Edouard Manet, Olympia (1865)

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, The Bridge (2010)

Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas (1939)

My mini-exhibit aimed to highlight and explore the viewing relationships that an artist can create between subjects and an audience. The exhibition space was a small black room with two holes on the wall across the entrance, positioned slightly below eye level. This hopefully would make the viewing experience feel like one of spying and draw viewers’ attention to the act of looking itself, specifically how the artists have constructed that act. Through the first hole on the left one would see Manet’s Olympia, a piece that very much emphasizes the subject’s “to-be-looked-at-ness,” as Laura Mulvey might say. Through the subject’s eye contact and body language it is quite evident that she exists, a least in the work, predominantly to satisfy the (likely male) viewer. Right next to this hole, one would look through to see Akunyili Crosby’s The Bridge, which depicts a highly intimate moment shared by a couple. The subjects seem to exist for each other rather than for the viewer, which is supported by Akunyili Crosby’s compositional choice to angle their bodies away from our point of view. The third artist I am introducing is Frida Kahlo. My decision to include Kahlo as the last artist stems from a desire to explore the subject-viewer relationship when that subject is also the artist. Self-portraiture is particularly fascinating because the artist-subject gets to control, as much as an artist can control their own work, how they are represented. In The Two Fridas, Kahlo literally puts her heart onto the page, presenting the audience with a glimpse into her physical and emotional states while maintaining the ultimate ability to control that presentation. One thing I would like viewers to consider is what factors influence subject agency in relation to the viewer as well as the artist.

In my original gallery, the two paintings “Dog Woman” and “Susanna and the Elders” hung across a long dim hallway from each other, both at eye level and the only brilliantly illuminated points in an otherwise heavy room. These two images paired contain a sense of duality, of completeness. Here is a woman, dignified but exploited, and here is a woman who leaves the concept of a “lady” behind, tapping into a primal rage. Watched and watching, they are flip sides of the same being. Into this twisted sisterhood we introduce an unlikely third sibling, the painting “Midday Drinking Den, after Embah I,” very recent work by Lisa Brice. The oversaturated red and blue surely enrich the room in sharp contrast to the muted earth tones of Tintoretti’s Susanna and the more realistic peaches and blues of Rego’s woman. The Brice painting comes with a twist — it is at once intoxicating and challenging. Hanging in the center of the hallway, directly in between the original works, Brice’s figure turns to face the viewer, clearly ignoring a potential seated spectator within the scene to pose for our eyes instead. She is naked, quite literally spreading herself open to the camera as another woman watches in the background, melting into a hazy red distance. Brice’s woman is unafraid and unapologetic. She is not threatened by voyeuristic looks, she seeks them out. She is bolder than Susanna, less physically enraged than the Dog Woman. She makes us aware that there are different types of power, and that her methods are potentially just as powerful as those of Rego’s heroine. Brice’s woman is sexy and daring, she challenges us in a third sense, forcing her audience to see her as a person with agency above all else. What does it mean for her to stare down the viewer? For Rego’s figure to hold a gaze just to the viewer’s side? For Susanna to make eye contact with only her own reflection? Each approach is a new way of seeing and of questioning.

The theme of my gallery is depictions of motherhood. I included Paula Rego’s Triptych and Bearden’s School Bell Time. The former is an image of a woman having just received an abortion; the latter shows a woman standing in the foreground holding an infant, seemingly in hiding from her family, which awaits expectantly in the distance. The third image I’m choosing to include is Picasso’s First Steps, which hangs in the YUAG. In it, a stocky woman, dressed in mourner’s black, holds the hands of her child as he takes his first steps. The child is all energy, his body bursting into squares and triangles and trapezoids. The geometric nature of the child’s body echoes that of the baby in Bearden’s image, whose head is an egg-shape resting on another oval. The mother in the painting has an expression of sadness and apprehension. Despite this seemingly exciting moment of motion and fledgling independence, she can’t bring herself to be happy. She has no choice but to let her child march off into the terrifying outside world; painted in 1943, the war weighed heavily on Picasso’s mind. All three works depict women in various stages of dependence/independence from their offspring, with varying degrees of willingness to let their children go.

