A feminist, surreal twist on an old tale at Wadsworth Atheneum
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” tells the story of a woman held captive in a tower near Camelot who is forbidden to look out the window. She only can look in the mirror at reflections of outdoor activity and weave what she sees. If she looks directly outside, she will be cursed.
Tennyson’s mythical ballad inspired several paintings by Pre-Raphaelite artists, including William Holman Hunt, who spent spent decades perfecting his interpretation of the Lady. Hunt’s Lady is surrounded by symbolic, Biblical and Arthurian imagery and is wound up in multicolored threads from her loom.
That painting, in the Wadsworth Atheneum’s collection since 1961, is the inspiration for the newest exhibit in the Hartford museum’s contemporaryart series MATRIX.
The artist behind that exhibit, Emily Mae Smith, has been fascinated by Hunt’s painting for years and wanted to respond to it with a feminist interpretation.
“She’s trapped in a tower, unable to interact with the world. … She’s bound to domesticity. That’s both fascinating and terrifying to me,” says Smith, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. This is Smith’s first solo exhibit in the U.S. It runs through May 5.
It’s not only the painting, but the history of art itself, that Smith wants to challenge. Traditional male domination in the art world has embedded depictions of women that are difficult to shake off, says the artist, whose work often comments on sex and gender with satire, in the traditions of symbolism, surrealism, and pop.
“There’s this condition of women not being able to render what they see. They have to do it through the lens of another,” she says.
“With the Pre-Raphaelites and symbolists, it was one of the last times that figurative images were allegorical in a way that was purposefully so. There was a kind of code getting really nailed down that carries through even in the subtext of 20th-century art. That’s when the language of oppression was perfected, and it becomes the newly blank page upon which new things are written.”
A key painting in Smith’s exhibit is “Unruly Thread,” an image of a needle, with yarn wound around it, the same color and pattern as the weaving threads wound around Hunt’s Lady.
“It’s an art form, but it’s entangling her and destroying her,” she says, adding that her images “are unraveling myths that are bad, that bind.”
“Brooms with a View” depicts two anthropomorphic brooms at two round windows, outside of which is the same countryside seen outside the window in
Hunt’s painting. One broom is pulling itself apart, what Smith calls “a deconstruction, an unraveling.”
“[In ‘The Lady of Shalott’], you gaze upon the window, you’re going to die or something horrible will happen. Here, the broom is gazing out and wants to be free,” she says.
Smith was inspired by Disney’s “Fantasia” in creating women in the guise of brooms, and she finds the removal of more realistic figures liberating.
“I can speak about issues really differently than when I have someone that someone recognizes,” she says.
A third painting shows one of Smith’s anthropomorphic forms looking into a mirror and shrieking. “She is screaming in either terror or joy or maybe both,”
Smith said.
Smith and curator Patricia Hickson chose other works for the 10-piece show that suggest that “The Lady of Shalott” has influenced Smith’s work for years, whether she intended it or not. These include a figure gazing out of a fortress and a lone figure in a room, looking out the window and creating artwork.
Hickson says Tennyson and Hunt had another interpretation of “The Lady of Shalott,” focusing on the solitary existence of artists.
“An artist must create in his studio or writing at his desk,” Hickson says. “It’s the lonely fate of those destined to be creative.”
Hunt’s “The Lady of Shalott” is on exhibit on the second floor of the Morgan wing of the museum.