At Tate Liverpool 
Peter Campbell
The faces and bodies of the women a painter invents are objects of libidinal desire. Greuze’s indelibly stupid, infatuated girls, their eyes rolled upwards in tear-stained sentiment; Burne-Jones’s slightly anaemic young women, well-built but sorely in need of someone to tell them to stand up straight; Fuseli’s athletic dominatrixes and witchy fairies; Rubens’s images of round-cheeked, half-smiling normality; even Millet’s solid-limbed and blunt-faced peasant girls: it’s hard not to read them as embodiments of desire (women don’t seem to invent men in that way). When men paint portraits of women the facts of a face dilute the archetype. Gustav Klimt created an eloquently sinister, predatory Judith/Salome type. Her jaw is rather square, her thin mouth is a little open, her lips drawn back showing white teeth – the faces of mummies shrink into similar smiles and grimaces. Her eyelids may droop heavily or be closed. She, and her less explicitly characterised sisters, are mostly skinny, but wide-hipped. When they are naked they are often standing in frontal poses in which pubic hair is strongly accented.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article and the back issue are also available for purchase online. Buy this article / Buy this back issue
Peter Campbell is the London Review’s resident designer and art critic.
Other articles by this contributor:
At the Whitechapel · ‘Faces in the Crowd: Picturing Modern Life from Manet to Today’
At the British Museum · John White’s New World
At the Hayward and the British Museum · With Goya and Rembrandt
At the Royal Academy · Edvard Munch’s troubles
At Tate Britain · Hamish Fulton
At Tate Britain · the art of protest
At the Royal Academy · Turner’s watercolours
At the Saatchi Gallery · The Triumph of Painting
print layout
tell a friend