If you go
What: Bawdy Bodies: Satires of Unruly Women
When: Through June 24
Where: CU Art Museum, 1085 18th St., Boulder
Cost: Free
More info: colorado.edu/cuartmuseum
Curatorial tour and discussion: 5 p.m. on Feb. 23
Fashion discussion and Academy Awards red-carpet screening: Feb. 26, time TBD
Memes circulated long before the internet existed.
Of course, they weren’t called memes. They were in the form of ink on paper, as cyberspace was centuries off. But, the spread of satirical cultural ideas and behaviors rapidly rose in late-18th century Britain when interest in celebrity piqued, said Hope Saska, CU Art Museum’s curator of collections and exhibitions.
Saska said she’s hoping this parallel from the 1700s to today’s culture becomes a topic of discussion with the University of Colorado’s new exhibit, “Bawdy Bodies: Satires of Unruly Women.” The selection of prints, from Yale University’s Lewis Walpole Library, will be on display in Boulder through June 24. Detail of “Patience on a Monument,” by James Gillray, 1791, on display at the CU Art Museum. (Christy Fantz / Daily Camera)
“It’s this notion of the role humor plays in our discourse today,” said Saska. “Humor has been used as a release of pressure. I think today we may see it as seeking truth to power, but it’s also used to keep people in line — to ridicule and to exert some sort of social control on an individual or a group of individuals.”
Present-day satire latches on to heirs and heiresses, celebrities, the wealthy elite and — much to his dismay — the president of the United States of America. In 18th-century England, caricatures deprecated royals, politicians and entertainers. It was “the rise of celebrity culture,” said Saska, that became the artist’s punching bag to combat unnerving social changes. As prominent figures became widely recognized by portraits, they became targets of ridicule.
The exhibit “Bawdy Bodies” looks at how accomplished and aristocratic women of the 18th century (the Kim Kardashians or Ivanka Trumps of days past) were lampooned in a biting, harsh and exaggerated manner.
“Breaking up of the Bluestocking Club,” an etching by Thomas Rowlandson from 1815, at first glance appears to depict an old-fashioned bar brawl — blouses rolled over bulging biceps, breasts exposed, tea table flipped over, objects hurled and a scarlet-faced woman showered in scalding-hot tea. “Bluestocking” was a term connected to female intellectuals, and the print depicts a dialogue gone awry.
“Six Stages of Mending a Face,” also an etching by Rowlandson from 1792, illustrates the famed 18th-century illegal gambler (and popular fodder for caricaturists) Lady Sarah Archer, pictured at different stages of dress and makeup. The images successively depict a haggardly bald woman in a nightcap with sagging breasts, a younger woman popping in her eye and teeth, and finally the polished form of a well-coiffed woman.
“It certainly wasn’t in clean fun,” Saska said. “There was definitely a motivation to maintain a status quo and to limit — or get a grasp on — social change.”
By hosting this exhibit in the CU Art Museum, Saska said she hopes to spur conversation about the parallels of these clashing eras.
“A lot of those images — although their content may be somewhat difficult to view at times, with that mocking tone that they take — they’re beautiful, innovative and fascinating images that call for discussion.”
Saska, who worked as a fellow during graduate school at the Lewis Walpole Library, said that she and her colleagues have worked on organizing this exhibit for a long time. She said she was motivated to bring it to CU, noting that the material is well-suited for an academic audience.
“It offers avenues for different disciplines to look at images and think about the way they work with history or social issues,” she said. “And certainly the images themselves have their own sensibility aesthetic in terms of design and composition and how they incorporate text and represent different characters.”
Today, among supermarket tabloids, paparazzi, internet and television, that 18th-century artistic satire doesn’t seem too far from modern-day lampooning.
“I hope visitors are exposed to a different view of the 18th century than what is typically presented in a museum,” Saska said. “I hope that they think about the ways we are similar to our historic past, drawing connections between then and today.”
Christy Fantz: 303-473-1107, fantz@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/fantzypants
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
