Room 10
The spiritual powers conventionally attributed to women are found residually in the “reader” type. Reading contains echoes of those spiritual, magical or mystical powers attributed to women in traditional iconography. Reading produces a bubble in which women can live their lives through the lives of others. The female reader can build what Virginia Woolf called “a room of one’s own”. Reading is an inner activity that defies all pictorial representation. In painting we are sometimes able to read a title; anything else is always illegible, inaccessible. That is why depiction of reading involves a process of exteriorisation, of “theatricalisation”. As we cannot read the text, we read the reader’s body, which provides a stage for or “somatises” the reading.
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- Autor:
- Édouard Vuillard
- Título:
- Mrs Hessel Wearing a Red Dress, Reading, c. 1905
- Fecha:
- Tipo:
- Oil on board, 39.5 x 36.6 cm
- Medidas:
- Úbicacion:
- Private Collection, Paris
- Numero de inventario
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- Autor:
- Gerhard Richter
- Título:
- Reading, 1994
- Fecha:
- Tipo:
- Oil on linen, 72.39 x 101.92 cm
- Medidas:
- Úbicacion:
- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
- Numero de inventario
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- Autor:
- Onorio Marinari
- Título:
- Saint Catherine Reading a Book
- Fecha:
- Tipo:
- Oil on canvas, 92.5 x 119 cm
- Medidas:
- Úbicacion:
- Sammlungen des Fürsten von und zu Liechtenstein, Vaduz-Vienna
- Numero de inventario