One of the nice things about the Internet is that you don’t have to go to museums any more. They come to you. Well, maybe not entirely, but doesn’t “Woman Looking at Herself in a Mirror” (1805) from Japanese master Katsushika Hokusai look terrific? There’s a lot more at the New York Review of Books, thanks to Christopher Benfey’s take on a show at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Chris also quotes from the exhibit’s catalog, in which MFA curator Sarah E. Thompson fills us in on some of what’s going on here. You may or may not have noticed that the mirror reflection shows that the woman has a small fruit—a hoozuki, or ground cherry, a symbol of summer—in her mouth. Thompson speculates that “Hokusai’s beauty may be whistling softly to herself as she admires her red lipstick with a green shimmer on the lower lip where it is applied most thickly, and teeth neatly blackened for maximum contrast with her white-powdered face.”
Well, maybe she is, or maybe she isn’t, but isn’t this a pretty ripe time for speculation on the “male gaze”? Why, after all, should a woman have to wear red lipstick, or put white powder on her face, or blacken her teeth for maximum contrast? To me, it sounds as though Thompson is reveling in the artificiality of it all, the woman as work of art, but I can imagine her pretty easily performing a rather different deconstruction of a contemporary lipstick ad, which, after all, would have exactly the same subject.
Note to Sarah E. Thompson
If you find lipstick ads empowering, I guess it’s my bad. Totally.
