, Queen of the Marquesas, 1899  Lucia Moholy, Portrait of Clara Zetkin, c. 1930 Lucia Moholy, Portrait of Clara Zetkin, c. 1930 Lucia Moholy, Portrait of Clara Zetkin, c. 1930 Tina Modotti, Worker’s Hands, 1927 Lucia Moholy, Portrait of Clara Zetkin with Theodor Neubauer, c. 1930  Louise Nevelson and Moon Garden, New York, 1958  Mende people, Sowo-wui, dance mask (ndoli jowei) of Ligba rank, mid-twentieth century  Sowei mask, before 1938  T. J. Alldridge, “The Bundu Devil Dress,” photograph of a Sowei in full costume and mask of Sowo rank, c. 1894–9 C. H. Firmin, “Bundu Devils,” photograph of two Bondo dancers of Ligba or Sowo rank, northwestern Liberia, c. 1904  Mende or Temne people, Bondo Sowo-wui, Janus-faced dance mask (ndoli jowei) of Ligba rank, 1886  (Cover) Joan Semmel, Transitions, 2012  Joan Semmel, Me without Mirrors, 1974  Joan Semmel, Foreground Hand, 1977  Joan Semmel, Recline, 2005  Joan Semmel, Flesh Ground, 2016  Joan Semmel, Transformations, 2011  Miwa Yanagi, My Grandmothers: Mika, 2001  Miwa Yanagi, Fairy Tales: Sleeping Beauty, 2004  Miwa Yanagi, Fairy Tales: Untitled I, 2004  Miwa Yanagi, Café Rottenmeier, during Festival Tokyo, 2010  Miwa Yanagi, dir. Wing of the Sun, performed in Yokohama, 2016 

111

112 114 116 120 125 126 127 129 134 148 153 156 158 159 166 170 172 173 177 178 182 188 191 193 194

Preface This project began with Frima’s glance in the mirror and recognizing the same wrinkles that she had seen on her own elderly mother’s face. She remembered that there were many such images in art, but realized no one had written about them. That was in 2008. A member of the College Art Association’s Committee on Women in the Arts, Hofrichter then organized a panel, Old Women, Witches, and Old Wives, under its auspices, at the annual CAA conference in 2010. The panel offered a vibrant and exciting morning and we decided we should move forward to a publication. All members of that initial panel, Paul Crenshaw, Johana Ruth Epstein, Jane Kromm, Vanessa Rocco, and M. E. Warlick, provide their contributions here, in writing, for the first time. We decided to open the topic beyond Western Europe, and to extend the time frame to contemporary art and include the area of performance. Midori Yoshimoto, already an included author, then came on board to co-edit and complete this project. The fields of both gender studies and gerontology are flourishing. Those born in the mid-twentieth century as part of the dramatic rise in the birthrate known as the baby boom are today in their late fifties to mid-seventies—and still aging. Soon almost onehalf of the world population will be over fifty years of age. As such there is a thriving market for “solutions” to the signs of aging, from hair dye and creams to Botox and surgery. There are also a growing number of publications featuring images of aging women, from popular magazine articles to well-researched academic ones. This is the first publication that examines the compelling images of old women across cultures, centuries, and media. We hope and expect that it won’t be the last. Frima Fox Hofrichter and Midori Yoshimoto

xii Preface

Acknowledgments We owe many individuals and institutions for the completion of this project. First we must acknowledge the generous support of Pratt Institute over several years. Our publication, research, and resources have been supported through Pratt Institute’s Faculty Development Fund Award, and Pratt Institute’s Mellon Grant for research. We would like to thank friends, colleagues, and family who supplied emotional and intellectual support which has sustained us over so many years, as we all have aged through this project. We would like to specifically mention our debt to Margaret Michniewitz, then Acquisitions Editor at Ashgate, who saw this theme’s potential. And to artist Diane Burko, Former Chair of the Committee on Women in the Arts of the College Art Association, who helped usher this idea into a conference panel which began the journey to this book. We are grateful to Helen Ronan and Ferris Olin for their guidance. We thank members of that original CAA panel, who weathered a major blizzard in Chicago and all of whom enthusiastically agreed to contribute here. We would also like to thank each other for the mutual cooperation we have been able to sustain and the friendship we have forged. And finally, we would like to thank our contributors who persevered with great patience through this long and often convoluted process. We thank them for their innovative scholarship and unwavering support and enthusiasm. Frima Fox Hofrichter and Midori Yoshimoto

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Figure 1.1  Ancient Rome, Statue of an Old Woman, 14–68 CE. Marble. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. Rogers Fund 1909, inv.09.39.

1

Introduction Frima Fox Hofrichter and Midori Yoshimoto

She is an old woman. Sculpted in Rome about 2,000 years ago, after a Greek original, she is stooped, bent over, weary, with sagging breasts, a ribbed neck, and deeply hollowed eye sockets—all of which affirm her advanced age (Figure 1.1). She is anonymous, but we recognize that she is old.1 She was traditionally called The Old Market Woman; however, recent scholarship now indicates that she “probably represents an aged courtesan on her way to a festival of Dionysus, the god of wine,” suggested by her ivy wreath and “delicate sandals.”2 The sculpture is well known for its individualized character, sense of realism, and rarity; it stands in marked contrast to the many classical sculptures of youthful goddesses: Venus, Diana, and Andromeda. The world of art is replete with images of young women, whose smooth skin, sparkling eyes, and full head of (often long, tousled, or braided) hair suggest a “perfect” or idealized female form. But when they display the physical signs of aging, women become invisible in most art historical literature. The subject has been overlooked in art history perhaps more than in other areas of the humanities.3 But is that a true assessment? The chapters in Women, Aging and Art: A Crosscultural Anthology will show that images of elderly women are present, and even common, in countless mediums across many cultures. They are represented in paintings, drawings, sculpture, performance, photography, prints, and masks. The women are recognizably old—with furrowed brows, wrinkled cheeks, crow’s feet, leathery or thin and crepey skin, deep nasolabial folds (lines from the nose to the corners of the mouth), marionette lines (from the corners of the mouth to the chin), weak and rheumy eyes, ribbed necks, bulging or exaggerated neck cords, noses and ears that have grown longer and larger, sagging breasts, and thinning gray or white hair. Their hands are brown-spotted, gnarled, and arthritic, their knuckles swollen. By today’s standards as well as in their own time, they often seem made to look deliberately ugly and unsympathetic. These generic signs of senescence have become the distorted elements that constitute the stereotype, even the caricature, of the procuress, the hag, the crone, and the witch. Old women with these attributes became characteristic of witch iconography.4 Images of particularly withered and wrinkled women, fully nude or nearly so, with unruly hair and sagging breasts, were assumed by art historians to be witches. In fact, images of “old and ugly” women were “clearly the fanciful pictures of what a witch ought to be like.”5

2

Women, Aging, and Art

Old women were associated with witchcraft because it was assumed to take nearly a lifetime to learn all the secrets of sorcery. Therefore, despite many examples in art of witches who were young, it was assumed more likely that they would be older. This is, in part, the fascination in the Middle Ages with the methods, formulae, and techniques of “old wives,” as examined by M. E. Warlick in her chapter “Alchemy’s Old Wives.” Images of witches from the early modern period became the prototype for images of witches through the centuries.6 The concept of what is witchlike is examined later in this volume in the commercial self-branding of Louise Nevelson explored in Johana Ruth Epstein’s chapter “Sculptor, Hostess, Witch: Unpacking Louise Nevelson’s Boxes.” The Japanese artist Miwa Yanagi has also tapped into tropes of Western fairy tales in her photographic series as Midori Yoshimoto discusses in her chapter, “Darkness of Girlhood and Lightness of Aging.” Old women were thought to be especially compelling because of their considerable sexual urges. And in old age, “dried-up” women could be even more powerful, for after menopause they could not be punished by pregnancy (or the threat of it) and thus could be completely uninhibited and dangerous. Furthermore, after menopause, with their flattened chests from drooping, dried-out breasts, and facial hair growth, women’s bodies seem to transform to become more male. The Renaissance scholar Juan Luis Vives asserted that wisdom “equal to that of men” is gained by women in old age and that the wrinkles of an old woman are signs of her new, more masculine authority.7 Women lose many of their female characteristics and look increasingly like men, so that in true old age, there would appear to be only one sex: male.8 Paradoxically, then, old women were either sexualized as flagrant seducers or desexualized to such a degree that they lost connection to their own gender, a dichotomy that demonstrates their overall perceived power. We can see this blurring of gender distinctions in Caravaggio’s (1571–1610) Judith Beheading Holofernes (Figure 1.2), of c. 1599. Within the bedroom-tent of the Assyrian general, the gender and sexuality of two of the three characters are obvious, pronounced, and even necessary to the story. But the gender of the third figure, the servant who accompanies Judith on her mission and is readying to capture the soonto-be decapitated head, is ambiguous. The leathered skin, bulging eyes, elongated nose, large ears, multi-furrowed brow, deeply wrinkled face, thinning gray hair, and missing teeth certainly indicate a person of advanced age. But the figure’s severe, harshly taut face is the opposite of feminine. Yet we know from the biblical story that she is Judith’s maid, here desexualized. There is only one desirable woman in this story: Judith. The old maid is a foil for the youthful, soft, and smooth-skinned heroine. We see this as well in the many paintings depicting old procuresses accompanying young prostitutes. The juxtaposition underscores the difference between the women and suggests the eventual loss of youthfulness even in the most courageous, beautiful, and seductive young women. An old woman, then, can serve as a memento mori—a reminder of death. She is not Death herself, but she is very near it and its looming possibility; she is only one step away. This can be seen most directly and even poignantly in a detail from Hans Baldung Grien’s (c. 1484–1545) The Ages of Woman and Death (Figure 1.3), of 1541–4. There

 Introduction 3

Figure 1.2  Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, c. 1599. Oil on canvas. Palazzo Barberini, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome. SCALA / Art Resource, NY. is a baby on the ground (not seen in this detail), and three full-length figures; one is a young woman standing to the left. The central figure is a gray-haired, old, thin woman, with sagging breasts set against a bony upper chest and shoulders, ringed neck, sunken cheeks, deepened eye sockets, jowly jawline, and elongated nose. She is the next step in the life span of the young woman beside whom she stands. The old woman is physically closer to the figure on the right—bony Death, who holds an hourglass, counting time. Death loops his arm firmly with the old woman’s, so he is slightly behind her, nudging her on. They are already connected; her fate is sealed. And the two look remarkably similar in their coloring and skeletal framework; certainly one can see that the next stage for the old woman is to look like Death. Death faces in one direction while the old woman looks in the opposite direction, to the fullness of life, not facing what is inevitable. She still holds on to the remnants of her womanhood as she tries to pull the cloth that is covering the private parts of the young woman, indicating that she, too, will be old with time, and that Death is not that far from her either. Old women were a welcome subject for artists in the early modern period. Painting the particular visual qualities of elderly women may have been considered a tour de force for artists, allowing them to explore the specificity of irregularities in the face, neck, and hands, with the idea that these would be a challenge. Indeed, in 1671, the artist Jan de Bisschop wrote (with disdain and in sarcastic terms) that for Dutch

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Women, Aging, and Art

Figure 1.3  Hans Baldung Grien, The Ages of Woman and Death (detail), c. 1541–4. Oil on panel. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY (See Plate 1). painters, it was “more painterly and artistically preferable [to paint] a misshapen, old, wrinkled person than a well-formed fresh and youthful one.”9 Judging by the number of extant examples of old women in Dutch genre paintings and tronies (head studies), the market for them seems to have been strong.10 Indeed, some artists executed several large paintings of old women, probably widows, alone and in their homes.11 Nicolas Maes’s (1634–93) The Old Woman Asleep (Figure 1.4), of c. 1655, is typical. The woman’s face is wrinkled, her nose long, her hands marked by veins visible through the thinning skin. Her glasses are still in her right hand; her head is resting on her left fist.12 It is clear from all the materials she has made available for herself (her lacemaking, a Bible open to the Book of Amos, another book on her lap) that she had planned to do much that day.13 But she was clearly too ambitious. Maybe it was what she could have done when she was younger but can no longer complete now—without a nap. She has begun her reading, however. A page of the volume on her lap (a book of sermons?) has a corner turned down to keep her place. Her Bible study refers to the piety of old widows.14 Although sleep is associated with laziness, that may not be the point here, as attested by the multiplicity of tasks she has set up for herself. More than a glimpse into the life of an elderly woman living alone, this painting, with its softened lighting, may sympathetically suggest the chores she no longer has the force to accomplish.

 Introduction 5

Figure 1.4  Nicolaes Maes, Old Woman Asleep, c. 1655. Oil on canvas. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Photo: J. Geleyns-Art Photography (See Plate 2). Antithetical to the sensitivity of Maes, the outwardly dramatic appearance of an aging woman has also been associated with malevolence, sin, and evil. This type of representation is explored by Jane Kromm in “Anger, Envy, and Aging: Early Modern Transgressive Old Women” and Zirka Z. Filipczak in “Silenced, Sidelined, and Even Undressed: Old Women in Seventeenth-Century Religious Art.” Using differing approaches and mediums, both authors identify the idea that old women were identified with the Deadly Sins of Anger and Envy and the most heinous sin of all: Heresy. The women are often enigmatic, whether they appear to be real people or allegorical figures, as is their absence. Filipczak previously noticed that old women are missing in Renaissance and Baroque depictions of Heaven and queried, “Why Are There No Old Women in Heaven?”15 Thus far, we have considered the universal “old woman,” a type that can welcome or even originate stereotypes. By contrast, images of old women are often vastly different when the subject is a real person known to the artist. These portraits are softened by the compassion of the artist or patron acknowledging and revealing the personality of

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Women, Aging, and Art

the sitter. Although portraits of old women from the early modern period are rare,16 several authors in this volume explore portraiture of old women from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. But they present wide-ranging curiosities for us. Here we read of Paul Crenshaw’s search for the lost portrait of the artist Judith Leyster painted by Frans Hals (“Frans Hals’s Portrait of an Older Judith Leyster”); Diane Wolfthal’s examination of portraits of household help (“Old Maids: Images of Elderly Servants in Early Modern Europe”); Carol Ivory’s study of life-drawings of nineteenth-century Polynesian queens (“Paetini and Vaekehu: Change and Aging in the Portraits of Marquesan Matriarchs”); Megan Smetzer’s study of portraits of royal First Peoples in “Portraits of Power: Masks of Northwest Coast Matriarchs in the Nineteenth Century”; photographs of the socialist Clara Zetkin (“Old Women/New Vision: Lucia Moholy’s Photographs of Clara Zetkin”) by Vanessa Rocco; and the straightforward—neither harsh nor fully sympathetic—self-portraits of Joan Semmel (“Aging and Feminist Art: Semmel’s Visible Bodies”) analyzed by Rachel Middleman. These portraits of known, identified women do not ignore their age, but the artists seem to see beyond such superficial markings. Indeed, some of the most famous portraits of old women were made by artists of their own mothers, most notably by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69) and Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). There exist many paintings of elderly women by Rembrandt and his School, which are known as “Rembrandt’s Mother.” She is seen in many guises: as an old woman reading or praying, or the elderly Prophetess Anna, and in numerous tronies. She is always in some “picturesque pseudo-historical or Oriental fantasy costume,” never in contemporary dress, and never as a formal portrait.17 Volker Manuth and Marieke de Winkel suggest that “the many portraits of his mother [in fantastic costume] show that Rembrandt regarded her as a timeless embodiment of old age,”18 rather than identifying her with a specific time or circumstance. This is in contrast to Dürer’s two depictions of his mother: one is a formal double portrait with his father while they were young, and the other is a drawing of her in old age (Figure 1.5). The latter is shocking in its devastating depiction of an old, emaciated, almost skeletal woman. Dürer’s mother had been bedridden and near death for some time, and she died two months after the execution of this work. The drawing is a careful and detailed rendering of her worn-out body. She bears almost every debilitating physical sign of aging. One can marvel at Dürer’s process of thorough, even detached, observation, through which he provides a wealth of visual information—so much so that the drawing seems almost cruel. But the artist let us know in his writings how painful it was seeing his mother like this, and he was in true mourning after her death.19 Although aged women were clearly a significant subject in the early modern period, scholarship on the subject did not follow up on it, and this neglect has continued for modern and contemporary art as well.20 Yet, as the world’s populations rapidly age and face the day-to-day reality of dealing with prolonged life spans, more artists, curators, and scholars are taking an interest in the subject. For example, the 2018 exhibition Aging Pride, presented at the Belvedere in Vienna, featured over two hundred works ranging across a century of artistic production. The majority

 Introduction 7

Figure 1.5 Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Barbara Holper, the Artist’s Mother, 1514. Charcoal. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Joerg P. Anders / Art Resource, NY. of artists were European, with some from the United States and one from Japan. Among the 107 artists, close to half were women.21 As the New York Times reported, “Nudes of old people, men and women alike, play a crucial role in this exhibition—as markers of the body in evolution, and as test cases for the social meanings of desire and disgust.”22 Prominently featured was Centered (2002) by the American painter Joan Semmel, who represented herself with her right leg bent and holding a camera in front of her face. Semmel’s nude self-portraits as a feminist critique of contemporary culture still trapped in the myth of youth are examined in depth by Rachel Middleman in “Aging and Feminist Art.” As she nears her nineties, Semmel’s remarkably frank depictions of

8

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her aging body continue to shock viewers. By looking back at Semmel’s early paintings, the Erotic Series, and comparing them to her recent ones, Middleman points out that the artist has fiercely countered male objectification of the female body by painting her own body from her point of view, building on the same strategy to the present. Her ongoing self-portraits show that age has not diminished her vitality. In fact, Semmel recalls her empowering and rewarding relationship, late in life, with her now deceased artist partner John Hardy, and her paintings demonstrate a “sensuality that is not confined to youth.”23 The example of Semmel represents the core mission of this book: to challenge stereotypical perceptions and expectations about aged women through an examination of wide-ranging representations, thus demonstrating that old age can be gratifying and filled with creative expression. Mature age is treated with respect along with attention to detail in Lucia Moholy’s photographic portraits of Clara Zetkin, one of the first female Socialist politicians, from the 1930s. Vanessa Rocco sheds light on this previously overlooked series “Old Women/ New Vision.” While Moholy adheres to stylistic innovations of New Vision photography, which had been established by her partner Moholy-Nagy, her photographs of Zetkin demonstrate another important task of the movement, which was to confront subject matter of contemporary urgency and promote social awareness—a task shared by the contemporaneous Worker Photography Movement in Germany, the USSR, and elsewhere, as well as even earlier by some artists of German expressionism. Indeed, poignant depictions of suffering farmers by Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) are the precursors. Before delving into other underlying themes in this book, a broader historical framework concerning women artists and old age needs to be discussed. The title of the 1972 Walters Art Gallery exhibition Old Mistresses: Women Artists of the Past points to the assumption that art is created by men. While the term “Old Masters” is reverential, its counterpart, “Old Mistresses,” has a derogatory connotation. Using the same title for their 1981 book, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock deepened their feminist analysis of art criticism across Western art history and exposed patriarchal ideologies at work behind the historical exclusion of women artists. They showed how Victorian writers pretended to describe natural characteristics of the feminine while prescribing social roles and behaviors.24 This patriarchal scheme of exclusion continued into the late twentieth century, when a greater number of women were educated in art schools. Many of these artists, however, were discouraged from pursuing a professional career or pressured to give up art in the middle of their development. In her first book of feminist criticism, From the Center, Lucy Lippard argued against the exclusivity of male-dominated art criticism, which adheres to the myth of originality as judged by formal or stylistic innovation. “One of the major questions facing feminist criticism,” Lippard asserts, “has to be whether stylistic innovation is indeed the only innovation, or whether other aspects of originality have yet to be investigated.” By reiterating the comment of the architect and critic Susana Torre, Lippard offers a hypothesis: “Perhaps women, unable to identify with historical styles, are really more interested in art itself, in self-expression, and its collective history and

 Introduction 9 communication, differing from the traditional notion of the avant-garde by opposing not styles and forms, but ideologies.”25 This can be said of several women creators studied in this volume. Lucia Moholy’s photos belong stylistically to New Vision photography, but she might have been more interested in selecting her subject of the matured female politician and exuding her aura than yielding to prescribed stylistic effects. Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), whose artistic and publicity strategies are discussed by Johana Ruth Epstein, seemed undeterred by male critics’ sexist comments and negligence, instead pursuing her own mode of abstract assemblages for decades. We know, however, that she struggled in poverty in the art-world wilderness for thirty years before she was finally “discovered” at age fifty-nine.26 “When a curator from the Museum of Modern Art apologized for arriving at her studio ten minutes late, the artist supposedly barked, ‘What’s ten minutes? Where were you ten years ago!’”27 As Epstein argues, the disguise of the Wicked Witch of the West (see Plate 11/Figure 10.1) that Nevelson donned for her publicity photo worked partly to distinguish her from contemporary, often younger, male sculptors. Thanks to her talent, tenacity, and, in part, tactics, Nevelson managed to cut into the male-dominant art world in the 1950s, but only a handful of women artists received the recognition they deserved before they turned sixty. Griselda Pollock called this situation “permanent belatedness,” resulting from “the absence of a critical acknowledgement at the right moment.”28 Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was seventy years old when she received her first retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1982. Similar to Nevelson, Bourgeois often cooperated with her photographers and presented herself shrouded in a mysterious aura reminiscent of a witch. In a 1982 photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe (Figure 1.6), Bourgeois wears a black monkey-fur coat and holds her phallic sculpture Fillette under her arm like a handbag and smiles mischievously. The numerous spider sculptures she created in her late nineties were a tribute to her mother as well as herself as a mother of three sons.29 Having lived a long time and continuing to produce art into the final stages of their lives, both Nevelson and Bourgeois paved the way for women artists to follow their challenging yet rewarding paths. It is telling that these two artists occupied prominent positions in Mary Beth Edelson’s collage appropriation of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. Titled Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper (Figure 1.7), Edelson’s work presents Georgia O’Keeffe as Christ in the center and twelve women artists replacing the disciples: flanking O’Keeffe from left to right are Lynda Benglis, Helen Frankenthaler, June Wayne, Alma Thomas, Lee Krasner, Nancy Graves, Elaine de Kooning, Louise Nevelson, M. C. Richards, Louise Bourgeois, Lila Katzen, and Yoko Ono. Surrounding them are seventy more women artists, the majority of whom Edelson did not know personally. Although Edelson mentioned that her selection of women for the central space was arbitrary, they included artists who were more mature and established than those on the border, which she called the “audience.”30 By appropriating one of the best-known Western “master”-pieces and replacing male protagonists with female artists, Edelson assaulted the patriarchal power governing both religion and art while

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Women, Aging, and Art

Figure 1.6  Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Bourgeois, 1982, gelatin silver print. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission. elevating the status of women artists. O’Keeffe, Nevelson, and Bourgeois, in particular, appear to be treated as wise elders among the artists.31 The early 1970s saw the rise and spread of the women’s liberation movement, and many American women artists joined forces to produce and exhibit art that expressed and celebrated women’s lives. Womanhouse, organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, encompassed an exhibition and a series of performances that took place in an old house on the campus of the California Institute of the Arts in February 1972. There, Faith Wilding presented her legendary performance Waiting (Figure 1.8), which condensed a woman’s life from birth to death into a fifteen-minute monologue, coupled with the repeated action of bowing while seated. Scripted by Wilding, the poem repeats the word “waiting” more than 100 times, followed by a phrase representing a different life phase. For example, infancy ends with “waiting to be cuddled,” while adolescence begins with “waiting for my breasts to develop.” After marriage and childbirth, the

 Introduction 11

Figure 1.7 Mary Beth Edelson, Some Living American Women Artists, 1972. Cut and pasted gelatin silver prints with crayon and transfer type on printed paper with typewriting on cut and taped paper. © Mary Beth Edelson 2019; Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY. Image licensed by Art Resource, NY.

Figure 1.8 Faith Wilding, Waiting, 1972. Performance. Photo by Lloyd Hamrol. Courtesy Faith Wilding.

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reality of aging kicks in fast: “waiting to be beautiful again,” “waiting for menopause,” “waiting for my husband to die,” “waiting for the struggle to end.” Simple yet direct, this performance was perhaps the earliest to confront the often saddening aspects of aging and to alert us to how passive a typical woman’s life can be when in the service of others.32 The feminist art movement allowed women artists to home in on topics that were previously unexplored and suppressed.33 Furthermore, the movement challenged the institution to accept women artists and feminist topics, although this took almost four decades because of backlashes and resistance. It is only recently that older women artists have supposedly “replaced young men as the art world’s darlings,” according to an article with this title that was posted on Artsy. net.34 This recent shift in the contemporary art market is explained by the Dutch art historian and gallerist Marta Gnyp: “Older women artists became the natural choice for galleries to look at, especially after 2013 and 2014, when all of a sudden it became clear that not every emerging artist is the next Warhol.”35 In her article, which lists a number of older living women artists (along with some deceased) enjoying rapidly rising recognition, such as Carmen Herrera (b. 1915; Cuban American) and Geta Bratescu (b. 1926; Romanian), Gnyp posits: “The interest in older women artists is driven by the quest of collectors for new, high-quality work with a strong potential for growth. The mature oeuvre offers social, cultural, and very likely economic capital to collectors and galleries.” Economic interest aside, “personal narratives” are appealing to collectors and easy for them to identify with.36 Needless to say, the growing number of women collectors, gallerists, curators, and art historians over the past several decades has led to this phenomenal change, which has not been as sudden and dramatic a shift as the author suggests. It has been long and steady and will continue beyond a mere temporary trend. Women, Aging, and Art builds on the contributions of feminist art history by illuminating women artists’ achievements and analyzing historical representations of women, and the chapters in this volume benefit greatly from the ongoing expansion of global art history. Chapters by Carol Ivory, Megan Smetzer, and Susan Kart employ anthropological approaches in analyzing depictions of matriarchs in the indigenous society of the Marquesan Islands in the Pacific Ocean, the American Northwest, and West Africa, respectively. All of these women yielded considerable power in the nineteenth century, but their fates were drastically changed by Western colonizers. Both Carol Ivory and Megan Smetzer contrast the patriarchal perspectives of colonists with the matriarchal structures of indigenous communities, with the former affecting the visual renditions of the latter. In a reversal of that viewpoint, Susan Kart unpacks the recent controversy over the display in Western museums of Sande masks worn by elder women from Sierra Leone and Liberia, which have become associated with female genital mutilation. She argues that these masks were not necessarily worn during the initiation ritual, and museums should not stop exhibiting them. Instead, she promotes the idea of using the object as a catalyst for a conversation between the museum, the viewer, the maker, and the performer. Our final chapter, on the Japanese artist Miwa Yanagi, demonstrates how the stereotype of old witches in Western fairy tales has become part of global visual

 Introduction 13 culture—a rich resource to appropriate and subvert. By researching depictions of aged women in Japanese classical art, such as Noh theater, Yanagi melds Western and Eastern cultures to create her unique world of empowered mature heroines through photography and performance. According to Betty Friedan: “Aging is not ‘lost youth’ but a new stage of opportunity and strength.”37 This idea is confirmed by the current art market’s recognition of older women artists as the “art-world’s Cinderellas” who preserve “its magic and allure” because “their life stories are not only romantic and heroic; they also confirm the miracle of art, casting the art world as a place where the impossible can happen and where the reward for hard work can be earned against all odds.”38 Although such romanticization can be misleading, it is a welcome change to combat the long-standing ageism and gender discrimination that have dominated the art world. Women, Aging, and Art: A Crosscultural Anthology will hopefully open a pathway for more scholars and curators to engage in this immensely rich topic in the history of art.

Notes 1 In the field of historic gerontology, the response to “How old is old?” is fundamental, yet still not agreed upon. Lynn Botelho, “Old Women in Early Modern Europe: Age as an Analytic Category,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allyson M. Poska et al. (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 311. For the early modern period, for example, forty is the general age accepted by art historians; cultural historians use fifty, and social historians use sixty (301). 2 “Marble Statue of an Old Woman, A.D. 14–68,” Metropolitan Museum of Art (website), accessed May 4, 2019, https​://ww​w.met​museu​m.org​/art/​colle​ction​/sear​ ch/24​8132?​&sear​chFie​ld=Al​l&sor​tBy=R​eleva​nce&f​t =rom​an+ol​d+wom​an&of​f set=​ 0&rpp​=20&a​mp;po​s=1. 3 This disparity has been recognized by other historians who note the scarcity of work on this subject in the field of art history. See Anouk Janssen, “The Iconography of Old Age and Rembrandt’s Early Work,” in Rembrandt’s Mother: Myth and Reality, ed. Christiaan Vogelaar and Gerbrand Korevaar (Zwolle: Nijhoff, 2006), esp. 63 and n6. 4 See Linda C. Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); for the development of witch imagery, see 14–26. 5 Ruth Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice, 1550–1560 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 228, as quoted in Erin Campbell, “Prophets, Saints, and Matriarchs: Portraits of Old Women in Early Modern Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 63 (Fall 2010): 815n45. 6 Hults suggests that the iconography is already set by 1518; Witch as Muse, 19. 7 Erin J. Campbell, Old Women and Art in the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 57; for a discussion of the writings of Vives, see 50–2, 57–9. 8 Stephanie Dickey explored these ideas in her paper on the theme of Vertumnus and Pomona, presented at the 2017 Annual Conference, Chicago, of the Renaissance Society of America in the session “What’s New about Old Women in Dutch Art?” chaired by Frima Fox Hofrichter and sponsored by the Historians of Netherlandish Art.

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9 De Bisschop, Paradigmata varioum artificum, voor-beelden der teken-konst van verscheyde meesters (The Hague, 1671) as translated and quoted in Manuth and de Winkel, “Artist’s Mother,” 67. 10 Wayne E. Franits, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in SeventeenthCentury Dutch Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 161. 11 Ibid., 177. 12 Eyeglasses in the seventeenth century were just magnifiers; they were used by both men and women. 13 Franits suggests that widows were obliged to keep themselves busy; Paragons of Virtue, 180. That the Bible is clearly open to the Book of Amos may be a reference to the Prophet’s rebuke to take care of each other, even in what was the economic age of great prosperity. 14 Ibid., 163–7. 15 Zirka Z. Filipczak, “Why Are There No Old Women in Heaven?” in Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen 2000, ed. Paul Vanderbroeck et al., 69–89. 16 Franits, Paragons of Virtue, 163. 17 Volker Manuth and Marieke de Winkel, “The Artist’s Mother: Tradition, Reality and Image,” in Vogelaar and Korevaar, Rembrandt’s Mother, 76. 18 Ibid. 19 Michael Roth, “Dürer’s Mother: Beauty, Age and Death in the Image of the Renaissance,” in Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin 24, cat. 1 (Berlin: by the museum, 2006). 20 The art historian who specializes in Visual Aging Studies, Sabine Kampmann, has stated: “A visual cultural history of old age has to deal with this iconographic diversity as well as with the various genres, contexts, and functions of portrayals of older people, and this complexity is one reason why an art history of the representation of old age is yet to be written.” Sabine Kampmann, “Visual Aging Studies: Exploring Images of Aging in Art History and Other Disciplines,” Age Culture Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Issue 2 (2015): 279–91; 280. 21 Galerie Belvedere, November 17, 2017–March 4, 2018, https://www.belvedere.at/ aging_pride. 22 Jason Farago, “‘Aging Pride’ Challenges the Cult of Youth,” New York Times, February 8, 2018. 23 Priscilla Frank, “8 Artists Who Explore Beauty of the Aging Body,” Huffpost, April 24, 2015, accessed from https​://ww​w.huf​f post​.com/​entry​/agin​g-bod​y-art​_n_71​18550​. 24 Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Routledge, 1981), 10. 25 Lucy Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: Plume, 1976), 6. 26 Mary Sabbatino, vice president at Galerie Lelong, commented on the soaring reputation of the Paris-based, Lebanon-born artist Etel Adnan (b. 1925), whom the gallery has represented since 2014: “When she was picked for Documenta [in 2012], everyone suddenly ‘discovered’ her. But she wasn’t discovered; the venue finally matched her achievements.” Anna Louie Sussman, “Why Old Women Have Replaced Young Men as the Art World’s Darlings,” Artsy.net, June 19, 2017, accessed from https​://ww​w.art​sy.ne​t/art​icle/​artsy​-edit​orial​-wome​n-rep​laced​-youn​g-men​-art-​world​ s-dar​lings​.

 Introduction 15 27 Arnold B. Glimcher, Louise Nevelson (New York: Praeger, 1972), 94–5. 28 Griselda Pollock, “Old Bones and Cocktail Dresses: Louise Bourgeois and the Question of Age,” Oxford Journal 22, no. 2 (1999): 87. 29 Michael McNay, “Louise Bourgeois Obituary,” The Guardian, May 31, 2010, accessed from https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/ar​tandd​esign​/2010​/may/​31/lo​uise-​bourg​eois-​ obitu​ary-a​rt. 30 Kat Griefen, “Considering Mary Beth Edelson’s Some Living American Women Artists,” Brooklyn Rail, March 7, 2019, accessed June 4, 2019, from https​://br​ookly​ nrail​.org/​2019/​03/cr​itics​page/​Consi​derin​g-Mar​y-Bet​h-Ede​lsons​-Some​-Livi​ng-Am​ erica​n-Wom​en-Ar​tists​. 31 In terms of ethnic minority, three black artists (Kay Brown, Faith Ringgold, and Dinga McCannon) and three Asian artists (Ce Roser, Yoko Ono, and Yayoi Kusama) were included. For the full list, see Linda Aleci et al., The Art of Mary Beth Edelson (New York: Seven Cycles, 2002); for the discussion, see Kathleen Wentrack, “Communal Impulses: The Posters and Wall Collages of Mary Beth Edelson,” in Collaboration, Empowerment, Change: Women’s Art Collectives, ed. Kathleen Wentrack (forthcoming). 32 Faith Wilding, “Waiting” (1972), accessed June 10, 2019 from http:​//fai​thwil​ding.​ refug​ia.ne​t/wai​tingp​oem.h​tml. 33 Martha Wilson and Rachel Rosenthal also addressed aspects of aging in their performances. See Joanna Frueh, “The Erotic as Social Security,” Art Journal 53, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 66–72; and Frueh, “Visible Difference: Women Artists and Aging,” in New Feminist Criticism: Art Identity Action, ed. Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer, and Arlene Raven (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 264–88. 34 Sussman, “Why Old Women Have Replaced Young Men.” 35 Ibid. 36 Marta Gnyp, “Miraculous Resurrections: The Contemporary Art Market of Older and Deceased Women Artists,” lecture presented at the University of Loughborough, April 2017, accessed from http:​//www​.mart​agnyp​.com/​artic​les/m​iracu​lous-​resur​recti​ ons-t​he-co​ntemp​orary​-art-​marke​t-of-​older​-and-​decea​sed-w​omen-​artis​ts.ph​p. 37 Betty Friedan, “How to Live Longer, Better, Wiser,” Parade, March 20, 1994: 4–6. 38 Gnyp, “Miraculous Resurrections.”

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Figure 2.1  “Harvesting Spinach” from Tacuinum Sanitatis, late fourteenth century. Vellum. Cod. Vindobonensis Nova 2644, f.27r. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (See Plate 3).

2

Alchemy’s Old Wives M. E. Warlick

The itinerant alchemist and physician Paracelsus (1493–1541) was a pivotal figure in the history of alchemy and medicine. Having famously burned the texts of Galen and Avicenna on the steps of the University of Basel, he scorned the university-taught medical knowledge of his day. He urged other alchemists to abandon their foolish attempts to turn lead into gold, encouraging them to use alchemical substances and processes for medical purposes, instead. He stated: “The universities do not teach all things, so a doctor must seek out old wives, gypsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. . . . Knowledge is experience.”1 Paracelsus’s inclusion of “old wives” in this rather shady list of sources for medical knowledge reveals his low opinion of them. Yet, it also indicates his admiration for the folk remedies and empirical evidence developed by medical practitioners working without a university education. The term “old wives” has deep roots in biblical and classical texts; it was revived at the beginning of the scientific era, with its new relevance indicating outmoded theories that had no basis in science.2 For Paracelsus, the term referred to the many anonymous women who gained practical medical knowledge of the occult properties of plants and other natural substances through trial and error. Just as contemporary male physicians claimed to have learned obstetrical secrets from midwives,3 Paracelsus sought the medical secrets known to women, even as he criticized their skills. This chapter will explore the nexus of old women, alchemy, and medicine, as seen in images from several visual traditions, including late medieval guides to healthy living, alchemical treatises on distillation, and witchcraft imagery, with a focus on older women and the pairing of older and younger women. These images reflect prevailing cultural patterns and the increasing exclusion of women from the arenas of science and medicine during the early modern period. Today, alchemical transformations of metals are better known, but herbal alchemy also descended from ancient traditions. The most famous female alchemist of the ancient world was Maria the Prophet, a philosopher and practitioner who supposedly lived in Hellenistic Egypt.4 Although no writings by her remain, she is mentioned by Zosimos of Panopolis (c. 300 CE) in his treatise On Furnaces and

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Women, Aging, and Art

Apparatuses. He claimed her as one of his teachers and credited her with the design of several innovative alchemical vessels.5 Similar vessels were in use at that time, both in kitchens and in artisan workshops, but because Zosimos assigned their design to a woman, comparisons were made between alchemical practices and “women’s work.” In a conversation purported to have occurred between Maria and the philosopher Aros, she explained the benefits of a white herb, which she identified as the “Stone of Truth.”6 Thus, for Maria, the alchemical work with plants also had value. Herbal medicine within a broader pharmacopoeia has a long history stretching back to antiquity, when it appeared in the works of Theophrastus, Dioscorides (De Materia Medica), and Galen. As alchemical and medical texts migrated from the Mediterranean to the Middle East, Arabic philosophers and practitioners preserved and adapted the works of classical authors. For alchemy, this was a time when Aristotelian concepts of physical matter—with its four elements of earth, water, air, and fire and their qualities of heat, coldness, moisture, and dryness—transformed into the concepts of fixed masculine sulfur and volatile feminine mercury. Arabic philosophers considered these two gendered and polarized aspects of physical matter to be the dual components of all metals.7 Beginning in the late fourteenth century in Western Europe, masculine sulfur and feminine mercury are represented in illustrated alchemical texts as a variety of male and female characters, including the sun and moon and other religious, royal, and sexual figures. Throughout the evolution of alchemical imagery, however, few images show women working as practitioners.8 In the late Middle Ages, the return of alchemical and medical texts to the Latin West initiated much intellectual ferment within educational and theological circles. From the twelfth century onward, Latin translations of classical and Arabic manuscripts were joined by newer texts written by late medieval European authors. The field of medicine grew in respectability through the establishment of medical schools within universities, with Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna recognized as the principal authorities. Alchemy held a somewhat different position within this established intellectual hierarchy. It was considered to be revelatory knowledge of God’s creation as well as a more practical approach requiring technical skills that fell outside the theoretical concerns of early universities.9 Medical and alchemical manuscripts circulated outside universities, as did guides to healthy living, such as the regimens of health that had descended from classical and Arabic texts and were developed at the late medieval medical school in Salerno, Italy.10 One of the most influential treatises of this type was the Tacuinum Sanitatis, a popular guide to health that described the occult power of plants to promote balance through the proper intake of foods and offered suggestions for physical and emotional well-being.11 Ibn Butlân originally composed the text in Baghdad in the late eleventh century. When it entered the Latin West, two versions circulated, one long and the other short; the abbreviated version was enlivened with illustrations that have survived in several late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century manuscripts produced in Northern Italy, including one now in Vienna. It contains an illustration of an old

 Alchemy’s Old Wives 19 woman harvesting spinach, her age indicated by her face and clothing (Figure 2.1). She carries a distaff, a rather curious item to take into a garden. This object might connect her symbolically to the three Fates and their power over the transitions of human life, from birth to death, to unwind, stretch, and ultimately cut the cord of life. Within the context of the other images in these manuscripts, this one does not appear to emphasize negative connotations of old age, although the distaff reappears later in scenes of witchcraft.12 The philosophy of healthy living contained in these manuscripts was based on Galenic principles that had descended from antiquity and formed the basis of folkloric remedies and official medicine well into the early modern period. The short summaries that accompanied each image in the Tacuinum Sanitatis enumerated the benefits of plants to restore balance to the humors within the body and to improve one’s quality of life. They incorporated the Aristotelian four elements and the four qualities of heat, coldness, moisture, and dryness. For example, spinach was considered cold and humid in the first degree, thus providing moderate benefits for old women, who were believed to be cold and dry, like the earth, and prone to melancholy.13 The texts also indicated the times of year and times of life, from childhood to old age, that might benefit best from the various preparations of these plants. Throughout these images, men and women of different ages and classes take an active role in picking and preparing the plants. Other illustrations depict women cooking and delivering healthy remedies for the sick, mostly within domestic interiors, including two women who bring barley soup to a bed-ridden patient.14 In another illustration, a slim, beardless figure, most likely a woman, uses a mortar and pestle within a pharmacy.15 This scene shows the preparation of theriac, a secretive panacea made from serpents, among other ingredients. The illustrations within the Tacuinum Sanitatis contain a striking abundance of women harvesting fruits and vegetables and preparing food and herbal remedies. Such images become harder to find by the end of the fifteenth and into the sixteenth centuries, when scenes of witches boiling noxious poisons in their cauldrons begin to proliferate. The Tacuinum Sanitatis illustrations seem to contain none of the evil overtones of these later images, particularly in terms of the demonization of older women. In contrast, other medical and religious texts from the thirteenth through to the fifteenth century reveal a growing distrust of older women.16 The dangers of women’s susceptibility to demonic forces led to suspicions of sorcery. These suspicions were deeply rooted in late medieval philosophical, theological, and medical theories, which maintained many classical presumptions about the inferiority of women. The older woman (vetula) was thought to have some redeeming qualities, although she was viewed as more credulous, volatile, and readily pulled to the margins of social norms. Older women were recognized as serving important roles in preparing medicine, but because they could not attend universities or receive formal medical training, their knowledge of efficacious remedies was passed by “biological heredity” from mother to daughter,17 as well as among other women, in ways that could not be controlled by medical or ecclesiastical authorities.

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Beginning in the twelfth century, when translations of classical and Arabic alchemical manuscripts first appeared in the Latin West, alchemical treatises dealt with metallic transformations and the search for an elixir to prolong human life. In the same way that base metals could be stripped of impurities and transformed into the noble metals of silver and gold, so, too, could the human body be cleansed of the impurities that cause disease and premature death. It was also during this period that distillation processes were greatly improved, and the hope of many alchemists engaged in medical alchemy was to produce such an elixir. The health benefits of alcohol and its effective combinations with herbal remedies would transform medicinal recipes. Simple fermentation produced alcoholic beer and wine in antiquity, but scholars have debated when the first distillations of pure alcohol occurred. The Greek alchemists Pseudo-Democritus, Maria the Prophet, and Zosimos constructed devices in which gases rose from a heated vessel and condensed on a cap above, before running down a distillation collecting tube.18 This procedure was not as effective for substances needing greater heating or cooling.19By the mid-thirteenth century, alchemy was widely practiced in Franciscan and Dominican monasteries. Long before Paracelsus, several late medieval alchemical writers discussed the medical applications of substances and processes, in addition to their interests in the transformation of metals; they included Albert the Great (German), the physician Arnald of Villanova (Catalan), Roger Bacon (English), and John of Rupescissa (French; Jean de Roquetaillade).20 A summary of their contributions reveals the interconnections between alchemy and medicine during this period. The Dominican Albert the Great (c. 1200–84) exerted a considerable influence on contemporary theology, philosophy, and natural science.21 Although not a practitioner, he analyzed the applications of theoretical knowledge by visiting mines, metal workshops, and alchemical laboratories in an effort to deepen his understanding of the relationship between theory and practice. Within his extensive writings on the natural sciences, Albert refers to alchemy in his Liber mineralium (Book of minerals) and Commentary on Aristotle’s Meteorology,22 among others. Having read Latin translations of Arabic texts, he adopted the Arabic theory that metals were formed from sulfur and mercury, noting their metaphorical gendering as the “father” and “mother” of all metals, which was important for the development of gendered alchemical imagery. Albert compared the production of metals to medicine because the alchemist cures metals of impurities through the use of an elixir, or fermentum, in the same way that doctors cure the body of disease. He recorded the ways that metals and stones could be used medically. He drew analogies between biology, medicine, and metallurgy, linking Aristotle’s theories of the generation of metals to the Arab theory that metals develop from a combination of sulfur and mercury (quicksilver). He compared quicksilver to menstrual blood and sulfur to semen, explaining that defects in these two substances could cause imperfections in the metals.23 The pseudo-epigraphic text De secretis mulierum (Women’s Secrets) reflects much of the common medical knowledge of the time, although its attribution to Albert is now considered spurious.24

 Alchemy’s Old Wives 21 Arnald of Villanova (c. 1240–1311) began his education with Dominican friars.25 His reputation was founded largely on his medical treatises, although his other interests included astrology, alchemy, and religious and social reform. He believed in the occult powers of plants, stones, and metals and suggested the use of natural objects, either suspended from one’s neck or tied to parts of the body, to effect cures. Arnald was aware of the practices of the “old wives of Salerno,” and criticized the incantations they whispered to mothers during childbirth. Around 1310 he translated the Regimen Sanitatis Salerni, and printed editions appeared throughout Europe almost yearly after 1474. His treatise on the conservation of youth was translated into English in the mid-1500s.26 His remedies are largely herbal, and he believed that health could be maintained by balancing the cold and dry humors that characterize old age. The intellectual pursuits of the Franciscan Roger Bacon (1214 or 1220–c. 1292) included mathematics, geometry, optics, medicine, astronomy, astrology, and alchemy. Like many of his contemporaries, Bacon wanted to separate the fraudulent works of magic from true science, but he bent the rules to include what he found to be the appropriate uses of “natural magic,” talismans, and astrology. Throughout his writings, Bacon positioned himself as a great defender of the practical and experimental approach of alchemy, advocating its inclusion in the university curriculum.27 Bacon thought that medicine should be closely aligned to alchemy because alchemy taught one how to combine substances in proper proportions. Alchemy could be helpful in purifying pharmaceutical products, which were often incorrectly mixed by apothecaries. He even felt that quicksilver and other metals could be used medicinally, provided they were properly prepared. Most important, he believed that alchemy held the secret for prolonging life through the production of an elixir, in which the four elements would be blended in a perfect balance, as they are in gold. One of the texts attributed to him, the Breviarum Praticiae Medicinae, contained strongly sarcastic comments about the ignorance of old women. Most important for refining the processes of distillation and for the development of medical alchemy were the writings of the Franciscan monk John of Rupescissa (Jean de Roquetaillade; c. 1310–66).28 Influenced by Joachimism, his prophecies and theological writings led to his imprisonment several times between 1345 and 1356. Two alchemical treatises are attributed to him: Liber lucis (Book of light) and De consideratione quintae essentiae (On the quintessence). The former shares with other alchemical treatises of the later fourteenth century clear explanations of alchemical procedures, for its author was well versed in the popular processes of that time. The latter is known in multiple versions. For Aristotle, the “fifth essence” was a heavenly substance that held the other four elements in perfect suspension; for Rupescissa, the quintessence was purified alcohol, achieved through repeated distillations that improved earlier techniques for making aqua ardens (ethyl alcohol) or aqua vitae.29 Where Arnald of Villanova had understood the medical benefits of alcohol, Rupescissa prepared mineral distillations that could be used internally, rather than external salves. His alcohol-based medicines would prove highly influential to later alchemical practitioners.

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The fields of medicine and pharmacy became increasingly professional over the next few centuries as a result of the growth of universities, the establishment of professional societies, and the passage of greater regulations against unlicensed practitioners. As a result, the number of women within these professions diminished, at least within the public sphere.30 Scholars continue to examine these transitions; the evolving gender dynamics of medicine and pharmacology appear more complex than originally assumed in early feminist scholarship. Men and women of different classes in both urban and rural geographic regions remained involved in herbal healing throughout this long period. Women used basic alchemical techniques of infusion and distillation to prepare medicines within their homes. Nevertheless, it is striking how few images of women performing distillations or working in pharmacies can be found, even though historical records reveal that many worked in these professions and in the related profession of brewing beers and ales.31 A rare scene of a woman distilling plant essences is found on the title page to Michael Puff von Schrick’s Von den gebrannten wassern (literally “of the burning waters,” 1474), a small pamphlet with alcohol-based medicinal remedies (Figure 2.2). The woodcut depicts an older woman who holds a bellows to control the fire within a

Figure 2.2 “Woman Distilling Plant Essences,” title page from Michael Puff von Schrick, Von den gebrannten Wassern (Strasburg, 1474). Woodcut. Wellcome Collection, London.

 Alchemy’s Old Wives 23 furnace. She is one of the “aquavit women,” mentioned but rarely seen, who prepares herbal medicines from plants and distilled alcohol. Above the furnace is a distillation cap called a rosenhut, which gathers condensed gases rising from the vessel within the furnace below and then channels them to a receiving flask on the right. Although the woodcut is crudely executed, we can see plants and bits of charcoal scattered about the floor beneath her feet.32 During this same period, from the late fifteenth century onward, the first printed herbals appeared. These texts contained information on the medicinal benefits of plants and other substances and the ailments to which they provided the greatest relief.33 Most of these herbals contained simple crude woodcuts of plants, with a few scattered images of men and women performing basic tasks, such as picking fruit or harvesting stones from the head of a frog. Unlike the images from the Tacuinum Sanitatis manuscripts, these texts offered little evidence of the continuing role of women in the production of herbal medicines. In another rare woodcut, three older women are seen working together to produce herbal medicines; the image appeared in two lesser-known herbals published in Crakow, Poland (Figure 2.3). The first, O Ziolach i o moczy gich (About herbs and their power), was written and compiled by Stefan Falimirz.34 Hieronim Spiczyński

Figure 2.3  “Three Women Distilling Herbal Remedies” from Stefan Falimirz, O Ziotach i o moczy gich (Crakow: Florian Ungler, 1534). Woodcut. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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published his herbal, O Ziolach tutecznych y zamorskich y o mocy ich (About local and overseas herbs and their powers), in 1542, expanding the number of plants discussed and recycling the woodcuts.35 In this later edition, the woodcut heads a chapter on herbal remedies made from plants and distilled alcohol. The women, who may be nuns, are working in a convent hospital.36 One is a herb woman carrying a huge bundle of plants and a small basket as she enters the work room. A second woman in the background stirs a pot, although the instrument she holds looks like a cleaver, which would be helpful for chopping. The woman in the foreground is operating a large bellows to control the fire in a small tabletop furnace, which holds a distillation vessel beneath its cap. A distillation arm channels the distillate to a collecting flask below, while a variety of flasks and tankards line the shelf above. In another woodcut in these two texts, a herb woman stands beside the patron saints of medicine and pharmacy, Cosmas and Damian. A third woodcut contains a woman delivering medicine to a patient in bed, while a doctor and pharmacist consult over the patient’s urine. This scene is reminiscent of the one in the Tacuinum Sanitatis that shows women feeding barley soup to a patient, discussed earlier. Such images depict what must have been a common occurrence: that of women preparing and giving medicines to patients under the supervision of male physicians and pharmacists. Yet, few comparable images of women producing and administering herbal medicine can be found in the herbals of Western Europe, where the professionalization of these fields was advancing rapidly. During the first part of the sixteenth century, Hieronymus Brunschwig (c. 1450–1512) wrote numerous books on distillation and medicine.37 They enjoyed wide popularity and were frequently translated and plagiarized. The title page of his Liber de arte distillandi (Book of the art of distillation), of 1500, includes a complex woodcut scene of men and women gathering plants and distilling the essences within a garden.38 When the image was recycled for the title page of Brunschwig’s Medicinarius (1512),39 the top third was removed, leaving two women gathering plants in the upper left and a man beside a large, round, brick distillation furnace (Figure 2.4). The two women are placed within the natural botanical world and give the plants they have picked to a second man, perhaps the alchemist’s assistant. They are distinguished from each other by age and head coverings. The older woman wears her hair beneath a bonnet, which was typical of married women in Germany, while the younger woman’s long flowing hair, denoting her unmarried state, is crowned by a wreath of flowers. They may be mother and daughter, or the younger woman might be included to suggest the freshness and purity of the plants they are picking. The different ages of the women can be interpreted as a visualization not only of the “biological heredity” of secrets about plants, passed from mother to daughter, but also of the oral transmissions of herbal lore among women, who lacked access to a university education. Male distillers and apothecaries were undoubtedly more numerous than their female counterparts throughout history, but the early sixteenth century was a significant time for transplanting the skills of “old wives” within the

 Alchemy’s Old Wives 25

Figure 2.4 “Gathering Plants and Distillation in a Garden” from Hieronymus Brunschwig, Medicinarius (Strasburg: J. Grüninger, 1512). Woodcut. Wellcome Collection, London. professions of medicine and pharmacy. By mid-century, scenes that conflate the garden with the laboratory disappear almost entirely. Brunschwig next published his larger and more profusely illustrated Das Buch zu Distillieren (Book of Distillations; 1519), which contains primarily images of male university professors, along with male pharmacists preparing medicines and male doctors dispensing remedies to their patients.40 The almost complete absence of women from these pages is explained in part by the intended audience of professional readers; even so, the book does include a recycled woodcut of witches brewing an explosive concoction (Figure 2.5). A young nude woman and two older women gather around a cauldron, while a demon directs their activities from a tree on the left. This image appears in a section of the book that discusses the problems and treatments of a melancholic temperament, one of the ailments associated with older women. The inclusion of a witchcraft scene in a book on distillation underscores the ways in which women’s contributions to herbal medicine were being devalued and even demonized. No doubt, it was inserted as a warning against the dangers of herbal remedies produced by unsupervised and undereducated women. Whereas women in earlier images had prepared and delivered medicines to patients, their pictorial roles in these rare later images have been transformed into patients or sick clients needing medicines at pharmacy counters. Their disappearance within gardens and

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Figure 2.5 Baldung workshop(?), “Three Female Witches,” from Hieronymus Brunschwig, Das Buch zu Distillieren (Strasburg, J. Grüninger, 1519). Colored woodcut. University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections Ferguson Ai-y.11, CXCIIIIv.

as creators of herbal remedies coincides with the rise of images of witches brewing noxious potions in their cauldrons. Only a few decades before, in 1487, Heinrich Kramer (Institoris) and Jakob Sprenger published the Malleus Malificarum (Hammer of the witches).41 This misogynistic text chronicles the nefarious deeds of witches, and its contents fueled the suspicion that sorcery was spreading. Its authors claimed that women were more susceptible than men to the influence of demonic forces, and they bolstered their warnings about such evil practices with quotations from the Church fathers. The text then instructed magistrates on the best ways to interrogate and torture witches and ultimately convict them. It doesn’t say much about how witches concocted their potions, although it does cite St. Augustine to assert that devils are attracted by “various kinds of stones, herbs, trees, animals, songs and instruments of music.”42 The Malleus Malificarum proved to be a runaway best seller, although its lack of illustrations limited its influence on the development of the visual iconography of witchcraft. Rather, that influence came from Ulrich Molitor’s De lamiis et phitonicis mulieribus (Of witches and diviner women), a text illustrated with a variety of rough woodcuts to demonstrate the evil activities of witches.43 As a legal scholar, Molitor (active

 Alchemy’s Old Wives 27

Figure 2.6 “Two Witches Brewing” from Ulrich Molitor, De laniis et phitonicis mulieribus (Strasburg: Johann Prüss, 1489). Woodcut. University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections. 1470–1501) was skeptical of the extent of witches’ powers, and he urged more rational evaluations of the charges brought against them. First published in 1489, his book also proved to be popular, with multiple editions appearing in Cologne, Strasbourg, and elsewhere. In one woodcut scene (Figure 2.6), two witches stand on either side of a boiling cauldron and add a rooster and a snake to their brew, while a hailstorm gathers in the sky above. In other images, a woman encounters a claw-footed demon on a road and a group of women prepare for a meal, suggesting the dangers of unsupervised female gatherings. Elsewhere, witches transform into animals and fly away on cooking forks. Among the various editions, the images differ somewhat; several show older women, who were often parodied in German culture. Others depict women of different ages to emphasize the idea that older women teach younger ones their tricks. During the persecutions of witches, several cases tried mothers and their daughters together.44 In this scene, the women appear to be of different ages. Even though both wear matronly headdresses, the one on the right appears older, with a more angular, less supple positioning of her body. Within the context of witchcraft, their cooking is

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ominous, but in a more neutral image, adding a chicken to a pot might produce a healthy soup, or the serpent could indicate the preparation of the panacea theriac. Recipes from contemporary domestic medical recipe books often required strange animal products as ingredients.45 The less threatening images in the Tacuinum Sanitatis, which show women cooking healthy soups in kitchens and preparing theriac in a pharmacy, contrast with the more evil connotations of witches brewing demonic potions in their cauldrons. As more skillful artists recognized the popularity of such illustrations, many of the activities illustrated in Molitor’s text were conflated into ever more complicated scenes of witchcraft practices. The witchcraft prints of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien have been compared to German humanist written revivals of classical sorcery46 and analyzed within the broader trajectory of the development of witchcraft imagery. In several of Baldung Grien’s prints, old and younger women gather in a forest to conjure hailstorms out of a pot or cauldrons. His chiaroscuro woodcuts share some of the activities illustrated in Molitor’s texts. Although such images were probably intended to be humorous, they helped reinforce and sustain the belief that women were susceptible to demonic activities and that when women came together, they were typically up to no good. Over the past fifty years, feminist scholars have taught us much about misogynistic attitudes that such witchcraft imagery reveals, often by focusing on gender issues and sexuality, investigated within the increasingly masculine gender hierarchy of early modern Europe.47 Witches brew their evil potions in boiling vessels whose shapes often mimic the female body or womb.48 Yet the appearance of these earlier witchcraft images does not align neatly with the persecution of witches, which gathered steam only in the late 1500s. One explanation may be that the persecution of women gained in intensity as the professionalization and masculine predominance of the medical fields became more established.49 Men and women worked as unlicensed practitioners of pharmacy and surgery in the public sphere into the 1600s, even as the professional societies of physicians and barber surgeons brought legal sanctions against them.50 Women’s work as distillers of home remedies and medicines also endured, as evidenced by the numerous recipe books intended for use by women in domestic settings, including the 1655 publication of The Queen’s Closet Opened, which purported to be recipes of the exiled widowed queen Henrietta Maria.51 These household manuals provided recipes and advice for cooking, preserving, and preparing confections, cosmetics, and household cleaners.52 Many were supposedly authored by women, or by men claiming that their recipes had been collected from prominent women. They offer insights into the tasks of elite women responsible for maintaining the health of their families and servants as well as overseeing all household activities.53 Such printed books and related manuscripts were often passed between female family members or from mother to daughter. Although these texts are not typically illustrated, many of the frontispieces and title pages display small distillation vessels,54 essential equipment for anyone who needed to produce herbal and animal-based medicines, household products, distilled waters, and confections.

