The Lezley Saar: Salon des Refusés exhibition at the California African American Museum includes a painting devoted to Bertha Rochester:Lezley Saar: Salon des Refusés
October 25, 2017 - February 18, 2018
curated by: Mar Hollingsworth, Visual Arts Curator and Pro
gram Manager, CAAM
Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Rejected) includes three of Saar’s most recent bodies of work: Madwoman in the Attic/Madness and the Gaze, Monad, and Gender Renaissance, along with a selection of early altered books that show the origins of the artist’s interest in literature, mixed media, and marginalized figures.
The first works in the gallery are those of "Madwoman in the Attic/Madness and the Gaze," in which Saar calls into question the stigmatization of madness. A glassy-eyed Bertha Rochester, the “violently mad” and mistreated first wife of Edward Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, stares blankly. Her dark eyes are framed within a tree adorned with surrealist ephemera, collages of photographs that hang from the boughs like ornaments. Due to the precision of the portrait and its accompanying collage work, the image of Rochester, who in the novel is described as being “of Creole heritage,” is the only work in the exhibition to be painted on a plain, white background. (Leah Rosenzweig)
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