"Haunted", Belinda Lei, 2011

"Expulsion from the Garden of Eden", Masaccio, 1425

The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, or simply Expulsion, was painted as a fresco in the Brancacci Chapel by the Italian painter Masaccio during the early 15^th century. Masaccio was part of a large group of Italian Renaissance painters, so his artwork was based upon the humanist studies. The fresco was damaged in the 18^th century when the chapel was undergoing construction. (Web Gallery of Art) The painting depicts one of the most popular stories from the Bible: the day that Adam and Eve sin after eating from the Tree of Knowledge and are expelled from the Garden of Eden. In the fresco, Adam and Eve are not only obviously in a lot of pain and experiencing remorse but there is also an angel with a sword—making sure Adam and Eve do not return back.

 Stylistically, Masaccio uses many different types of art techniques to bring out as much human emotion as possible from Adam and Eve. When Masaccio painted this masterpiece, he focused more on Adam and Eve using their body language and facial expressions to show their anguish as opposed to the obvious punishment they have just received from God ( Encyclopedia Britannica). Masaccio wanted to establish a emotional connection between the viewer and the figures (“Western Painting,” Encyclopedia Britannica). Masaccio allows Adam and Eve to appear more 3D and human-like by using chiaroscuro. He also made it more dramatic by painting with dramatic strokes (“Masaccio,” Encyclopedia Britannica). Masaccio allows Adam to have some dignity through the use of Adam’s body placement. Compared to Eve, Adam is not afraid of what his body looks like and while he does look sad, he does not look as remorseful as Eve. On the other hand, Eve looks like she “bears all of the suffering in the world” (Web Gallery of Art). Her hands cover the most private parts of her body while her face expresses not only in sadness but extreme pain. Masaccio further emphasizes the dark mood of his painting by using few and very plain colors. The use of colors creates a dreary look for the fresco. The towering angel also stands out with the use of red, the only bright color in the painting. Through the use of different facial expressions, body language, and color, Masaccio creates a pitiful image of two people’s tragic fates.

Eve’s emotion in “Expulsion” ties into the theme, “Women in Mourning” because of how she is reacting to her predicament. Not only are her facial features in distress, but her body language also shows that she is in remorse. Masaccio also makes Eve look like the important figure in the picture by having Adam cover his face, the place where viewers can truly tell what a person is feeling. In the painting, Eve is obviously mourning her fate. Eve is considered the true sinner in Christian for convincing Adam to eat the forbidden fruit. As a result, Eve must be faced with the punishment of painful childbirth and becoming the lesser of the two sexes. Adam’s punishment was simply expulsion, so Masaccio painted him as less distressed than Eve. Expulsion sets itself apart from the other paintings of “Women in Mourning” by being the only painting where the artist is not trying to suggest an injustice in society. Instead, the woman is mourning over her own mistakes.

"Speechless", Shirin Neshat (1996)

                Speechless is part of a series of photographs titled “Women of Allah” by Shirin Neshat. Neshat was raised in Qazvin, Iran, but left her country to pursue art in the US after high school. She was unable to return back to Iran until eleven years later because of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. When she finally returned to Iran, it was completely different from the country she grew up in. Confronted with feelings of displacement, Neshat expressed the ideology of Islam through art, and “Women of Allah” was born (Time Europe).  Shirin Neshat was actually the director of the “Women of Allah” series because she was not a photographer herself. Each photograph that is used in “Women of Allah” has three essential elements: the black veil, a modern weapon, and written text, often disguised (Macdonald).

                Neshat uses herself as a model of Speechless and the photo casts a feeling of awe and power. By having the camera so zoomed in on her face, it gives off a feeling of power: different from the commonly depicted submittal woman (Macdonald). Through her facial expressions, it is obvious that Neshat is desperate for the freedom to express herself. Her eyes look determined and fierce. Almost as if she is saying, “here I come”. but the black veil that can be discerned in the left of the picture seems to stop her. The black veil in the Islamic culture symbolizes the compliance of women to their religion and in Iran, it symbolizes the support of the Islamic Revolution. By wearing the black veil in the photograph and having it take up half of the picture, it seems like a struggle between the yearning for freedom and the support of religion. Looking closely at the photograph, written text is also seen on the woman’s face. The written text is actually sacred text in the Islamic religion. By putting it on her face, the body part where people can identify emotions the most, it serves as a reminder of the power that religion has over women and the oppression it has towards free expression. The gun in the picture is another juxtaposition. The woman seems to be embracing the gun as a part of her, giving off a threatening feeling, but at the same time, it does not feel dangerous because of her conflicted emotions: freedom versus opression.

