Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws by Adrienne Mayor

Author:Adrienne Mayor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 30

Wine Goblets and Women’s Breasts

TO KICK OFF THE NEW ART SEASON of fall 1993 in SoHo, the New York Times “Styles” section featured photographs of socialites, celebrities, and art patrons attending a series of gallery openings and parties. In the lead photo, Gwendolyn Fisher wears a “cocktail dress with cutouts resembling champagne glasses” on the bodice just under the bust. Her companion, gallery owner Pablo Van Dijk, pretends to hold the stem of one of the cutouts, giving the impression of cupping Fisher’s breast in his goblet. The setting is chic, sophisticated, but the image, as well as its conceit, is an updated, elite version of a cliché with roots in both low and high culture.

The art patron’s witty cocktail dress with revealing cutouts that appear to support her breasts echoes a well-known photograph of another art-world celebrity taken twenty years earlier by Helmut Newton, known for his contrived images of artistic decadence. In the 1973 photo, the jewelry designer Paloma Picasso wears a designer cocktail dress and holds a highball glass strategically over her exposed breast. Picasso appears to be toasting her own bosom in a composition that is remarkably similar to the pose affected by Van Dijk as he pretends to toast the breast of Gwendolyn Fisher. Picasso’s glass is tall and cylindrical, but the visual simile conveys the same erotic conceit of a woman’s breast suspended in a wineglass. The austere straight-sided tumbler complements Picasso’s own bold, angular gold and silver jewelry designs. But more significant for our purposes, a straight-sided glass is the opposite of a curvaceous champagne glass, allowing Newton to impart androgynous ambiguity to the conventional breast/beaker association. Whereas a stemmed champagne glass would in effect display a breast on a pedestal, and its hourglass shape evokes a womanly form, Newton uses a tall columnar glass to play on this expectation. Indeed, one may discern the ghostly shape of a champagne glass in the chiaroscuro created as one views Picasso’s breast through the glass. The dark nipple appears to float near the surface, giving a subliminal impression of a cherry in a champagne cocktail.

Dress with champagne goblet cutouts, worn by art patron Gwendolyn Fisher, toasted by gallery owner Pablo Van Dijk, SoHo, New York, 1993. Drawing by Michele Angel, after photo in the New York Times.

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