Emily Kate Hastings (she/her) is an artist, writer, and speech-language pathologist from the East Coast of Canada. She can be found drinking ginger-lemon tea in the Himalayas between hikes, reading in Viennese coffee shops over a plate of bread dumplings, or snowshoeing in the winter forests of Canada, depending on the day. She has worked in Canada, South America, Europe, and Asia and frequently documents her world travels in photography. She currently makes her home in vibrant Shanghai.
“I love looking at portraits of women. I find the dichotomies fascinating: the passive/the active, the muse/the artist, the painted woman/the real woman, and what is erotic versus that which is vulgar and damaging. In this piece, I wanted to invite readers on a gallery walk to look at images of women in art history—from Joan Miró to Norman Rockwell to Man Ray.”
(written for M.)
It was a large slit of a woman. The slit had a head, an incensed bulbous face smudged and scraped into existence, and dreadful lumps formed the slit a body. It was an angry ugly woman. Black pubic hairs looked like long legs of spiders. Isla found this painting quite grotesque and off-putting.
Joan Miró
Femme, Oct. 1934
When Isla was a girl, she liked to walk along the bookshelf of her parents’ study, tracing her fingers up and down the spines of books and taking in their textures: grainy woven cloth, smooth coated paperboard, and the soft touch of Nubuck leather. It was a rainy Thursday in August when her mother had gone to the shop and Isla selected a heavy gloss-coated picture book and brought it down to the table. It was one that she had peered inside before.
Pages of curious images: Isla had always been intrigued by art. It seemed to her that paintings were a glimpse into the secrets of the world, the things that adults never spoke of but for which they displayed a cryptic reverence nonetheless. Her father always commented that Isla’s devoted appreciation for the classics was unusual for her young age but surely a sign of her exquisite taste. She’d pour over photographs of paintings, spellbound by the odd ways that figures were positioned in scenes; all sorts of strange circumstances were portrayed, some very mysterious to Isla.
On the rainy Thursday, Isla found The Luncheon on the Grass to be particularly engrossing. Édouard Manet had painted an ordinary situation: two men and two women were picnicking in a lush forest. The men, donning dark suits, reclined on a blanket, occupied in conversation, while one of the women waded in the background, her flowing white dress dipping into a stream. But most peculiarly, the other woman of the picnic—sitting in the foreground just next to the men—was completely naked, her brown eyes gazing right into Isla’s!
The woman was undressed, but not in her bedroom or in the bath, the only two places Isla could think of ever being naked herself. She wondered about this bizarre picnic where public and private spheres swirled into one.
Isla recalled a folktale her father had read to her about an emperor who ordered new lavish clothes to be made by weavers; it turned out that the emperor had been deceived by swindlers who spun a tale of magic clothing: a wardrobe, they said, that could only be seen by those who were not stupid or incompetent. Not wanting to appear inept, the emperor played along, marching around the city to show off his new attire. The townsfolk in turn were also afraid to acknowledge that the emperor, in fact, was wearing nothing at all. Perhaps, Isla surmised, the painted woman was also a powerful leader, the suited men too intimidated to declare her nudity.
Édouard Manet
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863
When Isla was a young woman, she horrified her mother.
To her father’s delight, Isla had enrolled in art school, where she immersed herself in art history and relished hours in the studio. With this area of study, Isla felt a great opening of her mind—here was a place for her to examine with new eyes the paintings she had come to know so well and to speak of the compositions that had long held an unnamed curiosity. Isla also found herself rapt in the practise of life drawings.
“Doesn’t it make you uncomfortable? Staring at…naked people?” Isla’s cousin was younger than her by three years and they spoke weekly on the telephone.
“No, not at all. I find drawing nude models fascinating,” Isla replied, “Besides, most of them are women anyway. Remember when we used to do those photoshoots with our dolls? It’s kind of like that, setting it up and making it look just right. It’s technical.”
Dolls had always held a charm for Isla. Paper dolls, plastic, and porcelain—as a girl she had loved styling them and positioning them as though in a painting. Acting out the magic oddities of Henri Rousseau’s work had made Isla feel powerful and alive: women and tigers and snakes in the jungle landscape: plastic animals and Barbies splayed amongst the most exotic of plants in her mother’s garden.
