Still Lives

Jacqueline Doyle is the author of the flash chapbook The Missing Girl (Black Lawrence Press). She is a previous contributor to Tiny Molecules, with flash in Wigleaf, matchbook, CRAFT, The Collagist, Hotel Amerika, and elsewhere. Find her online at www.jacquelinedoyle.com and on twitter at @doylejacq.

The artist in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Oval Portrait” becomes increasingly enraptured by his painting of his wife, and fails to realize that her life is draining away as he paints. It’s Poe, so the moment he completes the portrait, she slumps to the floor, dead.

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In Edvard Munch’s painting “Weeping Nude,” a woman sprawls on a brightly colored divan, a curtain of long hair covering her face, hands over her eyes. The unclothed model, unrecognizable in this painting, was his 17-year-old housekeeper Ingeborg Kaurin. He often used his housekeepers as models.

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In contrast, Pablo Picasso’s “The Weeping Woman,” is all face, contorted in agony. His model, the well-known Surrealist painter and photographer Dora Maar, was his mistress for almost a decade and the subject of many of his paintings. He said of her, “For me, she’s the weeping woman. For years I’ve painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure, either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me. … women are suffering machines.”

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Anne Fjeldbu, another housekeeper who modeled for Munch, recalled that he frequently awakened her at night to pose for him. In a painting called “The Artist and His Model,” she stands in front of the artist, brown faced and staring, her eyes empty sockets. In her white nightgown and flowing blue robe she looks like the Virgin Mary. The pale, gaunt-faced artist, wearing a suit and loose bow tie, lurks behind her, overshadowed by his heavenly, earth-toned muse. A half-made bed, covers thrown aside carelessly, is visible to the right. 

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Picasso had a succession of mistresses who served as models. When he discarded Dora Maar for the much younger painter Françoise Gilot, he is said to have told Françoise: “for me, there are only two kinds of women —goddesses and doormats.” He treated his many women as both. 

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There are centuries of precedents for Munch’s and Picasso’s female nudes, women who stare calmly like enslaved odalisques offering themselves for the viewer’s pleasure, or sprawl amidst rumpled bed sheets, apparently oblivious to the viewer’s scrutiny. John Berger suggested in Ways of Seeing that we try to imagine any of the famous female nudes in the history of Western painting as male nudes instead. Think about it: why can’t you? 

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In another painting by Munch, also called “The Artist and His Model,” the artist dominates his subject and the canvas. The model is hunched in nightgown and robe, gazing down at the unmade bed in the background, face invisible, while Munch stands at the forefront of the scene, an aggressive figure with legs akimbo, hands in his pockets as if waiting, face and clothing vivid. 

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When Picasso first met Dora in a café in Paris, she was wearing black gloves embroidered with roses and playing with a penknife, stabbing the wooden table between her fingers. Drops of blood appeared among the roses. Picasso later asked her to give him the bloodstained gloves, which he displayed in a showcase of souvenirs. 

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The Duke in Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess” displays a portrait of his beautiful wife to an unnamed listener, commenting on its history. In the past he’d objected when his wife gazed too indiscriminately on other men and blushed at their compliments. Now he keeps the prized painting behind a curtain and chooses who will be permitted to gaze on her beauty, which has become his possession. We never learn what happened to the flesh and blood Duchess. 

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Picasso did many paintings of artists and models throughout his career. In the early, pre-Cubist “Painter and His Model,” the artist is seated sideways in a chair, his elbow resting on chair back, his head resting on his hand.  The model stands before him, a wrap lowered to her knees so that most of her naked body is visible. There is a tablecloth and a bowl of fruit on a table just behind her to the right. She is painted naturalistically, her skin faintly tinged pink, and part of a landscape in the background—perhaps a view through a window—is also rendered in rich color. The rest of the painting, including the painter, is only sketched, with no color. Both figures seem contemplative, almost unaware of one another. The painter looks down as if lost in thought. The model gazes into the distance. The model-mistress in this painting, Eva Gouel, died the following year of cancer. Picasso never exhibited the painting. 

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Fifty years later, another painting called “The Painter and His Model” is more identifiably Picasso’s. The nude model squats on the right side of the canvas, her body contorted, her dark face flattened in profile and larger than her torso. The deep reds and browns and yellows on the right side of the canvas contrast with the cool lavender and black and white of the artist on the left side, where the artist gazes not at the model as he paints but at his painting, utterly absorbed.

Picasso was 83 when he completed “The Painter and His Model,” one in a series on the subject. His model in his later years was often his much younger wife, Jacqueline Rocque, but art historians suggest that these paintings may have been done from memory, without a model. Perhaps these female nudes are composites of many women.

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Poe famously proclaimed, “the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” adding that “the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.” The artist elegizes his living subject, who needs to remain very still as he kills her into art.

Woman as still life. A bouquet of flowers, buds open for the artist and viewer alone. A bowl of fruit, forever on the cusp of ripeness. A mistress’s bloodstained glove, eternally on display.

Dora outlived Picasso by more than twenty years. All of his many “portraits of me are lies,” she observed. “Not one is Dora Maar.”