A new exhibition attempts to bring to life the mysterious novelist through works in conversation with her books
In Jean Rhys’s 1931 novel After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, the protagonist, Julia, is telling a stranger how she once worked as an artist’s model for a sculptor named Ruth. While she sat for Ruth, she talked about her life. “And all the time I talked I was looking at a rum picture she had on the wall – a reproduction of a picture by a man called Modigliani. Have you ever heard of him? This picture is of a woman lying on a couch, a woman with a lovely, lovely body. Oh, utterly lovely. Anyhow, I thought so. A sort of proud body, like an utterly lovely proud animal. And a face like a mask, a long, dark face, and very big eyes. The eyes were blank, like a mask, but when you had looked at it a bit it was as if you were looking at a real woman, a live woman.”
Rhys’s protagonists are lonely, penniless women who live transitory lives in crowded cities and turn to men for money and companionship, only to be abandoned: an archetype that became known as “the Rhys woman”. As the writer Mary Cantwell put it, they are women who “struggle with life the way a sleeper struggles with a tangled blanket.” These characters are interested and invested in appearances: masks, reflections, clothes, mannequins, portraits, makeup and mirrors are repeating motifs throughout Rhys’s novels and short stories. And though Rhys went through life feeling as if she were “a person at a masked ball without a mask”, she is – in interviews, biography and her own memoir, tellingly called Smile, Please – somehow unknowable, always glimpsed through a veil.
Postures: Jean Rhys in the Modern World is an exhibition curated by the Pulitzer prize-winning critic and essayist Hilton Als, “a kind of portrait of the artist through art”. Held at the Michael Werner gallery in London’s Mayfair, it attempts to capture something of Rhys’s work and life in a series of contemporary artworks – Kara Walker, Sarah Lucas, Hans Bellmer, Celia Paul and Leon Kossoff all feature. It is, aptly, dynamic, unsettling, irrepressible. There are portraits of fearless, enigmatic women, landscapes heavy with dark shadows, twisted sculptural bodies, and eyes that seem to look back.
Read more at: Jean Rhys and the art of not belonging, The Observer