Lilith (painting)

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Lilith (John Collier)
Lilith
John Collier , 1887
Oil on canvas
194 × 104 cm
The Atkinson, Southport

Lilith is the title of a painting by the British painter John Collier (1850–1934). Originally located in the Bootle Art Gallery, the work, created in 1887 in the Pre-Raphaelite style and measuring 1.94 mx 1.04 m, has been part of the collection of the Atkinson Art Gallery in Southport since the 1970s . The subject of the picture goes back to the mythological figure of Lilith .

The paintings

Collier portrayed Lilith as a gold-haired, porcelain-skinned naked woman who eats the head of a licking snake that has wrapped itself around its body in a passionate embrace. Against the background of a gloomy, brown-green jungle stands an unclothed female figure, whose pale skin and long blond hair falling over the back forms a strong contrast to the forest. The head posture and gaze are turned away from the viewer and focused on the snake's head resting on her shoulder. The snake wraps around its body in several coils, starting around its tightly knit ankles over the knee to its abdomen, which it thus covers. Lilith supports the body of the snake with her hands in the area of ​​her upper body so that the snake's head can lie over her right shoulder up to her throat. Lilith's head is tilted towards the snake, her cheek hugs the animal. The brown tones of the snake's body stand out from the pale female body, but pick up on the color scheme of the surrounding jungle. Collier added Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem Lilith or Body's Beauty from 1868 to his painting , in which Lilith is described as the witch Adam loved before Eve. Her gorgeous locks gave the world "its first gold," but her beauty was a weapon and her charms were deadly.

The British Architect described the work in 1887: “Here is a naked woman, whose lush, round shape is most gracefully depicted, surrounded by a large snake, the thickest part of which it crosses horizontally and cuts in half; her head slides down her chest and she seems to be pulling it closer to her. The background is a rough sort of green, repulsive and hideous ”.

detail

The Metropolitan Museum of Art stated in the 2004 exhibition catalog: “John Collier gave his Lilith a Pre-Raphaelite hairstyle of lush, freely falling auburn locks, which contrasted with the fashionably controlled hairstyles of the time. Her waist is unnaturally constrained, even though she is not wearing a corset. He set the smooth, milky surface of her skin against the slimy, speckled shape of a giant snake ”, […]“ that hugs her neck while she leans her cheek against her in unseemly intimacy. ”“ The snake twists dangerously around Lilith's figure, but Lilith doesn't seem to feel threatened or repelled. "

Exhibitions and reception

1880s

When John Collier presented his monumental painting to the public, he received widespread recognition, starting with the London exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1887.

On the occasion of the eleventh summer show at London's Grosvenor Gallery in 1887, The Photographic News magazine found Lilith's nude study to be of considerable value. In the exhibition catalog itself it is noted that the work is worth looking at in terms of craftsmanship and sensitivity, and the painterly execution of the snake is also remarkable. The British Architect magazine regretted that few can paint like this, and the number of those who would be able to paint the snake like this can be counted on one hand.

The journal The Athenaeum ruled that Collier had provoked a risky comparison by adding Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem Lilith to his painting . His Lilith shows a robust model of about 25 years, standing upright, naked, arms crossed in front of her body, which tilts her head slightly to one side, so that her light yellow hair falls like a cloak over her back. She is entwined with a monstrous snake that coils around her and pushes its head over her shoulder. The female figure is beautifully painted, thoroughly thought out, carefully worked, but more reminiscent of Salambo . As a knowledgeable study it is highly praiseworthy, but it is by no means Rosetti's mystical demoness, rosy, lovely, amorous and diabolical.

The Spectator attested that the picture was a detailed, technically skilled and realistic representation, which, however, led to the fact that “somehow all poetry and every feeling had slipped away” and emphasized that, in general, every nude painting “only realizes the superficial aspects of the body seeks, and realistically, that it must be bad art “if it has been painted uninspired by feelings and thoughts. The Literary World expressed a similar opinion , which Colliers Lilith found clearly pretty, but too naturalistic and all too sober.