 Alchemy’s Old Wives 29 Throughout this visual evolution, the connections between women and herbal medicine underwent many changes. Although it is always risky to assume that images born of artistic traditions can provide evidence of the realities of daily life, the depictions of “old wives” and younger women involved in plant work and alchemical distillations offer a glimpse into the involvement of women in herbal medicine and botanical alchemy at a time when medicine and pharmacy were becoming exclusively masculine domains. Such artworks may not be the most reliable historical records, but the disappearance of scenes showing women as practitioners reflects this changing climate. Beyond the effect on real women’s lives, these images may be reclaimed as dim reflections of the oral transmission of medical remedies between female friends and women of different generations who passed recipes within their families. The recipes of “old wives” recommended by Paracelsus and collected by doctors and pharmacists at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution preserved at least some of the oral traditions of herbal medicine and botanical alchemy. The identities of the “aquavit women” and “herb women” remain largely unknown, and few images of them can be found. Nevertheless, their legends speak to the wisdom learned through experience and old age, and to a lesser-known chapter in the history of science, to which the contributions made by women should not be forgotten.

Notes 1 Andrew Weeks, Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 136. 2 Eileen Reeves, “Old Wives’ Tales and the New World System: Gilbert, Galileo, and Kepler,” Configurations 7, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 301–54. 3 Apprenticeships of younger women with older women existed among midwives; see Eucharius Rösslin, When Midwifery Became the Male Physician’s Province: The Sixteenth Century Handbook “The Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives,” Newly Englished, trans. Wendy Arons (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 1994), 1–25. Rösslin had no experience in midwifery but complained about the ineptitude of midwives to establish his authority in the field. 4 She was also known as Maria the Jew, Maria the Copt, and erroneously as the sister of Moses. Raphael Patai, The Jewish Alchemists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 60–91. 5 Illustrations of Maria’s vessels are found in an eleventh-century manuscript in Venice, MS Marcianus graecus. Z. 299; and in the fifteenth-century manuscript Traité d’Alchimie, (Mss Grec 2327, fols. 81v, 221v, Bibliothèque Nationale Richelieu, Paris). 6 “Mariae Prophetissae Practica,” Auriferae artis (Basel: Petrum Pernam, 1572), 343–8. Transcription available at http:​//www​.alch​emywe​bsite​.com/​maryp​rof.h​tml. 7 John Read, Prelude to Chemistry (London: G. Bell, 1939), 8–21. 8 Notable exceptions are the engravings of a man and woman equally engaged in alchemical processes within the Mutus Liber (1677), a silent book based on

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the legend of Nicolas and Perenelle Flamel; M. E. Warlick, “Picturing Nature in Alchemical Images,” in Esotericism, Religion, and Nature, ed. Arthur Versluis et al. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009), 255–76, here 270–2. 9 Although alchemy was not taught in universities, it shared theoretical and cosmological views of similar subjects that were, such as astronomy. See, for example, Constantine of Pisa’s thirteenth-century transcriptions of his university lecture notes on alchemy in Barbara Obrist, Constantine of Pisa: The Book of the Secrets of Alchemy (Leiden: Brill, 1990). 10 Pedro Gil Sotres, “The Regimens of Health,” in Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. Mirko D. Grmek and Bernardino Fantini, trans. Antony Shugaar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 291–318. 11 Cathleen Hoeniger, “The Illuminated ‘Tacuinum sanitatis’ Manuscripts from Northern Italy, ca. 1380–1400,” in Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200–1550, ed. Jean A. Givens, Karen M. Reeds, and Alain Touwaide (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 51–81. 12 The witch in Albrecht Dürer’s The Sorcerer also carries a distaff. The woman pictured in the Tacuinum Sanitatis version in the Casanatense Library in Rome does not have a distaff. 13 Jole Agrimi and Chiara Crisciani, “Savoir medical et anthropologie religieuse: Les représentations et les fonctions de la vetula (XIIe-XVe siècle),” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 48, no. 5 (September–October 1993): 1298. 14 This image is reproduced in Luisa Cogliati Arano, The Medieval Health Handbook “Tacuinum Sanitatis” (New York: George Braziller, 1996), fig. 29. 15 Ibid., fig. 41. 16 Agrimi and Crisciani, “Savoir medical,” 1281–308. 17 Ibid., 1288. 18 F. Sherwood Taylor, “The Evolution of the Still,” Annals of Science 5, no. 3 (July 1945): 185–202. 19 R. J. Forbes, A Short History of Distillation (Leiden: Brill, 1948). Earlier Chinese and Arabic alcohol distillations have also been argued. 20 Chiara Crisciani, “The Conception of Alchemy as Expressed in the ‘Pretiosa Margarita Novella’ of Petrus Bonus of Ferrara,” Ambix 20, no. 3 (November 1973): 178–9. Several edicts were issued against the fraudulent production of alchemical metals in the late thirteenth century. The authenticity of Arnald’s alchemical treatises has been questioned but not resolved. Bacon’s alchemical and medical interests are well documented. 21 James A. Weisheipl, “The Life and Works of St. Albert the Great,” in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, 1980, ed. James A. Weisheipl (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980), 13–51. 22 This text contains Avicenna’s De congelatione et conglutinatione lapidum, thought by Albert and others to have been written by Aristotle. 23 Chiara Crisciani, “Alchemy and Medicine in the Middle Ages,” Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 38 (1996): 11–12. 24 Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), II: 739–44; Helen Rodnite Lemay, Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s “De Secretis Mulierum” with Commentaries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).

 Alchemy’s Old Wives 31 25 Thorndike, Magic and Experimental Science, II:841–61. 26 Arnald of Villanova, The Conservation of Youth and Defense of Age: De conservatione juventutis et retardation senectutis, trans. Dr. Jonas Drummond, 1544, with additions from the Brevarium of Arnaldus, ed. Charles L. Dana (Woodstock: Elm Tree Press, 1912), 22. The editor Charles Dana estimates that 240 editions of Arnald’s translation of the Salerno text were reprinted between 1474 and 1846. 27 Dorothea Waley Singer, “Alchemical Writings Attributed to Roger Bacon,” Speculum 7 (1932): 80–6; William R. Newman, “An Overview of Roger Bacon’s Alchemy,” in Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed. Jeremiah Hackett (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 317–36. 28 Leah DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy and the End of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). For an overview of the Franciscans and medicinal alchemy, see Zachary A. Matus, Franciscans and the Elixir of Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 29 Robert Halleux, “Les Ouvrages Alchimiques de Jean de Roquetaillade,” Histoire littéraire de la France 41 (1981): 241–84. He outlines the development of aqua ardens and aqua vitae among several prior practitioners (246–50). 30 For the development of pharmacy and its images in Germany, see Werner Gaude, Die alte Apotheke (Stuttgart: Deutscher Apotheker Verlag, 1986); and Joachim Teller, Pharmazie und der gemeine Mann (Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 1982–3, exh. cat). 31 Judith M. Bennett, “Misogyny, Popular Culture, and Women’s Work,” History Workshop 31 (Spring 1991): 166–88; and B. Ann Tlusty, “Water of Life, Water of Death: The Controversy over Brandy and Gin in Early Modern Augsburg,” Central European History 31, nos. 1/2 (1998): 1–30. 32 A 1501 version of this woodcut shows the plants more clearly; Sheila M. Durling, “An Ulm Unicum of 1501 in the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland,” The Library, 5th ser., 20, no. 1 (March 1965): 55–7. 33 Animal, mineral, and metallic substances were less prominent than the plant remedies, but substances such as pig fat for burns were included. 34 Published in Crakow by F. Ungler. Falimirz was connected to the court in Kraśnik. Because of the lack of trained physicians and pharmacists in his country, he published this herbal in Polish to make medical remedies more available to the general public. 35 Published in Crakow by Helena Unglerowa. Both men have been described as doctors and/or botanists, although little evidence remains to verify the details of their training and professional lives. The full text of the 1542 edition can be viewed online: https​://po​lona.​pl/it​em/o-​ziola​ch-tu​teczn​ych-y​-zamo​rskic​h-y-o​ -mocz​y-ich​-a-kt​emu-k​xiegi​-leka​rskie​,NDcz​OTUzN​A/2/#​item.​ A third herbal, reworking the second by Spiczyński, was published by Marcin Siennik (Crakow: Mikolaj Scharffenberger, 1568). The author thanks Rafel T. Prinke for his help in gathering information concerning these three texts. See Jan Szostak, “Autorzy pierwszuch zielników polskich—Stefan Falimirz, Hieronim Spizyński i Marcin Siennik,” Archiwum Historii Medycyny 40, no. 3 (1977): 277–89; and Janusz Ostrowski, “Herbal Treatment of the Urinary System Diseases based on 16th and 17th Century Herbals in Poland,” Giornale Italiano di Nefrologia (2016): Supp. 66.33.S6. 18.

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36 Diane R. Karp, ed., Ars Medica: Art, Medicine and the Human Condition (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1985, exh. cat; distributed by the University of Pennsylvania Press), 174. 37 His name is variously spelled Brunschwygk, Braunsweig, Bruynswyke; Henry E. Sigerist, Hieronymus Brunschwig and His Work (New York: Ben Abramson, 1946). 38 The full woodcut appears as the title page of Brunschwig’s Liber de arte distillandi de Simplicibus (Strasbourg: Grüninger, 1500). The full illustration is reproduced in Jacques van Lennep, Alchimie (Brussels: Crédit Communal, 1985), 151. See also Book of Distillation by Hieronymus Brunschwig, intro. Harold J. Abrahams (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1971), xv–lxviii. 39 An earlier version of this text was published in 1505 in Strasbourg by J. Grüninger. 40 Published in Strasbourg by J. Grüninger. 41 The ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, trans. Montague Summers (1928; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 40. Sprenger was more involved in the publishing of the treatise than with its composition. 42 Ibid., 40. 43 Natalie Kwan, “Woodcuts and Witches: Ulrich Molitor’s ‘De lamiis et pythonicis mulieribus,’ 1489–1669,” German History 30, no. 4 (December 2012): 493–527. 44 Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 173. 45 German medical recipes often included serpents, along with parts of scorpions, vultures, and badgers; Francis B. Brévart, “Between Medicine, Magic, and Religion: Wonder Drugs in German Medico-Pharmaceutical Treatises of the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries,” Speculum 83, no. 1 (January 2008): 1–57. 46 Margaret A. Sullivan, “The Witches of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 332–401. Sullivan points out many of the differences between Molitor’s images and those of Dürer and Baldung Grien, which she relates more closely to classical literary prototypes. 47 Allison P. Coudert, “Probing Women and Penetrating Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe,” in Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter Hanegraaff and Jeffrey Kripal (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 231–80. 48 Charles Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft (New York: Routledge, 2007), 70–98. 49 Leland L. Estes, “Origins of the European Witch Craze: A Hypothesis,” Journal of Social History 17, no. 2 (1983): 271–301. 50 Doreen Evenden Nagy, Popular Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988). 51 Laura Lunger Knoppers, “Opening the Queen’s Closet: Henrietta Maria, Elizabeth Cromwell and the Politics of Cookery,” Renaissance Quarterly 60, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 464–99; and Lynette Hunter, “Women and Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, ed. Judith P. Zinsser (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 123–40. 52 Penny Bayer, “From Kitchen Hearth to Learned Paracelsianism: Women and Alchemy in the Renaissance,” in Mystical Metal of Gold, ed. Stanton J. Linden (New York: AMS Press, 2007), 365–86.

 Alchemy’s Old Wives 33 53 Lynette Hunter, “Women and Domestic Medicine: Lady Experimenters, 1570–1620,” in Women, Science and Medicine, 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society, ed. Lynnette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), 89–107, esp. 104. 54 Elizabeth Talbot Grey, Countess of Kent, A Choice Manual, or Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chirurgery (London: W. Jar, 1654); Hannah Wooley (Wolley), The Ladies Directory, in Choice Experiments and Curiosities of Preserving in Jellies, and Candying both Fruits and Flowers: With Rarities of Many Precious Waters . . . (London: printed by T. M. for Peter Dring, 1662); Hannah Wooley, The Accomplish’d Ladies Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying and Cookery (London, 1684).

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Figure 3.1  Alvaro Pirez, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, early fifteenth century. Tempera and gold on wood. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY., inv.1982.60.3 (See Plate 4).

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Silenced, Sidelined, and Even Undressed Old Women in Seventeenth-Century Religious Art Zirka Z. Filipczak

Many images exist of old men speaking about religious matters or holding what they had written, but few show old women doing the same. Moreover, how artists pictured these old women changed substantially from the thirteenth through to the seventeenth centuries. So did the quantity of such images and their audience. By the 1600s, positive images of old women speaking out about religious matters declined to a low point, a progressive downturn that came as three different subjects—the prophetess Anna at the Presentation of Christ, aged sibyls, and the personification of Heresy—underwent major alterations. Although each subject has been studied, their interrelated implications have not. Nor has the relevance of what historians have found about the relationship between mystics or other devout women and their ecclesiastical spiritual advisers. Few aged women have prominent roles in seventeenth-century religious art, but not because female saints (or, for that matter, most women) died young. Surveys exist of the life spans of those whose historicity is settled with established birth and death dates.1 Not only did almost half of the women have long lives, but the percentages also remained roughly the same from the sixth through to the eighteenth centuries: 40-some percent lived to at least sixty-five years of age. Nevertheless, although Renaissance and Baroque artists depicted numerous old male saints on earth as well as in heaven, they typically pictured female saints who lived into old age as young, as exemplified by the newly canonized Teresa of Avila (died in 1582, aged sixty-seven) or Bridget of Sweden (died aged seventy), who looks as young as her adult daughter.2 Literary texts praised the beauty of young women but disparaged old women as hateful and ugly: “Her beauty gone, Ugly had she become. . . . And wrinkled foul that formerly were fair” wrote the author of The Pilgrimage of Human Life in the 1330s.3 The youthful beauty of women was not morally neutral. Beauty’s association with goodness, an idea traceable to classical antiquity, continued through the Middle Ages, gaining new vigor through Neo-Platonism during the Renaissance. As Baldassare Castiglione summarized in his Book of the Courtier (1528) through one of his speakers, Pietro Bembo, “outward beauty is a true sign of inner goodness.”4 Michelangelo took this belief to a strange but logical conclusion. According to Ascanio Condivi’s report, Michelangelo rebutted complaints about the youthfulness of Mary in his Pietà of

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1498: “Do you not know that chaste women retain their fresh looks much longer than those who are not chaste? How much more, therefore, a virgin in whom not even the least unchaste desire ever arose?”5 The link between virtue and beauty persisted in the seventeenth century. In 1620, John Ford wrote, “good women, modest women, true women; ever young, because ever virtuous, ever chaste.”6 The pictured exceptions, elderly women with prominent roles, are those who miraculously gave birth despite their old bodies. Marks of age served as evidence of the supernatural motherhood of St. Elizabeth, cousin of Mary and mother of St. John the Baptist, whom artists always pictured as old, and of St. Anne, Mary’s mother, sometimes portrayed as old.7

The Gradual Demotion of a New Testament Prophetess The New Testament included one prophetess. According to the Gospel of Luke (2:3638), when Mary and Joseph brought the infant Christ for his ritual presentation in the temple, the elderly Anna (also identified as Hannah) came to see him.8 According to the gospel, she had been married for seven years, after which she lived till the age of eighty-four as a widow who remained in the synagogue, praying and fasting until the day of the infant Christ’s presentation. Recognizing him as the promised Redeemer, she “spoke of him to all that looked for the redemption of Jerusalem.” Also present in the temple that day was old Simeon, whom artists pictured holding Christ in his arms, as the Gospel of Luke described. First Simeon said to God that he was now ready to die, and then he told Mary about Christ’s fate as well as her own. Whatever their date, depictions of Christ’s presentation in the temple typically include a prominent Simeon, but not always Anna, whose popularity and characterization varied over time.9 Influenced by Byzantine art, which celebrated the Presentation as one of the ten major feasts in the Orthodox calendar, Italian artists of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and early fifteenth centuries usually pictured Anna delivering her prophecy in the public space of the temple.10 As exemplified by the version painted in the early fifteenth century by Alvaro Pirez, a Portuguese artist active in Italy, a scroll in Anna’s hand identifies her as a prophetess (Figure 3.1).11 The scroll’s presence testified that Anna’s foretelling mattered as much as prophecies by Old Testament prophets, who also hold scrolls. Body language sometimes reinforced her message, as when she points to Christ, a gesture that functions as a form of speech, literally making a point. In Pirez’s painting, two men, one of them St. Joseph, react with surprise at what she predicts about the child in Simeon’s arms. The popular representational tradition of Anna as prophetess that Pirez’s predella painting exemplifies did not survive long after his version. By the second half of the fifteenth century, the scroll had disappeared. Gestures became less clear as artists adopted new ones that, by themselves, failed to signify foretelling, as with Lorenzo Lotto’s outspread, lowered arms or Albrecht Dürer’s pointing directed at Mary rather than Christ. As seen in the version from 1516 by Fra Bartolomeo (Figure 3.2), Anna was usually turned into a devout witness, with nothing that identified her as a prophetess, or she disappeared from the scene.12 Even partial exceptions to her demotion remained

 Silenced, Sidelined, and Even Undressed 37

Figure 3.2 Fra Bartolomeo (Baccio della Porta), Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 1516. Oil on poplar. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: KHM. Museumsverband (See Plate 5). rare, a case in point being Ludovico Carracci’s version from c. 1605. Placed in the foreground, Anna looks at us as she points to Christ but the prophetic statement on her tablet is not inscribed with her own words; according to the Gospel of Luke, that statement was Simeon’s, not hers.13 Despite her spatial prominence, Anna lost her independent prophetic voice. Only two seventeenth-century artists conveyed the significance of Luke’s account about Anna: Rembrandt van Rijn and Philippe de Champaigne (Figure 3.3). Rembrandt, known for the aptness of his figures’ body language, created six versions of the Presentation in the Temple. In the four earliest (c. 1628–39), he explored different ways to communicate Anna’s prophetic realization. Medium made a difference, as sometimes is the case with his works.14 In the two early paintings, he focused on her gestures, which he emphasized through his use of light. Though prominent, these gestures by themselves would not identify her as a prophetess, for they could be also interpreted as prayer, astonishment, or acknowledgment of truth in response to what Simeon said.15 Most viewers already knew Luke’s gospel account, so they would interpret her gestures to fit the familiar narrative. Rembrandt invented his visually clearest interpretation in an etching from about 1639. As the dove of the Holy Ghost hovers above Anna’s head (an unusual sign of divine presence in this context), she leans on her crutch and energetically hobbles toward Christ; her free hand remains lightly raised as if ready for speech.16

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Figure 3.3  Philippe de Champaigne, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 1648. Oil on canvas, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Photo: BALaT KIK / IRPA / The Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, Brussels. Philippe de Champaigne empowered Anna with a voice in two altarpieces, one from 1628–30 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon)17 and the other from 1648 (Figure 3.3). As seen in the later, austerely classical version, created for the high altar of the Church of Saint-Honoré in Paris, he also provided her with an audience. With animated face and parted lips she speaks to listening men whose expressions of surprised wonder

 Silenced, Sidelined, and Even Undressed 39 reflect the importance of what she communicates. With her right hand, Anna points toward Christ, while in her left she holds a book, an updated substitute for a scroll. One might be tempted to attribute Champaigne’s positive interpretation of Anna’s role, particularly the emphasis on her male listeners, to the artist’s close ties with the Jansenist-influenced convent at Port-Royal.18 Run by the articulate abbess Mother Marie-Angelique Arnauld, whom the artist portrayed that same year at the age of fifty-seven (Musée Condé, Chantilly), the convent gained a reputation as a center for sometimes controversial intellectual discussion of theological matters. Close ties with Port-Royal may have been a contributing variable, but Champaigne’s tendency to adhere to the original biblical text would have been the main reason. In his earlier version, painted before he developed a connection with Port-Royal, he gave Anna the same active speaking role and attentive audience. Rembrandt’s and Champaigne’s exceptional versions stand apart from those typical of seventeenth-century artists, who adhered to what the Gospel of Luke emphasized about Simeon, but not about Anna. The general pattern of silencing continued as eighteenth-century depictions relegated the prophetess Anna to being a devout bystander or absent altogether. The sharp decrease in images that acknowledged Anna’s biblical role as a prophetess came during a gradual, continuing change in ecclesiastical response to female mystics and other devout women. When depictions of Anna making her prophecy became popular in Italy during the thirteenth and, especially, the fourteenth centuries, ecclesiastics largely respected the prophecies and other religious statements by female visionaries, and the women themselves felt confident that their insights came from God. People believed that women’s cold-wet humoral makeup made them less rational and more impressionable, which increased their openness to divine communication. Depictions of Anna as a prophetess declined to near extinction by the mid-fifteenth century, a time when people grew suspicious of externalized mystical experiences and, instead, favored quietly internalized states. Also, the women’s confessors took an increasingly questioning, even severe, approach to their spiritual life, which in turn influenced the women’s self-perception.19 The new depictions of Anna presented her as a silent, devout old woman, thus an appropriate model, especially for widows.

Old Sibyls Outnumbered as Well as Outlasted by Young Ones After depictions of Anna as prophetess largely disappeared by the mid-fifteenth century, old sibyls took her place as the favored aged prophetesses in Western European art. Although the earliest classical Greek source to mention a sibyl speaks of only one (Heraclitus, fragment 95), the numbers soon multiplied, without settling on a definite total. Twelve became the favored number during the fifteenth century, but artists often pictured fewer or more sibyls in both groups and series.20 The appeal of all sibyls, young as well as old, stemmed from their dual identity. Although they belonged to Greco-Roman history and mythology, they held religious importance for

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Christians, who interpreted certain texts of their oracular statements as references to Christ, comparable in significance to the foretellings of Old Testament prophets.21 Unlike Anna, who had to be portrayed looking old, sibyls could be any age. Nevertheless, the vast majority look young. Despite classical, medieval, and Renaissance texts that talked about old sibyls, even as old as one thousand years, images of young sibyls far outnumbered them.22 Furthermore, artists did not consistently depict any specific sibyl as old. In Germany, for instance, the oaken choir-stall sculptures that Joerg Syrlin carved around 1470 for the Cathedral in Ulm include seven young sibyls but only one old, the Phrygian, who opens her mouth as if to voice the prophetic words written on her stall. In Italy, the splendid intarsia floor (1481–3) of Siena Cathedral includes a series of ten full-length sibyls, amidst whom the Cumaean appears twice, both times as old. In one image she stands calm and dignified; in the other, she is frenzied with inspiration.23 Agostino di Duccio carved high reliefs of ten sibyls, showing some of them old, including the placid Tiburtine and the inspired Cumaean (Figure 3.4). They decorated the Chapel of the Ancestors in the unfinished church that Sigismondo Malatesta turned into a family mausoleum, his Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini. Though fewer in number, old sibyls survived into the sixteenth century, north as well as south of the Alps.24 The best-known sixteenth-century examples are those that Michelangelo Buonarotti frescoed on the Sistine Ceiling in the Vatican, together

Figure 3.4 Agostino Duccio, Cumaean Sibyl. Chapel of the Ancestors, Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini, Italy. Ufficio Beni Culturali—Diocesi di Rimini. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY.

 Silenced, Sidelined, and Even Undressed 41 with seven prophets. His five sibyls vary in age, with two of them old, namely the Persian and the muscular Cumaean. Michelangelo also exceptionally included three old women among the blessed in his Last Judgment.25 Although he admitted them, he also shadowed, occluded, and sidelined them so that from floor level they are hard to see. The one most visible sits alone at the uppermost left edge of the wall, farthest from viewers standing in the chapel below. Her powerful arms recall the nearby Cumaean Sibyl, whose oracular statements included one interpreted as a prediction of the coming of a redeemer, Christ’s birth.26 Whether the woman carries some sibylline significance remains unclear. Michelangelo darkened her eyes but gave her a location with an unobstructed view of Christ at his Second Coming, this time as an all-powerful judge. Despite Michelangelo’s influential example, images of old sibyls grew rare by the mid-sixteenth century, even though their young counterparts remained in demand through the nineteenth. Without the differentiating presence of an occasional old sibyl, the young ones look even more interchangeable, distinguished by their prophecies and purported location but not individuated in appearance. Unlike Anna, they became types more than individuals.27 The virtual pictorial extinction of Anna as prophetess and then, a century later, of the old sibyls largely eliminated images of women whose aging was accompanied by spiritual insight, not decline.

Naked Heresy Although early modern artists stopped producing positive images of old women who spoke out about religious matters, they multiplied old women’s negative roles in religious as well as secular art. By the seventeenth century, the repertoire for old women included witches (some shown naked), madams (in the Netherlands, at least, madams averaged thirty-five years of age),28 a remodeled and undressed personification of Envy, and, worst of all, an equally bared Heresy, whose theologically false positions had to be silenced. The naked or near-naked Heresy as an old woman marked a new stage in this personification’s representational history. Artists had traditionally pictured Heresy as a devil or as a man whom an accompanying book might identify as the founder of a specific heretical movement. When medieval artists needed a generalized image of heresy, however, they pictured it as an old woman, clothed from head to foot, as exemplified in illustrated manuscripts of Pilgrimage of Human Life.29 At the end of the sixteenth century, during which time Protestantism tore apart the Catholic fabric of Europe, Cesare Ripa introduced a new, deliberately repulsive image of Heresy/Heresia in his Iconologia, which served artists as a much-used handbook for personifying abstract concepts and qualities. He at first only described Heresy in 1593 in his unillustrated first edition, and then in 1603 he added a woodcut illustration to strengthen the repellent effect (see Figure 3.5). An old, naked, haggard, disheveled hag with intense energy, Heresy exhales smoke and flames while she holds a handful of snakes and a book from which slither more snakes, symbolic of her false theological doctrines. The personification was not directed against actual heretical spokeswomen,

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Figure 3.5  Anonymous, Heresia in Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, 1603. Woodcut. Chapin Rare Books Library, Williams College, Williamstown, MA. even though some sects, such as Quakers, did allow women to preach. Instead, Ripa used an old woman’s body for its symbolic moral implications. Whereas the Iconologia pictured several young female nudes who personify such positive qualities as beauty (belezza), clarity (chiarezza), and truth (verita), or neutral ones, such as the summer solstice, the only naked old woman shown stands for the spiritually mortal sin of heresy (heresia). Ripa could have personified Heresy as young, with ragged clothing, snakes, and other props evocative of her evil nature. Instead, the gaunt, aged body carries much of the symbolism. Describing Heresy as both old and ugly, Ripa explains that she stands “naked because bare of all virtues” and ugly because deprived of the light of faith. Her flaccid breasts reveal she cannot nourish good works, the kind worthy of eternal life.30 By contrast, the full breasts and nipples of the young personification of Catholic Faith are visible through her clothing. Republished multiple times, the Iconologia proved internationally influential. Ripa’s personification of Heresy reappeared in prints, especially title pages of books, and to a lesser extent in paintings and sculptures.31 In the twelve volumes of Cesare Baronius’s Annales Ecclesiastici, a monumental historical rebuttal to Lutheran ecclesiastical history, Heresy occupies the lower left corner of each title page. Seated and chained, the bare-chested personification prominently exposes her sagging breasts as she exhales flames while holding live snakes in each hand. More snakes twist around her bony limbs and emerge from her books. Alongside but symbolically above her sits a

 Silenced, Sidelined, and Even Undressed 43

Figure 3.6 Jan Baptiste Collaert, after Peter Paul Rubens, “Allegory of Church History,” title page for F. Labata and G. Stanyhurst, Thesaurus moralis (Antwerp, 1652). Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. youthful female personification with attributes of the papacy (cross, dove of the Holy Spirit, papal tiara, book, and keys to heaven). As the Annales Ecclesiastici went through multiple editions between 1601 and 1658, the single engraved copper plate, reworked when needed, yielded 18,257 impressions, an astonishingly large number.32 Peter Paul Rubens deliberately borrowed but improved on the title page of Baronius’s volumes, which he acquired in 1622. That same year, he designed the title page for Dionysius Mudzaert’s De Kerckelycke Historie, which the Plantin-Moretus Press in Antwerp then reused for two more publications, including Francisco Labata’s Thesaurus moralis in 1652 (Figure 3.6).33 By moving the young female personification of the Catholic Church to the top of the page, Rubens conveyed the church’s hierarchical importance. By contrast, by relocating Heresy from the left corner to a stone-walled space in the lower right corner, he made her look imprisoned and more noticeable. As she glares fiercely at viewers, snakes emerge from her hair as well as from her volumes of Lutheran church history. In sculptures or paintings by other artists, Heresy likewise appears as defeated by a young woman who symbolizes the Catholic Church or some other virtuous being. Because the contrast between youthful beauty and withered old age carried much of the moral message, artists used the same type of exposed elderly body to personify Envy and the Plague, which, like heresy, can spread with fatal consequences.34 Even when artists continued to

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exemplify heresy by a specific male heretic, they sometimes gave him a haggard old woman as a companion, as if the two formed a team.35 Between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, as changes in the representational traditions of the prophetess Anna, old sibyls, and the personification of heresy culminated in the most unfavorable image of women who spoke about new religious matters, the ecclesiastical reception of women’s spirituality continued to deteriorate. The title of a 1999 essay by the historian Gabriella Zarri, “From Prophecy to Discipline,” encapsulates the shift in women’s relationships to their confessor priests. What was once a receptive association in the thirteenth century had, by the seventeenth century, turned into a supervisory, even inquisitorial one. Instead of being respected for their openness to divine communication, mystics and other devout women were subjected to cross-examination by male confessors wary of even a trace of heresy.36 The personification of heresy as an old woman stood for what was feared. As the favored images changed, so, too, did their audience. Because churches remained their main habitat, the numerous depictions of Anna as prophetess had a large and varied viewing public. The same applies to the far less numerous old sibyls, who likewise could be found in churches but rarely appeared in prints, unlike young sibyls. Heresy as a naked old woman had a different audience, however, for although some sculptures and paintings that pictured this personification could be seen in churches, it most often appeared on the title pages of religious publications. Although huge and international, its audience thus remained largely limited to readers literate in Latin, which meant men far more than women, and especially ecclesiastics, the type of men who supervised the religious ideas voiced by women. Despite standing for an abstract concept, the image of Heresy could not be neutrally received, for viewers were meant to react with dislike to the naked, aged female body and its twisting snake companions. As research on emotional reactions has shown, if personifications of Heresy prompted a negative response, unlike depictions of Anna and of old sibyls, they would have remained the most memorable images of old women who voiced their religious ideas.37

Notes 1 Robert Kastenbaum, “The Age of Saints and the Saintliness of Age,” International Journal of Aging and Human Development 30, no. 2 (1990): 95–118. For a breakdown of data from the years 500 to 1099, see Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500–1100 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 2 St. Bridget of Sweden (1303–73) with her adult daughter, St. Catherine of Sweden, in Högsby church, Smalandia, Sweden. Artists infrequently portrayed Teresa of Avila as old, as in the crude portrait made from life by Juan de la Miseria toward the end of her life, for example, Peter Paul Rubens, St. Teresa of Avila Writing under Divine Inspiration (location unknown). 3 Shulamith Shahar and Yael Lotan, Growing Old in the Middle Ages: Winter Clothes Us in Shadow and Pain (London: Routledge, 2004), 43–9. Quotation from The

 Silenced, Sidelined, and Even Undressed 45 Pilgrimage of Human Life, written in the 1330s. Welleda Muller, The Representations of Elderly People in the Scenes of Jesus’ Childhood in Tuscan Paintings, 14th–16th Centuries: Images of Intergeneration Relationships (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 178–219. 4 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1976), 330. 5 Charles Holroyd, Michael Angelo Buonarroti, with Translations of the Life of the Master by His Scholar, Ascanio Condivi, and Three Dialogues from the Portuguese by Francisco d’Ollanda (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 26. 6 John Ford, Hic Mulier; or, The Man Woman (London: Christ Church Gate, 1620), n.p. 7 Michaelina Woutiers, Education of the Virgin, 1656, private collection; Bartolomé Murillo, Saint Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary, 1655, Prado, Madrid. 8 “And there was one Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser; she was far advanced in years, and had lived with her husband seven years from her virginity. And she was a widow until fourscore and four years; who departed not from the temple, by fastings and prayers serving night and day. Now she, at the same hour, coming in, confessed to the Lord; and spoke of him to all that looked for the redemption of Israel” (Lk. 2:36-38). 9 Dorothy C. Shorr, “The Iconographic Development of the Presentation in the Temple,” Art Bulletin 28, no. 1 (1946): 17–32; Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, vol. 2, trans. Janet Seligman (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1972), 90–4; Muller, Elderly People, 58–9; Jessica Savage, “Widow’s Window to the Presentation: Prophetess Anna in the Temple,” The Index of Medieval Art, February 8, 2018, https​://im​a.pri​nceto​n.edu​/2018​/02/0​8/wid​ows-w​indow​-to-t​he-pr​esent​ation​ -prop​hetes​s-ann​a-in-​the-t​emple​/. 10 Beyond Italy, the purification of Mary, signaled by the presence of candles, took precedence over Anna’s prophecy; see Penny Howell Jolly, “Learned Reading, Vernacular Seeing: Jacques Daret’s Presentation in the Temple,” Art Bulletin 82, no. 3 (September 2000): 428–52, esp. 431–3, 443–5. 11 The numerous examples include Master of Bagnacavallo, c. 1278, manuscript illumination, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Giotto, 1305, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua; Duccio, 1308–11, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena; Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1342, Uffizi Gallery, Florence; Bartolo di Fredi, 1388, Louvre, Paris; Giovanni di Paolo, c. 1435, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Lorenzo Ghiberti and Bernardo di Francesco, 1443, stained glass, Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence. 12 Absent from the scene, for example, Fra Angelico, c. 1440, Cell 10, Convento di San Marco, Florence; Jacopo Tintoretto, c. 1550, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice; Sebastian Bourdon, c. 1644, Louvre, Paris. 13 What Simeon said to Mary (Lk. 2:34) is written on Anna’s tablet: “Behold, this one has been set for the ruin and for the resurrection of many in Israel.” 14 Shelley Perlove and Larry A. Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009), 197–225. 15 In the painting from c. 1628, Rembrandt raised both of Anna’s arms, as he did with the centurion’s in the late Three Crosses drypoint to convey the converted soldier’s realization of Christ’s divine identity. Conventionally, hands raised in that manner stand for an assertion of truth; John Bulwer, Chirologia, or the Natural Language of

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the Hand, ed. J. Cleary (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974), 48, 115. 16 For the effect of Anna’s prophecy on the setting, interpreted as the second temple of Jerusalem, see Perlove and Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith, 211–14. 17 For a post-restoration image of the altarpiece and background information, see “L’Oeuvre du mois, Mars 2011: Philippe de Champaigne (Bruxelles, 1602–Paris, 1674), La Présentation au temple,” Musée des beaux-arts Dijon, https​://be​aux-a​rts. d​ijon.​fr/si​tes/d​efaul​t/fil​es/Co​llect​ions/​pdf/c​hampa​igne_​la_pr​esent​ation​_au_t​emple​ .pdf.​ 18 Jean Lesaulnier, “Philippe de Champaigne et Port-Royal: Les leçons d’une correspondence,” in Philippe de Champaigne ou la figure du peintre janséniste: Lecture critique des rapports entre Port-Royal et les arts, ed. Marianne Cojannot-Le Blanc (Paris: Nolin, 2011). 19 John Coakley, “Gender and the Authority of Friars: The Significance of Holy Women for Thirteenth-Century Franciscans and Dominicans,” Church History 60, no. 4 (December 1991): 445–60; Benedicta Ward, Signs and Wonders: Saints, Miracles and Prayers from the 4th Century to the 14th, ch. 23 (Aldershot: Routledge, 1992), 107–17; Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), esp. 1–3, 7–8, 121, 299–303; John Van Engen, “The Complicated Fifteenth Century: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church,” Church History 77, no. 2 (June 2008): 282–3. 20 Examples of multiple sibyls: Giovanni Pisano, six sibyls, c. 1300, pulpit of the Church of San Andrea, Pistoia; Domenico Ghirlandaio, four sibyls, 1485, Ceiling of the Sasetti Chapel, Basilica of Santa Trinita, Florence; Studio of Sandro Botticelli, Five Sibyls Seated in Niches, c. 1472–5, Christ Church, University of Oxford; sixteen engraved by Crispijn de Passe the Elder, 1601. 21 Robin Raybould, The Sibyl Series of the Fifteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2016); H. W. Parke, Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1988), 161–70. 22 Even though in the Aeneid, bk. 6, line 321, Virgil describes the Cumaean Sibyl as aged, some artists pictured her as young (e.g., Jan Brueghel). Tim G. Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World: A Cultural and Social History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 324n18. Seventeenth-century narrative illustrations continued to depict the Cumaean Sibyl as old: Gerard de Lairesse in drawn and printed illustrations; Arnold Houbraken, Aeneas and the Sibyl in the Underworld, n.d., drawing, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Pietro Testa, Aeneas on the Bank of the River Styx, c. 1649, private collection, https​://ww​w.wga​.hu/h​tml_m​/t/te​ sta/a​eneas​.html​. 23 Attributed, respectively, to the design of Giovanni di Stefano and Vito de Marco. R. H. Hobart Cust, The Pavement Masters of Siena (London: George Bell and Sons, 1901), 36–8. 24 Other old sibyls: Hellespontine Sibyl, engraving after Baccio Baldini; Anonymous Flemish painter, The Twelve Sybils in The Isabella Breviary, last decade of the fifteenth century, British Museum, f. 8v. The Erythrian, seen frontally, clearly looks old. The Hellespontine, in profile, may also be meant to look old; Raphael Sanzio, The Four Sibyls, c. 1514, fresco (Chigi Chapel, Santa Maria della Pace, Rome), shadowed only the old Tiburtine sibyl’s face; Lorenzo Lotto, The Erythraean Sibyl, 1524, fresco, Suardi Oratory, Trescore, Bergamo, Lombardy.

 Silenced, Sidelined, and Even Undressed 47 25 Zirka Filipczak, “Why Are There No Old Women in Heaven?” Jaarboek: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen 2000 (Antwerp Royal Museum Annual 2000): 69–90. From photos available to me then, Michelangelo’s exceptional inclusion was not visible. 26 Ella Bourne, “The Messianic Prophecy in Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue,” Classical Journal 11, no. 7 (April 1916): 390–400. 27 Non-Caucasian sibyls remained rare, for example, the dark-skinned Libyan Sibyl on the intarsia floor of the Cathedral of Siena; and Abraham Janssens’s Agrippine Sibyl of 1600 (Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf). 28 Lotte C. van de Pol, “The Whore, the Bawd, and the Artist: The Reality and Imagery of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Prostitution,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 2, nos. 1/2 (2010), http:​//www​.jhna​.org/​index​.php/​past-​issue​s/vol​ume-2​-issu​ e-1-2​/116-​the-w​hore-​the-b​awd-a​nd-th​e-art​ist. 29 Heresy covers her head with a wimpled veil; French, Les trois pèlerinages, c. 1400, MS 3812, 93v, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, http:​//www​.bl.u​k/man​uscri​pts/F​ ullDi​splay​.aspx​?ref=​Add_M​S_381​20. 30 Personification of Catholic Faith, Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Rome, 1603), 151. 31 Antoine Coysevox, The Angel of France Expelling the Heretics, bronze plaque on pedestal of statue of Louis XIV, c. 1687, Museé Carnavalet, Paris; Domenico Piola, The Triumph of Divine Wisdom over Satan, Avarice and Heresy (2013, art dealer); Burchard Precht, The Gospel Triumphing over Heresia and the Serpent (Satan), 1728, Church of King Gustaf Vasa, Stockholm, Sweden. 32 Karen L. Bowen and Dirk Imhof, “18,257 Impressions from a Plate,” Print Quarterly 22 (September 2005): 265–79. 33 J. Richard Judson and Carl Van de Velde, Book Illustrations and Title Pages (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard) (London: Harvey Miller, 1978), cat. no. 49; see cat. no. 50 for another title page with Heresy. Gitta Bertram, Peter Paul Rubens as a Designer of Title Pages: Title Page Production and Design in the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century, Stuttgarter Akademieschriften, vol. 1 (Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Library, arthistoricum.net, 2018), 236–48, 256–7, https​://do​i.org​/10.1​ 1588/​arthi​stori​cum.4​03. 34 For example, Giusto Le Court, Envy, Czartoryski Museum, Kraków, Poland; Giusto Le Court, The Queen of Heaven Expelling the Plague, 1670, Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, Venice; Matthias Rauchmiller et al., Plague Column, 1693, Vienna. 35 For example, Pierre Le Gros the Younger, Religion Overthrowing Heresy and Hatred, 1700, Altar of St. Ignatius of Loyola, Chiesa del Gesù, Rome; Abraham van Diepenbeeck, An Allegory of the Triumph over Heresy, with St. Domenic to the Fore, drawing (study for an altarpiece?), 1650–60, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 36 Ward, Signs and Wonders, 103–18. Gabriella Zarri, “From Prophecy to Discipline,” in Women and Faith, Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present, ed. Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 83–112. 37 Elizabeth A. Kensinger, “Remembering the Details: Effects of Emotion,” Emotion Review 1, no. 2 (2009): 99–113, https​://ww​w.ncb​i.nlm​.nih.​gov/p​mc/ar​ticle​s/PMC​ 26767​82.

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Figure 4.1  Attributed to Hendrik Goltzius, Labyrinthe of Errant Spirits (Den doolhof van de dwalende gheesten) (Jan Cloppenburgh, Amsterdam, 1610), pl. 18. Etching. Trustees of the British Museum.

4

Anger, Envy, and Aging Early Modern Transgressive Old Women Jane Kromm

Old women behave badly in early modern scenes of the seven deadly sins and the four humors. Popular serial images of these subjects often portrayed the vagaries of human nature in derisive ways, and in many the elderly crone became a reliable vehicle for easy ridicule. Images of these errant harridans ranged from familiar classical or vernacular stereotypes, to characterizations newly drawn from current thinking about the behavioral impact of age on gender.1 Although some exaggeration common to satire remained a feature, images of vice and passion were soon enlivened by the Northern European turn toward greater realism and non-elite character types.2 The increasing popularity of bust- or half-length figures known as tronies were influential as well, bringing a more focused sense of psychological depth and probity to some renditions, whether inward-turning and thoughtful, or extroverted and expressive.3 These pictorial and psychological innovations were to have a marked impact on what had been a long-standing, rather traditional, and more or less standardized iconography for representing human character and behavior. Given these populist developments, age and gender differences came to assume both illuminating and instructive forms. Some serial images of the seven sins and the four humors boast all male figures and others all female, but a notable group offers a mix of age and gender exemplars in response to influences from proverbial lore to early modern medical thinking, moral prescriptive literature, and even marketing issues.4 In fact, evidence from this mixed-type series suggests that certain weaknesses or susceptibilities were associated more with one gender or age group than another, and therefore were likely regarded as the more natural characterization. A viewer would notice that young men and soldiers were typically invoked to represent anger, that young women appeared as personifications of pride and lust, and that older women more commonly exemplified the three sins or passions of envy, anger, and avarice.5 Examining the alignment of these grievous conditions with “transgressive” elderly women will help to clarify the ways social anxieties developed around age and gender in the early modern period. Some depictions address the aging process directly, especially those that cast the deadly sins in “ages of woman” or life cycle configuration. A work attributed to Hendrik Goltzius from c. 1574–5, seen in a 1610 edition of Jan Cloppenburgh’s Labyrinthe of Errant Spirits

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depicts a male heretic pulling along three female captives: a young fashionable Pride, an old emaciated Envy, and a plump mature Gluttony (Figure 4.1).6 Lines in four languages below the image clarify that the heretic holds captive those weak women who are burdened with sin, and each is seen weighed down with a heavy sack surmounted by the traditional animal symbol for their condition. Although not necessary for the work’s wider theological message, the artist makes the point that women at particular ages are especially susceptible to certain vices: the young are overly concerned with looks and finery, the old with having lost youth and beauty and therefore covetous of others’ advantages, and the mature with satisfying appetites, a penchant underscored by her ample chin, full face, and stout figure. Clearly the life cycle rubric contributes an age-sensitive relevance to the wider array of vices linked to women in the art and literature of the era. Unlike Pride’s youthful position, Avarice is most often conceived as an older figure whose stinginess has grown with the years. Whether male or female, Avarice is typically shown as a hoarder of considerable age whose impressive stash has taken either years or substantial earnings to accrue. In Jacques Callot’s etching from c. 1618/25 (Figure 4.2), the wizened female miser is an isolated character.7 She is absorbed in inspecting this hoard as a small devil tries to tempt her with yet another bag of money. On the ground beside her there are more riches and a toad lurking ominously in the cast shadows, one of several details, like the pointed nose, that inject suspicions of witchcraft and the satanic. When avarice is presented in a setting, whether country or city, the context can influence its depiction in critical ways. In rural depictions, it is often shown as a woman

Figure 4.2  Jacques Callot, Avaritia, The Seven Deadly Sins series, c. 1618–25. Etching. Trustees of the British Museum.

 Anger, Envy, and Aging 51

Figure 4.3 George Glover, Avaritia, The Seven Deadly Sins series, 1625–35. Engraving. Trustees of the British Museum. of mature years who is overloaded with a surfeit of dead game, harvested grain, and money, all of which threaten to burst out of sacks and containers.8 Such portrayals are inversions of hospitality, for they demonstrate that selfish withholding rather than providing for others is avarice’s dominant passion. Avarice directly contradicts the traditional domestic female role of generous hostess, indicating that its presence in women is particularly dystopian and unsavory. In town-based scenes, the focus is largely on the money-hoarding theme, and the polarity of giving and withholding is invoked in more urban-specific ways. For example, the interior scene in George Glover’s Avaritia from the Seven Deadly Sins series of c. 1625–35 shows an elderly, care-worn woman, toothless, with dry skin and a hint of bony décolletage, all underscoring an undesirable physical aspect (Figure 4.3).9 Holding up glasses to her narrowed, myopic eyes, she examines a coin for authenticity. The verses that follow offer an explanation for the vice’s relation to age and gender: A covetous yong Wench t’is rare to see. For as her body, soe her purse is free. But once turnd bawd, (as past it) and growne old. Her soule it selfe, shee Prostitutes to Gould.

Told from a roguish male viewpoint, the rhyme invents a satirical, sexualized backstory for the older, hoarding female. A period of universal generosity is imagined for young

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women in which both person and property are made readily available. But with age, this bountiful tendency ends, leading women to demand payment and so become bawds and prostitutes. A fixation on coins and hoarding soon follows and they turn to “prostituting” their souls for gold. The false claims in this explanation are telling, its satire resting on the questionable notion that young women’s bodies and purses are “free.” Women’s sexuality is here viewed in economic terms, just as her economics are cast in sexual terms, so that the apt motif for representing avarice in the elderly female can only be hoarding money earned through prostitution. Conflating sharing, offering, or giving with sexual license, as these verses seem to do, easily demonstrates how even the narrow range of influence allotted to early modern women —the responsible management of the domestic sphere—could be reduced to a ribald form of selfish hoarding. Glover’s image continues the logic that avarice alarmingly inverts a woman’s proper role; the additional gloss on the sexuality of older women, a notably risible idea in popular culture and misogynist literature, further guaranteed his version a hilarious brand of notoriety. Similar rationalizations that align women’s age with vice characterize depictions of envy and anger, the two deadly sins distinctive for being direct expressions of excessive passion or emotion. Women were widely acknowledged as “the weaker vessels” in early modern theological writing as well as in conduct books: as such they were more susceptible to being overtaken by the stronger passions like anger and envy, and unable to handle or control them.10 Both states are extroverted emotional conditions that, once spurred into action, threaten public standards of decorum and neighborliness. They are also highly expressive in terms of pathognomy and facial characterization. In the older female visage in particular, telltale lines of fleeting emotions assume the permanency of ingrained wrinkles, imprinting the face with clear evidence of past expressions. Beyond the human subject, envy and anger are typically shown in circumstances that suggest details of causality and hints of the situation that provoked them. On the strength of external circumstances as well as internal inclinations then, a case can be made that features intrinsic to envy and anger make them a particularly good match for being personified or exemplified as elderly women. In its standard form, envy is almost always defined by a significantly aged female character. Two allegorical examples may serve to establish the template: Goltzius’s Envy from his group of female vices (see Figure 4.1) and Invidia descriptio from A Choice of Emblemes, the collection assembled by Geffrey Whitney in 1586.11 Ovid and Lucretius are the classical sources for Envy’s delineation as old and pale, dry and ugly, shriveled and with sagging breasts.12 Her great age is explained by the fact that she has been an enemy of virtue for a very long time. Envy enjoys the misfortunes of others, but this enjoyment soon turns into a poison that causes her to waste away and become putrid. She often wears disheveled garb of rust or black to show that this vice is more common among the poor; her unkempt hair is sometimes mixed with snakes. There is a pointed reflexivity about Envy that the snakes emphasize, for although they spread Envy’s venom abroad as poison, sound or speech, they also turn and bite her and are sometimes also attached to her tongue or replace the tongue itself. This self-attacking aspect is recurrent, since Envy also eats out her own heart. Cesare Ripa describes the simple, demotic gesture

 Anger, Envy, and Aging 53 of bringing the hand to the mouth as a variation on this reflexivity, adding that it is typical of women who have experienced misfortune.13 “A hideous hag” is Envy’s common epithet, and her ill-favored appearance is borne out by eyes that are, in Ripa’s formulation, “twisted in disparagement,” and in Ovid’s description “all awry.”14 A squint or sidewise glance connotes her vigilant looking-out for new sources of envy. Invidia derives from invidere, which initially meant intensive seeing, but later devolved into the idea of a squint-eyed look and bearing a grudge.15 Francis Bacon regarded envy as a form of the evil eye, discerning that in the act of envy, there was “an ejaculation, or irradiation of the eye.”16 Whitney’s Envy is a “hideous hagge with visage sterne” who is “leane, pale, and full of years.”17 He lingers on her eyes: “What meanes her eies? So bleared, sore and red: Her mourning still, to see anothers gaine.” Strained looking and blindness are imbricated: Whitney explains “Whie lookse shee wronge: bicause shee woulde not see.”18 Goltzius’s images and Whitney’s emblem emphasize that envy takes an extroverted, active position in the world in order to wound. It is the vice’s aggressive and invasive scheming that characterizes the sin in its genre representations as a kind of interfering, all-noticing, busybody. Glover’s Invidia, also from the Seven Deadly Sins series, is one such depiction; it is also a good example of the type of vice imagery that adds a fashion critique to its array of condemnations (Figure 4.4).19 The personification resembles its classical prototype: here, too, is an aged hag with stern visage whose askew glance indicates a vigilant lookout. Neither poorly dressed nor disheveled, Envy with her venomous and evil intent is hidden by the latest French fashions; these exemplify the

Figure 4.4  George Glover, Invidia, The Seven Deadly Sins series, 1625–35. Engraving. Trustees of the British Museum.

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luxuries and novelties over which she is most inclined to become envious. Mask aside, her evil calculations are revealed to the spectator through her venom which takes the form of poisoned powders rather than writhing snakes. The verses that follow confirm her motivation and the reflexive nature of her acts: Leane spare cheeckt Envy, first from hell did growe, Her visard, poysonnous Box, and Glasse can showe, Upon her neighbours, prosperous state shee lowers, And aymes at others, but her selfe devours.

