The Rokeby Venus

In this rather hilarious report of the incident in the Times, the attack on the painting is described in almost human terms: ‘probably the most serious blow has caused a cruel wound in the neck’; there is ‘a broad laceration starting near the left shoulder’ and ‘other cuts […] cleanly made in the region of the waist’. The Keeper of the National Gallery, meanwhile, describes ‘seven distinct injuries’ and ‘a ragged bruise’ on the painting, in the language of a post-mortem.

Meanwhile, ‘prominent woman suffragist Mary Richardson’ (note that the noun there is ‘suffragist’, not ‘woman’) is said to have used an instrument ‘similar to [those] used by butchers’ – as if that somehow makes it worse than if she’d used sewing scissors or a hat pin. Clearly the writer considers the Venus as much of a piece of meat (albeit a sacred one) as Mary Richardson – who later said she ‘couldn’t stand the way the men visitors gawped at it’.

The Times counters by saying that this Venus is ‘absolutely natural and absolutely pure’ –  a strange claim that implicitly contrasts this ‘marvellously graceful’ women with the ‘woman suffragist’ who attacks her, in the process making this about much more than the destruction of art.

Art Under Attack

Unfortunately, little has changed in the gallery notes to Tate Britain’s exhibition Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm. There’s a whole room devoted to women (after several focusing on those other Wanton Destroyers of Art, the Protestants and the Irish), with accompanying hand-wringing notation:

In 1913 and 1914 the campaign to win women the vote became more militant and turned from window-smashing to attacks on art. Paintings in public museums and galleries – the nation’s cultural heritage – were attacked in order to effect to effect political change.  The militant women who carried out these acts of iconoclasm did so in the name of the Women’s Social and Political Union[.]

– Tate Britain, Histories of British Iconoclasm, Room 6 

It’s couched in the language of facts and neutrality but there’s a nasty undercurrent to the emphasis on ‘public museums and galleries’ and the little clarifying clause that this is ‘the nations’s cultural heritage’ (to which we will return). Together with the repetition of ‘militant’ and the rising pitch of hysteria in the movement ‘from window-smashing to attacks on art’, it’s clear that the writer is no friend to Mary Richardson.

‘Iconoclasm’ is, of course, the term used in the exhibition as a whole, although I find its application to the Rokeby Venus little better than the Times‘ assertion that the painting is ‘universally recognised by good judges as […a] masterpiece’ – it implicitly speaks from the perspective of a white, male, artistic elite, which has confirmed that this painting is ‘objectively’ of almost religious (‘iconic’) importance. In the process, the word comes close to justifying Richardson’s claim that an ‘outcry against my deed […] is an hypocrisy so long as they allow the destruction of Mrs. Pankhurst and other beautiful living women’ – the elite cared more for a painted woman than a living one.

Interestingly, that very perspective appears once again in the next room, where we have Carl Andre’s brick sculpture on display. This was attacked by a member of the public who resented his taxes being spent to acquire it for Tate because it wasn’t ‘proper’ art. Whatever you think about the piece, you can see his point. Yet today, we are told in the gallery notes, ‘Carl Andre’s sculpture remains admired by some and misunderstood by others’.

Photograph of Mary Richardson in 1914

Conserving womanhood

I am by no means condoning the destruction of artworks, but the salient point for me is that the Rokeby Venus is ‘alive’ and well in the National Gallery to this day, and the other canvas victims of the suffragettes’ knives exhibited in ‘Attacks on Art’ are similarly unharmed.

In fact, while the gallery notes assert that paintings such as ‘In Prayer’ by George Frederick Watts (exhibited here) were selected for destruction by the suffragettes because of the problematic image of womanhood they presented, the effect of exhibiting them in their restored form is merely to reassert that complete, beautifully conserved image in the service of a narrative of ‘militant women’ attacking ‘the nation’s cultural heritage’.

