Completed in 2020, Romania stands nine feet tall, six feet wide. The scene, a nocturne. A marble column marks the right edge; at the left, a leafless tree scratches the evening sky. Bookended by these elements, a pair of dogs and a young woman patrol the center.

A young woman? Consider the phenomenon: after decades (make that centuries) of seeing themselves portrayed in paintings by countless male artists, with little opportunity or encouragement to pick up a brush of their own, today, female artists are supported more equitably than ever before, are freer to paint as they wish than ever before. What do women painters choose to paint? The short answer: to paint young women. That is the single most preferred subject matter, by far.

This essay continues to explore questions I considered in my essay, Why are there so many great paintings of women by women right now?: do female artists mirror the male artists that predate them? Or, do new great paintings of women by women strike off in new directions? Strike different poses. . . . The earlier essay examined key aspects of the quest for Why – which involved considering the who, what, when, and where of historic social changes that opened opportunities for women to train as artists and to succeed at the highest levels. In this essay, attention returns to examining how a painting takes shape, and, taking shape, makes meaning. The focus starts with Romania. In the case of this particular painting, one aspect I find most curious: it is difficult, for me at least, to make up my mind. Is this a great painting, or a not-so-great painting? do these questions even ever matter? For the painting is pointing us to a world in which evaluations like these are determined by larger forces, most out of our control.

1. Canines

Doberman pinschers, with elongated pointy-ears and puffed out chests with white fur, these the young woman holds with a leash. The leash is a hint. Specifically, the thinness of the leash. Plus, her small gloved hands: No way she can control the canines. At least not physically. Her command could be psychic, may border on witchcraft, if she leads them at all. The four-legged creatures look askance, as if they don’t notice (not yet anyway) how we approach, how we peer into their beady yellow eyes, how we veer into their territory.

Developed as a breed late in the 19th century, Dobermans are renowned for loving their masters and loving to provide fierce personal protection. Stubborn as wolverines, without firm training, dogs like these may wonder who is master of this domain? Who’ll win the leash then; who’ll be the alpha animal? Each beast must weigh 80 pounds. Bone dry.

2. Fashionista

Does she wear a little black dress? She does not. Instead, a full-length dark cape shields her body from view, but the outerwear doesn’t thwart the recognition – indeed, it intensifies – how seeing her face and facial structure, an observer senses she contains a body. Like a fashion model’s. (One of the under-examined dimensions of representational painting – in contrast to totally abstract painting – is the understanding that the scene contains invisible elements, unseen qualities. Looking at a painting by Mark Rothko, or Piet Mondrian, the viewer is not driven to wonder: underneath those painted rectangular shapes, what’s there?) If this scene resembles a fashion shoot, the set-up seems slightly fake. The background resembles a backdrop, with painted-on accessories (marble column, marble moon, and vague swirling sky) that exist on their own plane, divorced from the foreground where the white glow that outlines the girl’s sculpted wavy hair pulls her, like a decal, away from the backdrop.

Why a fashion shoot? Writing about a recent (2023) exhibit in London of Paulina Olowska’s art, Emily Steer explains, “Calling for a greater connection between humans and nature, Olowska intricately weaves together the magic and spirituality of Slavic mythology and traditional landscape painting to interrogate [my emphasis] women’s representation in fashion publishing.” So, there you have it: unpacking cultural ideologies is much of the punch the painting packs. The imagery involves the representation of representation (a key strategy in concept-driven contemporary visual art). Olowska’s imagery references – via the lens of the staged fashion show – Poland’s recent history; how courageous one must have been to be stylish when the Soviet’s grim regime held power throughout much of the late 20th century. Giving a nod to out-of-date fashion magazines, the painter functions as a troublemaker, who collapses past into present to concoct her witches’ brew. Her imagery walks a fine line – never straying far into irony, nor remaining fully, naively, sincere.

