Women with their backs to us

[Nemonymous]

Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864 - 1916)

[dante1991]

That's certainly not what I expected from the title of the thread. Thank you for giving me some amusement for my morning, which is actually everyone else's afternoon (haven't been getting much sleep lately, made up for it today).

[G. S. Carnivals]

des, I think James Tiptree, Jr.'s story title "The Women Men Don't See" greatly expresses the art in this thread. Thank you.

[alogos]

Quote Originally Posted by G. S. Carnivals

des, I think James Tiptree, Jr.'s story title "The Women Men Don't See" greatly expresses the art in this thread. Thank you.

Huh, that's interesting I empathized with the painter POV on these. As if he were in an empty house looking on at these women, more quietly and repressively pinning than stalking them or anything,

Does that make me romantic or in need of psychological help?



Or does it make me mysoginistic for empathizing with absent painted rather than the women on display?

[trieffiewiles]

A few of my favored non-explicit examples of this.



and



hotchie-motchie. . . . I can't get in trouble for this, can I?

[Nemonymous]

Women with their backs to us (a fiction)


There was an exhibition of paintings of women with their backs to us. I, as a woman, wondered why anyone would think to paint these paintings or arrange such a display of mixed motives: scornful watchfuless, loving care at a distance, stalking, pining...

In fact name-hidden, as opposed to body-hidden, presences above have given me some of these clues as to the possible permutations of reaction to such a ‘happening’ of themed images.

As I walked around the gallery, I tried to put myself in the mind of each man who stood or sat behind each woman in the paintings ... thus concocting for myself a new recipe of tempting emotions fitting for such an apparently bleak, often oblique experience.

Have you ever sensed eyes boring into your back? You dare not turn for whatever reason. It’s almost as if you are guilty about catching someone looking at you surreptitiously. They’re to blame for their own actions (or inaction in not looking away) but you feel guilty that you may have stirred their curiosity, their longing, distaste or even gratuitousness of idle gaze.

Well, today, that day, whenever it was to be, in that gallery-of-few-visitors-but-many-guards-sitting-in-corners, you now somehow gazed at the backviews of each painting, knowing, in some intrinsic dream bordering on nightmare, that you were staring outward from the frame .... and you cried inwardly as you felt bugs crawling along your back and nape of the neck between canvas and wood. Or between canvas and paint. You could not be sure.

Just the distant echo of a shout from a corner guard whose words were deadened by the glass.

[Nemonymous]

Back of Woman - Watteau (1684-1721)

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Vakhtang Kakulia

[Daisy]

"Farm Road" (1979), by Andrew Wyeth

[Daisy]

"Christina's World" (1948), by Andrew Wyeth

[waffles]

Young Girl on Shore, 1896 Edvard Munch