About that ‘cultural heritage’. The next room but one in the exhibition focuses on Auto-destructive art, with examples from  Gustav Metzger and Yoko Ono, a fragment of whose Biba dress (destroyed during a performance art piece) is exhibited here. She bought that Biba dress, so she’s entitled to destroy it, is the implicit argument here (from this point on the exhibition is all about ‘good’ iconoclasts, such as Gilbert and George, who had the decency to buy the art before they destroy it). The suffragettes, by contrast (like the Protestants and the Irish) were ruining it for ‘the nation’.

Galleries as a model for citizenship

The National Gallery – where the Venus was hanging in 1914 – was set up in 1824 to provide a space for the poor to view art alongside their social betters. In its original conception, there was a moral reform impetus behind it – many spoke of how museums accessible to the broader public would reduce birth rates and crime among the poor (who would now have a gallery to go to instead!), and there was talk of how, through exposure to their ‘betters’ – including middle-class women, for whom the gallery offered a genteel and ‘safe’ public space – the working classes would learn to regulate their passions and behave in a more orderly (quasi-middle-class) manner. In fact, national galleries – set up throughout Europe during the nineteenth century – were described as instruments in which to learn better citizenship.

You know the punchline, right? Yup – the majority of the people museums were trying to entice in and train up as model citizens – working class men, all women – did not have the vote. That’s the problem. These works may have been the ‘nation’s cultural heritage’, but the nation in question was an incomplete one. The Rokeby Venus didn’t belong to the Suffragettes. It belonged to art-loving, nude-gawping middle-class men.

The most interesting thing in this exhibition, for me, is the admission in the Suffragette room that the Suffragettes prompted as much ‘iconoclasm’ as they enacted. A WSPU pamphlet is exhibited on which Mrs Pankhurst’s face has been so violently ‘de-faced’ the paper has torn, exposing the words on the next page. In this age of Caroline Criado-Perez and Anita Sarkeesian, that should make us think.

This is an especially grim state of affairs since in the rest of the museums, galleries and cultural heritage sector women actually outnumber their male colleagues – sixty percent to forty.

So it’s heartening that Dr Penelope Curtis, a specialist in sculpture and British art, should have taken up the mantle of Director of Tate Britain. Since her appointment in 2010 she has been largely overseeing The Millbank Project, whose most recent result is The Tate Rehang.

So they’ve got the hammer and nails out.

The London-dwellers among you might remember the old Tate Britain – pictures ordered roughly by category or theme. That big Pre-Raphaelites room with the dodgy John Martin landscapes next door. A room of Modernism. A room of sixteenth-century portraits. That’s all gone.

In its place is a ‘Walk through British Art’ – pictures ordered chronologically, swirling round the main hall, with a timeline at the beginning giving you not the potted history of art, but the history of the Tate itself.

Sugar pots and panopticons

The Tate & Lyle golden syrup tin, still emblazoned with a line from Judges 14 – ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’.

The Tate was founded from a bequest of Henry Tate, of Tate & Lyle – who also did (and do) sugar and golden syrup.

Like the Tate Modern, which was converted from a mid-century factory, the Tate Britain partially re-appropriates an earlier space. The Millbank Prison was originally going to be Jeremy Bentham’s pilot Panopticon, but it didn’t work out and the National Penitentary was demolished and replaced by the National Gallery of British Art – which then became the Tate.

Built on Henry Tate’s sugar- (which in practice means ‘slave-‘) money, and sitting there on the site of Bentham’s prison overlooking the Thames, the Tate has always felt strangely emblematic to me.

Unlike the National Gallery, which has a noble heritage more akin to the great educative state institutions – the Louvre, say, or the Uffizi – the Tate has an intrinsically London spirit and a capitalist soul, with something of the Protestant Work Ethic hanging about it.

Indeed, today the Tate group as a whole earns over sixty percent of its income – staggering when you consider the average equivalent for its fellow UK museums is more like two to three percent.¹

A woman’s work is never done

Most of the painting interpretation has now been stripped out entirely. I always read those explanations slavishly, but I have to say I didn’t miss them at all – in fact, I barely noticed they were gone.

