Reframing: Art and Architecture

Scholars’ assessment of Danish painter Anna Ancher (1859-1935) seems to focus narrowly between the years 1880 when she was twenty-one and 1900, just after she turned forty. Culture, gender, age and a narrow definition of modernism have slanted our view. Representations of her in popular painted images of Denmark’s Skagen art colony and as a young wife of one of its founding members exacerbate critical fixation on her youthful output. My paper at the LIM Fashion Institute in 2013 explored how the clothing that she wears in these depictions, contributed to and yet reframed the context of her painting.

P. S. Krøyer, Hip! Hip! Hurra!

In A Baptism Skagen colleagues assemble behind Anna Ancher in an image that reenacts their daughter Helga’s baptism. Anna wears a deep hue of gold, in a heavy fabric with an elaborate bustle. Horizontal pulls of the bodice fabric indicate a tight lacing across the chest. Both women have exaggerated bustles, as advertised by the much-emulated Charles Worth and other fashion houses in Paris from 1885 through 1887. Michael’s paintings portray traditional milestones in nineteenth-century Danish families: the arrival of the first child and its baptism. Nonetheless, he seems overly eager to provide assurances of accepted gender roles. The feminist movement, an increase in education, and professional opportunities for women, challenged masculine identity, and probably destabilized the balance of relations between Michael and Anna Ancher. His wife was allegedly too busy to pose for this painting, and her rising acclaim had begun to eclipse his own reputation. Michael Ancher’s position as breadwinner was precarious; the couple initially lived in an outbuilding on her family’s property and struggled to finance travel study.

Michael Ancher, En Barnedåb

Portrait of My Wife shocked modern audiences in its straightforward indication of Anna Ancher’s pregnancy and implication of sexual intimacy. In a salon-scale canvas, Michael Ancher invited the observer physically across his threshold, to gaze up to his wife’s pregnant womb, and to follow the point of the snout of the master’s hunting dog. Gravidity amounted to observable evidence of marital intercourse, not acceptable subject matter for spectacle or display. Michael Ancher embroiled Anna Ancher as represented object into a milieu where she as the artist subject also becomes part of a highly charged Scandinavian controversy about private versus public domain.

Michael Ancher, Portræt af min hustru.

Michael’s 1902 portrait in reform or “artistic” dress reflects striking changes in Anna Ancher as painting subject. She strides confidently toward the viewer.  The low angle of the observer and the repetition of the long vertical draping extend her height and add weight to her petite frame.  She wears a wide-brimmed straw hat that purposefully shields her eyes and face from the sun.[i]

[i] Ken Montague, "The Aesthetics of Hygiene: Aesthetic Dress, Modernity, and the Body as Sign." Journal of Design History, vol. 7, no. 2 (1994), 95.

Ancher’s setting in a graveyard diverges with cultural tension about procreation evident in images of fetuses, sperm, and stillborn infants that could be seen in the work of Ancher’s male Symbolist contemporaries, including Edvard Munch and Giovanni Segantini.[i] Sharon L. Hirsh summarizes a woman’s necessarily different perspective: “For … late-nineteenth-century males, sexuality meant mental pain and even eventual death for the male, but for the late-nineteenth-century woman, it also meant pregnancy, the burdens of motherhood, and a likely early death, not only for her but also for the child.”[ii] Instead of modern anxiety over procreation, Ancher offered private imagery that situated loss in the un-picturesque and barren soil of rural Denmark, indicated by a still, flat horizon and exaggerated shadows.

[i] Sharon Hirsh in Symbolism and Modern Urban Society, 167-209 points to the examples, among others, of Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt or Giovanni Segantini.

[ii] Hirsh, 189

Claudel’s Shakuntala reversed many of the understandings of gender difference in this period and within Symbolist art circles, assigning sexual potency, performance and desire to the female.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Camille_Claudel_atelier.jpg

Ancher’s Grief shares a title and naked female subject with van Gogh’s Sorrow , exhibited in Copenhagen at an extremely important 1893 show of works by van Gogh and the painter Gauguin (married to the Dane Mette Gad). Van Gogh’s lithograph employed similar stark and expressive contours to Ancher’s Grief, although he isolated the lone, pregnant female figure from any recognizable human or physical context.

Parallel to van Gogh’s lithograph Sorrow and Ancher’s painting Grief, the model’s belly in Gauguin's Étude du nu seems either pregnant or postpartum, a visual conclusion strengthened by the full breasts with enlarged and reddened nipples in Gauguin’s study.

In his Life and Death, one of Gauguin’s Brittany paintings at the 1893 exhibition, two contrasting female bathers represented those opposing forces. The figures differ in color, comportment and framing. Blues and greys dominate “death;” oranges and pinks indicate life. The figure of death folds her knees in over her genitalia and belly, while her arms block her breasts. In contrast, the depicted figure of life exposes her nudity; her breasts are full and the rosy nipples erect, while painted highlights and shadows clearly indicate the fullness of the abdomen and its recession toward the pubis. Whereas black rocks and breaking waves frame death’s torso and head, brightly lit sands offset life. Reddish ground links the figures, but also adds to their distinct attributes. Death’s feet rest on the fiery color, whereas the red might be likened to menstrual flow emanating from the seated life figure, with the rosy hue carried across her thighs and pubic hair.

In Manao Tupapau Gauguin  deployed a crone in black to establish mortality as a counterpart to the young nude. Gauguin identified this “little old woman” as a “ghost,” in an account he supplied to Mette. The effect of this polarity differs markedly from that of Ancher's Grief, where the two figures kneeling in the graveyard establish a different thesis than the pairing in Manao Tupapau. The resemblance to her own mother, represented at the age where she would or could be a grandmother, facing a painted surrogate for Ancher as a mature woman suggests that the artist grappled with grief in the context of generational relations. Ancher’s partnering suggests many possible hypothetical sorrows

About the museum and the collection (many elements of the site can also be accessed in English): http://www.glyptoteket.dk/

http://www.e-architect.co.uk/copenhagen/magasin-du-nord

Pegasus Pediment--second building replacing that by Thorvald Bindesbøll. http://www.denstoredanske.dk/Kunst_og_kultur/Billedkunst/Billedkunst,_Danmark_generelt/Den_Frie_Udstilling

Klimt portrays the heroine without the weapon she used in the biblical account and removed from the urgent need to save her people. Instead of being a warrior, she is a seductress in an erotic fantasy. What does the viewer make of the gorgeous jewel tones that visually function like neck cuffs and bondage straps, binding the flesh to the picture plane?

Is this an image of liberation and freedom because the photographer is a woman? How would male authorship change who we read the posture, position, setting and lighting?