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| Dehn and Mairs captured women within their feminine roles during the landmark events of their live s. These snapshots of birth, marriage, and death emerge from both regionalist satire and out of a documentary and celebratory spirit. Mairs’ works depict special occasions such as weddings and funerals, while a different theme emerges in Dehn’s work. Rather than rendering momentous events in the lives of women, his focus is on aging and affluence, themes that have inherently satirical qualities, though some of his works depict the paring of aging and poverty with a truly sympathetic hand, as in Two Women of the Streets of Vienna. His objectification of women occurs in works such as Innocence, that resembles a disturbingly coquettish and sexualized doll more than a young girl, much in the same manner as his showgirls of the next series. His subject becomes a commentary on the upper class with his image of gossips (She said, that they said, that you said…) in which society’s ladies spread the latest news. Compare this with Mairs’ work titled The Gossips, and a shift in tone occurs. Dehn seems to be illustrating gossipy women, witnessed by the wide-eyed mounted deer head, while Mairs’ darkened foreground contains women shadowed and silent. Dehn documents these women in a critical light, they are individuals, but they are all engaged in the negative personality trait of being a “gossip.” Mairs’ dark figures aren’t even engaged in conversation, these women have become one with their rocking chairs, and the title here suggests a situation more than a personality flaw. Are these women simply labeled gossips by those engaged in the life outside of their window? Or are they the keepers of the secrets of those actively living? What does the tense angle of the rocking chair and lack of differentiation between furniture and figure suggest about the lives of these women? Both artists are active observers of “life’s ever changing seasons”; their approach is both sympathetic and satirical. In the next series women as subject/object move out of the everyday and onto the stage. |
