The Eternal Feminine by Katelyn Eichwald

Paul Cézanne, The Eternal Feminine, 1877.Oil on canvas. 17 x 20 7/8 in.  (Credit: J. Paul Getty Museum)

In Paul Cézanne's The Eternal Feminine, men from different occupations (musicians, painters, a bishop) surround a female nude. Although The Eternal Feminine relates to much of Katelyn Eichwald's work, where women are painted in vulnerable situations and/or as a mere object to the male mythology, Eichwald appropriated Paul Cézanne's painting including it within the context of her body of work.

The context in which Eichwald presents the painting is very distant from the Cézanne piece.  The Eternal Feminine by Cézanne was painted in 1877. The painting is part of the J. Paul Getty Museum collection and is seen by thousands of people daily. Eichwald's The Eternal Feminine, on the other hand, was painted in 2012. The painting lives in her one-bedroom apartment in Chicago and the only person who has seen Eichwald's The Eternal Feminine in person (other than herself) is her boyfriend Michael. 

The distant history of both objects does not stop there. In 1954, the female nude in Cézanne's The Eternal Feminine was given a retouch to make her look less disturbing and more feminine. Only in 1991, Cézanne's The Eternal Feminine was restored to its "original." Eichwald's The Eternal Feminine female nude always had her red socket eyes.

While in most interpretations of Cézanne's The Eternal Feminine, a bald figure admiring the female nude might be Cézanne, in Eichwald's The Eternal Feminine, the bald figure is Cézanne. Also, in Eichwald's The Eternal Feminine, the female nude might be Eichwald herself (with her long golden hair). 

Cézanne's The Eternal Feminine has been known by many other titles such as The Golden Calf, The Triumph of
Woman, Apotheosis of Woman, La Belle Impéria, and The Whore of Babylon, while Eichwald's painting is only known by The Eternal Feminine. 

Paul Cézanne, The Eternal Feminine, 1877. (Picture between 1954-1991/ Without red eye sockets). (Credit: J. Paul Getty Museum) 

Truth and Markmaking

a mark i've kept

i'm aware of directness as a conceit in writing, a tool, as useful as metaphor or voice. ariana reines sometimes uses all caps and that makes me feel like she's speaking straight from the hip with no editing, a message sent through her like a prophet, but i also know that she's a craftswoman of language and i'd guess that her process curls back on itself like a snake spitting. eileen myles does it with run-ons and inconsistent capitalizations like she has to get it all out before it dissolves. there is truth and style in both of these ways of writing and i'm not even suggesting that truth and style are on opposite poles. and can you ever be without style? the way i move my hand when i paint, is that style? 

i always thought of writing as work and painting as the guiding of a force, especially in later years when i paint in a fever, surrounded by mess and coffee cups and rolls of wax paper half-dipped in blue latex, trailing. as though the mess and urgency kept me closer to something, but what? i do want truth, and i do think it exists, and i do think it exists in painting. but not because it aligns with something i already know is truth, or because it has the look of truth, or because i felt truthy when i made it. markmaking is a writhing pit and i am happily lost inside it. moments of clarity rise up and i stare at a line for days, trying to see what it is revealing to me. so many things in the visual world seem like they are opening themselves up to me, hoping to be seen and understood. the best of these are the things i make myself, because in their unfamiliarity i feel a rush of love, like my little brother doing calculus. a thing that is part of me surpassing me, becoming other. 

but painting has just as much fake-directness as writing does, if not more. all those men strong-arming their way into the canon, mistaking adrenaline and privilege for truth. and it's clear that writing toes the abyss just as painting does, the inconceivable possibilities of letters, the way a poem vibrates in the mind after reading it, the long, looping lives of characters that exist beside our own. when i finished dostoyevsky's "the idiot" a few weeks ago i sobbed in the shower and i wasn't even being self-indulgent. those characters deserve my sadness. their loss is real. this is why i keep the marks i make, the ones i have no practical use for, the ones no one else will ever see or buy. they are as real and living in the world as i am. unlike dostoyevsky, i'm the only one looking at them and usually i'm the only one who knows they are worth looking at. if you are an artist, you have these marks too, and you honor them in your own way. you know there's something there, truth or whatever, you don't need to call it anything. pink beside gray or black beside black or white beside white or a picture of a banana beside a weird purple or a thin line of something, you don't know what it is, you found it there on your palette like your palette was a doorstep.

