Houston Art Drive-by, part 2
Continuing my perambulation around Houston’s art world, I went to the MFAH. I wanted to see the Artemisia Gentileschi painting of Judith and Holofernes. I was less interested to see the Kehinde Wiley’s version. This two-painting show closed on April 16. As I looked at the two paintings, I realized a fundamental difference between them. Wiley’s version is unlike Gentileschi’s because Wiley’s is more of a poster. Despite the complex baroque patterns in Wiley’s painting, it reads like advertisement for Judith’s vengeance. This made me think about the poster and its profound effect on visual art in the past century and a half. Painters who had day jobs creating advertising posters like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec were able to take the visual impact of a poster and translate it to drawings and paintings. All that Wiley lacks in his version of Judith and Holofernes is display type.
Gentileschi’s version is certainly dramatic but isn’t meant to compete with the visual culture of modernity the way an advertising poster does. Its figures don’t pop from a background, but inhabit it. The space in which the two women and Holofernes exist in is deep and dark in a way that you would never want in an advertisement.
The story of Judith and Holofernes is related in the Old Testament in the Book of Judith. Judith was a Jewish widow who went with her maid into the Assyrian camp where she beheads the lustful general Holofernes. It is not included in Protestant bible because there are anachronisms in the story that make it seem fictional. But Assyria was an actual early iron age empire that did defeat both Israel and Judah, so in that regard it fits in with actual history.
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