Thoughts of the Past (1859)

But there is a little bit in one of my favourite new rooms of the rehang – the drawing and prints room covering the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On a preliminary drawing for John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s alt-Pre-Raphaelite Thoughts of the Past, the curators comment on the depicted ‘sex worker’ in her lodgings which (like the Tate) overlook the Thames.

Her industry is compared with that of the Thames itself, and its corruption with the corrupt contemporary society the picture implicitly comments upon.

What was interesting for me here was not only the correct use of the term ‘sex worker’ (I notice that the interpretation available for the final painting on the Tate’s website sticks to the more trad-Art History ‘prostitute’) but also the connection between her work and the city as a whole, its bustle, its trade, its work ethic.

This sits alongside the (for me, at least) unprecedented acknowledgment of female artists and their productions through the ages. We had Mary Beale – seventeenth century, claimed as ‘the first professional female English painter’ – Mary Sargent Florence, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Georgina Macdonald, Mabel Nicholson and many others, all on display.

There was nothing of the tokenistic about this: you just casually bumped into female names in much the same way you might casually notice a few Raphaels in the Renaissance rooms at the National Gallery. They were just there.

The work of painting

Gwen John – Self Portrait

As an example of how ‘women’s painting’ was displayed, one particularly interesting juxtaposition for me was that of a self-portrait by Gwen John. It sat atop two paintings by male artists depicting female models – William Orpen’s The Mirror and Philip Wilson Steer’s Seated Nude. The choice of the John self-portrait here seemed to me to comment implicitly on the relationship between artist and model and, again, different kinds of work.

The Mirror shows a fully-clothed female model in a large hat looking glumly out at us – except she’s not looking at us, but at William Orpen, who can be seen working at his painting in the Van Eykian mirror above her.

Wilson Steer’s painting shows a naked female model, also in a large hat, sitting within roughly sketched unfinished surroundings, in the process drawing attention to painting’s backstage elements, its construction.

Gwen John shows herself fully clothed and looking at the viewer, but she is of course painting herself modelling herself.

These kinds of juxtapositions really bring out some of the nuances of the ‘History of British Art’, and the rehang is full of them. I could also go on about the new room of 1920s silent film responding to two Pre-Raphaelite paintings; the sudden influx of craft, sculpture and 3D works, and the re-instatement of the glorious Blake collection.

And other reviewers have talked at length about the choice to spread a single artist over multiple rooms, so you see the same artist appearing and reappearing at different points throughout the journey, depending on where you are chronologically. I won’t talk about it forever – I’ll just suggest that you go and see it.

1. In fact, my one gripe with this new rehang is that it has an actual, literal, break for the gift shop. As in, you have to walk through the gift shop to get between two rooms in the middle of the big Walk Through Art. Tacky, guys, tacky.

It was at once a brilliant and thoroughly embarrassing afternoon.

I came home exhausted and tearful, clutching a new book and my partner’s sleeve.  “But I can’t write about that!” I protested.  “What would I draw for it?”

Hello, BadRep readers.  I’m here to tell you about the time I embarrassed myself in a museum.

Image: Kirsty Connell (credit link at end of article)

I live in Cambridge, which is a nice place, and contains the Fitzwilliam Museum, which is also nice.  Startlingly nice, in fact.  Long warrens of gold-framed paintings, glass cabinets full of glittering treasures, and ancient wooden tables polished to a mirror sheen with little toblerone notices on them telling you to keep your paws off, thank you.

There’s marble busts that I could look at for years and never get old, myriad hoards of coins, terrible thorny ranks of daggers and swords, medieval Christian bling and a glorious rotating selection of temporary exhibitions.

Their temporary exhibitions are spectacular.  They recently had one on Chinese tomb treasures that I saw posters for when I was visiting London.  “I’ve been to that!” I exclaimed, pointing at a poster on the Tube.  But no-one was impressed, for they were cultured London types with the British Museum on their doorstep, and I am a scruffy Cambridge yokel with orange hair and visible underpants.

The most recent standout exhibit – which was so busy they had to implement a timed ticket system – was the Quentin Blake: Drawn By Hand exhibition.