The picture was also shown in the 17th Autumn Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool from September to December 1887.

Later reception

In the 2004 exhibition Wild. Fashion Untamed of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the painting was juxtaposed with contemporary design drafts. The exhibition explored the question of how “the physical and sexual characteristics of animals have defined ideals of femininity”. She presented a “historical and cross-cultural study of man's obsession with the animalistic expressed in clothing” and also explored “darker relationships between animalism and female sexuality. Thematically, myths and legends are dealt with, such as those of Lilith, Medusa and the Sirens , which combine images of women as divine matriarchs and sexual predators. "

In 2016 it was on the occasion of the gender struggle exhibition . Franz von Stuck to Frida Kahlo on male and female identities and the change in gender roles from the beginning of the first women's movement in the 19th century to the end of the Second World War can be seen in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt . It was shown how social change is reflected in the representation in art . The emphasis was on symbolism and surrealism . Collier's work shows a type of woman, threatening and desirable at the same time, who, in addition to being portrayed as Lilith, also points to the Eva motif.

  • Lilith, 1887

  • Eve, 1911

Artists increasingly gave Lilith to Eva's attributes. Collier's painting Eve from 1911 cannot be distinguished from his Lilith in the representation of the female type and the wilderness, but in contrast to the self-confident charisma of Lilith, Eva's horror-filled escape is depicted. The Germanist and religious studies scholar Kathrin Trattner wrote in the Standard in 2017 , Colliers Lilith, “which at first glance may be reminiscent of the biblical Eve” is probably the best-known artistic representation that is still used today for book covers and websites.

In 2020 the painting was the focal point of the exhibition Fatal Attraction: Lilith and her Sisters at the Atkinson Art Gallery in Southport, which traces the “history of the femme fatale and her change from a symbol of patriarchal power to the heroine of her own history”. John Collier's Lilith is portrayed naked as an object of desire, but as a classic femme fatale draped with a snake, equally beautiful and dangerous, to symbolize temptation and sin.

background

John Colliers Lilith is thematically included in the works of the Pre-Raphaelites , to whom he was close. Mythological subjects and female figures were popular motifs among them.

In the romantic period towards the end of the 18th century, other female motifs increasingly replaced Eva as the “icon of sexual danger”. In literature and the fine arts, hybrid creatures and shapeshifters , who robbed men of will, strength and life by hiding their evil being under a lovely exterior, increasingly became the subject of artistic debate. Parallel to the development of the women's movement , the artistic preoccupation with the “destructive, ominous woman” gained in importance throughout Europe. The depictions emphasized the guilt and the seductive arts of Eve and her successors. They presented them exaggerated and one-sided as figures of evil, who used their "sexual stimuli specifically to disempower men". In the literature and art of the 19th century, the portrayal of the hideous demon changed in favor of the "unbridled seductress". Poets, writers and painters of this time were fascinated by the female type of femme fatale, who was endowed with magical - demonic features but also for the first time independent .

Often only the title of the picture reminded of the mythological meaning, as in Rosetti's and Collier's Lilith depictions or the Lamia by John William Waterhouse. Goethe , Rossetti and Collier took up central characteristics of Lilith from Jewish mythology . A feminist reading that made Lilith a symbol of female independence in Jewish feminism only came about in the 1960s and 1970s.

John Keats' poem La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819) and Friedrich de La Motte Fouqués Undine (1811) are about seductive forest spirits who lure men with their deceptively innocent appeal. The image of seductive, deadly, female hybrid creatures, in the form of the mermaid , is also found in the fine arts in Edward Burne-Jones The Depths of the Sea (1886), John William Waterhouse A Mermaid (1900) and Isobel Lilian Gloag The knight and the mermaid or The Kiss of the Enchantress (around 1890), inspired by John Keats' poem Lamia . The painting Lamia (1909) was also by Waterhouse . In his poem Lamia from 1819, Keats takes up an ancient legend about a snake who was at times transformed into a beautiful woman. The Lilith myth can also be found in the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti ( Lady Lilith , 1868) and Kenyon Cox ( Lilith , 1892) as well as in the literary works of Robert Browning ( Adam, Lilith and Eve , 1883), George MacDonald ( Lilith , 1895) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti ( Lilith or Body's Beauty , 1868).

