The revealing of naked legs is, in the codes of nineteenth-century decorum, a signifier of degradation in a woman, an abandonment of self-respect. The left one folds back in on itself, exposing its vulnerable fleshiness to the gaze of the viewer yet suggestively leading to more exciting, darker passages, areas doubly forbidden because this is a mother as well as an object of charity.
Take her legs, for instance: bare, flabby, pale, unhealthy, yet not without a certain unexpected pearly sexual allure. Bathed in ineluctable darkness, the Irishwoman resists the light of productive reason and constructive representation, that luminous and seductive aura surrounding the artist and his work. Figuring all that is inexplicable and irrational-female, poor, mother, passive, unproductive yet reproductive-she denies and negates all the male-dominated productive energy of the central portion and thus functions as the interrupter of the whole sententious message of progress, peace, and reconciliation of the allegory as a whole. Embodying in a single figure the convergence of gender and class oppressions, the Irish beggar woman becomes, for me, the central figure-the annihilation of Courbet’s project in the Painter’s Studio, not merely a warning about its difficulty.
She is a figure undermining both the would-be harmony of Courbet’s allegory and the image of art’s triumph that dominates the center.īecause of the material specificity of Courbet’s visual language, we are made aware, in the most substantial way possible, of allegory’s alternate potential: to emphasize the signifier at the expense of the signified.
The poor woman-dark, indrawn, passive, a source of melancholy within the painting as well as a reference to it outside its boundaries-is both a sardonic memorial to Albrecht Dürer’s historical Melencolia I (1513–14) and the repressed that returns (one might think of William Hogarth’s drunken, degraded mother reaching for her snuffbox as her luckless infant slides off her lap in the British artist’s moralizing allegory of 1751, Gin Lane). Within the complex allegorical structure of Gustave Courbet’s L’Atelier du peintre ( Painter’s Studio, 1854–55), the Irish beggar woman constitutes not merely a dark note of negativity calling into question the painting’s utopian promise but, rather, a negation of that promise as a whole.
0 kommentar(er)