In a recent (2023) exhibit in Mexico, Olowska presented artworks in a variety of media that are directly inspired by the fashion sense of American photographer Deborah Turbeville (d. 2013), who Gaby Cepeda cites as “one of the three major image-making forces in fashion – alongside Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin – [Turbeville] is credited with changing not only the way fashion magazines looked, but with raising the level of their artistic ambitions and expanding the grasp they hold on our collective imagination.” Borrowing from Turbeville, Olowska inserts fetching young women in scenes that restage Turbeville’s fashion shoot in Kraków, Poland, in 1989. The aesthetic result? Cepeda describes the ambient mood that, all of a sudden, became fashionable: “the saddened glamour of the interwar period, dwelling in ruined buildings, be they in Mexico or in Poland.” In other recent paintings, such as Romania, Olowska composes a related mise-en-scene – taking her female subjects into the woods, where the contrast between nature and culture (e.g., those dogs are pure bred, the cape attaches with a choker around the girl’s neck) creates enough friction to set a branch aflame.

3. The forest

In the wake of postmodernity, at the ¼ way-point in the 21st century, painting becomes a form of being on patrol. The young woman and her dogs scan their surroundings for symbols and secrets. And we, viewers of the artwork, do too. Romania harkens back to when paintings contained coded proverbs (example: Pieter Breugel the Elder, Dutch, 16th century: a scene of a blind man leading the blind (them toppling into a ditch)). This forest isn’t the backwoods. This is not the home of rural poor. Here is a faux forest setting with poetic props, the picture of an image of society on a new path – entering a new Dark Age. Or, a new 1984. Everyone watching everyone. No one watching out for anyone else. A young lady needs her dogs. And their|her leash.

4. Ultra-Equality

In Jean Genet’s essay “Something Which Seemed to Resemble Decay,” the narrator undergoes a transformation, a transformation that almost rivals the mind-bending transformation of the narrator in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, who wakens to discover he inhabits the body of a cockroach. In the case of Genet’s narrator, the transformation stems from a sudden revelation: “I was incapable of telling how I moved from the knowledge that every man is like every other man to the idea that every man is all the others. But the idea was now within me.”

Riding on a train, the narrator locks eyes with another passenger, a total stranger, alarmingly disheveled, and in that brief connection the narrator, literally, feels the other man’s identity flow into him, and feels his own identity flow into the other man. They become one and the same. Genet’s narrator boils down his vision – “Only one man exists and has ever existed in the world. He is, in his entirety, in each of us. Therefore he is ourself. Each is the other and the others.” (What remains unsaid: Is the narrator Genet? Is the stranger Genet?)

Is every woman the same woman?
Does the painter repeat the same painting?
Why are there so many great paintings of women by women artists today?

Consider the case of a Romania.

5. Color

A monochromatic color scheme (so much purple!) enhances the enchantment.

6. The true artist invents her own tradition

The artist of Romania? Paulina Olowska. Born 1976, in Gdańsk, on Poland’s northern coast. If you count yourself a devotee of contemporary painting, Paulina Olowska is a name you’ll want to know. In 2022, the Pace Gallery, NYC, one of the top art venues on the planet, began to represent her art commercially. In addition to painting, she maintains other forms of creative production, including performance, photography, installation art, community building, social action, and puppetry! All of these practices build together in defining who Paulina Olowska is as an artist, whose biggest achievement yet may be her flexible approach to life. A woman living in Poland, a citizen of the world. To deepen her connection with her Polish roots, the artist relocated 17 years ago to Rabka-Zdrój (a small Polish town in a forested region south of Krakow) – where she began collaborating with a Polish puppet troupe and took a deep dive into the surrounding scenery, relishing its influence on her paintings’ imagery. Ergo, Romania’s woodsy setting.

Contemporary art worth serious consideration thrives on connections. Curator and critic Monika Szewczyk, also born in Poland, explains Olowska’s distinctive approach to the imagery she paints in terms of temporal relationships:

“Nostalgia is a special province of fantasy that unhinges our sense of time and melds reality and fiction, lending life a pliable quality. Discussing Olowska’s practice is a matter of learning to elaborate on a deep sense of Fantasy that is aimed both at the future and the past. . . . of course the question[s] will arise: Why persist with this talk of a ‘sense of fantasy’, is this not in fact non-sense?  ‘Fantasy’ may be the only real thing and it still has too few dimensions in our mindless times.”

