A bracingly intelligent reflection on how history paints women
More than half the pieces are by men: for a long time, gazing was their preserve
Reframed: The Woman in the Window Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21
★★★★★
It starts, as everything does, with sex. On entering this exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, one of the first works you see is a Greek bell krater, a wine pot from the fourth century BC; on it is painted a man, climbing a ladder towards a window and proffering an apple to the woman inside. He’s wearing a stock comic costume, she’s a hetaira (a high-status courtesan), and apples were a fruit shared by couples on their wedding night; so this is a boozy joke about marriage, or prostitution, or both. But it also plays with the portal through which we see the woman’s head. The window might be protecting her or putting her on display – keeping her in, or selling her out.
This tension is at the heart of Reframed: The Woman in the Window, a show of bracing intelligence that deals with a subject both neatly specific and deeply historied. There are 50 works on display, all depicting women at windows, and dating from 1,450 BC to just a few months ago. From fragments of ancient frescos, we shuttle past Botticelli, Rossetti and Degas, and make our way to Hodgkin and Hockney (both represented by less familiar 1960s works). More than half of the pieces were made by men: for a long time, gazing was their preserve.
While the show is chronological – for the way we see women, and consider our seeing, has changed over 3,000 years – it occasionally toys with its timeline, pairing works from different eras that share historical or formal blood. (There’s no overarching thesis here.) Beside that bell krater is Rembrandt’s Girl at a Window (1645) – one of Dulwich’s proudest possessions – and while, with her pink cheeks and her loneliness, she might seem distant from the bawdy comedy, that isn’t entirely the case. She leans on a ledge, a hand at her neck, as if straightforwardly shy; but around her the air melts weirdly into darkness, and her expression is hard to read. The picture frame itself is shaped like a window’s arch. The pot and the portrait, centuries apart, are of a surprisingly similar mind: we’re pictures of women, yes, but we’re pictures of picturing, too.
Throughout Reframed, that move puts the onus on the viewer. In asking what “the woman at the window” represented hundreds or thousands of years ago, you remember that history is a tempting but foggy place. The wall texts are clever on that score: they offer brisk intellectual context – how the act of looking was, roughly, construed at a given time – but otherwise they stick to a well-judged reticence. For instance, beside Woman in a Red Dress (c1660-9), a portrait attributed to the Dutch painter Gabriël Metsu of a black woman in finery, the label tells you she “may have been” a rich person of African heritage in the 17th-century Netherlands, or she “may reflect” the slavery trade in some imaginative way; but, crucially, it doesn’t interpret what Metsu (or whoever) had in mind. Pictures are usually saying more than their most strident readers allow. This woman’s dress is luxurious, but her shoulders are oddly bare; her earring catches your eye, but her own eyes look away; and below her window is a relief that shows naked putti playing with a goat, a detail that scholarship has yet to explain.
In the stand-out pairing, the woman-at-window lens is as impressive as it gets. Johannes Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (c1657–9) hangs beside Tom Hunter’s Woman Reading a Possession Order (1997), which updates the sweet Old Master with a new downbeat resilience. Where Vermeer’s window and love-letter point at wealth and romantic possibility, Hunter’s window and eviction notice conjure life in London’s economic dirt. Love has been supplanted by desperation; the window remains, but the view has changed.
Towards the close is a clutch of photography with tactility on its mind. Wolfgang Tillmans’s Smokin’ Jo, window (1995) shows the eponymous DJ in profile, touching her fingers to the glass; the electric contact between skin and window, and the aversion of her gaze, seem expressive but remain opaque, which speaks to the ambiguity of her status on a macho music scene. Later, the emotions turn plangently clear, with two Covid-era images taken by members of the public (Steph James and Simran Janjua), in which families press up against windows that act as cordons sanitaires. To look at these relics from near-history might seem heartwarming, or upsetting, or saccharine; that’s for the viewer to resolve. Reframed gives you windows on to several things: one is these women, but another is you.