Summary:

A woman, Frida Kahlo, looms in the foreground, central to the painting, facing the viewer fully frontal.  She is nude, except for a sheet that is wrapped around her foreshortened lower body, and the widely spaced straps of an upper-body corset.  The center of her upper body is vertically torn open from neck to pubic region to reveal an Ionic column that is split horizontally in numerous places.  The column pushes up against the figure's chin.  The expression on the woman's face is serious, stoic.  Tears trickle from her eyes and carpenter nails penetrate the skin of her face and the rest of her exposed body, as well as the sheet.  Her long dark hair hangs loosely behind her head, her left ear exposed. Behind the woman stretches a fractured greenish-brown earth, reaching to a strip of sea, which meets the dark blue sky.

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Munch has many works dealing with the illness (tuberculosis) and death of his dear sister, Sophie. In this painting she is seated in the wicker chair with her back to us. The aura of sanctity is in no way diminished by the medicine bottles, bedpan and paraphernalia of the sickroom. The bed is empty and in the background. The artist directs our focus not to the dying person but to the inner thoughts and grief of the family members, the soon-to-be survivors.

Munch's father (a physician) and aunt Karen (who brought up the children after Munch's mother died when he was five years old) are close by Sophie. Munch and his sisters are in the foreground. His brother Andreas is alone to the left (perhaps wanting to leave--the lithograph version shows the door slightly ajar).

Munch was fourteen when his sister died. Members of the family (who can be identified in so many of his pictures, e.g. "Death Agony," "The Dead Child") are painted not at the ages they were when the event happened, but closer to the ages they were when Munch painted the picture. Munch would not dispute that illness and death laid the foundation for his art. He himself said, "In the same chair as I painted the sick one I and all my dear ones from my mother on have been sitting winter after winter longing for the sun--until death took them away--I and all my dear ones from my father on have paced up and down the floor in anxiety." (Bente Torjusen, Words and Images of Edvard Munch {Chelsea Green Publ. Co., Chelsea, Vt., 1986)

 

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To Kiss the Spirits: Now, This Is What It Is Really Like is in oil on canvas with a painted frame. The work's center is filled with a column of light that stretches like a holy tornado from the top of the frame to the bottom. Within the luminescence exists a spiral staircase up which silhouetted ladies ascend. As the women move from the bottom of the stairs to the top, their colors change from purple to pink to white. The ladies who have reached the top of the stairs gain wings and fly into the starry night.

The bottom of the painting is lined with small, plain houses, some of which are lit interiorly. The sky is filled with stars, which appear in greater numbers the farther their distance from the ground.

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In the foreground, staring directly at the viewer, white tears visible on her cheeks, the artist lies immobile in a four poster hospital bed, only her head visible above the white sheet covering that is decorated with pale, pastel circles of cells or microscopic organisms.  The towering wooden oak easel that held her canvases, allowing Frida to paint when ill, is now the structure supporting a funnel of physical and emotional preoccupations erupting as vomit from her mouth: fish heads, dead chicken carcasses and fowl entrails, and skull inscribed with her name.  The background is a barren, parched and cracked desert.  The solitary objects in the sky, a moon and red-orange rimmed sun, suggest being trapped eternally, day and night, in this state, "Without Hope" --the painting's title. On the back of the painting Kahlo wrote, "Not the least hope remains to me....Everything moves in tune with what the belly contains."  [Hayden Herrera. Frida Kahlo: The Paintings (New York: HarperPerennial) 2002, p. 187]

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Marriage à la Mode is a set of six paintings which were subsequently made into engravings. The series depicts the dissolution of a marriage conceived of greed and vanity. This fictional, arranged marriage between a Viscount and a rich merchant’s daughter is doomed to end in tragedy. "The Visit to the Quack Doctor" (also called "The Inspection") is the third in the series.

By this point, the husband has contracted a venereal disease and he and his diminutive mistress are visiting a quack doctor and female accomplice. This bold, angry assistant commands the center of the picture--she bears the tattoo of a criminal on her breast, holds a jackknife and is clothed in a wide black dress with a red and gold fringed apron. The toothless, bowlegged, leering doctor is colored in browns like the background of the picture.

The Viscount is seated, has a plaster on his neck, and extends a box with three black pills towards the doctor. His grinning expression is one of foolish pleasure. The mistress, who barely reaches the height of the seated Viscount, is the only sad figure and object of pity. Surrounding these figures are numerous icons of death, such as skulls, skeletons, anatomical dissections, and a torture machine complete with French instruction book.