Isla narrowed her eyes and tried to picture the woman somewhere in the world.
“Okay that’s good, Sam,” Auguste called to the model and threw her a robe. “You’re an angel.”
Isla looked up to realize she was the only student left working in the studio.
Auguste approached and stood behind her, surveying Isla’s canvas. Moments of silence passed, and Isla began to grow self-conscious, uncertain what she should do. Auguste was a student, maybe a year or two ahead of her, but he seemed to have some authority in the studio.
“The resemblance is there,” Auguste’s voice seemed to come from just behind her shoulder, “but the tits look too good.”
Isla suddenly turned to face him, perplexed.
Auguste grinned, “Remember, a woman’s body’s not perfect. But, Isla, not bad.”
Isla smiled and felt her cheeks grow warm.
“Tell me what you like.” The professor was almost too nonchalant; his eyes seemed to look past Isla to the door.
“I like the Impressionists. I love the paintings of Henri Rousseau—all of the jungle ones. As a girl I always returned to The Dream. I spent hours trying to recreate it in drawings and photography. Manet is also—”
“How would you characterize The Dream?” Dr. Courbet focused his gaze on Isla for the first time.
“Well, I find Rousseau’s paintings to be a bit odd, but magical. The way that he takes and places the woman into such an exotic environment, like a copy-paste. I find it mesmerizing.”
“Is the painting erotic?” Dr. Courbet asked.
“Um, I’m not sure. Maybe,” Isla reflected.
“And you like photography?”
“Yes,” she responded, adding quickly, “Although I have a lot to learn.”
“Man Ray.”
Isla turned to see Auguste looking over her shoulder again.
“Have you heard of him?” Auguste probed.
Isla could not recall seeing the name in any of her father’s collection of art books.
“His photography, Courbet’ll ask you about it. He’ll be impressed if you know it.”
“Oh okay, thanks.”
“He was my first-year advisor too,” Auguste explained. “Make sure you have something to say. He likes women with opinions.”
It was a woman transformed into an object. The artist, inspired by a history of distorted female figures, had placed two f-holes onto the woman’s nude back. The playfulness, the element of fantasy, the erotic beauty: Isla found the photograph of the woman/violin to be highly stimulating.
Man Ray
Ingre’s Violin, 1924
At 12 years old, she sat on her stool, knees together, bare feet on the floor; the slender girl in the white dress inspected her reflection in the mirror. A comb and red lipstick at her feet, and a magazine photo of the voluptuous Jane Russell; doll discarded on the floor. Isla’s mother had always loved this painting of a girl no longer a little girl.
Her mother unwrapped the parcel slowly, delicately folding the brown papers instead of tearing them. She reached for her eyeglasses and held the painting in front of her at arm’s length, inspecting it with a look of apprehension. It was a reproduction, gifted to her on Christmas day.
Isla had worked on the painting for months, agonizing over each detail. Truly, she wanted to please her mother. After all, she had chosen a university far away, to pursue a subject her mother had never considered to be an area of study. It was all quite unexpected, her mother had said more than once.
In all honesty, Isla had always wished to make her mother proud. While her father had habitually gushed about her talents, Isla secretly hoped that her creative achievements would one day also evoke her mother’s effusive approval.
“It always made me a bit sad,” her mother said finally, looking up from the painting.
“Our little girl, a great artist!” Isla’s father extolled with the usual glee.
Her mother set down the painting and turned to her daughter, a thin curling of her lips formed a slight smile. “Isla, thank you. This painting always reminded me of you.”
Norman Rockwell
Girl At Mirror, 1954
The human form was malleable, the ways that women could become colours and lines and shapes. A Surrealist photographer transformed a woman’s neck and chin into a phallus on gelatin silver print, an image from a distorted lens that Isla found revelatory and heavy with mood.
Man Ray
Anatomies, 1929
“What did you think of Schiele?”