  • Lady Lilith, 1868

  • La Belle Dame sans Merci, 1901

  • The knight and the mermaid, around 1890

  • A Mermaid, 1900

  • Lamia, 1909

literature

Web links

Commons : Lilith (painting)  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Art UK: Artworks: Lilith . Retrieved March 10, 2021
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Lindsay J. Bosch, Debra N. Mancoff: Icons of Beauty: Art, Culture, and the Image of Women . Greenwood Press 2009, ISBN 978-0-313-33821-2 , p. 146 . Retrieved April 11, 2021
  3. ↑ a b The Grosvenor Gallery . In: The British Architect: A Journal of Architecture and the Accessory Arts . Volume 27, Pennsylvania State University 1887, p. 339 . Retrieved March 25, 2021
  4. ↑ a b c Andrew Bolton, Shannon Bell-Price, Elyssa Da Cruz: Wild. Fashion Untamed . Exhibition catalog, Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York 2004, ISBN 978-1-58839-135-3 , p. 149 . Retrieved March 25, 2021
  5. ↑ Wide Angle: The Grosvenor Gallery, May 20, 1887. In: The Photographic News: A Weekly Record of the Progress of Photography , Volume 31, Cassell, Petter & Galpin, London 1887, pp. 306-307. Retrieved March 11 2021
  6. ^ Grosvenor Notes 1887. A complete catalog . No. 10, Henry Blackburn (Ed.), Grosvenor Gallery, Chatto and Windus, London 1887. Retrieved March 11, 2021
  7. ^ The Grosvenor Exhibition . In: The Athenaeum: A Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Music, and the Drama . James Silk Buckingham , John Sterling, Frederick Denison Maurice, Henry Stebbing, Charles Wentworth Dilke, Thomas Kibble Hervey, William Hepworth Dixon, Norman Maccoll, Vernon Horace Rendall, John Middleton Murry. No. 3106, J. Francis, 1887, p. 613 . Retrieved March 25, 2021
  8. ^ The Grosvenor Gallery . In: The Spectator. A weekly review of Politics, Literature, Theology, and Art, June 18, 1887. Volume 16, 1887, p. 831 . Retrieved April 17, 2021
  9. ^ The Grosvenor Gallery . In: The Literary World of May 6, 1887. Volume 35, Jan. – Jun. 1887, James Clarke & Co. London; P. 425 . Retrieved April 17, 2021
  10. ↑ The Magazine of Art . Volume 10, Marion Harry Spielmann (eds.), Cassell, Petter & Galpin, London 1887, xlvi Art in September . Retrieved March 25, 2021
  11. ^ The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Met publications. "Wild: Fashion Untamed". Description . Retrieved April 14, 2021
  12. ^ The Metropolitan Museum of Art: "Wild: Fashion Untamed". Exhibition Overview . Retrieved April 14, 2021
  13. ↑ a b Gender struggle: Franz von Stuck to Frida Kahlo . Felix Krämer (Ed.), Prestel, Munich, London, New York 2016, ISBN 978-3-7913-5572-6 , pp. 16, 25
  14. ↑ a b c d Kathrin Trattner: From demoness to femme fatale: Lilith in art and literature of the 19th century . In: Der Standard , International, Blog Religionswissenschaft, November 29, 2017. Retrieved April 14, 2021
  15. ↑ The Atkinson: Fatal Attraction: Lilith and her Sisters . Retrieved April 11, 2021