A period drama replete with danger, subterfuge and seduction — it’s hard to think of a more operatic plot than the tale of Judith and Holofernes.
The story comes from the book of Judith, a text within the Old Testament Apocrypha. The apocrypha are a collection of Scriptures accepted by Catholics and Orthodox Christians as sacred but contested by Protestants. The story spotlights Judith, a Jewish widow who, with the help of her maid, lures and then decapitates the Assyrian general in order to save her town from invasion.
The story has many interpretations: It can represent a struggle against pagan beliefs or an allegory of virtue vs. vice or a warning against the susceptibility of masculine might to feminine wiles. Whatever the interpretation, the message is always symbolized by the grim victory of our beautiful heroine Judith over the drunk and rapacious general.
What is often overlooked is the relationship that exists between the women in the story, between Judith and the female servant by her side.
“Slay,” the dramatic exhibition that opened at the Kimbell Art Museum in July, takes this dilemma, of how women negotiate power and solidarity among one another, as its central tension.
Confrontation and conspiracy suffuse the gallery as two large depictions of the story of Judith and Holofernes painted 400 years apart face one another. Viewers find themselves caught in a tense conversation. On the left is the 17th-century tenebristic painting by female Baroque artist Agrtemisia Gentileschi, and on the right, a colossal work exhibiting the unmistakable hallmarks of contemporary American painter Kehinde Wiley, who is best known for painting President Barack Obama’s official portrait.
Women’s solidarity
Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes displays the power of women’s solidarity in action. The painter positions the heroines on top of the Syrian general, straddling him in a clear role reversal. Working together, these women refuse to be subjugated. The servant uses all her might to hold down Holofernes on the bed. Judith grimaces, and her muscles strain as she draws the sword through his flesh.
Other famous depictions of the scene play up the differences between the beautiful Judith and her servant. The artist Caravaggio depicts the maid as a crone in washer woman clothes, while Renaissance painter Titian positions a milk-white Judith — clearly meant to symbolize ideals of beauty and virtue — over a cowering Black servant whose face remains unfinished.
Gentileschi, on the other hand, minimizes the physical differences between Judith and her comrade. Both women appear to be the same age. Both wear rich fabrics. Both are equally engaged in the physicality of the act. It is interesting to note that though beneath Judith in class, the servant is depicted above Judith in the composition, suggesting that these social differences are not to be essentialized.
When larger and more noble causes are at stake, women must stand together.
This may be a contemporary feminist reading of the painting, but details from Gentileschi’s life support it. A fellow painter and colleague of her father raped Gentileschi when she was a teenager. It was revealed that Gentileschi’s older female chaperone conspired with her rapist to arrange the assault.
In Gentileschi’s version of Judith and Holofernes, the servant aids her mistress, preventing her defilement and the plunder of their country. It’s an act Gentileschi herself might have wished for.
Face of a villain
In contrast, Wiley’s contemporary realization of the scene shows us the boundaries of solidarity among women.
Triesha Lowe, a Black stay-at-home mother from Brooklyn, serves as the model for Wiley’s Judith. Her patterned lime and pink toenail polish and the heart tattoo inside her right wrist resolve an intimate portrait.
Wearing an elegant royal blue Givenchy gown custom-made by Riccardo Tisci, Judith dispassionately carries a sword in one hand. In the other, she holds the head of her Holofernes. A blond ponytail replaces the invader’s dark beard. The decapitated general is a white woman.
Relatively tame, compared to the energetic gruesomeness of Gentileschi and Caravaggio’s paintings, Wylie’s forgoes the drama of the attack to depict its bloodless aftermath. It is both surprising and telling that when the work debuted at the North Carolina Museum of Art, outraged viewers alleged that the painting promoted racial violence against white women and wanted the painting taken down. Viewers must remember that Judith and Holofernes is not a story of callous murder but political assassination.
In placing a white woman in the position of Holofernes, we are directly told to whom we are meant to offer our allegiance and admiration — and it’s not her. Black women standing up to white women, Wiley seems to say, is like a widow going up against a warlord.
The tension for some viewers arises from the difficulty of imagining white women as the villain. By calling his painting Judith and Holofernes, Wiley forces viewers to examine our context and ask: What makes a Black woman’s beheading of the archetypal white woman just, even heroic?
History of brutality
Wiley’s painting topples Eurocentric beauty standards while also imagining an end to the brutality against Black women and their families that is often committed under the guise of safeguarding white womanhood.
Historical examples that come to mind are the 1800s experiments on enslaved women Lucy, Anarcha and Betsey, which served as the basis of modern gynecology, and the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till for allegedly whistling at a white woman, an act his accuser later admitted to lying about. The horrific 1918 murder of pregnant Mary Turner, a Black woman who protested her husband’s lynching, and countless sexual assaults against Black women took place with relative silence from white counterparts.
As a Black woman, I wonder whether the kind of collaboration and unified struggle depicted by Gentileschi is only possible between white women. What would a white woman risk when it’s our bodies on the line? Did Judith come to our aid when Holofernes asked for us?
After the death of the great patriarch, the model Lowe portrays a stoic Black woman continuing the work of liberation. Judith poses victorious but without vengeance, in full awareness that the compact between mistress and servant will always be tenuous. Where power is used to justify oppression, whether on the basis of gender or on the basis of race, revolt is not only possible but expected.
“Slay: Artemisia Gentileschi and Kehinde Wiley” is, at its heart, a duel, a confrontation between two possibilities for female relationships. One hopes that solidarity and mutual support can usher in a capacious feminism that acknowledges the variety of class, racial and sexual identities that women possess. But if not, “Slay” suggests, there’s always the sword.
Details
“Slay: Artemisia Gentileschi and Kehinde Wiley” runs through Oct. 9 at the Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth. Tuesday through Thursday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Friday from noon to 8 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Free. The exhibition is organized by the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, the Kimbell Art Museum, and the Museum Box. For more information, visit kimbellart.org.
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