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WOMEN! KNOW YOUR PLACE!
To some unreconstructed sexists, that place will be in the kitchen - or the bedroom - or both. To more enlightened feminists and allies, that place will be, as the posters and books have it, in the resistance. To most reasonable people, a woman's place will simply be wherever the fuck she wants it to be. But to generations of artists, it seems a woman's place is in the window. Or looking out of the window. Or trapped behind a window.
Ajarb Bernard Ategwa - Posing with My Parrot (2021)
At the Dulwich Picture Gallery, they've observed just how common a trope the woman in the window is and have put together an exhibition, Reframed:The Woman in the Window, that seeks to investigate why this is. It looks at multiple works that fit the theme and multiple interpretations and readings of those works.
The oldest works in the show are nearly three thousand years old. The newest ones have been made in the last few months. But what they all, more or less, have in common is that they feature a woman, sometimes women, in a window frame. We begin with perhaps the more obvious readings of these images. Are these women imprisoned? Are they trapped? Are they being protected? Are they being inspected or even worshipped as if some holy relic?
In most cases, it's hard to say. The curators of Reframed suggest that part of the appeal of these images is the fact that they are open to so many interpretations. While Rembrandt is often credited with being the pioneer of the format him and his followers were really just reawakening a genre that dates back to Greek wall paintings, ancient Italian pottery, and Iraqi ivory panels.
Carved ivory panel showing the head of a woman looking out of a window, Phoenician, North West Palace, Nimrud (900-700 BCE)
Bell Krater, Paestum (modern-day Italy) (360-340 BCE)
The ivory panel, from Nimrud - the ancient Assyrian city in northern Iraq, features a woman who is supposed to represent beauty, fertility, and love and is said to be practicing a form of 'sacred prostitution'. The window, the curators tell us, represents a portal between the world of the secular and the world of the sacred
The prostitution on the bell krater (no, me neither) is slightly less sacred. We see an old man in some daft costume climbing a short ladder to reach a 'lady of the night' in her window. She's tempted him in with apples (but of course) but once there he'll be getting more than a juicy red apple. The curators make sure to tell us the 'hetaera' who is pictured here about to sell her body is 'highly edcuated'. So perhaps the randy old git will get an education as well as a bunk-up.
Rembrandt van Rijn - Girl at a Window (1645)
Gerrit Dou - Old Woman at a Window with a Candle (1671)
Attributed to Gabriel Metsu - Woman in a Red Dress
By the 17th century and the Dutch Golden Age, the women depicted in the windows, though still mostly painted by men, were allowed roles other than sex workers, highly educated or not. Rembrandt's sitter, who plays self-consciously with her necklace, has been variously described as his lover, an allegorical figure, a historical figure, a servant, and a bride.
Oh, and a 'courtesan'. Of course. Older women, and even women of colour, began to appear too. Gerrit Dou's old woman doesn't actually look that old. She just looks like a young woman dressed in old lady's clothes. The clues though are elsewhere in the painting. The empty birdcage and empty pail, as well as the dead bird, are all intended to represent ageing and death. If you squint you can see a vaguely amorous couple in the background.
Young love continues for them whereas our old woman with her candle will never see youth, or love it seems, again. Old people might have started to appear more regularly in paintings but they weren't getting a great deal. Black people too. Though the woman in a red dress has been painted sympathetically it is most likely that she represents the Dutch involvement in the enslavement of African people. An alternative reading at least explains that it is possible that she was part of a small community of prosperous people of African descent who lived in the Netherlands at this time.
Either way, it's quite a jump, both in style of painting and of representation, to Ajarb Bernard Ategwa's Posing with My Parrot which I liked so much I used it to head up this blog. Ategwa lives and works in Cameroon's largest city Douala. Birds reappear but almost everything else has changed. It's a portrait of that modern day phenomenon:- the 'influencer' and though influencers are one of the few things I have zero interest in I love it as a piece of art. The colour, the energy, the dynamism. It certainly lit up the room it was in.
Louis Leopold Boilly - A Girl at a Window (about 1799)
Oskar Kokoschka - Woman at a Window (1908)
Gerrit Dou - A Woman Playing a Clavichord (c.1665)
It's completely different but I was also taken by Louis Leopold Boilly's monochrome oil painting. Telescopes, birdcages, fish, vegetables, and a young man who, knowing a little of Boilly's reputation, has snuck into the young girl's room with not entirely honourable intentions. There's a story to be told here but, also, it's simply a brilliantly executed painting.