                In Speechless, Neshat uses a woman in mourning to represent the oppression of women in the Islamic culture. Speechless is simple but also very complex due to the symbolism of each object  in the picture. The solemn look on the woman’s face with the tears brimming at her eyes gives a look of strength and also a cry for help. Neshat makes the symbol of a woman in mourning more powerful by having opposites of each emotion in the photograph: freedom and oppression, strength and weakness, determination and submission, hope and despair. Neshat’s focus of a woman in mourning is different from the other works of art because of the emphasis on women’s rights.


To see a slide show of the "Women of Allah" photography, click here.

"Ophelia", Sir John Everett Millais, 1851

An English painter named Sir John Millais created Ophelia in 1851. Sir John Millais was well known as being part of an artistic movement named the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. (Encyclopedia Britannica). It was a movement that was opposed to contemporary art, which they believed had begun with Raphael. The Brotherhood was so opposed to contemporary art because they believed the teaching of Raphael had corrupted the teachings of art: it was too mechanical. The scene in the painting is based upon the Shakespeare play “Hamlet.” Ophelia allows herself to die after she discovers her lover, Hamlet, had slain her father (Google Art Project). The natural background is famous for it’s accurate depiction of nature. The scenery is based upon Hogsmill River in Surrey. The woman posing as Ophelia in the picture is Elizabeth Siddal. Because the river was so cold for Siddal while Millais was painting her, he put lamps beneath her to heat up the water.

Sir John Millais’ style of art is exemplary of Romanticism. He makes the scene of Ophelia drowning seem natural and graceful through the use of his serene natural background and the hauntingly peaceful expression on Ophelia’s face. Her body language suggests how welcoming Ophelia is of death with not only her arms opened towards the sky but also the palms of her hands. The strokes the Millais uses to paint his art piece are small and indefinite, creating a dreamlike quality to the picture. Ophelia wears a greyish hue attire, making it look like a funeral dress. Ophelia’s pallid skin also matches the scene because she looks like she is already dead, yet she looks so beautiful while continuing to float in the water.

Ophelia is a very interesting way of depicting a woman in mourning. Unlike the other art pieces where women have tears and are in obvious distress, Millais gives Ophelia a peaceful facial expression. Instead, he uses the flowers that Ophelia is holding as a way to show a woman in mourning with each flower symbolizing a different grievance. The poppies that Ophelia are holding symbolize death; daisies symbolize innocence, and pansies symbolize love in vain (Google Art Project). The overall mood of the picture seems so calm yet the meaning behind the flowers gives the painting an ironic turn. In all the other four paintings, the background has a bleak and foreboding feeling, but Ophelia manages to capture the tragic? beauty of death. Another reason why Ophelia stands out is because of how Millais is not mourning over an aspect of society in any way. Instead, he is simply painting the picture as away to capture grace, beauty, love, and grief all in one brilliant masterpiece.

"No Woman, No Cry", Ofili, 1998

 No Woman No Cry by Chris Ofili was created in 1998 after the murder of a London teenager name Stephen Lawrence. Stephen Lawrence was murdered in 1993 as a result of racism. He was waiting for the bus one night and was stabbed. There were five suspects, but they were never convicted. Ofili was inspired by the bravery of Doreen Lawrence, Stephen’s mother, to expose the truth behind her son’s murder (Google Art Project). Doreen’s pursuit of justice exposed the corruption of the Metropolitan Police and many faults towards the handling of the investigation. Chris Ofili is well known in the art world for his drawings about popular beliefs. He uses many eccentric ways to create his painting such as with elephant dung, glitter, and cutouts (Tate Britain). His inspriations also have a wide variety ranging from cavemen drawings to the hiphop culture.