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A tightly walled cube-shaped block of buildings seemingly made of child’s building blocks looms in the midst of a barren foreground of stony rubble and a background of hazy nondescript sky. No sign of life, human or vegetation, anywhere. Entirely in shades of muted yellow, orange, ochre and brown, coloring suggestive of a crematorium, the canvas reeks of desolation.The only window into the tomb-like image, seen from above, is a carved cut-out star of David through which can be glimpsed a more detailed view of the abandoned ghetto. Barely visible, a pale yellow cloth remnant of the star of David stitched to their clothes to identify Jews sits atop one of the rooftop slates.

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In this and other works, French artist Suzanne Valadon steps outside the boundaries established for women artists in the male-dominated world of art. Portrayal of the gazed-upon female nude was reserved for men who conventionally painted them as objects: ageless, beautiful, seductive, passive, and vulnerable. Women painted flowers and children, not nudes.

Not only does Valadon violate traditional expectations, she presents an adolescent nude who, like most adolescents, is self-absorbed with her appearance. She is not positioned for the viewer's gaze, but for her own self-appraisal. The pubescent child/woman sits at the edge of the bed intent upon her own image in a handheld mirror. In contrast, a fully clothed woman, probably her mother, sits behind her on the bed gently towel-drying the girl's shoulder and arm.

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Also called "Dr Péan Teaching His Discovery of the Compression of Blood Vessels at St Louis Hospital," the scene takes place in a room in which the walls are interrupted by tall windows.  Daylight shines through the windows, illuminating an attractive naked young woman in the right foreground who lies seemingly anesthetized -- her eyes are closed although there is no sign of anesthesia -- on a bed of some kind that is draped loosely with sheets.  Her body is pointing away from the viewer, her head facing away from us, her long hair falling casually over the near edge of the bed.  Her breasts are fully visible, especially her right breast, while her lower body is covered.  A seated man grasps the wrist of her bent right arm, perhaps taking her pulse. His hand and arm rest directly on the woman's body -- on her abdomen and groin area.  He appears to be reading from a paper.

In the left foreground is the edge of a table that holds some surgical instruments and a glass jar containing what may be anatomic specimens.  An imposing sideburned man stands to the left, above the head of the bed and the woman.  Holding a surgical instrument in his right hand, he gesticulates with his left-hand, his mouth partly open: he is lecturing to the people in the room, some of whom are looking directly at him while others talk to each other.  Two in the audience are women -- a nun barely visible in the far background, and a nurse standing behind two men who are near the bed.  The men are all dressed in street clothes.

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As a father of three boys and a friend of the famous doctors Erik Erickson and Robert Coles, Rockwell had plenty of opportunity to study doctors interacting with patients. Before the Shot is one of his humorous doctor-patient scenes. Published as a Saturday Evening Post cover, March 15, 1958, this oil painting depicts a doctor's examination room with the male physician and his young male patient standing with their backs to each other. In the foreground the young boy stands on a chair in his undershirt. He grasps his belt and pants around his buttocks and leans forward toward the wall, his nose up against one of his doctor's framed diplomas. On the chair are his coat, hat, and scarf. His heavy shoes are on the floor. The doctor stands behind him facing the window and holds a syringe in his hand. The walls of his office are hospital green; the floor grey and white linoleum tile. The dominant color is green. It is daytime.

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Vertumnus and Pomona is a story of seduction and deception from Ovid's Metamorphoses, a popular source of imagery for 17^th century Dutch painters. Vertumnus, the Roman god of seasons and change, assumed multiple guises as he attempted to woo the recalcitrant wood nymph Pomona. Govaert Flinck has painted the moment in the courtship when Vertumnus, disguised as an old woman, is speaking on his own behalf to a bemused Pomona. The two figures are dramatically pressed to the front of the picture plane in a tightly defined space and are set against a dark background of tree trunks and exposed roots.

While the setting is intimate and the figures are so close that their knees almost touch, the distance between them is unmistakable. Pomona, seated on the right, is portrayed as a ruddy complexioned young woman, elegantly-if curiously for the setting-dressed in white satin, with a richly embroidered bodice. She leans to her left, her check pressed heavily into her hand, her gaze directed off into the distance. Whether she is listening intently to her companion or dreamily lost in her own thoughts is impossible to discern.

On the left, Vertumnus is portrayed in mid-gesture, "her" right hand moving toward Pomona; her left, turning back to herself. In contrast with Pomona's youthful complexion, Vertumnus' coarse skin and features bear the evidence of age. What isn't immediately certain, however, is Vertumnus' gender. While the rust-colored clothing and turban-like headdress suggest a woman's garments, there is a manly quality in both the face and hands. Flinck, exercising his culture's delight in sexual innuendo, solves the riddle for the careful observer who notices the walking stick that leans against the inside of Vertumnus' thigh.

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