Her finery may project an aura of material comfort and luxury in the bows, lace and reflective nap of her billowing dress, but the figure inside betrays a contrastingly bleak subsidence revealed by her sunken cheeks and bony torso. Unsuccessful as a disguise, the exterior finery cannot hide the envious intentions that have brought about interfering ploys. The busybody’s scheme is clear as she prepares to sneak a little something into the wine glass on the table; she thus literally performs the poisoning action that replicates the venomous envy roiling within her. Ultimately, as the verses emphasize, she mainly harms herself. Although envious thoughts could lead in the extreme to sudden, disruptive actions, the deadly sin with the greatest connection to antagonistic and wayward behavior is anger. Ire in the emblem tradition often has a masculine focus grounded in what is an essentially belligerent, militaristic formulation. There is, however, a significant iconographic alternative of female exemplars for this sin.20 Both gender groups share some common characteristics derived from humoral dynamics and the classical tradition. Anger is fueled by the choleric humor that overheats and causes swelling, fieriness, and redness. The facial expression that results typically displays a furrowed brow and clenched teeth along with swollen eyes and veins. Unruly hair registers the untamed, energized and uncontrollable aspect of the humor in its excessive form. Female allegories of the type with an antique construction often suggest Bellona, sister of Mars and goddess of discord. A good example of the classical standard is Goltzius’s Ira of 1593. A full-length figure of mature and substantial proportions, Anger is shown ready to respond to a provocation just beyond the image field. With sword drawn in a combat-ready stance, this type of ira signifies the hasty impatience and hotheadedness that are among its telltale attributes.21 Many common templates rely less on stance and gesture in favor of concentrating on facial expression alone, as in Philips Galle’s Ira of before 1612.22 This bust view of an elderly woman still projects the notion of a threat, but facial details are more precisely indicated, especially in the bulging eyes, swelling neck, furrowed forehead, and emphatic lines around the mouth. These features are deeply scored, even overly modeled, and their ingrained harshness stands out clearly in the aged, dry, and nonresilient skin. Whereas a realistic emphasis on a very old male warrior would strain plausibility, in the female figure, the elderly condition enhances anger’s unnatural, abhorrent aspect among the sins. Instead of the clenched teeth often described in the literature on anger, Goltzius and Galle have given their female Iras open mouths more suggestive of belligerent speech.23 When anger is personified in this vocally aggressive

 Anger, Envy, and Aging 55 manner and cast in a genre format, the motif is brought into the noisy, clamorous fold of scolds, harridans, and busybodies, the unruly women who disrupt the peace and fight with neighbors and husbands. Pieter Huys’s Enraged Woman from c. 1570 exemplifies this transition (Figure 4.5).24 The angry woman, a half-length figure, dominates the foreground of a truncated domestic interior. No furnishings soften the constricted space save for a fireplace visible past an open doorway to the right. On the left, a latticed window more suggestive of enclosure than egress follows the composition’s steep orthogonals. In contrast to the spare backdrop, the enraged woman sports an elaborate if confusing array of dress components incompletely assembled, along with several necklaces and a straw hat worn over a loose kerchief. Thus accoutered in noisy disarray, she shouts while sighting something off to the left, gesturing with one hand and holding an open jug in the other. The figure bears many of the features that Seneca noted in his influential essay on anger, De ira, especially the “fierce expression, hurried step, and restless hands.”25 The furrowed and raised brow, strained facial muscles, and swollen throat and tongue are all aspects underscored in early modern discussions of anger, along with the haste and agitation that precipitates the pitch toward the spectator’s space.26 This aggressive, threatening aspect could sometimes be viewed as stronger in women. Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), reported that angry women were often “far more violent, and grievously troubled” than were men, even though men were the more

Figure 4.5  Peter Huys, Enraged Woman, c. 1570. Oil on panel. Private collection. On loan to the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA (See Plate 6).

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commonly afflicted.27 In Huys’s image, the woman’s gestures add another degree of agency and interference. The right hand suggests a rhetorical function, such as addressing an audience or making a point. But when combined with the bellowing expression, a gesture of impending eloquence is turned into one of hectoring interference. The jug, awkwardly held in a clasp less for practical use than for combative potential, adds another dangerous element to the scene. In images of peaceful domestic interiors, jugs and ewers might be emblematic of a wife’s good housekeeping, but in tavern interiors, such vessels invoked associations with carousing and fighting. Moreover, a solitary or cracked jug might hint at sexual innuendo, particularly as a vulgar symbol of the uterus.28 In the context of depicting angry women, the female weaponry of jugs and pots serves to relocate the arena of conflict from the masculine worlds of militia or tavern to the domestic sphere. This satirical turn recalls the older northern tradition of Dame Anger, as well as more recent imagery, such as the rampant termagants of Bruegel’s Ira (1558) or the housewife mobs of Dulle Griet (1563).29 Since in popular lore the brunt of a housewife’s rage is her spouse, the spectacle of angry women by the hearth led naturally to the trope of wives dominating husbands and usurping male authority, a theme supported by many proverbs related to the “fight for the breeches.”30 When the noisy quarrelsome aspect of rage takes the upper hand, the angry wife figure readily leads to associations with the scold.31 In fact, depictions of women as the choleric temperament—the humor that precipitates anger—are often skewed this way. George Glover’s Choller, from his series the Fowre Complexions (Figure 4.6), is one such example, with the bossy, irate woman venting her spleen in the spectator’s direction and toward the object of her wrath.32 Arms akimbo and “leaning in,” she shows the strained effect of this hot humor across her inflamed visage, with deep lines scoring her face and furrowing her brows, expressive marks ingrained from years of repetition. The delicate edgings and feminine bows trimming her gown contrast not only with her ornery mood but also with other details, such as the sharp sewing scissors and the dark headdress. A verse further explains the scene’s salient points: By crabbed looks beneath a bare French hoode Choller, and spleene, are plainly understood.

The scold elements are the stance and the vocal aspect which together convey the act of berating or taking another to task. The stance of outthrust elbows has long associations with the spheres of masculine power, particularly kingship and the military; it is often used to emphasize dominance and assertiveness.33 In the female figure the gesture tends to be status lowering, conveying an aggressiveness and a rejection of commonly held standards of comportment associated with women who interfere in the public arena—unneighborly, nosy, and inclined to gad about.34 In An Eavesdropper with a Woman Scolding, a painting by Nicolaes Maes from a group on the theme of listening in, an angry mistress is depicted scolding someone not visible to the spectator.35 The scene exemplifies the world-turned-upside-down aspect that results when domestic tranquility is disturbed by the chaos of a woman’s unruly behavior. Such scenes often present the eavesdropper as complicit with the audience, looking out, thus

 Anger, Envy, and Aging 57

Figure 4.6  George Glover, Choller, from The Fowre Complexions, c. 1630. Engraving. Trustees of the British Museum. functioning rather like a chorus in the theatrical tradition.36 Individual choric figures were a common feature of rhetoricians’ plays and tableaux vivants, and this was a role that women and girls were allowed to perform.37 Given the spectator-conscious, vocal aspect of many scold characters, they, too, along with the more extroverted personifications of envy and anger, participate in a kind of choric role, directly addressing the audience who is at the same time the object of scorn. Such features are elaborations of the standard spectator-engaging devices found in earlier and contemporary works, recalibrating the image’s dynamic potential for a wider range of spectators. The notably performative, theatrical pitch in these modest print series on the temperaments and the vices would have offered consumers an experience akin to that of a performance in which they were privy to a shared joke at another’s expense. Indeed, the suggestion that many prints of this humble type would have been passed around for entertainment in taverns, explaining their rarity today, further underscores a theatrical aspect to their design and function.38 Most of the details and satirical exaggerations common to images of elderly women cast as avarice, envy, or anger are those linked to well-known and long-held misogynist strains in the Western tradition. The pointedly ugly witchlike visages, the emaciated, sexually unappealing bodies, and the general tone of repulsive social interaction dominate the stereotypical outward appearance of these shrews, scolds, and crones, making them familiar if offensive aspects of early modern visual culture. However, pictorial innovations are also typical of these depictions. For example, when particular details in genre scenes received a contemporary twist of some novelty, they did so by invoking

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gendered conceptions about caretaking and property. Some scholars have emphasized a critique of fashion as the principal motivation behind such images, and certainly this feature is an effective aspect of many of them. But it seems, rather, that portrayals of these older harridans and busybodies display significant dysfunctional characteristics more specific to then-current concerns about gender, property, and community.39 All women were traditionally regarded as property, but older women and married women in particular were also charged with the maintenance, oversight, and distribution of family goods and holdings.40 The domestic chaos evident or threatened in depictions of avarice, envy, and anger demonstrates amply how these vices could disrupt patriarchal systems of property. With avarice there is the manipulation of property without the maintenance of it, and the negative effect of hoarding on the responsibilities of hospitality similarly erodes, even inverts, a woman’s traditional domestic role. With envy, the maintenance of neighborly relations is stymied by covetous forays that fuel the formation of envious desires. And with anger, the destruction of property—especially household goods—and the noisy disruption of tranquility are significant threats to the maintenance of domestic peace. These actions were all antithetical to the appropriate, limited forms of agency considered normative and allowable for mature and older women. They were triggered by wayward movements, especially by gossiping and gadding about, those negative forms of female circulation that chafed against the bounds of patriarchal control and were condemned routinely in tracts, essays, and plays as instances of female usurpation.41

Figure 4.7  Frederik Bloemart, after Abraham Bloemart, Het Tekenboek, pl. 103, 1650–6. Engraving. Trustees of the British Museum.

 Anger, Envy, and Aging 59 Beyond the social implications of these figures’ troublesome activities as vices or humors, a consistent major feature common to them all—whether full- or half-length presentations—is the focus on the face and its emotional expression. This aspect places even the most humble of such paintings and prints in the company of the numerous, often more substantial, innovative efforts evident in late sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury works that explored expressiveness and reframed an image’s effect on the spectator.42 From the character studies of Frans Floris and the excerpted, engraved editions of Brueghel’s peasant heads, to Abraham Bloemaert’s drawing manual, the Tekenboek (Figure 4.7) and the Utrecht Caravaggisti’s efforts to highlight the psychological immediacy of a single character and connect with the spectator through cropped life-size images, and thence to the development of the tronie, there was a common endeavor to enhance a depicted figure’s palpable presence through pictorial means.43 This artistic goal brings even the less vaunted depictions of the vices and humors into a more significant sphere of timely psychological and pictorial innovation. This development is most evident in images that forego stereotypical representations of old women, such as visages with witchlike warts, long noses, and pointy chins, and that partake, instead, of the more empirical approach to depicting expressions as they appeared in an aging countenance. These images may forego tired stereotypes of the early modern tradition, but they ominously point in another direction, yoking newer, supposedly more scientific, areas of knowledge into the service of the same biases represented in the older misogynist tradition.

Notes 1 Jane Kromm, The Art of Frenzy: Public Madness in the Visual Culture of Europe, 15001850 (London: Continuum, 2002), 48; Antony Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain, 1603-1689 (London: British Museum, 1998), 105; J. Bruyn, “A Turning Point in the History of Dutch Art,” in Dawn of the Golden Age, ed. Ger Luijten et al. (Zwolle: Waanders, 1993), 112–21. 2 Peter C. Sutton, Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984), xxviv–xxxii; Bob Haak, The Golden Age (New York: Abrams, 1984); Bruyn, “Dutch Art,” 112–21; Wouter Th. Kloek, “Northern Netherlandish Art, 1580-1620: A Survey,” in Ger Luijten et al., Dawn of the Golden Age, 74–8. 3 Jane Kromm, “Anger’s Marks: Expressions of Sin, Temperament, and Passion,” in The Passions in the Arts of the Early Netherlands, ed. Stephanie S. Dickey and Herman Roodenburg (Zwolle: Waanders, 2010), 39–47. 4 Griffiths, Print in Stuart Britain, 108; Kromm, Art of Frenzy, 62–3. 5 On young men and soldiers as anger, see Kromm, Art of Frenzy, 48–50. 6 The etching is one of twenty-two numbered plates by Goltizius for Cloppenburgh’s Den doolhof van de dwalende gheesten: this print is in the collection of the British Museum (1856 0209.124). 7 The print is in the collection of the British Museum (X 4.288.). 8 For example, see Maarten de Vos’s Avarice, engraved by Crispijn de Passe the Elder between 1590 and 1637 (British Museum; D 6.68).

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9 Glover’s print was published by William Webb (British Museum; 1870 0514.1137). 10 Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 26; Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel (New York: Knopf, 1984). The phrase’s source is 1 Pet. 3:7. 11 Goltzius’s Invidia was printed by Jacob Matham (British Museum; 1857 0613.514). 12 Ronald Bond, “Vying with Vision: An Aspect of Envy in The Faerie Queene,” Renaissance and Reformation 8, no. 1 (1984): 30–8; Mathew Dickie, “Ovid’s Metamorphoses II, 760–64,” American Journal of Philology 96, no. 4 (Winter 1975): 378–90; Jesse Gellrich, “The Art of the Tongue: Illuminating Speech and Writing in Later Medieval Manuscripts,” in Virtue and Vice: The Personifications in the Index of Christian Art, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 93–119; R. B. Gill, “The Renaissance Conventions of Envy,” Medievalia et humanistica 9 (1979): 215–30; Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2 vols., trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), I:113–19; Jennifer O’Reilly, Studies in the Iconography of the Virtues and Vices in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1988); Selma Pfeiffenberger, “The Iconology of Giotto’s Virtues and Vices at Padua” (PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1966); Nina Serebrennikov, “Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Series of Virtues and Vices” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 1986); Rosamund Tuve, “Notes on the Virtues and Vices,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26, nos. 3/4 (1963): 264–303; Henry Green, ed., Whitney’s “Choice of Emblemes”: A Facsimile Reprint (New York: Blom, 1967). 13 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia: Padua, 1611, The Renaissance and the Gods series (New York: Garland, 1976), 261–2. 14 Ibid.; Ovid, Metamorphosis, I:115. 15 Pfeiffenberger, “Giotto’s Virtues and Vices,” Section V:51. 16 Cited in Bond, “Vying with Vision,” 31. 17 Green, Whitney’s “Choice of Emblemes,” 94. 18 Ibid. 19 This engraving was also published by William Webb (British Museum; 1870 0514.1133). 20 On representations of anger, see Kromm, Art of Frenzy, ch. 2; Kromm, “The Bellona Factor: Political Allegories and the Conflicting Claims of Martial Imagery,” in Early Modern Visual Allegory: Embodying Meaning, ed. Cristelle Baskins and Lisa Rosenthal (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 175–95; Kromm, “Anger’s Marks,” 39–47. 21 Goltzius’s Ira was printed by Jacob Matham (British Musuem; 1857 0613.513). 22 The print by Hieronymous Wierix was made after Galle’s engraving (British Museum; 1872 0511.1229). 23 As in, for example, Seneca, De ira, in Moral Essays, 3 vols., trans. John Basore (London: Heinemann, 1928), I:109. 24 James Welu commented on the image’s links to anger, the choleric temperament, and also avarice. See Welu, The Collector’s Cabinet (Worcester: Worcester Museum of Art, 1983), 78. 25 Seneca, De ira, I:109. 26 Kromm, Art of Frenzy, chs. 1–3. 27 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) (New York: Vintage, 1977), 172. 28 Laurinda Dixon, Perilous Chastity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 114–15; Sutton, Dutch Genre Painting, 148, citing Otto Naumann; Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 33.

 Anger, Envy, and Aging 61 29 Walter Gibson, Bruegel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 102–9; Margaret A. Sullivan, “Madness and Folly: Peter Bruegel the Elder’s Dulle Griet,” Art Bulletin 59, no. 1 (March 1977): 55–6; Margaret A. Sullivan, “Bruegel’s Proverbs: Art and Audience in the Northern Renaissance,” Art Bulletin 73, no. 3 (September 1991): 431–66; Welu, Collector’s Cabinet, 80. 30 Gibson, Bruegel, 104; Gibson, Figures of Speech. Picturing Proverbs in Renaissance Netherlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 77, 101–2; Lyckle de Vries, “Tronies and Other Single-Figured Netherlandish Paintings,” Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 8 (1989): 188. De Vries sees the woman as winning this fight over the breeches, given her stance. 31 Most unruly, “turbulent or brawling” women were regarded as scolds in the early modern era; Reginald Scot was convinced that most women accused of being witches were in effect just scolds. See Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 273, 25, respectively. 32 The engraving was published by William Peake (British Museum; 1870 0514.1128). 33 Joaneath Spicer, “The Renaissance Elbow,” in A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (New York: Cornell University Press, 1992), 97. 34 Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 15–16, 18–19; Spicer, “Renaissance Elbow,” 100. 35 Martha Hollander, An Entrance for the Eyes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 103–111. Maes worked on this theme from 1655 to 1657. 36 Ibid., 110–11. 37 Anne Laure Van Bruaene, “Brotherhood and Sisterhood in the Chambers of Rhetoric in the Southern Netherlands,” Sixteenth Century Journal 36, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 24. Many morality plays featured figures drawn from social stereotypes, including unruly women; see Van Bruaene, “‘A Wonderfull tryumphe, for the wynning of a pryse’: Guilds, Ritual Theater and the Urban Network in the Southern Low Countries c. 1450–1650,” Renaissance Quarterly 59, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 384. Theater practices also included elements of a more direct engagement between the actors and the audience; see Perry T. Chapman, Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 16. 38 Griffiths, Print in Stuart Britain, 105; Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 24. Natalie Zeman Davis sees the function as more like that of a charivari; see her “Woman on Top,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 124–51. 39 Concerning the critique of fashion, see for example Ger Luijten, “Frills and Furbelows: Satires on Fashion and Pride Around 1600,” Simiolus 24, nos. 2/3 (1996): 140–60. 40 Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 53; Wiesner, Women and Gender, 59, 132–3; Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 15–16, 18, 21. 41 Kromm, Art of Frenzy, 39–42. 42 See Kromm, “Anger’s Marks,” 41–7, for an overview of this development; see also De Vries, “Tronies,” 181, 191; and Jan Muylle, “Tronies toegeschreven aan Pieter Bruegel Fysionomie en expressive,” Ze Zeventiende eeuw 81, no. 2 (2002): 117–30. 43 This print, after plate 103, is attributed to Frederik Bloemaert, 1650–6 (British Museum; L 83.104).

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Figure 5.1  (a) Frans Hals, Portrait of a Painter (Jan Miense Molenaer?), c. 1652. Oil on canvas. The Frick Collection, Henry Clay Frick Bequest, inv. 1906.1.71. (b) Frans Hals, Portrait of a Woman (Judith Leyster?), c. 1652. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Henry G. Marquand, 1890, inv. 91.26.10 (See Plate 7).

5

Frans Hals’s Portrait of an Older Judith Leyster Paul Crenshaw

Listed in the 1668 estate inventory of the Dutch artist Jan Miense Molenaer are two portraits of the deceased and his wife by Frans Hals.1 Molenaer’s wife was the painter Judith Leyster, who had died eight years prior. The inventory entry has not gone unnoticed by scholars as interest in Leyster has increased in the last several decades, but to this point no one has been able to suggest extant paintings by Hals that seem to fit the descriptions, and generally they have been presumed lost.2 As is well known, stylistic affinities exist between paintings by Leyster and Hals from the late 1620s to the mid-1630s. Documents describing a dispute over a student and the concomitant apprenticeship fees establish personal interaction between the two artists that corresponds with the visual and stylistic influences. Some scholars have suggested that this disagreement severed ties between Hals and Leyster, but Frima Fox Hofrichter rightly notes that the inventoried portraits by Hals must have postdated the marriage of Molenaer and Leyster in 1636—one can hardly imagine pendants made out of wedlock. Therefore, the court case cannot have been the end of Leyster’s contact with Hals.3 Indeed, it makes more sense to look for the lost portraits among works dated significantly later. Molenaer and Leyster left Haarlem for Amsterdam shortly after their marriage, but returned about eleven years afterward. There is a pair of Hals pendants that may well be identified as the missing portraits of Molenaer and Leyster (Figure 5.1). The paintings were separated in the late eighteenth century but today reside a short distance from each other in New York: the man’s portrait is in the Frick Collection and the woman is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The dimensions of the paintings are nearly identical. The man’s portrait contains a fragment of a signature and date, “165–,” with the last digit indiscernible. On the basis of style, Seymour Slive dated the portraits to c. 1650–2, but they could conceivably fall anywhere from 1650 to 1658.4 In 1966, representatives from the two institutions brought the paintings together and concluded that they did not form a cohesive pair.5 In notes on file at the Frick Collection, the opinion was noted, “The pose of the man is aggressive and closer to the viewer, that of the woman reserved and placed more [deeply] in the picture space.” Moreover, the columns do not align perfectly. Yet, as Walter Liedtke pointed out in the notes to his recent catalog of Dutch paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s

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collection, these same points can be used to maintain that the paintings are consistent with Hals’s approach to pendants: complementary but not exactly alike.6 Liedtke did not emphasize the gendered aspects of these differences—the active forward character of the man, the demure quality of the woman—or acknowledge that our awareness of these conventional differences has been raised in the feminist era. Gendered differentiation was simply standard practice in the early modern period. A pair of sixteenth-century paintings by Hans Holbein—portraits of Lord Guildford in the Queen’s Collection, London, and Lady Guildford in the Saint Louis Art Museum (Figure 5.2)—demonstrate that these variations in pendant portraits were commonplace throughout the early modern period, and not only in the work of Hals. Both paintings were in Amsterdam in the late 1640s and early 1650s, part of the collection of Lady Arundel, and it is likely that they were seen there by Hals.7 Lady Guildford and Hals’s Portrait of a Woman in the Metropolitan Museum of Art bear a remarkable resemblance in pose, tenor, and the physical stature of each woman. Although Lady Guildford holds a book and Hals’s subject tightly clasps her hands, the remainder of the stances accord well. Such three-quarter turned, half-length poses are not uncommon, but the dignified rendering of a woman of some girth, enabled by the scale of the figure within the painting, the turn of the head, the angle of the shoulders, the flattening of the forefront bend in the arm, and the foreshortening of the rear arm, are all tightly aligned and relatively unusual. The background columns, generally regarded as symbolic of fortitude, would seemingly secure the source relationship between the two works, except for one nagging

Figure 5.2  (a) Hans Holbein, Portrait of Lord Guildford, 1527. Oil on panel. Windsor Castle, Royal Collection, inv. RCIN 400046. (b) Hans Holbein, Portrait of Lady Guildford, 1527. Oil on panel. Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum Purchase, inv. 1:1943.

 Frans Hals’s Portrait of an Older Judith Leyster 65 problem: we cannot be entirely certain when the background elements—the columns and a cityscape in the Hals portraits—were added. If it were merely a matter of the background elements being a slightly later addition, one might suggest that the painter of the Frick portrait added them. One might even note that the coloration and pigment saturation of the columns differ slightly between the Hals pendants, and the presence of the cityscape further differentiates the elements, thus begging the question whether Molenaer might have painted the addition to his painting and Leyster the additions to hers. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Molenaer and Leyster knew the source—maybe even accompanied Hals on his visit to Lady Arundel’s collection—and mimicked the Holbein in furtherance of the reference point. The hypothesis that the additions were made by Molenaer and Leyster is contradicted, however, by technical evidence. According to the Frick Collection’s files, analysis on the paintings conducted prior to 1966 determined that the two columns and the background cityscape contain Naples yellow (lead antimonate yellow). This pigment was widely used in Italy but little known in Northern European painting before the eighteenth century, although it can be found in Dutch majolica. Joris Dik has noted that analytical difficulties with various forms of lead antimonate make it possible that more paintings created with it will be discovered, but until such confirmation one must conclude that these elements of Hals’s pictures were likely added later, presumably to update them to match the taste for a lighter background and more classicizing appearance.8 Liedtke refers to the backgrounds of both pictures as a modernization in an “unsuitable manner.”9 Rather than unduly diminishing the historical possibilities with an opinion on taste, it would be prudent to wait until updated scientific analysis is conducted before arriving at a conclusion. Several attempts have been made to identify the sitters in the Hals portraits. In 1909 E. W. Moes (followed in 1921 by W. R. Valentiner) identified the Frick painting as a self-portrait of Hals and the Met pendant as his second wife, Lysbeth Reniers. However, neither is a good likeness, nor is this identification plausible on the grounds of age, since Hals would have been nearly seventy years old in 1650.10 In 1965 Dirk Vis identified the portraits as depicting none other than Rembrandt and his maid-turnedmistress Geertje Dircx.11 No scholar has supported Vis’s hypothesis in print. First, the timing is wrong: Vis maintained that the paintings were made in 1643 (disproved by the partial date on the man’s portrait), and by 1650 Rembrandt and Geertje had parted less than amicably.12 Moreover, the physiognomic comparison is far from convincing in Rembrandt’s case, and we know nothing for certain of Geertje’s appearance. Returning to Molenaer and Leyster, the inventory reference opens the door to the present suggestion. While readily acknowledging that identifying portraits (or rejecting an identification, for that matter) solely on the basis of perceived likeness is the worst way to go about the process, it is a necessary step and in this case quite illuminating because we do have other images of the proposed sitters. Molenaer used his own likeness as a model repeatedly in his genre paintings, and one can easily assume that a certain reoccurring woman present in many of the paintings is modeled after Leyster. That said, these are not formal portraits, so it is difficult to make too much of one-to-one resemblances. The Frick portrait compares

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favorably to a presumed self-portrait by Molenaer recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, again acknowledging that we are dealing with different hands and a sitter at different moments in his life (Figure 5.3). Physiognomic similarities exist in the nose as well as the shape of the cheeks and prominence of the chin, the breadth of the mouth, and the substance of the mustache. Both sport curly locks, but the highlighting is more featured in Molenaer’s work. Hals’s use of deeper blacks, not just in the clothing but also to underscore the shading of the chin, adds a more substantial fleshiness to his figure. Perhaps the major difference is a slight weight gain evident in the later Hals portrait, not out of the question with the passing of more than a decade. The issue of weight—and particularly girth—is clearly the most striking difference between the woman in the Metropolitan Museum portrait and the vivacious, nonchalant Self-Portrait by Leyster, now in the National Gallery in

Figure 5.3  Jan Molenaer, Self-Portrait as a Lute Player, c. 1636–7. Oil on panel. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund, inv. 2015.20.1.

 Frans Hals’s Portrait of an Older Judith Leyster 67

Figure 5.4  Judith Leyster, Self-Portrait, c. 1630–3. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, inv. 1949.6.1. Washington, DC (Figure 5.4). This self-portrait was perhaps Leyster’s guildentry masterpiece in 1633, although it may have been made a few years earlier.13 The style of dress is completely different, lending the two figures opposite personalities, one lively and young, the other somewhat dour and plain, though the later Hals portrait does present the sitter with a bit of a mischievous smile. The differences in clothing are easily explained by the passage of time—some twenty years or more—and the basic idea of age appropriateness in fashion. At a cursory glance, the portraits seem to present different visages, but on closer inspection this dissimilarity, too, may be the result of years gone by. Of course, if Leyster had a prominent scar, a wounded eye, or even a crooked nose, then it would be much easier to determine whether both portraits represent the same person or not. Alas—or, one should say, lucky for her—apparently her features were symmetrical. In fact, if one were to overlay the two heads, the similarities in proportions and facial features would show them to be an almost exact match.14 When this comparison

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was first presented by the author at the College Art Association Annual Conference in 2010, faded overlays and smooth transitions enabled one painting to “evolve” into the other. Unfortunately, that digitally aided comparison cannot be effectively reproduced here. Nevertheless, it revealed that, although there were differences in viewpoint angles and degrees of fleshiness, the underlying bone and facial structure of the two women is similar. The spacing of the eyes is almost identical—just a few millimeters off. The bridge of the nose is almost exactly the same. The projection and highlight on the tip of the nose is different because of the viewing angle, but the proportions are equivalent. The placement of the chin is the same. The contour of the jaw differs, with the woman in the Met portrait clearly more substantive in the jowls. The cheeks are also heavier in that painting, but the crease of the cheeks between the nose and mouth is similar. The most telling characteristic is the mouth. In both paintings, a glimpse of the teeth is evident, and the upper lip is slightly downturned. In the Met painting, this downturn is on the left side, whereas in the self-portrait it is on the right, but Leyster is perhaps looking in a mirror. I would say that overall the smile is the same, even if a bit more pronounced in the self-portrait. The greater prominence of the smile also accounts for the difference in the arc of the eyebrows. In 2016, a new painting came to light that may well act as a bridge between Leyster’s self-portrait in the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum’s Portrait of a Woman (Judith Leyster?). In December of that year, a self-portrait attributed to Leyster was auctioned at Christie’s London and entered a private collection (Figure 5.5). Dating this painting is problematic. At the very least, it presents Leyster as slightly older and more fulsome in appearance than the National Gallery image. It may well date to the early to mid-1640s. This discovery should put to rest one of the central questions in studies of the artist: although Leyster did renounce her professional ambitions upon marriage to Molenaer in 1636, she did not abandon the brush entirely. The self-portrait’s small size, measuring 12 1/8 by 9 5/8 in. (30.9 × 21.9 cm), and its alignment with the painting in the 1668 inventory of the front rooms, described as “A round (i.e. oval) portrait of the wife of the deceased,” indicate that it was made for personal use and commemoration rather than for the market.15 In comparison to the National Gallery and Metropolitan Museum of Art pictures, the symmetry and concordance are strong. The alignment of the eyes, the angle of the mouth, and the slight smile are evident in all three. In the two self-portraits, the tip of the nose is more distinct than in the Hals portrait, but again that is due primarily to the point of view, with both of Leyster’s own paintings featuring a more dynamic tilt of the head. These comparisons, especially with the new self-portrait dated between the other two paintings, demonstrate that in Hals’s portrait we are likely looking at an older Judith Leyster, a heavier-set woman projecting a more mature personality. Leyster’s active gesture of placing her elbow on the back of her chair, which she chose for herself in her self-portrait, is repeated by Hals, albeit to less dynamic effect. Significantly, Leyster is not publicly presented as a painter later in life, whereas her husband is. In fact, in Hals’s portrait, Molenaer is given her pose, if

 Frans Hals’s Portrait of an Older Judith Leyster 69

Figure 5.5  Judith Leyster, Self-Portrait, c. 1640–5. Oil on panel. Christie’s London, December 8, 2016, lot 16. it may be called such: the more vigorous act of turning on the back of the chair. Of course, Molenaer’s career was still in full swing, and he is presented with the fashionably rakish air of a gallant artist. Yet, even though Leyster had largely relinquished her career for family, the recently discovered self-portrait of the 1640s affirms that she did not stop painting entirely and that her skills did not wane. Between her aspiring self-portrait of the 1630s and Hals’s portrait of the 1650s, approximately two decades had passed. In the intervening years, Leyster bore five children, though only two survived infancy. Rather than seeking a perpetually young female painter, praising her ambition and confrontation of a maledominated profession, we are forced to confront our prejudices favoring youth and beauty, as well as our desire to heroicize early modern women painters in contemporary terms. Hals’s portrait, if this hypothesis is correct, commemorates a Judith Leyster who had moved on in her life from her career. Vita longa, ars brevis.

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Notes 1 The 1668 inventory of Molenaer’s effects in his house on the Burgwal in Haarlem can be found in transcription and English translation in Frima Fox Hofrichter, Judith Leyster: A Woman Painter in Holland’s Golden Age (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1989), 85–103. The inventory has 340 items. The item in question is no. 267: “(Op de boven Voorcamer) 2 conterfeijtsels van Jan Molenaer ende sijn huysvrou van Frans Hals—sonder lijst” ([In the second-story front room (attic)] two portraits of Jan Molenaer and his wife by Frans Hals—without frame). The room contained nearly 100 paintings, mostly unframed, in addition to some empty frames. It may have been a secondary storage area for older works or stock in trade. There was also a bed, two tables with an armchair, a cupboard with “a lot of books in folio, quarto, octavo” (item 337) and some painting implements, including two mirrors, a standing round mirror and a square one. 2 In her footnote to entry 267 (103n14), Hofrichter assumed the Hals portraits lost. The question remains open why the Hals portraits should have remained unframed and not prominently displayed in the more public areas of the house. Notably, the inventory contains in the front room(s) an unattributed picture of Molenaer and his brothers (item no. 1, possibly identifiable with Molenaer’s Self-Portrait with Family Members, c. 1636, in the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, on loan from the Instituut Collectie Nederland) and in the side room two portraits of Jan Molenaer and his wife (item no. 38), also unattributed. It is possible that the paintings in the side room are the “finished” Hals pictures (with possible additions by Molenaer and/ or Leyster?), and the attributed works upstairs may have been sketches for those portraits, but the inventory is specific and would not seem to favor that supposition. Interestingly, item no. 4 in the inventory, also in the front room, is “een ront stuck van den overleden sijn huisvrou” (a round painting by [or of] the wife of the deceased). Hofrichter made two suggestions to align that work with known paintings by Leyster, but it may be the self-portrait found in 2016, for which, see below. 3 Hofrichter, Judith Leyster, 16. 4 Seymour Slive, Frans Hals (London: Phaidon, 1970), cat. nos. 186 and 187. Slive continued to support a date of c. 1650–2 in the extensively revised second edition of 2014 (p. 304 and pages 186 and 187). 5 Walter Liedtke, Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 1: ix, 295–8, no. 68, color pl. 68, fig. 80. For the pros and cons of the pair as pendants, see also Slive, Frans Hals. 6 Liedtke, Dutch Paintings. 7 I explored this possibility at length in “Rembrandt and Hals Visit the Arundel Collection,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 9, no. 1 (2017), https://doi. org/10.5092/jhna.2017.9.1.7. 8 Joris Dik, “Scientific Analysis of Historical Paint and the Implications for Art History and Art Conservation: The Case Studies of Naples Yellow and Discoloured Smalt” (PhD diss., Van ’t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences [HIMS], University of Amsterdam, 2003), esp. ch. 2. Dik confirmed earlier studies concluding that lead antimonate yellow was exceedingly rare in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, but, curiously, he did find it present in pottery samples from Holland at this time (p. 31).

 Frans Hals’s Portrait of an Older Judith Leyster 71 9 Walter Liedtke, Frans Hals: Style and Substance (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011), 43 (caption to fig. 43). 10 E. W. Moes, Frans Hals, sa vie et son oeuvre, trans. J. de Bosschere (Brussels: Van Oest, 1909), 37; and W. R. Valentiner, Frans Hals, Vol. 28: Klassiker der Kunst in Gesamtausgaben (Stuttgart–Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1921), 153 and repeated in subsequent editions and publications. 11 Dirk Vis, Rembrandt en Geertje Dircx: De identiteit van Frans Hals’ portret van een schilder en de vrouw van de kunstenaar (Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1965). 12 For more on the end of Rembrandt’s relationship with Geertje Dircx, see Paul Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy: The Artist, His Patrons and the Art Market in Seventeenth-Century Netherlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), esp. 40–2, 70, 175. 13 Frima Fox Hofrichter first suggested the correlation with Leyster’s entry into the Haarlem guild in 1633; Hofrichter, “Judith Leyster’s ‘Self-Portrait’: ‘Ut Pictura Poesis,’” in Essays in Northern European Art Presented to Egbert HaverkampBegemann on His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Anne-Marie Logan (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1983), 106–9. Arthur Wheelock, in the object entry on the National Gallery of Art’s webpage, prefers an earlier date, c. 1630, on the basis of costume and comparison to other paintings by Leyster; Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., “Judith Leyster/Self-Portrait/c. 1630,” Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century, NGA Online Editions, https:// purl.org/nga/collection/artobject/37003 (accessed September 29, 2020). 14 Paul Crenshaw, “Frans Hals’ Portrait of an ‘Older’ Judith Leyster,” part of the session “Old Women, Witches, and Old Wives,” College Art Association 97th Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, February 2010. To construct the overlay, the scale was equalized, and the National Gallery of Art picture was flipped on its vertical axis and adjusted by a slight two degrees in the tilt of the head for the sake of comparison and alignment. 15 See note 2.

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Figure 6.1  Gillis van Tilborgh, Tichborne Dole, 1671. Tichborn House, Hampshire, UK / Bridgeman Images (See Plate 8).

6

Old Maids Images of Elderly Servants in Early Modern Europe Diane Wolfthal

Being a servant in early modern times was often a temporary stage in a young person’s life between childhood and marriage, but for some women it was a lifelong career.1 Those engaged in a large household sometimes rose through the ranks to become senior staff, for example, chief housekeeper. Others returned to domestic work when they found themselves in dire financial straits or their former employers needed help in a crisis.2 Because contemporary images generally depict female servants as young women, the few exceptions that represent elderly servants demand attention. This chapter examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings and prints produced in northwestern Europe that portray old women who perform such domestic tasks as cleaning the house, washing the linen, and caring for young children. Since it is often difficult to distinguish the mistress from the maid, this article concerns only those images in which elderly women can be clearly identified as servants.3 This small group includes a Swabian Birth of the Virgin from the turn of the sixteenth century, and five portraits, mostly English, that date from the 1670s to the 1690s.

The Tichborne Dole All too often scholars view the so-called lower class as an undifferentiated mass. But even among domestic workers there were different strata, particularly in a large household. Gillis van Tilborch’s The Tichborne Dole, a monumental six-foot wide canvas that dates to the early 1670s, best visualizes this social hierarchy and the place of an elderly female servant within it (Figure 6.1).4 The painting shows Sir Henry Tichborne, the third Baronet, distributing loaves of bread to the poor in an annual ceremony that is said to date back to the thirteenth century.5 The work’s primary function is to portray Henry, who undoubtedly commissioned the work, as a magnanimous, successful, and powerful lord. A Catholic who supported the Stuart monarchy, Henry was forced to hide after the Battle of Cheriton, was captured at sea, and was twice imprisoned in the Tower of London. When Henry inherited

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the baronetcy in 1657, he found, to quote a letter to his son, “a broken and almost ruined estate.”6 After the Restoration of 1660, Henry was rewarded for his loyalty to the Stuarts and gradually restored his estate, although his relations with the local Protestants remained tense. The Tichborne Dole must be seen, then, not only as a celebration of Henry’s success in rebuilding his family’s fortunes but also as an attempt to associate him with such values as charity, loyalty, honor, and nobility. In his memoirs, Henry makes clear the importance of his lineage and invents family roots going back to ancient Rome. Similarly, the setting for the portrait is Henry’s monumental Tudor manor house with its large coat of arms. Maintaining the social hierarchy was especially pressing for a Catholic lord who wished to retain his class privilege after the civil war and who had recently inherited an estate heavily burdened with debt. It may not be accidental that Henry hired the Flemish artist Gillis van Tilborch. A Catholic with an expertise in both genre scenes and large group portraits of elite sitters, the painter was perfectly suited for this commission.7 Van Tilborch’s figures realize Henry’s goals through their placement, pose, clothing, and even hairstyle, which convey their social status. Henry and his wife, children, priest, and servants assemble before his manor house on the heraldic right, the privileged side in any composition.8 The recipients of the dole congregate on the heraldic left. Carrying a walking stick, a sign of authority, Henry stands just left of center, holding the hand of his daughter Frances.9 His wife stands behind him, and his oldest son, at center stage, points to a basket of loaves in the foreground. Henry’s daughter Mary carries bread in her apron. Closest to the family are the servants of highest status. Men outnumber women in this group, but three women are included in the group. Behind Mary are the family chaplain and nurse, Constantia Atkins, whose white hair marks her as elderly. Just behind her are Lady Tichborne’s maid, Mrs. Chitty, and the housekeeper, Mrs. Robinson. On one level, Atkins is an attribute of Henry, one more figure to show his wealth, the loyalty he commands, and his high rank. But on another level, the nurse is differentiated through van Tilborch’s visualization of her precise status within the household and the village. Her hair is covered, unlike the elaborate hair styles of the Tichborne ladies, and her garments are simpler in style, plainer in material, and more sober in coloring than those of Henry’s relatives. The exception is a sumptuous red cape with stand-up collar and gold trimming that she holds in her arms. It is, however, out of date by about a century, and if it belongs to her, it is probably a hand-me-down.10 Nevertheless, she is shown as higher in rank than the female servants who line up along the manor wall. Like these ordinary maids, Atkins wears a white headcloth, long lace collar, white sleeves, and plain dress, but her lack of apron, more foreground position, and proximity to the family that she serves make clear her relatively high status among the servants. She is also much better dressed than the vast majority of villagers and tenants. Her loyalty to the family and her strong ties to its children granted her a privileged spot in the portrait.11 In short, van Tilborch visualizes both the usual young servants who stand against the manor house, and the older Constantia Atkins, who has gained a higher status through many years of service.

 Old Maids 75

John Riley’s Bridget Holmes Few independent portraits of servants survive, in part because domestic workers were generally of little importance to those with the means to commission art. But likenesses of four elderly servants from northwestern Europe survive for which the name of the sitter and the circumstances of production are known. In 1686 John Riley portrayed Bridget Holmes, who worked as a “Necessary Woman,” the servant responsible for cleaning the king’s privy chamber, which comprised his bedroom, library, study, and toilet (Figure 6.2).12 According to Olivia Fryman, Holmes was a lower-ranked court servant who was responsible for “cleaning and laying the fires, dusting and polishing furniture, mopping and sweeping, and emptying and cleaning chamber pots and close stool pans, . . . [and] bed making.”13 Holmes was far from an ordinary servant, since she supervised three to four underlings who performed the most menial tasks, and although her pay was far beneath that of higher status servants, it was more than that of an ordinary domestic worker. Holmes was paid £60 in salary alone, and in addition £10, 10s for her lodgings, and £21, 5s for “all kind of necessaries in lieu of Bills.”14 According to her tombstone, she was a widow who had served all the English monarchs from Charles I until her death at the age of one hundred in 1690 under William and Mary, that is, for at least thirty-five years.15 Because the portrait of Bridget Holmes was completed during the brief reign of James II and its earliest provenance is the royal collection, scholars assume that the king commissioned it.16 The painting is certainly one of Riley’s most important commissions. A rare full-length portrait, over seven feet high, its grand size makes clear that it must have been displayed in one of the more public rooms of a major palace. Although it is not listed in the inventories of the royal collection undertaken during James’s reign, it may have been commissioned for one of the new apartments being built by James at Whitehall just about this time.17 Its importance is underlined not only by its large size, but also by its two inscriptions, which indicate the artist’s name and profession, the date of the work, and the sitter’s name and age—ninety-six years.18 The painting shows Holmes wearing a plain red skirt, black jacket, and white sleeves, cap, neckerchief, and apron, much like those worn by the servants standing against the manor house in The Tichborne Dole (Figure 6.1). Her apron is pinned up at her waist to keep it sparklingly clean while she performs a messy task.19 The position of Holmes’ apron, then, suggests that she is at work, a fact confirmed by her rolledup sleeves, her bare forearms, and the long-handled brush with stiff bristles that she brandishes toward a page who peeks at her from behind a curtain.20 The Necessary Women of English monarchs were skilled workers who focused on those chores requiring expertise, such as cleaning fragile and costly furnishings. They also emptied and cleaned the chamber pots and close stools, which required great care to avoid “splashes or spillages” or crossing paths with high-ranked servants and visitors in the hall or on the backstairs.21 Necessary Women were highly valued because they contributed to the health and comfort of the king by keeping his rooms clean, because they saved money by maintaining valuable furnishings in good condition, and because

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Figure 6.2  John Riley, Bridget Holmes, 1868. Royal Collection Trust. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2019 / Bridgeman Images.

 Old Maids 77 they could be trusted to keep secret those intimate details that they might learn in the course of performing their duties. Riley shows Holmes holding a round-haired, long-handled whisk of the type that was used to reach high up, to clean ceilings, wall hangings, and curtains, like the one portrayed near Holmes. This chore was normally performed by cleaners other than Necessary Women.22 In fact, the setting for the painting is not the privy rooms, but rather a terrace. Bridget Holmes’ cleaning tool serves as her attribute; she is not actually shown performing labor. As scholars have long recognized, Riley, or perhaps his patron, envisioned this painting as a parody of fashionable Baroque portraits.23 By incongruously inserting a housekeeper with her brush into a grandiose setting, Riley aimed to produce a comic effect. Holmes stands before a magnificently draped, richly patterned, fringed and lined curtain and beside a large vase filled with flowers. Decorated with dancing nymphs, the vase is a variant of Cherubino Alberti’s engraving, dated 1582, after a fresco painted by Polidoro in the 1520s.24 Below the vase is a heroic relief of Roman soldiers, and Holmes’ act of brandishing her brush is meant to be mock heroic.25 But within the parameters of this parody, Riley grants Holmes great dignity. He shows her firmly gripping the brush with strong arms and standing with an erect posture despite her advanced age. Furthermore, Riley paints Holmes with a far-off, introspective expression. Holmes’s advanced age, which is inscribed on her portrait, is noteworthy. Most portraits of older women show them at around age sixty, which is not surprising considering that seventy-two years was the average life span for an Englishwoman.26 But, as Anne French and Giles Waterfield justly observe, Holmes was also painted because of her long years of service.27 Indeed, their prime example of a portrait of the ideal loyal servant, before capitalism transformed that role into a short-term contract worker, is that of the long-serving, elderly Bridget Holmes. This portrait is telling for another reason. It aligns with the political ideals of James II. Holmes had served the Stuart line through tumultuous times, from Charles I to Charles II and James II. For this reason, it was not simply the length of time that she had served, but also her extraordinary loyalty to the royal family that gave her pride of place among the king’s servants. Little is known about the art patronage of James II, but a year later he did commission a similar, full-length portrait of the Chinese Jesuit Shen Fu-Tsung, which, like that of Bridget Holmes, is often dismissed as a mere curiosity.28 James displayed this work at Windsor, in his presence chamber, the room in which he received guests and assemblies.29 Since by this time James had converted to Catholicism, this pair of publicly displayed, full-length, life-size portraits must have represented to him and to his petitioners his twin ideals of loyalty to the sovereign and to the Catholic faith. But there may be another reason why Holmes was the first housekeeper to be the subject of an independent portrait. Mark Girouard notes that at the end of the seventeenth century, country houses underwent major architectural changes. He writes of the . . . revolutionary invention of backstairs—and of closets and servants’ rooms attached to them. . . . The gentry walking up the stairs no longer met their last

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Women, Aging, and Art night’s faeces [sic] coming down them. Servants no longer bedded down in the drawing room, or outside their master’s door or in a truckle bed at his feet. They became, if not invisible, very much less visible.30

The seventeenth-century English architect, Roger Pratt, advised that a house should be planned so that “your freinds [sic] and persons of esteem should pass without being annoyed by the sight of foul persons . . . [The house should be] so contrived . . . that the ordinary servants may never publicly appear in passing to and fro.”31 Indeed, at this time servants began to dine separately from their master and sleep in attic garrets.32 A full-length life-size portrait would have made Holmes visible just when real servants of her class were being hidden.

Katherine Elliot Three portraits survive of the elderly Katherine Elliot who like Bridget Holmes also had a long career at the royal court. Nurse to James II, Duke of York, in 1635, she later became Dresser and Woman of the Bedchamber to both his wives, Anne Hyde, Duchess of York, and Queen Mary of Modena. As the Woman of the Bedchamber, Elliot ranked below the Ladies of the Bedchamber, and her duties included helping the Queen to bathe, dress, and undress.33 Elliot, who was widowed at the time the portraits were created, had served together with her husband in the royal household.34 Her bestknown portrait was painted jointly by John Riley, who depicted her face, hood, and perhaps her sleeves, and the German artist Johann Baptist Closterman, who painted the rest (Figure 6.3).35 A smaller copy that excludes much of the background is in the Rijksmuseum, and a third version was reported at Corsham Court.36 Judging by its provenance, the version in the royal collection was probably commissioned by James II or one of Anne Hyde’s daughters. It shows Elliot in threequarter length seated in a red upholstered chair adorned with gold fringes. She wears black widow’s clothes, including a hood, and holds a white handkerchief, which was employed to wipe away tears, and so may signify, along with her garments, her widowhood.37 The portrait is generally dated to the late 1680s, that is, shortly before her death in 1688.38 When Horace Walpole visited Buckingham Palace, probably in 1783, the portrait was publicly displayed and its sitter and painter were still identifiable.39 The nature of service changed in late seventeenth century England.40 Servants were becoming wage earners, and traditional ties that bound servant and master, such as kinship and community, were loosening. In larger households, such as the ones in which Constantia Atkins, Bridget Holmes, and Katherine Elliot worked, employers began to hide servants by building backstairs and separate corridors that bypassed the rooms of the elite. Was the cluster of portraits of elderly servants in large English households produced to show their loyalty and longevity of servants at just the time when such qualities were disappearing?

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Figure 6.3 John Riley, Katherine Elliot, c. 1487–8. Royal Collection Trust. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2019 / Bridgeman Images.

Alice George41 Another aged female servant, Alice George was portrayed in part because of her longevity. A laundress or bed maker of Wadham College, Oxford University, George was interviewed because of her advanced age by the Oxford antiquary William Fulman, the diarist Anthony Wood, and the philosopher and physician John Locke

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(Figure 6.4).42 These sources record her maiden name, birthplace, husband’s name, the age at death of her parents and grandmother, her age at marriage (thirty), the number of her children (ten sons, five daughters) and grandchildren (thirty-nine), her favorite foods (cheese, bread, butter, ale, and roasted pig), and the year of her death (1691). They further agree that her eyesight and mental capacities were intact despite her advanced age, but they disagree as to her exact birth date, and Wood suggests why. After she turned 100, he relates, “shee doubled every yeare.”43 George informed Locke that “she was able to have reaped as much in a day as a man, and had as much wages,” which suggests that she had not always been a domestic servant.44 George’s legendary status is confirmed by the three portraits that were made of her. A painting by William Sonmans has been in the possession of Wadhum College for centuries and is reported to have been donated by the artist.45 A second likeness of the laundress, a print by Bernard Lens II, is copied after a painting by Martin Powell, now lost (Figure 6.4).46 Sonmans’ portrait shows George with arms placidly folded before her, but Lens’s print and presumably Powell’s painting depict her in more ragged clothes and holding over her arms what is presumably laundry, perhaps as an attribute of her profession as laundress or bed maker. Like Bridget Holmes, George’s extraordinary age goes a long way in explaining the existence of these portraits. These images confirm

Figure 6.4  Bernard Lens II, after M. Powell, Alice George, mezzotint, National Portrait Gallery, London, c. 1670. Trustees of the British Museum.

 Old Maids 81 that servitude was not always a temporary stage that girls and young women went through before marriage.47 Female bed makers employed at the Wadhum College were required to be “ancient women of good report,” according to a statute of 1649–50.48 Presumably younger women and those of ill repute were thought to be too tempting for the college’s male students. In short, George’s age lent honor to the college, and Sonmans’ version, displayed there, would have made this virtue visible. Female servants and slaves were, in fact, often sexually harassed, seduced, and even raped by their masters. By showing older women rather than young, attractive ones, the portraits of Bridget Holmes, Live Larsdatter, and Alice George performed the cultural work of counteracting an embarrassing reality.49 Although lifetime servants were few, the vast majority of independent portraits of early modern servants show elderly women.50 But Lens’s portrait differs from the others in one critical aspect. Unlike Holmes, and Elliot, George was a low-status worker, and Lens makes clear her poverty through her worn and ragged clothes.

Swabian Birth of the Virgin Strikingly different from these late seventeenth-century portraits is an image of an elderly servant that appears in a Swabian Birth of the Virgin (Figure 6.5). It differs not only in its earlier date (turn of the sixteenth century), its genre of painting (a religious scene), and its German provenance, but also, and most importantly, in the way the servant is depicted. It shows St. Anne lying in bed, while a young woman reaches out to receive the newborn infant Mary.51 A popular theme in art, the Birth of the Virgin had long been represented by St. Anne in bed, surrounded by women who help her and her child, including one or more who prepare Mary’s bath or bathe her.52 At least three other German versions show a woman standing beside the bed ready to receive Mary from St. Anne while another, in the foreground, tests the water.53 All the others, however, depict a younger woman who is seated comfortably on a stool, rather than an old maid who kneels on the ground. The elderly woman in the Swabian painting readies a bath for the infant by leaning forward to grasp the handle of a pot of hot water in her right hand while testing the temperature of the bathwater with her left. That she is old is apparent from her wrinkled skin, thin lips, and the droopy tip of her nose. That she is an ordinary, lowstatus household worker is made clear through a comparison to the other woman assisting St. Anne in the painting. The elderly servant lacks the keys, purse, and case (perhaps for a midwife’s knife) that dangle from her colleague’s belt and mark her higher status. Furthermore, whereas the younger woman wears a bright red dress, the old maid is clothed in a drab greenish-brown dress over a dull, dark blue-green underskirt. Most striking is that unlike the other portraits discussed in this essay, here the artist emphasizes the hard work that the elderly woman performs. Although the portrait of Bridget Holmes displays motifs that are commonly employed to denote labor—

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Figure 6.5  Swabian, Birth of the Virgin, Städtische Museen Freiburg. © Augustinermuseum—Städtische Museen Freiburg. Photo: H. - P. Viesler (See Plate 9). rolled-up sleeves that reveal her bare forearms and a raised outer garment—the viewer is not convinced that she is working strenuously (Figure 6.2).54 By contrast, the Swabian servant’s labor is evident through her posture—kneeling on the ground with bent back—and even through the disarray of her hair, which has become undone and falls in thin, stringy locks. Her arduous effort is underlined by her exhausted expression, her unfocused eyes, and her downturned mouth, which is slightly open, revealing a few teeth, a sign of low status.55 Often artists employ the advanced age and unattractive appearance of elderly servants as foils for an elite mistress, as in portraits by Sofonisba Anguissola or Caravaggio’s painting of the biblical heroine Judith.56 But the Swabian painter does not invoke the servant in contrast to St. Anne. Why did the painter introduce the unusual motif of a prominent, elderly, exhausted, and pitiful servant? Much like the metal hinges on the door and the chamber pot that pokes out from under the chest at the foot of the bed, the artist may have introduced a naturalistic portrayal of an elderly servant in order to enhance the viewer’s identification with the sacred figures through references to contemporary life. Texts, like images, rarely betray the unhappiness of servants, but Ralph Josselin, a preacher and the brother of a lifelong domestic worker, notes his sitter’s misery in his diary. On March 8, 1656/7, he wrote, “My poore sister, whose heart is broken with greife . . . my poore sister . . .”57 Born in 1611, Mary Josselin was forty-six or

 Old Maids 83 forty-seven years at the time of this entry, and still working as a servant. Sheila McIsaac Cooper has concluded that Mary Josselin, initially a satisfied life cycle servant, became an angry and depressed lifetime servant long before she married in her fifties.58 The portraits do not betray any anger or depression and at most only hint at the servant’s labor. By contrast, the Swabian painting makes clear an elderly servant’s backbreaking work.