You all know who Quentin Blake is, of course.  He illustrated all of Roald Dahl’s books for children and many other things besides.  I wasn’t very familiar with his “many other things besides”, though, and that was what this exhibit showed me.

I didn’t know, for example, that he has done public paintings for hospitals.  There were many of his maternity-unit paintings, all involving cheerful mothers having fun in a variety of scenes (some are underwater for a water-birthing unit) and all very sweet and soothing to look at.

And there was this one that made me lose my shit comprehensively.

I was already on delicate emotional footing because I have a lot of feelings about Quentin Blake, and then I came across this painting he’d done for the Vincent Square eating disorder treatment unit in London.

The painting, titled Ordinary Life No. 8, is of a young woman in her hospital room in a gown, feeding birds on her windowsill through the open sash window.  She looks happy, and all the birds are eating seeds.

This just in: I have just started crying writing that paragraph.

I am at work.

She’s in her room, where she has to stay until she’s better, but the birds can go where they please; she is happy to feed the birds, and the birds are happy to be fed.  Oh my god, there are so many things in that piece that kind of punched me in the heart until I burst into a fire hydrant of noisy tears in the middle of the reflective silence of the exhibit.

Some very well-behaved children turned around and scowled at me.  My partner ushered me on.  The next piece was from the lithograph series Girls and Dogs, of a young girl in a red dress, happily showing a gigantic pitch-black terrifying-looking wolf monster a painting she’d done.  The tears came again, only worse.

And then, at the end, there was an illustration for The Boy In The Dress (a children’s novel by David Walliams, of all people) and it was all too much and I had to leave.

“Mummy,” said a small child with crisp, angelic gold ringlets bearing aloft a blue ribbon, “That man is crying”.

Blake’s paintings, with their characteristic loose, expressive style – fluid washes of watercolour and ink contained by haphazard spidery cages of scratchy black ink somehow conspiring to be more life-accurate than anything photorealism could ever offer – capture and reflect simple happiness and freedom.

I don’t want to use words like “innocence”, because I don’t like its implications of fetishising a lack of knowledge.  Blake’s paintings are very canny; their veneer of simplicity disguising a great depth of self-awareness and knowledge of the subject.

The young girl showing the big wolf her painting isn’t afraid of the big wolf.  The big wolf likes her painting, and looms in front of her with giant, masonry-nail fangs bared in an appreciative grin.  She has nothing to fear from her playmate, however, because she is brave and has made friends with something that others would find terrifying and avoid.

The young woman in her hospital room is finding joy in feeding the birds.  The birds don’t know why she’s in hospital, or of her own difficulties with food; they just like seeds and she’s put some out for them.

I bought a copy of The Boy In The Dress on the way home.  An entire exhibition of mostly women, magic and birds and I end up with a book about a boy who likes to wear dresses.  That’s top marketing, that.

I’ll let you know how it is.

The Quentin Blake: Drawn By Hand exhibition closed in mid-May, but you can still check out the following:

• Mr. Blake’s podcast introducing his work
• Mr. Blake talking about his work in a video which I’ll also embed below – it shows some of his Girls and Dogs pieces among other brilliant things.

Image of the museum banner by Kirsty Connell on Flickr.

I’ve read and seen far too much already over the past few days, from endless eulogies in the papers through to angry words on the street and in the House of Commons. The truth is I am genuinely shaken by it. Like the Queen Mother, she was one of those figures we all suspected might go on forever, and her shadow was long. With it gone, one of the touchpoints for my personal politics is gone.

I started to think about how I might even begin to parse what has happened: I’m not sad, but I’ll admit I didn’t crack open the champagne personally; I merely drank someone else’s.So in a similar vein, I wanted to write not about her, but about representations of her.

Maggie’s Farm

I’m going to start with one of my favourite political cartoonists. Alongside his later portrayal of her puppeteering Tony Blair, comic artist Steve Bell also focuses on her controlling authority. He wrote a series called Maggie’s Farm which depicted her as completely insane – with trademark wonky eye and multiple exclamation points in her speech.

