Does bad romance lead to great art?

A London exhibition looks at the art that came out of the twentieth century’s most tumultuous relationships. But is it only within the context of romantic unrest that the best art can be made?

It was a Friday evening in 1914 and the American novelist and playwright Natalie Clifford Barney was throwing a garden party in Paris. Throughout the decades, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, and Marcel Proust would all drop by, but Barney’s salons were particularly known as gathering places for lesbian and bisexual women. That night, the painter Romaine Brooks had, true to character, shown up alone.

FRIDA KAHLO, LE VENADITA (LITTLE DEER), 1946.
(PHOTO NATHAN KEAY, © MCA CHICAGO)

An American born in Rome, Brooks was already becoming known for her uniquely dark and somber portraits of women. That Friday—and over the course of many Friday salons—in the cool of Barney’s garden, she and Brooks fell in love and would remain so for the rest of their lives. However, their disagreements, which became famous in their circle, often exploded in their art—to great creative success. Brooks was a loner—she disliked parties and much of the social jockeying on which Barney thrived. Barney, on the other hand, adored social energy and refused to have a monogamous relationship. She dated a string of other women, including Élisabeth de Gramont (a descendant of Henry IV of France) as well as the socialites Janine Lahovary and Dolly Wilde (niece of Oscar), which put pressure on her relationship with Brooks.

But the challenges of their relationship were also at the core of their many artistic breakthroughs. When Brooks met the Italian heiress and socialite Luisa Casati at one of Barney’s parties, she channeled her jealousy into a lustful, hypersexualized, and remarkably original portrait in which Brooks depicts Casati exposing herself in a black cape, her hair and nipples a fiery red. In an earlier portrait of Ida Rubinstein, an heiress and Russian ballerina, Brooks allowed the other side of her relationship with Barney to shine through: Brooks depicted Rubinstein looking off into the distance while remaining unbowed by the winds and clouds around her—a stoic strength seemingly derived from the lasting love and respect she had for Barney.

NATALIE CLIFFORD BARNEY (LEFT) AND ROMAINE BROOKS (RIGHT)

Not all romantic turmoil translates into genius, but for nearly all artists, affairs of the heart leave a mark on their oeuvre. “Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy, and the Avant-garde,” an exhibition that I saw at the Centre Pompidou-Metz outside Paris (opening soon at the Barbican in London) explores how more than forty artistic couples—from Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp to Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin to Brooks and Barney—aided or destroyed their partner’s creativity.

The show does not answer the question of whether some of these artists would have been better off without their partners, or whether their partners were crucial to their work. It does, however, imply that it is only in especially difficult and fraught relationships that exceptional creativity is channeled. In the case of Brooks and Barney, their relationship was difficult, often desperately so, but it ultimately served to benefit both of their careers. For a couple like Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar, it would seem that one member of the relationship benefited disproportionately—perhaps many of the women in these relationships would have been better off without their man. (There is, of course, a vital difference between a partner who is a fellow artist and a partner who is a muse: a muse is rarely an equal.) Most interesting is the question of whether great art derives primarily from romantic collaboration or domination—that is, in romantic ease or unease—because it is most often the latter that receives our focus and our mythologizing.

DORA MAAR, PICASSO EN MINOTAURE, MOUGINS, 1937.

There is Picasso and Maar, of course. There is also Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. Kahlo’s painting The Wounded Deer, in which a deer with Kahlo’s face is mortally wounded by arrows, depicts the physical trauma of the many operations related to her childhood polio, a bus crash, and her miscarriage, but it also shows the pain of feeling that so little of her love for Rivera was returned. Rivera was Kahlo’s everything. She wrote in her diary: “Diego = my husband / Diego = my friend / Diego = my mother / Diego = my father / Diego = my son / Diego = me / Diego = Universe.” But to him, she seemed to mean far less. He was an open philanderer, and had an affair with her younger sister, Cristina. His respect for Kahlo and her feelings often seemed close to nil. One of Kahlo’s best paintings, Diego on My Mind (Self-Portrait as Tehuana), grapples with this constant romantic devastation. In this self-portrait, an image of Rivera is stamped onto her forehead. She looks out towards the viewer—glum, quiet, almost beatific—and one wonders if she is weighing whether she has brought their heartbreak on herself. Perhaps only by being dominated in love was she able to access such a scarring, fundamentally true emotion. Romantic unrest thus seems to lend itself to accessing new perspectives—to creativity.

