Women's rites on show

By LINDA HERRICK arts editor

There she stands, the heroic Queen Zenobia, gazing out over her city of Palmyra as it burns at the hands of the Romans in AD273. Note her clenched fists, the tension in her arm, the golden shackles and her empty knife scabbard as she faces being led away to slavery. It looks like a still from a Cecil B. DeMille melodrama, but Herbert Schmalz' Zenobia's last look upon Palmyra (1888) is based on fact: Queen Zenobia did bravely resist the Romans, she was taken prisoner and paraded in Rome as a trophy, and the ruins of her city are still being excavated in Syria.

Zenobia's proud figure is just one of many representations of women in Love & Death: Art in the Age of Queen Victoria, which has taken over the upper level of the Auckland Art Gallery.

Imported from the Art Gallery of South Australia's hugely popular touring show, curated by Angus Trumble and including works lent by Sydney collectors John and Julie Schaeffer, the Love & Death we see here has also been strengthened by a number of paintings from the Auckland Gallery's collection.

They have been selected by Mary Kisler, the gallery's MacKelvie Curator, International Art, who is an informative, amusing host on a tour through the variously themed rooms.

"This exhibition is far more about women than men," she says, as we pass by a dazzling parade of beauties portrayed by the likes of Frederic Leighton, J. W. Waterhouse, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and many more artists - all male (apart from one work - of a battle scene - by Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler).

"There are men in the paintings but very few are active - they are passive characters. I think the artists were more interested in looking at women, especially those who looked so different from the women they knew in their lives. Apart from the paintings that are about the social circumstances in England at the time, most of these are a form of escapism."

Love & Death shows women in many lights: they are dramatic historical figures like Zenobia or Edward Poynter's Helen (of Troy, 1881); or demure beauties, such as W. P. Frith's Lovers (1855).

There are women cast helplessly adrift by poverty (Millais' Blow, blow thou winter wind, 1892) and adultery (George Harcourt's Forgiven, 1898-99); and at the opposite end of that powerlessness, all-knowing femmes fatales, as in Waterhouse's gorgeous - but vicious - sorceress Circe invidiosa (1892).

And then, there are the wan ones, the women - and children - destined for an early grave, as so often occurred in those days. "Death was a presence at every level of society," says Kisler, occasionally pointing at a pallid figure in the "Till Death Do Us Part" section, and mock-whispering, "She's next ...

"In those days you never knew when you would get ill, and if you did, chances were high you would die. Often these sorts of paintings were a great solace and they showed themes people really understood. Most people then were born and died in the same bed. We don't often sit around the deathbed of someone dying at home."

Victorian art was out of fashion for many years, its lusciousness and sentimentality rejected in favour of Impressionism and modernist practices. But, in a recent radio debate with Tate Gallery curator Alison Smith, South Australian Art Gallery director Ron Radford discussed the reasons for its resurgence.

"There's a nostalgia, there's a return to narrative ... and younger people are particularly interested in the romance of Victorian painting ... One of the real reasons for the revival is that the paintings simply are good. People are loving the gorgeous qualities and richness of the pictures. When you walk into Love & Death, people are blown over by the richness and almost overwhelming extravagance."

There is also a subversive thread running through the exhibition. Take William Quiller Orchardson's The first cloud (1887), one of a series of three he completed about upper-class marital discord.

The younger wife has turned coldly away from her pompous ass of a much older husband. "You can almost hear her shoes tip-tapping as she leaves the room," says Kisler. "The property law changed in England in the 1850s; before that, if a husband and wife divorced she got nothing. The law change meant women could inherit property and if a marriage failed, she could claim some of the property. The first cloud is a huge painting with two very small figures but there is the emphasis on property."

Of course sex is there, too. There is plenty of draped semi-nudity - male and female - in Love & Death. When Roddam Spencer Stanhope painted the exquisite Love and the Maiden in 1877 - a work Kisler adores for its delicacy and detail - he was living in Florence and greatly influenced by Botticelli.

Here, he pays tribute to the quattrocento (15th century) period of Florentine art, and the imagery of the Annunciation, but creates instead a tableau of an encounter between innocence and Eros. For once, the female is passive; the male active.

Victorian nudity was purer than the French version of the day, which the English regarded as decadent. "But they are also extremely sexy," said Radford in the radio discussion. "And more sexy than the French because they are so much more subliminal.

"In many cases it comes over as much more smouldering, and even the figures that are not nude but semi-nude or even fully clothed, you know, the lips are over-red, the cheeks are over-red. Even the little children, in a way, seem over-sexy, over-ripe."

A strange brew, indeed, of reverence and lust. Kisler agrees: "There were some peculiar attitudes to women in those days.

"If you took Victoria herself as the model, they were extremely prudish. There is the notion on the one hand of the angel of the hearth, the woman's responsibility to be a good wife and mother. She stays at home and guards the morals. But then, when men leave the house they are always in danger and it's the women on the streets who are the temptresses."

Love & Death also includes images of what has been labelled as "rescue obsessions", such as Burne-Jones' St George slaying the Dragon (1864 or 1866); the knight in armour runs his sword through the beast as the helpless damsel clasps her hands and gazes upon her saviour. But remember this was the period when women were starting to clamour for the vote, and for emancipation and independence from men.

"The knight is meant to live up to the chivalric role and that appears a lot," says Kisler. "But the knights are often under a spell - women, of course, terrible seductresses. They torment you once they've got you. There is quite a seductive thread here. There is a fear of women, or awe - or both."

After all, Schmalz' most famous painting (but not in this show) was Faithful unto death, a high-kitsch study of a group of bound, naked Christian girls, awaiting death by lion-mauling in the Colosseum. These days, said the Tate's Alison Smith, Schmalz' work is seen through contemporary eyes as "perhaps the indulgence of violent feelings as well as sexual feelings towards women".

* Love & Death, Auckland Art Gallery, until November 24.