The Mirror and the Mask: Holly Trostle Brigham's Self-Portraits
Robert Cozzolino
Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator of Paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Art
For two decades Holly Trostle Brigham has made self-portraits that deny a fixed identity and imaginatively engage the past. She has tirelessly explored gender and sexuality through self-representation, often using her body to subvert misogynist histories and reclaim the female nude. In her earliest self-portraits, Brigham appears close to the picture plane, confronting the mirror without guise, attentive to the viewer and aware of the emotional charge carried by self-scrutiny. Gradually Brigham began to enact the traditional poses of mythological figures – goddesses such as Isis (1997) or Cybele (2000) – incorporating their iconography into full-length self-portraits. While the paintings depict Brigham, her body bore additional meanings by performing ancient ciphers of female power. As Cybele, the Roman goddess of nature and fertility, Brigham appears nude, seated on a wooden birthing throne holding a pomegranate. She gives birth to violets, a symbol for her son Attis and a poetic expression of generation and Spring. Her intense expression suggests that we witness Cybele engaged in a ritual trance, her physical and spiritual selves unified in heightened consciousness.
Soon after completing Cybele, Brigham embarked on her current series of self-portrait homages to female artists. These paintings represent her most complex and sustained exploration of self-hood and artistic identity. Through them she has explored such wide-ranging themes as celebrity, innovation, mortality, piety, sexual violence, and sexual liberation. In each instance, though we know the subject to be a historical artist, the figure at the easel, flying a plane, aggressively wielding a dagger, and cradling a skull, is Brigham. Thus far she has completed paintings of and about Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532-1625 – Italian Renaissance artist), Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1651/53 – Italian Baroque innovator of traditional themes), Judith Leyster (1609-1660 – versatile Dutch artist of the Golden Age), Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980 – Bohemian exemplar and icon of Art Deco figuration), Frida Kahlo (1907-1954 – the one and only), and plans one in honor of Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun (1755-1842 – official portraitist of Marie Antoinette and French Royal Academician). She is currently at work on Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717 – German naturalist and scientific illustrator).
Brigham’s choices reveal an affinity for strong personalities who determinedly earned critical and commercial success in environments that were hostile to women. Not only did they succeed at their craft but in many cases they transformed its possibilities. Significantly, Brigham has only depicted two as artists witnessed at work (Sofonisba and Leyster). This emphasizes the degree to which they are imaginative meditations on the women as important historical figures (beyond their status as significant artists) and symbolic mentors for Brigham – women with whom she feels a strong personal connection. This is critical, for Brigham elides her identity with that of the historical artists, inhabiting their bodies through self-superimposition. The gestures, symbolic attributes, and references to existing paintings contribute to a composite portrait of the individual artists but also a collective portrait of Brigham. These are extraordinarily intimate self-portraits, bravely exposing the psychology of their author as they meditate on the histories of their ostensible subjects. Brigham’s depiction of herself as an artist at work (specifically as Sofonisba) has the added ability to become an allegory of the art of painting or the female figure of pittura. The multiple and overlapping meanings concentrated in her self-images expand through the convergence of gender and history.
Freeing the Frida in Me (2003) combines elements of Frida Kahlo’s personal mythology with that of her lived reality to ruminate on the life cycle – when Brigham started the painting her father had just died and she was contemplating mortality. Artemesia: Blood for Blood (2000) is an extraordinary image of strength, aggression, defiance, and desperation, its emotional impact embodied in the figure’s dramatic expression. According to Brigham the image represents the moment following Agostino Tassi’s rape of Artemisia, which for many feminists, art historians, and biographers was a pivotal point in her history that has affected interpretations of her work. Accordingly, Brigham has included details that were brought out in Artemisia’s testimony and torture during Tassi’s trial. A virtuoso balance of lighting effects, symbolic color, and kinetic gestures, the watercolor transcends the expectations we have of self-portraiture to become an essay on human limits. Partially inspired by the intensity of Artemisia’s peerless Susanna and the Elders (1610) but expressed in a composition wholly Brigham’s own, this confrontational image is aggressively open ended and full of unresolved tension befitting the subject.
The Surrealist poet André Breton famously mused, “I wish I could change my sex the way I change my shirt.” Brigham’s work posits no gender-bending transgressions. Yet she is fascinated by the fluidity of identity and the potential for enhanced meaning that comes from merging with the persona of another artist. In this she shares territory with contemporaries Cindy Sherman and Morimura Yasumasa who have through staged photographs, cast themselves in the roles of figures from famous paintings. Artists throughout art history have been fascinated by what preceded them and have conceived their projects to build on, defile, obliterate, or expand the achievements of the past. Brigham’s work provokes significant questions about the relationship between past and present. Is it a one-way communication? Clearly the biographies and artifacts of earlier artists speak to and transform the experience of living artists. In that way Brigham’s work is a collaboration, unlikely and yet inevitable. When one takes on the guise of an historical figure there is an inherent loss of identity just as there is an enhancement of the self. Brigham’s self-portraits are a tangible manifestation of what all artists do in their heads or in their studios, following in footsteps, emulating, discarding, and wrestling with art of the past. The resulting work invites viewers to consider the ways we navigate identity, sift and incorporate experience to form our persona, and the means by which we project it to the world.