The comics, which reference Dylan’s song of the same title (which was in itself used as a protest song against Thatcher) were originally published in Time Out from 1979, and, to my eye, probably heavily influenced later depictions.

Spitting Image

The first time I saw Spitting Image I was hooked, probably helped by the fact my parents told me I wasn’t allowed to watch it, and to this day I regret that it has gone off the air. Perhaps it’s because no satire is strong enough to be distinguished from the ridiculous facts of today’s government? Anyway, back to Thatcher.

The depiction of her was grotesque, but no more so than that of any other puppet on the show. That said, it was the nature of the grotesque that interested me.

She was ridiculed for her strength and controlling nature in the form of a horrific headmistress. It’s interesting to note that later John Major was ridiculed for his lack of strength.

But rather than this being portrayed as an essential part of her it was represented in reference to Thatcher as a woman  (note the ongoing references to her as “sir”). Her strength was ridiculed, in part, by presenting it as “unfeminine” and therefore funny or dangerous: a stereotype of women in politics that will no doubt take many years to overturn. As the series moved on she became less and less human, eventually turning into an alien monster.

The Old Iron Woman

Raymond Briggs delivers a rendition of the Falklands War in a way that is moving, vitriolic, frightening and humbling in his 1984 piece The Tin Pot Foreign General and The Old Iron Woman.

What I find particularly interesting here is how her depiction contrasts with that of Spitting Image. Both use the “non-human” references, but whereas the Spitting Image Thatcher is usually either asexual or very masculine, here she is quite the opposite. Guns and victory explosions fire from her breasts as she squats (in high heels, with rounded buttocks and suspenders, no less) over her land and nation in a parody of birth. The conflation of female and war-machine gives rise to a gross, highly sexualised fembot.

The Iron Lady

I returned from holiday just over a year ago to find London distressingly covered in images of Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, with her icy blue eyes following me all over the place. It haunted me, in much the same way as it did our Rhian Jones (I’ll admit it, I couldn’t bring myself to see the film).

It was the glossiness of the whole thing that threw me, the vogue-ish fashion magazine stylings that worked their hardest to reunite those twin features of “female” and “powerful” which had created such horrors through both Spitting Image and at the pencil of Raymond Briggs. And they succeeded in being very flattering, through a combination of make-up and airbrushing.

Streep is noticeably less wrinkled and more attractively-styled than Thatcher, looking eerily like a better-looking sister. The situation was enhanced by Streep’s own acting ability, and a script which included scenes of feminine domesticity.

What next?

I never knew her. Never met her. I only understood her as a series of images and icons, on the television as a politician and in other representations of her, which are more numerous than I can contain in one article. Buzzfeed, for example, collected a list of songs about her. Like many other dead, famous people, over time she will fade from a real person, who nonetheless was one of the bogeymen of my childhood (alongside the boggle-faced baddie animals in Orm and Cheep) to being almost imaginary, an icon.

To me, she will always be the figurehead for all that is wrong with right wing thinking and the sort of “feminism” that claims it must be feminist if a woman is doing it. Those with opposing politics have put her on a pedestal. Other people will make her into other things.

I doubt we’ve seen the last representation, but I’ll be interested which version of Margaret Thatcher will stand the test of time, and which version we will be faced with next.

My taxidermy adventure

After reading about Amanda’s Autopsies taxidermy workshops on the fabulous Mookychick I signed up for the next one as quick as you could say “lifelong interest in stuffed animals”. Our victims: guinea pigs.

Me with Boudica G. Pig

The workshop was fascinating, absorbing, and not as gruesome as I had feared. Having been frozen and bashed about a bit, my subject (who I’ve since named Boudica) didn’t look anything like a live guinea pig when I met it, so its thingness made it surprisingly easy to cut into.

Although I’m a big fan of badly stuffed animals, from the famous Horniman Walrus to the facebook page du jour, following the workshop I have a newfound respect for the taxidermist’s art. Taking the skin off was reasonably straightforward, but my god it’s difficult to get the creature into the right shape.