Isla was enthralled. “I found him to be much more vulgar than Klimt, but very evocative. I like how he portrays women.”
“I suspected you might. I’d like to explore this word—vulgar. What makes a portrait of a woman vulgar?” Dr. Courbet prompted his eager student.
The painting was also known as Dr Péan Teaching His Discovery of the Compression of Blood Vessels at St Louis Hospital. Bearded and mustached men, black suited, stood honourably beside the patient’s bed, listening to the wise doctor, while shining surgical instruments lay on the table in the foreground, inspiring reverence.
An attractive young woman lay naked, the subject of the experiment, exposed and powerless before the upright men: a Renaissance beauty resembling Venus: flowing hair, innocent face, and angelic sexual skin. Isla found the piece unsettling.
Henri Gervex
Before the Operation, 1887
Spider web emanating from pelvis, hands crossed behind her head. Isla detected a slight smile on the woman standing nude, as though saying to her audience it’s on my terms.
It was a departure from the docile female: immortalized, fetishized, objectified. The male gaze was astoundingly prevalent in art: the portrayal of women designed for heterosexual men to enjoy, master, possess. Were women’s bodies always sexualized? Isla had begun to wonder. She visualized the pliable limbs of a Barbie, the child’s doll suddenly hypersexualized to her.
The past was like a glass cage from which Manet’s women stared out at her, brown eyes at the picnic. The male gaze oozed out in all directions, like a spilled can of rotten-milk paint. Isla was tired of this reduction, women as passive items in art—props—serving to empower men.
As a girl, it had been her. It was sunlight on her skin, limitless, movements always flowing through her. Why had she failed to notice that the artists in her father’s books were all men? Were these real women, as vivid as Isla had always painted them? Did these women also like to play with dolls? What did they want to say?
For the first time, she wondered if she should feel ashamed: Isla was Eve with the snake, and the snake had coiled around her.
But the photograph seemed to contest those ideologies, with playfulness and fantasy: the coy innuendo that the woman enjoyed. Isla enjoyed it too. An active voice, Isla felt the freshness and the magic of the jungle all around her. Next time she saw Auguste, perhaps she’d ask him to kiss her neck.
Man Ray
Spider Woman, 1970
Isla looked out across the grass, sketchbook in hand. Her eyes surveyed the campus, combing for something of interest. According to Auguste, she needed more practise drawing. Suddenly, she found her eyes on Auguste himself sitting with some of his friends. She quickly looked away, hoping he hadn’t seen her. Isla raised her eyes slowly a second time to discover it was not Auguste at all, but another young man. She suddenly felt foolish. Anyways, she thought, why should I look away?
Isla walked along the bookshelf of her parents’ study, tracing her fingers up and down the spines of books and taking in their textures: grainy, smooth, and the softness of Nubuck leather.
Her mother sat on the sofa, spine erect, reading the thesis proposal. She was reading rather slowly, Isla observed, and she felt a seed of apprehension begin to grow in her stomach. Isla longed for her mother to acknowledge her not just as a skilled painter of replicas but as a serious student, an intellectual.
When she had finally finished reading, her mother folded the papers in half and placed them on the table.
“What do you think, Mum?”
Isla’s mother said almost nothing but made a small sound that was either hmph or mm. She stood and walked past Isla to the next room. After a moment, Isla heard the vacuum cleaner and she stood in stunned silence, staring at the door.
Isla had seen it on her face: her mother was mortified that her daughter had written about female sexuality in art.
Isla walked to the bookshelf and selected a heavy gloss-coated picture book and brought it down to the table. She flipped through the pages until she found it: a coarse painting of a naked woman pinned underneath a black beast: the canine creature, blacker than black, bared pointed teeth and intense yellow eyes; the woman on her back, pallid grass, jaundiced skin, and round breasts. Jagged vegetation enclosed the pair in a dark, sickly green. Isla pressed the page between her fingers. It was an expressionless woman: blank and holding a mirror above her head. Isla placed the folded papers inside the book, her hand quivering. She snapped it shut and placed the book back on the shelf into the expected slit.
Henri Rousseau
Beauty and the Beast, 1908