Holly Trostle Brigham: Visual Storyteller
Dr. Leo G. Mazow
Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Holly Trostle Brigham’s beguiling series of watercolors of women artists from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, Baroque, and Modern eras (Seven Sisters, 2000‒11) calls to mind the eighteenth-century ideal of the speaking likeness. Boldly illuminated and deftly modeled, Brigham’s subjects are frozen in time, as if captured in a moment of suspended action. Yet, paradoxically, they appear to move, or at least to suggest the possibility of movement. Brigham consistently models her figures at expressive angles and in strong poses. As viewers, we effectively join the motion as our eyes investigate these variegated surfaces. The illusion of the subjects’ potential energy results in part from the artist alternating between washes and linear work. The vibrant luminosity of the watercolors approaches the effects of egg tempera mural painting—the artist’s attention to artificial light is always present in these works. Brigham also frequently uses opalescent coloration to invest her subjects with intimations of activity, voice, and vision.
The women artists in Seven Sisters function as prototypes for Brigham’s creative work in the newer Sacred Sisters (2012‒15) series. It is important to note that her artistic process includes not only preliminary studies and thumbnail sketches, but also meticulous research into biography, costume, and—especially for the Sacred Sisters—religious history. The eyes and hands of Brigham’s subjects —the instruments with which an artist fashions her work—captivate the viewer. In so many works, the sisters’ hands are in the process of making, evoking the artist’s own hands as she made the compositions. However, this parallel is perhaps not surprising, as she becomes her own sitter to play the part of the subject in a good many of these paintings. The painted sisters wield brushes (like Brigham herself), fly an airplane, grasp a skull, and pray—all the while gazing fixedly upon the observer. Intent on reclaiming their place in history, and with a firm command of rich, time-honored (if still, sometimes, obscured) iconographies, Brigham tells the personal story of each subject and connects them to larger narratives about art, creativity, and women’s work.
Given that her technical finesse ultimately communicates these information-rich narratives, I wonder if it would not be missing the point to call Holly Trostle Brigham a storyteller, perhaps a visual raconteur, one for whom materials and process comprise her speech and critical vocabulary. And I wonder if this is why I am so beguiled by her verbal descriptions of the paintings, and the series of which they comprise a part. Telephoning Brigham to discuss her art is like calling a friend who, in turn, tells you about what her other friends have been up to. But in this case the “friends” are the subjects of her paintings: typically saints, nuns, and unlikely, but very accomplished, adventurers. On one recent phone call, we spoke of her religious sisters—and her nun-friends have been busy. Rengetsu (2014), for example, a nineteenth-century Buddhist nun, was also a ceramicist and poet who wrote verse (think David Drake/Dave the Potter) on her vessels. And then there’s Henriette de Lille (2013), the Creole—and free African American—founder of the Catholic order of the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans in the period leading up to the Civil War. In her painting of Mother de Lille, Brigham poses as the nun, holding a black Jesus doll. This evokes for Brigham—and surely for the earlier nuns—the sacred tradition of bathing and clothing a doll as if it were a baby.
Another friend is a member of a Brazilian order, the Sisterhood of Our Lady of the Good Death, Hilaria Batista de Almeida, Provider (2015). Originally untitled, the painting came about at the suggestion of renowned contemporary poet Marilyn Nelson, who suggested that this nun be named Hilaria and composed an eponymous poem. The work narrates the story of an order (in Bahia, Brazil) that was singlehandedly responsible for freeing several thousand slaves before emancipation in 1888, and which has since that time addressed ever-present issues of poverty and financial inequity.
With Hilaria looking at and yet through us, cropped into our realm, and with the diamond tiling pattern of the floor bringing us into the perspective plane, the picture brings us so immediately into the story’s realm that we are there with Brigham’s friend. The nun, posed here as the order’s Provider, participates in the Festival of Boa Morte (the good death), a ritual in which nuns worship and mourn the Madonna, as if attending a viewing. In this work, however, the artist does not represent herself as the foregrounded subject, Hilaria; instead Brigham appears as the deceased Virgin in the background.
This watercolor of a Brazilian sister is only one of several recent works in the Sacred Sisters series to feature a collaboration with Nelson, who writes poems about the figures appearing in the watercolors that are blown up and exhibited in juxtaposition with the artworks. It is little wonder that Brigham would work with Nelson—a Frost Medal winner, Guggenheim fellowship recipient, and former Connecticut state poet laureate, among other achievements—to narrate the nuns’ stories. Nelson’s prayer-like verse continues and facilitates the story aspect of the nun-friends. As we study a painting such as Andrea Maria de la Encarnacion (2015), for example, we are reminded that Brigham’s work both portrays and reflects, but not in the mirror/verisimilitude sense—although several passages capture with watercolor a shimmering lifelike quality that might usually be attributed to oil painting.
Rather, these painted commentaries of the nuns’ lives reach the viewer like oral histories that call out with visual power and narrative clarity, offering much upon which to reflect. If Brigham creates modern-day speaking likenesses, Nelson captures the words they are about to express. The ancient Roman poet Horace coined the phrase, “ut pictura poesis,” which translates to “as in painting, so in poetry.” Later, Renaissance humanists explored the expressive possibilities of this concept in a number of canonical treatises and paintings. Thus, the Brigham-Nelson collaboration continues the powerful tradition of joining word and image—powerful because, for these Sacred Sisters to speak to us, we must understand that their stories cannot be limited to any one medium or genre.