Thoughts on an Aesthetic

Katelyn Eichwald, Untitled, oil on paper, 2011

i'm annoyed at brooklyn raw bare wood metalworking leather linen with the top button left open

which reeks of nothing but money and a bon iver fetishization of realness and utility

utility in my world is the sweat-yellow arm of the couch with a shirt draped to hide it

but i have said "fetishization" so many times this week that i'm starting to think i don't know what it means

though i am getting better at pronouncing it

i say it with bitterness like i deserve something better

a rabbit in another woman's arms

i know, some people just like to drink their whiskey like that

i'm no line of flour to the door

i have ideas about cool too and sometimes i can't get up from under them

i can't define myself against something all the time, especially an aesthetic so bloodless

and i understand that our objects have twisted and cruel origins these days and it is attractive to know what you're getting and where it came from

though as usual we want the appearance of honesty, not honesty itself, which grows darker on the edges

j. crew can make that hand-dyed wool cardigan look like my dead grandpa's, but it isn't my dead grandpa's, is it

like pain in a dream

what do i have against wealth?

oh everything

but is that ok or do i need to get over it?

it's the hatred you feel for your lover's ex

self-care, like cleaning your fingernails

nobody owes me anything

except love 

from the universe, not even from any person if they don't have it to give

art students walk into work with thick-soled boots and carhartt coats like dockworkers

but if carhartt coats weren't so stiff and uncomfortable i would wear them too

i love my dad's workbench in the back of the garage but i hate the sight of a pretty woman with premature gray hair in a 

topknot and a black silk shirt sitting at an identical workbench in a photograph

though god knows i wear enough black these days and the workbench doesn't know anything except what it is

and i bet she knows how to saw shit and that she's good at the things she does

what does she feel when she touches it? maybe she feels like a fighter

or maybe not

our target bookcases tremble

michael put them together himself

he screwed one of them on backwards

but it still holds my books

the couch i sit on crushed my mother's watch into her wrist

i think about it when i lean back on the cushions

the curtains on the window are the ugliest things i have ever laid my eyes on, they look like scars on a dirty body

do objects have integrity?

i'll kick all the things in this room with my bare foot, see what breaks

is my mother's crushed wrist worth less than my own?

the objects in her hand are her bones

Leftovers

Unknown image of bomb; stained scrap of paper; photo of a peach found in the "face painters" folder on my computer desktop; chalk pastel palette found in my parents' basement; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Arthur's Tomb," 1860, watercolor on paper; oil paint palette.

Hot Bodies

Dana Schutz, Frank on a Rock, oil on canvas, 2002. Schutz says, "I have been working on a group of paintings loosely hinged on the act of painting a fictional man from observation...the paintings are premised on the imaginary situation that the man and I are the last people on earth. The man is the last subject and the last audience and, because the man isn't making any paintings, I am the last painter."

Brooke Shields at age 10, photographed by Garry Gross in 1975 and rephotographed by Richard Prince in his 1993 work, "Spiritual America." The version seen here was found on the internet and has been further altered; someone has cropped the photo, changed the color, and added a black and green border. Shields has unsuccessfully fought to gain control over the photographs in this series for years. Courts have said both that Shields' career was built on her sexuality (and thus she has no reason to complain) and that the photographs are not sexual in nature: "They are pictures of a prepubescent girl posing innocently in the bath." Prince's version of the photograph was sold at Christie's in 1999 for $151,000.