I
spent yesterday presenting a the first week of a short course on Women Artists at the V&A, starting
in the sixteenth century with Sofonisba Anguissola and moving on to
Judith Leyster, Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Beale - not eras or artists I am closely familiar
with, though much of their work is well known and as accomplished as that of many
male contemporaries.
Two pictures are new to me: this enchanting portrait of an unidentified young woman
by Antwerp-born Caterina van Hemmesan, painted around 1550 and now to be found
in the Bowes Museum – cue for a return visit.
The chaste palette enhances the sitter’s sober yet alert expression. She is fingering her wedding ring, so this is
presumably a wedding portrait? It’s notable
for the pictorial device of the shadow on the wall behind the sitter, endowing
the flat image with an illusion of depth and making her seem very immediate to
us.
The
other picture is Gentileschi’s supposed self-portrait with a lute, from about
1615. Artists often used themselves as
models, so it may not have been intended as a selfie, though it evidently is. The depiction is beautifully sensuous, with
skin on bosom and hands that seems to glow with warmth and touchability. The lutenist's expression is curiously guarded; one can interpret it is quizzical - what does her audience think of the music? or don't look at my tits, listen to my playing. As it turns out, the work is being sold by
Christies in New York on 29 January.
They mostly reference Morris’s political views as anarchic,
anticapitalist precursors of Occupy and/or stuff-the-rich attitudes, and the
tension between radical political views and the assumed English pastoralism of
his designs energises the artworks. Deller’s
new installation at the William Morris Gallery yokes together further elements
from stone-age axes to present-day prison art, and includes examples of Morris’s
Socialist speeches and agitprop juxtaposed
with allusions to the dire situation for most Russians when the oligarchs carved
up all economic assets in a capitalist carnival of exploitation. In this clip, if still live, Deller
succinctly outlines Morris’s impact on his thinking.
Wiley’s recent work is less overtly
political, in the agit-prop sense, in its homage or appropriation of Morris’s floral
designs. Paintings based on photos of hip-hop Jamaicans whom the artist met on a visit to the island are set inside vividly manipulated
versions of Morris wallpaper. Given
fanciful Anglo-aristocratic names that cast unnamed clubbers in the roles of
the nobility, Wiley's montages aim to challenge all-white western portraiture. According to a press interview: 
“I’m in love
with the tricks of coaxing paint into form, and making something that’s almost a Trojan horse. Where it’s striking, it’s vibrant, and you
think only later about some of the broader cultural or political implications,
some of the power juxtapositions. All
those things are important but I don’t want to bore myself or anyone else for
that matter, with making work that’s simply didactic.”
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