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ AND ULAY, RELATION IN SPACE, 1975.

A more contemporary example of heartbreak inspiring great work is Marina Abramović and her former partner, Ulay. They made one of their most meaningful works at the lowest point of their relationship: the very moment of their breakup. In 1988, the two began walking from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, met in the middle, and officially ended their romantic relationship. The fact that neither of them seemed to want it to end but knew that it had to end added an extra layer of emotional wreckage, each person deeply wanting to be with—and not wanting to be with—the other. They then continued walking past one another. “For her, it was very difficult to go on alone,” Ulay said in a later interview. “For me, it was actually unthinkable to go on alone.”

They met again, in 2010, during Abramović’s performance “The Artist is Present” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ulay visited the performance without warning. They looked at one another from across a table, blinking and slightly shaking as if their entire pasts, as if all of the memories of their relationship, were flooding through their bodies. What might be considered their greatest works of art came, therefore, at the moment of romantic devastation—their breakup—but also at this second moment of reckoning.

FRIEDRICH G WALKER, EMILIE FLÖGE IN
CHINESE IMPERIAL COSTUME, 1913.

At their best, romantic relationships are able to foster openness and trust, inspiring a belief in the goodness of all people. A strong relationship, even amidst its inevitable tumult, allows one to feel protection, kindness, empathy, even autonomy. Studies show that being in love allows you to think in a more global, long-term, and creative way because it pushes you to think further ahead—beyond the literal and concrete. And yet, though inter-artist romance is so often venerated, should it be? What, for instance, would Maar have accomplished had she not had to deal with Picasso? What about Kahlo vis-à-vis Rivera? Perhaps they might have been able to blossom into artists renowned in their own lifetimes.

So, too, when love manifests itself as manipulation and heartbreak, it might not really be love. The truest form of love is a kind of aloneness, spent together. Love is the protection of a partner’s independence, the providing of space and freedom and a sense of earnest openness when the rest of the world desperately wants to infringe upon all of that. The trouble with romanticizing chaotic love is two-pronged: it is emotionally destructive, but, less obviously, it implies that it is only within the realm of power dynamics—domination or submission—that art is created. More often, it is within the context of collaboration that the best art is made.

Emilie Flöge, for instance, Gustav Klimt’s long-term partner, was a skilled fashion designer who ran her own couture house in Vienna. She modeled for him and was in his painting Portrait of Emilie Flöge, as well as, more famously, The Kiss, in which they both star. More subtly, though, her talent for dressmaking and her advocacy for free-hanging, corsetless dresses known as the “rational dress style,” embraced by turn-of-the-century feminists, became one of Klimt’s signature artistic themes, no doubt a quieter but equally important contribution. (His paintings, in turn, bolstered her couture practice.)

ROMAINE BROOKS, UNA, LADY TROUBRIDGE, 1924.

In the case of Brooks and Barney, their tumult was perhaps useful, but they were far more collaborative in their art than is often known. Brooks craved solitude and, although Barney got a rush from parties, they decided to make a place where they could be alone, together. While Barney was still living on the rue Jacob in Paris, before the Second World War, they had a summer home built in the south of France, which they dubbed the “Villa Trait d’Union,” or the Hyphenated Villa. It was called that because the house was composed of two distinct wings, which came together into a central dining and living room. Brooks would work at one end and Barney at the other. Of course, their relationship would continue to careen. Brooks would soon slowly go mad, believing her chauffeur was trying to poison her and that someone wanted to steal her drawings. Barney continued seeing other women.

But, at that house, Barney completed her feminist text Thoughts of an Amazon (which drew a philosophical line between the poisonous ideologies of war and the inherent aggression of all male relationships), and Brooks worked on her most richly nuanced portrait of Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge, the British sculptor and long-term partner of Marguerite Radclyffe Hall. They were apart and together—protecting each other’s independence even as the Second World War approached. No matter what happened inside and outside of their relationship, they allowed the other her time, her space, and her selfhood. It was their collaborative love and their protection of the other, far more than their power struggles, that fueled their art. Each day, in the mornings and the evenings, they would come together in the center of the house, bearing witness to the truth of their solitude, reflected in the other.