7. Fairy tale setting

Romania is a painting. “Romania” is a country, in southeastern Europe. Romania borders Ukraine (to the north); Olowska’s choice to title her artwork after the country bears political ramifications, motivations to invest the timelessness of the fairy tale with current political maneuverings. A country, a place that needs to be on its guard. The contemporary edge of Romania is balanced by its romantic mythos: Romania encompasses Transylvania, a forested region, next to the Carpathian Mountains, known for medieval castles, including Bran Castle, associated with the legend of Dracula. Ah, the plot thickens in ‘reading’ the painting’s imagery and dark purplish forms. (Who said, purple stems from the color black blossoming . . ?)

However, the grisly historic account of the Count (a.k.a., Vlad the Impaler) doesn’t resonate with the image Olowska offers. The danger in Romania is closer to the imaginary, to the magical peril of the tale of Red Riding Hood. See: There’s a semblance of visual elements in the painting Romania and a graphic designed to accompany the fairy tale by renowned British book illustrator Arthur Rackham [1867 – 1939]:

Arthur Rackham, Little Red Riding Hood

While leafless branches of a tree on the left conspire in both images to set the stage: in Rackham’s Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf poses a direct threat to the girl and her basket of goodies. A rhetoric isn’t just fun & games; words are weapons: is the wolf, mouth open, teeth bared, tongue outstretched, engaging ‘Red’ in a ‘dressing down’? In contrast, Olowska’s Romania shows woman’s best friends as strong, silent types, potential protectors, not interlocutors who quiz the female protagonist with riddles. In Romania, the young woman and dogs are on the same team, may be each other’s alter ego. In the memorable 1960s classic rock hit by Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs’ “Li’l Red Riding Hood,” the wolf wants to protect the girl on her walk through the woods, only, of course!, to earn her love . . . at least for a night. In the song’s chorus, the plaintive howl of the wolf marks the power of his – and her – unleashing each other’s wild side.

This image of the not-so-solitary, stylish young woman in Romania echoes a similar compositional device in numerous paintings by the artist, such as The Mycologist:

Paulina Olowska, The Mycologist, 2016, oil and acrylic on canvas, 86 5/8 x 70 7/8" © Paulina Olowska. FAIR USE.

So, the question: is every painting by the same artist the same painting? Yes and no. The consistency of motif and manner make for a fusion that builds holistically. Slight variations on a theme forge the theme. In The Mycologist (one who studies fungi), the gamine female poses amidst a rush of mushrooms (or poisonous toadstools? You pick.). Like Romania, the scenery is pared down to the essentials: vaguely foreboding, an evening in the woods. A young woman in boho chic clothing. And, like Romania, it all adds up to ½ fairy tale and ½ fashion shoot. (An ominous undercurrent runs across both interpretations – what does she carry in her basket? Is that a small animal? A crow flaps flying nearby.)

Olowska’s females, older and wiser to the ways of the world than Lil’ Red Riding Hood, stand cloaked, but not in moral rectitude; good looks – evidenced by the fashion model face and hip wavy hair style – give the girls away. In each Olowska painting, the female appears alone, but she isn’t, not really. The picture shows only one side of the story. Literally. We’re there, too, looking. And, depending on our own predilections, the scopic regime takes on distinctive coloration: we may be delighted, or disturbed, to recognize that each young woman appears down for a booty call. What this says about society is every viewer’s guess.

The gaze is gendered, complexly.

Of course there’s the theory: Paulina Olowska’s output cannot be defined by the approach she took in Romania. Other paintings – and her work in other media – fly in other directions. Some closely related (e.g., recent, large paintings of multiple young women wearing fashionable threads in a forest); other artworks vary considerably (e.g., a gorgeous painting of a young woman on a ladder reaching for a file box from an enormous book case of file boxes. Each box bears a specific label – such as “coiffure,” “punk”, “communisme”, “alphabet” – the whole collection implies that all the world’s knowledge fits in a Borges-like library of endless concepts and categories.)