Conclusion It is striking that Sheila McIsaac Cooper in her excellent study of English servants analyzes many cultural forms from the clock and travel to literature and musical instruments, but fails to consider images.59 Yet, the paintings and prints discussed in this chapter shed light on elderly women servants. Most independent portraits of servants portray those of higher rank, such as chief housekeepers and nurses, who were depicted because they represented loyalty or honor, were tied to the family they served through bonds of affection, or were singled out because of their unusually advanced age. But most of these portraits do not reflect the servants’ lived experience. Few of the women look their age, and their arduous labor is usually not visualized. The hardship of their lives is revealed, however, through the poverty of Alice George the laundress, and the backbreaking work of the ordinary maid in the Birth of the Virgin. Although today the term “old maid” has a disparaging connotation, referring to a spinster who never married, in fact, some career servants, such as Bridget Holmes, Katherine Elliot, and Alice George, did marry and all are portrayed as valued members of their professional household or community.

Notes 1 See J. Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” in Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, ed. D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), 191–43; J. Hajnal, “Two Kinds of Pre-industrial Household Formation System,” in Family Forms in Historic Europe, ed. R. Wall, J. Robin, and Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 65–104; and Peter Laslett, “Notes and Queries: The Institution of Service,” Local Population Studies 40 (1988): 57–8. 2 Sheila McIsaac Cooper, “Service to Servitude? The Decline and Demise of Life-Cycle Service in England,” History of the Family 10 (2005): 372. 3 On the difficulty of identifying servants, see Diane Wolfthal, “Household Help: Early Modern Portraits of Female Servants,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 8 (2013): 13. 4 For this painting, see Gervaise Jackson-Stops, ed., The Treasure Houses of Britain: Five Hundred Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting (Washington, DC: National Gallery and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 147.

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5 For Henry, see John Walter, “Tichborne, Sir Henry, third baronet (bap. 1624, d. 1689),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), http:​//www​.oxfo​rddnb​.com.​ezpro​xy.ri​ce.ed​u/vie​w/art​icle/​66939​, accessed March 16, 2017. The ceremony shown here took place on Lady’s Day, that is, the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25). 6 John Morris, ed., The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers Related by Themselves (reprint. 1872–7; Farnborough: Gregg Int., 1970), 1:419. 7 For van Tilborch, see L. J. Wassink, “Tilborgh, Gillis van,” Grove Art Online, http:​// www​.oxfo​rdart​onlin​e.com​.ezpr​oxy.r​ice.e​du/gr​ovear​t/vie​w/10.​1093/​gao/9​78188​44460​ 54.00​1.000​1/oao​-9781​88444​6054-​e-700​00850​14#oa​o-978​18844​46054​-e-70​00085​014. 8 Corine Schleif, “Men on the Right—Women on the Left: (A)symmetrical Spaces and Gendered Places,” in Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church, ed. Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 207–49. 9 The major figures are identified in Jackson-Stops, Treasure Houses of Britain, 147; no primary source is cited for the servants’ names. For the walking stick as a sign of power and status in early modern England, see Patricia Samford, “Being Fashionable on Maryland’s Western Shore in the Late Seventeenth Century,” Northeast Historical Archaeology 40 (2011): 78. 10 For the closest examples, see Francis M. Kelly and Randolphe Schwabe, A Short History of Costume and Armour, Chiefly in England (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1931), 25, fig. 15; and Carl Köhler, A History of Costume (reprint 1928, New York: Dover, 1963), 266, fig. 330. 11 For images of other nurses, see Diane Wolfthal, “Foregrounding the Background: Dutch and Flemish Images of Household Servants,” in Concerning Early Modern Women of the Low Countries, ed. Sarah Moran and Amanda Pipkin (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 12 For Riley, see Christopher Lloyd, The Queen’s Pictures: Old Masters from the Royal Collection (London: Royal Collection Enterprises, 1994), 66. 13 Olivia Fryman, Making the Bed: Housekeeping in Royal Bedchambers at Hamtpon Court 1689-1737 (PhD diss., Kingston University, 2011), 168. 14 Ibid., 26. 15 See Jodocus Crull, The Antiquities of St. Peter’s or the Abbey-Church of Westminster, II, 4th ed. (London, 1741), 163. 16 Riley’s portrait of Holmes is first mentioned at Windsor Castle in the inventories of Queen Anne (r. 1702–14). See Oliver Millar, The Tudor, Stuart and Early Georgian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (London: Phaidon, 1963), 1:140; Anne French and Giles Waterfield, “Loyal Servants,” in Below Stairs: 400 Years of Servants’ Portraits, ed. Waterfield et al. (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2004), 69; Andrew Barclay, “The Inventories of the English Royal Collection, temp. James II,” Journal of the History of Collections 22, no. 1 (2010): 5–6. 17 Barclay, “Inventories,” 5–6, 10. 18 Margaret Whinney and Olivar Millar, English Art 1625–1714 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 189; Millar, The Tudor, Stuart, and Early Georgian Pictures, 1:140: (“BRIDGET.HOLMES./ ETAS SUAE: 96. A:D:1686”). 19 For the raised apron, see Edward Croft-Murray and Paul Hulton, Catalogue of British Drawings (London: British Museum, 1960), 1:111, cat. no. 45; Clare Graham,

 Old Maids 85 Dummy Boards and Chimney Boards (Aylesburg: Shire Publications, 1988), 13–15; and Clive Edwards, “Dummy Board Figures as Images of Amusement and Deception in Interiors, 1660-1800,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 10, no. 7 (2002–3): 74–97. 20 Oliver Millar deems the cleaning tool a broom; see The Tudor, Stuart and Early Georgian Pictures, 1:140. Ellis Waterhouse terms it a mop. See Painting in Britain 1530–1790 (London and Baltimore: Penguin, 1953), 137. It does not resemble the mop in the print Betty the Cook Maid’s Head Drest (London: W. Humphrey, 1776). Lloyd, The Queen’s Pictures, 66, correctly terms it “the brush that is the attribute of her duties.” 21 Fryman, Making the Bed, 215 (quote), 216. 22 Ibid., 204, 230. 23 Lloyd, The Queen’s Pictures, 112, states that she is “playing a game with a Page of the Downstairs.” She does not seem amused, however. Nor does she glance at the page or advance toward him. 24 Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 137; Timothy Clifford, “Polidoro and English Design,” Connoisseur 192 (August 1976): 284. 25 The subject has never been identified. 26 See, for example, in Roy Strong, The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture (London: Routledge & Kegan and New York: Pantheon, 1969), 209, 231, for the portraits of Dorothy Petre Wadham and Lady Catherine Constable. For life expectancy, see Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1965), 105–6. 27 French and Waterfield, “Loyal Servants,” 57. 28 For the portrait of Fu-Tsung, see Millar, The Tudor, Stuart, and Early Georgian Pictures, 1:146, no. 348; Theodore N. Foss, “The European Sojourn of Philippe Couplet and Michael Shen Fuzong, 1632–1692,” in Philippe Couplet, S. J. (1623– 1693) The Man Who Brought China to Europe, ed. Jerome Heyndrickx (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1990), 136–7. 29 Barclay, “Inventories,” 5. 30 Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 138. 31 See Jeremy Musson, Up and Down Stairs: The History of the Country House Servant (London: John Murray, 2009), 54 (quote), 86–7. 32 See Girouard, English Country House, 138. 33 For the duties of Woman of Bedchamber, see R. O. Bucholz, Office-Holders in Modern Britain: Volume 11 (Revised): Court Officers, 1660-1837 (London, 2006), 4–25, on British History Online, http:​//www​.brit​ish-h​istor​y.ac.​uk/of​fi ce-​holde​rs/vo​ l11. 34 Ernest Law, The Royal Gallery of Hampton Court (London: George Bell and Sonds, 1898), 147. 35 For this painting, see ibid., cat. no. 372, and the publications listed in note 37. 36 The Rijksmuseum copy (76 × 63 cm.) was a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Kessler-Hülsmann, Kappelle op den Bosch, in 1940 (SK-A-3303). For the other version, see Millar, The Tudor, Stuart, and Early Georgian Pictures, 140. 37 See Stephanie S. Dickey, “‘Met een wenende ziel . . . doch droge ogen’: Women Holding Handkerchiefs in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Portraits,” Beeld en zelfbeeld in de Nederlandse Kunst 1550-1750 Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 46 (1995):

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340; and Juana Green, “The Sempster’s Wares: Merchandising and Marrying in ‘The Fair Maid of the Exchange’ (1607),” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 1087–90. The latter makes clear that such handkerchiefs were not confined to the wealthy. 38 C. H. Collins Baker, Lely and the Stuart Portrait Painters: A Study of English Portraiture before and after Van Dyck (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1912), 32 (dates it to1680); Whinney and Millar date it after 1681 (English Art, 189); Millar, The Tudor, Stuart, and Early Georgian Pictures, 140 (c. 1687/8); Stewart J. Douglas, Sir Godfrey Kneller and the English Baroque Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 33 (c. 1686/7). Malcolm Rogers asserts that Closterman only began collaborating with Riley ca. 1689; see “John and John Baptist Closterman: A Catalogue of Their Works,” Walpole Society 49 (1983): 226. 39 Paget Toynbee, “Horace Walpole’s Journals of Visits to Country Seats,” Walpole Society 16 (1927–8): 78. 40 Cooper, “Service to Servitude,” 376–83. 41 For earlier publications on the portraits of Alice George, see Giles Waterfield, “Servants in Institutions,” in Waterfield et al., Below Stairs, 81, and Wolfthal, “Household Help,” 46–50. 42 Waterfield, “Servants in Institutions,” 81. For George as bed maker, see Sir Thomas Graham Jackson, Wadham College, Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893), 150n.2. See also Lord King, The Life and Letters of John Locke: With Extracts from His Correspondence, Journals, and Common-Place Books (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1858), 131–2, and C. S. L. Davies, “Decline and Revival: 1660–1900,” in Wadham College, ed. C. S. L. Davies and Jane Garnett (Oxford: Wadham College, 1994), 38–9. 43 Andrew Clark, ed., The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary, Oxford, 16321695 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), 3:367. 44 King, John Locke, 131. 45 For the portrait of George, see William Combe, A History of the University of Oxford, Its Colleges, Halls, and Public Buildings (London: R. Ackerman, 1814), 2:162; Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, ed. Ralph N. Wornum (London: Chatto and Windus, 1876)., vol. 2, 520; Jackson, Wadham College, 149–50; Catalogue of a Loan Collection of Portraits of English Historical Personages Who Died between 1625 and 1714 (Oxford: Henry Frowde, 1905), 77, no. 173; Mrs. Reginald Lane Poole, Catalogue of Portraits in the Possession of the University, Colleges, City, and County of Oxford (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1912–26), 3: pt. 3, 23, 218; Baker, Stuart Portrait Painters, 2:218; and Waterfield, “Servants in Institutions,” 81, 201. 46 For Powell, see Poole, Catalogue of Portraits, vol. 3, part 3, 218. A portrait of George, perhaps the one painted by Powell, was in the possession of a “Gentleman” of New College, Oxford, in 1772; see William Huddesford, ed., The Lives of Those Eminent Antiquaries: John Leland, Thomas Hearne, and Anthony à Wood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1772), 2:255. This “Gentleman” was later identified as George Huddesford; see Clark, ed., Anthony Wood, 3:367n3. In Catalogue of Portraits, Poole describes another portrait of George (218). For Sonmans, see F. M. O’Donoghue, revised Arianne Burnette, “Sonmans [Sunman], William [Willem],” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 51, 630. 47 See Marybeth Carlson, “A Trojan Horse of Worldliness? Maidservants in the Burgher Household in Rotterdam at the End of the Seventeenth Century,” in Women of the Golden Age: An International Debate on Women in Seventeenth-Century Holland,

 Old Maids 87 England, and Italy, ed. Els Kloek, Nicole Teeuwen, and Marijke Huisman (Hilversum: Verloren, 1994), 91; and Paula Humfrey, The Experience of Domestic Service for Women in Early Modern London (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 3. 48 Jackson, Wadham College, 150n2. In 1893 it hung in the Common Room opposite the window. 49 The literature on the sexual abuse of servants is extensive. See, among others, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Women Servants during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” trans. Nancy Elizabeth Mitchell, in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 69, 72; essays in Susan Broomhill, ed., Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Richardson, Household Servants, 164–8, 199–200, 203–5; and Mark Thornton Burnett, Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience (Houndmills: Macmillan Press and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 129–38. 50 For the relatively small number of older servants in early modern England, see Cooper, “Service to Servitude,” 381. 51 For this painting, see Michael Philipp, ed., Zwischen Himmel und Hölle. Kunst des Mittelalters von der Gotik bis Baldung Grien (Munich: Hirmer, 2004), 97–8. 52 See Adolfo Venturi, La Madone: Représentations de la Vierge dans l’art italien, trans. unknown (Paris: Georges Baranger, 1902), 79–82. 53 Hans Holbein der Ältere und die Kunst der Spätgotik (Augsburg: J. P. Himmer, 1965), figs. 61,138, 140. 54 For other paintings of kitchen workers with raised sleeves and bared forearms, see paintings by Pieter Aertsen, Joachim Beuckelaer, and Pieter Cornelis van Rijck, among others. This motif also appears in images of male kitchen workers. 55 For the open mouth as low status, see Donald Posner, Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Italian Painting Around 1590 (London: Phaidon, 1971), 19 (for Carracci’s Bean-Eater) and images in Paul Vandenbroeck, Over Wilden en Narren, Boeren en Bedelaars. Beeld van de Andere, Vertoog over het Zelf (Antwerp: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 1987), pl. II, figs. 51–2, 55, 60, 71, 122, 141–2, 151, 159–60. 56 For these paintings, see Wolfthal, “Household Help,” 7, 11–12. 57 The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683, ed. Alan MacFarlane (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 393. 58 Cooper, “Service to Servitude,” 370. 59 Ibid., 380–1.

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Figure 7.1 Kaigani Haida artist Mask, carved ca. 1825. Wood, pigment. Kasaan, Southeastern Alaska, United States. © Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA Photography by Mark Sexton and Jeffrey Dykes (See Plate 10).

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Portraits of Power Masks of Northwest Coast Matriarchs in the Nineteenth Century Megan A. Smetzer

A human face, delicately carved from wood, emphasizing heavy black eyebrows and embellished with abstracted designs painted in red and blue across the forehead, cheeks, and chin, becomes distinctive through the inclusion of a large, plate-like st’iitga (labret) inserted in the lower lip exposing two rows of teeth through the slightly ajar mouth (Figure 7.1).1 This portrait of power, depicting a high-ranked, mature Haida woman is among the most recognizable and discussed set of masks and figurines originating on the northern Northwest Coast of North America in the early nineteenth century. Though the mask maker is unknown, the skill with which it is rendered, its context of origin, and the reasons for its existence have fascinated academics and others for generations. Artists and scholars continue to question whether or not these “labret” or “portrait” masks portray an important supernatural ancestor or an actual woman. These discussions have also considered whether these masks were developed exclusively as souvenirs capitalizing on Euro-American fur traders’ fascination with labrets or if they were specially made gifts given to fortify specific trading alliances between Haida leaders and sea captains. While all of these considerations are compelling, the most important question remains unexamined. Why did Haida artists send representations of a k’uuljaaad, (lady of high esteem) out into the wider world? This omission has much to do with the historiography of the Northwest Coast. Prior to European contact in this region, women, particularly mature women, were central to many indigenous cultural practices. Individuals received rights and privileges from their mothers within the matrilineal societies of the Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian peoples, and also high-ranked women, known today as matriarchs, had economic and social responsibilities that balanced the roles and responsibilities of high-ranked, or chiefly, men. The late eighteenth century onset of trading relationships with European and American seafarers began to shift the indigenous gender balance as their patriarchal perspectives increasingly shaped these encounters and provided the lens through which they were documented. By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, gender roles were further destabilized by the religious and governmental structures imposed through settler colonialism in both Canada and the United States. The collecting practices of ethnographers and the

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economics of the tourist trade combined with the gendered hierarchies of art history and anthropology also favored the aesthetic privileging of work produced by male carvers and painters over the woven and beaded objects made by women from the nineteenth century onward. As Métis art historian Sherry Farrell Racette points out, this sustained “erasure” of indigenous women from art history has had a profound effect.2 Though these carved and painted masks depicting powerful older women fit well into the privileged categories of art history, the historical marginalization of women’s roles and responsibilities within the literature have left a rich vein of inquiry untapped. I argue here that the production of these masks was not purely market driven; rather, the fact that high-ranked, mature women were significant in terms of trade relationships and the acquisition of wealth long before Europeans arrived suggests that these masks served a complex and more meaningful purpose. Through an examination of oral histories and long-standing cultural practices that acknowledge Haida women’s superior abilities in trade, I will illustrate that female labret masks embodied far more than souvenirs, or even special gifts; rather, they extended the roles and range of women within the early fur trade on the Northwest Coast.

Haida Contexts The traditional territories of the Haida people include Haida Gwaii off the northern coast of British Columbia, an area that has been continuously inhabited for at least 13,000 years.3 Art historian Robin Wright notes that in the early eighteenth century, several families, now known collectively as the Kaigani Haida, settled on Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska.4 Oral histories, genealogies, and even artistic genres and materials indicate that Haida communities have been inextricably linked with other coastal peoples through marriage, trade, and warfare—relationships that began long before Europeans arrived and that continue to be acknowledged to this day. These connections often hinged on women in kinship relationships as well as their esteemed role in terms of trade and intercultural commerce, both of which contributed to the wealth and prestige of family and clan. As with other northern coastal people, the Haida are matrilineal. Individuals are born into a specific moiety (either Raven or Eagle) and receive rights and privileges through the family affiliation of the mother. These rights and privileges include access to resources, oral histories, dances and songs, as well as specific crests (gyaaging.aay) in the form of a bird, animal, or supernatural being obtained through an encounter with an ancestor. Crests, as a form of clan association and identity, are displayed in many ways, including on carved and painted belongings, woven and sewn regalia, jewelry, tattoos, and face paint. Many crests are rendered in two and three dimensions utilizing the “northern formline design system,” a concept coined and described by art historian Bill Holm in 1965 as “a sensitive arrangement of related forms . . . bound together with a network of subtly varied line . . .”5 Aspects of formline

 Portraits of Power 91 design are apparent on the PEM mask, including the curvilinear blue ovoids on the left cheek and right forehead, the cross hatching above the left eye, and the u-forms above the left eyebrow. Some have surmised that these as yet unidentified designs indicate that the mask represents jilaa quns, an important Haida ancestor discussed in detail later, while others believe they merely indicate the high rank of the woman depicted. In either case, these designs broadcast the prestige of the individual and, more specifically, that of the lineage from which she came, enabling that knowledge to circulate beyond the confines of clan and community, regardless of whether or not it was understood as such by outsiders. In her discussion of Haida women’s roles prior to the effects of settler colonialism, anthropologist Margaret Blackman describes the ways in which a woman’s power fluctuated throughout her lifetime. One of her most powerful moments occurred at puberty as the onset of menstruation and the transition from girlhood to womanhood required a period of seclusion from the community.6 During her childbearing years, a woman’s power related strongly to her sexuality. The humorous story of how Raven (the hero/trickster figure central to Haida mythology) gave women their tsaw (genitalia) illustrates the near helplessness of men in the presence of women.7 Haida elder Florence Davidson affirmed this perspective in more modern times stating, “Once they change their life [referring to puberty], they’re [men] scared of them.”8 A woman was least powerful when first married and a young mother as she would have been under the household authority of “her husband’s mother’s brother’s wife.”9 As a high-ranked woman gained maturity, the physical power of her body transformed into the power of production. Her status rose due to the number of children she bore over a lifetime (ten being ideal); her increased economic responsibilities in terms of the harvesting and processing of food; and her potential for taking on a role in trade relationships, all of which contribute to the wealth of a clan. Though it was possible for many women to become a k’uuljaad, only a few became matriarchs. As GwaaGanad, Diane Brown states: To be a matriarch is the most powerful position a woman can have. A matriarch plays a very major role within one’s clan and our nation. You don’t get there until you’re old, and you won’t get there unless you’re respected. So, there isn’t much pressure to stay young.10

In addition to these rights and responsibilities within social and economic systems, matriarchs held complementary roles with chiefly men in terms of important cultural practices, especially within the ceremonial system—‘waahlGahl—commonly known as the potlatch. These important events enabled people of rank to attain higher status through name giving, marriage acknowledgment, house building, or mortuary pole raising. In addition to feasting, dancing, and oration, girls would receive their first labrets, crest tattoos would be applied to those who had earned them, and witnesses to the event would be paid from the wealth amassed over several years. Women had many responsibilities for their own clan at these events, but women from the opposite clan were crucial for fortifying cross-clan relationships. Even today, as Haida curator Nika

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Collison remarks, the potlatch remains “our legal system and an essential part of the social, economic and political systems of all coastal First Nations.”11

Women and Haida Worldviews In 1900, ethnographer John R. Swanton recorded two origin stories that indicate the centrality of women to Haida worldviews particularly in terms of their association with wealth. According to one history, Raven, also known as Nanki’lsas (He-whose-voicemust-be-obeyed), captured the Eagle moiety ancestor, a woman named jilaa quns [also Djilakons, Djila’qons, Jiila Kuns] at the headwaters of the Nass River (located in the territory of the Nisga’a Nation in what is now known as northern BC). Once back in Haida Gwaii, Nanki’lsas built her a house and she became a Creek Woman, one of the most important supernatural beings. As a Creek Woman, jilaa quns had great wealth because of the cyclical return of the salmon and trout to her waterway.12 Another story located her origins further south in Nuxalk territory.13 Many of the ten children (five girls and five boys) born to jilaa quns and her husband became the heads of important families that settled throughout Haida Gwaii. Additional stories address those daughters, such as Property-making-a-noise (also known as Sounding Property) who developed strong relationships with other indigenous communities. After the destruction of a town called Dji’gua by her mother, Property-making-a-noise collected coppers (shield-shaped chiefly property) from the ashes, which gave her great wealth and drew the interest of a young Tsimshian man, identified in one account as One-who-gets-Wood-for-Dried-Tobacco. She left Haida territory to marry the high-ranked man and lived among his people. Years later she returned bringing her children as well as a beaver crest and established several Eagle lineages.14 Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss relates another variation of this story that highlights the connection between jilaa quns, one of her daughters, and wealth in the form of copper, which provided a dowry, allowing her to marry a highly ranked Tsimshian man.15 Within Haida worldviews children, especially females are considered wealth as they could increase the family lineage through their potential for having children.16 Crests, as in the beaver crest noted earlier, are also considered wealth in the form of both tangible and intangible property acquired through interactions with supernatural beings. As these stories indicate, one of the powerful roles of high-ranked Haida women was as a bringer of wealth from afar, a perspective established long before explorers and traders arrived on the Northwest Coast, but one that set a foundation for the equating of farflung trade as a source of potential wealth and status. According to Swanton, jilaa quns, and the Eagle moiety more generally, are also responsible for artistic practices carried out by both women and men. Being an artist was a privileged position as artists were high ranked and also trained as leaders.17 Another of jilaa quns’ daughters, Swiftly-Sliding Woman, wove a cedar bark blanket and placed two coppers (t’aaGuu) on it. In so doing, she introduced weaving to Haida women and placed great value upon its creation.18 Another Eagle ancestor, Master

 Portraits of Power 93 Carpenter, introduced woodworking to the Haida people, which enabled the carving of masks such as the ones discussed here.

Masks and Masking Practices on the Northern Northwest Coast Masks and masking practices among Tsimshian, Tlingit, and Haida communities of the northern Northwest Coast have had important and varied significance defined by complex cultural protocols and nuanced histories. As early collections of Northwest Coast material indicate, masks have fascinated visitors to the region since the time of initial European contact in the eighteenth century. Masks depicting human faces, specifically, have garnered considerable scholarly attention from the late nineteenth century onward due to their cultural uses and physical attributes.19 Historically, in Tsimshian communities, most masks, including representations of humans and animals, were considered nax nox—an expression of supernatural power—that were brought to life and danced publicly at ceremonial occasions.20 Among Tlingit people, masks tended to be shamanic in nature, used in ceremonies for healing or driving out evil spirits.21 Among the Haida, though there may have been some pre-contact use, most scholarship agrees that masks depicting humans were likely made to satisfy the demand for souvenirs by fur traders and other early visitors to the coast, a claim that has remained relatively unchallenged.22 As noted earlier, many early Haida masks depict old women whose massive lip-piercing labrets and intricate face paint indicate high status, wealth, and power.23

Historiography of Haida “Labret” Masks The works that have inspired this chapter include at least eleven masks and three figurines, located primarily in the collections of New England museums, which were made by at least two artists, possibly from Kaigani Haida communities.24 Loosely known as the “Jenna Cass” masks for reasons that will be discussed later, they were acquired by sea captains and fur traders between 1820 and 1850. Beginning in the 1970s, academics argued that early Haida masks must have been made as souvenirs rather than deriving from extant masking practices, because the masks were neither rigged to be worn nor showed signs of use.25 The existence of the female figurines made by the same artist or group of artists buttressed this position, as they were unprecedented among early Haida cultural expressions, which strongly suggests their creation as souvenirs.26 The development of carved objects made specifically for trade and/or sale from argillite (a dense black stone quarried only on Haida Gwaii) around the same time has also been used to support the perspective that as Haida carvers were developing unique objects in response to new economic opportunities, the masks must have served a similar purpose. Finally, some have argued that it is highly unlikely that

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important ceremonial regalia would have been sold at that early date as traders were primarily interested in furs and not focused on ethnographic collecting.27

Ceremonial Masking Practices This final point is complicated by the question of whether or not Haida communities used masks depicting humans within ceremonial practices in the early nineteenth century, as they did by mid-century. Though art historian Steve Brown makes a connection suggesting that these early masks were used ceremonially, the majority of sources are far more circumspect.28 In 1900, Swanton indicated that secret society dances were acquired from neighboring peoples such as the Tsimshian and Heiltsuk as early as 1700, though only some of these dances used masks.29 In his 1884 descriptions of Haida dances and masks, surveyor George Dawson noted that masks were used in only one dance, and their use was entirely up to the person dancing.30 The masked dance recorded by Dawson took place during a potlatch, just before the distribution of property to witnesses “on the occasion of such an event as the tattooing of a child or the death of a relative or friend.” He described and illustrated two types of masks—those depicting men and others illustrating birds.31 Neither source indicates that human masks were used early in the century. Swanton’s description of the “Dress Spirit” (K!uyan sga nagwa) —a ceremony for women initiates into a dance society—makes a specific connection between women and masked dancing. At multiple points initiates wear masks, though what they depict is not stated: “Again they came in through the doorway, wearing masks. Only the most skilled workmen made these masks. Each mask had a spirit-song with it.”32 As this description indicates, and when coupled with the photograph described later, women were wearing masks depicting humans by 1890, but it remains unclear at what point this particular gendered practice began.

Portrait Masks A poignant 1890 photograph taken by Anglican missionary Charles Harrison shows a group of young women from Skidegate wearing secret society regalia (Figure 7.2).33 Missionaries often circulated photographs such as these—framed in their literature as images of unconverted peoples—to solicit additional funds to continue suppressing the use of masks, face paint, labrets, and other adornment as well as the cultural practices within which they gained meaning. By this time, the potlatch and other ceremonial practices had been criminalized under Canada’s repressive 1884 Indian Act, compounding the effects of the 1862 smallpox epidemic, which decimated the Haida population. In this image, two women at the far-left side of the back row wear paper facemasks and a third wears a finely carved chief ’s frontlet/forehead mask (sakii. idee or sGaaga jilk’ii) depicting an image of a young woman. The female figure on the

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Figure 7.2  “Haida Indians in dancing costume: New Year’s masquerade at the Skidegate mission, Queen Charlotte Islands, 1891.” United Church Archives. Toronto. 93.049P/9N. headdress is known to be a portrait of a chief ’s deceased daughter carved by Simeon Stilthda (sdiihldaa [skil kingaans]).34 In the face of Harrison’s ongoing suppression of these practices, these women convey a sense of strength and defiance through their forthright gaze and the tangible expression of the knowledge that continued to be passed from generation to generation through the use of masks and wearing of face paint. This photograph, in conjunction with Swanton’s witnessing of a potlatch in 1900, underlines the fact that many Haida people refused to conform to the laws imposed on their bodies and their cultural practices, and, instead, found subtle ways of resisting these restrictions. Though ethnographies make it clear that masking practices were extant in Haida communities in the early nineteenth century, it remains somewhat unclear if masks depicting humans were used in either potlatch contexts or secret society dances at that time. Amateur ethnographer George Thornton Emmons argued that portrait masks developed after contact due to the introduction of iron, which enabled the creation of tools and techniques for finer carving. He believed that this practice reached its apex by the mid-nineteenth century.35 Certainly, by the third quarter of the nineteenth century, human masks were being used and carvings of specific individuals had also developed.36 Some scholars suggest, however, that the representation of actual people may have occurred earlier.

Jenna Cass/Jilaa Quns In 1982, Holm discussed a possible identity for the woman depicted in these masks. The inscription found on the inside of one (10-47-10/76826) in the collection of the

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Peabody Museum at Harvard, “A correct likeness of Jenna Cass, a high chief woman of the North west Coast J. Goodwin Esq.” he argued, could indicate the depiction of a specific individual. More intriguingly, when considered alongside the other masks and figurines sharing almost identical carved and painted attributes and in conjunction with the language barrier between the Haida and Euro-American traders, he felt these could represent the Eagle moiety ancestor, jilaa quns rather than a real person.37 Historian Mary Malloy acknowledges Holm’s speculation about jilaa quns but argues for the mask as a representation of an actual woman, possibly Madame Connecor, a high-ranked Kaigani Haida woman who was well known to nineteenth-century traders.38 Either way, Malloy suggests that at least one mask was likely a special gift given by chief Neacoot of Tongass to American sea captain Daniel Cross of the Rob Roy sometime between 1822 and 1824. During these years Neacoot spent weeks at a time on board with the crew acting as “a pilot, translator, an occasional collaborator and a friend” as they travelled from community to community along the coast.39 Though there is no evidence that they exchanged gifts, Haida protocols around trade, which early literature notes included singing, dancing, and the scattering of feathers, would likely have shaped the interactions.40 Other mentions of gift giving do exist, including one recorded on June 9, 1795, in Captain John Boit’s log: “A Canoe boarded us, in which was Cunniah’s [gannyaa] Wife [Madame Connecor], Who made a present of two Skins for which I made a suitable return.”41 Despite the compelling argument made by Malloy, it is Holms’ speculation about jilaa quns that is now accepted almost universally.42 One intriguing exception, explored by anthropologist Bruce Bernstein, takes Malloy’s gift argument a step further by suggesting that if these were portraits of an actual person, they could have been given as “calling cards,” so traders could return to the same individual in subsequent seasons.43 The agency accorded to women in Bernstein’s perspective enriches the complexity of women’s responsibilities within Haida cultural contexts, many of which have to do with the acquisition of wealth and expertise at trade.

Early Fur Trade on the Northwest Coast Though sporadic contact occurred between European explorers and indigenous communities along the Northwest Coast in the late eighteenth century, it was Captain Cook’s third voyage (1776–80) that led to a sustained non-indigenous presence due to the high prices achieved in China for sea otter pelts sold by expedition members. Dozens of primarily American, but also British, Spanish, and Russian, ships made the arduous, often multiyear journey from their home ports in order to reap great profits from the sea otters harvested by coastal people, whose skills in trade were noted with great frequency and frustration. Upon encountering Haida people for the first time in 1774, Spanish explorer Juan Perez stated: “From what has been experienced with them, they are very adept at trading and commerce, judging by the briskness with which they dealt with us . . . one may readily believe there is frequent commerce between them.”44 The recognition of these skills meant that though trading exchanges were often brief

 Portraits of Power 97 and imbued with protocols that were little understood by European and American traders, they were carefully adhered to in order to obtain the most furs for the least cost. To the Haida, these traders quickly became known as Yaats XaaydaGa or the Iron People, as iron used to create tools became a popular item of trade.45 In their official ship logs and personal journals, traders often indicated those aspects of the appearance of and interactions with indigenous peoples that seemed most unfamiliar or unique. The bodies, roles, and adornment of women they encountered on their travels around the Pacific received a great deal of attention. As historian Jean Barman points out, in general, “male newcomers depicted Indigenous men in terms of their physicality and Indigenous women in terms of their sexuality.”46 As the perspectives of these male explorers and fur traders were shaped by their patriarchal worldviews, an understanding of the autonomy and power of Haida women can only be glimpsed obliquely in the descriptions and comments made about them. Two recurring themes are significant here—the labret as an object of adornment and the integral nature of women’s participation in trade. The fact that these aspects of women’s appearances and actions drew so much comment says a great deal about the social position of Haida women in these encounters.

St’iitga (Labret) Worn by women along the entire Northwest Coast until the late nineteenth century, the labret was a visual manifestation of a woman’s status and power within Haida cultural practices.47 The majority of girls above the rank of slave were pierced beneath the lower lip by a thin piece of copper or brass wire in a special ceremony, primarily at the time of puberty, though some early documents record labrets worn by infants.48 As a highborn girl became a powerful and accomplished woman, the wire would be replaced by incrementally larger labrets made from wood, stone, and/or shell.49 The number of children she bore and the status of her family lineage contributed to the size and embellishment of the labret.50 In addition to indicating the marriageable age of a young woman, the labret acted both as a reminder to the wearer and as a signal to the observer that a woman’s words were powerful and needed to be carefully weighed before spoken.51 Elder women of rank wore labrets of enormous size, fascinating and repulsing the sailors who encountered them. In 1787, seaman William Beresford recorded Captain George Dixon’s acquisition of a labret in Haida territory: “One of these lip pieces appears to be peculiarly ornamented, Captain Dixon wished to purchase it, and offered the old woman to whom it belonged a hatchet; but this she refused with contempt.”52 After some negotiation she eventually traded her labret, made from wood inlaid with abalone and rimmed with copper, for the buttons that met her criteria of value. Many visual practices of this sort, such as face painting and tattooing, came under attack by the third quarter of the nineteenth century when missionaries began imposing their belief systems on the inhabitants of Haida Gwaii. Young women no longer had their lips pierced and only the oldest women continued to wear labrets. According to Swanton, by 1900 some women wore carved shell necklaces depicting their crest in lieu

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of the labret. When dancing, a woman would hold the necklace in her mouth.53 This practice enabled women to physically conform to missionary ideals of womanhood, and at the same time provide a means to reinforce their status and identity in culturally significant, yet outlawed, contexts. The importance of labrets during this era continued in other formats as well. Famed carver Charles Edenshaw (1839–1920) often included images of women with face paint and labrets in the model totem poles he made for the burgeoning tourist trade. Though women no longer wore them, their meanings were carried forward in subtle ways not recognized by those who suppressed these practices.54

Women in Trade Beresford’s 1787 journal entry, like many others, both provided observations about the appearance of indigenous women, and also voiced opinions about the responsibilities being upheld by women in these early trading encounters. Older women were recorded as standing in the prows of canoes and greeting those on board ship before trading commenced; they are described as having the last word in terms of the negotiations of price and quantity, and their less than subordinate relationships with their male companions were depicted by those with patriarchal worldviews as outside the norms of proper behavior. When Perez sailed near what is now known as Langara Island in 1774, his ship was greeted by a flotilla of 200 Haida in 21 canoes. The records of this earliest contact between Europeans and the Haida make particular note of Haida women whose seemingly unusual abilities took them by surprise. “Among the canoes was one containing only women, some twelve in number, and they alone paddled and managed the canoe as well as the most expert sailors could.”55 In an 1848 public lecture, retired Captain William Sturgis specifically discussed women’s trading abilities: “Among the tribes upon Queen Charlotte’s Island and the adjacent Coast the management of trade was in greatest measure intrusted to the women, and they provided themselves worthy of the trust, for keener traders I have never met with.”56 Though these early statements suggest a certain admiration, most found the actions of women disconcerting and appear to have preferred trading with men regardless of the power expressed by the high-ranked, older women who accompanied them. One significant exception was the Haida woman known as Madame Connecor whose reputation preceded her. In a subsequent lecture, Sturgis noted: Madam Connecor, (well known to every early visitor of the Coast), the wife of one of the most distinguished chiefs, was remarkable for the enormous size of her wooden lip. She was remarkable, too, in some other respects; for as a trader, she was the keenest and shrewdest among the shrewd.57

He explains that Madame Connecor viewed the traders she encountered as “her children,” suggesting a parallel to the story of Property-making-a-noise and the return to Haida Gwaii with children as wealth as well as familial expectations and obligations,

 Portraits of Power 99 which were likely little understood by Sturgis and others. Nonetheless, the appellation of “‘Mother’ Connecor, by which she was universally known,” indicates that traders, both new and returning, sought her out.58 This ongoing relationship supports both Malloy and Bernstein’s suppositions that the mask might be a portrait of an actual woman and a “calling card.” In addition to expertly negotiating high demands and parameters around trade, women also produced food for trade—particularly potatoes and other introduced crops; made items for sale such as woven baskets and hats; and sometimes mediated tense situations that arose during these cross-cultural interactions.59 While women’s roles may have been unexpected for the newcomers, Tlingit writer Florence Shotridge noted that northern coastal women were trained for trade from a young age: “If a child wanted to earn something she would give part of her stores [food she prepared/preserved] to her brother or uncle, who would pay twice the value for encouragement.”60 A woman’s control over food supply in particular, not only maintained her status within the private sphere of the clan, but also had the potential to increase her status in the public sphere as any excess would be traded for potlatch gifts or sold to accumulate wealth to host a potlatch or other ceremonial event.61 The centrality of women and trade to Haida origin stories, as discussed earlier, as well as being part of a woman’s upbringing are significant in terms of the circulation of labret masks in the first part of the nineteenth century.

Portraits of Power These competing worldviews provided the context for the making and circulation of these masks. While it is entirely possible that part of the reason for their existence was to fill a void in a new economic market by providing souvenirs, another reason for being must relate to Haida women’s roles in trade. These masks could have acted metaphorically and literally simultaneously. On the one hand, they could reference important female ancestors as both jilaa quns and her daughters were associated with wealth. Jilaa quns came from afar, bringing wealth with her. At least one of her daughters left Haida Gwaii but returned with additional connections and wealth. These stories suggest a plausible reason for sending representations of a k’uuljaaad out into the world—the significant possibility that they would bring both tangible and intangible wealth upon their return, which, one could argue, they did for the duration of the fur trade. On the other hand, these early masks could have been portraits of an actual woman with whom traders had dealings and acted as a “calling card” for traders to return to a specific person. Certainly, by the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Haida carvers were creating masks and frontlets that represented specific individuals.62 This perspective seems more likely when considered in conjunction with another powerful female trader from the late nineteenth century. Multiple memoirs and photographs document that among all the women selling souvenirs, tourists actively sought out Gadjin’t, a Tlingit woman also known as Princess or Mrs. Tom during their summer excursions to Alaska. Through images and reputation, Gadjin’t created a market for her wares. Though speculative, Gadjin’t may very well have been inspired by the practices

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of the successful women entrepreneurs who preceded her, such as Madame Connecor, to cultivate a market utilizing the technologies of the day.63 No matter the original reason for their making, these masks extended the range of women’s influence, and, as their ancestors before them, brought, for a brief window in the early years of encounter, wealth and status to Haida Gwaii. Moreover, these portraits of power make tangible for a wider world both in the past and in the present, Haida perspectives that mature women were central to Haida cultural practices, particularly in terms of their ability to acquire wealth and gain prestige for themselves, their clans, and their communities.

Notes 1 Several Haida orthographies have been developed so direct quotes incorporate the author’s chosen orthography. For the Haida words used in this text I draw from Gina Suuda Tl’lXasii. Came to Tell Something: Art and Artist in Haida Society (Skidegate: Haida Gwaii Museum Press, 2014) as it acknowledges and utilizes the spelling differences between Alaskan, Skidegate, and Masset dialects. 2 Sherry Farrell Racette, “‘I Want to Call Their Names in Resistance’: Writing Aboriginal Women into Canadian Art History, 1880–1970,” in Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850-1970, ed. Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2012), 287. 3 Mark Hume, “Underwater Discovery near Haida Gwaii could Rewrite Human History,” Globe and Mail, September 23, 2014, http:​//www​.theg​lobea​ndmai​l.com​/ news​/brit​ish-c​olumb​ia/bc​-rese​arche​rs-ma​y-hav​e-fou​nd-ea​rlies​t-sit​e-of-​human​-habi​ tatio​n-in-​canad​a/art​icle2​07372​78/. 4 Robin K. Wright, Northern Haida Master Carvers (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 93. 5 Bill Holm, Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965), 83. 6 Margaret Blackman notes that even within customary Haida cultural practices, where women had many rights and responsibilities, asymmetry between the genders existed, aspects of which became exacerbated through the imposition of settler colonial perspectives. In “The Changing Status of Haida Women: An Ethnohistorical and Life History Approach,” in The World Is as Sharp as a Knife: An Anthology in Honour of Wilson Duff, ed. Donald N. Abbott (Victoria: British Columbia Provincial Museum, 1981), 65. 7 Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson, “How Raven Gave Females Their Tsaw,” in Charles Edenshaw, ed. Robin K. Wright and Daina Augaitis (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2013), 61. 8 Margaret B. Blackman, During My Time: Florence Edenshaw Davidson, A Haida Woman (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1982), 29. 9 Blackman, “The Changing Status of Haida Women” (1981), 75. 10 Quoted in Gina Suuda Tl’lXasii, 1. 11 Nika Collison, “Everything Depends on Everything Else,” in Raven Travelling: Two Centuries of Haida Art, Daina Augaitis (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2006), 58–9. 12 Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson, Out of Concealment: Female Supernatural Beings of Haida Gwaii (Victoria: Heritage House Publishing Company, Ltd., 2017), 83.

 Portraits of Power 101 13 John R. Swanton, “Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida,” in Memoir of the American Museum of Natural History: The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, vol. 5, ed. Franz Boas (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1905), 23. 14 Ibid., 95–6, 109. 15 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1982 [1975, 1979]), 104. 16 Blackman (1981), 66. 17 Wright, Master Carvers, 120. 18 Swanton, “Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida,” 92. 19 See William H. Dall, “On Masks, Labrets, and Certain Aboriginal Customs, with an Inquiry into the Bearing of Their Geographical Distribution” (Bureau of American Ethnology. Annual Reports 3, 1884), 73–203; George Mercer Dawson, “Report on the Queen Charlotte Islands, 1878” (Geological Survey of Canada. Publication no. 133, 1880); George Thornton Emmons, “Portraiture among North Pacific Coast Tribes” (Washington, DC: s.n., 1914). Reprinted from the American Anthropologist (N.S.) 16, no. 1 (January–March 1914): 59–67. 20 Mique’l Askren, “Dancing Our Stone Mask Out of Confinement: A Twenty-firstCentury Tsimshian Epistemology,” in Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast, ed. Aaron Glass (New York: Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, 2011), 37–48; Marjorie Halpin, “Seeing in Stone: Tsimshian Masking and the Twin Stone Masks,” in The World Is As Sharp as a Knife: An Anthology in Honor of Wilson Duff, ed. Donald N. Abbott (Victoria: British Columbia Provincial Museum, 1981), 269–90. 21 See Frederica de Laguna, Under Mount Saint Elias: The History and Culture of the Yakutat Tlingit, vol. 7 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, 1972), 690; Allen Wardwell, Tangible Visions: Northwest Coast Indian Shamanism and Its Art (New York: The Monacelli Press, Inc., 1996), 109–10. 22 My appreciation goes to Dr. Robin K. Wright for bringing these general distinctions to my attention. Personal communication, May 2012. These distinctions have blurred significantly since the early nineteenth century as masking practices are now ubiquitous among northern Northwest Coast peoples and take place both within and outside of ceremonial contexts. 23 See Jonathan C. H. King, Portrait Masks from the Northwest Coast of America (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 70; Peter Macnair, Robert Joseph, and Bruce Grenville, Down from the Shimmering Sky: Masks of the Northwest Coast (Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1998), 63. 24 Mary Malloy, Souvenirs of the Fur Trade: Northwest Coast Indian Art and Artifacts Collected by American Mariners 1788-1844 (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press, 2000), 12, 122. See also, Peter Macnair, “Power of the Shining Heavens,” in Down from the Shimmering Sky, 66–7. These include masks and figurines now located at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard (PMH): 10-47-10/76826 (mask), 98-04-10/51671 (mask), 99-12-10/53093 (figure), 99-1210/53094 (figure); Peabody Essex Museum (PEM): E53452 (figure), E3483 (mask). National Museum of Natural History (NMNH): One mask (E2666-0) is related to those noted here, two additional masks (E2665-0, E2667-0) appear to have been made by a second artist. A third mask (45-12-2), also by the latter artist, is located at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (UPM).

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Though the existence of an additional figure and four masks were mentioned in the literature, their current locations were not provided. Some of these masks were brought together for the first time in the 1973 exhibition, The Far North: 2000 Years of American Eskimo and Indian Art. 25 Macnair, “Power of the Shining Heavens,” 67. 26 Thomas Vaughan and Bill Holm, Soft Gold: The Fur Trade & Cultural Exchange on the Northwest Coast of America (Oregon: Oregon Historical Society, 1982), 161. 27 See King, Portrait Masks from the Northwest Coast of America, 5–6, 72; George F. MacDonald, Haida Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 73; David Penney, The American Indian: Art and Culture Between Myth and Reality, trans. Beverly Jackson (Amsterdam: Nieuwe Kerk/Hermitage Amsterdam, 2012), 172. 28 Articulated mask (Figure 92) illustrated in Spirits of the Water attributed to Haida c. 1790–1830. The caption states: “Masks like these were used in theatrical performances that narrated historical, genealogical, or divinatory scenes, and in some initiation rites. The articulated eyelids that appear in the masks of certain artists in this area lend an incredibly lifelike drama to the masks, especially used in a firelit performance house. The small ears and rounded form of this mask are typical of Haida portrait masks of the very early nineteenth century” 132. This is an intriguing statement as it claims that Haida masks were used within early nineteenth-century ceremonial practices, but its lack of citations from early sources suggests it is an extrapolation about the use of masks from other parts of the coast at this time. 29 Swanton, “Contributions,” 156. 30 Dawson, “Report on the Queen Charlotte Islands, 1878,” 128. 31 Ibid., 137–8. 32 Swanton, “Contributions,” 172. 33 United Church of Canada Archives. A nearly identical image exists in the Canadian Museum of History archives (CMH) 71-6778. 34 Emmons, “Portraiture,” 65. Robin K. Wright made the attribution in her essay “Two Haida Artists from Yan: Will John Gwaytihl and Simeon Stilthda Please Step Apart?” American Indian Art Magazine 32, no. 3 (1998): 42–57, 106–7. 35 Emmons, “Portraiture,” 61. 36 See, for example, a mask “intended to be a portrait of the artist’s wife” collected by Dr. F. Dally in 1868. Henry Balfour, “Haida Portrait Mask,” Man 7 (1907): 1. 37 Vaughan and Holm, Soft Gold, 96–7. 38 Robin K. Wright believes Madame Connecor was the wife of Haida Chief Gunya (gannyaa) from Kiusta (k’yuust’aa). Personal Communication, June 16, 2016. 39 Malloy, Souvenirs of the Fur Trade, 15. 40 For the earliest recorded example of Haida trading protocols, see the diary of Juan Perez cited in Wright, Master Carvers, 18. 41 Cited in Wright, Master Carvers, 73. 42 See Robin K. Wright, “The Depiction of Women in Nineteenth Century Haida Argillite Carving,” American Indian Art Magazine 11, no. 4 (Autumn 1986): 36–45; Macnair, “Power of the Shining Heavens,” 66–7; Peter Macnair, “From the Hands of Master Carpenter,” in Raven Travelling: Two Centuries of Haida Art (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2006), 100. 43 Bruce Bernstein, “Expected Evolution: The Changing Continuum,” in Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art (Salem: Peabody Essex Museum, 2012), 40.

 Portraits of Power 103 44 Quoted in Wright. Master Carvers, 18. 45 Nika Collison, Gina Suuda Tl’lXasii, 85. 46 Jean Barman, “Indigenous Women and Feminism on the Cusp of Contact,” in Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture, ed. Cheryl Suzack, Shari M. Huhndorf, Jeanne Perreault, and Jean Barman (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 92. 47 For a discussion on the distribution and diversity of labret types along the coast, see Marina LaSalle, “Labrets and Their Social Context in British Columbia,” BC Studies, no. 180 (Winter 2013/14): 123–53. 48 Noted in George Thornton Emmons, The Tlingit Indians, ed. Frederica de Laguna (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 247. Also, Sturgis, quoted in Malloy, Souvenirs of the Fur Trade, 9. 49 For an archaeological and ethnological examination of labret distribution, see Grant R. Keddie, “The Use and Distribution of Labrets on the North Pacific Rim,” Syesis 14 (1981): 59–80. For an ethnohistorical examination of labret wearing, see Madonna Moss, “George Catlin among the Nayas: Understanding the Practice of Labret Wearing on the Northwest Coast,” Ethnohistory 46, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 31–65. For a structuralist/symbolist examination of labret wearing among the neighboring Tlingit, see Aldona Jonaitis, “Women, Marriage, Mouths, and Feasting: The Symbolism of Tlingit Labrets,” in Marks of Civilization: Artistic Transformations of the Human Body, ed. Arnold Rubin (Los Angeles: UCLA Museum of Culture History, 1988), 191–205. 50 Moss, “George Catlin among the Nayas,” 32. 51 De Laguna, Under Mount Saint Elias, 444, 827. 52 Quoted in Wright, Master Carvers, 33. 53 Swanton, “Contributions,” 147. 54 Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, “Eagles and Elephants: Cross-Cultural Influences in the Time of Charles Edenshaw,” in Daina Augaitis and Robin K. Wright, Charles Edenshaw (London: Black Dog Publishing, Ltd., 2013), 176. 55 From Father Juan Crespi’s Diary, quoted in Wright, Master Carvers, 24. 56 Captain William Sturgis, “An Historical Sketch of the Northwest Coast Trade (1848),” in A Most Remarkable Enterprise: Lectures on the Northwest Coast Trade and Northwest Coast Indian Life, ed. Mary Malloy (Marstons Mills: Parnassus Imprints, 2000), 16. 57 Captain William Sturgis, “The Character of Northwest Indians and Occurrences among Them (1848),” in A Most Remarkable Enterprise: Lectures on the Northwest Coast Trade and Northwest Coast Indian Life, ed. Mary Malloy (Marstons Mills: Parnassus Imprints, 2000), 36. 58 Ibid., 36. 59 Loraine Littlefield, The Role of Women in the Northwest Coast Fur Trade (Unpublished MA Thesis, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, 1987), 106. 60 Florence Shotridge, “Life of a Chilkat Indian Girl,” Museum Journal 10, no. 102 (1913): 101. 61 Carol Cooper, “Native Women of the North Pacific Coast: An Historical Perspective, 1830-1900,” Journal of Canadian Studies 27, no. 4 (Winter 1992–93): 48. 62 See Balfour, “Haida Portrait Mask,” 1–2; Emmons, “Portraiture,” 59–67. 63 Silvia Koros, “Princess Tom and the Alaska Tourist Trade 1884-1900,” European Review of Native American Studies (Vienna) 19, no. 1 (2005): 27–30.

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Figure 8.1  Map of Nuku Hiva showing locations and tribes. Courtesy Carol Ivory.

8

Paetini and Vaekehu Change and Aging in the Portraits of Marquesan Matriarchs Carol Ivory

A matriarch is defined as an older woman who is powerful within a family or organization, a dignified usually elderly woman of some rank or authority.1 This is the story of two matriarchs: Paetini and her daughter, Vaekehu, whose combined lives spanned the entire length of the nineteenth century. They were Polynesians whose ancestors probably settled in the Marquesas Islands, an archipelago about 1,000 miles northeast of Tahiti, around 1000 CE, according to most recent theories.2 Their home was Taiohae valley on the southern coast of Nuku Hiva (Figure 8.1), the largest island in the archipelago. With its magnificent horseshoe-shaped bay, Taiohae is formed by six smaller valleys nestled within the sunken caldera of an extinct volcano. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had become the most important moorage in the Marquesan archipelago for Western visitors. Over time, these included missionaries, military men, colonial administrators, and writers and artists of note, including Herman Melville, Pierre Loti (Julien Viaud), and Robert Louis Stevenson. The visitors met and wrote about both Paetini and Vaekehu, which is how we know quite a lot about their lives. The two women were also the subjects of numerous portraits, including drawings, and later in the nineteenth century, in the case of Vaekehu, photographs. This chapter looks at four of these portraits, two of Paetini, done in the first half of the nineteenth century, and two of Vaekehu from the second half. When the original portraits of Paetini were sketched in 1838, she was in her early forties. The two portraits of Vaekehu were done when she was forty-nine and seventy-six, respectively. In written comments, both Paetini and Vaekehu were considered “old” at the time their portraits were made. Done decades apart, they reflect the very different circumstances in which the two women lived. When Paetini was born in the late eighteenth century, Marquesan culture was strong and vibrant, as it was during Vaekehu’s youth. By the time the latter died in 1901, it had become a shadow of itself, one of the many indigenous cultures and peoples imagined by Westerners to be on the verge of extinction. This chapter places

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the portraits within the context of complex calamitous historical and cultural change. It also examines them to discern any similarities or differences over time. This chapter will also consider the way the artists, all men, depicted the women, and especially the impact of the prevailing attitude about Polynesian culture generally, and women especially, as sexually free and available. Within this context, Polynesian women have been, and still are, depicted visually as “Dusky Maidens”—exotic, sensual, different. To what degree can this bias be seen in the images, and if there, was it mitigated by any understanding of the importance of factors such as rank, status, wealth, and age? In other words, is it possible to see them as “Dusky Matriarchs”? From the women’s perspective, can we discern anything about their thoughts about their portraits? Might age have played a role in any sense of agency on their part or in shaping aspects of them? Though definitive answers to these questions are not possible, it is interesting to interrogate the images for the messages they themselves share.

