"I want to be a living work of art."

My Image Theory class met at the AGO last night for our first and only field trip of the course. If it's not too obvious to state, this is my favourite course that I am taking in my Image Arts, specialization in New Media certificate program @ Rye high. My professor Rhonda Abrams is the interesting and inspiring art teacher I wish I had first year studying art @ Western U., rather than the misogynist SOB that I did have!!! Freshman art school bitterness aside... the trip was recreational yet meditative. Our assignment involved selecting an artwork and taking a fictitious leap into the imagination of the artist and creating a background theory as to why he chose to create the piece, alongside a sketch of the artwork.

I chose: The Marchesa Casati, Augustus John, 1919, oil on canvas.

Always captivated by this painting when visiting the AGO, I dragged my friend Drew on a mad hunt to track it down. I wrote a ridiculous account of beauty and seduction, intriguing Augustus John to paint this femme fatale. I decided to do some background research on her true identity, later that night. 


"She was the most scandalous woman of her day," according to marchesacasati.com. "The Marchesa Luisa Casati was Europe's most notorious celebrity, and its most eccentric. For the first three decades of the twentieth century she astounded the continent. She travelled to Venice, Rome, Capri and Paris-collecting palaces and a menagerie of exotic animals. Nude servents gilded in gold leaf attended her. Bizarre wax mannequins sat as quests at her dining table. She wore live snakes as jewellery, and she was infamous for her evening strolls, naked beneath her furs, parading cheetahs on diamond-studded leashes." 


I came across a compelling blog (fascinatingpeople.wordpress.com) in which Toronto writer, Lorette C. Luzajic vividly encapsulates the essence of Luisa Casati as madly eccentric, immortalized through her many, many artistic representations (supposedly ranking third EVER behind Cleopatra and Virgin Mary). 

"The Marchesa has been criticized for the bottomless well of her vanity. Would she have been so outrageous if she attracted no attention? Furthermore, she had hundreds of portraits made of herself in ink and oil and photograph. Her motivation, hardly original, yet clear as a bell, was simply this famous statement: “I want to be a living work of art.” Luisa wished to make herself immortal, and so she made herself memorable, with portraits that would bring her to life centuries after her passing." 

...

"The Marchesa was a patroness extraordinaire who valued the arts above all else, even, I believe, above her own image. I am certain that the meaning of her vanity was rooted in her absolute devotion to the creativity of the human imagination," suggested Luzajic.

Written by Shakespeare on her tomb, in 1957: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.” 

Eccentricity in the name of art, is there a better method to madness? I think not.