The Art of Girlhood: Marchesa Luisa Casati
I remember looking up at Laura Muntz Lyall’s painting Interesting Story with my big sister; it always brought her to tears. She said it felt like it captured the way she loved me. I remember feeling this same way looking at the girls playing in Dorothea Sharp’s work. There’s an almost indescribable element of girlhood that comes through certain artworks and reaches deep into my chest. Claire Marie Healy’s thoughts in her collaboration video with Tate on girlhood in art got me pondering this idea more deeply. Exploring the complexity of this kind of female representation has transformed the way I experience and relate to art completely. Girlhood has been captured in forms ranging from renaissance portraits of wealthy aristocrats’ daughters to current projects like the photography of Mary Ellen Mark or Rene Matic, or even paintings like those of Sari Shryack. As Healy describes it, girlhood transcends a length of time in a woman’s life. The term is inclusive and encompasses complex emotions and connections that a ‘girl’ carries with herself throughout her entire journey through to womanhood and beyond. This field of art is where many women and girls find the most impactful representation. In her video, Claire touches on how girls now have developed a language for documenting and sharing their lived experiences and even make art beyond any traditional sense of the word using the internet. The global community has connected girls worldwide and allowed us to find community and culture within our shared joys and traumas.
The Marchesa Luisa Casati, an oil portrait painted by Augustus Edwin John in 1919, of Luisa Adele Rosa Maria Amman has held my attention through this thematic exploration. She hangs in the AGO, in a room with works of Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso. The painting has a free feeling with a textured stylistic element that still feels very traditional, she is set in front of a smoky background of greens, blues, and grays that feels like a scene set up at a fancy portrait studio for The Marchesa herself. Her face is painted in the sharpest detail, amplifying the magnetic quality of her eyes. Looking dramatically over her shoulder, with a hand on her hands on her hip, her powerful presence can be sensed from across the room. Her mysterious ghoulish complexion, flaming orange hair, penetrating gaze, and decadent style have made her a “visitor favourite” according to the gallery - and her popularity is nothing new. A beauty feature in Vogue Magazine describes how the Italian heiress, born in 1881, was famous all over Europe for her extravagance. Six feet tall, she was known for hosting lavish dinner parties and her wonderful and esoteric feats of fashion and beauty. She famously had affairs with designers, poets, and artists and became a muse to many – Augustus Edwin John being one of them. After I became captivated by her power in the halls of the AGO, I noticed that she had captured the hearts of people all around me as well. My friend’s posted her on social media, and her signature bright orange tangle of hair and big belladonna pupils seemed to pop up on advertisements all over the city – but why?
Her power and beauty did not come from conforming, in fact the opposite is true. Her persona of artful outlandish fetish expression and carefree creative lifestyle inspires viewers to embrace freedom. A New Yorker article explains that men believed she “had willfully ravaged a great beauty” and likened the shock of meeting her to that of coming face to face with medusa herself. Though she was an heiress who was wealthier than many of the most wealthy people on the planet and therefore is hugely unrelatable to most of the world, there’s such power in her story that evidently touches many people. In everything she did - like commissioning a life-sized wax figure of herself with glass eyes and a wig made from her own hair - is saturated with empowerment and defiance. The same New Yorker feature describes her life as one “that was obscenely profligate yet strangely pure.” Her sheer hedonistic enjoyment of sex, love, drugs, food, art, and who knows what else, was ahead of her time - and her impact has survived long after her death in 1957. Luisa is not what a lot of people would describe when asked about a symbol of girlhood, but perhaps that is what makes her and this portrait of hers so special. Girlood is not one singular thing; it is endlessly inclusive and undefinable. Her creative expression was ahead of her time, I see echoes of it across many female and queer centred creative spaces today. The point is that her image of girlhood counts because all images of girlhood count. Mine and my sister's versions we found in Laura Muntz Lyall's work - which started this whole journey - wildly differ from that of Luisa Casati, but that’s the beauty. We are all together in our wonderful experiences of girlhood, though each looks so wildly different. It is always a positive thing to consider and embrace all lived experiences, and what we should learn from Luisa, and from the countless other women and girls creating all sorts of things around the world, is that no matter how you do it, girlhood is beautiful and strange and worthy of celebration.
The Marchesa Luisa Casati, an oil portrait painted by Augustus Edwin John in 1919, of Luisa Adele Rosa Maria Amman has held my attention through this thematic exploration. She hangs in the AGO, in a room with works of Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso. The painting has a free feeling with a textured stylistic element that still feels very traditional, she is set in front of a smoky background of greens, blues, and grays that feels like a scene set up at a fancy portrait studio for The Marchesa herself. Her face is painted in the sharpest detail, amplifying the magnetic quality of her eyes. Looking dramatically over her shoulder, with a hand on her hands on her hip, her powerful presence can be sensed from across the room. Her mysterious ghoulish complexion, flaming orange hair, penetrating gaze, and decadent style have made her a “visitor favourite” according to the gallery - and her popularity is nothing new. A beauty feature in Vogue Magazine describes how the Italian heiress, born in 1881, was famous all over Europe for her extravagance. Six feet tall, she was known for hosting lavish dinner parties and her wonderful and esoteric feats of fashion and beauty. She famously had affairs with designers, poets, and artists and became a muse to many – Augustus Edwin John being one of them. After I became captivated by her power in the halls of the AGO, I noticed that she had captured the hearts of people all around me as well. My friend’s posted her on social media, and her signature bright orange tangle of hair and big belladonna pupils seemed to pop up on advertisements all over the city – but why?
Her power and beauty did not come from conforming, in fact the opposite is true. Her persona of artful outlandish fetish expression and carefree creative lifestyle inspires viewers to embrace freedom. A New Yorker article explains that men believed she “had willfully ravaged a great beauty” and likened the shock of meeting her to that of coming face to face with medusa herself. Though she was an heiress who was wealthier than many of the most wealthy people on the planet and therefore is hugely unrelatable to most of the world, there’s such power in her story that evidently touches many people. In everything she did - like commissioning a life-sized wax figure of herself with glass eyes and a wig made from her own hair - is saturated with empowerment and defiance. The same New Yorker feature describes her life as one “that was obscenely profligate yet strangely pure.” Her sheer hedonistic enjoyment of sex, love, drugs, food, art, and who knows what else, was ahead of her time - and her impact has survived long after her death in 1957. Luisa is not what a lot of people would describe when asked about a symbol of girlhood, but perhaps that is what makes her and this portrait of hers so special. Girlood is not one singular thing; it is endlessly inclusive and undefinable. Her creative expression was ahead of her time, I see echoes of it across many female and queer centred creative spaces today. The point is that her image of girlhood counts because all images of girlhood count. Mine and my sister's versions we found in Laura Muntz Lyall's work - which started this whole journey - wildly differ from that of Luisa Casati, but that’s the beauty. We are all together in our wonderful experiences of girlhood, though each looks so wildly different. It is always a positive thing to consider and embrace all lived experiences, and what we should learn from Luisa, and from the countless other women and girls creating all sorts of things around the world, is that no matter how you do it, girlhood is beautiful and strange and worthy of celebration.
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