The New York Review of Books - USA (2022-05-12)

6 The New York Review

denotes Painting’s silence in Ripa and

removes the word “imitation” from the

mask, as if to convey that she imitates

no one. She also ignores Ripa’s instruc-

tion that Painting’s tools should ap-

pear at the figure’s feet, where they are

meant to signify that hers is “a noble

exercise,” which “cannot be done with-

out much application of the intellect.”

Rather than subordinate the work of

the hands to that of the mind, in other

words, Artemisia chooses to show a

fully embodied Painting vigorously

manipulating the tools of her trade.

Compared with some of the works for

which she has become famous—her

early Susannah and the Elders (1610),

for example, or the multiple paintings

of strong women committing acts of

violence, like Salome with the Head of

John the Baptist (1610 –1615) or Judith

Slaying Holofernes (circa 1620)—the

premise of this picture may seem tame,

but the confidence and boldness with

which it was executed make for a pow-

erful self- portrait.

Though I have suggested that women

artists entered the field by rendering

their labor visible rather than effacing

it, their willingness to get their hands

dirty—or at least to represent them-

selves as doing so—clearly had its limits.

With the partial exception of Artemisia,

who wears a brown apron over her silky

dress and has apparently rolled up a

voluminous sleeve on the arm nearest

her canvas, no one in these early self-

portraits looks as if she ever spilled a

drop of paint. Van Hemessen’s arms ap-

pear to be encased in velvet; Anguisso-

la’s wrists and collar sport demure white

ruffles. In another Self- Portrait as the

Allegory of Painting (1658) made two

decades after Artemisia’s, the twenty-

year- old Elisabetta Sirani sits at her

easel in a low- cut gown and lavish cape,

her hair wreathed with laurel.

Even the Dutch artist Judith Ley-

ster, who flirts with propriety by part-

ing her lips in a smile and gesturing

with her brush at the groin of the man

she is painting, compensates for her

cheekiness by decking herself out in an

elegant bodice and magnificent white

ruff. Leyster’s self- portrait, which

dates from around 1630, was attributed

for more than two centuries to Frans

Hals, until scholars finally decoded the

monogram that ser ved as her signatu re :

“JL*”—a play on her name and leid-

star, the Dutch word for “lodestar.”

For anyone who’s ever been told to

smile for a camera, Leyster’s expres-

sion may seem unsurprising, but her

willingness to show some teeth already

represents a small departure from de-

corum. Higgie identifies a possible pre-

cursor in a 1554 sketch by Anguissola

of a broadly smiling young girl teach-

ing an old woman to read, but even if

Higgie is right that the artist modeled

the girl on herself, it seems doubtful

that she meant this genre scene to be

viewed as a self- portrait.

On the other hand, Anguissola may

well have been the first woman painter

to risk depicting herself in old age. In

a self- portrait from around 1610 (not

included by Higgie), the elderly artist,

nearing eighty, sits firmly upright in a

red chair, one hand holding a letter and

the other marking her place in a book.

It’s a dignified image but scarcely an

exercise in self- flattery, as the painter

scrupulously records her thinning hair,

bulbous nose, and narrow lips pursed

over a mouth evidently lacking in teeth.

By comparison, Rosalba Carriera’s

Self- Portrait as Winter (1730 –1731),

elegantly coiffed in ermine, is an ideal-

ized picture of an aging artist, though

Higgie may not be altogether wrong to

characterize Carriera’s representation

of her own features as “brutally hon-

est.” (Carriera, it should be noted, was

twenty years younger than Anguissola

had been in 1610.)

But the most haunting depiction of

old age in The Mirror and the Palette

comes from the brush of the Finnish

painter Helene Schjerfbeck, whose

Self- Portrait with Red Spot (1944) is

among over twenty such images the art-

ist completed while holed up in neutral

Sweden during the final years of World

War II. Schjerfbeck, who was eighty-

two at the time and dying of stomach

cancer, reduces herself to a hairless

skull with one eye seemingly widened

in terror and features that appear to

be dissolving into the canvas. A sin-

gle patch of bright red on her lower lip

disrupts the painter’s otherwise nearly

monochrome brushstrokes and adds a

note of ambiguity to an already unset-

tling image. What looks to Higgie like

“a drop of blood or a target,” Rudd—

who also discusses the picture—sees as

“a spirit of defiance, a spark of life.” But

both writers are clearly moved by the

brushstrokes through which a ghostly

Schjerfbeck self- consciously enacts the

process of her own mortality.

The aging face is one thing, however,

the naked body another—at least when

the body in question is that of a woman

painting herself. Higgie organizes her

book thematically rather than chrono-

logically, and she saves her chapter

entitled “Naked” for last. It starts off

with what she identifies as “the earliest

known painting of a naked self- portrait

by a woman”: Paula Modersohn-

Becker’s Self- Portrait on Her Sixth

Wedding Anniversary (1906). Strictly

speaking, the figure is bare- breasted

rather than naked, since a white cloth

below her waist conceals her thighs and

genitals, but what is even more remark-

able than her uncovered torso is the

swollen belly that unmistakably identi-

fies her as pregnant. To the best anyone

can determine, however, this aspect of

the self- portrait is a fiction: a kind of vi-

sual experiment by which she could both

identify with the most traditional form

of female creativity and radically break

with it, announcing the pregnancy as

entirely the work of her own mind and

hands. Signed with her maiden initials,

“P. B.,” and painted at a time when the

Avi Steinberg

for a biography of

Grace Paley

Krithika Varagur

for a group biography

of the Princesses

Duleep Singh

Tatiana Brailovskaya

for a biography of

Henry Bigelow

Levy/Sloan Fellow

Nicholas Forster

for a biography of

Bill Gunn

Jane Kamensky

for a biography of

Candida Royalle

The 2022 – 2023 Fellows

Congratulations to Rebecca Donner

2018 - 2019 Leon Levy Fellow and winner of the 2022 National Book Critics

Circle Award for ‘All the Frequent Trouble of Our Days: the True Story of

the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler’

Applications now open for a new M.A. Program

in Biography and Memoir: gc.cuny.edu/bam

The 2022 BIO conference will take place online May 13 – 15

biographersinternational.org/conference/2022-bio-conference

Alamy

Yeazell 04 09 .indd 6 4 / 14 / 22 5 : 25 PM