FEMME FATALE by Frances Livings
HE HAMBURGER KUNSTHALLE .
Femme Fatale . Gaze – Power – Gender at the Hamburger Kunsthalle is an impressive exhibition comprising over 200 artworks from the early 1800s until the present day . On show are oil paintings , photographs , video installations , and graphic designs . Many are from prestigious collections like the Musée d ’ Orsay ( Paris ), the Metropolitan Museum of Art ( New York ), the Städel Museum ( Frankfurt ), or from the Kunsthalle itself .
These depictions of the femme fatale are hung in loose chronological order and grouped into subgenres of art movements , mythological and biblical motifs , and iconic elements of the modern day . The exhibition covers an entire floor of the Galerie der Gegenwart . The partition walls and partially dim lighting , mainly in shades of gray , create an intimacy the vast space wouldn ’ t necessarily otherwise provide . Whether this can be seen merely as a means of setting off gilt frames of exquisite nineteenth century paintings or as an allusion to 50 Shades of Grey , in which control and power are the primary themes , is open to interpretation .
What becomes so apparent in the exhibition in its entirety is that the figure of the femme fatale is as seductive as it is problematic as a concept . She is “ a myth , a projection , a fiction ,” Markus Bertsch , the curator and head of the department of nineteenth century paintings , states . Subjecting this myth to a more politicized and contemporary spotlight , the objective of the exhibition is to question and investigate the traditional , systemic narrative of gaze , power , and gender .
Evolving from Clemens Brentano ’ s literary figure from 1801 , the beautiful young siren who lures men to their deaths on the cliffs of the Rhine River in Carl Joseph Begas ’ s oil painting The Lorelei from 1835 is alluring and deadly but isn ’ t yet utilizing her seductive powers consciously . The fact that these men fall to their deaths is depicted as a coincidence .
In contrast , artists of the mid-nineteenth century , Pre- Raphaelites like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John William Waterhouse and Symbolists such as Fernand Khnopff and Gustave Moreau , derived the “ classical ” image of the femmes fatale from biblical and mythological female
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