Oskar Kokoschka, the Austrian artist dismissed as a 'degenerate' by the Nazis - quite a compliment really, perhaps identified with both the bird and the woman in his own lithographic postcard. They're both confined and perhaps he felt that way too. Except the work was made more than two and a half decades before Hitler took power so who knows?
It looks nice anyway. As does the second Dou of the show. Yet again, the birdcage makes an appearance as Dou's sitter does one of the few things that these almost imprisoned women were allowed to do. It seems when they're not selling their bodies or preparing food, they're playing musical instruments. But only ones that can be played gracefully, for which read sitting down, and while wearing large and expensive looking dresses. Even then, there's something about the sitter's expression that suggests she's been caught playing on an instrument that she shouldn't be. Fiddling with a man's organ!?
Edgar Germaine Hilaire Degas - Woman at a Window (1871-72)
Walter Sickert - Woman Seated at a Window (1908-09)
Wolfgang Tillmans - Smokin' Jo (1995)
Pablo Picasso - La Femme a la Fenetre (Woman at the Window) (1952)
Which is just the level of puerile humour, or attempt at humour, to take us to a section of the show they've only gone and called 'Models and Muses'. I've said, and wrote, many times how much I dislike the term 'muse'. How belittling and objectifying it is. How come only famous artists get to have muses? How come only famous male artists get to have muses?
While I don't like the term, it's quite easy to imagine that three of the artists in this section would be more than happy to use it. With Wolfgang Tillmans the honourable exception, let's have a look at the records of Degas, Sickert, and Picasso as regards women. Picasso was famously a love rat of the highest order and Degas claimed that he didn't marry art - he raped it, he disbelieved that Mary Cassatt - a mere woman - could be responsible for her own paintings, and was fond of painting young ladies as if through a keyhole. Walter Sickert became so obsessed with Jack the Ripper that, sixty years after Sickert had died, Patricia Cornwell maintained Sickert was the murderer!
To be honest, that's on Cornwell more than it's on Sickert. Though it would be interesting to know how Sickert replied when Degas, his friend, said to him, of his own Woman at a Window that he paid his model, a starving sex worker, with meat which she "immediately devoured raw". Is that how you treat your muse?
Picasso's gone for a muse too. An abstracted form of his then partner Francoise Gilet (when they split after ten years Gilet claimed Picasso had been abusive and he in return used his status to dissuade galleries from buying her work) and Sickert, of course, has gone for a sex worker. One whom it appears has just finished a 'shift'.
Tillmans' Smokin' Jo sits at odds with these images and not just because it's a photograph. House and techno DJ Smokin' Jo (a deliberately ambiguous name gender wise and one taken from the boxer Smoking Joe Frazier) seems as much in control of the photo as Tillmans. She doesn't, to me, look like anyone's muse.
Dirk Bouts - The Virgin and Child (c.1465)
The Christian church seems to have slightly confused views about women. Saint Augustine, we learn, warned against certain types of gazing. He called it the "lust of the eyes" and feared, correctly, it could lead to sinful thoughts. Dissuading ogling and lechery seems sensible enough but much Christian art includes highly idealised visions of the female body.
At the Dulwich Picture Gallery, the curators of this show have tried to move away from that. Instead we have Dirk Bouts' virgin Mary presented as the 'window of Heaven', her breast providing sustenance for the infant Jesus rather than cheap thrills for 15c Dutchmen. Saint Avia was so pious that, according to legend, she refused to marry in order to devote herself to God. She was imprisoned for her Christian beliefs (as the below 15c limestone sculpture shows) and while incarcerated she was, if you can believe this, visited by the Virgin Mary who sustained her with bread that had been kneaded by angels.
Saint Avia (The Jailed Woman) (c.1450-1500)
Antonio Rizzo - Virgin and Child (second half of the 15th century_
Yeah, right! If you buy that you'll buy anything. Back in the world of reality, the social norms of Renaissance era Florence had it that upper class women would rarely have appeared at a window looking straight ahead so Botticelli's rather plain portrait of Smeralda Bandinelli was deemed daring and provocative at the time!
Sandro Botticelli - Portrait of a Lady Known as Smeralda Bandinelli (c.1470-80)
Hans Bladung Grien - The Bewitched Groom or The Sleeping Groom and Sorceress (1544-45)
There's quite a shift in gear as the exhibition moves into a section about the use of windows as screens. Eastern architecture, historically, made use of screens to regulate light and air in buildings so, inevitably, artists from countries like India and Japan began to make images that featured both screens/windows and women.