Paetini When Paetini was born around 1796 in Taiohae valley, her place in society was determined by her genealogy. Marquesan society, though stratified, was flexible. Genealogy, reckoned along both maternal and paternal lines, was the main mechanism by which people were ranked, since one’s genealogy determined one’s relationship to the ètua3 (gods, mainly deified ancestors), and to the hakaìki (high chief), the direct descendant of the gods and the highest-ranking person in the tribe. Theoretically, the first-born son of the hakaìki inherited the most tapu (spiritual power) and assumed leadership upon his father’s death. In reality, rank and status were extremely malleable with the practice of adoption, accumulation of wealth and prestige, and ability, at times the determining factors, regardless of gender. Marquesan women could inherit property. Edward Robarts, a beachcomber who lived in the Marquesas between 1797 and 1806, for example, reported that: “A man being possessed of land and [who] has several children, the eldest son and daughter gets the greatest share of land, and the others in proportion.”4 If there was no male heir, the only or oldest daughter inherited the title, authority and land of the chief.5 As a result, many women were, in fact, quite wealthy and influential, owning land and wielding considerable personal power. Paetini’s own family is a good example of this. She was the first-born daughter of a first-born daughter (Tahatapu) of a first-born son (Kiatonui) of a powerful mother (Putahaii). At the time of her birth, her grandfather, Kiatonui, was the hakaìki of Taiohae. With his marriage to a highly ranked and powerful woman from Hakaui, a valley to the west of Taiohae, he was recognized as the hakaìki of the whole Te Ii Nui a Haku tribe, one of two large rival tribes on Nuku Hiva.6 Her paternal great-grandmother, Kiatonui’s mother, Putahaii, was a powerful and wealthy woman in her own right who assumed her father’s position as chief when he died. Robarts, who knew her when she was in her seventies, described her power: “the

 Paetini and Vaekehu 107 favour of the old lady was worth the favour of the Whole family. Her word was a law. They even did not go to war without her consent. She was a woman of sound reason, her intelects [sic] Keen, and firm in her resolutions.”7 Paetini was a favorite of Putahaii, and as a child, lived in a special house near her great-grandmother.8 On Nuku Hiva, warfare between the two overarching rival tribal alliances, the Te Ii Nui a Haku and the Taipi Nui a Vaku, was an integral component of life. Alliances with other valleys, or even islands, were formed against such enemies, often through arranged marriages between high-ranking individuals. These marriages established a degree of peace and stability between uneasy allies and even enemies. Such was the case for Paetini, whose marriage to Tuoiea, a high chief of Hooumi, one of the Taipi Nui valleys, reinforced a recent developing peace between the two tribes. Prestigious women, like Paetini, in fact, had many husbands. The Marquesans were polyandrous, that is, women could formally have more than one husband at the same time. Most high-ranking Marquesan women had a primary husband and at least one secondary one (called a pēkio), who were usually lower status male servants that played an important economic role in the family in which they lived. In the absence of the primary husband, they performed the duties of head of household and had the privilege of sexual relations with the wife. Père Mathias Gracia, a French missionary in the Marquesas at that time, noted that Paetini usually had “two or three other small chiefs, also called her spouses” around her, but apparently she had many more than that, for Max Radiguet, who arrived in Nuku Hiva in 1842 about a year after she had died, wrote that she left a dozen widowers, adding in a footnote that it was said that she had had thirty-two husbands.9 By that time, he wrote, she was considered a god, and was being invoked to help heal an ailing man, in fact, the husband she esteemed the most.10 Paetini had a strong demeanor and temperament even as a young woman. In 1813, when she was around seventeen or eighteen years old, she met the American naval captain, David Porter. With the United States at war with Great Britain, he brought three captured British whalers to Taiohae harbor, which he renamed Madisonville.11 There, as was common in Polynesian ports, eager women swam to the ships to greet the crew and commence liaisons with the men. Porter was quite taken with Paetini. He described her at length as a “handsome young woman . . . , her complexion fairer than common, her carriage majestic. . . . Her glossy black hair, and her skin were highly anointed with the cocoa-nut oil, and her whole person and appearance neet [sic], sleek, and comely” When he learned she was the granddaughter of Kiatonui, and “held in great estimation, on account of her rank and beauty,” he decided to make advances toward her.12 At the age of seventeen, Paetini would have been sexually experienced and sophisticated. As a young adolescent, and before settling down with a partner, she along with other boys and girls of high rank enjoyed several years of sexual experimentation and freedom as part of an association called the kaìoi. They learned the social arts and graces, helped with the preparation for, and served as singers and dancers at, ceremonial feasts. They entertained important visitors, too, including proffering sexual favors, part of Marquesan hospitality.

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However, she would not have been one of the women swimming to the ships. Most of those came from the lower classes. And while they were not faking their genuine enthusiasm for sexual activity with the sailors, there was another agenda for them: acquiring the very desirable goods given to them by the men. As Andy Martin notes, there was likely “a principle of exchange underlying the gifts: that sex is being bartered for nails and buckets.”13 Paetini, given her high position in society, had the prerogative to choose from among those to whom she was attracted, which she did. She turned Porter down, “with a coldness and hauteur which would have suited a princess, and repelled every thing like familiarity with a sternness that astonished me,” going on to “follow the dictates of her own interest.”14 Though he suggested disdainfully that Paetini enjoyed a liaison with a different officer, others later claim (and quote Paetini as admitting) that, in fact, Porter was the officer with whom she was involved. He was himself an excellent artist and while in Taiohae made a drawing of an unidentified Nuku Hivan woman (Figure 8.2), who may or may not be Paetini. Because of the widespread and continued influence of the Dusky Maiden trope, and its possible relation to the portraits discussed later, it is salient to consider its main characteristics as seen in this drawing.15 Steeped in Enlightenment notions

Figure 8.2  “Woman of Nooaheevah,” from Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean by Capt. David Porter in the United States Frigate Essex in the years 1812, 1813, & 1814, vol. II (Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1815), p. 66. Photo: © The British Library Board (10492.h.11 page 66).

 Paetini and Vaekehu 109 of the “noble savage” living in unspoiled nature, Europeans became fascinated with the images of nubile, bare-breasted women published in the journals of late eighteenth-century explorers, beginning, notably, with that of Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s report of his 1768 experiences in Tahiti, which he called the New Cythera.16 As described by Lisa Taouma, the women are slim and fair, “a tanned imitation of the white woman, but by being a light shade of brown and dressed ‘native’ she is removed enough from Western society to be eroticised,”17 set apart as well by her tattoo, local clothing and sometimes cultural objects, and local setting. Located in an Enlightenment Eden, it was common stylistic practice to place Polynesians, both men and women, in Classical Greek and Roman poses, suggesting an “untouched world somehow suspended in time.”18 They usually incorporated marks of cultural difference, benign facial expression, and bared breast, to construct “the ubiquitous image of the sexually receptive and alluring Polynesian maiden.”19 The woman in Porter’s drawing reflects much of the above. She is dressed in a cloak or cape tied in a knot over one shoulder made of tapa (beaten bark cloth), with another piece wound around her head like a turban. She is adorned with a seed necklace and a type of ear ornament worn by both men and women that signified high rank. They were made from the teeth of the sperm whale and pig, and from human bone, often carved, as the woman’s is, in the form of small tiki, human figures that represented deified ancestors. The ear ornaments accumulated their own tapu, or sacredness, and were handed down from generation to generation. Her features, including a straight classical nose, are Caucasian, not Marquesan. Only some mottling suggests lightly darkened skin. No tattoo is seen, but she would have had some. The art of tattoo—te patu i te tiki, literally to draw tiki—was a sacred art in the Marquesas and in Polynesia elsewhere. It was a mark of high status, wealth, bravery, sensuality, and beauty. Her first tattoos would have been on her hands, and then her ankles and feet, but none of these parts of her body are shown. She is young and desirable, with her left breast exposed. Though it was completely normal and natural for Marquesan women to be bare-breasted, the way that Porter exposes the woman’s breast is typical of the Dusky Maiden trope. There is no exotic setting or props, and the focus is entirely on the woman. She is looking away, not engaging directly with the artist’s gaze. Her head tilts back while her body turns and leans toward the artist/viewer in a somewhat ambiguous posture of reticence and approach. Whoever she is, she presents a demeanor that is quiet, dignified, perhaps even aloof. Though not completely the seductive “Dusky Maiden,” she nevertheless shares many of the characteristics common at the time, as does at least one of the later portraits of Paetini. In 1838, when Paetini was about forty-two years old, the Astrolabe and Zelée, French ships under the command of Admiral Jules Dumont D’Urville, arrived in Taiohae harbor. Twenty-five years after her meeting with Porter, she was still an impressive woman, well known to visitors who came to pay their respects to her during their stay. Vincendon-Moulin, the hydrographer on the Dumont D’Urville expedition, wrote that she was “more beautiful and more stately than her companions.”20 Still highly respected

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for her political standing as chiefess, or haatepeiù, of three valleys in her own right (Taiohae, Hakaui, and Hapaa) and through her marriage, of the entire island,21 her role was nevertheless changing with the ascendancy of her own elder daughter, Apekua, who with her husband (and cousin), Temoana, would soon assume the position of high chiefess and chief of Nuku Hiva. Within two years Paetini would be described as “the dowager queen.”22 It should not be surprising that the artists on board the French scientific expedition would be interested in making a portrait of this beautiful and powerful matriarch. There were, in fact, three artists: the official artist, painter Ernest Auguste Goupil, and two draftsmen, Louis LeBreton (officially a surgeon’s aide) and Elie LeGuillou (a surgeon). All three drew portraits of Paetini, and later, LeBreton’s and LeGuillou’s were published as lithographs. In the works by all three artists, the pose is identical to the one seen in Goupil’s sketch (Figure 8.3). Paetini’s face is in profile, while her torso is in three-quarter view. She wears a voluminous garment around her body, with her breasts modestly covered, and another piece of cloth as a band around her head. Her lips are tattooed and extensive tattoo designs can be seen on her right arm from the fingertips to her shoulder, and on the left, to below the elbow. The outlines of her body and face are softly curved, her shoulders rounded, suggesting a plump, even voluptuous body. The lithograph after the drawing by LeGuillou is nearly identical to this image. However, the engraving by LeBreton, which is titled Princesse Patini (Figure 8.4), has some significant differences from the other versions. There is a faint patterning to the cloth, indicating that it is probably commercial fabric traded in, which would not be surprising in 1838. In comparison to Goupil’s drawing and LeGuillou’s lithograph, her face is thinner and her features are more sharply defined. She seems stiffer, less relaxed, her expression less open. The most striking difference is that both her breasts are bared. Finally, it is only in the LeBreton lithograph that she is holding a tāhii, a woven fan that was another Marquesan signifier of rank and prestige. As with Porter’s Nuku Hivan woman, there is no background indicating an exotic location in any of the portraits. In all three, the extensive tattoo designs serve to mark Paetini, literally, as “other,” but would have been something about which she was no doubt proud. Her quiet, composed demeanor suffuses all three portraits. The baring of the breasts and inclusion of the fan in LeBreton’s lithograph are intriguing elements. Were they the result of an additional sitting, apart from the others? Did Paetini exert some agency on her part, and decide she wanted to underscore her status by including the prestige of the fan in her portrait? Given common practice, Paetini might have been quite comfortable with her breasts bared, and proud to be displaying her fan. At the time the lithograph was made, did the artist or publisher decide to “spice” up the image with the sensuality and exoticism expected by Western viewers by baring the breasts and adding the fan? In any case, it is LeBreton’s lithograph that most invokes the Dusky Maiden mode, though it still captures, as do the others, a mature, dignified matriarch. Paetini lived another three years. At the time of her death around 1841, the islands were not yet French, the missionaries were having no success in converting

 Paetini and Vaekehu 111

Figure 8.3  Ernest Auguste Goupil, Quini [Queen] de Noukoohiva, 1838. Drawing. Louis-Joseph Bouge collection, Album 2, pl. 95, Musée de Beaux Arts, Chartres. Marquesans to Christianity, and customary beliefs and practices were strong. Change was happening, but slowly, except for the increasingly catastrophic decline in population due mainly to introduced diseases.23 When Vaekehu, her second daughter, in turn married Temoana around 1850, she was thrust into a very different political, cultural, and social situation.

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Figure 8.4  Louis LeBreton, La Princesse Patini [Paetini] (original drawing, 1838), from Jules Dumont D’Urville, Atlas pittoresque, Voyage au Pôle Sud et dans l’Océanie, sur les corvettes L’Astrolabe et La Zélée exécuté par ordre du Roi Pendant les Années 1837–1838–1839–1840 sous le commandement de M. Dumont-D’Urville (Paris, Gide et Cie., 1846), pl. 59. Photo: Courtesy Musée de Beaux Arts, Chartres.

 Paetini and Vaekehu 113

Vaekehu Vaekehu was the second of Paetini’s daughters: Apekua, the elder daughter, was born around 1818, and Vaekehu five years later around 1823. They grew up in a period when many of the “old ways” were still vital and the structure of “traditional” Marquesan life remained intact. Both, for example, were extensively tattooed on their legs, arms, and hands as their mother had been, and they often displayed them for visitors. As Vaekehu explained to Albert Davin, in 1886, “It was necessary that the tattooing of my hands and arms to my shoulders, of the feet, of the knees, of the mouth and the ears, reveal my noble origin.”24 Both sisters in turn became haatepeiù, high chiefess, of Nuku Hiva through their descent lines and their strategic marriages to the same man, their second cousin, Temoana. Apekua married him first. He separated from her around 1840, and during the decade that followed, engaged in two further marriage alliances.25 Around 1850, in her early thirties, Vaekehu became his fourth and final wife. By that time, the islands were French, and their titles had become “king and queen” of Nuku Hiva. We know little about Vaekehu before her marriage to Temoana. Like him, she had been married before, to a Hapaa chief, but both her husband and a child had died. According to her descendants, Vaekehu was required by custom to take her older sister’s place as Temoana’s wife and care for his two children, whom she adopted. With the same genealogy as her sister Apekua, she was ranked just slightly below her. Vaekehu’s union with Temoana, like those with all of his wives, was necessary to unite the island and ensure peace. In Marquesan fashion, she further solidified this peace by adopting children and grandchildren from other important families and from different valleys. Life with Temoana was very difficult for Vaekehu, as it had been for his previous wives. He had numerous disputes with the French colonial administration, causing the couple to be exiled to Tahiti briefly in 1852. On their return, they received support from the Catholic bishop of the Marquesas, René Dordillon, and on June 29, 1853, Vaekehu and Temoana were baptized as Elisabeth (Eritapeta) and Charles (Karoro), along with their families and many followers. This was the first major success the missionaries had in converting Marquesans. From this time on, Vaekehu and Temoana were faithful supporters of the Catholic Church. She forged a lasting relationship with Bishop Dordillon by, for example, adopting him as her grandson, providing him (and other missionaries for whom she did the same thing) with her personal protection.26 Temoana died on September 12, 1863, of pleurisy. At the same time, Nuku Hiva was experiencing a horrendous epidemic of smallpox in which over 1500 people on Nuku Hiva and nearby Ua Pou, perished within seven months. Vaekehu survived and began the final phase of her life, some thirty-eight years, as the “last queen” of Nuku Hiva. Now a devout Catholic and financially supported by the French administration, she took refuge in her new religion. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, most Marquesans had become Catholic, and the islands were a distant and mostly forgotten French outpost. Many customary practices had died out, or like the tattoo, were made illegal by the colonial government. Most of the old cultural objects were gone —gifted, sold, or stolen over the decades. Ritual and ceremonial sites were abandoned, with only a few stone or wooden tiki surviving. Life in the archipelago had become increasingly desolate as the population

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declined even more precipitously. Whole valleys, and very nearly whole islands, were abandoned; those who remained moved to villages on the larger islands. It is during this later period, after Temoana’s death, that several portraits of Vaekehu were made, in the form of both drawings and photographs. One of the first is a drawing (Figure 8.5) by Louis Marie-Julien Viaud, who wrote under the pseudonym, Pierre

Figure 8.5  Pierre Loti (Louis Marie-Julien Viaud), Reine Vaékéhu [Queen Vaekehu], January 1872. Drawing. Musées-municipaux Rochefort, inv. number 2006.5.3.

 Paetini and Vaekehu 115 Loti. He was a French naval officer who traveled to French Polynesia in the early 1870s, visiting Nuku Hiva in 1872. Loti sensed a palpable desolation on Nuku Hiva and in Vaekehu’s own life, describing a vapid, lethargic scene surrounding her and her companions, and trying to understand her thoughts: Seated the whole day in a half-doze, they remain motionless and silent as idols. This is the court of Nuku Hiva, Queen Vaekehu and her retainers . . . . The thoughts that contort the strange face of the Queen remain a mystery to all, and the secret of her eternal reveries is impenetrable. Is it sadness or stupor? Is she dreaming about something or nothing at all? Does she mourn for her independence, and the savagery which is disappearing, and her people who are degenerating and becoming estranged from her?27

She was then forty-nine years old. Though some Western observers, like Loti, saw her as a sad, lonely old woman, in fact, she was still held in high regard among the Marquesan people. According to the French administrator there at the time, Eyriaud des Vergnes, she was a respected, influential, and judicious political leader, usually supporting the French government of the day. In her role as highest-ranking person on the island, she presided at meetings of the chiefs, where, he said, if they saw “her in accord with the resident [French administrator], one can be sure that the measure will be adopted unanimously, without any contrary manifestation; if necessary, Vaekehu addresses to all the chiefs some words which put to an end all hesitation on their part.”28 Yet, despite this power, or perhaps because foreign visitors did not discern it, many who visited her did not consider her to be particularly intelligent and described her as naïve or simple. Always, such criticism is tempered with respect for her dignity. Eugène Caillot, for example, met Vaekehu in 1900 not long before her death and just after her photograph included in this chapter was taken (Figure 8.6), said that she was “less intelligent than Queen Pomare [of Tahiti], but on the other hand, she was better than her; she had above all more dignity.”29 Loti, in discussing his experience drawing her, indeed, recognized her selfpossession and inner strength, saying, “Vaekehu consented with perfect graciousness to pose for several sketches of her portrait. Never did a more poised model allow herself to be examined at such leisure. This deposed queen, with her great shock of coarse hair and her silent pride, still retains a certain grandeur.”30 He made numerous drawings of the tattoos on one hand and both feet, and of just her face. In this drawing, Vaekehu faces frontally, her eyes heavy lidded. Her thick hair falls freely. She is dressed very modestly in the kind of full-length, long-sleeved dress introduced throughout the Pacific by missionaries. She is the model of a dignified, proper, matronly Christian woman. At the same time, her cultural difference is signaled through several means. The background consists of dense tropical foliage. Like her mother thirty-four years before, she holds a fan, the tāhii, a symbol of her high rank. Carved on its handle, Loti tells us, were four “images of their god [tiki].”31 Her right arm rests on the head of a large wooden tiki, between whose hands is an incised cross. Finally, Vaekehu’s tattoos are

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Figure 8.6  Alfred G. Mayer, Vaekehu, Queen of the Marquesas, 1899. Photograph. American Museum of Natural History Library, Image #121424. drawn with delicate, careful lines on her lips, hands, and lower left arm. Her feelings and emotions are difficult to read as she looks directly at the artist/viewer. The second image of her is a photograph (Figure 8.6) taken twenty-six years later. By 1899, Vaekehu was quite familiar with the new medium. The first photos of her were made in 1870, two years before the Loti drawing, by the French photographer, Admiral

 Paetini and Vaekehu 117 Paul-Émile Miot, captain of the frigate, Astrée. Robert Louis Stevenson photographed her in 1888 and gave her prints as a gift just before he and his family left Taiohae on his yacht, the Casco.32 By the 1880s, Marquesans were posing for formal studio portraits, which became cherished family possessions. Vaekehu posed in 1894 for such a family photograph on the occasion of the joint weddings of two of her grandchildren. The 1899 portrait was made by Alfred G. Mayer, the official photographer on the United States Fish Commission Steamer Albatross’s 1899–1900 expedition to Japan and the South Pacific. It was taken when she was seventy-six years old, two years before her death. She sits in a Western-style chair in front of a large stone platform, or paepae. She is wearing a long modest dress very similar to the one she wore in 1872. Her white hair is tidy. Though she doesn’t hold anything in her hands, they rest prominently on her knees, the tattoos on her hands and lower arms on view. She looks away from the photographer, her head held high, her eyes closed, her expression again difficult to read: pain, sadness, resignation, resentment? It is interesting to consider the two portraits together. In both, a foreign locale is signaled: in the first by the tropical foliage featuring palm trees, in the second by the paepae in the background. Both her dresses are in the modest, missionary style. In the Loti drawing, specific cultural markers are present, including the wooden tiki, the fan, and Vaekehu’s tattoos. The fan, as in her mother’s portrait by LeBreton, reflects recognition of and pride in her high rank and status. The tiki and the way in which she relates to it are somewhat curious. After her conversion to Catholicism, she had had such statues knocked over and destroyed. Here, she casually rests her arm on its head. In Marquesan culture, the head was the most sacred part of the body, and it was forbidden for anyone to touch the head of the hakaìki or other high-ranking people. By leaning on the head, is she signaling that the tiki no longer has any power in this now Catholic society, especially in conjunction with the cross between its hands? Lisa Taouma suggests that the Dusky Maiden trope also “functions as a metaphor for the colonisation of the Pacific” wherein the woman becomes “an image of domestication, of the tamed ‘noble savage.’”33 Perhaps, there is an element of this notion in the inclusion of, and her relationship to, the tiki. In the photograph twenty-six years later, it is reasonable to think that the deliberate exposure of her hands and lower arms is a conscious gesture by Vaekehu and/or the photographer to display her tattoos, even if faded. These and the paepae behind her were, in this later period, among the few remaining vestiges of the old Marquesan culture still visible at the turn of the twentieth century. Houses, as in past times, were still being erected on them. Vaekehu, herself, had a traditional-style house that stood on the paepae named Pikivehine, which she inherited from her mother. The strongest presence of the Dusky Maiden trope seems to be evident in LeBreton’s engraving of Paetini, with the exposed breasts and addition of the fan. More subtly, it might be discerned in Loti’s portrait of Vaekehu, signifying her “otherness” through the setting and the presence of the tiki and the fan. However, it is also reasonable to believe that the women themselves had some role in the inclusion of the fans and, for Vaekehu, in the locations chosen for her portraits. Native American scholar Hulleah Tsinhahjinnie’s notion of “photographic sovereignty,” wherein the sitter employed

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strategies such as including cultural objects in photographs taken by non-indigenous photographers as a means of resistance, might be relevant here. Perhaps Vaekehu was signaling resistance, or more likely in her case, other things—resilience and survival, or possibly cultural loss?34 Certainly, as the “last queen” of Nuku Hiva, she was the living symbol of the changes brought about by history. In that role, one feels in her portraits the increasing weight of loss that she carries with her as she ages. More than a century after her death, the Marquesan population has rebounded and the culture is again strong and vibrant, the people fiercely proud of their history and heritage. They remember both Paetini, but especially Vaekehu, as strong women and important cultural heroes. The portraits of them confirm their dignity and their place in history. Pikivehine, the paepae they shared and on which their homes once stood, is proudly incorporated within a contemporary tohua, a public ceremonial place, named Temehea, which sits just below the small mausoleum where Vaekehu now rests, her memory invoked each time the Temehea is used today.

Notes 1 Webster’s II New Collegiate Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “Matriarch.” 2 See Melinda S. Allen, “Marquesan Colonisation Chronologies and Post-colonisation interaction: Implications for Hawaiian Origins and the ‘Marquesan Homeland’ Hypothesis,” Journal of Pacific Archaeology 5, no. 2 (2014), 1–17. 3 Several different Marquesan orthographies have been used over time. Direct quotes use the orthography of the author cited. The Marquesan words used in the text are those developed and approved by the Académie Marquisienne. 4 Greg Dening, ed., The Marquesan Journal of Edward Robarts: 1797–1824 (Honolulu: The University Press of Honolulu, 1974), 267, emphasis added. 5 Père Mathias Gracia, Lettres sur les îles Marquises ou Memoires pour servir à l'étude religieuse, moral, politique, et statistique des îles Marquises et de l'océanie orientale (Paris, 1843), 102. 6 The other being the Taipi Nui a Vaku, see Figure 1. 7 Dening, The Marquesan Journal, 148. 8 William Pascoe Crook, An Account of the Marquesas Islands, 1797–1799 (Tahiti: Haere Po, 2007), section 232 [p. 135]. 9 Gracia, Lettres sur les îles Marquises, 102; Max Radiguet, Les Derniers Sauvages aux îles Marquises, 1842-59 (Paris: Editions Phébus, 1929), 180. 10 Radiguet, Les Derniers Sauvages aux îles Marquises, 1842–59. 11 He also claimed Nuku Hiva for the United States, but this was never acted upon by the US Congress. 12 David Porter, Journal of a Cruise made to the Pacific Ocean, 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley & Halsted, 1822). Reprinted with introduction by R. D. Madison, edited and notes by R. D. Madison and Karen Hamon (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986), 306–7. 13 Andy Martin, “Willing Women: Samoa, Tahiti, and the Western Imagination,” Raritan 25, no. 4 (2016): 148. 14 Porter, Journal of a Cruise made to the Pacific Ocean, 307.

 Paetini and Vaekehu 119 15 See; Lisa Taouma, “Gauguin Is Dead . . . There Is No Paradise,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 25, no. 1 (2004): 35–46; A Marata Tamaira, “From Full Dusk to Full Tusk: Reimagining the ‘Dusky Maiden’ through the Visual Arts,” The Contemporary Pacific 22, no. 1 (2010): 1–35; Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1992); Heather Waldroup, “Traveling Representations: Noa Noa, Manao Tupapau, and Gauguin’s Legacy in the Pacific,” Journeys 11, no. 2 (2010): 1–29. 16 Louis Antoine de Bougainville, A Voyage Round the World, translated from the French by John Reinhold Forster (New York: DaCapo Press, 1967). 17 Taouma, “Gauguin Is Dead,” 37. 18 Ibid. 19 Tamaira, “From Full Dusk,” 1. 20 Clément Vincendon-Dumoulin and César Desgraz, Iles Marquises ou Nouka-Hiva (Paris: Arthur Bertrand, 1843), 45. 21 Ibid., 193. 22 Edward Belcher, Narrative of a Voyage Round the World . . . 1836–42 (Folkestone and London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1979 [1843]), 360. 23 The estimated population for the late eighteenth century is between 80,000 and 100,000. By the 1840s, it was about 20,000. When Vaekehu died in 1901, it was about 4,000. The lowest point came in 1926, when the population numbered 2,094. Today there are about 10,000 Marquesans in the archipelago, and another 18,000 living in the Society Islands. 24 Albert Davin, 50,000 miles dans l’océan Pacifique (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1886), 218. 25 I am grateful to Jacques Pelleau for sharing his recent research on the topic of Temoana and his wives. 26 Simeon Delmas, “Essai d’histoire de la mission des îles Marquises depuis les origins jusqu’en 1881,” Etrait des Annales des Sacrés-Coeurs, 1905–11 (Paris: Bureau des Annales des Sacrés-Coeurs, 1929), 97–8; Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (London: The Hogarth Press, Chatto and Windus Ltd., 1987), 78. 27 Pierre Loti, The Marriage of Loti, trans. Wright and Eleanor Frierson (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1976), 69. 28 P. E. Eyriaud des Vergnes, L’archipel des îles Marquises (Paris: Berger-Levrault et Cie, 1877), 19. 29 Eugene Caillot, Histoire de la Polynésie orientale (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1910), 379. 30 Loti, Marriage, 71; of course, she was not a deposed queen. She was still a highly regarded high chiefess. 31 Loti, Marriage, 68. 32 Margaret Stevenson, From Saranac to the Marquesas and Beyond (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 121. 33 Taouma, “Gauguin Is Dead,” 40. 34 Hulleah Tsinhahjinnie, “When Is a Photograph Worth a Thousand Words?” in Photography’s Other Histories, ed. Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (Durham: Duke University, 2003), 40–53.

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Figure 9.1 Lucia Moholy,  Portrait of Clara Zetkin, c 1930, gelatin silver print. Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG BildKunst, Bonn.

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Old Woman/New Vision Lucia Moholy’s Photographs of Clara Zetkin Vanessa Rocco

Known primarily for her Bauhaus architectural photography, Lucia Moholy’s portraits divide critics and historians. While most have aligned her portraits with the same “objective” principles she used in her product-based images, many of the portraits concurrently allow a great deal of humanity to emerge. This was particularly true of her extensive series of radical socialist politician Clara Zetkin (1857–1933) (Figure 9.1). A writer, editor, women’s rights activist, and champion of leftist causes since her youth, Zetkin was nearing the end of her days at her sitting with Moholy in c. 1930, a meeting arranged by Moholy’s then partner and Zetkin’s political ally, Theodor Neubauer.1 This chapter will demonstrate how Moholy’s use of stylistically innovative angles for her subject’s face and hands, as well as close-cropping—all characteristic of the New Vision photography she had developed with her husband, the Bauhaus Master László Moholy-Nagy2—succeeded in conveying Zetkin’s life of labor, her pensiveness, and her standing as a political and intellectual powerhouse. It will thus attempt to redefine the concept of idealization and heroicization in photographic portraiture away from one based on surface physical perfection: Zetkin, as an “old woman” is ideal for this exploration. It will also show that the visual innovations of the New Vision, which are still often analyzed through strictly formal means, can, indeed, increase the viewer’s empathic engagement with the subject.3 The portraits of Zetkin make this case more convincing than others in Moholy’s oeuvre. This is all the more powerful due to the political nature of this subject, and previously underexplored visual connections between Moholy’s work and the Worker Photography movement. There has been a good deal of breakthrough scholarship on Lucia Moholy in the last ten years, but not much about her post-1920s output. The Bauhaus still reigns supreme in Moholy scholarship. Rose-Carol Washton Long’s groundbreaking 2014 essay “Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus Photography and the Issue of the Hidden Jew” examines her photographs of everything from furniture to Bauhaus spouses in relation to her marginalization. Unlike most analyses, Long links Moholy’s initial acceptance of that marginalization to her repressed Judaism rather than simply her gender.4 Robin Schuldenfrei’s 2013 essay “Images in Exile: Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus Negatives and

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the Construction of the Bauhaus Legacy” focuses on her Bauhaus negatives and her crucial and underexamined role in the construction of the school’s identity.5 According to Ulrike Mueller, Moholy actually objected to the “overestimation of the Bauhaus through a mythologizing and ahistorical viewpoint,” which her photographs ironically worked to create.6 Matthew Witkovsky’s 2009 Museum of Modern Art catalog entry “Lucia Moholy: Photograph of George Muche” is perhaps the most relevant to my argument. He quotes Moholy as equating her own portraits of people to that of architectural photography: that is, that she “photographed people like houses.”7 Witkovsky points to exceptions to this deadpan approach in stronger psychological studies like that of the Bauhaus professor Muche in 1927. However, he attributes this to her looking back to certain nineteenth-century conventions of portraiture, such as that of Nadar, where personality was teased out through pose and/or costuming. I would argue that sticking to the New Vision methodology still allows for the complexity of the Muche portraits—as well as the Zetkin portraits—without needing to resort to nineteenthcentury conventions. But first, it is necessary to start with some background on Zetkin to posit why she was such a compelling subject for Lucia Moholy and why she may have brought out stronger-than-usual psychological features in Moholy’s portrait photography. She was born Clara Eissner in 1857 in a small town in Saxony, and trained as a teacher of modern languages; her life span coincided with convulsive political events across Europe and the peak of the debate about the different potential directions of socialism. She joined the Socialist Party in Germany in 1878, the same year she met the Russian Ossip Zetkin, the future father of her two sons—Konstantin and Maxim—whose name she would adopt despite not marrying him. In the early years of her political commitment she spoke at the founding of the Second International in 1889 on the “Woman Question,” a phrase in use in Victorian England as early as the 1830s addressing whether women had any rights. In her later years she witnessed the National Socialist ascension in Germany, as Hitler became chancellor just five months before her death in 1933, at age seventy-five. In between she gave landmark speeches espousing the common cause of women and the proletariat, as well as the rights of each group. Indeed, she was described in a 1901 article in the Manchester Guardian as being a “really remarkable” orator, along with her friend Rosa Luxemburg.8 Her key speeches included a speech at the party congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in Gotha in 1896 entitled “Only in Conjunction with the Proletarian Woman Will Socialism be Victorious,” where she explored the concurrence of the development of private property with the suppression of women’s rights. She gave a key speech about women’s suffrage in 1906 at a women’s conference in Mannheim, twelve years before women achieved the right to vote in Germany. She was also responsible for promoting an International Women’s Day beginning in 1911. Although different nations had celebrated Women’s Days before that, it was at a conference about women’s issues in Copenhagen—preceding a socialist conference—that the wheels were set in motion by Zetkin and others that led to the establishment of the March 8 milestone that is celebrated to this day.9

 Old Woman/New Vision 123 In 1919, Zetkin resigned from the Socialist Party and joined the Communist Party, which she represented in the German Parliament at the Reichstag from 1920 until her death in 1933. One of her last and most prescient acts in the Reichstag was to call for a united front against fascism when she opened the session in 1932 as elder stateswoman. She had to be helped to the speaker’s platform, where she opened her speech with the words: “Our most urgent task today is to form a united front of all working people in order to turn back fascism.”10 She singled out women (“still subjected to the chains of sexual slavery”), youth, and those who produce through “intellectual labor.” She also demonstrated her pacifism in her last published brochure, Imperialist Wars against the Working People, Working People against Imperialist Wars (1933). When she died in June of that year she was buried at the Kremlin Wall in Moscow, esteemed for her monumental contributions to spreading the socialist message and linking it to equality. It was well known that Zetkin had endured many difficulties in her life—not just that she traveled extensively and arduously for her political work, or that she lost Ossip Zetkin to illness when her children were still small, but in addition, that she had borne the violent death of many close friends including Spartacist (an offshoot German Communist Party) leader Karl Liebknecht and his fellow member Rosa Luxemburg in 1919. Both were killed after being arrested, and therefore presumed assassinated by the murderous and rogue former military First World War forces, the Freikorps, who were highly resistant to postwar democratic, anti-monarchist efforts. Luxemburg had been such a fan of Zetkin’s fortitude that she stated that the two of them were the “last remaining men” in the Social Democratic Party.11 In the last year of her life, 1933, these kinds of losses would again mount, as intellectuals began disappearing in the wake of the Nazi ascension. This would include the persecution of Theodor Neubauer, a Reichstag member, Communist Party deputy, and organizer of Nazi resistance who would introduce Zetkin to Lucia Moholy, and arrange the extensive sitting at an outdoor restaurant. Neubauer was an authentic profile in courage. After his arrest in the summer of 1933, the Nazis moved him from concentration camp to concentration camp for six years. Once he got out in 1939, he went right back to work setting up a resistance group in Thuringia. The group produced numerous pamphlets reminding Germans of Nazi atrocities to encourage a larger participation in the resistance movement. He was arrested again in 1943 and executed two years later. Through his involvement at the Reichstag in educational issues, Neubauer liaised with the Bauhaus and became Moholy’s lover after the dissolution of her marriage to László and their mutual departure from the school in 1928. Moholy was born in Prague, and met Moholy-Nagy in Berlin, where she married him in 1921. Her photographic practice had been intertwined with his artistic career since that point, but now she had begun asserting independence in her work, and in her new life with Neubauer. Indeed, the intimate connection between Zetkin and Neubauer may partly explain Moholy’s special feeling for Zetkin. But Zetkin’s age and accomplishments also merged with Moholy’s techniques beautifully. Such a life gave Zetkin a visage ripe for photography. These experiences line her face and hands like so many rings on a beautifully aged tree. Lucia Moholy records

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these etches and crevices with fascination from many different angles and in extreme close-up, without bowing to the conventions of female portraiture. This is where New Vision stylistics subvert the practice of portraiture as one dependent upon flattery and vanity. These shots of Zetkin are truly indicative of the New Vision. The retroactively named New Vision started as a photographic aesthetic based on experimental darkroom practices such as photograms, or “camera-less photography.” It expanded to embrace many approaches, although it was most known for unexpected and jarring angles applied to outdoor subjects for the purpose of subverting and reevaluating entrenched modes of seeing. Its critics complained of it being gimmicky and onenote,12 but if one takes the comprehensive New Vision exhibition (Film und Foto, Stuttgart, 1929) as its defining moment, that exhibition included movements ranging from German Bauhaus photography to Surrealism to Worker Photography: the point was, to see—photographically—the modern world in new and jarring ways. Lucia and her husband László developed the core principles of the New Vision starting in the summer of 1922. He has, of course, received most of the credit for the New Vision, but she had all the initial darkroom skills, as well as the German writing skills to codify the ideas in articles and the Bauhaus book series which Moholy-Nagy helped organize with Bauhaus Director and architect, Walter Gropius. A key text from the time now attributed to both of them was “Production/ Reproduction” published in De Stijl, 1922, where the reproductive approach to photography (i.e., “repetition of relations that already exist”) was downgraded in favor of a productive one (or a more aggressive practice “that aids human construction”).13 These ideas of the “productive” went on to catch fire at the Bauhaus, where oblique angular photographs became the norm. Students ran around campus with their portable Leicas, photographing each other at work and frolicking at play on the grounds and on the Bauhaus balconies from viewpoints above and below. But one of the original mistakes in the literature from the 1930s which stretched into the 1990s was placing all the emphasis on form: the experimental angles and viewpoints, and not what those forms would supposedly lead to—knowledge and social awareness. As stated in Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus book Painting, Photography, Film (1925/27) about the photographer: “The technician has his machine at hand: satisfaction of the needs of the moment. But basically much more: he is the pioneer of the new social stratification, he paves the way for the future.”14 This set of interests is clearly about much more than form—it is borderline political utopianism (with the unfortunate codicil that the photographer is posited as a “he.”) In other words, the New Vision is about changing the way viewers see things—but a question was expected to follow: to what end? In the case at hand, it was to open a new perspective on things of consequence, such as Zetkin. Clara Zetkin as a subject brought out the best in Moholy’s abilities to interpret material in a New Vision manner, and the situation also brought out the rarer elements of empathy in Moholy’s photography. Moholy forces the viewer to focus on that face through unexpected angles, and think about what this woman is doing: she is thinking, pondering, debating with her peers such as Neubauer. And although debate with Neubauer may be preaching to the choir, so to speak, it works as a metaphor as to how she had spent her life convincing others

 Old Woman/New Vision 125 of her very challenging political positions. In other photographs from the sitting she is squinting directly into the light, and in another she seems to be daydreaming. The strongest set of images from the sitting are closely cropped profiles, one from above, and a close-up of her hands (Figures 9.2 and 9.3). In her sittings, Moholy often took one shot with her subject’s eyes closed, an unsurprising nod to pensiveness given that her sitters tended to be artists and intellectuals. The image is the one most indicative of her New Vision style, where the viewer might be caught off-guard by the unexpected twist on the three-quarter view. From this elevated stance, it offers a completely different view of the face than one normally has access to and thus unusual details come to the fore: the wrinkled forehead from Moholy’s chosen angle seems almost three-dimensional, as if rendered with impasto paint, and the whiteness of most of her hair is highlighted by the contrast with the unruly bun that still appears to be black. The photograph of the hand study shows the nonchalance of the hair dramatically: this is not a woman who overly prioritizes her appearance. Her bulky and wrinkled clothes are visible in many shots, in clashing patterns, almost to the point of humor, but clearly worn for comfort. Then the hands underscore why this is so: because she is and has been preoccupied with other labors; they are clenched, wrinkled, and appear hard-worked. This close-up of the hands resembles Worker Photography in many ways, a contemporaneous genre supported by the Communist Party that emphasized working-class subjects, the

Figure 9.2  Lucia Moholy,  Portrait of Clara Zetkin, c. 1930, gelatin silver print. BauhausArchiv, Berlin. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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Figure 9.3  Lucia Moholy, Portrait of Clara Zetkin, c. 1930, gelatin silver print. BauhausArchiv, Berlin. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. tools of their trade, and the facts of their work.15 First appearing in the USSR in the mid-1920s, Willi Münzenberg, backed by Comintern, expanded the movement into interwar Germany in a highly programmatic way. The movement had programs that included distribution of cameras to the working class, lessons, and magazine outlets such as AIZ—the primary publisher of the master John Heartfield’s work—and later Der Arbeiter-Fotograf.16 Fertile ground for Worker Photo offshoots also sprang up in Mexico, the United States, and other European outlets. As mentioned earlier, this was a body of photography that was admired enough by New Vision pioneers such as Moholy-Nagy that it was included in New Vision-instigated exhibitions like Film und Foto, including an entire room for Heartfield. And Lucia Moholy certainly would have been well aware of the movement’s tropes and iconography. Some of the most recognizable Worker Photography is comprised of a series of laborers’ hands undertaken by Tina Modotti in Mexico. Worker’s Hands (Figure 9.4) is a standout. Calloused and dusty hands grasp a shovel, as if physical labor ceased just moments before. As with Zetkin’s hands, Modotti’s worker is close-cropped to the extreme, with nothing visible other than hands, the top of the shovel, and dirtcovered sleeves. The worker’s shirt forms the background, with the face unseen. The hands therefore become monumental, and personality characteristics are transferred to them: determination, fortitude, ready for action. The other tour de force from Modotti’s hand studies is the Hands of a Marionette Player (1929), in which the politicization of her subjects is more overt—the tools of political work more

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Figure 9.4  Tina Modotti, Worker’s Hands, 1927, gelatin silver print. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Sophie M. Friedman Fund, (1985.813). Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. emphasized. This is one of the Mexican puppeteers who would travel the countryside, giving puppet shows with leftist political subject matter to rural folk. With the veins popping out, and the highly effective use of shadowing, this study works as a striking pendent to Zetkin’s hands. In fact, each Modotti overlaps with Moholy in different ways. The close-cropping of Zetkin’s hands monumentalizes them, as does Modotti’s Worker’s Hands, in more of a comparison of form. And the folded hands, gnarled knuckles and use of shadow emphasize the hands as instruments of work, in a way similar to the Marionette. Zetkin is an intellectual, a writer. Her hands are folded in a manner similar to a student at a desk, or a teacher during a debate. They are the vessels of her work, no less than the shovel in Worker’s Hands, A photograph from the same year as Marionette, called Hands Washing (c. 1927), similarly close-crops the hands so that the viewer is forced to focus on the work, and the vessels of work—in this case, a washcloth. In many ways, Modotti’s story creates a pendant to Moholy’s. She developed as a photographer—initially—in conjunction with a famous man. In Modotti’s case, that was Edward Weston. She and Weston settled together in Mexico. But once he left to return to the States in 1926, her work flourished in a new and thrillingly political direction as she increased her commitment to Communism.17 Weston-influenced masterpieces included abstracted images of cactuses, calla lilies, and staircases from 1924 to 1926. From 1926 on, she completed not only the three Hands compositions

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discussed earlier, but also stunning integrations of compositional form and overt politics—or as the Museum of Modern Art has phrased it, a “blend of formal rigor with social awareness”18—including Workers Parade (1926), Bandolier, Corn and Guitar (1927), and Bandoliers, Corn, and Sickle (1927).19 Although early scholarship tended to focus on what was considered purer modernism, like that of her lover Weston, attention to the political has increased in analysis of Modotti’s work. Lucia Moholy scholarship, in contrast, still struggles to assert more substantive, political analyses of her work that is not dependent upon her husband’s brand of modernism.20 A case in point is that her most famous photographs are of buildings and lamps. Lucia’s photography at the Bauhaus harnessed the New Vision oblique viewpoint to a series of the famous Gropius Bauhaus buildings. She also undertook more sober layouts of mass-produced products like Marianne Brandt’s lamps. Many of her works were so sober, in fact, that even her biographer Rolf Sachsse has implied that they often lack artistry. Indeed, one could apply the term “objectivity” to much of Moholy’s Bauhaus–based portrait photography. In an example, a juxtaposition of Anni Albers with a photograph of one of Brandt’s lamps, one can see that the deadpan approach and plain background make them both read, in their own ways, as product photography. But other portraits prove that this was the genre where she was most experimental, and Sachsse also acknowledges this: “while architectural and object photography decline to the point of denial of their own creative means, it is clear from the portraits how far Lucia Moholy stressed the extension of reproduction toward productive design.”21 In other words, portrait photography is where Moholy truly thrived. The seventeen portraits of Zetkin, in fact, were among the most complete, multiviewed, and therefore most engaging of any in Moholy’s oeuvre. And, like the angled views of the Bauhaus buildings, they make obvious use of Moholy’s skills as an experimental photographer. With younger subjects of Moholy’s like those previously mentioned, such close-ups and angles seem preordained to flatter taut and smooth skin. In Zektin’s case, with her mismatched garb and unkempt hair, any pretense of flattery is cast aside and the subject must be confronted for other qualities: one is forced to contemplate questions about those face lines (where did they come from?), to contemplate those rough hands (how hard have they worked?), and wonder what words of wisdom are coming out of those parted lips, poised to speak as they are in Figure 9.1. Standard portrait “visual cues” of idealization are jettisoned, but one is given no outs, nothing to look at other than the figure, except two where Neubauer appears with her (Figure 9.5). Thus the viewer must confront Zetkin. One must analyze her. One must celebrate her; and, as she is being photographed over and over in one of her most extensive portrait sittings, Lucia Moholy has presented her as someone who must be worthy of continued gaze. Further, because of the close-cropped New Vision approach to portraiture, there is no room for distraction. Certainly, accomplished older women had been previously photographed in Moholy’s era. A case in point would be Hugo Erfurth’s 1917 portrait of the groundbreaking German expressionist

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Figure 9.5  Lucia Moholy,  Portrait of Clara Zetkin with Theodor Neubauer, c. 1930, gelatin silver print. Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Kathe Kollwitz. However, Erfurth was a Pictorialist, a movement that based itself on gauzy printmaking practices for the purpose of idealization. Yes, Kollwitz’s hair is gray, but her skin has been smoothed out and perfected in the darkroom, removing the viewers from the raw engagement experienced in relation to Zetkin. This is a loss to the viewer, as Kollwitz had a life with many struggles, like Zetkin, having lost her son Peter in the First World War.22 It is proposed in the catalogue Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model that Lucia’s 1930 SelfPortrait was the only instance in which she allowed a psychological characterization of a person portrayed.23 But in another recent essay in the 2009 book Bauhaus Women, an alternative history is proposed. Ulrike Mueller and Sandra Kemker remark upon how Moholy’s “dispassion” in her photography of objects was transferred to her photographs of people: that is, until after 1925 when she began to use a Leica—before that she used an 8 × 10 large-format camera.24 She felt freer in portraits which were “not for Bauhaus documentation” and therefore the diagonals and worm’s-eye views came across as more sensitive psychological studies. In other words, Mueller proposes that the more radically New Vision-esque the portraits, the more psychologically penetrating they are, not less. The sensitivity of Zetkin’s portrayal of the same year bears this theory out, although the achievement of the sitting cannot be limited to the diagonals. It is imperative to

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keep the inspiration of radical politics at the front of the mind. Too often in the history of women’s art, and in this case, photography, has the possibility of political motivation been dismissed. This is a compelling factor in bringing Modotti into this conversation, making Moholy–Modotti more of an engaging parallel than has been explored in the past. In a recent review of the reissue of Modotti’s biography, New York Times critic Rena Silverman states at the start that Modtti’s art and life had “little to do with Edward Weston. Yet her brief but poignant apprenticeship and affair with him resulted in much literature about Ms. Modotti referring to Mr. Weston within the first paragraph.”25 This is uncannily familiar to the treatment of Lucia Moholy, wherein László Moholy-Nagy is routinely introduced in the first paragraph, even in the three most recent pieces of scholarship mentioned earlier.26 Modotti then went deep with her political subject matter once Weston returned to Los Angeles. “A still life was not just a still life; now there were political implications.”27 There is little doubt that this same equation should be applied to Moholy. With the portraits of Clara Zetkin, a portrait is not just a portrait. Now there are political implications. These should not be in doubt once one learns that Lucia Moholy spent years trying to help her lover Neubauer escape the Nazis who were constantly imprisoning him, specifically so that he could continue his work undermining them.28 Yet, this chapter of her life is rarely even referenced, in favor of discussing buildings and lamps. Historical women photographers and activists must be given the chance in historiography to actually be political beings, especially in the current times. Again, to Silverman, “Modotti’s story is essentially modern, and continues to be relevant in our times with the growing interest in activism, especially among young women and the increased fascination with photography and photographers.”29 How essential, then, to transfer this equation to a fascination by young women like Lucia Moholy with the old women like Zetkin who experienced life on the front lines—and in the 1930s, one of the most politically fraught decades in modern history. Lucia Moholy’s portraits of Clara Zetkin undeniably embrace the spirit of New Vision photography. Moholy adheres to the dynamic angles, unexpected viewpoints, and close-cropping that were the hallmarks of the movement. Perhaps more importantly, the Zetkin photographs fully engage in the less discussed but equally important task that the New Vision set out for itself: to confront subject matter of contemporary urgency and promote social awareness. Zetkin’s history as a tested Communist warrior embodies those themes just as strongly as any industrial structure, with the added benefit of her compelling persona. That history further provides an undeniability of the political in Moholy’s subject matter that is rarely attributed to her, and aligns her, if only in this one instance, with the assertive political subject matter of one of the “sister” movements to the New Vision, Worker Photography. Lucia Moholy’s merging of the diagonals and close-ups with such a surprisingly unvarnished and aged figure as Clara Zetkin makes one rethink the entire practice of portraiture in a manner that departs from surface aesthetics. And seeing—and therefore thinking—in new ways, particularly radical new ways, is at the very crux of the New Vision.

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Notes 1 Note on the issue of dating the Zetkin photographs: her definitive biographer Rolf Sachsse dated them to 1929. However, that was a 1985 biography and the BauhausArchiv in Berlin has Moholy’s writing changing them from 1931/32 to 1930. Thus the “circa 1930” date seems most accurate and is also used by Ulrike Mueller in one of the few recent references to these photographs: Ulrike Mueller, Bauhaus Women: Art, Handicraft, Design (Paris: Flammirion, 2009), 148. 2 Throughout this chapter, Lucia will be referred to as “Moholy” and her husband as “Moholy-Nagy.” 3 Although Eleanor Hight’s 1995 book Picturing Modernism: Moholy-Nagy and Photography in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) did much to dismantle the strictly formalist argument of the New Vision, seventy years of that angle inevitably leads to hard-to-shake scholastic entrenchment. Hight posited that Moholy-Nagy’s subject matter as confronting the industrial world and contemporary urban life was unnecessarily shortchanged in the rush to analyze his and others—including Lucia Moholy’s—photographs as purely formal exercises. 4 Rose-Carol Washton Long, “Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus Photography and the Issue of the Hidden Jew,” Women’s Art Journal 35 (Fall/Winter 2014): 37–46. 5 Robin Schuldenfrei, “Images in Exile: Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus Negatives and the Construction of the Bauhaus Legacy,” History of Photography 37, no. 2 (May 2013): 182–203. Meghan Forbes has also written recently about the loss of her negatives in “What I Could Lose: the Fate of Lucia Moholy,” Michigan Quarterly Review (Winter 2016), 55: 1. 6 Mueller, Bauhaus Women, 143. 7 Matthew S. Witkovsky, “Lucia Moholy Photography of Georg Muche, 1927,” in Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity, ed. Leah Dickerman and Barry Bergdoll (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 236, citing Lucia Moholy in 1971. 8 This article was otherwise a fairly patronizing and patriarchal-sounding takedown of a contemporaneous socialist conference. See reference to the article in Lauren Niland, “International Women’s Day: Who was Clara Zetkin?” The Guardian, March 8, 2012, https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/th​eguar​dian/​from-​the-a​rchiv​e-blo​g/201​2/mar​ /08/c​lara-​zetki​n-int​ernat​ional​-wome​ns-da​y 9 See the United Nations official history of Women’s Day, https​://ww​w.un.​org/e​vents​/ wome​n/iwd​/2008​/hist​ory.s​html 10 The speech is excerpted in Clara Zetkin Fighting Fascism: How to Fight and How to Win, ed. Mike Taber and John Riddell (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), n.p. 11 Rosa Luxemberg, The Russian Revolution: Leninism or Marxism? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), 7. 12 This was particularly true of Moholy-Nagy’s nemesis, Albert Renger-Patzsch, in his essay “Postscript to Photo-Inflation: Boom Times,” in Photography in the Modern Era, ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989), 140–1. 13 Rolf Sachsse, “Lucia Moholy,” in Jeanine Fiedler, Photography at the Bauhaus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 26.

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14 Vanessa Rocco, Expanding Vision: László Moholy-Nagy’s Experiments of the 1920s (New York: International Center of Photography, 2004), 5. 15 For groundbreaking scholarship on this movement, as well as original documents, see Jorge Ribalta and E. Witschey, eds., The Worker Photography Movement (1926–1939): Essays and Documents   (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, 2011). 16 In her description of the photography contest that truly launched the movement and AIZ into prominence, Erika Wolf presents one of the most compelling descriptions of its mission: “. . . a contest calling upon readers to contribute photographs depicting the political, economic, and social life of workers. Noting the absence of workers in the press photographs available from commercial bourgeois photograph agencies, AIZ called upon readers to assist the magazine in the political task of . . . self-representation.” Erika Wolf, “Worker Photography Movement,” Grove Art Online, February 11, 2013, https​://do​i-org​.ezpr​oxy.s​nhu.e​du/10​.1093​/gao/​97818​84446​054.a​ rticl​e.T22​29530​. 17 New scholarship also explores her involvement with the Mexican movement “Estridentista,” which likely contributed to her awakening. As Lynda Klich has explored, the artists who associated with this movement faced a Mexico in the 1920s which was a “highly politicized, constantly changing environment in which a revered past confronted modernization on a daily basis . . . represented a true commitment and receptiveness to pressing cultural and social reform.” Klich, “Mexico Estridentista,” in Paint the Revolution! Mexican Modernism, 1910–1950, ed. Matthew Affron, Mark A. Castro, Dafne Cruz Porchini, and Renato Gonzalez Mello (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2017), 301. 18 Kelly Sidley, “Tina Modotti,” Museum of Modern Art website, 2016. 19 All three are juxtaposed next to each other in the new publication mentioned above: Paint the Revolution! 116–17. 20 There is finally a palpable shift in this avoidance of politics in discussions of Lucia Moholy’s oeuvre. The publications I cited on the opening page have been working to restore Moholy’s individual accomplishments, apart from Moholy-Nagy, in support of the Bauhaus. However, a forthcoming publication includes a chapter on Lucia’s engagement in “utopian-communist” ideas that predate her relationship with Moholy-Nagy, and that she was the linchpin to summers they both spent at two different radical women’s communes. That is, the chapter reveals many of Moholy-Nagy’s ideas as “firmly rooted both in his wife’s work and ideas and in anti-institutional feminist circles.” Sandra Neugärtner, “Utopias of a New Society: Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, and the Loheland and Schwarzerden Women’s Communes,” in Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Most Influential Institution, ed. Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 73–100. 21 Sachsse, “Lucia Moholy,” 26. 22 See Kollwitz portraits in Bodo von Dewitz, Hugo Erfurth (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 1992). 23 Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 290. 24 There are issues in surmising this, however. Most of the famous Bauhaus documentation photographs were taken after 1925. So, does that mean she also used a Leica for those, but because they were for the Bauhaus they weren’t as

 Old Woman/New Vision 133 psychologically penetrating, or that she continued using a large-format camera, but only for Bauhaus documentation? Mueller overlooks this point. Mueller, Bauhaus Women, 146. 25 Rena Silverman, “Tina Modotti, Behind the Camera and Out of Weston’s Shadow,” New York Times (August 24, 2017): n.p. 26 Although admittedly the present chapter only managed to delay that mention until the second paragraph. 27 Silverman, “Tina Modotti, Behind the Camera and Out of Weston’s Shadow.” 28 Mueller, Bauhaus Women, 147. 29 Silverman, “Tina Modotti, Behind the Camera and Out of Weston’s Shadow.”

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Figure 10.1  Louise Nevelson and Moon Garden, New York, 1958. Photo by Walter Sanders / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images (See Plate 11).