But I was reasonably pleased with the result, and Boudica G. Pig proudly adorns my mantelpiece. At some point I need to get her a spear, helmet and tiny chariot but that’s a project for another day.

Women wield the scalpel

Interestingly, as well as the glamorous Amanda herself and her assistant on the day I’d estimate that the workshop participants were nearly all women. Taxidermy is clearly kinda fashionable at the moment, and although I can’t say it was at the top of my equality agenda I’m pleased that women are getting stuck in.

As noted on the brilliant website of academic Rachel Poliquin who has just written a book about taxidermy, there are a surprising number of stuffed animals finding their way into contemporary art. I first heard about Polly Morgan‘s work a few years ago, but there’s also Merel Bekking, Claire Morgan, and the incredibly disturbing work of Kate Clark.

There are even signs that the tired old TV trope of taxidermy as a hobby for creepy men is being eroded, with a friendly, sympathetic taxidermist as a central character in Dinner for Schmucks and even a sexy indie flick with a kooky girl taxidermist as the romantic lead.

Creepy cool

That said, no matter how cool it becomes I doubt taxidermy will ever stop being creepy altogether. Firstly because it makes you think of death. Stuffed animals act as a kind of hipster memento mori. Secondly because part of taxidermy’s appeal (particularly as part of an artwork) is its uncanny effect, the ambiguity of animate or inanimate, alive or dead. And finally because taxidermy is so firmly lodged in the symbolic language of horror, where it also takes on a fascinating gendered aspect.

One of the victims in Cabin In The Woods gets friendly with a stuffed wolf head. Image: MGM

As TV Tropes notes most haunted houses, villain lairs, and cabins in the wood contain a trophy deer head with antlers that cast eerie shadows, or a stuffed owl, wolf or bear with glinting eyes and gleaming teeth. Whether predator or prey these creatures provide a handy visual signal for danger to the audience (and occasionally the protagonist) and get them meditating on the theme of death.

Taxidermy and patriarchy

But there’s also a number of influential horror films that contain some form of human taxidermy as an especially unsettling treat, most of which draw some of their grisly inspiration from the sickening ‘trophies’ of real life serial killer Ed Gein.

In The Horror of Everyday Life: Taxidermy, Aesthetics, and Consumption in Horror Films Jeffrey Niesel argues that taxidermy in horror films is often used as a way to silence feminine subjectivity. He quotes from Jane Caputi’s book The Age of Sex Crime, in which she argues that sexual serial killings, far from being ‘deviant’, represent the logic of patriarchy taken to an especially brutal extreme:

Serial sexual murder is not some inexplicable explosion/epidemic of an extrinsic evil or the domain only of the mysterious psychopath. On the contrary, such murder is an eminently logical step in the procession of patriarchal values, needs, and rule of force.

For Niesel, “taxidermy represents the most literal expression of male violence, and reveals both the violence and the ultimate instability located at the core of a patriarchal system that relies on validation from passive feminine subjects.” He views taxidermy in Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs as an expression of the crisis of masculinity as Norman Bates, the Sawyer family and Buffalo Bill strive to possess women while silencing their subjectivity, turning them into objects. As Niesel observes, “a stuffed woman is the perfect woman because her male companion can make her say whatever he wants.”

“As harmless as one of these stuffed birds”

Norman Bates with one of his owls. Image: Paramount

I’ll share some of his thoughts on Psycho, because it’s my favourite, and because it features animal and human taxidermy, hooray! In Psycho the connection between women and “stuffed birds” is made pretty clear. Norman tells Marion that “you eat like a bird” and shortly afterwards describes his mother as being “as harmless as one of those stuffed birds”, a comparison ‘she’ herself makes later. He also tells Marion “I think only birds look well stuffed because they’re kind of passive to begin with.” As Niesel points out:

Birds are not really any more or less active or passive than other creatures, but his statement resonates throughout the film because it describes the way women are treated. Women are expected to be stuffed birds, and there is a constant tension involved in trying to enforce their “passivity.” Women pose a threat in the film because they might do something like steal $40,000 (as Marion does)

I particularly like Niesel’s reading of the moment when Lila Crane finally confronts the stuffed Mrs Bates: she is in fact confronting the full horror of violent suppression of female agency and subjectivity. She is facing herself. Well no wonder it always makes me jump.

