30 ARTS
THE WEEK 28 May 2022Art
The artistic convention of depicting
a woman positioned by a window
“dates back millennia”, said Hettie
Judah in The Guardian. From the
craftsmen of the ancient world to
Vermeer to Cindy Sherman, artists
have found the window a rich symbol.
It can be philosophical – “a threshold
between interior and exterior worlds”,
confinement and freedom – or more
earthy: it has often been used as a
pictorial shorthand for prostitution.
This thoughtful and “tightly
structured” exhibition explores
the history of the tradition, as it
has survived down the centuries.
Taking in sculpture, paintings,
prints, photographs and drawings,
it mixes bona fide masterpieces with
“intriguing oddities”, grouping works
together in thematic clusters that
probe subjects including identity,
voyeurism, solitude and longing. You
can see Rembrandt’s touching Girl
at a Window (1645), from Dulwich
Picture Gallery’s own collection,
and a whole section by contemporary
female artists: notably, there’s a 1975
photograph of Marina Abramovic,
taken when the performance artist
swapped roles with an Amsterdam
sex worker.It gets off to a scintillating start, said
Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday
Times, with a section that explores the sexual connotations of
the woman at the window, dating back to ancient times. There’s
carved decorative ivory from around 900BC from Nimrud, in
Mesopotamia, depicting the face of a “cultish goddess of love”
framed by a window. Perhaps more startling is a Greek pot from
about 360BC incorporating what, even by today’s standards, is a
riotously bawdy image of a man climbing a ladder up to a woman
waiting above, his erection sticking out of his pants “like anuncooked frankfurter”. A Walter
Sickert painting of “a prostitute sitting
in a window” is juxtaposed with an
extraordinary 15th century French
sculpture showing the “virgin martyr”
St Avia being “locked up for her
beliefs”. Towards the end, however,
the show starts “clumping its way
down the overtrodden path of identity
politics”. A “beautiful” Picasso
aquatint of his lover Françoise Gilot,
for instance, is not so much analysed
as “blasted” by the curators’ “casual
accusations” about the artist’s
“abusive” relationship with Gilot.
Somewhere down the line in this
otherwise engaging exhibition,
“scholarship has given way to clichés”.I thought the show was “filled with
revelations” from start to finish, said
Laura Cumming in The Observer. It
is packed full of standout pictures,
from a Botticelli portrait of a “steely
Renaissance redhead” with her
“fingers suggestively clasping the
window”, to the 17th century Dutch
painter Gabriël Metsu’s vision of an
African woman “seated behind a stone
sill in red velvet and pearls”. Nor
does it limit itself to canonical
Western art: one highlight is an Indian
miniature depicting “two women
appearing at a window like performers
in a play, arms around each other, their
smiles exquisitely expressive”. One of the greatest works here is
Degas’ “stupendous” Woman at a Window (1871), in which the
titular figure sits “still as a heron” in the gloom of a Paris
apartment, as the light “strikes out her face with its dazzle”.
This is an “enthralling, imaginative and constantly surprising”
exhibition, “superbly curated” and visually ravishing. It is the
kind of show that will “make you look harder and think longer
about both art and life”.Exhibition of the week Reframed: The Woman in the Window
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21 (020-8693 5254, dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk). Until 4 SeptemberBotticelli’s Portrait of Smeralda Bandinelli (c.1475)News from the art world
A cheese sandwich worth £220,000
A painting by a Canadian folk artist that
was originally exchanged for a cheese
sandwich has been sold at auction for
C$350,000 (£220,000), says Leyland Cecco
in The Guardian. Black Truck, a work by the
painter Maud Lewis (1903-1970), who made
a meagre living from peddling her “distinct
and cheery” paintings by the roadside in
her native Nova Scotia, set “a new high
mark” for the artist. Interest in Lewis’s work
has “surged” since a biopic, Maudie,
documenting her “struggles and success”
introduced it to a whole new audience in- Irene Demas, Black Truck’s seller, was
working as a chef when she acquired it in
1973 through an ad hoc arrangement with
the artist John Kinnear: in exchange for making him grilled
cheese sandwiches she was allowed to choose from a selection of
paintings by him and his friends, who included Lewis. Demas has
expressed “disbelief” at the sale, but told The Guardian that the
original deal wasn’t quite as one-sided as it might appear: “It
wasn’t just an ordinary grilled cheese,” Demas explained. “It was
a great sandwich, with a five-year-old
cheddar and beautiful bread.” Prior to the
sale, the painting had hung in her house
for nearly 50 years.Michelangelo’s first nude
A recently discovered drawing by
Michelangelo has sold at auction in Paris
for €23m, says Adam Sage in the Times.
Michelangelo is thought to have created
the drawing of “a nude man standing
between two figures” in his early 20s,
basing it on a fresco by the 15th century
painter Masaccio in the church of Santa
Maria del Carmine in Florence. The work is
the earliest nude Michelangelo is known to
have drawn, but has only been identified
as his work since 2019, when it was spotted by Dr Furio Rinaldi,
an Old Masters specialist at Christie’s auction house. When it was
last sold, in 1907, it was attributed to a member of the school of
Michelangelo. Although the final sale price fell short of its €30m
estimate, Christie’s said that the work had broken a new record
for a drawing by the Renaissance artist.Lewis’s “distinct and cheery” Black Truck