Excerpt from article.
European art history is full of stories where the female perspective is hidden or missing, says artist Natasha Walsh. At best, the women subjects are frequently depicted either as passive vehicles for the artist’s talent or in an exploitative and violent manner. “When artists are painting, they are painting their own perception,” Walsh says. “It’s only problematic when the muse exists solely in the context of the artist, when we look at it as a child does, only within the frame.”
Walsh is one of several contemporary artists who are reimagining the portrayal of the female sitter. Instead of a passive subject, these artists seek to show the creative insight originating from the female subject herself, or through a collaborative, reciprocal exchange between the artist and their subject. As a teenage art student, Walsh often faced requests to sit for male painters, which she declined. She recalls one artist advising her to agree soon, “as if my worth were reduced to solely my physical appearance and my value was temporary and fleeting”.
In her series Hysteria, Walsh challenged the male gaze by reinterpreting Gustav Klimt’s 1907 painting Danaë, which romanticised an ancient Greek myth of rape.
Reimagining herself as the mother of Perseus, she painted her eyes actively gazing back at the viewer – Klimt painted them closed – and vanished Zeus’s impregnating shower of “golden rain” that glossed over rape in the original painting.
Walsh has continued to reinterpret art history, painting fashion duo Nicol and Ford in the likeness of the 16th-century Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters (a finalist in the 2024 Archibald Prize). She also depicted musician Montaigne as Medusa, and posed artist Atong Atem as Matisse’s Yellow Odalisque, shifting the focus to Atem’s African heritage.
Walsh collaborated with writer Bri Lee on a collage of Picasso nudes, created in the Brett Whiteley studio. Their aim was to reimagine a nude free from Picasso’s gaze, depicting the figure in an act of self-pleasure. Lee later posed for Walsh’s Hysteria exhibition the following year, with Walsh stating, “We wanted to create a nude that existed for herself.”
Walsh is particularly scathing of Picasso’s depiction of Dora Maar as an archetypal figure of suffering. “Picasso does an immense disservice to Maar’s practice and rich individual identity present in her work to reduce her to mad crying women,” Walsh says.
It was a portrayal that Maar herself rejected. “All these portraits of me are lies. They are all Picasso; none is Dora Maar,” she once said.