(Source: The Paris Review)

Reading what Weinstein did to Salma Hayek during Frida makes me never want to watch a movie again

With the full confidence of someone who had just graduated from college the previous year I said, “No woman in a Bangalore college dresses like that.” The editor gave my salwar a look and said genially, “You don’t know anything”, writes Nisha Susan in The Ladies Finger. Read on: 

We watched Frida on cable TV, my friend and I. The scene in which Trotsky pulls Frida Kahlo down onto his lap is the moment in which my friend, who got her communism with her mother’s milk, huffed in disgust and left the room. Nonsense, she kept mumbling. Back then I found her reaction hilarious. I don’t remember a sex scene in Frida. Perhaps because I watched it on TV.

Then yesterday I read Salma Hayek’s essay about facing tortuous sexual harassment at the hands of Harvey Weinstein during the making of Frida. And I read about his attempt to break her as an artist. Frida was Hayek’s movie; she imagined it, produced it and played the Mexican artist. Hayek writes, “I was hoping he’d acknowledge me as a producer, who on top of delivering his list of demands shepherded the script and obtained the permits to use the paintings [and] Frida Kahlo’s houses… But all of this seemed to have no value. The only thing he noticed was that I was not sexy in the movie… He would let me finish the film if I agreed to do a sex scene with another woman. And he demanded full-frontal nudity.”

Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina. Still from Frida

Hayek then writes about the day she finally shot the scene with Ashley Judd and how ill she felt. “It was not because I would be naked with another woman. It was because I would be naked with her for Harvey Weinstein…At that point, I started throwing up while a set frozen still waited to shoot. I had to take a tranquilizer…”

Reading this made me think of a phrase I’d learnt a couple years before I watched Frida. In the 70s, feminist film critic Laura Mulvey had gifted the world the idea of the male gaze – ‘the act of depicting the world and women in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine and heterosexual point of view, which present women as objects of male pleasure’. It was so handy and explained so much to me. Now it feels like watching a crime in progress.

Still from Rear Window

The same year that Weinstein was already doing to women actors what would be considered a violation of the Geneva Convention if done to prisoners of war, I assisted in the making of a short film. A friend’s friend donated his time and services as an editor. I spent a few nights in his studio in Bangalore’s Gandhinagar neighbourhood waiting as he worked on big Kannada movies. One night he was editing a song. The Bangalore college girl in the sequence was dancing in a teeny tiny skirt. With the full confidence of someone who had just graduated from college the previous year I said, “No woman in a Bangalore college dresses like that.” The editor gave my salwar a look and said genially, “You don’t know anything.” I remember thinking, “What am I supposed to feel now? That you think I don’t have any short skirts or that I am not cool enough to know girls who wear short skirts?” The ‘male gaze’ was just then explained the ridiculous female characters in my favourite Malayalam movies all of whom sounded like no woman I had ever met. The male gaze explained why they screamed, threw tantrums and were so ‘chulbuli.’

Unfortunately, I had also been taught just then that realism was overrated and that I shouldn’t be so by-the-book in my approach to critiquing Indian movies. So I shrugged at the editor.

But now? Now, I feel a little cheated. And Laura Mulvey, wherever you are, you probably feel a little gypped too. What need is there for us to understand a vast philosophical construct because of which male writers and directors create roles and narratives for women actors that are utterly alien to women viewers? “Why should Frida sit in Trotsky’s lap?” my friend had asked while storming out.

The answer is not the male gaze but something simpler. We were taught that via Gabbar’s gaze as he made Basanti dance, male viewers could have a guilt-free consumption of Basanti. After all, the villain was making Basanti do it, not the hero. But in Hayek’s case, it wasn’t the single-headed artistic, male-gaze of the director or the hydra-headed male gaze of the box office that was making Basanti dance. It was just that Harvey Weinstein wanted it. It wasn’t his objectifying subconscious rejecting Frida’s unibrow and limp. It wasn’t his lack of understanding of patriarchy’s twisting of art that demanded a scene in which Frida Kahlo had sex with Tina Modotti. No, he just wanted to screw Hayek and if he couldn’t screw her, he wanted to screw her over. Actually, he just wanted to screw her over to begin with. That rape is about power not sex, I still believe, whatever other theory has been ripped from my heart.