10

Sculptor, Hostess, Witch Louise Nevelson’s Boxes Johana Ruth Epstein

American sculptor Louise Nevelson was the first female sculptor of her generation who managed to achieve, during her lifetime, the status of art superstar. She did not even begin to achieve this status until she was in her late fifties. This chapter takes a close look at the strategy she adopted late in life for becoming visible, and why that strategy is as important as the evolution of her impressive oeuvre, charted elsewhere. Publicity photos of Nevelson reveal the careful and deliberate construction of a biographical legend tailored to the needs of its time. Allow me to take you back to 1979. In a publicity shot, the eighty-year-old Nevelson poses under the jackknife arch of one of her steel sculptures. Her gaze, amplified by several pairs of false eyelashes, is fixed upon the camera. From the sleeves of a voluminous fur coat, her two black-gloved hands emerge, palm-up, like those of a conjurer. It is as if her gesture recreates the environment before our very eyes. At this point in her career, the artist fully embraced the at once magnetic and malignant persona of sorceress. Posing for this photograph, Nevelson could look back on a forty-year career, the first three decades of which had been relatively thankless. Long after the artist had been discovered, a curator visited Nevelson’s studio to look at her recent works, and apologized for arriving at her studio ten minutes late “What’s ten minutes?” the artist supposedly barked, “Where were you ten years ago!”1 If the image given were half a double portrait, sculpture’s “grand dame” might be juxtaposed with Constantin Brancusi, “the father of modern sculpture” leaning nonchalantly against the doorway to his studio in a publicity shot for an interview with Arts Magazine in 1958. Though published over twenty years earlier, the photograph and interview would have been familiar to Nevelson, since a brief review of her own sculptures appeared in the same magazine. One wonders how Nevelson, then in her late fifties and still struggling to make a name for herself, interpreted Brancusi’s advice to fellow artists: An artist generally has the attitude that he must stop everything and get to work, that work itself is something special, sacred, apart from life. On the contrary,

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a man should work as he breathes, as he sweeps the floor, easily and naturally, without thinking too much about it. In fact, I can think of no better way of getting to work than drifting into it after sweeping the floor and cleaning up. An artist should always do his own chores.

Brancusi’s breezy statement deftly excludes women artists, for whom making art with the ease of breathing was cruelly unrealistic. Cleaning and sweeping were the primary responsibilities of the 1950s housewife. Therefore the very act of becoming a serious professional artist required a radical departure from a woman’s accepted role. Postwar American circles perceived women artists as dabblers, amateurs, or muses, accessories to male vitality and creative power. At the beginning of Nevelson’s career, art history had begun to acknowledge a handful of distinguished women painters. Sculpture, on the other hand, was still considered a man’s territory. All major innovators had been men. Women sculptors of this period faced a compound prejudice: it was assumed that they could not meet the physical demands of the medium in any scale worthy of critical attention; and—perhaps more importantly—virility was considered essential to the act of imposing great form on solid matter.2 Any woman with the temerity to create sculpture rather than inspire it simply couldn’t win. If she did exactly as male sculptors did, and did it just as well, she was merely a competent follower. If she tried something that was a departure from sculptural tradition, it was likely to be ascribed to a feminine deficiency in aptitude or discipline. Given that Nevelson was one of the few celebrated female sculptors of her generation, we need to ask: What was her survival strategy and what made it work? Crucial elements of biography can bring Nevelson’s work into dialogue with the widespread social experience of women of her class and generation, although the artist herself might have been the last to admit it. A Russian Jew, Nevelson was born in Kiev and immigrated with her family as a toddler to Rockland, Maine, where her father owned a lumberyard. Nevelson’s accounts of her childhood recall a romantic, self-imposed solitude, implying that she was a loner destined for greatness. “I knew I was a creative person from the first minute I opened my eyes. And I knew I was coming to New York when I was a baby. What was I going to do anywhere but New York? Consequently, as a little girl, I never made strong connections in Rockland, because I was leaving.”3 In fact, she probably had little choice in the matter of her isolation, not least because the small New England community was unaccustomed to newcomers, perhaps especially Jewish ones. By her own admission, to get out of Rockland she married a wealthy New Yorker and undertook the accepted occupations for women of her age and station: housewife, mother, and society matron. These things succeeded only in making her more miserable. It was fairly common for women in bourgeois social circles to dabble in the arts and so she did, taking singing, dancing, and acting lessons. When she took up studio art, however, she left her marriage and her young son in order to study in Munich with Hans Hoffman, the German-born abstract expressionist who taught a number of respected women artists, including Lee Krasner, and rewarded female students for “painting like men.”4

 Sculptor, Hostess, Witch 137 Nevelson’s first reviews are almost all qualified by variants of this standard double-edged praise. In 1943 Maude Riley wrote that “you might even insist Nevelson is a man when you see her ‘Portraits in Paint,’ showing this month” in Art Digest.5 A few sentences later Riley describes a painting as “sensitive and lovely,” as if to redeem Nevelson’s femininity. But at the moment when action painting was emerging—with its huge, aggressive splatters—sensitive and lovely were not terms applied to great art. In another early article flippantly titled “Irrepressible Nevelson,” Riley characterized the artist as a practical jokester, “full of pranks, running at large around 57th Street, liable to turn up anywhere in any guise and always she offers something fresh, very sincere, often humorous, and always basically good,”6 all phrases that credit the artist more with stubborn persistence than talent or discipline. In 1943, when Nevelson’s work was selected for a group show of Surrealists that included an unusually large number of women artists, Henry McBride reasoned that when it came to surrealism, women’s natural proclivities for hysteria and neuroses gave them the edge. “There are, we all know, plenty of men among the New York neurotics, but we also know that there are still more women among them. Hysterics insure a show. They may be laughed at, they may be pitied, but always they arouse attention.”7 Sexist sentiments pervade reviews of Nevelson’s early work, and are indicative of the barrier to acceptance she and other women artists faced daily. Her earliest sculptures are modestly sized, Cubistinspired figures in polychrome plaster, terra cotta, or wood. They are whimsical and occasionally even playful, inviting comparison with Henry Moore or Alexander Calder, but the hilarity McBride perceived in her bulky stylized nudes and solitary circus performers seems less obvious today. Whatever else may be said of Nevelson, she was serious about making art. She sacrificed wealth, marriage, motherhood, and often her own physical and mental health to pursue her creative goals. Her trajectory as an artist is impossible to understand without an appreciation for the position of her career in a pre-feminist art world, well before the 1970s feminist inquiry into art, and before a critical mass of high-profile women in the arts began jostling to be taken seriously. From the 1930s through to the mid-1950s she received scant attention from critics. She was not cultured in academic terms, and had the sense to know that for her this was not a viable point of entry into New York’s finely tuned critical circles. More importantly, networking venues like New York’s Cedar Tavern and The Club were effectively off-limits for women, admitting them only as occasional and usually decorative guests. In the words of Barnett Newman to Lee Krasner, “We don’t need dames.”8 In a career move that was nothing short of brilliant, for nearly a decade, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, Nevelson offered her home as a meeting place for the Four O’Clock Forum, a discussion group for New York artists who debated issues relating to abstract expressionism, and reduced her activity at galleries. Inside the Four O’Clock Forum, Nevelson ruled the roost, moderating a discussion in 1954, titled “Changing Concepts of Space in Art Today” (José de Rivera, Worden Day, and John Ferren were panelists), and later that year a symposium, “The Synthesis of Idea and

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Technique in Art Today,” in which Willem de Kooning was a panelist, and engaged in a bitter debate with Barnett Newman over the nature of reality. Elaine de Kooning claimed her husband had never expressed himself so brilliantly as in the evocative atmosphere of Nevelson’s home. In her role as hostess, Nevelson gained the recognition of the influential men who congregated at her home, and transformed her home into an environment that augmented the power of their ideas. Throughout this period, she continued to work steadily. Wood became her primary medium, and she developed the modular box constructions that characterize her mature style. A 1954 photograph from this era depicts Nevelson, dressed in ordinary clothes, standing several paces behind an austere sculptural column bristling with wood shards, as if contemplating her next move. The sculptor, then in her mid-fifties, had experienced a major breakthrough in her work. The artist herself, however, was still very much a garden-variety dame. The first illustration of the malignant, yet mesmerizing, persona that would sustain her critical success appears in a kitschy, full-page photograph in Life magazine announcing her first solo show at the Grand Central Moderns Gallery in 1955. Tinted slime green, the photo displays the 57-year-old artist crouching behind one of her sculptures and above a caption that reads “Weird Woodwork of the Lunar World.” The caption elaborates: Like a sorceress in her den, sculptor Louise Nevelson is peering out from an eerie world of her own making. Without resorting to eyes of newts or toes of frogs, she has conjured up a spectral sculptured landscape which she calls The Moon Garden. Recently the garden was installed in New York’s Grand Central Moderns Gallery where it cast a spell upon the current art season.

She originally intended to display the work without the use of light, leaving the audience essentially in the dark. The Grand Central Moderns Gallery found this a bit too daring and persuaded her to install a few midnight-blue bulbs to guide visitors through the installation.9 A departure from high art, but nonetheless relevant, is the photograph’s unmistakable reference to the popular 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. The sculptor has clearly modeled herself after the Wicked Witch of the West. None of Nevelson’s biographers has reproduced this photograph, and few have mentioned it. It doesn’t paint her in a good light: it exposes her avid commercial ambition and mocks the modernist ideal of the true artist as being above mass-marketing. It also affirms one of the most damaging stereotypes of older women: witch. This particular issue of Life, featuring South Pacific’s scantily clad actresses washing themselves in tropical rain elsewhere in the issue, held fierce competition for the witch. A letter of congratulations from Robert Rosenblum shortly afterward read: “Although I don’t really think you’re a witch, I was delighted to see you get almost as much attention as South Pacific.”10 Rosenblum’s remark acknowledges the logic behind her sales pitch. How could an aging female artist expect to capture the interest of a mainstream audience without an

 Sculptor, Hostess, Witch 139 eye-catching gimmick? This was, after all, Life magazine! No one would be interested in Nevelson dressed in everyday clothes, but a witch—now that was something. Were audience responses to Nevelson’s work conditioned by a desire, cultivated by critics, to know more about the personal eccentricities of a sorceress? Surely part of what drew the public to her exhibitions was a fascination with the idea that, by viewing her sculpture, one was entering the realm of black magic. The appearance of this image in Life magazine marked a critical turning point in the artist’s career. Depending on how the individual critic felt about Nevelson, the designation of witchcraft could be good or bad, but after 1958 it remained an unflagging component of her mystique. In 1960, Thomas B. Hess described her work in this way: “[T]here is a sense that a whole environment has succumbed to an artist’s iron will and velvet eyes.”11 Hubert Crehan, Managing Editor of Art Digest (Nevelson’s ex-lover and the author of the earliest critical reviews of her work, which appear in the magazine) routinely dismissed her black boxes as coffins and remarked offhandedly in a letter to her biographer in 1984, “I suspect that her psyche is a witches’ brew of fear and trembling about death.”12 Even in her obituary, Paul Richard wrote, “Louise Nevelson thrived on shadows. The sculptor—who died Sunday evening in Manhattan—preferred to work, as witches do, in the dream-time before dawn.”13 Whether in praise or in denigration, critics implied that Nevelson’s power over solid material was psychic will, as opposed to physical brawn, and that the chambers she built were enchanted spaces meant to be inhabited by the woman herself. Nevelson’s cultivation of a personal reputation that conformed to a stereotype of aging female power was counterbalanced by her work, which resisted feminine description. Her response to the early critical feminization of her work was to create big, black sculptures. From the mid-1950s onward, black remained Nevelson’s trademark. On the one hand, the choice of black seems impersonal enough: it was fashionable for the period, and abstract expressionists were especially fond of it (one thinks of Ad Reinhart, Barnett Newman, and Franz Kline). Monochrome black forced critics to assess work on the basis of linear and structural elements as opposed to chromatic considerations, branding the work as serious, and signaling a rejection of anything that could be construed as “pretty color”—presumably something Newman, Reinhart, and Kline were seeking to avoid, but a particularly perilous pitfall for women artists. Given Nevelson’s initial struggles with being taken seriously, however, and her ascension to prominence in the art world at a relatively advanced age, her adoption of black is laden with additional significance. For her the absence of color functioned as a kind of occult signature. Just how important this attribute was to the critical perception of her work became clear in 1959 when, at age sixty, she surprised everyone by exhibiting white sculptures in the prestigious Sixteen Americans show at the Museum of Modern Art, and Robert Rosenblum promptly attributed to them “a peculiarly contemporary and feminine sensibility,” likening them to the poems of Marianne Moore. As her place in the art world became unassailable, Nevelson experimented with gold and red, but each piece was always monochromatic. Monumentality, Nevelson’s other important weapon against feminization, was an equally important factor in the success of her sculptures and is essential to

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understanding how they resisted the standard diminutive descriptions for work by women, and demanded serious treatment. In the late 1950s, one sought in sculpture the transcendent, the awesome, the universal. Astonishment that Nevelson’s work possessed these qualities is evident in Hilton Kramer’s description of the built walls of Moon Garden Plus One in 1959: “appalling and marvelous, utterly shocking in the way they violate our received ideas on the limits of sculpture and the confusions of genres.”14 In his reference to “confusions of genres” and “violating received ideas on the limits of sculpture,” is there not a subtle, perhaps even unconscious, subtext in Kramer’s praise about gender, and received ideas about big, sculptural statements, and who could make them? Though no longer stated as bluntly as it had been in early reviews of the artist’s work, the greatest shock value of these hulking walls for Kramer was that they had been made by a woman. In the 1960s Nevelson went even larger, with freestanding metal sculptures designed to be seen in conjunction with architecture. Like it or not, it is impossible to ignore a sculpture like Night Presence IV, which looms in the median at the corner of Manhattan’s Park Avenue and 92nd Street, discoursing easily with the buildings that surround it. As Lisle points out, “[I]t is difficult to ascribe old notions about female sensibility to the assertive metal sculptures.”15 Femininity and masculinity are, of course, extremely mobile terms, dependent upon context for precise meaning, perhaps nowhere more so than in the history of art criticism. Nevelson was engaged in a careful balancing act between delivering and withholding what was expected of her as a woman artist. The spectrum of traits labeled feminine in her art evolved over the course of her career, shifting from text to text, but emotion, mystery, and timelessness are leitmotifs in descriptions of Nevelson’s work. For Parker Tyler in 1958, illusory distance, mysterious grouping, limited balance, internal units, and tiny spaces represented a feminine aesthetic: “The feminine delicacy she achieves is that her melodic images have an illusory distance, a grouping mysteriously intangible, and a limited dynamic balance illustrated by the tiny spaces frequently separating their internal units.”16 Also in 1958, Hilton Kramer dwelled on the emotional impact of Nevelson’s work, praising its “gluttony of images” and flair for “arresting the eye with a brilliant or subtle passage wherever its glance falls.”17 For Robert Rosenblum, Nevelson’s built environments evoked “an exotic ancient metropolis.”18 Like Georgia O’Keeffe, she was presumed to be driven by natural, biological, primitive, archaically feminine—and thus timeless—instincts. And yet the stern, rigid forms of twentieth-century New York architecture, which invite masculine associations, are an evident source in Nevelson’s work, which the artist herself acknowledged: “Now if you take a car, and you come down on the West Side Highway toward evening or toward morning, when the buildings are silhouetted, you will see that many of my works are real reflections of the city.”19 Having taken tremendous care to produce work that defied traditional notions of the feminine, Nevelson appeared to relish, especially in her later career, furnishing descriptions of her own working process that were emphatically feminine. When asked about her enormous metal sculptures, for instance, she compared her handling

 Sculptor, Hostess, Witch 141 of the traditionally male medium to making cake and manipulating ribbons: “I found that in my hands . . . it was almost like butter—like working with whipped cream on a cake. I was using steel as if it was ribbon made out of satin.”20 “A man simply couldn’t use the means of, say, fingerwork to produce my small pieces. They are like needlework.”21 The antithesis of Louise Bourgeois who was a decade younger and a deservedly heroic figure in contemporary feminist discourse, Nevelson snubbed feminism and was championed by the likes of Hilton Kramer, John Canaday, and Robert Hughes who were hardly crusaders for the feminist cause. In 1972, Nevelson’s dealer Arnold Glimcher attempted to explain the artist’s late arrival on the public art scene as a result of personal modesty: “Nevelson’s awareness of the sexuality of her work contributed to her waiting so long before she considered publicly showing her work, selling it, and thereby divesting herself of self-images.”22 In fact, the difficulty of exposing her work to a wide audience during the first decades of her career had nothing to do with sexual modesty. If anything it was Nevelson’s lack of timidity that allowed her, eventually, to reach the public with her work. At any rate, modesty flies in the face of firsthand accounts of the artist. Alice Neel recalled asking, when both artists were employed by the Work Projects Administration, how Nevelson dressed so beautifully on so small a stipend. “Fucking, dear, fucking,” was Nevelson’s reply. “That was one way she survived as an artist,” added Neel matter-offactly.23 Whether or not Nevelson actually supported herself through sexual relations is not the point. Both Neel’s question and Nevelson’s answer indicate that this was already the prevalent assumption about how Nevelson was subsisting and advancing her career, and which contributed to the marginalization of her work in feminist circles for decades. Not knowing what to do with her, many pioneering texts on women artists—for example, Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock’s seminal 1981 text Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, and later Frances Borzello’s survey A World of Our Own: Women as Artists since the Renaissance—simply leave her out. Non-feminist authors stress covert sexual symbolism and references to the female body in her work. In 1980, curator Robert Hobbs emphasized the essential femininity of Nevelson’s sculptures, stating: “The boxes have strong sexual connotations because a box is slang for woman in general and for her lower torso in particular. Nevelson is familiar with this meaning and has undertaken to personalize it.”24As evidence for this view, Hobbs cites the statement from Nevelson’s dealer in 1972 (see above) about her modesty, rather than her own words, which were readily available in published interviews. In alignment with the general consensus that Nevelson’s boxes were veiled references to vaginas, the artists’ biographer Laurie Lisle reiterated in 1990: “The filled box is an obvious psychological representation of rich interior depths, or a fertile womb, or sexuality, as in Pandora’s box. With its variably protected and penetrable interiors, the box became in Louise’s hands a half-hidden device that enabled her to express her female sensibility, maternalism and sexual energy.”25 It is hard to imagine what gender these authors might ascribe to Joseph Cornell’s box constructions. In retrospect, it seems Nevelson’s compartments suggest space more

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graphically than the body or its particular parts. In 1959 Robert Rosenblum noticed, “Nevelson’s sculpture extracts a gossamer evocativeness from objects that most people would overlook—a nailed plank of wood, the hinge of a door, the leg of a discarded chair.” The critic’s description highlights a key element in Nevelson’s success strategy: the co-opting of interior design. Like being a hostess, it was a traditionally feminine practice that allowed her to attain power in the vigilantly gendered atmosphere of the late 1950s. My point here is that Nevelson’s is essentially an art of selection and arrangement, a culturally acceptable form of creativity for women of the upper classes. In 1936 Meyer Schapiro observed that the relationship of a high-society woman to the domestic sphere was not so different from that of the artist to society: A woman of this class is essentially an artist, like the painters whom she might patronize. Her daily life is filled with aesthetic choices; she buys clothes, ornaments, furniture, house decorations; she is constantly rearranging herself as an aesthetic object. Her judgments are aesthetically pure and “abstract,” for she matches colors with colors, lines with lines. But she is also attentive to the effect of these choices upon her unique personality.26

Nevelson was intimately familiar with the idea that aesthetic arrangement, as opposed to invention, was expected of women, for the life Schapiro describes is precisely the one she had left behind in order to accomplish her professional goals. Her decision to make sculpture from found wood, a rejection of traditional sculptural material, took her in a different direction from male sculptors of her time. Like collage or quilting (most assuredly identified with women’s work), it is piecework and allows for infinite modular expansion. Working with, rather than acting on, a substance had distinctly feminine implications. Her process is one of finding and refashioning abandoned material, as opposed to forging it from scratch. While the previous generation’s male sculptors had defined and explored objet-trouvé construction, Nevelson herself drew a distinction between their choice of materials and her own. “Maybe there’s something about wood that is closer to the feminine,” she mused in her introduction to her Whitney retrospective in 1980.27 During an interview Nevelson claimed she found welding “warlike” and described her approach as that of attending to the specific needs of each piece of wood. Some of it “screams back,” she claimed, “and some is quieter.”28 Contrary to the idealistic assertion in the opening lines of this chapter that “art must survive through its own means,” it is impossible to imagine how Nevelson could have prevailed without high levels of personal and professional aggression. She freely admitted that anger was essential to her process. “All my life people have told me not to waste my energies on anger, but I kept anger, I tapped it and tapped it. Anger has given me great strength.”29 A passage in her autobiography, written at age seventy-six, describes a fit of rage leading to a conceptual breakthrough: “I had worked and worked on one particular box,” she remembered, “and it didn’t work. I was so mad. . . . I took a gallon of black paint and threw it on the floor. . . . I picked up the circular piece I was

 Sculptor, Hostess, Witch 143 working on and I pushed it, bango, into the box. And I knew I had it. The pièce de résistance.”30 As the group of photos from the Life magazine article illustrates, Nevelson’s work blurred the line between the domestic and professional spheres. She was conscious of this, allowing herself to be photographed at home, using kitchen tongs to dip each piece of wood into her paint (Figure 10.1). As for her own eccentric appearance, she quipped: “Every time I put on clothes I am creating a picture.”31 Her autobiography describes housekeeping as an art form, underscoring the relationship between her studio practice and traditional feminine domesticity: I’m really a good house cleaner. Well, when I clean house or sweep the street in front of the house, I am not really cleaning house. I am building architecture. . . . I will get on my knees and wipe up a floor or the stairs. Now for me, it is just not cleaning. . . . I do it for a higher order.32

The role of domestic rage in Nevelson’s sculpture and its expression in material terms is curiously absent from most formal analyses of her work. The only critic who touches upon it is Donald Kuspit, who addressed, in 1992, the issue of restrained violence in Nevelson’s constructions, noting their “peculiar rigidity” and observing that their inner contents are “invariably dismembered; the dead parts, aesthetically cosmeticized as though in a coffin, accumulated in psychic space, reifying the inflexibility of the space.”33 Apart from this, the language employed to discuss Nevelson’s sculptures usually ignores what they actually are: dismembered household objects wrestled into the uniformity of a grid. This dimension of the work’s significance seems to have been invisible to the very audience who embraced it. Since Nevelson’s aggression appeared in the guise of the purely formal modernist aesthetic, it slipped by unnoticed. Her pieces do not, in fact, possess the formal violence of works by Lee Bontecou, Nevelson’s junior by three decades, whose early career was roughly contemporary with Nevelson’s. Bontecou’s canvas and metal constructions, many of which contain menacing cavities, some fitted with saw-teeth, radiate from the wall with ferocious energy; Nevelson’s are self-contained, ordered shrapnel from domestic scenes, not as overtly threatening as Bontecou’s. What was spelled out in every detail of Bontecou’s superb but, at the time of their creation, far less popular pieces was carefully coded and obscured for those who did not want to see it in Nevelson’s work. Contained rage is rage, nonetheless. At a time when it was considered reckless for women to question their function as Betty Crocker–style homemakers, Louise Nevelson smashed the idea to bits and suggested an alternate model. Formalist analyses, devoid of any political or social context that might taint the purity of our transcendent experience of art, miss this point entirely. They also miss the richness of the interdisciplinary circles in which she moved. Although she was not a performance artist, Nevelson was surrounded by artists experimenting with the permeability of boundaries among the arts, from Stravinsky’s twelve-tone technique and Noguchi’s designs for Graham’s dances to the collaborative works of John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Martha Graham’s impact on Nevelson bears particular scrutiny.

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Graham moved into a house on West 10th Street while Nevelson was living on West 13th Street, and the dancer made a major impression on everyone as she swept majestically down the street. Nevelson was captivated by Graham, went often to see her dance, and was inspired by her magnetic personality as much as the physical movement.34 For Nevelson, who had studied dance, art and performance were always closely related. Her environmental sculpture was meant to be experienced, walked through, and danced through. One of her own students recalled Nevelson launching into a long improvisational dance in front of a sculpture. Graham’s eloquent hand gestures reverberate in the photographs of Nevelson at age eighty, and Graham’s autobiographical statements often sound interchangeable with Nevelson’s. The legendary dancer’s lines, “I swear that my favorite role is the one I am dancing now. You don’t build on security. You risk. Everything is a risk. You use every part of anything you remember as part of the present, the now,” might be mistaken for Nevelson’s professional credo.35 In 1981 Robert Hughes dubbed her “Sculpture’s Queen Bee,” hailing her as “one of the most distinguished living sculptors,” avoiding the designation “female sculptor” that would have been applied a decade earlier.36 Even as he pays tribute to the woman, Hughes manages to trivialize her accomplishments as an artist in a covert, yet persistent form of sexism in art criticism. The bulk of his article is devoted to her wardrobe and lifestyle rather than to her creative life or technical process. Hughes dwells gratuitously, for example, on the level of material comfort she enjoyed as a child, as well as in her marriage, finding it appropriate to quote the price her husband paid for her dancing lessons.37 True, certain types of financial support were available to Nevelson, but wouldn’t many male artists be vulnerable to such scrutiny? The objective in this chapter has not been to evaluate Nevelson’s choices, but to consider their evolution and their implications. Despite the double barrier of gender and age, she devised a professional strategy that allowed her to thrive in the vigilantly gendered atmosphere of postwar abstract expressionist circles. Her remarkable success within this patriarchal structure kept her from acknowledging its crippling ideological limitations. In public interviews and private conversations, she steadfastly refused to accept a connection with the women’s movement. When the critic Cindy Nemser tried several strategies to get Nevelson to express support for other women artists or say something encouraging about the current feminist movement when interviewing the artist in 1975, Nevelson obstinately refused. She insisted that “men were no challenge to me personally” and firmly dismissed the issue of her profession’s historically unequal treatment of the sexes. “Leave men where they are, leave women where they are. The point is that men are as enslaved as women are.”38 Nevelson’s persistent use throughout her life of the masculine he in discussions of her own practice (“I don’t think an artist develops a style. He is born with it, dies with it.”) is emblematic of her pre-feminist understanding of genius, and lifelong ambition to be accepted within that patriarchal milieu. In hindsight, it is apparent how much she owes to the timing of the women’s movement—from her implicitly subversive approach to 1950s household objects to the recognition she eventually achieved, despite the odds. Of course, Nevelson was

 Sculptor, Hostess, Witch 145 enormously aided by the example of outspoken women artists and critics. Of course, feminist interventions in the 1960s and 1970s accelerated her public acclaim and yielded a more balanced consideration of her work. The New York Feminist Art Institute made her their guest of honor in 1979.39 Having managed to avoid the usual pitfalls for women artists, Nevelson fell into others. Clinging absurdly to a structure she believed she had exploited, she maintained that her ideas owed nothing to other women artists. It was a heartless, and perhaps shrewd, professional decision. Where does that lead us with respect to the question raised at the beginning of this inquiry? What was Nevelson’s survival strategy and what made it work? Stated in its simplest terms, Nevelson’s infiltration of the men-only New York art network depended on two complementary strategies: in the first of these, she disguised herself as someone acceptable to the group; in the second, she selected materials and subject matter that conformed to the rules of the game. This does not diminish her role in opening the territory for other women in the visual arts. Her strategies worked because of her furious insistence that she had something substantial to contribute. In fact, she did. But there was a catch: having gained entrance, she was trapped in an ideology that excluded her. This point is imperative to a feminist response. The roles of hostess and witch were both contemporary and archaic, definitions of female power deeply rooted in cultural assumptions that Nevelson turned to her advantage. She used them to make herself visible. Her influence extends, of course, beyond her career. The critique of domestic space and the role of women within it is an ongoing theme for countless artists who have come after her. In the next generation, artists as diverse as Lynda Benglis, Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta, and Laurie Anderson—to name just a few for whom the adoption of stereotypes was central—were unquestionably encouraged by Nevelson’s strident example. Nevelson herself probably had only the vaguest notion of her persona’s far-reaching implications. I think we have to face the fact that she helped the feminist cause primarily by helping herself. Her strategies pose serious problems from a feminist perspective, and yet her professional success made her a model for women artists. Unlike Lee Krasner or Alice Neel, who actively embraced the feminist movement but did not live to see retrospective exhibitions of their work in major museums, Nevelson was honored during her lifetime with unprecedented public acclaim. She had demonstrated that a woman could, indeed, be a great modern sculptor. The brilliance of her achievements in this field, previously all but inaccessible to women, encouraged others to take risks.

Notes 1 Arnold B. Glimcher, Louise Nevelson (New York: Praeger, 1972), 94–5. 2 Regarding other contemporaneous women sculptors, see for example, Joan Marter, Dorothy Dehner, Sixty Years (Katonah: Katonah Museum of Art, 1993).

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3 Glimcher, Louise Nevelson, 19. 4 See Lee Krasner’s interview with Cindy Nemser, published in Art Talk: Conversations with Twelve Women Artists, ed. Nemser (New York: Scribner, 1975), 80–112. 5 Maude Riley, “A Sculptor’s Portraits,” Art Digest (November 15, 1943): 19. 6 Maude Riley, “Irrepressible Nevelson,” Art Digest (April 15, 1943): 18. 7 Henry McBride, New York Sun, January 9, 1943. Quoted in Laurie Lisle, Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1990)144. 8 According to Krasner, Newman’s statement was in the context of a casual conversation at the Cedar Tavern. Quoted in Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art and Society (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990), 303. 9 Lisle, Louise Nevelson, 209. 10 Letter from Robert Rosenblum to the artist, March 25, 1958. Quoted in Lisle, Louise Nevelson, 211. 11 Thomas B. Hess, “U.S. Art, Notes from 1960,” Art News (January 1960): 25. 12 Letter from Hubert Crehan to Laurie Lisle, 1984. Lisle, Louise Nevelson 188. 13 Paul Richard, “Nevelson and Her Fabled Shadows,” The Washington Post, April 19, 1988. 14 Hilton Kramer, “The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson,” Arts Magazine (June 1958): 29. 15 Lisle, Louise Nevelson, 267. 16 Parker Tyler, “Reviews and Previews: Louise Nevelson,” ARTnews (January 1958): 54. Tyler was referring specifically to Nevelson’s The Royal Voyage (Of the King and Queen of the Sea). 17 Kramer, “The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson,” 29. 18 Quoted in Glimcher, Louise Nevelson, 57. 19 Nevelson, Dawns + Dusks (New York: Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1976) 112. 20 Ibid., 171. 21 Glimcher, Louise Nevelson, 23. 22 Ibid., 147. 23 Quoted in Lisle, Louise Nevelson, 126. 24 Robert C. Hobbs, “Louise Nevelson: A Place That Is an Essence,” Woman’s Art Journal 1, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1980): 39–43. 25 Lisle, Louise Nevelson, 196. 26 Meyer Schapiro, “The Social Bases of Art” (1936), in Worldview in Painting—Art and Society: Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1999), 124–5. 27 Edward Albee, Louise Nevelson: Atmospheres and Environments, exh. cat. (New York: The Whitney Museum of American Art, 1980). 28 Quoted in Lisle, Louise Nevelson, 197. 29 Natalie S. Bober, Breaking Tradition: The Story of Louise Nevelson (New York: Atheneum, 1984), 82. 30 Nevelson, Dawns + Dusks, 138. 31 Ibid., 180. 32 Ibid., 184. 33 Donald Kuspit, “On Being Boxed In,” Sculpture (November–December 1992), 30–7. In the context of this general essay on box sculpture Kuspit’s comments on Nevelson had no feminist slant, but I suspect his long-standing interest in feminist art contributed to his sensitivity to the stifled aggression in Nevelson’s approach to her materials.

 Sculptor, Hostess, Witch 147 34 Noguchi’s abstract stage sets for Graham’s dances are also a clear source of inspiration for Nevelson’s sculptures. 35 Martha Graham, Blood Memory (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 256. 36 Robert Hughes, “Sculpture’s Queen Bee,” Time (January 12, 1981): 46. 37 Ibid., 69. 38 Nemser, Art Talk, 60–1. 39 Lisle, Louise Nevelson, 265.

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Figure 11.1  Mende people, Sowo-wui, dance mask (ndoli jowei) of Ligba rank, midtwentieth century. Wood. Smith College Museum of Art, Gift of Gwendolen M. Carter, ex. Guy Massie-Taylor. SC 1960:55 (See Plate 12).

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Museums and the Missing Women of Sande Susan Kart

Within the limited regions in Africa where performances requiring wooden-mask headpieces were and are practiced, the performances are usually the responsibility of men. Women may take the lead in singing, but men usually wear the masks even when the headpieces and costumes represent women. Mende society in West Africa is an exception: Mende women—and elderly women at that—perform their own masquerades. Mende women are the primary singers and dancers as well as the wearers and commissioners of their sculpted wooden masks.1 The Mende now live in Sierra Leone and Liberia as well as around the world. Adults belong to organized societies—the Poro for men, and the Sande (or Bondo) for women—which serve as powerful political, social, and family entities.2 The Sande society organizes and hosts the women’s masked performances, which are marked by elaborately carved wooden helmet masks. The masks, stained black, appear as part of a black fiber costume enveloping a woman’s body. The whole manifestation of woman, mask, and costume is referred to as Sowo. The Sowo preside over a handful of important public events, including the celebration at the conclusion of girls’ initiation into the Sande society, marking the end of their childhood and the beginning of their lives as adult women. Sowo also appear in public at weddings, at funerals, and in litigation involving men accused of criminal activity against women. The carved headpieces carry extremely powerful imagery, the kind that evokes fear, awe, and the supernatural, for Mende viewers. Sande wooden masks are visually striking and, therefore, became highly desired by European collectors during the colonial period. They were praised for their elegance, beauty, and artistic virtuosity, the same qualities the Mende appreciate in their masks. Even though the Sande is not the largest or most significant social organization in Sierra Leone, their masks have become the default symbol of the country and its citizens.3 Sande is now active worldwide, largely as a result of the vicious civil wars in Sierra Leone (1991–2002) and Liberia (1980s–early 2000s). Both countries saw mass population displacement, violence against civilians, women, and children, and the forced conscription of child soldiers. Sande survived in both countries because it moved with its members to large cities, such as Freetown and Bo in Sierra Leone, and Monrovia in Liberia, when the countryside became too dangerous. Sande also traveled internationally, primarily to England and the United States, as women and children refugees fled the conflicts. Just as

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the two African countries were beginning to stabilize in the early 2000s, the outbreak of the Ebola virus began in 2014, resulting in more devastation. In Sierra Leone, recent initiatives at the international level have supported heritage projects, including the Sande and Poro societies, as a means to assist in the cultural rebuilding of a largely devastated country.4 Yet, the Sande and Poro societies are finding themselves increasingly at odds with the international community. Sande in particular has come under international attack for its initiation ceremonies. These traditionally include genital modification of pubescent girls by female elders to mark the death of their childhood and the beginning of womanhood. The controversy over genital alteration has come to rest on the objects used in public by the most senior Sande women, and those appearing most frequently in museums: their wooden masks.

Masks and the Mutilation Debate Some women who underwent Sande initiation as children are now coming forward to condemn the practice’s inclusion of genital alteration. The international audience has been quick to proclaim its outrage at “female genital mutilation” (FGM), and attempts to ban the practice worldwide are gaining traction.5 Even though a mask in a museum is long divorced from the mature woman who may have worn it, and was never worn while she was operating on girls, the mask has been proclaimed a tool by which elder women mutilated their children. As a result, museums such as the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland and the British Museum in London have found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to defend their displays of Sande sculptures while arguing that these institutions are not condoning FGM. Most Sande activities are conducted in private, and so the helmet masks worn by the Sowo are the public face of the society, being viewed by the Mende during public appearances and subsequently by international museum-going audiences. I suspect that because the Sowo is the most important public representative of the Sande, her mask has become a vector for contemporary concerns about Sande and its women. In addition, the wearers of the masks (if the mask was in use prior to its collection) are senior members of Sande, that is, older women. Because older women are empowered in Mende culture to dictate their own femininity and to thwart the norms of EuroAmerican society by shaping their daughters’ genitals, they are rendered out of bounds of acceptability.6 Many of these women are refugees residing in Euro-American settings, where they are subject to nationalistic and racialized condemnation as well. Regardless of one’s stance on altering healthy genital tissue in children, the sociopolitical debate runs into its own hypocrisy on a regular basis. Euro-American societies comfortably grant their mothers control over the genital alterations of male children through circumcision while making it illegal for immigrant mothers to alter their daughters’ genitals.7 Another example emerges in scholarly articles promoting circumcision of African men to help combat HIV, while Canada and the UK have all but ceased circumcision because health claims have proved insufficient to continue the practice.8

 Museums and the Missing Women of Sande 151 Now that the highly charged debate has arrived at the art museum, curators and art historians are feeling pressured to take a stand because museums are understood as sites of educational, institutional, and, frequently, moral authority. On the one hand, if museum professionals use their exhibitions of Sande art to condemn the practice of genital surgeries, they risk repeating the colonial practice of criticizing the “primitive” nature of the colonized in order to prove the “civilization” of the colonizing empire. On the other hand, to issue blanket positivist support for the Sande society and its art objects discounts the testimonies of initiated women who find the process barbaric and have suffered from its effects. And to ignore the debate altogether and focus only on the masks as art with a capital A is akin to the ostrich sticking its head in the sand. In all cases, the erasure of women and their bodies (in particular those of older women) from exhibitions of Sande art has perpetuated a narrative of youthful beauty, which unintentionally draws attention to initiation surgeries. It furthermore comes at the expense of narratives regarding middle-aged and mature women, the same women whose masks are now in museum collections.

The Women and Art of Sande At, or slightly before, puberty, Mende girls assemble into a cohort to go through Sande training together. They are removed from their families and society and are admitted exclusively to the company of adult Sande women for an extended period.9 Freed from their roles as daughters, sisters, and children, the girls can be reborn as women. Older women, therefore, are entirely in charge of defining the roles they hold in society and wish to cede to their offspring. Lynda Day has noted that “the separation of community responsibilities along gender lines assumes that women are the supreme authorities in their own sphere and that this sphere is of equal importance to that of men.”10 Sande, indeed, functions as a corporate body, capable of enforcing Sande laws, ensuring correct behavior of men and women, and protecting women’s interests.11 This protection is one reason girls participate in its initiations. More important, girls become adults only after completing the challenging educational training directed by Sande leaders. Midwifery, women’s health, political advocacy, and judicial oversight were and are the traditional occupations of the senior Sowei, the woman who serves as head of her town’s or region’s Sande society. Women of lesser rank, or Ligba, are dance and voice instructors for the girls and, often, their surgeons. Other Sande members are tasked with teaching girls about puberty, sex, childbirth, cooking, and maintaining a household. Training includes labor performed on behalf of the elder Sande women in order to teach the girls “modesty, diligence and respect for one’s seniors.”12 Sylvia A. Boone argued convincingly that the physical beauty and sexual nature of women are critical pieces of female power in Mende society, and these attributes are actively taught by the older women to girls before and during Sande initiation.13 The wooden masks commissioned by Sande women depict the entirety of the abovedescribed processes, from birth to adolescence, maturity, and ancestry. Commissioned by professional Ligba dancers and by the head Sowei of each Sande chapter, the masks

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highlight such abstract characteristics as modesty, integrity, eroticism, and beauty, as well as the Sande spiritual realm. Because there is a correlation between rank in Sande and a woman’s age, only older women can commission and wear the high-ranking Sowei mask. A dancer’s mask can be commissioned and worn by much younger members. The masks distinguish between old age and youth; they can therefore help museums determine their own collection’s bias toward youthful representation. For example, the Smith College Museum of Art has a small permanent exhibition of African art. One highlight is a Sande helmet mask, or sowo-wui (Figure 11.1), carved c. 1958 by Pessima, a master artist from Moyambawo, Sierra Leone. The headpiece is dramatic; parallel striations on the head imply a tightly braided coiffure, while snakes, a reptile, and a bird decorate the top. The mask possesses a high forehead, small facial features, and two horizontal slits carved between the chin and first ring of the neck to allow the wearer to see. Pessima’s headpiece exemplifies the ndoli jowei style of mask made for a professional Sande dancer of Ligba rank. From Boone’s interviews with Mende men and women, we understand that the designs for the hair on Sande masks are elaborate variations of women’s actual hairstyles. Young women prefer hairstyles of fine, tight braids, often arranged in elaborate patterns. Older women prefer a looser style with braids that do not cling to the scalp and can be as few as three or four in number. This style, a sowo-bolo (sowo’s cap), produces what Boone translates as “big hair.”14 The pattern of tight V-shaped “braids” on Pessima’s mask indicates youthfulness, and the mask celebrates the newly born adult Sande woman. Compare Pessima’s mask to one at the British Museum (Figure 11.2), which displays a very different hairstyle—the “big hair” of an older woman—and the eye slits for the dancer to see out of are located at the lower eyelid of the mask’s eyes. Boone claimed that when a Sowei wore her mask, the “mask-head forms a Janus with the head of the human being inside; she, with her human eyes, has added to her all the power of the mask’s eyes to see inside the spirit world.”15 The more powerful placement of the slits, allowing the wearer’s own eyes to align with the mask’s (rather than looking through eye slits placed in the neck, for example), along with the hairstyle, indicates that this mask is most likely one of the highest rank, belonging to a senior Sowei leader of the Sande society. Given that only older women achieve the rank of Sowei, this sowo-wui mask was the property of one of the oldest and most powerful women in her society. While the object label for the mask in the Smith College Museum of Art describes the Sande tradition, the installation does not draw attention to the mask’s hairstyle as an indication of age or rank, in large part because the mask was carved on commission for a European and thus never worn by a Sande dancer.16 The “older woman-type” mask in the British Museum is not on display. Nothing is wrong with the Smith display or the British Museum’s lack thereof, but a stronger model is offered at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA). In 2015 the BMA completed an extensive renovation of its African art galleries. The museum holds a uniquely large collection of Sande helmet masks, and curator Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch decided to open the galleries with a display of twelve masks. This, she argued, was an important corrective for African art exhibitions that, in documenting the diversity of African art, display one object from each culture to represent as many

 Museums and the Missing Women of Sande 153

Figure 11.2 Sowei mask, before 1938. Wood. British Museum, purchase from Glending & Co, ex. Capt. R. S. Rattray. Af1938, 1004.12.

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groups as possible.17 Gunsch, along with many in the field of African art, is concerned that the “one object from each region” approach presents a skewed view of uniformity within cultures, as if one Sande mask could stand in for all such objects over three centuries of creation.18 By displaying a dozen Sande masks of both Sowei and Ligba rank, the revamped installation introduced greater diversity than had ever been present in a US exhibition.

Initiation in Exhibitions In her otherwise positive review of the new African art galleries for the Baltimore Sun, Mary Carole McCauley found significant fault with the museum’s display of Sande masks, stating: “Despite the charming touches, the masks are undeniably powerful and even frightening—as befits their role in a controversial female initiation ritual that has traditionally involved genital mutilation.”19 McCauley was upset that nowhere in the exhibition did the museum acknowledge that “Sande initiation rites have frequently included the widely condemned practice of female circumcision.”20 The museum’s PR department responded: “The curator chose to focus on the visual expression of the Sande society and the aesthetic value of the masks themselves rather than one aspect of the rite of passage for some members.”21 A subsequent editorial in the Sun, “Masking the truth at the BMA: Exhibit leaves out a human rights violation connection to the exhibit,” prompted action at a higher level.22 The deputy directors for Curatorial Affairs and Education posted a lengthy response on the BMA’s blog, part of which reads: Just this week, Nigerian President Goodluck Johnson signed a bill that criminalizes female genital mutilation or cutting. . . . The practice is also on the rise in the U.S., where according to Newsweek, more than half a million women are at risk of undergoing the procedure or have already experienced it.23 How do we as viewers hold these stories—stories of beauty and creativity, culture and tradition, individuality and self-efficacy, pain and suffering—simultaneously? And what is the museum’s role in negotiating and presenting multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings?24

I argue that the museum bears significant responsibility in how it exhibits material, and curators should be actively presenting the multiple meanings held by these objects. One glaring problem with the FGM controversy at the Baltimore Museum of Art is the absence of older women in the debate. Clearly, girls who have undergone genital surgery have grown up to become women and senior citizens. And yet, as the case above illustrates, the Sun and the BMA are focused on the surgical initiations of young girls. The international condemnation of FGM deals with older women only to condemn their desire to maintain initiation traditions (and, I would argue, the legitimacy of their own bodies) and to punish them for their roles as surgeons in the practice.25 Otherwise, the surgically adjusted bodies of older women are completely invisible in the narratives against initiation. Since Sande masks are produced for the older women who perform

 Museums and the Missing Women of Sande 155 them, their display in museums should convey just as much about Sande elders and their bodies as it does about Sande youth. As scholars and museum professionals, we have not adequately confronted the absence of older women in museum displays, and yet these same women were the commissioners, users, guardians, and sellers of the very objects on display.

So Where Are the Old Women? Museum collections often limit curatorial choices, and we must remember that exhibitions of Sande art are curatorial theses, based on the relatively static nature of the collections that curators are tasked with displaying. We often learn more about the museum’s collection history, and the collection’s purported relationship to the heritage of the country where the museum sits, than we do about the individual objects displayed.26 In addition, the type of Sowei mask from the British Museum was rarely collected, given its spiritual and political importance to the Sande society as a whole. It is far more common to see the ndoli jowei style in museums because these were more easily obtained by purchasing them either from their female owners (who could then commission a new mask for themselves) or directly from the artists themselves. Fewer masks of high-ranking elders in museums translate to the unintentional skewing of displays toward representations of younger women. Given that collections of historical material are unlikely to change much over time, exhibitions also tend to experience the same inertia: items are locked into the past, leaving little room for the present day or for present-day needs from certain objects.27

Absent Bodies, Missing Stories: The Colonial Legacy Perhaps the most critical problem for museums when exhibiting Sande masks is that the Sowo (the entirety of the woman, mask, and costume) is absent. Curators must exhibit the wooden headpieces incompletely, thereby eliminating from consideration the bodies of the women who served as Sowo. In any public appearance, the Sowo’s mask and clothing must completely conceal the woman underneath. This allows the Sowo to act on behalf of the entire Sande society and the ancestral/spirit worlds, not just as an individual. The mask plays only a small part in this bodily concealment. In fact, without the uniform, the helmet mask is merely a wooden museum object, unrecognizable even to the Mende. Ruth B. Phillips records how she showed photographs of masks in museums to Sierra Leonean women and “found that the bare headpiece, deprived of its costume, ornaments, and dramatic impersonation, could become virtually unrecognizable as ndoli jowei. People would puzzle over these photographs and then offer a comment that amounted to a kind of disowning: ‘It might be a sowei, but it’s not from here.’”28 The removal of the headpiece from its costume is largely a result of nineteenth-century colonial practices of procuring masks for display in Europe. The Sowo headpiece was

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Figure 11.3  T. J. Alldridge, “The Bundu Devil Dress,” photograph of a Sowei in full costume and mask of Sowo rank. Wood, palm fiber, fabric. Sherbro District, c. 1894–9. From T. J. Alldridge, “Exhibition of Lantern Slides (plates X to XIII),” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 29, nos.1–2 (1899): plate XI. carved (like a sculpture) in wood (an acceptable artistic medium) and, most important, figurative (although far more abstract than European art of the time), which led colonizers to see it as the creative product of an “other” culture. African masks were interesting to nineteenth-century European anthropologists and art historians (hence, museums) for what they might offer about the gods, fetishes, devils, or even people (in the form of portraiture) of the cultures living in the European colonies. The costumes associated with masks, however, were often made of nonpermanent materials, such as raffia, clothing, and seedpods, or intangibles like body paint. These posed a problem for transportation, display, and conservation and were usually not collected in the first place. This does not mean that the costume was of no interest to colonial Europeans.29 In early records of the Sowo, the costume, wooden headpiece, and the woman wearer received equal attention, a situation largely different from the subsequent museum fascination with the headpiece alone. T. J. Alldridge was one of the first Europeans to photograph the high-ranking mask worn as part of the Sowo ensemble, complete with a white head wrap indicating the presence of a high-ranking Sowei underneath (Figure 11.3).30 Alldridge served in various posts for the British colonial government from the late 1870s through to the early 1900s and published some of the first accounts of the Sande in Europe. His description of the Sowo, which he calls a “Bundu devil,” appears in all of them:

 Museums and the Missing Women of Sande 157 Her distinctive costume is unvarying . . . except as regards the head-piece. . . . Her dress is of long shaggy fibre, dyed black, and over her head she wears a grotesque mask. . . . I have had the honour of shaking the covered hand of a good many of these devils. I was also fortunate enough to obtain possession of a very fine specimen of a Bundu devil mask, which is now to be seen in the Ethnological Section of the British Museum. The fetish power of these beings is very great.31

Alldridge stresses his acquisition of the “devil mask,” not the “dress” or “costume” of the Sande medicine woman. While he has correctly determined that the British Museum would be interested in purchasing a wooden mask, he does not even bother to collect the rest of the ensemble, for he knows it would be problematic: Civilization is making strides even in this most secret of native societies, for whereas formerly only country-cloth was used for leggings sewn up at the feet (as no portion of the flesh may be visible), today some of the devils may be seen wearing tan-coloured stockings peeping above the lace-up black boots or tan shoes which many of them now affect. I must admit that these modern things do not harmonise with the bulky fibrous costume, and considerably detract from the characteristic effect of this barbarous dress with which so much fetish and mystery is associated.32

Alldridge and his colleague Harry Hamilton Johnston, writing from across the border in Liberia, expressed their surprise that members of the Sande society in the two countries would use men’s pants (the “leggings” made of country cloth) as well as European pants, stockings, and shoes to conceal the legs of the Sowo (Figure 11.4).33 They were also amused that the European top hat, a symbol of the well-to-do gentleman, was occasionally worn by high-ranking Sande women and even incorporated into the wooden helmet masks of Sande dancers (Figure 11.5).34 Although both Alldridge and Johnston amassed collections of Sande helmet masks, neither made an effort to collect the costumes—parts of which were European and, therefore, contained no exotic value for museum display. The wooden mask with a European top hat, however, was a different story. The mask that Alldridge speaks of selling to the British Museum wears a top hat and has two identical faces, one on the front and one on the back, making it one of only a few Janus-faced Sande masks. Whereas the appropriation of actual European goods was troubling to the supposed authenticity of a Sowo costume, the artistic appropriation of European imagery constituted a fine discovery for Alldridge. Distracted by their understanding of Mende women using men’s clothing to perform a dialogue between the “African” and the “European,” Alldridge and Johnston missed the more relevant connection between the Sande and Poro, or female and male dichotomy, embodied in the Sowo regalia. Mende women did not wear pants in Alldridge’s time; their usurpation of men’s clothing served as a not-so-subtle reminder of the Sowo’s power to defend Sande women against men. By attaching a sculpture of

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Figure 11.4  C. H. Firmin, “Bundu Devils,” photograph of two Bondo dancers of Ligba or Sowo rank, northwestern Liberia, c. 1904. From Harry Hamilton Johnston, Liberia: Vol II (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1906), p. 1031. Reprinted in T. J. Alldridge, “Sierra Leone,” in Customs of the World: A Popular Account of the Manners, Rites and Ceremonies of Men and Women in All Countries (pp. 768–92), edited by Walter Hutchinson (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1913), p. 771. a woman’s head on top of black raffia fiber hung from men’s clothing, the women in Alldridge’s and Johnston’s photographs were marking their complete control over the spiritual and ancestral realms for women and men alike. Furthermore, the skills of warrior-chiefs were taught to men and boys in Poro, yet women were believed able to channel these skills in the face of pregnancy, birth, and defense of their families and other Sande women.35 Often, in Alldridge’s own time and still today, senior Sande women serve as equals to the paramount chiefs in their towns.36 The Sowo’s power in society was evident to Alldridge, and he was in awe of it: The Bundu devil is a “medicine” woman, who is believed to be capable of casting spells, for good or evil, over the destinies of men. There is generally a Bundu devil in any large town belonging to an important chief, but she does not appear in her peculiar costume unless she is especially called out to look into some misbehaviour on the part of the men, or upon some gala occasion, or upon the visit of strangers whom it is wished to honour. I had myself many opportunities of observing this remarkable personage, who naturally inspires her people with much awe, and commands the greatest respect from all classes.37

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Figure 11.5 Mende or Temne people, Bondo Sowo-wui, Janus-faced dance mask (ndoli jowei) of Ligba rank. Wood. British Museum, purchase from T. J. Alldridge 1886. Af1886, 1126.1.a-b.

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Alldridge’s simultaneous assessment of Sande women as “devils” and “medicine women” seems contradictory, yet he clearly understands that Sande women use their power against men when their women have been victims of male behavior. In other words, to men, Sande women are “devils,” but to women, they are healers. Further, Alldridge seems to implicate Sande women as witches, given their abilities to “cast . . . spells, for good or evil” over men. Implying that women were witches was a common insult used for centuries in Europe to disparage women who gained power outside the circles allotted to them by monarchical and patriarchal European class-based society.38 It was a clever way for Alldridge to allow his European readers, who would have been primarily men, to experience the same sense of dread that a Mende man would feel when confronted by an angry Sande elder in full Sowo dress. Despite Alldridge’s dealings with women chiefs during his tenure in Sierra Leone, he remained blind to the imagery of costume, hairstyle, and dress that marked status for the elder Sande women. He certainly did not realize the significance of women wearing masks, men’s pants, and shoes, or their performing in public, but he was impressed with the stamina required of the dancing women in full costume.39 Given that Alldridge met and photographed high-ranking Sowo, the endurance he attributes to the “devils” belonged to the oldest and most senior women in the districts where he was working at the time. It took several generations of scholars after Alldridge to determine how women in Sierra Leone, or elsewhere for that matter, felt about Sande and how they interpreted its high-ranking women. Unsurprisingly, the scholars given the most access to Sande were women, while male researchers were better able to document the Poro. Phillips and Boone, both American women, began conducting their research in the 1970s. They were the first to detail for art historians how a young girl becomes a Sande woman and how the masquerade performance was critical to the public perception and reception of Sande women in society.

