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FACE, DAVID LYNCH

David Lynch and women. Discuss. It’s a thorny question. Does the man who gave us Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks offer a vision of femininity that struggles to stretch beyond the post-war notion of the femme fatale?

A new book and exhibition of Lynch’s photographs might have something to say on the subject. Both take that perennial subject of male artists, the female nude, as their subject.

Lynch’s photographs of nudes, many of them not seen before, are on show at the Fondation Carier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris and gathered together in a book. The images are both erotically charged and yet also abstract. That might be telling, too.

“I like to photograph naked women,” the filmmaker and artist says. “The infinite variety of the human body is fascinating: it is amazing and magic to see how different women are.”

Different? Does that maybe make them seem like another species? Because there is a sense that in Lynch’s brilliant, often beautiful, yet surely problematic work, women are portrayed as “other”. Beautiful creatures under glass. Or seen through glass.

Is that the whole story though? In the final scenes of the recent film David Lynch: The Art Life there are scenes of the artist sitting in his studio working away while his young daughter Lula plays around him. Unlike his work, it’s an image of domesticity that has no dark shadows hanging over it.

No lipstick, no glamour. But still beautiful.