In yesterday's post we looked at lawsuit regarding a work of art reproduced on a fashion collection. For today let's continue the art thread, but let's look at the way a painter, Gustav Adolf Mossa, used a hat to create a metaphor about women.
In his paintings, Gustav Adolf Mossa often focused on women portrayed as femme fatale figures with a malevolent sexuality. Introduced to the Art Nouveau while studying at the School of Decorative Arts in Nice, Mossa became interested in the Symbolist movement after visiting the Exposition Universelle in 1900, turning for inspiration to the art of Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau and Symbolist writers, such as Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Joris-Karl Huysmans.
Quite often in his works, Mossa turned to Biblical sources, offering modern versions of Judith, Delilah and Salome, that he combined with his vision of the New Woman emerging at the the turn of the century, whom he considered perverse by nature.
In his "La Légende de Judith" (The Legend of Judith; currently part of the "19th-Century Works of Art" auction at Sotheby's in New York), the main subject looks a bit like a caricature: in an elegant green coat with geometrical decorations and enormous feathered black hat, the Old Testament heroine Judith is turned into a modern-day femme fatale. Holofernes' headless corpse is in the background, visible through the window, while Judith is in the foreground, literally holding Holofernes in her clutch(es), as she is intent in putting the head that looks tiny in her hands, in her beaded evening purse.
The dimensions of Judith's hat juxtaposed to Holofernes' head are a way to point at her frivolous attitude: Judith may be perverse, Mossa seems to tell us, but she is also devoted to the latest fashion trends and therefore she is to be considered not a woman of substance, but a superficial lady. Yet, at the same time, Judith ends up occupying most of the painting with her extravagant hat, dominating it and subverting through it the painter's misogynist metaphor, turning into a cruel and cold, but also powerful, woman.
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