Afterwords: Body

I am grateful to my friend Nicholas Poburko for pointing out to me recently that Migraine echoes some of the elements in Manet’s Olympia and Goya’s Naked Maja.

Knowing her feeling for the verbal as well as the visual (as witness the titles of a number of her works), there may well be a serious play here on that familiar bedroom text (which she herself never used), “Not tonight, I have a headache”—a meditation on relationships between health and desire, and on disjunctions between women as public icons and/or performers, and as privately suffering “subjective” selves.

 

Eduard Manet, Olympia, 1863

Goya, The Nude Maja, 1800