So, the question returns: although the compositions can vary, in every painting, is each eye-catching young woman the same? Are they, at heart, all interchangeable? Olowska’s art leans into the way/s media shapes identity. In contemporary female-centric narrativity, there’s a toggling back and forth – the viewers’ gazes get rewarded, then reflected by the injection of a counter-acting gaze, engineered by the artist and issuing from the painting’s subject. This reflection sets off a ricochet dynamic – along one interpretive arc, a (hetero) male gaze may be unmasked, perhaps reprimanded, even, maybe, shamed. All the while, the reward – female attraction – remains available, ever visible. Every young woman can trigger an equivalent response – if the focus is on the viewer’s interiority. One key node pinpoints: What alarms, what pleasure buttons are pushed, inside a person looking at the image? . . . But, if the focus is from within the painting’s subject, then her agency, her interior, reigns paramount; then each woman contains, like Whitman, multitudes.

8. Femme fatale

A painting moves in two temporal directions. The past is one. The allure of the female figure in Olowska’s Romania recalls (and critiques) the trope of the femme fatale found in a wide array of by-gone cultural narratives – from Salome and Lilith to sirens painted by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their immediate followers, the Romantic Classicists (see, for example, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 1893, by J.W. Waterhouse). Closer to our own era, Hollywood’s heyday of film noir brought to the screen a host of dazzling temptresses. The “lead” figure in Romania bears resemblance to any number of film stars of the 1940s and early 1950s – Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck, Ava Gardner. Ava Gardner has the high cheekbones, long, flowing dark tresses, and hard-to-pin down expression that defined feminine magnetism. Not just in the middle of the twentieth century. But earlier. The Pre-Raphaelites. The Mona Lisa.

Ava Gardner

To name these figures “temptresses” cuts both ways. How much is the temptation caused by the women, and how much is a result of projection by the viewer?

To compare the painting Romania with Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (or La Gioconda) brings Olowska’s artwork full circle – back to the source of an approach to painting portraits that influenced not just the Renaissance (e.g., Raphael) but depictions of women and men through the ages. (The subtle shading of flesh tones being one quality that generations of artists aimed to capture.) What is especially delicious about comparing Olowska’s with da Vinci’s is the mood of risk (the lure of entrapment) that swirls like a whirlpool in each image. Of Mona Lisa, the 19th century writer Walter Pater described her in terms (“the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it”) that pinpointed her appeal to his readers, those Victorians who were enamored with gothic romance. Pater’s 1873 description of Mona Lisa made her famous.

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; . . . and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. . . . Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.” Walter Pater

Does Pater’s description propel us into the visionary, offering a Genet-style dictum: ‘every gorgeous young woman is the same gorgeous young woman’? Or, from serious overexposure have we lost the capability to see Da Vinci’s painting with clear eyes? Is the painting locked in the past, chilled to the bone, almost lifeless? Her hair style hopelessly out of date. My own interpretation seeks a rectification. A change to restore to her the primeval quality that Pater asserted; by making her timeless and timely:

Mona Lisa, Rectified, 2024 © Craig McDaniel

8 ½ .   Femme fatale redux

The second temporal direction to look in: the present, as the leading edge of the future. The femme fatale image now must be seen, must be questioned, within a context of rising (and then falling a little, then rising again) tide of pop culture imagery that pairs violence and sexuality. Where’s the harm in this? Consider, to cite just one example, the advance of unwanted episodes of strangulation (sometimes continuing until the partner blacks out) during lovemaking. It’s not coincidental that Mia Goth has become one of the more prized young female actors on the planet, for her starring parts in a host of dark films. It is against this cultural context that Romania plays its role. The fairy tale quality does not let the painter off the hook. I’m sure you could offer countless examples from your own observation of a culture spinning out of control. Not to be overlooked: to pair sex and violence, one popular strategy is to insinuate the female contains more physical power . . . to imply that the playing field is equal. That there isn’t a power imbalance. In Romania, she controls the big dogs. She can unleash danger. This is an oft-repeated formula in Gothic romance. Olowska knows exactly what she’s doing presenting us with her versions of familiar tropes. The question becomes: are we blind?

9. Lesson in looking: foreshortening

To assert every young woman is the same young woman does not mean that all images are the same.

