Body's Beauty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1864-73
Also titled Lady Lilith (after Adam's first wife, who ran away to become a witch), Body's Beaut)' represents sensual absorption. Paired with the sonnet of the same name, the painting associates the sexual allure of the woman at the center with the golden hair that represents her value, and her narcissistic contemplation of herself with the art that she embodies. Like the Lady of Shalott, Lady Lilith is a weaver, but a deadly one�the poppies and roses surrounding her link death and sexuality. DELAWARE ART MUSEUM, WILMINGTON, USA/SAMUEL AND MARY R. BANCROFT MEMORIAL/ BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY.
.
The Beguiling of Merlin, Edward Burne-Jones, 1870-74
Burne-Jones draws on a medieval version of the Arthurian legend for this painting, in which Merlin's pupil, Nimue (also called Nimiane, Vivian, or Vivien), uses one of Merlin's own spells to imprison him in a hawthorn tree. The winding branches of the tree, echoed in the Medusa-like snakes of Nimue's hair, create a flat decorative surface. Although the
Nimue of the story is a femme fatale enchanting the helpless Merlin, her posture and expression and the simi
larity of the two faces make the paint
ing ambiguous. THE BOARD OF
TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUMS
AND GALLERIES ON MERSEYSIDE, LADY
LEVER ART GALLERY, LIVERPOOL,
ENGLAND.
The Passing of Arthur, Julia Margaret Cameron, 1875
Using photography in the way that earlier artists had used engravings to illustrate literary texts, Cameron produced a set of tableaux vivants to illustrate Tennyson's Idylls of the King, posing family and friends in costume, in a combination of reality and fantasy that recalls the Pre-Raphaelites. This photograph illustrates lines 361�93 of The Passing of Arthur (see
p. 2033), where the three queens attend the dying king in the barge that takes him to Avalon. HULTONDEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS.
.
Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket, James A. M. Whistler, 1875
Whistler's impressionist painting of fireworks approaches the abstraction suggested in his title. He emphatically rejected the precise depiction of objects in earlier Victorian painting. When the critic John Ruskin saw the painting in Grosvenor Gallery, he wrote in Fors Clavigera that he "never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." Whistler sued Ruskin for libel and won; but he was awarded damages of only one farthing, and the trial left him financially ruined. THE DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ARTS, USA/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY. GIFT OF DEXTER M. FERRY, JR.
.
Climax, Aubrey Beardsley, 1893
After seeing a drawing in Studio magazine of Salome holding the head of John the Baptist, Oscar Wilde asked the artist, Aubrey Beardsley, to illustrate the English translation of his play Salome. The engraving makes the sexuality of the two figures ambiguous, and links them through the likeness of their faces and their Medusa-like hair. The decorative surface of the drawing absorbs its morbid, erotic subject in aesthetic pattern. FROM BEST WORKS OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY, DOVER PURIFICATIONS, INC.
.
The Twentieth Century an a Aft er
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Pablo Picasso, 1907
This masterpiece by Spanish expatriate painter Pablo Picasso helped unleash the experimental energies of modern art. The painting breaks with formal traditions of one-point perspective and human modeling, violently fracturing space in jagged planes. At the same time it defies conventions of sexual decorum in the visual arts, confronting the viewer with five naked prostitutes in a brothel. The masklike faces, particularly of the women to the right, echo African art; they suggest the crucial role non-Western art will play in the development of modernism. The abstract faces, angular forms, and formally fragmented bodies intimate the revolutionary techniques of analytic cubism that Picasso and his French collaborator Georges Braque would develop in Paris from 1907 to 1914. THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART/LICENSED BY SCALA/ART RESOURCE, NY.
.
The Merry-Go-Round, Mark Gertler, 1916
Painted in the midst of World War I, The Merry-Go-Round explores the insufferable condition of life on the home front and on the battlefields. Its circularity describes the frustration of the deadlock on the Western Front, while its mingling of automatized soldiers and women conveys the sense of psychological menace pervading civilian society. The grinning puppet- like figures and the fun-fair setting convey an atmosphere of ghastly levity, in which war becomes a game. Glaring artificial colors contribute to the impression of a violent and confined world, where even nature is mechanical. TATE GALLERY, LONDON/ART RESOURCE, NY.
.
Over the Top, 1st Artists' Rifles at Marcoing, 30th December 1917,
John Northcote Nash, 1918
John Nash enlisted in the Artists' Rifles in 1916 and survived several attempts at going "over
the top" before his appointment as a War Artist two years later. In this painting he powerfully recollects the futile danger of an attack near Cambrai in 1917. A line of soldiers clambers out of a crude, wound-red trench to trudge through snow toward an unseen enemy. Several men are killed immediately, then fall prostrate or fall back into the ready-made grave of their recent refuge. Years later Nash recalled that the advance had from the outset been doomed, "was in fact pure murder," designed to divert attention from a bombing raid elsewhere. Of the eighty men who set out, only twelve, including Nash, returned. IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM,
LONDON, UK/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY.
.
Tube Shelter Perspective (1941) and Family Group (1947), Henry Moore
In their disparate treatments of space and community, these works powerfully demonstrate the antithetic atmospheres of war and peace. Moore took up sketching during World War I because of a scarcity of sculpting material. His impression of crowds sheltering in the London Underground during an air raid, ranged in parallel lines down a seemingly endless tunnel, evokes the involuntary intimacy of strangers�forced into proximity, yet still isolated and anonymous. Family Group, by contrast, expresses a postwar moment of relative security, when the birth of Moore's only daughter coincided with the government's promotion of traditional family values, and Moore's return to sculpture found a ready market for large- scale public art. Two parents, infants on their knees, sit in a cozy circle, their bodies merging
in a physical expression of unity. The holes within the sculpture recall the wartime tunnel,
transforming it from a void that swallows
masses of people to a harmonious space con
trolled by the bodies. FAMILY GROUP: CHRISTIE'S
IMAGES/CORBIS; TUBE SHELTER PERSPECTIVE: HENRY MOORE FOUNDATION; TATE GALLERY, LONDON/ART RESOURCE, NY.
.
Painting, Francis Bacon, 1946
Bacon's nightmarish association of the slaughterhouse with the emblems of political and religious power conjures both the suffering and the hypocrisy of the twentieth century. The bust of a man, his face overshadowed by an open umbrella, surrounded by microphones, the whole superimposed upon a butcher's display, evokes the discrepancy between rhetoric and means of power. While the umbrella offers a ludicrous symbol of respectability, the visual parallels between man and meat draw attention to the brutal foundations of political inlluence. The man's broad shoulders resemble the squared outline of the carcass behind him. The red and white of his face, and his exposed teeth, suggest the flesh and bone of the beef. Incongruous religious references, in the cruciform spread of the carcass and the churchlike decorations on the walls, augment the painting's insinuations of corruption. THE ESTATE or FRAINCIS BACON/ARS, NY/DACS, LONDON; DIGITAL IMAGE; THE MUSEUM OE MODERN ART/LICENSED BY SCALA/ART RESOURCE, NY.