48

ever.

The image of the femme fatale, especially
popular at the turn of the century, would seem
to contradict the image of woman as victim.
Typically, she looms over the male viewer, fix-
ing him with a mysterious gaze and rendering
him will-less. Yet she is born of the same set of
underlying fears as her powerless, victimized
sisters, as the depictions often reveal. Munch’s
Madonna (1893-94), a femme fatale par excel-
lence, visually hints at the imagery of victimiza-
tion. The familiar gestures of surrender (the arm
behind the head) and captivity (the arm behind
the back, as if bound) are clearly if softly stated.
These gestures have a long history in Western
art. The dying Daughter of Niobe, a well-known
Greek sculpture of the 5th century B.C., exhib-
its exactly this pose. The raised arm is also seen
in numerous 5th-century statues of dying Ama-
zons and sleeping Ariadnes, where it conveys
death, sleep or an overwhelming of the will. It
may-also convey the idea of lost struggle, as in
the Amazon statues or in Michaelangelo’s
Dying Captive (The Louvre), themselves master-
pieces of victim imagery with strong sexual
overtones. But in the modern era, the raised
arm (or arms) is emptied of its classical conno-
tation of defeat with dignity and becomes
almost exclusively a female gesture—a signal of
sexual surrender and physical availability.
Munch used it in his Madonna to mitigate his
assertion of female power; the gesture of defeat
subtly checks the dark, overpowering force of
Woman. The same ambivalence can also be seen
in the spatial relationship between the figure
and the viewer: the woman can be read as rising
upright before him or as lying beneath him.

However lethal to the male, the late 19th-
century femme fatale of Munch, Klimt and
Moreau ensnares by her physical beauty and
sexual allure. In the 20th century, she be-
comes bestial, carnivorous and visibly gro-
tesque. In images of monstrous females by
Picasso, Rouault, the Surrealists and de Koon-
ing, the dread of woman and male feelings of
inferiority are projected, objectified and univer-
salized. Yet here too the devouring woman im-
plies her opposite, combining features of both
the powerless and the threatening. The women
in Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, although
physically mutilated and naked (vulnerable),
aggressively stare down the viewer, are impene-
trably masked, and display sharp-edged, dan-

Left to right: Edvard Munch. Madonna.
1849-95. Nasjonal Gallieret, Oslo; Wil-
lem de Kooning. Untitled Drawing.
1969; Joan Miro. Woman’s Head. 1938.
Private Collection; Pablo Picasso. Seat-
ed Bather. 1929. Museum of Modern
Art, New York; Maurice Vlaminck.
Bathers. 1907 Private Collection. Kees van
Dongen. Reclining Nude. 1904. Private
Collection.

gerous-looking bodies. Picasso ambivalently
presents them with sham and real reverence in
the form of a desecrated, burlesque icon, al-
ready slashed to bits. De Kooning, in his contin-
uing Woman series, ritually invokes, objectifies
and obliterates the same species of goddess-
whore. Here too a similar ambivalence finds its
voice in shifting, unstable forms whose emer-
gence and destruction are accepted in the criti-
cal literature as the conscious “esthetic” pretext
for his work. The pose his figures usually take —
a frontal crouch with thighs open to expose
the vulva—also appears in the Demoiselles
d’Avignon (in the lower right figure), which, in
turn, derives from primitive art. Like Picasso’s
figures, de Kooning’s women are simultaneous-
ly inviting and repelling, above and below the
viewer, obscene modern whores and terrifying
primitive deities.

The pronounced teeth in de Kooning’s Wom-
an and Bicycle (1950)—the figure actually has a
second set around her throat—also speak of
primitive and modern neurotic fears of the fe-
male genitals. The vagina dentata, an ancient
fantasy into which males project their terror of
castration —of being swallowed up or devoured
in their partner’s sexual organs—is commonly
represented as a toothed mouth. The image,
which appears frequently in modern art, is a
striking feature of Mir6’s Woman’s Head (1938).
The savage creature in this painting has open
alligator jaws protruding from a large, black
head. The red eye, bristling hairs and exagger-
ated palpable nipples, in combination with the
thin weak arms, help give it that same mixture
of comic improbability and terribleness that
characterize Picasso’s Demoiselles and de
Kooning’s Women. But in addition —and true to
Miré’s love of metamorphosing forms—the
image can be read literally as the lower part of a
woman’s body, seen partly as if through an X
ray. Inverted, the arms become open legs, the
dark, massive head a uterus, and the long, dan-
gerous jaws a toothed vaginal canal. The preda-
tory creature in Picasso’s Seated Bather (1929)
not only has saw-toothed jaws, but several fea-
tures of the praying mantis.

The praying mantis, who supposedly devours
her mate, was a favorite theme in Surrealist art
and literature. In paintings by Masson, Labisse,
Ernst and others, the cannibalistic sexual rites of
this insect become a metaphor for the human
sexual relationship, and the female of the spe-