Gulf Women Prepare for War by Maggi Hambling
Charlotte Mullins comments on Gulf Women Prepare for War
THIS large painting by Maggi Hambling is one of the most arresting works you encounter as you walk around Murray Edwards College in Cambridge. A woman dressed in a black hijab and loose-fitting clothes sits in an unnamed location. She is armed with a rocket launcher, her index finger curled over the trigger. She is at war, fighting alongside other women who create a temporary front line in an unforgiving landscape. The barren desert is tinged pink, as if by the early-morning sun. Behind the women, black dust swirls and coalesces, as if ancestral ghosts are rising to urge her on.
The artist based this painting on a photograph in The Times showing preparations for the Iran-iraq war. She used women fighters to confound our expectations of war imagery. There are similarities with Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian (1867–68), but Miss Hambling strips away the victim, the setting, the anonymity of the firing squad. By contrast, we see this woman’s face, feel the weight of her weapon. She faces an unseen enemy. Do we even know whose side she is fighting for?
Miss Hambling was the National Gallery’s first artist-in-residence in 1980 and, during her time there, she made a study of the soldier loading his gun in The Execution of Maximilian. Her regendering of this weaponised fighter in Gulf Women Prepare for War has not been without its critics and the painting continues to stimulate debate among students at one of the three women-only colleges at Cambridge University.