The reason I chose the two pieces included in my mini exhibit, “The Power of a Look”, are because I found them visually similar in their conception and composition, but strikingly different in their mood and what my role as a viewer is. My exhibit takes place in a small gallery space devoid of anything in the room except for two small holes in opposing walls that are located low on the walls. This is to simulate the feeling of being a voyeur and witnessing private acts. The two paintings are  Lucien Freud’s “Painter and a Model” and Gervex’s “Rolla”, where one person is naked and there is another figure watching alongside the viewer, which creates a very strange dynamic. I chose to include Andrew Wyeth’s “Study for Overflow” which is a watercolor of his neighbor Helga whom he painted and drew over 240 times. I have always been fascinated by Wyeth’s obsession of her and the numerous works he produced of her sleeping. Wyeth, like Freud, yet not quite to the extent, painted the human body in a hyper-realistic way, but was also able to inject an emotional connection to the model. I thought it would be an interesting addition because it’s almost a perfect combination of the two paintings. She lies languidly and unaware, in way that would provoke the gaze of a man, yet there is a certain kind of intimacy and tenderness in the picture that exposes her but doesn’t objectify her.

My original mini-exhibit, which includes Paula Rego’s pastel painting, Snow White Playing with her Father’s Trophies (1995) and her acrylic painting, The Family (1988), is located inside of a gallery that has been transformed into a stereotypical family living room. The intended effect of this transformation is to underscore the upheaval of traditional family structures and female roles that one associates with a traditional living room. Her paintings, which employ erotic imagery and provocative humor, celebrate female control. If one walks right outside the pseudo-living room, he or she will find Louis Bourgeois’ The Destruction of the Father (1974). Like Paula Rego’s artwork, Louis Bourgeois’ sculpture, which a childhood dream of murdering and consuming her father at the dinner table, implies a subversion of the traditional family.

Paula Rego’s Snow White Playing with her Father’s Trophies (1995)

Paula Rego’s The Family (1988)

Louis Bourgeois’ The Destruction of the Father (1974)

Portrait of an Artist by David Hockney is one of my favorite paintings. My mini-exhibit (which includes Edgar Degas’ The Bath and Romare Bearden’s The Prevalence of Ritual: Baptism) is titled Rituals and Water and explores the way that water is used in both public and private rituals. I think that any time I enter water, whether it be to shower or to swim, I feel calmer and more centered. Here, the person in the pool evokes a sense of serenity that matches the great stretch of nature behind him. This feeling of calm; however, is broken by the man watching from the pool deck. In many ways he plays the role of the visitor plays in that he is an intruder in a ritual, an outsider.

Eyes directed straight at the viewer, the yellow suited man evokes a lonely, yet self-confident aesthetic. He has always struck me as an artist. Among yet distinguished from the motley crowd attracted to the late night cafe, the man is self-aware yet deep in thought. Unphased by the late hour and the already finished bottle of wine to his left, his mental state fundamentally differs from those of the other figures in the room. His hypersensitive visual perspective is heightened by the deep reds, off yellows, and bright greens. He perceives the room differently than the rest and boldly stands apart. To his right sit two lovers warmly entwined and an old man burying his face in his jacket. Aware of these figures, the artist holds his ground and focuses instead on an unseen person completely removed from the scene–the subtle observer waiting for the essence of life to reveal itself.

When I first saw Van Gogh’s “The Night Cafe on Place Lamartine in Arles,” at the Yale Art Gallery, I was intrigued by its vivid colors. Now, I am fascinated by the yellow suited man. He is the only person in the painting aware that the scene is being visually recorded. I suspect that Van Gogh painted himself in the scene to share how he feels at that late night cafe. Isolated in his aesthetic, observant of other people, and aware of life’s transience, he is proud of his work and will forever look his fans and critics in the eye.

