Untitled (studio portrait of woman wearing lacy dress and pearls) 1942

Curator: This is an intriguing studio portrait from the Harvard Art Museums, created by Martin Schweig. What's your initial read? Editor: It’s haunting, isn't it? The woman’s pose is so formal, the dress lovely, but those marks... the penned edits on her face give me chills. Curator: Indeed. It speaks volumes about societal pressures on women, doesn't it? The demand for an impossible, surgically enhanced perfection. Editor: Absolutely. And there's a violence in the precision of those edits – "cut mouth turn up corners"– turning her into a living doll, or a paper doll, ready to be reshaped. Curator: The annotations lay bare the process of constructing an idealized image, highlighting the disjunction between reality and representation, and that this process is actively violating the subject in the image. Editor: It makes you think about the agency, or lack thereof, she had in this…performance. Ultimately, it's an eerie document of a past that still echoes today.