The Contemporary Exhibition: Why FGM Belongs in the Art Museum Alldridge’s refusal to collect the entire mask ensemble is symptomatic of what has been defined by scholars as an act of colonial violence: a forced separation of the bodies of the colonized from the artifacts of their own history.40 Historians and artists alike have critiqued the staging of a “decapitated” mask isolated in a vitrine or hung from a wall in a museum.41 Arguably, African masks in public collections serve as particularly poignant indexes not only of the historical violence enacted against the colonized but also of the museum’s discomfort in examining its own dependence on that colonial violence. As Jennifer González astutely notes, “Museums worked to guarantee the meaning of cultural patrimony and, in many cases colonial privilege for imperial nations. To change the museum and its forms of display was to question not only the validity of the power relations of the past but also the meaning of that past for those living in the present.”42

 Museums and the Missing Women of Sande 161 A recent exhibition at the British Museum attempted a corrective by placing Alldridge’s top-hat-wearing mask on display, surrounded by information about its nineteenth-century collection and documentation, interwoven with contemporary videos and photographs from Sierra Leone and the Sierra Leonean diaspora in London. The goal of the exhibition Sowei Mask: The Spirit of Sierra Leone was to use a single object and retrace its history from its carving to its exhibition. This approach placed the object in a chronological and temporal continuum, where it could serve as a mediator between past and present, diaspora and homeland. The fact that the mask had two faces and wore a European hat provided co-curator Paul Basu “with an opportunity to explore the entanglements of European and African culture during the colonial era (including the bi-directional material flows as embodied in the mask’s design).”43 Basu further stressed, “In the display we wanted to present a plurality of ‘framings’ of the mask—as ethnographic object, art historical object, an object entangled in cultures of colonialism, as postcolonial national icon, and to juxtapose it with an audio-visual presentation which showed such masks animated as part of masquerade performance rather than static art objects.”44 Of primary concern was a discussion of Alldridge’s role in taking the object out of Sierra Leone so that the colonial history of the object was acknowledged. And yet, three years after the exhibition opened, the British Museum drew the ire of a reporter and the Sierra Leonean women she interviewed, who objected to its exhibiting a “devil” mask (notice the reanimation of Alldridge’s colonial language).45 Anna Davis, writing for a free urban circular, the Evening Standard, titled her article “British Museum accused of ‘celebrating’ FGM by displaying cutter’s mask” and pointed out that “survivors of FGM living in London said they still suffer flashbacks to the mask, which they said is used at the end of cutting ceremonies in Sierra Leone to terrorise young girls into keeping quiet about their ordeal.”46 This is why a more conservative approach usually prevails, such as the one taken by Smith College and the Baltimore Museum of Art, where curators focus on the artistry of the Sande masks. Nevertheless, a lack of contemporary context in an exhibition of historical objects was leveled against both approaches. Where the British Museum exhibit was criticized for “celebrating” FGM, the Baltimore Museum of Art was targeted for “papering over the reality [of FGM].”47

Solutions? Certainly, the concerns about genital surgeries are not for museums to resolve, though they can be a proactive partner for Sande women from within the educational, social, and cultural realms in which these institutions are located. For museums with Sande art objects in their collections, I have already suggested one possibility: the inclusion of a fuller Sande narrative that disrupts the traditional focus on youth and girls at the expense of maturity and age. Sande women in diaspora have greater access to museums housing the ceremonial objects of their foremothers. Sande women in Sierra Leone have greater access to Sande society. The two groups’ experiences have begun to converge within social media.

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Opinions not expressible in England (a favorable opinion of genital excision, for example) or Sierra Leone (a rejection of Sande initiation) are accessible across geographic lines via digital news, blogs, Facebook/Instagram, and humanities-based research projects such as the SierraLeoneHeritage.org website.48 Social media allows for public discussions and the wide dissemination of scholarly research into socio/politico/medical arguments for and against Sande initiation and genital modification. If we understand the tool of technology as being able to connect scholarly and public debate in a virtual space, the museum offers a real-world location for this connection to occur in person among the public, scholars, institutions, and the objects important to them all. Along with their historical pasts, objects like the Sande masks maintain ongoing histories, and these need adequate expression in museum contexts. Just as the meanings of Sowo headpieces shifted on their routes from creation to use to colonial collection to public display, we must not assume that their postcolonial meanings are now absolute. Arjun Appadurai has argued that the “social life” of an object represents what an object from the past is understood to mean for its present audiences.49 Therefore, for one Mende woman, a top-hat-wearing mask in the British Museum is incontestably the “face of the cutter,” as she calls upon its association with initiation and demands that it answer for its role in contentious social practices.50 For another, it may be a symbol of her pride as a Sierra Leonean woman now that she lives as a refugee in a foreign country.51 Charles Garoian suggests that instead of seeking historical absolutes in objects, we should understand that “works of art represent the potential to dialogue with history,” and viewers have the ability to “challenge the monologic pedagogy of museums” despite the “unpredictability of visitor responses and narratives.” Knowledge-making that occurs in dialogue among object, institution, and visitor creates a museum that is an “integral part of community life.”52 This means that if we desire the museum to be an interpretive space where we encourage viewers to participate in exhibitions, then we must discuss genital altering of children in public. When we invite the visitor to share her history, it may be one of FGM and the horrific consequences that it had and continues to have. It may include the abuses by some women of the initiation tradition for money or influence. It may stem from concerns of patriarchal control over women’s sexuality. But it may also include experiences of those who have chosen to go through initiation as adults, or those who are fervent supporters of Sande and who cannot imagine being a woman without being Sande. We can discuss the significance of genital surgery and how, without it, women in Sierra Leone are not considered women. Indeed, we must accept that the struggle by older women to keep the tradition alive is not a struggle to undermine women’s sexual pleasure but, rather, a struggle to ensure young girls a place of power in adult society. The Sande masks speak to all these histories; all of the above narratives are true even as they seem to stand in opposition. This is why we must let go of our positivist and preservationist strategies that prioritize an aesthetic point of view, a linear history, a meaning based only on the original use-context for a Sande mask. The objects themselves contain fully contradictory meanings: they are not just about the initiation of young girls; they are about the sexual maturity of women and the public performance of that sexuality in front of other women, men, and boys. The women’s spectacle—

 Museums and the Missing Women of Sande 163 the creation of a space where women are the center of attention in masquerade or in judicial matters—grants them autonomy in a patriarchal society.53 The Sowo brings the past of the ancestors and spirits firmly into the present not only when she dances but also when her headpiece is on view in a museum. The presence of the past in our current space creates a contemporary legitimacy for middle-aged and older Sande women. The masks point out how older women still maintain an important and, in fact, insurmountable presence in the rule of Mende society and the preservation of their autonomy as women.

Notes 1 The author thanks Jessica Nicoll, director and Louise Ines Doyle ’34 chief curator, Smith College Museum of Art; Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch, former associate curator of African Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, currently Teel curator of African and Oceanic Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Siona Wilson, associate professor of art history, the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York; and Dr. Paul Basu, professor of anthropology, SOAS University of London. A longer version of this essay appears in African Arts (Autumn 2020)53:3, 72–83. 2 Ruth B. Phillips, “Masking in Mende Sande Society Initiation Rituals,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 48, no. 3 (1978): 265. Sande is the name for the society in the Mende language. Among the neighboring Temne and related groups in Liberia, it is called Bondo, and the terms are often used interchangeably. 3 On independence from England, the government adopted the Sande mask as a symbol of Sierra Leone, using it on a series of 1961 postage stamps. 4 An international project by museums, professors, and individuals created the website SierraLeoneHeritage.org. The site uses museum object databases, interviews, videos, and documentaries to connect contemporary individuals with past practices. See Paul Basu, “Reanimating Cultural Heritage: Digital Curatorship, Knowledge Networks, and Social Transformation in Sierra Leone,” in International Handbooks of Museum Studies: Museum Transformations, ed. Annie E. Coombes and Ruth B. Phillips (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2015). 5 Liliane Bitong, “Fighting Genital Mutilation in Sierra Leone,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 83 (November 2005), http:​//www​.who.​int/b​ullet​in/vo​lumes​/83/1​ 1/new​s2110​5/en.​ 6 Eric K. Silverman, “Anthropology and Circumcision,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 429. 7 Kirsten Bell, “Genital Cutting and Western Discourses on Sexuality,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 19, no. 2 (2005): 127–8. 8 Robert Darby and J. Steven Svoboda, “A Rose by Any Other Name?: Rethinking the Similarities and Differences between Male and Female Genital Cutting,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 21, no. 3 (2007): 303, 13. Silverman, “Anthropology and Circumcision,” 419–45. 9 Over generations, Sande has had to change its traditional isolation period. The society now allows for multiple training sessions during school vacations and allows younger girls to participate at the same time as their older sisters. See Sylvia Ardyn

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Boone, Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), Ch. 3, 45–79. 10 Lynda Day, Gender and Power in Sierra Leone: Women Chiefs of the Last Two Centuries (New York: Springer, 2012), 24. 11 Ibid., 25. 12 Phillips, “Sande Society Initiation Rituals,” 267. 13 Boone, Radiance from the Waters, 45–81. 14 Ibid., 184. 15 Ibid., 176–7. 16 The Smith mask was commissioned from Pessima by Guy Massie-Taylor, an art teacher for the British Colonial Service in Sierra Leone. From 1956 to 1963 he amassed a highly regarded collection of Sande masks, most of which were purchased upon his death by the Kelvingrove Art Gallery (now the Glasgow Museums). Gwendolen M. Carter, then professor of government at Smith College, was visiting Sierra Leone in the late 1950s and acquired the mask from Massey-Taylor. She gifted it to Smith in 1961. 17 Gunsch, conversation with author, Accra, Ghana, August 11, 2017. 18 Gunsch, email to author, September 6, 2017. 19 Mary Carole McCauley, “Baltimore Museum of Art Opens Renovated African and Asian Galleries,” Baltimore Sun, April 25, 2015. 20 Ibid. 21 Anne Mannix-Brown quoted in ibid. 22 Editorial, “Masking the Truth at the B.M.A.,” Baltimore Sun, May 26, 2015. 23 This is somewhat of a bait and switch, as Newsweek attributes the rise in genital surgeries to increased immigrant populations from “African and Middle Eastern countries”; Lucy Wescott, “Female Genital Mutilation on the Rise in the U.S.,” Newsweek, February 6, 2015, http:​//www​.news​week.​com/f​gm-ra​tes-h​ave-d​ouble​d-us-​ 2004-​30477​3. 24 Jay Fisher and Anne Manning, BMA Blog, May 29, 2015, http:​//blo​g.art​bma.o​rg/20​ 15/05​/grap​pling​-with​-chal​lengi​ng-to​pics-​in-ar​t-mus​eums-​sande​-soci​ety-m​asks-​at-th​ e-bma​. 25 Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives, Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 4, 7–8. 26 Kristoffer Arvidsson, “När Konsten Inte Talar För Sig Själv: Konstmuseer Och Pedagogik = When Art Does Not Speak for Itself: Art Museums and Education,” Skiascope Konstpedagogik = Art Education, no. 4 (2011): 39, 70–1. 27 Ibid., 69. 28 Ruth B. Phillips, “Dancing the Mask, Potlatching the Exhibition: Performing Art and Culture in a Global Museum World,” THEMA: La revue des Musées de la civilisation 3 (2015): 19. 29 In a slideshow for the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Alldridge displayed the photograph included here as Figure 3. The meeting minutes noted the audience’s fascination: “The native customs of Poro and Bundu and the Bundu Devil, also the Tasso men, were extremely particular, the costumes being beyond imagination”; T. J. Alldridge, “Exhibition of Lantern Slides (Plates X to XIII),” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 29, nos. 1/2 (1899). 30 Boone, Radiance from the Waters, 163–5.

 Museums and the Missing Women of Sande 165 31 T. J. Alldridge, “Wanderings in the Hinterland of Sierra Leone,” Geographic Journal 4, no. 2 (August 1894): 135–6. 32 T. J. Alldridge, A Transformed Colony, Sierra Leone, as It Was, and as It Is: Its Progress, Peoples, Native Customs and Undeveloped Wealth (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1910), 223–4. 33 Harry Hamilton Johnston, Liberia, 2 vols. (London: Hutchinson, 1906), 2:1031. Firmin’s photograph was republished in T. J. Alldridge, “Sierra Leone,” in Customs of the World: A Popular Account of the Manners, Rites and Ceremonies of Men and Women in All Countries, ed. Walter Hutchinson (London: Hutchinson, 1913), 771. 34 Alldridge, “Sierra Leone,” 773. 35 Day, Gender and Power in Sierra Leone, 30. 36 Ibid., 30–1. 37 Alldridge, “Wanderings,” 135–6. 38 See ch. 3 of B. Hallen and J. O. Sodipo, Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy, Mestizo Spaces / Espaces Métissés Series (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 87–90. 39 Alldridge, “Wanderings,” 136. 40 Polly Savage, “Playing to the Gallery: Masks, Masquerade, and Museums,” African Arts 41, no. 4 (2008): 74. 41 Fred Wilson has made a career out of creating installations that expose colonial and exhibitionary violence. “Fred Wilson: Material Museology,” in Jennifer A. González, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 42 Ibid., 66. 43 Paul Basu, Email communication, June 30, 2017. 44 Ibid. 45 Alimatu Dimonekene was initiated in Sierra Leone when she was sixteen and has since become an activist for ending the practice. She called the mask at the British Museum a “Bando Devil.” Anna Davis, “British Museum Accused of ‘Celebrating’ FGM by Displaying Cutter’s Mask,” London Evening Standard, February 12, 2016. 46 Ibid. 47 “Masking the Truth at the B.M.A.” 48 Radha Rajkotia, “Dealing with ‘That Thing’: Female Circumcision and Sierra Leonean Refugee Girls in the UK,” in The Family in Question: Immigrant and Ethnic Minorities in Multicultural Europe, ed. Ralph Grillo (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008). 49 Appadurai as quoted in Savage, “Playing to the Gallery,” 79. 50 Sarian Kamara, a Sierra Leonean activist against genital alteration, cited in Davis, “British Museum Accused of ‘Celebrating’ FGM.” 51 Rajkotia, “Dealing with ‘That Thing.’” 52 Charles Garoian, “Performing the Museum,” Studies in Art Education 42, no. 3 (Spring 2001): 236. 53 Even those who oppose female genital modification acknowledge that Sande societies fulfill “a number of philosophical, economic, political, social, religious and educational functions in their communities”; Chi Mgbako et al., “Penetrating the Silence in Sierra Leone: A Blueprint for the Eradication of Female Genital Mutilation,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 23, no. 1 (2010): 118.

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Figure 12.1 (Cover) Joan Semmel, Transitions, 2012. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © 2019 Joan Semmel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Aging and Feminist Art Joan Semmel’s Visible Bodies Rachel Middleman

In concurrent exhibitions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and a New York gallery in the spring of 2013, artist Joan Semmel (b. 1932) confronted audiences with largescale canvases that unabashedly present her nude, aging body as the subject of figure painting.1 In Transitions (2012), she juxtaposes five images of herself, precariously positioned and unclothed, with varying light flesh tones and long gray hair clearly visible against a loosely painted field of bright oranges and greens (Figure 12.1). Denoting a series of source photographs taken in quick succession, the multiple bodies overlaying one another convey motion and fragmentation as the undulating lines of hips, elbows, thighs, and breasts flow through one another. The painting strikes the viewer immediately with the shock that comes from seeing the older nude female body presented with candid detail as the resolute subject of the work. In the face of evershifting critical opinions on the validity of figurative painting and of utilizing images of the female body toward feminist ends, Semmel recasts the female nude to make visible that which has not been deemed socially acceptable, or possible, in the public realm or in high art—the proposition of beauty in the naked old woman. Transitions is an example of Semmel’s recent work that approaches the tension between art history’s appreciation of an artist’s mature vision and its simultaneous rejection of the old bodies in which that vision is located. Since the early 1970s, the nude self-portrait has offered Semmel a highly personal and individual strategy for investigating female experience and challenging objectification within the broader feminist project of claiming rights to female agency and expression. Directly stated by the artist: “My intention was to present a confrontational view of the body rather than a voyeuristic one.”2 She has now developed a timely critique of contemporary cultural paradigms about aging, adapting her practice of revamping the genre of the nude through self-representation to address aging as a phenomenon that affects how one sees oneself and how one is seen by others. These “self-portraits” undermine what sociologist Julia Twigg has termed the “gaze of youth.”3 Considering “the general emphasis—if not obsession—in Western culture on the appearance of the body as the dominant signifier of old age,” the lack of critical

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attentiveness to the issue in contemporary art is surprising.4 Images of old bodies seem a particularly rich source for both shocking and socially conscious interventions in art. In the introduction to Art Journal’s 1994 issue on “Art and Old Age,” guest editor Robert Berlind called for renewed attention to older artists and remarked on the preference for young, attractive bodies in contemporary art and its reception, which “reflects society’s deep resistance to dealing with the reality of aging.”5 Despite this, Semmel and other feminist artists from her generation continued the practice of incorporating their bodies in artwork at every life stage, intentionally transgressing artistic and social norms. Semmel’s work, which vividly displays the aging female body, must be explored for what it demands of viewers in this contemporary culture that fetishizes youth and beauty, and provides a compelling case study for examining the impact of such images. Aging may very well be one of the last taboo subjects for visual art. Semmel spent most of her career in New York, where she attended art school and received her BFA (1963) and MFA (1972) from Pratt. After finishing her undergraduate degree, she moved to Spain where she lived until 1970. While abroad, she created and exhibited paintings in an abstract expressionist style; however, upon her arrival back in New York, in the midst of the women’s liberation movement, she found that method no longer spoke to her current experience.6 Abandoning strictly abstract compositions, she created her “Sex Paintings” (1971), large-scale paintings of male/female couples engaged in sexual activity as a feminist response to the plethora of sexual imagery in American visual culture, in particular that which she saw on newsstands. While Semmel’s brushstrokes were quite gestural in this first series, in her “Erotic Series” (1972–3) she distinctly referenced photographs, using smoothly painted surfaces and drastic foreshortening. In Erotic Yellow (1973), Semmel composed the image using deep horizontal perspective, showing the nude bodies stretched out before the viewer, their heads obscured by their embrace toward the top of the canvas. The gendered bodies are rendered in contrasting, saturated pink and green, drawing attention to their intertwined flesh through the unnatural coloring of the male and female nudes. Semmel painted from photographs, yet her source material was not culled from mass culture but from pictures taken (with permission) by the artist of her models in the midst of sexual activity.7 Her erotic work is a feminist envisioning of mutual and equitable heterosexual encounters, representing sexual experience between partners in which neither figure is singled out as the object of desire. Semmel made these explicit paintings when such subject matter was considered scandalous, especially for women, and in spite of the overwhelming rejection of figuration that still permeated art criticism.8 Perhaps their being too radical for their time, she was unable to find a gallery in New York that would show the works, so she rented a space and exhibited the paintings herself in May of 1973. She had recently become a founding member of the Fight Censorship Group, an advocacy group for sexual art made by women, conceived by artist Anita Steckel and formalized with the group’s first meeting in March of 1973.9 In an essay published in 1980, Semmel and co-author April Kingsley wrote about the ways women’s sexual art was changing the visual language of eroticism. Much of

 Aging and Feminist Art 169 the contemporary sexual art made by men, despite its stylistic innovations, merely reinforced the status quo: Significantly, erotic work by contemporary men often celebrates the same attitudes found in the girly magazines, albeit with considerably more style and class. Artists such as Tom Wesselman [sic], Richard Lindner, Mel Ramos, and John Kacere purposely adopt the slick, brassy look of the pop vernacular and conscious pornographic iconography, skillfully referring us back to other contexts. This referral to a realm of experience thought to be antithetical to “sacred” art is characteristic of Pop art in general. However, in the case of erotic imagery the evocation of the pop culture tends to absolve the artist of any responsibility for the content and its implications.10

Art critics agreed that Semmel’s approach to the nude was different from that of male artists. In 1975, a review in Arts Magazine distinguished her from male photorealists for what the critic perceived as her greater personal involvement with the subject matter, and, in 1977, a critic for the Feminist Art Journal wrote that compared to Philip Pearlstein’s realist nudes, Semmel’s paintings are “warmer and more intimate.”11 In a recent interview, Semmel related her erotic art from the 1970s to her artistic goals and stage of life at the time: “I wanted to use the figure in a way that was totally contemporary and not academic. I was young, and sexuality was very important to me, so it was natural for me to choose an erotic theme.”12 Her concern with the erotic was one that pervaded her activities in the 1970s—her early figurative paintings, her involvement with the Fight Censorship Group, and her writing.13 In light of the fact that Semmel’s explicitly sexual images marked the beginning of her sustained work with the figure and because of the similarities with which she continued to compose her pictures—highly cropped viewpoints, unusual angles—they provide a foundation from which to explore the sexualized nature of her subsequent work, in which the sexual partner disappeared, leaving the solo female figure, and, in her most recent series, multiple images of the same body. After completing the “Erotic Series,” Semmel turned her gaze to her own body in works such as Me without Mirrors (1974) from the “Self-Image” series (Figure 12.2). In the painting, Semmel sits in an awkward though everyday pose, holding her left leg bent over her lap so that she can lean over and wipe her foot with a pink cloth. We are allowed to survey her body as if looking down from her perspective, which is quite different from a traditional artist’s self-portrait in which the eyes meet the viewer’s. Her lap forms the central point of the composition with her arms rising vertically from the bottom edge of the canvas to grasp her leg and foot toward the top. In the middle of the picture, her breasts point upward toward a triangular void created by the bending of one knee. Seeing the body through the artist’s first-person point of view, with the aid of a camera rather than a mirror, the image is at once more intimate and incomplete than a more typical self-portrait. Parts of the body are necessarily excluded from the image to create the illusion of looking directly through the artist’s eyes. The painting suggests her subjective glance in a convincing way, first and foremost because it does not rely on the convention of the mirror reflection.

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Figure 12.2 Joan Semmel, Me without Mirrors, 1974. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © 2019 Joan Semmel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. The image of Semmel’s individualized body in her early forties shows smooth white skin, firm breasts, and long brown hair. However, the distorted perspective from which we see the figure exaggerates its topography and the physical awkwardness of bunched up skin and strained muscles. Her painting style—smooth brushstrokes, realist detail, and foreshortening—adds to this effect. The fact that the body cannot be seen whole or contained completely within the frame of the canvas contributes to the photographic aspect of the image and its presumed realism, for there is always more to see beyond our field of vision. Semmel speaks about this aspect of fragmentation in her work as an attempt to forgo narrative and capture immediate experience: I was always wary of the head because of the romantic connotations that come with the expressions of the face—because facial expressions tell a story. . . . I was interested in representing the body as a way of experiencing oneself—that a woman should be able to experience her own body through her own eyes and through her own feelings rather than through the feelings that have been seen in art and popular culture all along.14

By constructing a first-person point of view, Semmel communicates the concept of the direct experience of oneself, through feeling, before this experience can be externalized, objectified, and understood.

 Aging and Feminist Art 171 Considering postmodern and feminist critiques of the history of modernist painting, as well as feminist deconstructions of images of women in the history of art, analysis of Semmel’s work demonstrates her skillful manipulation of representation to subvert painting’s norms, solidified by patriarchy, that have relegated women to the status of objects. In a foundational reappraisal of the female nude in the Western tradition as a practice of containment and control, art historian Lynda Nead proposed: The female nude has been the focus of a certain idealist aesthetic of wholeness and containment and whilst the female body has indeed been the object of relentless display within this framework, it has at the same time rendered certain bodies invisible within the defining boundaries of art. Women whose bodies do not conform to the ideal are beyond the field of vision, and the right to self-definition in these cases may mean an insistence on the right to make and be visible.15

Art historians have investigated aspects of Semmel’s “Self-Image” paintings that undermine idealized nude through the use of her own body. In The Art of Reflection, Marsha Meskimmon enumerates the ways Me without Mirrors radicalizes the traditions of both the female nude and self-portraiture: offering a particular yet incomplete image of the body, blurring the division between artist and model, and rejecting tropes of female vanity (i.e., bathing scenes, women holding mirrors in the boudoir). Meskimmon interprets the absence of the mirror through feminist theory and offers a multifaceted reading of Semmel’s early provocations to “masculine traditions” in art and representation more broadly.16 In The Nude in American Painting, 1950–1980, David McCarthy turns to the contemporary influence of feminist activism as well as such writers as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Herbert Marcuse who provided models for rejecting Kantian divisions between aesthetic experience and the body and were instrumental in creating the broader cultural context in which Semmel’s paintings communicated embodied sensuous experience. In doing so, McCarthy argues, her work protests the “myth of the nude,” breaking its male-authored conventions: “She destabilized the male voyeurism inherent in traditional paintings of the female nude by forcing the spectator to consider the possibility of perceiving himself as the object of vision. She countered the convention of woman as sight, cogently arguing that a feminine erotics was based on touch.”17 Semmel subverted aesthetic norms by putting the male viewer in the position of object, while, at the same time, she complicated such divisions by creating a representation of a subject’s erotic experience cast from within a physical body. Works like Foreground Hand (1977) evoke this physicality through the angle of the reclining nude figure taking over the space of the picture and a hand gently placed on the smooth inner thigh (Figure 12.3). Joan Marter likewise posited that Semmel’s nudes “co-opted the male gaze” of art and consumer culture by representing a femalecentered experience of “sensual gratification through self-exploration.”18 Since the 1970s, Semmel has continued to use her own image and, in the 2000s, returned to her nude body as the focus of her compositions. In the face of social and cultural taboos against the visibility of the aging female form, Semmel depicts an older

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Figure 12.3  Joan Semmel, Foreground Hand, 1977. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © 2019 Joan Semmel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. woman’s body with the same unabashed realism of her earlier series. In Recline (2005) from her “With Camera” series (2001–6), the recumbent nude is cropped in a dramatic close-up view from thigh to shoulder and fills most of the canvas (Figure 12.4). We find a multiplicity of subtle colors in her skin, in the cumbersome breasts, and in the wrinkles forming around her chest and arms. She communicates the pliability and temperature of flesh. At the upper left corner, instead of the artist’s face, we see her hand holding a camera with its lens pointed toward us. Unlike her earlier compositions that created the illusion of Semmel’s point of view, the inclusion of the camera in Recline forthrightly shows that she offers her viewers constructed self-portraits using technological devices (in this case both the camera and the mirror) that produce their own visions of reality. Recounting a studio visit, art historian Richard Meyer noted the lack of correspondence between the old women portrayed in her paintings and the artist, observing that the “self-portraits conjured a material form—a body in and of paint—that was fundamentally incommensurate with the woman with whom I was speaking.”19 In his essay, “‘Not Me’: Joan Semmel’s Body of Painting,” Meyer adapts this experience of dis-identification as a concept with which to reexamine her practice against the predominant interpretation that her selfportraits are “truthful transcriptions of (her own) female embodiment.”20 Instead, Meyer points to the gaps between what she would see firsthand and what she presents on the canvas: “The isolated left hand and corner-right wedge of flesh in Foreground

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Figure 12.4  Joan Semmel, Recline, 2005. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © 2019 Joan Semmel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (See Plate 13). Hand, for example, challenge our ability to make the painted figure cohere.” This brings him to her source photographs which further reveal her technical manipulations. His analysis challenges the notion that Semmel’s work is autobiographical in a direct sense, opposing many previous critics who have assumed that “the viewpoints of the artist and the observer are identical.”21 Following this concept that Semmel’s work constructs a viewpoint that (falsely) mimics the artist’s—exposing the constructed nature of what we think we see—her work suggests how spectators might experience their own bodily “imperfections.” In Foreground Hand the body is so vast and heavily cropped within the edges of the canvas that it transforms into a hilly landscape of flesh. This distortion calls to mind body dysmorphic disorder, in which one’s perceived bodily flaws are blown out of proportion and become the object of obsession. A less pathologized reading might consider the ways in which images of our bodies do not align with our experiences of and through them.22 There is a reason we need mirrors—to convince ourselves that what we seen in them, our outward appearance as we want to present it, is what others will see as well. The more literal reference to the camera and mirror recalls her “Locker-Room” series (1988–91) in which she first explored aging. These compositions are derived

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from photographs she took of women going about their everyday routines in the shared space of a gym’s locker room. In some paintings, Semmel’s reflection appears in a mirror, seemingly inadvertently, as she takes the photograph that would become the source for the painting. Nude or partially clothed, she is part of the complex environment she depicts. Rather than editing herself out of the painting, Semmel left the evidence of her active, embodied, and particularized looking as an older female artist. The painterly brushstrokes in Semmel’s recent work conjure up ideas about artists’ late work or “old-age style” often defined by a less rigid technical approach and, in some cases, affected by physical decline.23 The multiple images on the same canvas create a sense of movement, emphasizing this old body as an active, living presence. Such blanket categorizations as “late style” are outmoded in current art historical practice, which rejects the concept of style based on individual biography; however, there is ripe new territory to explore in representation of the tensions between social construction and the reality of the individual, physical body in the discourse about aging. Karen Painter writes in “On Creativity and Lateness,” her introduction to Late Thoughts: The relationship between biography and artistic creation may be clearer in late works than in any other phase of life, and the self-exploration that is often prompted by the confrontation of genius with old age or fatal illness can be as deeply human as it is self-referential. We prize artistic production that seems to sum up the accumulated experience of life in a mature aesthetic vision: works of art that pose questions of mortality and existential meaning speak to each of us. Late thoughts do not necessarily conform, however, to the expectations that have developed around the myth of late style.24

The assumption that the connection with biography is stronger in late work, if nothing else, shows that this connection has been more acceptable at the end of an artist’s career. In earlier stages, the artist would presumably be occupied with the problems of art, and it is only later in life that they may tackle the human theme of old age and death. In Semmel’s case, the looser brushwork in some of her later paintings are the result of blurred source photographs, a conscious choice by the artist in constructing her composition rather than an index of her physical state. This demonstrates what Painter describes as a mature aesthetic vision that speaks of mortality without resorting to “myths of late style.” There is widespread acknowledgment that the aging baby boom generation has played a part in the increased visibility of people past retirement age in today’s visual culture. There are clear commercial reasons for the swell of images of older people in the media as this demographic increasingly constitutes a larger portion of the consumer population. However, sociologists have examined the ways that the elderly are interpellated as subjects, with particular attention to prescriptive notions regarding their behavior and patterns of consumption based on a middle-age model of “quality of life”:25 Successful aging requires maintenance of the activities popular among the middleaged privileged with money and leisure time. Thus, staying fit, or at least appearing

 Aging and Feminist Art 175 fit, is highly valued social capital. In this sense, successful aging means not aging, not being “old” or, at the very least, not looking old. The body has become central to identity and to aging, and the maintenance of its youthful appearance has become a lifelong project that requires increasing levels of work.26

In addition, judgments are made based on outward appearance: “people assume that health is self evident, appearing on the surface of a body . . . we believe that people have control over their bodies and their health, through such means as diet or exercise regimens, by being ‘active,’ or by consuming appropriate lifestyles.”27 The bias toward middle-age ideals in the anti-aging advertising industry is also reflected in scholarship on aging, and some researchers have advocated the need for self-awareness of these biases when the investigator/scholar is younger than her subjects. [I am in my forties— how are my own constructs of aging bearing on my research of second-wave feminist artists who are in their eighties?] Our society differentiates and then privileges certain age groups, establishing and institutionalizing unequal power relationships among them.28 In the relatively limited literature on the subject of aging and visual art, there is some attention to the issue of gender as the social status of old women is recognized to be different from men’s. The second-wave feminist movement tended to focus on equality for women in the reproductive phase of life while overlooking issues relevant to older women (of course, the movement has also been criticized for ignoring those who were not middle-class, white, and heterosexual).29 At least since the 1980s, feminist scholars have brought attention to this bias in their fields and begun to draw focus onto issues relating specifically to old women.30 In her article entitled “Performing Age, Performing Gender,” Kathleen Woodward, who has published extensively on aging and culture, identified “feminist aging” as an alternative form of representation of old age found in the work of artists Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Rosenthal, and Nettie Harris. Woodward highlights performances by these artists (in live performance, photography, or video) in which the artists are not “passing for younger” and, instead, confront the ways the aging body is performed in visual mass culture.31 In the special “Art and Old Age” issue of Art Journal, artist and writer Joanna Frueh contributed an article titled “The Erotic as Social Security” proposing the erotic (and erotic art) as an essential source of vitality for women in old age. Since her concept of “erotic-for-women” involves autoeroticism and self-exhibition, she often illustrates her point with work made by women that depicts the nude flesh of older female bodies. Frueh writes: “The tactility of visual erotic-for-women bears a relation to the diversification and complexity of a woman’s bodily pleasure.” She cites Joan Semmel, Carolee Schneemann, and Hannah Wilke, among others, who “deserve recognition for their origination of a feminist erotics and their charting, over decades, of female pleasure.”32 Indeed, their work challenged perceptions about the erotic as a category historically defined by male artists and viewers, even as they reached middle age and beyond. For example, in Interior Scroll—The Cave (1995, video), eight nude women and Schneemann enact a ritualized re-performance of her earlier, iconic Interior Scroll (1975, 1977) performance that transformed the female nude into a speaking subject.

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In Wilke’s case, her body affected by cancer and its medical treatment in a series of performative nude photographs from Intra-Venus (1991–2), made before her death in 1993, forced critics to reevaluate her earlier work. The exhibition of this series in 1994 pointedly countered the criticism that her previous use of her conventionally beautiful (young, fit) body had trivialized her art practice.33 (Certainly, the sick body is different from the elderly body, although American media and advertising often conflate the two.) Some twenty-five years after these interventions in the 1990s, Semmel’s paintings address another stage of old age through a body now more than eighty years old. Her paintings propose an alternative to the visual culture we experience daily in the bombardment of advertisements offering consumers ways to improve their appearance with direct and indirect implications that this goes hand in hand with looking younger. Reminding us of the inevitability of growing older and further from idealized beauty, these images may spark anxieties that lead to the purchasing of products that cannot possibly fix the “problem” of aging and merely reinforce ageism. It is these assumptions and social constructions that build a context in which Semmel’s sensuous paintings of a nude, older woman become oppositional. Semmel no longer needs to construct the first-person viewpoint, however, as the old woman’s nude body provides the sense of dislocation and shock for both artist and viewer. In Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Coming of Age, she described the disconnect experienced between aging and identity: “Thinking of myself as an old person when I am twenty or forty means thinking of myself as someone else, as another than myself. . . . Until the moment it is upon us old age is something that only affects other people.”34 Since we cannot not clearly recognize aging in ourselves, “it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside—from others.”35 Woodward proposed a related notion of an inverse “mirror stage in old age,” in which “what is whole is felt to reside within, not without, the subject.”36 Old age must be seen through the other’s eyes, or the mirror, and then reflected as an image back to the subject. Semmel’s paintings are more than their image, certainly, and I would like to return to the concept of “touch” as a crucial aspect of her work. Frueh’s perception of erotic tactility and McCarthy’s phenomenological account of touch in Semmel’s paintings speak to notions of both a sensuous embodiment and a polymorphous eroticism represented visually through her compositions. These analyses address how her work critiques the ways that women have been represented in visual culture, but can this concept of touch also bear directly on the medium she chooses? Painting might strike one as a paradoxical choice for subverting the ocularcentrism in the history of art. Semmel has never denied the photographic sources for her works and makes direct reference to the act of taking pictures and the plurality of the medium in some of her most important series. And, yet, she translates these images into paintings that bring with them a myriad of associations to the medium’s history, including its problematic notions of touch—“the artist’s touch” as an indexical marker of the artist’s hand and a haptic quality that is experienced through the eyes. Flesh Ground (2016) explores this by coaxing the eye to trace the deep pink outline of one figure as it overlays another (Figure 12.5). Tracing her gestural lines one cannot help traversing the two registers—

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Figure 12.5  Joan Semmel, Flesh Ground, 2016. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © 2019 Joan Semmel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (See Plate 14). we at once imagine the feel of rippled skin and appreciate the materiality of the paint seen in the brushstrokes and bleeds of color. Semmel’s play with realism and abstraction in her figure paintings draws an inextricable link to a history of the idealized nude in art, a category that has always been caught up with the erotic, where sensuality threatens to undermine the autonomous status of the art object.37 In light of her earlier work that spoke to the objectification of women in art and popular culture through the reappropriation of the female nude, her recent work forges new territory in violating and exposing implicit social and aesthetic codes that remain regarding the genre. Linda Nochlin has examined the “realist body and its relation to—or more often, rejection of—conventional beauty,” to cite just one particularly germane point supported by her significant scholarship on realism.38 Semmel’s paintings of an old woman perform this kind of rejection because of the subject matter in the image and its transgression of a residual aesthetics of painting that desires the ideal. In Transformations (2011), Semmel presents for scrupulous examination a visual, sensual experience of the ways that older flesh behaves (Figure 12.6). She counters

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Figure 12.6  Joan Semmel, Transformations, 2011. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © 2019 Joan Semmel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. the current social reality that women grow invisible, sexually and otherwise, with age, by offering a complex image that keeps us looking intently. In the painting, the nude artist is shown in overlaying images of the body, presented frontally from head to thigh. Working through the colorful, textured paint, one can attempt to decipher two distinct figures—one represented in yellower tones, the other in pinker—

 Aging and Feminist Art 179 however, the curvilinear forms continuously relock together like puzzle pieces. In the “transformation” from one figure into the next, there is also a startling juxtaposition between the expression and gestures of the two. One figure seems to lean back with a hand placed behind her head and looking down toward the viewer, perhaps referencing a familiar nude model pose. The second figure leans forward, both hands on her head and looking at the viewer with one piercing blue eye. In both Transformations and Transitions, multiple images of the same body imply movement and change, as the titles suggest. These bodies refuse to stay fixed in one place, actively antagonistic toward the inevitable outcome of age: death. Semmel’s series speaks to a woman’s experience of shock when realizing that she appears old to others, no longer seen as a sexual being because of her age. She acknowledges her coming to terms with losing her outward, social identity as an attractive woman, and, as a heterosexual woman, she is candid about the fact that she experienced this realization by no longer drawing attention from men.39 I am not implying that there is a desire to be objectified but, rather, a desire to be recognized as a subject that persists. In the struggle between visibility and invisibility—wanting to be seen by others as well as herself—perhaps “one has to understand beauty in a different way” as one ages.40 She challenges herself, as much as anyone else, to see beauty in a body that no longer fits established conventions for that category. Working from personal experience, Semmel is yet again creating work that raises broader questions about discrimination and incites reexamination of the ideologies of aging in contemporary American culture. In Semmel’s large canvases, the old woman’s body is suspended in visibility—within the dynamic of social construction and physical materiality—layered, amplified, and multiplied through the medium of paint. She is doubly exposed, as an aging artist and model. In relation to her career-long practice of overturning and redefining the nude and the self-portrait in feminist terms, Semmel’s pictures of the aging artist demand to be recognized for their cultural criticisms while they also offer an alternative—a provocation to find pleasure in images of the old.

Notes 1 Joan Semmel: A Lucid Eye (New York: Bronx Museum of the Arts, January 24–June 9, 2013) and Joan Semmel (New York: Alexander Gray Associates, April 17–May 25, 2013). 2 Joan Semmel, “Dialogue with Don Goddard,” in Joan Semmel: Continuities, exh. cat. (East Hampton: Guild Hall, 1998), 10. 3 Julia Twigg, “The Body, Gender, and Age: Feminist Insights in Social Gerontology,” Journal of Aging Studies 18 (2004): 65. 4 Kathleen Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 10. Exceptions include these publications on contemporary art and old age: Art Journal 53, no. 1, “Art and Old Age” (Spring 1994); Anca Cristofovici, “Touching

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Surfaces: Photography, Aging, and an Aesthetics of Change,” in Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, ed. Kathleen Woodward (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 268–93; Linnea S. Dietrich, “Aging and Contemporary Art,” Journal of Aging and Identity 1, no. 4 (1996): 251–61; Joanna Frueh, “Visible Difference: Women Artists and Aging,” in New Feminist Art Criticism: Art, Identity, Action, ed. Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer, and Arlene Raven (HarperCollins, 1994), 264–88; Michelle Meagher, “Against the Invisibility of Old Age: Cindy Sherman, Suzy Lake, and Martha Wilson,” Feminist Studies 40, no. 1 (2014): 101–43; Marcia Tucker with Anne Ellegood, The Time of Our Lives (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999); Lilly Wei, “The Body in Winter,” Art News 111, no. 5 (May 2012): 90–5. 5 Berlind, “Art and Old Age,” 19. 6 Ellen Lubell, “Joan Semmel: Interview,” Womanart (Winter 1977–8): 14–21, 29. Also see Joan Semmel, “A Necessary Elaboration,” in Joan Semmel: Across Five Decades (New York: Alexander Gray Associates, 2015), 3–9. 7 Joan Marter, “Joan Semmel’s Nudes: The Erotic Self and the Masquerade,” Woman’s Art Journal 16, no. 2 (Autumn 1995–Winter 1996): 25. 8 On erotic art and feminism, see Rachel Middleman, Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2018). 9 Artists in attendance were Louise Bourgeois, Martha Edelheit, Eunice Golden, Juanita McNeely, Semmel, and Hannah Wilke. Semmel was active in other groups including Women in the Arts and the Ad Hoc Women’s Artists Committee. On the Fight Censorship Group, see Richard Meyer, “Hard Targets: Male Bodies, Feminist Art, and the Force of Censorship in the 1970s,” in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, ed. Cornelia Butler (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007), 362–83. 10 Joan Semmel and April Kingsley, “Sexual Imagery in Women’s Art,” Woman’s Art Journal 1, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1980): 1. 11 Judith Tannenbaum, “Joan Semmel,” Arts Magazine 50, no. 2 (October 1975): 7; Holly O’Grady, “Joan Semmel,” Feminist Art Journal 6, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 47. 12 “An Interview with Joan Semmel,” in Joan Semmel: A Lucid Eye, exh. pamphlet (Bronx: Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2013), n.p. 13 Semmel compiled a substantial selection of images of women’s sexual art, along with critical texts by authors including Lucy Lippard and Carol Duncan, in a manuscript titled “A New Eros” that was never published. 14 “Interview with Joan Semmel,” n.p. 15 Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), 60. 16 Marsha Meskimmon, The Art of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century (New York: University of Columbia Press, 1996), 4–5. 17 David McCarthy, The Nude in American Painting, 1950–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 182. 18 Marter, “Joan Semmel’s Nudes,” 25. 19 Richard Meyer, “‘Not Me’: Joan Semmel’s Body of Painting,” in Solitaire: Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Joan Semmel, ed. Helen Molesworth (Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2008), 111. 20 Ibid., 112.

 Aging and Feminist Art 181 21 Tannenbaum, “Joan Semmel,” 7. 22 For discussion of research on the contradictions of images and bodily experiences, see Peter Öberg, “Images Versus Experience of the Aging Body,” in Aging Bodies: Images and Everyday Experience, ed. Christopher A. Faircloth (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2003), 103–39. 23 For critical discussion and historiography of “late style,” see Art Journal 46, no. 2, “Old-Age Style” (Summer 1987); Ann Gibson, “Living with the Past” and Selma Holo, “The Myth of the Old Age Style,” in Stuart Shedletsky, Still Working: Underknown Artists of Age in America (New York: Parsons School of Design, 1994), 82–90, 168–74. 24 Karen Painter, “On Creativity and Lateness,” in Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work, ed. Painter and Thomas E. Crow (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006), 1. 25 For analysis of ageism in anti-aging ads, see Toni Calasanti, “Bodacious Berry, Potency Wood and the Aging Monster: Gender and Age Relations in Anti-Aging Ads,” Social Forces 86, no. 1 (September 2007): 335–55. For a review of feminist literature on the cultural construction of the body in old age, see Twigg, “Body, Gender, and Age,” 59–73. 26 Toni Calasanti, Kathleen F. Slevin, and Neal King, “Ageism and Feminism: From ‘Et Cetera’ to Center,” NWSA Journal 18, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 15. 27 Calasanti, “Bodacious Berry,” 338. 28 Ibid., 336. 29 Exceptions are these early influential publications: Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: Norton, 1996, first American edition 1972) and Susan Sontag, “The Double Standard of Aging,” The Saturday Review (September 23, 1972): 29–38. 30 Diane Gibson, “Broken Down by Age and Gender: ‘The Problem of Old Women’ Redefined,” Gender and Society 10, no. 4 (August 1996): 433–48. On the lack of attention to old women in women’s studies, see Calasanti, Slevin, and King, “Ageism and Feminism,” 13–30. 31 Kathleen Woodward, “Performing Age, Performing Gender,” NWSA Journal 18, no. 1 (Spring 2006), 167. Michelle Meagher provides further feminist analysis of cultural visibility and artists’ self-representation in photography in “Against the Invisibility of Old Age.” 32 Joanna Frueh, “The Erotic as Social Security,” Art Journal 53, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 68, 66. She defines “old(er)” as over fifty years of age, postmenopausal, and on Social Security. 33 Amelia Jones, “Intra-Venus and Hannah Wilke’s Feminist Narcissism,” in IntraVenus, exh. cat. (New York: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, 1995), 4–13. 34 de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, 5. 35 Ibid., 288. 36 Woodward, Aging, 67. 37 Nead, The Female Nude, 5–16. 38 Linda Nochlin, “Real Beauty: The Body in Realism,” in Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 199. 39 Interview with author, New York, October 20, 2011. 40 Ibid.

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Figure 13.1 Miwa Yanagi, My Grandmothers: Mika, 2001. Chromogenic print. Courtesy the artist (See Plate 15).

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Darkness of Girlhood and Lightness of Aging Miwa Yanagi’s Transcendental Old Women Midori Yoshimoto

Grandmas are free. There is an expectation in this world that women have to be young and beautiful. But grandmas are liberated from such an obsession. That’s why these women willingly become old maids.1 Miwa Yanagi

Introduction Aging is one of the most palpable and challenging issues in Japanese society today. After a brief post–Second World War baby boom (1945–7), fertility rates dropped while life expectancy at birth rose to be the highest in the world: 86.8 for women and 80.5 for men.2 By 2030, one in every three people will be over sixty-five years old and one in five people will be over seventy-five.3 Women are typically expected to outlive men, and “old women” will be more ubiquitous than ever in Japan, in the coming years. As national concern for the rapidly aging population has increased, the media has been frequently covering the related social issues, such as, senior health and mental care, senior employment, and diminishing pensions. In terms of art, there has been scarce attention paid to the subject of aging. An exception was an exhibition, entitled Growing Old: The Forms and Aesthetics of Aging, organized by Fukushima Museum in 2005.4 It charted traditional Japanese depictions of aged subjects, the majority of whom were male, as high monks and hermits. Elderly women appeared only as a yamauba (Dame of Mountain, or a monstrous crone with cannibalistic tendencies), or as part of the couple who were personifications of old pine trees and symbols of longevity in a Noh play, Takasago.5 For contemporary art, the exhibition presented just a handful of artists. Among them were Miyako Ishiuchi’s photographic series featuring aged lingerie belonging to her late mother, Susumu Kinoshita’s realistic oversized drawings of old women and details of their wrinkled hands, and Tatsumi Orimoto’s photographic series Art Mama, which documented the everyday life of his mother, who has dementia.6 In contrast to these artists, who picked

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the theme of aging for just one or a few series in their work, Miwa Yanagi, who was also included in the exhibition, has persistently portrayed old women since the turn of the millennium. In the 1990s, Yanagi became known for a series of vivid color photographs which constructed fictitious worlds inhabited by young women clad in uniform, the so-called, “elevator girls.” By 2000, she had shifted her central subject matter to old women. Calling Japan a “big grandma nation,” Yanagi recognizes that older women are influencing lifestyle and culture more and more. On the other hand, the young-girl worship persisting in Japanese subculture presents a contradiction in which these two extremes coexist. Recognizing this situation, Yanagi turned it into an underlying theme in her work.7 This article explores Yanagi’s attempts to subvert the societal expectations for women through her imaginative photographic and theatrical productions.

Dichotomous and Circular Womanhood: Young and Old One of the most notable aspects of Yanagi’s work, since the turn of the millennium, is that she often juxtaposed the old and the young. At times, a single subject is made to look both young and old, while at others, two figures are presented together. They can be seen as representing two sides of the same coin and may remind us of the Roman god Janus, who encompasses duality—presiding over the beginning and ending of conflict, looking both to the future and into the past. Yanagi’s most renowned series of photographs entitled My Grandmothers (1999– ongoing) visualized the imagined futures of twenty-six sitters (as of 2009), many of them being women in their twenties (with the exception of a few men and an elevenyear-old girl). Thus, youth and age coexist in these images. The project began with extensive interviews of her models, during which Yanagi asked them how they imagined themselves to be in fifty years. Then, the sitters would be transformed through special makeup, wigs, costumes, and digital manipulations, into their own versions of “grandmothers,” and photographed in the various situations and environments they envisioned.8 Each of the photographs enacts the fantasies of the models, which are also narrated in their statements, exhibited alongside. Yanagi considers this a life work and intends to continue it “forever, like Sazae-san,” which is the longest-lived anime series of a family drama, revolving around a middle-aged housewife, which was based on a manga dating back to 1946.9 Curiously, many of these photographs present apocalyptic scenarios in which the protagonist’s “grandmother” has outlived others and is reflecting on her tumultuous past, or looking to a solitary future, while sending a message of hope to younger children. MIE, the first work completed in this decade-long endeavor, depicts an old woman with a hunched back, quietly seated with her hands clasped, as in prayer. The enormous modernist concrete building in the background almost dwarfs her, as does the water-filled earth in the distance. The accompanying statement, however, reveals that she is one of the seers, a shepherd of the human race, who has survived many disasters and wars, and is resigned to witnessing the extinction of the last survivors.

 Darkness of Girlhood and Lightness of Aging 185 MIKA (Figure 13.1) is dressed in a white kimono and shawl, and stands atop a rock protruding into the dark ocean. She also appears to be a shaman or spiritual leader to the younger women surrounding her in their red bikinis, which may symbolize that they are still fertile and undergo their menses. According to the text which accompanies the photograph, the leader is conveying a wish that they will give birth to a new generation. Inspiration for this may come from the old Japanese myth of nyōgogashima, an island in which only women reside, and another myth of Yaobikuni (or Happyakubikuni), a nun who has lived over 800 years by accidentally eating the meat of a mermaid.10 Like these examples, Yanagi’s “grandmothers” are transcendental and ethereal. These grandmothers Are the vision that, in youth’s ascent up life’s steep and rocky path, Reaching at last the clear, broad vista, the sea of clouds, like the dwelling of the immortals, Was, though constantly shifting and changing, Glimpsed, if only for a moment.11

As expressed in her poem, Yanagi envisions her “grandmothers” among the immortal beings that have overcome life’s challenges and can transcend time and space. In the interviews, Yanagi has expressed her self-identification with older women, wanting to age quickly and reach the transcendental stage.12 This is partly due to her upbringing, in which her grandmother provided as strong an influence on her as her mother. It also has to do with the fact that Yanagi has held a disdain for women of her own age, middle-aged women, as being “children in adult bodies,” and wished to “skip that period of life and go directly to old age.”13 Referencing the motif of the Four Ages of Man in Western art—Childhood, Youth, Maturity, and Old Age—the curator David Elliott has pointed out that Yanagi turns it completely on its head, saying that middle age, which is usually considered as maturity and establishment, has been a void in her work.14 By associating old age with enlightenment, middle age becomes a type of black hole of little or no value. This may be because her mother was not a great role model and in an interview, Yanagi identified her as a typical housewife who focuses her life on her children and husband, criticizing that she has become “incapable of going somewhere alone or thinking independently.”15 Furthermore, Yanagi’s generation (b. 1967) and younger women barely experienced the positive effects of the economic boom of the 1980s, and had to live in the seemingly never-ending era of depression which followed, interspersed by natural disasters such as the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake. Considering that Yanagi is currently living through her mid-life years, perhaps they are too raw to translate into art, or she may need the perspective that time away from a situation would allow for. The pairing of age and youth, as well as their renditions in an apocalyptic setting, partly derives from the post–1945 Japanese subculture represented in manga and anime. As the artist admitted, Yanagi and many subjects of My Grandmothers grew up watching the animated works of Hayao Miyazaki, which have often represented a

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world ravaged by human-caused disasters, viewed through the eyes of a resilient female protagonist.16 In MIWA, the only self-portrait in the series, Yanagi borrows the iconic and mysterious character Maetel, from the sci-fi anime classic Galaxy Express 999 by Leiji Matsumoto. This epic saga of a locomotive train which travels through the universe features an ageless blonde who reveals herself to be the daughter of Prometheum, the controller of the Machine Empire. It is also suggested that she can live forever because she is a machine and Prometheum has ordered her to recruit young people who are interested in obtaining a machine body. Rather than preserving Maetel’s youthful look, Yanagi constructs a wrinkled visage with special makeup, one hand holding a black umbrella as a cane, with a hunchback. Here, the ever-beautiful heroine has been transformed into a wizened crone who has numerous offspring throughout the world to visit.17 Even though she is nearing the end of her life, her DNA will be carried on by these children and the circular continuation of life is suggested. Yanagi has stated that she views a linear progression of time as frightening—as opposed to a circular notion of time as being truer to actual life.18 Thus two types of immortality are juxtaposed: on the one hand denying time and maintaining eternal youth, and on the other hand, the continuation of the self through one’s progeny. Yanagi expressed this perspective on circular life/time by creating a series of videos, Granddaughters, to form a conceptual pair with My Grandmothers in 2002. A few years later, she projected the videos in parallel onto a circular screen at the Sainte Marie-Madeleine Church in France. These videos feature women from France, Japan, and the United States in their seventies to nineties recollecting their memories of their grandmothers. In doing so, they “naturally slip back to the time when they were granddaughters themselves.”19 The voices of these women were replaced with those of unrelated young girls who were around the same age as when these elderly women were recalling themselves as granddaughters. This work speaks to both the fragility and resilience of memories. Although some of their accounts might have been previously forgotten and reconstructed in the course of their lives, little girls continue to live inside these now elderly subjects. According to the Alzheimer’s Association’s 2014 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures report, a “woman’s estimated lifetime risk of developing Alzheimer’s at age 65 is 1 in 6, compared to 1 in 11 for a man.”20 Women with Alzheimer’s tend to return to their childhood memories and relive themselves as young girls during the final years of their lives. That is another reason why Yanagi has come to focus on these two periods of women’s lives. In both the presentation format and content, Granddaughters embodies the circular reciprocity between youth and age and demonstrates how these two stages of life are closely interconnected.