Because women leading a movement would make unrealistic cinema. Still from Buddha in a Traffic Jam

At TLF and elsewhere, we female critics spend time analysing, praising, half-praising and critiquing movies with our feminist toolkit. I have laughed uproariously while telling the story of the man who wanted to make Buddha In A Traffic Jam, a movie ‘inspired’ by the Pink Chaddi movement telling me that it’s unrealistic to have a woman lead a movement like that. I have told this other story of the male scriptwriter’s gaze a 100 times and had audiences in a mixture of shock and giggles each time. I have been watching movies and television for years with that eager beaver feminist student’s notebook, giving points to the movies that thwart the gaze, and to the movies that give women actors names and a few more lines of dialogue. Spent years like a trudging pilgrim, to be nearer to thee, my non-denominational artistic deity. Because the best instrument of our feminist toolkit has been hope.

But now I want to retire from that game.

Over a decade ago, a filmmaker friend told me a story from the sets of a big Tamil movie. A song was being shot with the reigning chulbuli, a woman with a personality as effervescent as Hayek’s. The director paused action to ream the costume designer out in front of the whole set and the actor. And because this is Chennai, the reaming is in English. The director says, “Where are the tits and ass in this costume? Do you think I cast her for her acting?” The actor quit a year or so later, after getting married. That was the first time I didn’t do my usual moaning about women quitting the movies after getting married. For years I had bemoaned the loss of Manju Warrier, for which I boycotted her husband, nobody’s priya Dileep. I began to say to myself then that acting was just a horrible job for some women and why would anyone continue if they didn’t have to. Even then, I didn’t think that some of the women who quit, seemingly by their own choice, may actually still miss the movies. I didn’t think that, for some of them, it was an artistic pursuit but they were exhausted by its sexism.

So when we ask, where did all those women we loved in the movies go? They went perhaps to a place where they were facing less rape threats, death threats and daily violence. Weinstein threatened to kill Hayek at one point but that’s just him, right? No. In the first paragraph of her expose of Indian theatre that Nandini Krishnan wrote for TLF, she says, “Two years ago, I decided I’d stop acting in plays… In 2014, a co-actor slapped me as a scene was being choreographed. There was no slap in the script.”

Actor Parvathy. Photo courtesy Parvathy Instagram

This year I heard on the grapevine about an actor’s experience in a south Indian movie playing the wife of a star who’s old enough to be her grandfather. The movie is full of male-gaze-south-Indian-edition absurdities like the young wife wanting desperately to comb her husband’s moustache. The hero dies in this movie and the actor had to be in a scene where she is wailing next to her dead husband’s corpse. In each take, the ‘dead’ man, cotton balls in his nostrils notwithstanding, copped a surreptitious feel of the heroine. The third time it happened she got up mid-wail and yelled at him, “stop doing that right now.” And yelled at, for the first time in his 40-year career, the man quietened down. This young woman actor has a cultivated or accidental air of ‘I can take this career or leave it,” that has protected her from backlash. Or maybe we will read about the backlash 40 years from now in her memoir. It may be like the kind of backlash that actors like Swara Bhaskar are now talking about or the kind that award-winning star Parvathy is currently facing for saying that she was disappointed by Mamooty’s misogynistic dialogue in Kasaba. Or it may be worse.

One of the kindest and smartest things I’ve read all year is what Rima Kallingal said in Leena Reghunath’s profile of Manju Warrier. Warrier is a woman who dumped her husband, made a triumphant comeback and now has to cope with the drama of her former husband allegedly ordering a ‘supaari’ rape on her actor friend. Here is the line. “Kallingal was defensive about criticisms that Warrier was seeking to market her personal story as part of the movie. “That is the only thing that we have, our tragedies,” she said. “So what is wrong if we market that?””

So, no I don’t want any theoretical understanding of why male artists can’t help themselves, what with the weight of civilisation and all. What I want is a sign before every movie indicating that, “no women were harmed in the making of this movie.” I want movies written by women, made by women, funded by women.

Because is there any point knowing about the male gaze as long as there is no female bank balance to poke in that twisted eye? As the Superwoman’s mother said, “Tu minnu bhindiya tedhi aankhein na dikha, okay?”