The red sandstone Jali screen from 17c India would have been used, traditionally, in the part of the palace where the king's harem lived. They enabled the women of the harem to see out while remaining unseen from prying eyes themselves. By the time Rudolf Lehnert and Ernst Landrock reached Tunisia and staged their 'woman at a window' photo in the early 20th century, things had changed a great deal.
The women, at least in the minds of Lehnert and Landrock, were there to be viewed, to be objectified, and, who knows, even sold. It's a problematic photograph these days as it seems to encapsulate the very worst of misogynistic thought and a kind of Orientalist racism.
Jali Screen from Mughal India (17c)
Two noblewomen at a window, Jaipur, India (c.1800)
Albert Joseph Moore - The Mother of Sisera (1861)
Rudolf Lehnert and Ernst Landrock - Woman at a Window, Tunisia (c.1910-15)
Isa Genzken - Fenster (1990)
Women who weren't being kept in harems or ogled at in North African souks could, in the old days, often be found at home. Many considered it the correct place for women. Some still do. Of course women, like men, spend a lot of time at home and, also like men, when they are at home they may sometimes dream of being somewhere more interesting or somewhere warmer.
That certainly seems to be what Isabel Codrington's 1927 The Kitchen is all about. The two thirds empty bottle of gin tells as much of the story as the pensive lady in an apron, with her sleeves rolled up, looking out from under the curtain. Jeff Walls' view from a Vancouver apartment window flips that narrative completely. In Wall's image, the two women look happy and relaxed in a reasonably luxurious flat. It looks cold and uninviting outside. They're in the best place.
Isabel Codrington - The Kitchen (1927)
Jeff Wall - A View from an Apartment (2004-05)
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami - Tsitsi (2022)
Vanessa Bell - Woman in a Red Hat (1915)
Vanessa Bell's red hatted woman looks as if she was happy in her apartment staring out the window and spying on her neighbours - at least until we had the audacity to interrupt her. The young Jamaican lady in Andrew Jackson's photograph is more proactive in her defence - as well she might be. It looks as if a driver of a car is beckoning her, against her will, into his vehicle. As if she is simply a component of his car that he can activate as easily as his windscreen wipers or indicator.
Placing the Jackson next to a scratchy Euan Uglow painting of a woman undoing her bra makes for an uneasy juxtaposition and David Hockney's riff on the German fairy tale Rapunzel reminds of just how many stories there are of women being kept prisoner. We can't even see Rapunzel's face. Just her long hair coming out of the tower's solitary window.
Walter Sickert - Laylock and Thunderplump (1924)
Andrew Jackson - Hand #1, Kingston, Jamaica (2017)
Euan Uglow - Night Scene (1995-97)
David Hockney - The Tower Had One Window (1969)
Peter Blake - Girl in a Window (1962)
Of course, the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 had many of us, like Rapunzel, trapped indoors. Windows became ever more important as we banged pots and pans and clapped for carers from them and our children's images of rainbows and messages of support decorated them. Often we'd speak to our neighbours from them (not me, of course, I live in London).
The National Portrait Gallery began a Hold Still project which sought to create a collective portrait of the UK at this time and people were invited to submit photographs. There was even a competition and two of the final photos, you've guessed it, feature women at windows. Steph James touching and sweet photo of her one year old son and his eighty-eight year old Great Grandma kissing through a window, captured as Steph dropped her nan's groceries off, is so tender I could weep but it's matched by Simran Janjua's snap of her sister-in-law with her grandfather meeting after months of being apart. We all remember, surely, how comforting it was to finally see our loved ones again after so long apart.
Steph James - Glass Kisses (2020)
Simran Janjua - Dad's Love (2020)
I felt it was a really nice touch that the exhibition included work by amateur photographers but, of course, we ended with a more self-indulgent final room as the professionals took over. At least the professionals in question were female artists and those female artists had all created works that explore the construction of identity.
Catherine Caroline Cathinka Engelhart shows an artist, most likely herself, so consumed by her work that she turns away from the window. More interested, perhaps, in the light that streams in from it than the view outside. Very few artists interrogate identity as thoroughly as Cindy Sherman so it was hardly a surprise to see one of her pieces on show. In one of her untitled film stills, she's asking questions about how the way women are portrayed on film and television affects our perception of how women in real life should look or behave.
Catherine Caroline Cathinka Engelhart - The Artist in her Studio (1894)
Cindy Sherman - Untitled Film Still (1978)
Rachel Whiteread - Untitled (For WHP) (2015)
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