Darkness of Girlhood and Lightness of Aging The transcendent and omnipotent image of old women emphasized in My Grandmothers seems to be undermined in Yanagi’s next series, Fairy Tale. This new body of work was presented along with the preceding My Grandmothers and Granddaughters at her

 Darkness of Girlhood and Lightness of Aging 187 2004 solo exhibition entitled Shōjo jigoku gokuraku rōjo, literally meaning “girls’ hell and old women’s heaven.” Instead of being directly translated, the English title provided on the exhibition catalog was “Darkness of Girlhood and Lightness of Aging.”21 In Fairy Tale, Yanagi reimagined renowned Western fairy tales, such as, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Little Red Riding Hood, by having young girls act wearing old women’s masks and dramatizing them in stark black and white photographs. In the most striking image, Gretel, a young girl, nibbles on the index finger of an extremely wrinkled arm extended through a lower fence of a dark cell. This scene clearly reverses the original story and the old woman appears to be a victim of a young girl’s hunger. The accompanying conversational text reads: “You look like a dry twig. Why don’t you fatten up?” “So I will never be eaten by you.” The languishing demeanor of Gretel complicates the scene by suggesting a hint of eroticism. Perhaps what is being hinted at is a hunger for experience—and the loss of innocence which that entails. In another dramatic photo, Sleeping Beauty (Figure 13.2), a young girl pins down an older woman, who is wearing the mask of a hag. Behind them stands a spinning wheel and the floor is strewn with piles of raw wool. The woman with the mask most likely represents the witch, evil fairy godmother, or wicked stepmother (depending on the version of the tale), but she is wearing a white cotton night dress and her limbs seem to belong to a younger model in her late teens or early twenties. The girl on top appears to be around eight or nine years old; much younger than the sixteen-yearsold princess Aurora, or Briar Rose as she is sometimes called, who pricks her finger with the spindle of the spinning wheel. Here the older woman holding the spindle is being pushed to the floor by a much younger girl. The expected power dynamics have been reversed and there are many ambiguities regarding the possible outcome of their struggle. Which of the two will suffer the curse of eternal death-like sleep—itself another form of immortality? In Yanagi’s fairy tales, the younger protagonists appear to have more power and darker intentions than their older counterparts. As the Japanese exhibition title suggests, however, younger girls are not necessarily happier for having power. They may be taken over by dark thoughts and be trapped in a living “hell.” Yanagi’s Snow White seems to encapsulate this situation. A young girl with an old woman’s mask faces the mirror while holding a big apple against her mirrored image. The image may suggest that the evil in the witch also resides within the heart of Snow White herself. In her interpretation of this image, the English professor, Mayako Murai has stated that “it is the potential for death that connects them, as one side of the apple must be as poisonous as the other.”22 The idea of death connecting youth and age seems to be an underlying theme through the entire series. The reversibility and connectedness between the younger and older women is further emphasized in Yanagi’s version of Little Red Riding Hood. The photo depicts a little girl embracing an older, masked woman inside what appears to be the wolf ’s belly. The accompanying caption reads: “The two, rescued from the wolf ’s stomach,

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Figure 13.2  Miwa Yanagi, Fairy Tales: Sleeping Beauty, 2004. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy the artist. were newly born twins.” The wolf ’s belly, equated to a womb, suggests a rebirth ceremony—almost like a shamanic initiation. The red color of her hood is also suggestive of a woman’s menses, so it may symbolize a girl becoming a woman and the transmission of elder knowledge. Equating a little girl and an old woman as twins is conceptually nonsensical, but the mask resembles the young girl’s face and they appear to be interrelated. As Linda Nochlin noticed, Yanagi intentionally reveals the artifices which construct her images, such as the zippered opening of what she called the “wolf-skin sleeping bag.”23 We also see this in the works of the predecessor of makeup photography, Cindy Sherman. The distinction between the mask and the real skin of the model is made as apparent as the widely opened zipper. Through these artifices, Yanagi is perhaps bringing us closer to the contemporary era we live in, rather than drawing us to the old times of fairy tales. Yanagi actually made one mask as a symbolic art object for display, titled Darkness of Childhood and Lightness of Aging (2004). Like

 Darkness of Girlhood and Lightness of Aging 189 the lacquer masks used in Noh theater, the front side is lacquered to represent a young girl while the platinum used on the back is shaped to be the wrinkled face of an old crone. Like Janus’ two faces, this mask demonstrates that a woman can switch between being young and old at any time.24 This mask seems to be a perfect visualization of Carl Jung’s concept of persona, which is a “kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual.”25 Although both Nochlin and Murai interpreted Yanagi’s Fairy Tale as a feminist reinterpretation of the Freudian Uncanny, comparing her to other contemporary artists and authors who recreate fairy tales,26 Yanagi’s obsession with masks seems to relate more closely to the Jungian notion of persona and the archetypes of the collective unconscious.

Old Girls’ Theater Troupe In 2009, when Yanagi represented Japan at the Venice Biennial, she covered the Japanese pavilion with a large black tent to present Windswept Women—Old Girls’ Theater Troupe. The main feature of the exhibition was five gigantic photographs (thirteen-feet high) of ageless women ecstatically dancing in the desert. They appear ageless because of their large, pendulous breasts, while some of their legs are wrinkled. Although their faces are not visible and identification is difficult, “women of all ages” (toddler, teenager, young, middle-aged, and elderly) were employed as models and posed for these photographs.27 They sing, play tambourines, castanets, and cymbals, while striking dramatic poses, with legs wide open, like a kabuki actor. They also hold a curious resemblance to Chamunda, a fierce form of the goddess Devi, Divine Mother in Hinduism, who is often represented with sagging breasts and standing over the corpse of a man. Shot from a worm’s-eye view, they appear even more monumental than the actual size of the print. Printed in black and white and encased in dark silvergilt frames, they are exalted as primordial goddesses, celebrating the wind which blows away any societal constriction, and plunging forward through the desert. They can also be seen as untraditional, oversized family portraits. As in the subtitle, these women represent a theater troupe, which Yanagi often compared to the idea of the family. She has stated: “I’ve always regarded the family as a kind of troupe of traveling players, and thought that if their performance is no good, they should disband.”28 Yanagi’s unconventional view of family, as well as the idea of an all-women theater troupe, stemmed from the Takarazuka Theater near Osaka, where Yanagi was frequently taken by her mother and grandmother as a young child. Founded in 1913 in the city of Takarazuka, this theater of women has consistently performed a wide range of musicals and dances derived from Western sources. Although its performers are all young and beautiful women, they attracted a predominantly female fan base, and even impacted the emergence of a girl’s manga genre (yaoi) which featured love relationships between androgynous boys in the 1970s.29 As avid Takarazuka fans, Yanagi’s mother and grandmother not only took young Yanagi to its lavish revues almost every month but also sent her to dance and singing lessons with the hope that she would enter the Takarazuka and fulfill their dreams.

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Although Yanagi did not like Takarazuka as much herself, she was later drawn to the underground theater movement which she encountered while attending Kyoto City University of Arts in the 1980s. The first play she saw was entitled Shōjo Kamen [Girl Mask], and was performed under a red tent set up at the Shimogamo Shrine in Kyoto. The author and director of the play was Jūrō Kara, and his troupe began performing plays under a red tent in the late 1960s. He had founded a Jōkyō Gekijo (Situation Theater) in Tokyo in 1963. Based on the life story of the legendary Takarazuka actress Yachiyo Kasugano, this play featured young female Takarazuka fans that wore masks and traveled to Manchuria to meet Kasugano. In the end the tent collapsed and it left a strong impression on Yanagi.30 The tilted black tent in Yanagi’s Windswept Women installation was perhaps a homage to Kara’s red tent, and the Japanese underground theater movement. The black tent was set up so low to the floor that viewers had to crouch and peak in to see the video projected inside. The video showed several women traveling inside a small black tent in the desert, showing only their bare legs. Wherever they went, they carried the tent on top of their bodies, hiding themselves. Yanagi personally revealed a few other inspirations for the motif of a tent-covered woman: the first being the surrealistic novel Box Man by Kōbō Abe, about a voyeuristic man hiding in a cardboard box, the other, a mobile camera obscura from nineteenth-century Europe. In comparing these sources with her tent woman, Yanagi stated that the tent woman does not leave the tent and is always seen with the tent, while the man inside the box or the man inside the camera obscura would never become an object to be seen. Women would keep their possessions, such as clothes and a mirror, in the tent and “would not take from others in order to protect themselves as the voyeur and the object to be seen.”31 This self-content and self-contained impression of a tent woman is more reminiscent of the paintings of Femme Maison [woman-house] (1946–7) by Louise Bourgeois, where the upper half of a female body is covered with a house. Like Bourgeois, Yanagi may be commenting on the traditional societal confinement of women to the domestic sphere: house/home. Although Yanagi has stated that she originally got the idea for the tented figure from a Mexican fortune teller who invited her clients into her tent to read their fortunes, she also said that the idea of the tented figure predates her Elevator Girls series, and closed spaces like a tent and an elevator symbolize the world she finds herself in.32 The tent, therefore, is reflective of the marginalized space and limited opportunities for women in the Japanese society, and the figure in the tent represents an average woman, including the artist herself. The image of a tent woman had appeared earlier in Yanagi’s own fairy tale entitled Suna onna (sand woman) (Figure 13.3). It is a series of photographs and narrated video about a young girl searching for Suna onna in an infertile landscape. The story begins: “I can remember the story of Grandma’s village, of a gray and sterile land. Grandma told me that when she was a little girl she had met ‘Suna onna.’” Later, Suna onna turns out to be a mysterious woman with an old woman’s arms and a young girl’s legs who travels in a small tent to tell stories. It is further told that while sand keeps Suna onna alive, she also has to keep sweeping it with a broom so that the sand does not consume her. Next day she was gone and the girl located only a trace of Suna onna: some sand

 Darkness of Girlhood and Lightness of Aging 191

Figure 13.3  Miwa Yanagi, Fairy Tales: Untitled I, 2004. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy the artist.

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and shells. In the end, Grandma told her: “Suna onna is everywhere, but not everyone can find her. Suna onna lives in people’s hearts.”33 Here, Suna onna may represent the innocence or a woman’s true self—which becomes undermined or lost as she grows up and faces the realities of a patriarchal culture. Simultaneously, Suna onna or tent woman may be a self-portrait of the artist, or an alter ego, who continues exploring various artistic frontiers in her career.

Performing Old Women Since Yanagi always employed models to create her photographs, it was a natural progression for her to enter the world of performance in 2010. In fact, an undeniable degree of theatricality permeates Yanagi’s entire oeuvre, which may have been partly due to the influence of her mother and grandmother and their love of the Takarazuka Theater. Reminiscent of the Takarazuka actresses, Yanagi’s earliest photographic series, Elevator Girls (1993–9), featured the impeccably uniformed young Japanese women who greet and guide customers in the elevators of department stores. At her first solo exhibition (1993) at Art Space Niji in Kyoto, Yanagi had several women dressed in elevator-girl attire who stayed in the gallery throughout the course of the exhibition. Yanagi’s photographs and performances pointedly commented on the Japanese consumer culture, which often objectifies young female bodies, and the society, which confines them in a certain mold.34 In 2010, after earning fame with her Elevator Girls and My Grandmothers series, Yanagi returned to performance with Café Rottenmeier, which was produced as part of Festival Tokyo (Figure 13.4). A dozen Japanese women of varying ages wore special makeup and dressed to look like the middle-aged, conservative governess character Mrs. Rottenmeier, from the 1970s anime classic Heidi, which was based on the Swiss novel. These grim-faced, unsmiling women served customers drinks and food, and interacted with them for a fee. As a parody of the popular “maid cafés” in Tokyo, where young women dressed in blue and white French maid uniforms to serve their mostly male customers, Yanagi’s Café Rottenmeier critiqued the strong ageism against women in Japanese society, and was seen as “reflecting the fast grey-ing nation.”35 The women in the role of Mrs. Rottenmeier would admonish customers who are not sitting straight or forcefully involve customers in their cooking show. They are the opposite of “elevator girls” who appear passive and lack vitality. Speaking to the reasoning behind why these women volunteered to play the role of old maids, Yanagi explained: “Grandmas are free. There is an expectation in this world that women have to be young and beautiful. But grandmas are liberated from such an obsession. That’s why these women willingly become old maids.”36 In Yanagi’s view, young women are oppressed by the system of the patriarchal society and they can hardly break away from it, while old women can more easily transcend it. Contrasting with the confined gloomy world inhabited by elevator girls, Café Rottenmeier became a lively space, filled with Mrs. Rottenmeier look-alikes, chattering, singing, and dancing.

 Darkness of Girlhood and Lightness of Aging 193

Figure 13.4 Miwa Yanagi, Café Rottenmeier, during Festival Tokyo, 2010. Photo: Kazuhiro Nogi. Courtesy Getty Images (See Plate 16). Convinced of the triumphal and liberated state of old women, Yanagi conducted research on how old women were regarded and represented over the course of Japanese history. As part of her research, Yanagi even tried the Noh dance of Sekiderakomachi in which the centenarian female poet recollects her youth of fame and beauty.37 Eventually, she came across Nichirin no tsubasa (Wing of the Sun), a novel by Kenji Nakagami, about seven old women, called oba, traveling across Japan in a truck with young men. In order to turn this into a traveling theatrical play, Yanagi first designed a trailer which opens up into a stage and fundraised to have it made in Taiwan in 2014–15. She then hired a script writer, recruited actors, dancers, and staff, and approached possible venues throughout Japan, realizing the first traveling tour in 2016 (Figure 13.5). The venues included Shingū in Kumano region of Wakayama Prefecture where the writer had grown up and the narrative in the novel began. The synopsis of the script reads: five old women face forced removal from an “alley” in Kumano where they had been living for a long time. They begin a wandering journey on a refrigerator truck driven by a young man, Tsuyoshi who was also from the “alley.” On the way to Ise, Idewa, Mount Osore, and then to the Imperial Palace, they sing a pilgrim’s hymn. On this humorous and unparalleled pilgrimage, the old women share the supreme bliss they experienced on encountering various Gods, while young souls around them hunt for women in an ecstatic feast of sensory pleasure.38 Having been brought up in the alleyway (roji), as a child of the buraku (outcaste quarters) which had been excluded from literacy, Nakagami sought to bring a distinct voice back to the

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Figure 13.5  Miwa Yanagi, dir. Wing of the Sun, performed in Yokohama, 2016. Photo: Kenryou Gu. Courtesy the artist. alleyway and illuminate its vibrant but dying culture.39 Old women in his tale function like shamans—a conduit to a non-rationalized spiritualism, which combines folklore and animism, and embraces both the sacred and the profane. Yanagi found Nakagami’s women the perfect realization of her notion of circular womanhood: youth and age coexisting within them. By incorporating polar dancers and gypsy musicians/dancers which were not part of Nakagami’s narrative, Yanagi emphasized the vibrancy of life even further. The imaginary red flower, which Nakagami calls natsu-fuyō (summer lotus), painted inside the trailer unfolds in the middle of the play, and sets a vivid visual and sensual tone for the drama. Oba (the old women) in Nakagami’s story represented the pre-modern era, something that modern Japan has lost. While traveling inside the trailer, they talk about the history of roji and how it began one day with a couple from elsewhere building a hut near a lotus pond to live in. They were descendants of the people who were forced out of their native villages by wars and became wandering outcasts during the late medieval era. The year 1984, in which this novel was written, saw the transition of Japan from its postwar era of high economic growth to the bubble period. Cities expanded and old neighborhoods with roji were destroyed. One of the reviewers compared these women and men to those who had lost their hometowns due to the Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011.40 While Nakagami’s novel is based on the reality of rapidly changing Japan, his oba characters seem to be as archetypal and mythological as Yanagi’s old women. Like those women who traveled in a black tent in Old Girl’s Theater Troupe and Suna onna,

 Darkness of Girlhood and Lightness of Aging 195 Nakagami’s oba are nomads who wander across Japan in a trailer, chanting sutras, and telling stories. They do not lament the fact that they have lost their homes, and continue their journey as if it were their fate. Because of their strong connections, Yanagi had her oba wear witch-like, one-piece gray gowns, bending their backs to sweep the streets with brooms. Although they are supposed to be Japanese, they channel the world of Western fairy tales, inhabited by witches and crones. This deviation is perhaps intentional in order to establish a link among Yanagi’s wide-ranging oeuvres. The old women represented throughout her recent work act as symbolic figures who possess the qualities of fortunetellers, shamans, and goddesses—navigating worlds filled with obstacles and magical potential.

Epilogue For two decades, Yanagi Miwa has consistently put forth aged female figures as the key subjects of both her photographic and theatrical works. By subverting the stereotypes surrounding older and young women, Yanagi has illuminated how these tropes are constructed and reinforced in everyday life and popular culture. In photography and theater, she has found a malleable narrative space where women could leave behind their societal limitations and play out their fantasies and dreams. The stark contrast between unhappy young girls and transcendental old women in her work suggests a new perspective on aging, one which focuses on the positive aspects rather than the negative. As the world population faces the aging crisis, this optimistic attitude and out-of-the-box thinking offer hope and create a dialogue about society’s values and preconceptions regarding the “golden years” and the wisdom of our elders.

Notes 1 “Ijiwaru baasan ga meido ni? Kikan gentei no kafe rottenmaiyā ni chūmoku” [Nasty Old Women As Maids? Watch Time-limited Café Rottenmeier], Cyzo Woman (blog), November 7, 2010, accessed August 10, 2017, www.c​yzowo​man.c​om/20​10/11​/post​ _2603​_1.ht​ml. Reprinted courtesy of the artist. 2 World Health Organization, “World Health Statistics,” 2016: 10. 3 Naoko Muramatsu and Hiroko Akiyama, “Japan: Super-Aging Society Preparing for the Future,” Gerontologist 51, no. 4 (2011): 425–32. Accessed July 25, 2017, https:// doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnr067 4 Oi o meguru bi to katachi/Growing Old: The Forms and Aesthetics of Aging (Fukushima: Fukushima Museum, 2005). 5 In her article discussing the depiction of older women in Japanese modern painting, Tomoko Ogawa pointed out that the old woman in Takasago was not depicted as an individual, but always as a part of the pair representing the ideal of a long-lived couple. Tomoko Ogawa, “Kindai Nihonga ni egakareta Josei no Oi: Josei Gaka ga Bijinga ni kokoromita Toshimabi no Hyogen” [Aging Women Depicted in Modern

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Japanese Painting: Expression of Aged Beauty Sought in Paintings of Beauties by Women Painters], Bijutsu Forum 33 (2016): 64–9. 6 Although they were not included in the Growing Old exhibition, there are other male photographers who have taken old women as the subject matter. Manabu Yamanaka has produced unabashed nude portraits of women in their nineties. His purpose was to depict faithfully the “last physical body of human who is just vanishing away.” See www.ask.ne.jp/~yamanaka/gyahtei-e.html. Takahiko Kaneyama, based in New York, has been making intimate group portraits of his mother and her sisters over the last eighteen years. See www.tkaneyama.com/While1.html. 7 Newsweek staff, “Photography: Dreams of Japanese Women,” Newsweek, May 27, 2005, accessed August 7, 2017. http:​//www​.news​week.​com/p​hotog​raphy​-drea​ms-ja​ panes​e-wom​en-10​1505.​ 8 Harumi Niwa, “My Grandmothers: The Resonance of Memory,” in Miwa Yanagi (Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2009), 57. 9 Miwa Yanagi, Conversation with Yasumasa Morimura, htwi, no. 13 (2002): 38. 10 Takeru Onochi, “The View of Life and Death Conveyed in the Legends of HappyakuBikuni or Octa-Centenarian Priestess,” Kanagawa University Bulletin 155 (March 2005), accessed August 25, 2017, http://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/110004631043. 11 Yanagi, “My Grandmothers,” 7. 12 Aomi Okabe, ed., Chizuko Ueno x Miwa Yanagi Talk Session, November 29, 2004, accessed July 31, 2017, http:​//apm​.musa​bi.ac​.jp/i​msc/c​p/men​u/gen​der_r​esear​ch/ue​ no_ya​nagi/​inter​view.​html.​ 13 Yuka Uematsu, “Miwa Yanagi’s Field of Vision,” in Miwa Yanagi, 124. 14 David Elliott, “The Four Ages of Woman: Portraits of Innocence, Desire, Oblivion, and Enlightenment,” in Miwa Yanagi, 65. 15 “Sunday Salon with Greg Fallis—Miwa Yanagi,” Utata Tribal Photography, October 16, 2009, accessed September 13, 2017, http:​//www​.utat​a.org​/sund​aysal​on/mi​wa-ya​ nagi/​. 16 Okabe, Chizuko Ueno x Miwa Yanagi Talk Session. 17 Chizuko Ueno associated this image with “The Children of Hamelin” with the artist being a pied piper. Ueno, quoted in Mayako Murai, From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl: Contemporary Japanese Fairy-Tale Adaptations in Conversation with the West (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), 90. 18 Miwa Yanagi, an interview with the author, Japan Society, New York, February 1, 2015. 19 Miwa Yanagi, an interview with David Elliott, quoted in Elliot, “The Four Ages of Woman,” 67. 20 Alzheimer’s Association, Altzheimer’s News, March 19, 2014, accessed August 10, 2017, http:​//www​.alz.​org/n​ews_a​nd_ev​ents_​women​_in_t​heir_​60s.a​sp. 21 Miwa Yanagi, Shōjo jigoku gokuraku rōjo/ Darkness of Girlhood & Lightness of Aging (Marugame: Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004). 22 Mayako Murai, “The Princess, the Witch, and the Fireside: Yanagi Miwa’s Uncanny Restaging of Fairy Tales,” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 27, no. 2 (2013): 234–53. 23 Linda Nochlin, “Black, White, and Uncanny: Miwa Yanagi’s Fairy Tale,” in Christopher Phillips and Noriko Fuku, Heavy Light: Recent Photography from Japan, exh. cat. (New York: International Center of Photography, and Steidl, 2008), 239.

 Darkness of Girlhood and Lightness of Aging 197 24 Miwa Yanagi, “A Supremely Comfortable Place to Be,” Interview with Christopher Phillips, translated by Eric C. Shiner, in Heavy Light, 22. 25 Carl G. Jung, “The Relation between the Ego and the Unconscious (1928),” in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology/Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol. 7, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 305. 26 Nochin, “Black, White, and Uncanny,” 232–41; Murai, “The Princess, the Witch, and the Fireside,” 234–53. 27 Uematsu, “Miwa Yanagi’s Field of Vision,” 124. 28 Yanagi quoted in Uematsu, “Miwa Yanagi’s Field of Vision,” 125. 29 On Takarazuka, see Jennifer Robertson, Takarazuka, Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 30 The Japan Foundation (Performing Arts Network Japan), “Artist Interview: From contemporary art to theater, the artistic quest of Miwa Yanagi,” September 2, 2013, accessed August 5, 2017, http:​//per​formi​ngart​s.jp/​E/art​_inte​rview​/1307​/art_​inter​ view1​307e.​pdf 31 Miwa Yanagi, “The Mysterious Box of Youth and Old Age: A Conversation between Miwa Yanagi and Nona Tokue Pizan,” in Miwa Yanagi, Fairy Tale/Rōshōjo Kitan [Strange Stories of Women Young and Old] (Kyoto: Seigensha, 2007), 69–70. 32 Uematsu, “Miwa Yanagi’s Field of Vision,” 123. 33 Miwa Yanagi, Fairy Tale, unpaginated. 34 For more on Yanagi’s elevator girls and their appearances in her recent theatrical plays, see Midori Yoshimoto, “Elevator Girls Return: Miwa Yanagi’s Border Crossing between Photography and Theater,” in Reading Contemporary Performance: Theatricality Across Genres, ed. Gabriele Cody and Meiling Cheng (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 218–20. 35 Miwa Suzuki, “Japan’s Frilly ‘Maids’ Go Grey,” Timesofmalta.com, November 29, 2010, accessed August 14, 2017, https​://ww​w.tim​esofm​alta.​com/a​rticl​es/vi​ew/20​ 10112​9/wor​ld-ne​ws/ja​pan-s​-fril​ly-ma​ids-g​o-gre​y.338​468. 36 “Ijiwaru baasan ga meido ni? Kikan gentei no kafe rottenmaiya ni chumoku” [Nasty Old Women As Maids? Watch Time-limited Café Rottenmeier]. 37 Miwa Yanagi, Conversation with Seikou Itō, November 1, 2014, The Kumano Shimbun, a special issue on Nichirin no tsubasa (August 2, 2016): 3. 38 Nashi Yamazaki, synopsis of Nichirin no tsubasa, The Kumano Shimbun, 1. 39 Nina Cornyetz, Dangerous Women, Deadly Words: Phallic Fantasy and Modernity in Three Japanese Writers (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 170–1. 40 Michie Amano, “Sasurau boshijin no monogatari: Nakagami Kenji no Nichirin no tsubasa ga Yanagi Miwa no te de chūseifūno utsukushii jojishi e” [Story of Wandering Mother-Child Gods: Wing of the Sun by Kenji Nakagami Transformed into a beautiful medieval-flavored epic by Miwa Yanagi], Theatre Arts, July 29, 2016, accessed August 25, 2017, http:​//the​atrea​rts.a​ict-i​atc.j​p/201​607/4​666/.​

Contributors Paul Crenshaw is an associate professor of art history at Providence College, Providence, RI. His primary research has focused on aspects of Rembrandt’s life, career, and art, and he has published widely on Dutch and Italian art of the early modern period. His first book, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy: The Artist, His Patrons, and the Art World in Seventeenth-Century Netherlands, was published in 2006 (paperback, 2013). He has served as president of Historians of Netherlandish Art from 2017 to 2021. Johana Ruth Epstein is a New York–based art historian, journalist, and critic. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts and has contributed chapters and articles to a range of publications (most recently “Mining the Dutch Golden Age: The Avant‐Garde Enterprise” in A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art ). She has held the position of assistant professor at Hollins University and instructor at Rhode Island School of Design, and currently serves as Manager of Institutional Giving and Development at Bard Graduate Center. Zirka Z. Filipczak has retired from Williams College as the J. Kirk T. Varnedoe ’67 Professor of Art, Emerita. A specialist in seventeenth-century art, especially Flemish and Dutch art, she is the author of Picturing Art In Antwerp, 1550–1700 and an exhibition catalog, Hot Dry Men, Cold Wet Women: The Theory of Humors in Western European Art, 1575–1700. Her articles on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art deal with various topics, such as working methods, gestures and poses, and art theory. Currently, she is finishing a book about Rubens and miracle-working images of Our Lady. Frima Fox Hofrichter, is a feminist art historian, Professor in the History of Art and Design department at Pratt Institute, specializing in Dutch and Flemish Art of the seventeenth century, issues of gender, class, and women artists of the early modern period. She is best known for her book, Judith Leyster, A Woman Painter in Holland’s Golden Age and numerous related articles and exhibition contributions. Hofrichter has been the author of the Baroque and Rococo sections of the standard introduction to art history, Janson’s History of Art, since 2000. She is also the author of Gender and Art in the 17th Century for Oxford Bibliographies Online (2020). Carol Ivory is Professor Emerita, retired from Washington State University. Her research interests focus on the art, history, and culture of the Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia. In addition to many publications, she has consulted on numerous

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exhibitions on the Marquesas and French Polynesia, most recently curating Matahoata: Art et Société aux Iles Marquises at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris (2016). Susan Kart is a historian of the arts of Africa and holds a joint appointment in the Art, Architecture, and Design department and the Africana Studies program at Lehigh University (Bethlehem, PA). She has published in Third Text, Critical Interventions, Nka, African Studies Review, and African Arts among others. She curated the exhibition “Object Histories: From the African Continent to the SCMA Galleries” at Smith College, and exhibitions of African art at Lehigh University. Her work on the archives of the late Senegalese artist Moustapha Dimé is set to be published in book form both in Senegal and the United States in 2020. Jane Kromm is Professor of art history at Purchase College, State University of New York. She is the author of The Art of Frenzy: Public Madness in the Visual Culture of Europe 1500–1850 (2002) and the co-editor of A History of Visual Culture (2010). She has published essays on feminism and the iconography of emotions; her current projects include the display of objects in collecting and shopping, and the ways reception was structured at charitable institutions in early modern England and Europe. Rachel Middleman is Associate Professor of art history at California State University, Chico, where she teaches courses in modern and contemporary art. She is the author of Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2018). She has published in Art Journal, Woman’s Art Journal, and Konsthistorisk tidskrift, and contributed to edited volumes and exhibition catalogues, including Academics, Artists, and Museums: 21st-Century Partnerships (2018), Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy, the Arts and the American West (2019) and In the Cut: The Male Body in Feminist Art (2019). Vanessa Rocco is Associate Professor of humanities and fine arts at Southern New Hampshire University. Rocco has numerous peer-reviewed articles and essays. Publications include her most recent book, Photofascism: Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy, forthcoming from Bloomsbury, and The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s, published in 2011 and converted to paperback in 2012. She has been curator or assistant curator of exhibits in Barcelona, New York’s International Center of Photography, and the Guggenheim. Megan A. Smetzer is an independent art historian based in Vancouver, BC, on the traditional and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people. She has taught, published, and lectured on historical and contemporary Northwest Coast indigenous cultural expressions, focusing primarily on work made by women. She has written essays for several museum catalogs, as well as The Journal of Material Culture and American Indian Art Magazine. Her book Painful Beauty: Tlingit

 Contributors 201 Women, Beadwork, and the Art of Resilience will be published by the University of Washington Press in Spring 2021. M. E. Warlick is Professor Emerita of European Modern Art at the University of Colorado, Denver. Her research continues to focus on alchemy and art, both traditional and surrealist. Her books include Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth (University of Texas Press, 2001) and The Alchemy Stones (2002). Her recent articles in journals, museum exhibition catalogs, and conference proceedings sponsored by the Association for the Study of Esotericism (ASE) and the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE) concern the topics of traditional alchemical imagery, surrealism and alchemy, the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, and the German palm reader Dr. Charlotte Wolff. She is currently writing a book on women, gender, and sexuality in alchemical imagery. Diane Wolfthal is David and Caroline Minter Chair in the humanities and Professor of art history at Rice University. She specializes in late medieval and early modern European art. She has published books on feminist and gender studies, Jewish Studies, the history of sexuality, and technical art history. Her two major current projects are Household Help: Servants and Slaves in Europe and Abroad, 1400–1700, under contract to Yale University Press, and guest curating an exhibition, Medieval Money, at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. Midori Yoshimoto is Associate Professor of art history and Gallery Director at New Jersey City University. Yoshimoto specializes in post–1945 Japanese art and its diaspora with a special focus on women artists, Fluxus, and intermedia. Her book, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York led to numerous publications: Yes Yoko Ono; Japanese Women Artists in Avant-garde Movements; Dissonance: Six Japanese Women Artists; Yayoi Kusama; and Yoko Ono: One Woman Show. She is a co-curator and contributing author to the catalog of the exhibition, Viva Video!: The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota (2021).

Index Note: Page locators followed by ‘f ’ and ‘pl’ refers to figures and plates. Adnan, Etel  14 n.26 Aeneid (Virgil)  46 n.22 Ages of Woman and Death, The (Baldung Grien)  2–3, 4f, pl.1 aging. See also Semmel, Joan consumerism and  174–5 early modern social anxiety regarding  49–51 and eroticism  175 and identity  176 and images of elderly servants  73–83 as issue in Japanese society  183 scholarship on  175 Aging Pride exhibition (2018)  6 AIZ  126, 132 n.16 Albert the Great  20 alchemy  17–29 alcohol  20 Alice George (Lens)  81 Alice George (Sonmans)  80–1 Alldridge, T. J.  156–61 anger/Anger  52, 54–8, 142–3 Anna (New Testament prophetess)  36–9, 44, 45 nn.8, 15 Annales Ecclesiastici (Baronius)  42–3 Apekua  110, 113 Appadurai, Arjun  162 Arabic philosophers, and herbal medicine  18 Aristotle  21 Arnald of Villanova  21, 30 n.20 Atkins, Constantia  74 avarice/Avarice  50–2, 57–8 Avaritia (Callot)  50 Avaritia (Glover)  51 Bacon, Francis  53 Bacon, Roger  21, 30 n.20 Baldung Grien, Hans

The Ages of Woman and Death  2–3, 4f, pl.1 witchcraft prints of  28 Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA)  152–5, 161 Barman, Jean  97 Baronius, Cesare, Annales Ecclesiastici  42–3 Bartolomeo, Fra, Presentation of Christ in the Temple  36–7, pl.5 Basu, Paul  161 Bauhaus photography  121–2, 124, 128, 132–3 n.24 beauty, as associated with goodness and virtue  35–6 “belatedness, permanent”  9 Beresford, William  97, 98 Berlind, Robert  168 Bernstein, Bruce  96, 99 Birth of the Virgin (Swabian)  81–3, pl.9 Bisschop, Jan de  3–4 black, as Nevelson’s trademark  139 Blackman, Margaret  91, 100 n.6 Bloemart, Frederik, Het Tekenboek  58f, 59 Bondo. See Sande wooden masks Bontecou, Lee  143 Boone, Sylvia A.  151, 152, 160 Bougainville, Louis Antoine de  109 Bourgeois, Louise 9, 10f, 15n28, 15n29, 190 Brancusi, Constantin  135–6 Brandt, Marianne  128 Bridget Holmes (Riley)  75–8 Bridget of Sweden  35, 44 n.2 British Museum  161 Brown, Diane  91 Brown, Steve  94 Brunschwig, Hieronymus  24–5

 Index 203 “Bundu Devil Dress, The” (Alldridge)  156 “Bundu Devils” (Firmin)  158f Burton, Robert  55–6 Café Rottenmeier (Yanagi)  192, 193f, pl.16 Caillot, Eugène  115 Callot, Jacques, Avaritia  50 Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes  2, 3f caretaking  57–8 Castiglione, Baldassare  35 Catherine of Sweden  35, 44 n.2 Centered (Semmel)  7–8 Champaigne, Philippe de, Presentation of Christ in the Temple  38–9 Chicago, Judy  10 Choice of Emblemes, A (Whitney)  52–3 Choller (Glover)  56, 57f Closterman, Johann Baptist  78 Collison, Nika  91–2 colonialism, Sande wooden masks and  155–61 Condivi, Ascanio  35–6 Connecor, Madame  98–9 consumerism, and aging  174–5 Cooper, Sheila McIsaac  83 Crehan, Hubert  139 Cumaean Sibyl (Duccio)  40 dances, indigenous  94–5 Darkness of Childhood and Lightness of Aging (Yanagi)  188–9 “Darkness of Girlhood and Lightness of Aging” exhibition (Yanagi)  186–7 Das Buch zu Distillieren (Brunschwig)  25, 26f Davidson, Florence  91 Davis, Anna  161 Dawson, George  94 Day, Lynda  151 death, old women as reminder of  2–3 de Beauvoir, Simone  176 De lamiis et phitonicis mulieribus (Molitor)  26–8

Dik, Joris  65, 70 n.8 Dimonekene, Alimatu  165 n.45 Dircx, Geertje  65 distillation  24–5 Dixon, George  97 domesticity, Nevelson and  142, 143 Dordillon, René  113 “Dress Spirit” ceremony  94 Duccio, Agostino di  40 Dürer, Albrecht Portrait of Barbara Holper, the Artist’s Mother  6, 7f witchcraft prints of  28 Dusky Maiden trope  106, 108–10, 117 Eavesdropper with a Woman Scolding, An (Maes)  56–7 Edelson, Mary Beth, Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper  9–10, 11f Edenshaw, Charles  98 elderly servants, in early modern Europe  73–83 Elevator Girls (Yanagi)  192 Elliot, Katherine  78, 79f Elliott, David  185 Emmons, George Thornton  95 emotional expressions, and depictions of sins, humors, and vices  55, 59 Enraged Woman (Huys)  55–6, pl.6 envy/Envy  52–4, 57–8 Erfurth, Hugo  128–9 eroticism. See also sexuality and sexualization and aging  175 in Semmel works  168–9 “Erotic Series” (Semmel)  168 Erotic Yellow (Semmel)  168 Estridentista movement  132 n.17 expressiveness, and depictions of sins, humors, and vices  55, 59 Fairy Tale series (Yanagi)  186–9 Falimirz, Stefan, O Ziotach i o moczy gich  23–4, 31 n.34 family, Yanagi on  189

204 female genital mutilation (FGM)  150–1, 154, 160–2, 165 n.53 femininity, of Nevelson works  140, 141, 143 feminism and aging  175 Nevelson and  141–2, 144–5 feminist art criticism  8–9 feminist art movement  10–12, 144–5 fifth essence  21 Firmin, C. H., “Bundu Devils”  158f Flesh Ground (Semmel)  176–7, pl.14 Ford, John  36 Foreground Hand (Semmel)  171–3 formline design  90–1 four humors  49–59 Four O’Clock Forum  137–8 French, Anne  77 Friedan, Betty  13 “From Prophecy to Discipline” (Zarri)  44 Frueh, Joanna  175, 176 Fryman, Olivia  75 Fukushima Museum  183 fur trade  96–7 Gadjin’t  99–100 Galaxy Express 999 (Matsumoto)  186 Galle, Philips, Ira  54 Garoian, Charles  162 “Gathering Plants and Distillation in a Garden” (Brunschwig)  24–5 George, Alice  80–1 Girouard, Mark  77–8 Glimcher, Arnold  141 Glover, George Avaritia  51 Choller  56, 57f Invidia  53–4 Gnyp, Marta  12 Goltzius, Hendrik image in Labyrinthe of Errant Spirits  48f, 49–50, 52 Ira  54 González, Jennifer  160 goodness, beauty associated with  35–6 Goupil, Ernest Auguste, Quini [Queen] de Noukoohiva  110, 111f

Index Gracia, Mathias  107 Graham, Martha  143–4 Granddaughters (Yanagi)  186 Gretel (Yanagi)  187 Growing Old: The Forms and Aesthetics of Aging exhibition  183 Gunsch, Kathryn Wysocki  152–4 Haida masks  88f, 89–103, 102 n.28, pl.10 Hals, Frans  65, 70 n.2 Portrait of a Painter (Jan Miense Molenaer?)  62f, 63–6, pl.7 Portrait of a Woman (Judith Leyster?)  62f, 63–8, pl.7 hands, photos of  125–8 Hands of a Marionette Player (Modotti)  126–7 Harrison, Charles  94–5 “Harvesting Spinach” from Tacuinum Sanitatis  16f, 18–19, pl.3 herbal alchemy and medicine  17–19, 22–9 Heidi  192 Heresia (Anonymous)  41–2 Heresy, naked, depicted as old woman  41–4 Hess, Thomas B.  139 Het Tekenboek (Bloemart)  58f, 59 Hight, Eleanor  131 n.3 Hobbs, Robert  141 Hoffman, Hans  136 Hofrichter, Frima Fox  63, 70 n.2 Holbein, Hans Portrait of Lady Guildford  64–5 Portrait of Lord Guildford  64–5 Holm, Bill  90, 95–6 Holmes, Bridget  75–8 housewife, angry  56–7 Hughes, Robert  144 Huys, Pieter, Enraged Woman  55–6, pl.6 Iconologia (Ripa)  41–2 Indigenous masks  89–100, 102 n.28, pl.10. See also Sande wooden masks Interior Scroll—The Cave (Schneemann)  175–6 International Women’s Day  122 Intra-Venus (Wilke)  176 Invidia (Glover)  53–4

 Index 205 Ira (Galle)  54 Ira (Goltzius)  54 Ishiuchi, Miyako  183 James II  77, 78 Japan, aging in  183. See also Yanagi, Miwa jilaa quns/Jenna Cass masks  91–3, 95–6, 99 John of Rupescissa  21 Johnston, Harry Hamilton  157–8 Josselin, Mary  82–3 Josselin, Ralph  82–3 Judith Beheading Holofernes (Caravaggio)  2, 3f jugs, and depictions of angry women  56 Kampmann, Sabine  14 n.20 Kara, Jūrō  190 Katherine Elliot (Riley)  78, 79f Kemker, Sandra  129 Kiatonui  106 Kingsley, April  168–9 Kinoshita, Susumu  183 Klich, Lynda  132 n.17 Kollwitz, Kathe  128–9 Kooning, Willem de  138 Kramer, Heinrich (Institoris)  26 Kramer, Hilton  140 Kuspit, Donald  143, 146 n.33 Labata, Francisco, Thesaurus moralis  43 labret  97–8 labret masks  88f, 89–100, 102 n.28, pl.10 Labyrinthe of Errant Spirits (Cloppenburgh)  48f, 49–50, 52 LeBreton, Louis, Princesse Patini  110, 112f LeGuillou, Elie  110 Lens, Bernard II, Alice George  80–1 Levi-Strauss, Claude  92 Leyster, Judith  62f, 63–8, pl.7 Self-Portrait (c. 1630–3)  67–8, 69f Self-Portrait (c. 1640–5)  68, 69f Liber de arte distillandi (Brunschwig)  24 Liberia  149–50 Liber lucis (John of Rupescissa)  21 Liebknecht, Karl  123 Liedtke, Walter  63–5

Life magazine  138–9 life spans  35 Lippard, Lucy  8–9 Lisle, Laurie  140, 141 Little Red Riding Hood (Yanagi)  187–8 “Locker-Room” series (Semmel)  173–4 Long, Rose-Carol Washton  121 Loti, Pierre (Louis Marie-Julien Viaud), Reine Vaékéhu  114–16 Louise Bourgeois (Mapplethorpe)  9, 10f “Lucia Moholy: Photograph of George Muche” (Witkovsky)  122 “Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus Photography and the Issue of the Hidden Jew” (Long)  121 Luxemburg, Rosa  123 McBride, Henry  137 McCarthy, David  171, 176 McCauley, Mary Carole  154 Maes, Nicolaes An Eavesdropper with a Woman Scolding  56–7 The Old Woman Asleep  4, 5f, pl.2 Malleus Malificarum (Kramer and Sprenger)  26 Malloy, Mary  96, 99 Mapplethorpe, Robert, Louise Bourgeois  9, 10f Maria the Prophet  17–18, 20 Marquesas Islands, portraits of matriarchs of  105–18 Marter, Joan  171 Martin, Andy  108 masculinity, of old women  2 masks, of Northwest Coast matriarchs  88f, 89–100, 102 n.28, pl.10. See also Sande wooden masks Massie-Taylor, Guy  164 n.16 matriarch(s)  6, 12–13, 89, 91, 105, 110, 118n1 Matsumoto, Leiji, Galaxy Express 999, 186 Mayer, Alfred G., Queen of the Marquesas  116f, 117 Medicinarius (Brunschwig)  24 medicine  18–19, 21–2, 24–6, 28–9 memento mori, old women as  2–3 Mende people  149. See also Sande wooden masks

206 Meskimmon, Marsha  171 Me without Mirrors (Semmel)  169–71 Meyer, Richard  172–3 Michelangelo  35–6, 40–1 Miot, Paul-Émile  116–17 misogyny and images of elderly women as avarice, envy, or anger  57–8 in witchcraft imagery  28 Miyazaki, Hayao  185–6 Modotti, Tina  127–8, 130, 132 n.17 Hands of a Marionette Player  126–7 Worker’s Hands  126, 127 Moes, E. W.  65 Moholy, Lucia  120–132 Portrait of Clara Zetkin with Theodor Neubauer  129f portraits of Clara Zetkin  8, 9, 120f, 121, 124–30 scholarship on  121–2, 132 n.20 Moholy-Nagy, László  121, 123, 124, 130 Molenaer, Jan Miense  62f, 63–6, 70 nn.1–2, pl.7 Self-Portrait as a Lute Player  66 Molitor, Ulrich, De lamiis et phitonicis mulieribus  26–8 Moon Garden (Nevelson)  134f, 138, pl.11 Moon Garden Plus One (Nevelson)  140 Mueller, Ulrike  122, 129 Münzenberg, Willi  126 Murai, Mayako  187, 189 Mutus Liber  29–30 n.8 My Grandmothers (Yanagi)  182f, 184–6, pl.15 Nakagami, Kenji  193–5 Nanki’lsas (Raven)  92 Nead, Lynda  171 Necessary Women  75–7 Neel, Alice  141 Nemser, Cindy  144 Neubauer, Theodor  123, 128, 130, 129f Nevelson, Louise  9–10, 15n27, 134f, 135–47, pl.11 Newman, Barnett  137 New Vision photography  8, 9, 121–30, 131 n.3

Index Night Presence IV (Nevelson)  140 Nochlin, Linda  177, 188, 189 North, Sir Roger  78 Northwest Coast matriarchs, masks of  88f, 89–100, 102 n.28, pl.10 Nuku Hiva  104f, 105–18 Ogawa, Tomoko  195 n.5 Old Market Woman, The  1 Old Mistresses: Women Artists of the Past exhibition (1972)  8 “old wives”  17 Old Woman Asleep, The (Maes)  4, 5f, pl.2 old women. See also women associated with malevolence, sin, and evil  5 associated with witchcraft  1–2 increased distrust of  19 as memento mori  2–3 portraits of  6 scholarship on artistic depictions of  6 sexualization of  2 shift to older women artists  12 as subject in early modern period  3–4 transgressive  49–59 Orimoto, Tatsumi  183 O Ziolach tutecznych y zamorskich y o mocy ich (Spiczyński)  23–4 O Ziotach i o moczy gich (Falimirz)  23–4, 31 n.34 Paetini  105–19 Painter, Karen  174 Paracelsus  17 Parker, Rozsika  8 Perez, Juan  96–8 “permanent belatedness”  9 Pessima, sowo-wui mask  148f, 152, 164 n.16 pharmacology  21–2, 24–6, 28–9 Phillips, Ruth B.  155, 160 photographic sovereignty  117–18 Pirez, Alvaro, Presentation of Christ in the Temple  34f, 36, pl.4 Pollock, Griselda  8, 9 polyandry  107 Porter, David  107–9

 Index 207 Portrait of a Painter (Jan Miense Molenaer?) (Hals)  62f, 63–6, pl.7 Portrait of a Woman (Judith Leyster?) (Hals)  62f, 63–8, pl.7 Portrait of Barbara Holper, the Artist’s Mother (Dürer)  6, 7f Portrait of Clara Zetkin, c. 1930 (Moholy)  120f, 125–6 Portrait of Clara Zetkin with Theodor Neubauer (Moholy)  129f Portrait of Lady Guildford (Holbein)  64–5 Portrait of Lord Guildford (Holbein)  64–5 portraits of Clara Zetkin  8, 9, 120f, 121, 124–30 of Joan Semmel  166f, 167–79 of Marquesan matriarchs  105–18 of old women  6 Port-Royal convent  39 potlatch  91–2, 94–5 pots, and depictions of angry women  56 Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Bartolomeo)  36–7, pl.5 Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Champaigne)  38–9 Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Pirez)  34f, 36, pl.4 Princesse Patini (LeBreton)  110, 112f “Production/Reproduction” (MoholyNagy and Moholy)  124 property, disruptions of patriarchal systems of  57–8 Property-making-a-noise (Sounding Property)  92 Pseudo-Democritus  20 Putahaii  106–7 Queen of the Marquesas (Mayer)  116f, 117 Quini [Queen] de Noukoohiva (Goupil)  110, 111f quintessence  21 Racette, Sherry Farrell  90 Radiguet, Max  107 Raven (Nanki’lsas)  92

Recline (Semmel)  172, 173f, pl.13 Reine Vaékéhu (Loti)  114–16 religious art, old women in seventeenthcentury  35–44 Rembrandt van Rijn depictions of Christ’s Presentation in the Temple  37, 45 n.15 portrait of mother  6 as possible subject of Hals painting  65 Richard, Paul  139 Riley, John Bridget Holmes  75–8 Katherine Elliot  78, 79f Riley, Maude  137 Ripa, Cesare  52–3 Iconologia  41–2 Robarts, Edward  106–7 Rosenblum, Robert  138–40, 142 Rubens, Peter Paul  43 Sabbatino, Mary  14 n.26 Sachsse, Rolf  128 Sande wooden masks  148f, 149–50, pl.12 and colonial legacy  155–61 exhibition of  154–5, 160–2 and female genital mutilation debate  150–1, 154, 160–2, 165 n.53 and Sande training and initiation  151–4, 162–3 Schapiro, Meyer  142 Schapiro, Miriam  10 Schneemann, Carolee, Interior Scroll— The Cave  175–6 Schuldenfrei, Robin  121–2 scolds  56–7, 61 n.31 “Self-Image” paintings (Semmel)  169–71 Self-Portrait (c. 1630–3) (Leyster)  67–8, 69f Self-Portrait (c. 1640–5) (Leyster)  68, 69f Self-Portrait as a Lute Player (Molenaer)  66 Semmel, Joan  166–80 Centered  7–8 “Erotic Series”  168 Erotic Yellow  168 Flesh Ground  176–7, pl.14

208

Index

Foreground Hand  171–3 “Locker-Room” series  173–4 Me without Mirrors  169–71 Recline  172, 173f, pl.13 “Self-Image” paintings  169–71 “Sex Paintings”  168 Transformations  177–9 Transitions  166f, 167, 179 Seneca  55 servants, images of elderly  73–83 seven sins  49–59 seventeenth-century religious art  35–44 “Sex Paintings” (Semmel)  168 sexuality and sexualization and Haida women  91 of Marquesan women  107–8 of Nevelson  141 of old women  2 and Sande masks  162 in Semmel works  168–9 as viewed in economic terms  52 Shen Fu-Tsung  77 Shōjo Kamen (Kara)  190 Shotridge, Florence  99 sibyls  39–41, 44, 46 n.22, 47 n.27 Siena Cathedral  40 Sierra Leone  149–50. See also Sande wooden masks Silverman, Rena  130 Sistine Ceiling  40–1 Sleeping Beauty (Yanagi)  187, 188f Snow White (Yanagi)  187 social media, and public discussions on female genital mutilation  162 Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper (Edelson)  9–10, 11f Sonmans, William  80–1 Sounding Property (Property-making-anoise)  92 Sowei mask  151–2, 153f Sowei Mask: The Spirit of Sierra Leone exhibition  161 Sowo  149, 150, 155–60, 163 Sowo-wui mask (Mende or Temne people)  159f, pl.12 sowo-wui mask (Pessima)  148f, 152, 164 n.16

Spiczyński, Hieronim, O Ziolach tutecznych y zamorskich y o mocy ich  23–4 Sprenger, Jakob  26 Stanyhurst, G., Thesaurus moralis  43 Stevenson, Robert Louis  117 Sturgis, William  98–9 Suna onna (Yanagi)  190–2 Swabian, Birth of the Virgin  81–3, pl.9 Swanton, John R.  92, 94 Syrlin, Joerg  40 Tacuinum Sanitatis  16f, 18–19, 24, 28, pl.3 Takarazuka Theater  189–90, 192 Takasago (Noh)  183, 195 n.5 Taouma, Lisa  109, 117 tattoos  109, 110, 113 Temoana  110, 111, 113 Teresa of Avila  35, 44 n.2 Thesaurus moralis (Labata and Stanyhurst)  43 “Three Female Witches” (Brunschwig)  25, 26f Tichborne, Sir Henry  73–4 Tichborne Dole The (Tilborgh/Tilborch)  72f, 73–4, pl.8 Tilborgh/Tilborch, Gillis van, The Tichborne Dole  72f, 73–4, pl.8 Tlingit communities  93, 99–100 touch, in Semmel works  176 trade  96–9 Transformations (Semmel)  177–9 transgressive old women  49–59 Transitions (Semmel)  166f, 167, 179 tronies  49, 59 Tsimshian communities  93 Tsinhahjinnie, Hulleah  117–18 Twigg, Julia  167 “Two Witches Brewing” (Molitor)  27–8 Tyler, Parker  140 Ulm Cathedral  40 Vaekehu  105–19 Viaud, Louis Marie-Julien (Loti, Pierre), Reine Vaékéhu  114–16 vices  49–59

 Index 209 Virgil, Aeneid  46 n.22 virtue, link between beauty and  35–6 Vis, Dirk  65 Vives, Juan Luis  2 Von den gebrannten wassern (von Schrick)  22–3 von Schrick, Michael Puff, Von den gebrannten wassern  22–3 Waiting (Wilding)  10–12 Walpole, Horace  78 Waterfield, Giles  77 Weston, Edward  127, 130 Whitney, Geffrey, A Choice of Emblemes  52–3 wife, angry  56–7 Wilding, Faith, Waiting  10–12 Wilke, Hannah, Intra-Venus  176 Windswept Women—Old Girls’ Theater Troupe (Yanagi)  189–92 Wing of the Sun (Yanagi)  193–5 witches and witchcraft and herbal medicine  19, 25–8 misogynistic attitudes in imagery of  28 Nevelson’s self-portrayal as  134f, 138–9, pl.11 old women associated with  1–2 Sande women implicated as  160 Witkovsky, Matthew  122 Wizard of Oz, The  138 Wolf, Erika  132 n.16 Womanhouse exhibition (1972)  10 “Woman of Nooaheevah” (Porter)  108, 109

women. See also old women life spans of  35 in medicine and pharmacology  21–2, 24–6, 28–9 perceptions of, artists  136 in trade  98–9 women’s rights  122 Woodward, Kathleen  175, 176 Worker Photography  125–7 Worker’s Hands (Modotti)  126, 127 Wright, Robin  90 Yamanaka, Manabu  196 n.6 Yanagi, Miwa  2, 12–13, 183–97 Café Rottenmeier  192, 193f, pl.16 Darkness of Childhood and Lightness of Aging  188–9 Elevator Girls  192 Fairy Tale series  186–9 Granddaughters  186 Gretel  187 juxtaposition of old and young in works of  184–6 Little Red Riding Hood  187–8 My Grandmothers  182f, 184–6, pl.15 performance art of  192–5 Sleeping Beauty  187, 188f Snow White  187 Suna onna  190–2 Windswept Women—Old Girls’ Theater Troupe  189–92 Wing of the Sun  193–5 Zarri, Gabriella  44 Zetkin, Clara  120–133 Zosimos of Panopolis  17–18, 20

                

Plate 1  Hans Baldung Grien, The Ages of Woman and Death (detail), c. 1541–4. Oil on panel. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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Plate 2  Nicolaes Maes, Old Woman Asleep, c. 1655. Oil on canvas. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Photo: J. Geleyns-Art Photography.

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Plate 3 “Harvesting Spinach” from Tacuinum Sanitatis, late fourteenth century. Vellum. Cod. Vindobonensis Nova 2644, f.27r. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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Plate 4  Alvaro Pirez, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, early fifteenth century. Tempera and gold on wood. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY., inv.1982.60.3.

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Plate 5  Fra Bartolomeo (Baccio della Porta), Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 1516. Oil on poplar. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: KHM. Museumsverband.

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Plate 6  Peter Huys, Enraged Woman, c. 1570. Oil on panel. Private collection. On loan to the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA.

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Plate 7  (a) Frans Hals, Portrait of a Painter (Jan Miense Molenaer?), c. 1652. Oil on canvas. The Frick Collection, Henry Clay Frick Bequest, inv. 1906.1.71. (b) Frans Hals, Portrait of a Woman (Judith Leyster?), c. 1652. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Henry G. Marquand, 1890, inv. 91.26.10.

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Plate 8  Gillis van Tilborgh, Tichborne Dole, 1671. Tichborn House, Hampshire, UK/ Bridgeman Images.

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Plate 9  Swabian, Birth of the Virgin, Städtische Museen Freiburg. © Augustiner­ museum—Städtische Museen Freiburg, photo: H. - P. Viesler. 

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Plate 10 Kaigani Haida artist Mask, carved ca. 1825 Wood, pigment. Kasaan, Southeastern Alaska, United States. @ Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA Photography by Mark Sexton and Jeffrey Dykes.

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Plate 11 Louise Nevelson and Moon Garden, New York, 1958. Photo by Walter Sanders / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images.

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Plate 12  Mende people, Sowo-wui, dance mask (ndoli jowei) of Ligba rank, midtwentieth century. Wood. Smith College Museum of Art, Gift of Gwendolen M. Carter, ex. Guy Massie-Taylor. SC 1960:55.

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Plate 13 Joan Semmel, Recline, 2005. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © 2020 Joan Semmel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Plate 14  Joan Semmel, Flesh Ground, 2016. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © 2019 Joan Semmel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Plate 15  Miwa Yanagi, My Grandmothers: Mika, 2001. Chromogenic print. Courtesy the artist.

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Plate 16  Miwa Yanagi, Café Rottenmeier, during Festival Tokyo, 2010. Photo: Kazuhiro Nogi. Courtesy Getty Images.

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