The woman in the painting represents Doreen Lawrence and the tears she is crying are actually collaged pictures of Stephen Lawrence (Google Art Project). The colors that Ofili uses in the painting are bright and colorful—making the painting almost seem happy, but the dirty yellow with hints of black on her shadow suggest otherwise. The yellow in the picture also brings out the color of Doreen’s skin. By putting vibrant colors around the picture, Doreen’s dark skin seems to stand out more—with the yellow creating a type of angelic aura. Ofili may have purposely used this stark contrast of colors as a way of denouncing racism. By showing Doreen’s color in a positive light, it conveys the sense that Doreen is proud of her race, which sends a strong message of racial acceptance to viewers. Racism is considered as the belief that one race is superior to others. By showing Doreen as being proud of the same racial background that got her son murdered, it shows that she is just as equal to everyone else. Beneath the layers of paint, “RIP, Stephen Lawrence” can be noticed as a tribute to the dead teenager (Google Art Project). Ofili brings out the quiet dignity that Doreen Lawrence has through her raised head and stretched out neck.

                Thematically, No Woman, No Cry is similar to Kathe Kollwitz’s Misery because they are both about a mother mourning over her dead child. In Misery, a peasant woman mourns over her dead child as a murder by society while Doreen Lawrence mourns over her dead child as a murder relating to race. Ofili depicts the injustice of racism by using a specific event reference in his drawing. He not only uses Stephen’s pictures as teardrops, but also writes his name onto the painting, making blatant the history behind the painting. No Woman, No Cry is very interesting because Ofili uses only the mourning woman as the main focus of the painting while he makes subtle tributes to Stephen Lawrence.  The subtleness of his actions allows viewers to focus more on why the woman in the painting is mourning. She could be mourning over many different things: the death of her son, the failure of the justice system, the racial discrimination that continues to exist. At the same time, Ofili drew this picture as a way to express melancholy and grief universally (Google Art Project). Obviously, a woman in mourning can suggest many different things about the faults of society.

No Woman, No Cry was exhibited at Tate Britain from January-16 May 2010.

"Need or Misery" , Kathe Kollwitz, 1895-96

Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945) was a German graphic artist who created artwork depicting the “violence of war, social injustice, and inhumanity” (Encyclopedia Britannica). Her first few pieces of artwork showed the oppression of society upon the poor. However, her focus shifted more towards the loss of a child after the death of her son from a battle of World War I. Perhaps her most famous work is of a granite monument of herself and her husband grieving over their dead child. In 1932, it became a memorial near Ypre, Belgium (Encyclopedia Britannica). For the rest of her life, she produced simple, but powerful, pieces of art until her death in 1945. Many of her pieces are woodcuts, etchings, and litographs.

While Misery was created before the tragic death of Kathe’s son, it still expresses the powerful emotions that a mother feels with the loss of her child.  Misery is set in a small, dark room with a poor peasant woman mourning over her dead infant child. Kathe created this piece to express not only the tragedy of having a dead child, but the horrors the poor have to undergo; the mother could not even give the child much needed medical care because of poverty.  By using only white and black, Kath Kollwitz creates a bleak and dramatic image. The small child evokes not only sadness but also tragedy. In the society Kollwitz was living at the time, child-mortality rates were very high for the working-class (GHD). By having the mother clutching her head and leaning down towards the child, Kathe makes the woman seem frustrated and depressed. The cramped room with a small window and a spinning wheel behind the woman gives off an obvious image of poverty.

Kathe uses the image of a woman in mourning to relay her own personal feelings about her corrupted society. With the use of a mother with a dead child, it compels the viewer to feel sympathy for the mother. Furthermore, the frustration that the mother seems to be experiencing in the lithograph not only represents the frustration of being unable to save her child, but also a frustration towards the society that led her to end up in such a tragic state. The art piece revolves around the child through the use of different shades of light. On the other hand, it also sparks curiosity about why the little child is in the bed, leading up to the viewing of the woman in anguish. The woman in mourning is a subtle way for Kathe Kollwitz to convey her own message of the horrors of poverty and oppression.



Want to know more about Kathe Kollwitz's life? Go to her museum by clicking (here).