The Magic Circle’ (1886) by John William Waterhouse
From
a feminist perspective, the news that John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia”
and John William Waterhouse’s “The Lady of Shalott” came top in the
recent poll of favourite British masterpieces was disappointing. The
fact that these two hapless women – one of them dead, the other headed
that way, both felled by unrequited love – captured the nation’s heart
suggests that passivity is still a vote-winner when deciding who’s the
fairest of them all.
The exhibition about witches at the
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
is in essence a voyage through male titillations and terrors. But it
was impossible not to feel cheered by such a panoply of women, proud in
their perversity and uniformly potent, especially as the final section
unveils the female artists – Kiki Smith, Paula Rego, Ana Maria Pacheco –
who have reclaimed history’s most persistent bad girl for their own.
From
Albrecht Dürer to Cindy Sherman by way of Salvator Rosa, Goya,
Delacroix and William Fuseli, we are treated to a mosaic of feminine
malefice that leaves one awed at the hysteria lurking within the male
psyche. (An alternative title for the exhibition would be: “How do I
fear thee? Let me count the ways.”)
One remarkable characteristic of the representation of witches is how
little it has changed over the centuries. John Bellany’s lantern-jawed
she-man “The Witch” (1969) talks back to a string of androgynous crones,
including the bald hag in Goya’s etching “When Day Breaks We Will be
Off” (1799) and the hideous old woman cackling over a man’s body in Hans
Baldung Grien’s 1544 woodcut “Bewitched Groom”.
The figure of the witch gave the artist free rein to explore taboos.
Here are women who look like men disporting themselves with animals –
cats, goats, owls and assorted monsters – that are clearly no ordinary
pets. Among many images of witches riding beasts across the sky, the
British Museum’s Dürer engraving “Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat”
(1500) is a marvel of graphic virtuosity, delineating every hair of the
goat’s pelt and every wrinkle of its rider’s tummy. The plethora of
semi-naked elderly women conjured in merciless, lewd verisimilitude
suggests that artists relished the challenge of depicting a nude that
was the antithesis of the young, beautiful archetype.
©The Trustees of the British Museum
‘The Whore of Babylon’ (1809) by William Blake
Particularly
imaginative is the Ashmolean’s etching of “The Allegory of Discord”
(1770) by German engraver Melchior Küsel, the withered dugs of the
serpent-haired fury rhyme provocatively with her snaky tresses and the
flaming torch with which she stokes the fires of the argument that the
gods are having on a passing cloud.
Such images draw much of their power from the near-surreal detail
afforded by the medium of engraving. That this show abounds with a
wealth of outstanding examples is no coincidence. Without the print
revolution, witchcraft would never have ballooned into a phenomenon that
would electrify Europe.
Aside from the distribution of images, the print industry opened the
gates to a flood of religious texts denouncing witches while analysing
their deeds in prurient detail. The most influential was the “Malleus
Maleficarum”, first published in 1486-87 by two Dominican friars and
subsequently reprinted in the 1490s in Nuremberg by Anton Koberger,
whose 1494 edition is on display here.
‘The Four Witches’ (1497) by Albrecht Dürer
Koberger
was Dürer’s godfather, so it’s probable that the German master would
have been familiar with the text, which explained that behind women’s
propensity to witchcraft lay their inclination to deceit, debauchery,
stupidity, superstition and vanity. The two Dürer prints on show – the
aforementioned “Witch Riding” and an earlier engraving “The Four
Witches” (1497), which shows a quartet of nude, pneumatic sirens
clustered around a skull – were influential prototypes for the evolution
of an iconography that shuttled between the witch as exquisite young
maid and as horrid old hag, a schizophrenia that mirrored the irrational
misogyny from which it sprang.
Nowhere was persecution more relentless than in Scotland, where the
obsession of King James VI (James I of England) with witches saw him
personally supervise their torture during the North Berwick witch
trials.
Quite rightly then, the curators have included a section devoted to representations of the trio in
Macbeth.
(Shakespeare probably based their storm-stirring mischief on the king’s
conviction that Scottish witches had summoned a tempest that nearly
drowned him at sea). In a glorious pen-and-wash drawing, 17th-century
Flemish sculptor John Michael Rysbrack highlights the women’s manly
muscles and rats-tail hair with delicate inky scribbles. William Blake
fantasises of voluptuous blondes guarded by a lascivious donkey.
©Cindy Sherman
‘Untitled No 151’ (1985) from the Fairy Tales series by Cindy Sherman
Most
evocative of these is John Martin’s oil painting “Macbeth, Banquo and
the Three Witches” (c1820) where the trio descend in a vaporous spiral
out of a shimmering, iridescent mountain range, scaled to apocalyptic
proportions, that dwarfs the male protagonists and the kilt-clad army
that is massing on the slopes below.
As a champion of Enlightenment clarity, Goya scorned the witch as a
figment of fevered Catholic imaginations. Yet he still painted terror
with medieval glee. On loan from London’s National Gallery, his oil
painting “A Scene from the Forcibly Bewitched” (1798) shows a cleric who
has stumbled into a witch’s bedroom frantically lighting his lamp while
demonic donkeys rear out of the dark behind him in a spooky medley of
white-tipped noses and blade-sharp hooves.
One possible danger when feminism reclaims the figure of the witch is
that irony cancels out the shiver factor which is essential if the
politics are to catch fire. Paula Rego never falls into that trap. Her
etching “Straw Burning”, from the Pendle Witches series (1996), inspired
by Blake Morrison’s poetry cycle about the 17th-century Pendle
witch-hunts, figures a stocky, stiletto-wearing bride about to be
consumed by flames as her occult menagerie dances around her.
Rego, the Portuguese-born heiress to Goya’s ambiguous Iberian
darkness, scratches and shades her heroine with a graphic majesty to
rival her predecessor. The bride may be doomed but her dark arts will
live on in those devilish creatures.
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