Leda fell in love with Zeus, who came to her in the form of a swan. She later bore two eggs with twins inside each. One egg held the immortal twins Castor and Helen, and the other egg hatched to show the mortal twins Pollux and Clytemnaestra. Castor and Pollux are the twins of the constellation Gemini, one daughter became Helen of Troy, and the other the queen and assassin of Agamemnon, the commanding general of the Greeks against Troy.
When I started to design this piece, a cover for a theater program, I decided to reject illustrating the play's subject matter directly, and instead thought to allude to one of the play's themes: a kind of love that some people are powerless to resist. Instead of just seeing Leda as some sort of insane bestialist, I think of her as an archetype of a person who can’t help who she loves.
Leda was a frequent subject for artists in the Late Renaissance or Mannerist sixteenth century. Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Sodoma all made pictures of Leda. There’s a certain lèse-divinité in these paintings, perhaps an allusion to the religious skepticism that caused the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation. |
I made this work for the cover of a program for a play at Stages Theater, All Over by the great playwright Edward Albee, (who wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.) In Albee’s play, a family is gathered around a man’s deathbed, and together with the dying man’s mistress, they’re confronted with the affection and loyalty they bear for a man who hasn’t deserved them. Mr. Albee teaches here at the University of Houston, and he was given approval of the program’s cover, but he rejected my proposal, instead choosing an abstraction, with plain white text on a black background, a Modernist approach.
I don’t believe though that a work of art can exist without allusion or reference to cultural archetypes or previous works of art. That’s a tenet of Modernism, and is considered a sort of artifact now, perhaps because the great Modernists thought that the world would change for the better, and that mankind would become more humane if all the arts could forget history. By now though, everyone that lives in an urban area anywhere in the world has seen and heard examples of Modernism. |
Many of us have lived and worked in Modernist buildings, and Modernism hasn’t made mankind more humane. People forget that Modernism’s great totem was the machine. And the factory producing identical machines was the inspiration for every sort of building, from house to church to skyscraper to concentration camp. Modernism was actually the last great movement of the nineteenth century, a century that believed that mankind could become more humane through outside forces like religion or art or good government. Modernism was supposed to be the anti-style, and the last artistic movement, but since the heydey of Modernism in the 1950s, we’ve seen Pop Art, Op Art, Superrealism, Conceptualism, Post Modernism, Deconstructivism, along with all sorts of other “isms.” All the succeeding movements differ in one great respect though, they don’t assert that mankind will change for the better as soon as everyone’s been exposed to the movement’s ideas. |
