Art Rookie: Women, Art and The Aging Body
Over the past few years, I watched as people around me got less and less excited for each birthday, making sweeping declarations that they had decided to opt out of growing older. Baby botox - a popular preemptive botox treatment marketed towards people in their twenties - is praised by influencers and models for helping freeze their faces and prevent any and all minuscule signs of aging. This is mortifying to reveal, but the weeks leading up to my twenty-third birthday were unsettling. I was graduating from the age Taylor Swift anointed “happy, free, confused and lonely” and into the age I had decided comes with the symbolic weight of being an adult, aka no fun pop songs from 2012 to indulgently relate to.
This was around the time Julia Fox proclaimed that “Ageing is fully in. Like, fully.”and a new Twitter discourse around aging swiftly followed, prompting my social milieu of naive twenty-somethings to begin to consider the possibility that we were being wholly too dramatic about the prospect of growing older or (god-forbid) reaching our 30s. This desire to remain close to youth is a means to stay desirable, a notion cemented into our psyche by films, television, folklore, paintings, magazine covers and almost every other visual medium. Young female subjects are portrayed as beautiful in stark opposition to historical depictions of older women, which have bordered on the grotesque.
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One of Quinten Massys’s most famous works, An Old Woman (‘The Ugly Duchess’), stands out as a key example. As the title states, the oil painting made in 1513 depicts an elderly woman whose facial features and clothing are exaggerated for satirical effect; Massys painted the woman with deep-set eyes, a hairy mole, no teeth and hyperbolically rendered wrinkles across her face, neck and cleavage. He intended to ridicule older women and their attempts to look and behave as if they were young. In a purely formal reading of the work, the subject appears vulgar and almost devil-like due to her pointed headdress, wide nostrils and revealing outfit. The Ugly Duchess is everything a beautiful woman wouldn’t be. The painting is on view at the National Gallery as part of a new exhibition titled The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance. It is displayed alongside a twin portrait by Massys titled An Old Man and is often viewed as a parody of the traditional marriage portrait. According to the National Gallery, “Massys shows us a woman whose age, appearance and deportment are noticeably different from other women in the collection. This is an old woman acting like a maiden and offering her partner – who is more formally and soberly dressed – an unrequited token of her love. Viewers were invited to mock the foolishness of the old who behave as if they are still young.”
Through these standout paintings and other artworks, including sketches by Leonardo da Vinci, the show at the National Gallery unpacks antagonistic Renaissance-era sentiments regarding old age and beauty. These sentiments persisted throughout history and left a significant impact on Western beauty ideals for women.
As Susan Sontag declares in her generative essay The Double Standard of Aging, “For women, only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl. The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man….Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks — heavier, rougher, more thickly built. A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another. There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat.”
Looking to the 19th century, Henry Fuseli’s drawings of high-society women revealed the artist’s feelings on the moral turpitude and extravagance during the Georgian period. Fuseli’s women- almost always immaculately styled - had slender, waif-like bodies and elaborate hairdos adorned with beads, ribbons, lace, curling tongs and feathers. In many ways, his drawings are in stark opposition to the satirical Massys portrait, but as Fuseli’s depictions of women standing in front of dressing tables and staring at their own reflections reveal, the artist isn’t celebrating beauty at all, instead condemning their vanity.
In Fuseli’s fantasies, these fashionable young women were sexually deviant, while other women were seen as hags, witches and ultimately foul in spirit. This is encapsulated in a watercolour from 1807 titled The Debutante, where Fuseli created an image of three older women looking suspiciously at a younger woman (possibly a courtesan) tied to the wall by a strap and separated from onlookers by a screen. The older subjects possess villainous facial features in the form of smirks, disapproving glares and furrowed eyebrows while the object of their disapproval looks to the floor in shame. Their judgment pierces through the image subconsciously, signally to the spectator that these older women are not only vain but despicable as well. It’s a battle of the ingenues and the hags, and no one is winning.
The more I think about it, this relationship between age, attraction and virtue isn’t limited to Fuseli but is seen across media. In Disney movies and fairytales, older women are often posed as the selfish antagonist on a quest to attain youth and simultaneously beauty. Gothel from Tangled resorted to kidnapping a baby whose hair possessed the power to heal so she could be forever young and desirable, while a wicked queen poisoned Snow White into an endless sleep just so her status as the most beautiful would remain intact. In an essay titled, Aging With Disney and the Gendering of Evil, Nada Ramadan Elnahla states that these films generate cultural symbols who will “barter everything for the sake of eternal youth, beauty, and social and political power.” Elnahla goes on to argue that these depictions mirror how society appreciates youthful beauty and that when this beauty is lost, women will go to extreme lengths to reclaim their power.
“It’s a battle of the ingenues and the hags, and no one is winning.”
In a video on the histories of anti-ageing, Mina Le cites multiple tweets and Instagram posts that suggest that “unproblematic” celebrities age more gracefully than those considered controversial. This flippant remark further confirms that we are conditioned to believe signs of aging aren’t only undesirable but a marker of morality. Even when aging is celebrated in fashion and beauty magazines such as Jane Fonda for British Vogue, Jennifer Aniston for Allure and more recently, Julianne Moore for Elle France), they uphold an insular depiction of an older woman as the right way to age. In an article for Dazed, Halima Jibril argues, “When magazines ‘celebrate’ ageing, they’re not really lauding it at all. Instead, they’re celebrating aging people’s proximity to the social indicators of youth (health, beauty and physical mobility); they’re celebrating people’s “victories” over aging.”
Honest images of aging bodies without the pretense of satire or the burden of youth are rare, which is why looking closely at Alice Neel’s self-portrait from 1980 at the Barbican was a surreal experience. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw a body with visible signs of aging in the hallowed rooms of a gallery. Through her self-portrait as an older woman, who, besides the glasses perched on her nose, is entirely naked, Neel explores the idea of lived in bodies. Here wrinkles and rolls are in full display, and her returning of the gaze transfixes the spectator. Neel famously revealed that she put off painting herself naked until she was older or until “when people would accuse me of insanity rather than vanity.’ Julia K. Dabbs, in an essay on Portraits of the Aged Woman Artist, even suggests that by painting herself holding a paintbrush in one hand and a rag in another, she is comenting that even at the age of seventy-five, she is a work in progress.
The notion of the lived-in body haunts her work and lingers throughout the retrospective of her artistic life and legacy at the Barbican. The portrait of Andy Warhol is an example of this modality of Neel’s practice. Warhol sat for the portrait after he was shot by Valerie Solanos, and his physical and emotional vulnerabilities are on display. Warhol, who typically took charge of his image, is seen stripped down with clasped hands on his knees and a girdle that he was instructed to wear due to injuries related to the shooting. By painting his ailing body and avoiding a detailed background, Neel strips down Warhol’s persona to reveal that power and beauty are fickle.
The show at the Barbican also features depictions of pregnant women, male nudes in classical female poses and portraits of matriarchs where domesticity doesn’t eclipse their selfhood. Neel’s work, her lived-in bodies and “unconventional subjects” force us to reconsider our antiquated ideas of beauty and emphasize a radically different way of seeing. To Neel, ageing has always been fully in.
Words: Zara Aftab
