Depictions of Judith
is taking place front and center in the midst of a muscular struggle. When accused of giving her Judith a hard face, the artist is reputed to have said. "She is concentrating. Like all heroines, she feels profoundly her task." It's interesting to note that the artist herself at 19 years of age was allegedly raped by her instructor, Tassi. The trial which resulted was quite sensational and did more harm to Artemisia than to her assailant. She was tortured by thumbscrews in an attempt to verify her allegations but in the end Tassi was acquitted. The painting is a masterpiece of beauty and drama, and perhaps we can better understand the source of the fierceness and violence knowing the artist's past. We get a very different feeling of the type of woman the artist is showing us from the Judith in Caravaggio's painting.
Last, I have included a modernist version of the Judith story, created recently by New York art student, Alessandro Keegan. Clearly the red strokes in the background and the deep dark eye sockets of the two figures portray raw emotions of violence and anger. But the work is done in a hastily scribbled fashion similar to a child's simple crayon drawing. You can't learn anything of the personalities of either of the two figures, and they don't come alive for us as individuals. The storytelling quality is absent. You come away from the painting bereft and empty because there's no drama and no tension between two people we want to care about but can't.
If modern art is nothing but a rejection of the past, then ultimately it is defined by the past, can't exist without the past, can't stand alone. It is ironically defined by that which it spurns. Let's picture ourselves again standing in front of a Pollock paint-spattered creation. A famous Norman Rockwell painting similarly shows a man scratching his head while standing in front of a Pollock painting, and the implicit question is, "Norman Rockwell painted a Jackson Pollock, but could Jackson Pollock paint a Norman Rockwell?"
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