Among world-class female writers, woman as victim has always been a big theme: Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath. There is nothing comparable in painting, because for all sorts of social and economic reasons – chiefly the ease of writing in a room of one’s own versus the hazards of male-run art schools and the expenses of setting up a studio – history has produced no great female artists and, indeed, few female artists at all. But now that is changing, and the rise of women painters, film-makers and sculptors is a significant feature of 21st-century culture. Sure enough, just as pioneering women writers had to exorcise the victim-demon as they appropriated traditional male literary genres, so a prime, inevitable topic in the visual arts today is woman as victim.
This is marked among the swathe of female artists at the current Venice Biennale, from Tracey Emin to Sophie Calle. It is also there in the violent images of the female body by hard hitters (and big sellers) Marlene Dumas and Jenny Savile, and it lurks behind the girly curlicues of fashionable painters such as Karen Kilimnik or Elizabeth Peyton. But queen of victim-artists is surely Stella Vine, whose first solo exhibition opened at Modern Art Oxford on Tuesday.
The 38-year-old Vine, who has hung this abundant, chaotic, uneven show of some 100 paintings herself, did not turn up as promised for the press view, but she did not need to. Drip by drip, her life story has seeped into a titillated press over the past few weeks: abused child, runaway teenager, single mum, stripper, actress; then, in 2004, a whiff of notoriety when Charles Saatchi bought her painting of a blotchy, scared, dead-eyed Princess Diana dressed up in a little-girl tiara beseeching her bodyguard, “Hi Paul can you come over I’m really frightened.”
As critics were quick to complain, this blobby mess really does look as if a schoolchild painted it, and the scrawled graffiti accompanying it is a classic “Emperor’s New Clothes” child’s-eye comment: the fairy-tale princess revealed as nakedly vulnerable and terrified. But it took a mature man, not a child, to write the fairy tale, and so it is with the painting. Vine, like Hans Christian Andersen, is a fabulist who is both a grown-up artist and, emotionally, a child so damaged that she cannot grow up. All the strengths and weaknesses of her work, its mix of sincerity and impulsiveness and nostalgia and bleak repetitions, rest on that duality.
Like her traumatised memories, Vine’s paint drips and seeps menacingly, theatrically, down large, garish, sickly-sweet canvases. The female face rather than the body is her subject, and everything about how a woman paints it – her self-image – is cruelly unravelled. Mascara flows like black rivers. Lipstick smudges and blurs. Over-rouged cheeks resemble bloody bruises. In “Holy water cannot help you now”, sugar-pink paint leaks from Kate Moss’s cheeks and chin down her giraffe-neck as if she is disintegrating. In “Courtney black cab”, Courtney Love – another former stripper – cowers in a taxi, naked apart from knee-high black boots; from her bare flesh rivulets of skin-white paint trickle out across the boots, suggesting a body dissolving.
Surfaces slither and wobble, underpainting glints through, identity and personality are formless. Yet everyone is beautiful, big-eyed, long-lashed, glossy-haired. Colours are generous and warm. The apparent lack of control in the broad dashes of paint and tearfully dribbling strokes woos us as authentic, desperate.
It is palpably the stuff of childhood fantasy and fear, Freud and fairy tale. A small snow scene dotted with Christmas glitter has a girl in a glass coffin carried through a turquoise forest by seven top-hatted dwarves, a setting as tinsel-pretty as a 1970s Woolworth’s shop window.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall: the arrested child plays out revenge and resentment as a textbook case of the uses of enchantment. Between a smoothly painted “Diana family picnic” in which the stiff, gawky royal foursome and a dog – Lassie – in Day-Glo colours pose like a parody of Gainsborough, and the decaying Moss, is “Ellenor and Melissa Butterfly”: a portrait of a chilly mother and a frightened child. Vine was born Melissa Robson; those little-girl-lost eyes gaze out from subjects as diverse as Sylvia Plath as an icon of belljar perfection, Paula (Yates), Elizabeth (Taylor). Every portrait is a self-portrait, every reference is autobiographical. “Welcome to Norwich, A Fine City” is blazoned across a crisp poster-style depiction of an androgynous school-ma’am-like tormentor; on one side is staring young Melissa/Stella, mouth twisted in misery, one eye covered as it often is by flaxen Rapunzel hair; on the other is a symbolic pussycat. Norwich is the town where Ellenor Robson took her seven-year-old daughter when she married a child-abusing husband after Melissa’s father had abandoned the family. “Daddy, I have had to kill you,” Vine has scratched across a canvas above, depicting Ted Hughes.
Many late 20th-century painters – such as Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen – affected bad art, as gauche and clumsy as a child’s, to drive home conceptual points about aesthetics and consumerism; the results already look fatigued. Vine is refreshingly different. The infantilism of her daubing feels emotionally right, expressive of rage and powerlessness. Form and meaning are locked together; Vine’s cheap pleasures in brash colour and celebrity-caricature are not deep but they are somehow consoling. “We are unhappy with this life and seek a better one,” reads one little plaque: as honest a justification of art as any.
Vine is also clever, literate, witty. She can quote Plath or Mary Wollstonecraft – a portrait of the mother of feminist thought is carefully positioned at the core of this show – as lightly as a photograph from Hello! magazine. She understands, too, that the cult of celebrity is today’s fairy tale, its narratives transmitted by oral lore, its images instantly recognisable enough for her to deface and deform them; thus she is Warhol’s descendent.
Yet if pop art gives her basic form, vocabulary and overkill palette, she adds a 21st-century twist.
The opening series at Oxford focusing on supermodel Lily Cole – “Lily telephone”, “Lily Ivy” with its sunburst yellow and Prussian blue contrasts, “Lily Nietzsche” all poisonous violet melting into black, “Lily bath”, “Lily overdose” – is a cross between Roy Lichtenstein and a female version of Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, updated for a designer age. It is so of the moment that you gasp as you follow poor wide-eyed, red-haired Lily’s progress from sexual rejection through the consolations of food, philosophy and religion to suicide: “Lily breaks up with her boyfriend in Bulgari”, “Lily leaves the Ivy alone in Chloe and Louis Vuitton”, “Lily reads Beyond Good and Evil in Moschino...”, Lily – Ophelia-like in a tub bleeding red paint – “contemplates a trip to Lourdes in Van Cleef & Arpels”, “Lily overdoses in Marc Jacobs”.
Two years ago, Modern Art Oxford showed the first solo exhibition of a very different British female painter, Cecily Brown, born the same year as Vine and, like her, carving a language from a place where the popular culture of celebrity or porn magazines meets art history.
Brown is more rigorous, intellectual, impeccably trained and a much better painter. But what she and Vine share is a fearlessness about recapturing well-known terrain – for Brown, the highly sexual figurative/abstract tension of macho American mid-20th century painting, for Vine the self-portrait and society portrait – that no male artist would dare to touch with such throttling energy and engagement. It is entirely consistent with 21st-century society that women in art, as in many other areas, feel free to reinvent traditions in ways that men, their roles tied up in centuries of public history, cannot. The results for painting are liberating and exhilarating, for everyone.
Stella Vine, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, to September 23. Tel: +44 (0)1865 722733
