December is a quiet month for blockbuster openings; many of the main galleries accomplished their enterprise again at the beginning of autumn. However the relative lack of latest exercise offers extra off-piste reveals an opportunity to seize a few of the limelight; such is the case with the Femme Fatale exhibition on the Hamburger Kunsthalle, which brings collectively all kinds of artists—from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Nan Goldin—to analyze the context and myths surrounding this curiously pervasive stereotype. Subtitled Gaze, Energy, Gender, the present places itself on the coronary heart of up to date dialogue of feminism, notably because it pertains to the artwork world.
Conscious that the “femme fatale” is a problematic idea, to say the least, Markus Bertsch, the exhibition curator, calls it “a fantasy, a projection, a fiction. That is a picture of a particular, firmly encoded feminine stereotype: a sensual and erotic, fascinating lady whose demonic nature is revealed when males fall beneath her spell—usually with a deadly end result.”
Most of us would casually affiliate the time period with the slinky, blonde-capped characters in Nineteen Forties American movie noir—assume Barbara Stanwyck or Rita Hayworth—or maybe additional again with the sultry “vamps” of the silent-movie period. However this exhibition reaches again to the early nineteenth century, seeing its roots within the romanticism of Julius Hübner’s The Fisherman and the Mermaid (1828) and the Nazarene artist Carl Joseph Begas’s The Lorelei (1835), each work taking their cue from German
myth-reprocessing romantic poets, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine respectively.
Male fantasies
There would look like no getting over the maleness of those Victorian-era work, notably as they proceed onward via the idealised neo-Medieval visions of the early Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to the overtly erotic late-century photos of John Collier’s Lilith (1889)—through which the bare biblical determine is swathed in a large snake—and John William Waterhouse’s Circe Providing the Cup to Ulysses (1891). Bertsch means that these works “visualise long-outdated gender relations and stage the feminine physique in an erotic vogue that always seems sexist and misogynist to our fashionable eyes.” He provides: “The displays are to a big extent merchandise in addition to projections of distinctly male fantasies.”
In saying this, the curator factors to the controversy over one other Waterhouse portray: Hylas and the Nymphs (1896), which was faraway from show on the Manchester Artwork Gallery in 2018 as a part of a commissioned work by the up to date artist Sonia Boyce. “Some noticed the motion as an act of censorship, thus endangering the liberty of artwork. Others, in contrast, welcomed the participatory gesture of the measure with its encouragement of an open dialogue of socially related subjects.”
Bertsch and his crew are at pains to level out the up to date significance of the femme fatale, whilst we’re greater than 100 years away from Waterhouse’s Circe and Hylas. “On account of #MeToo, and in occasions of queer and intersectional feminist approaches, in addition to extraordinarily permeable gender boundaries, we’d have anticipated the subject of the femme fatale to wane in significance, as it’s primarily based on the concept of a gender binary,” Bertsch says. “ in the present day’s cultural and media panorama, nonetheless, the alternative appears to be true.” Citing movies akin to Christian Petzold’s Undine (2020) and Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021), the present’s most up-to-date choices—which embrace Goldin’s 16-minute found-footage video, Sirens (2019-20)—interrogate the traditional myths on which the iconography of the femme fatale is based.
Maria Lassnig’s Lady Energy (1979) provides an avant-garde different to erotic stereotypes
© Peter Kainz
Maybe much more pertinently, the exhibition goals to faucet into stay problems with sexism, gender id and the like. Included within the present can be a 1928 portrait by Gerda Wegener of Lili Elbe, the trans artist whose pioneering intercourse reassignment surgical procedure was the topic of the ebook and movie The Danish Woman. There are additionally a number of examples of works by the late Twentieth-century feminist avant-garde, from Birgit Jürgenssen’s erotically charged pictures to the unflinching painted portraits of Maria Lassnig.
Work evidently impressed by the #MeToo marketing campaign can be current: Betty Tompkins’s Apologia (Artemisia Gentileschi) (2018), for instance, combines textual content from an announcement by the late painter Chuck Shut after allegations of sexual harassment with Gentileschi’s celebrated Judith Beheading Holofernes (round 1613-14)—itself thought of a response to Gentileschi’s personal rape as a younger lady in 1611.
“Present feminist artists not must battle the picture of the femme fatale however can re-appropriate and re-use it,” Bertsch says. “In postcolonial and queer feminist place, enjoying with fragments of the femme fatale picture, opens up totally new approaches to our subject.”
The present, notably its extra salacious work, will not be to everybody’s style. “That the theme hardly appears to be consistent with the occasions and would possibly subsequently be polarising goes with out saying,” he says. However “trying again and being conscious of the historic circumstances helps us to grasp higher the place we stand in the present day and what nonetheless must be finished”.
• Femme Fatale: Gaze, Energy, Gender, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, 9 December-10 April 2023