Having recently read about Kerry James Marshall, his work fascinated me and I wanted to explore more of his oeuvre. I stumbled across this one called “Past Times,” painted in 1997 and relevant in 2018 because it sold for $21.1 million at a Sotheby’s event earlier this year. Strokes of acrylic paint create the texture for the rolling water and the grassy hills. Objects at the forefront–the picnic basket, the sleeping dog, the spewing fountain–are pieces of collage and visibly impose themselves onto the surface, gaining a three-dimensional authenticity. The three main figures all stare directly at the viewer, their steely gazes in weird contrast with their recreational activities. Their pleated, eggshell white attire simultaneously evokes a country club chic and the dour reverence of black Christian river baptisms. Marshall crowds his canvas with high-end commercial products, filling a space that would be otherwise empty as the red-brick urban sprawl lies in the distance. This is an assembly of black people undisturbed and well-off, yet still alert to the gaze that has been imprinted on their consciousness. “Past Times” takes on a double meaning, both referring to the pleasures of leisure and the pain of history, a history that temporal distance heals on the surface but leaves scars as reminders. The painting lingers in the mind because the group’s blackness is so stark, so unavoidable. Other colors seem more faded, causing the work itself to feel more dated, harkening back to black art from other 20th century eras. Marshall’s work here marks an inflection point, both the turn of a new millennium and the new age of black buying power. We see a nod to a future of potential, but are still forced to remember its foundations.

Théodore Géricault’s early 19th century painting, The Raft of the Medusa, has always been one of my favorite paintings and manages to stop me in my tracks each time I look at it.

Géricault packed so much drama into this piece that it will be impossible to describe every narrative aspect, but there are a few that stand out the most. First, the way he has oriented the raft and its passengers so that they all look away from the viewer and into the distance immediately draws viewers into the scene to look along with the men. The form they desperately wave toward in the distance is their last ray of hope, presumably a boat, that sails off completely unaware of them, which is reflected by the men being entirely unaware of us, the viewers, watching them. I think the greatest source of drama, other than the dead, torn apart bodies, is the movement encompassing this painting. The solid waves threaten on either side, the straining sail fights against the wind of the oncoming storm, the dynamic bodies climb, stretch, hang over each other. The frenzied gestures and anguished faces of these men keep the eyes rotating around the painting trying to analyze each character’s story. Géricault took care to individualize every man’s reaction to their situation, and also depicted each body in a different state of degradation and decay from the pallor of their skin and the expressions on their faces. The harsh light dramatizes the whole scene and makes the bodies of the dead and the dying seem even more unnatural and crazed, ostensibly an account of a current event, but actually a philosophical commentary on humanity and what happens when people are forced to the brink between human and animal, life and death. We see varying responses to the situation before them – some desperately trying to flag down a ship, some seemingly resigned to their fate, and others completely disconnected with reality, heads in their hands. Each man, dead or alive, found himself on this raft by mere misfortune and the story Géricault shares with us is one of real, everyday men forced into hell on Earth and examined when their last ray of hope, of life, of humanity, fades into the distance.

Gustave Moreau’s L’Apparition depicts a vivid re-imagination of the Biblical story of Herod and Salome. Enchanted by the princess’ dance, Herod promises Salome anything she asks for. The princess, incited by her mother, asks for the head of John the Baptist on a charger. Unlike traditional depictions of the story, Moreau’s version has the head of the saint floating in front of Salome while the charger lies beside the executioner standing behind. Though many figures appear in the work, it seems as if only Salome can see the terrible apparition before her. She shrinks away from the illusion while extending her left arm to point at the head. The saint’s head drips blood on to the ground while the halo surrounding it radiates luminance. Together they form a dynamic triangular composition taut with tension. The overall ochre tones of the painting sets the ominous mood for the grim event as well as the terror Salome experiences at seeing the apparition. Though the painting is steep in tremendous amount of details that describe the riches of the Judean court, the colors and the outlines blur into each other as if implying the insignificance, perhaps even eventual dissolution, of such luxuries in the face of the horrific act Salome has committed. The smudged colors also give the scene a dreamlike quality, turning the entire painting into an apparition.