Is the young woman in Paulina Olowska’s Romania equivalent to the young woman in Robin Williams’ painting Swoon at the Water Pump ? [Note: The latter painting stopped me in my tracks while viewing the exhibition, Robin F. Williams: We’ve Been Expecting You, on display, Spring 2024, at the Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art.] The females and the setting in each artwork differ, in obvious terms of coloration, clothing, complexion, and composition. The figure in Olowska’s painting is oriented vertically, and parallel to the picture plane of the painting. In Williams’ painting, the figure lies prone on the ground, her torso thrust diagonally, backwards into space.

Robin F. Williams, Swoon at the Water Pump, 2010. Oil on canvas. Collection of Noel Kirnon and Michael Paley. Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W. New York. Fair Use.

The result of the choice, by the artist, to depict the female parallel to the picture plane and standing, in Olowska’s painting,  maps the girl. Her parts remain symmetrical (even if we can’t actually see the parts, other than her face, since she is shielded from view by the cloak she wears). In contrast, Williams’ painting pictures the girl. Williams’ painting shows the figure from a specific point of view. However, is this the view we would see if the girl were, in fact, in front of us physically? Does Robin Williams create a painting based on the dictates of classical perspective? No!!!!  The change this painter enacts can be measured bythe degree to which foreshortening should alter the girl’s appearance. We can concoct our view by rectifying the painting:

Swoon at the Pump, rectified. By C. McDaniel

In classical perspective (as first codified by Renaissance theoretician Leon Battista Alberti), the painting serves as a transparent plane upon which the subject matter is projected. All surfaces in the depiction are presented from the corresponding angle that defines the viewpoint. The painting is the record of the subject projected onto the painting as if the painter carefully traced on a glass surface the scene that is seen looking through a window (while holding one’s eyes still). Similar to the way a camera records a picture, capturing the flow of light through the aperture.

The rectified version of Robin Williams’ painting replaces the original head of the figure with a head that is reduced in size, to actualize how the figure would appear at the strong angle the viewpoint dictates. The alteration repairs the spatial and temporal dimensions of Williams’ painting.

The actual painting that Robin Williams provides gives the female back to herself, gives us the felt experience inside the young woman. Her head is, again, equal in size to the size it is in comparison to her feet. She is inside herself, everywhere at once. She is herself. She is not a representation composed from the perspective of an external viewer, who would distort her. Foreshortening distorts. Telling a new truth, from an outward, specific, other point of view.

On the other hand, Paulina Olowska’s depictions of young women, as exemplified by Romania, confront the style of visual truth – not the truth, but a style of truth – the artist gains borrowing from photographic source material. Doing so, she critiques the way the world looks through a lens. As in a fashion shoot. And, simultaneously, she contrasts this view, with the view of the world through the lens of a fairy tale. A truth beyond truth.

Summary

Our view of others reveals our view of ourselves. Everything circles back to our inner thoughts.

I end by paraphrasing Genet:  I need hardly say that Paulina Olowska’s entire work has meaning, and Robin Williams’ and Leonardo’s work have meaning – at least for me – only if I know that what I have just written is, at least, partially false.

Are Romania and Swoon at the Pump great paintings or what?

***

Selected Bibliography

Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting. Translated by Cecil Grayson. Penguin Books, 1972.

Jean Genet, in Antaeus, No. 54, Spring 1985, 108-116, with translation by Bernard Frechtman.

Walter Pater, The Renaissance, 141 – 142, accessed: Internet Archive

Side note: Pater’s paragraph on Mona Lisa, published in his influential collection of essays, The Renaissance, 1873, was cited by W.B. Yeats as ‘the first modern poem.’

“Paulina Olowska Beckons You to the Woods,” Emily Steer, in FRIEZE Magazine, 18 Dec. 2023.

Gaby Cepeda, “Paulina Olowska and Mexico’s Enduring Romance with Modernism,” 15 May 2023, ArtReview.

***

Craig McDaniel is co-author of Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980 (Oxford University Press, 5th edition, 2022) with translations into Korean and Chinese. His essays, art and experimental writing have appeared widely in journals, including New England Review, Art Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review, Red Noise Collective, Midwest Review and DIAGRAM. A new essay on painting is forthcoming in On the Seawall.

***

| MORE FROM CRAIG McDANIEL'S LESSONS IN LOOKING |

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RETHINKING WATSON AND THE SHARK

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RETHINKING MANET AND DEGAS

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