Turning the tables

Applying Niesel’s analysis to one of my very favourite examples of taxidermy in popular culture, Roald Dahl’s short story The Landlady (published in 1959, a year before Psycho was released) gave me an insight into why it’s so incredibly effective. It’s not just the chill as you realise that the unnamed landlady is a serial killer with a penchant for human taxidermy, but her tremendous gender transgression in being so. She collects handsome young men, and wants the protagonist, Billy, as her latest possession. She even eyes him up in an objectifying gesture that will be familiar to most women on the planet:

“And it is such a pleasure, my dear, such a very great pleasure when now and again I open the door and I see someone standing there who is just exactly right.” She was halfway up the stairs, and she paused with one hand on the stair rail, turning her head and smiling down at him with pale lips. “Like you,” she added, and her blue eyes traveled slowly all the way down the length of Billy’s body, to his feet, and then up again.

Even though he can see she’s a bit unhinged Billy’s mistake is to assume that she is harmless (“there was no question about that”) because she is a middle-aged woman. He is not prepared for such a dramatic reversal in their gender roles, from predator to prey, from subject to object.

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.

Lady Bridgett Poulett as Arethusa by Madame Yevonde (1935)

The above quote comes from a letter between two of my heroes – Virginia Woolf to her sister, painter Vanessa Bell – which always comes to mind when I look at the work of a third: photographer Madame Yevonde.

Madame Yevonde was a British photographer in the early twentieth century, and an early pioneer of colour photography using the complicated and costly Vivex process. It wasn’t just that she produced photos in colour – she broke new ground in special effects and filters, using coloured cellophanes to lend sensuality and symbolism to her work, in particular her most famous series, The Goddesses.

When she shot her famous pictures of aristocratic ladies dressed as classical goddesses in 1935, Yevonde was already a successful society photographer, having set up her own photography studio at the age of 21. Before that, she was involved in the suffragette movement. Her hero was Mary Wollstonecraft, and she remained an outspoken advocate of women’s rights her whole life, saying “if I had to choose between marriage and a career I would choose a career, but I would never give up being a woman.”

Mrs Edward Mayer as Medusa by Madame Yevonde (1935)

Yevonde introduced her 1940 autobiography In Camera as not “the story of a woman’s life but of a photographer who happened to be a woman”. Although in the early twentieth century photography as a profession was open to women, most roles were low-paid and semi-skilled, assistants in photographic laboratories, and Yevonde was the first woman to give a lecture to the Royal Photographic Society.

The first thing everyone says about Madame Yevonde’s photos  is how modern they look. Her influence is difficult to overstate, as new generations of photographers have discovered her work, images which look at home on the walls of an art gallery and the pages of Dazed and Confused. I see the Goddesses series as a hymn to Yevonde’s medium, to colour, and also to the strength and beauty of women, in myth and in the modern age.

Bust of Nefertiti with Flat Iron and Letter by Madame Yevonde (1938)

And it’s not just the Goddesses pictures that have been influential. Bust of Nefertiti with Flat Iron and Letter (1938) reads to me like a comment on women’s elevated position as the subjects of art contrasted with their unglamorous low status in real life, and makes use of the same symbolism as that classic punk work by feminist artist Linder (link prolly NSFW) which graced the cover of the Buzzcocks single Orgasm Addict.

Yevonde’s portraits are beguiling, but what I like best about her work, apart from that devastating, dazzling use of colour, are the tinges of Surrealism. She was clearly influenced by Man Ray and Lee Miller, but also brought in her own sense of humour and playfulness, particularly to what she referred to as her ‘still life fantasies’ such as Bust of Nefertiti.

With her symbolism – and all that colour – Yevonde sits on my ‘favourite feminist artists’ shelf alongside Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo.

Whenever I look at their work, I just want to drink the beauty in like Woolf’s jug of champagne.

Self Portrait with Image of Hecate (1940)