Artist Elise Ansel Reimagines Macbeth

Folger Artist Fellow Elise Ansel’s reinterpretation of a striking painting in the Folger collection, Henry Fuseli’s Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head (1793), is on view at the Folger through November 9. It’s the first show of Contemporary Art at the Folger, four solo exhibitions featuring work by recent artist fellows. Ansel shares how her questions about Fuseli’s take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth inspired her to create two abstract, large-scale oil paintings but this time from a woman’s perspective that celebrates the play’s sisterhood.

I create by translating Old Master paintings into a contemporary pictorial language. Using an idiom of energetic gestural abstraction, I mine art historical imagery for color and narrative structure. I use abstraction to interrupt representational content in order to excavate and transform meanings and messages embedded in the works from which my paintings spring. I examine the impact of authorial agency and address the myriad subtle ways the gender, identity, and belief systems of the artist are reflected in the art.

My work challenges monocular thinking. Old Master paintings were, for the most part, created by men for men. The male point of view is firmly embedded—on both a visual and a narrative level—in the DNA of most Old Master paintings. My point of view—as a contemporary female painter—enters into my work as a result of authorial agency. I render subjectivity/objectivity in the feminine. Thus, my creative abstract interpretations allow me to interrupt pictorial images presenting single points of view and transform them into sensually capacious non-narrative forms of visual communication that embrace multiple points of view.

To be clear, my collages and paintings are not critiques of the Old Masters, and the great literary masterpieces from which their work often springs, but rather a use of their depth and resonance to shine a light on imbalances existent today. In this, the Old Masters and the Great Writers are my powerful allies.

I conceive of my art as alchemy, transformation. My painting is simultaneously invention and interpretation. I counteract the narrative, often hegemonic content, of images created predominantly by men, replacing the linear and the allegorical with the intuitive, spontaneous, and accidental. It is in the slippage between intention and execution, the incidental accidents that occur during the painting process, the failure to translate correctly, the curvature of time, that new territory is gained and at the same time a deeper connection with the Old Master source of inspiration is forged. By breaking up the figures and physical episodes on the canvas and dispatching them into polychrome fields, I make color the connecting element between the original and the reinterpretation. I shift the focus from narrative content to the brushstrokes themselves, and to the specific material characteristics of the media I work in. My chosen medium, oil paint, and my conceptual goal, feminist reinterpretation, generate pairs of opposites: transparency and opacity, darkness and light, flatness and depth, hard and soft edges, addition and subtraction, male and female, historic and contemporary. The synergistic energy created by these circumjacent polarities resonates with the conceptual underpinning of the project: the idea that the interaction and cooperation of opposites produces a combined effect greater than the sum of their individual parts. My intentional “errors” generate insight.

When I was awarded a virtual Artistic Research Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library for the academic year 2023–24, I began to explore the collection’s online database, searching for an Old Master painting to “translate.” Henry Fuseli’s MacBeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head (1793) caught my eye and fired my imagination. The painting is both stunning and disturbing. Visually, it is a gorgeous, sumptuous, luminous, and compelling image. Its narrative content, however, is distressing on a range of levels. The painting depicts Macbeth’s second encounter with the witches; the moment in Act 4, Scene 1, when the disembodied armed head, the first of three apparitions summoned by the witches, warns Macbeth to “beware Macduff”. The armed head bears an eerie resemblance to Macbeth. The visual genius of the painting is evident in the way this similitude creates a strange “through a glass darkly” mirror along an imaginary axis line bisecting the painting from lower left to upper right. The “through the looking glass” aspect of the painting alludes to the porous nature of the relationship between the conscious and subconscious minds. This is in keeping with Fuselli’s ouevre as whole, which favors the supernatural and evokes qualities of terror and the sublime, nightmare and fantasy.

The disembodied apparition of helmeted head warns Macbeth to “beware Macduff,” a nobleman who has become Macbeth’s enemy. The “armed” appearance of the head signifies that Macbeth and Macduff will eventually engage in a violent conflict and foreshadows Macbeth’s own death. The apparition’s form connects to the violent imagery of beheading, which is prevalent in the play, including Macbeth’s own beheading of Macdonald in Act I. The witches present their visions in a misleading way, giving Macbeth the impression of invincibility, even though the apparitions contain warnings of his downfall.

Though Lady MacBeth is not featured directly in the painting, her role in the play provides significant subtext as well. Lady MacBeth, as created and rendered by Shakespeare, is an “evil woman” who incites an otherwise good man to bad behavior, which results in disastrous consequences. This is a thematic trope, a tale as old as time, or at least as the Bible’s recounting of the story of Adam and Eve’s encounter with the snake and subsequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

What to do with all this violence and negativity?!?!?? In general, I like to create positive uplifting images that leave people with a sense of joy, hope, peace, and agency. Lady MacBeth and the intentionally deceptive and ambiguous pronouncements of the witches are catalytic agents that cause the violence and tragedy in Shakespeare’s play. What to do with these negative renditions of women?

I reached out to Patricia Akhimie, director of the Folger Institute, to see if she could shed some light on Shakespeare’s play and assist in my effort to pour some light into Fuseli’s painting, to find and convey a positive message. She shared some brilliant insights. The one that was most relevant to my painterly translations of Fuseli’s work was the idea that “the weirdest thing about the witches for early modern people was not so much that they were supernatural but that they were women who were gathered together without male supervision and for purposes unknown and unsanctioned, a big no-no for women in that time.” This catalyzed my realization that a positive way to overturn or re-write this narrative was to use Fuseli’s depiction of Shakespeare’s Macbeth to create paintings that celebrate the golden glow of sisterhood.

About Elise Ansel

Elise Ansel was born and raised in New York City. Ansel received a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 1984. While at Brown, she studied art at both Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design. She worked briefly in the film industry before deciding to make painting her first order medium. Ansel has exhibited her work throughout the United States and in Europe. Her works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, the Farnsworth Art Museum, NYU Langone, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and the Evansville Museum of Arts and Sciences. She is represented by  Miles McEnery Gallery in New York City, Cadogan Gallery in London and Milan, and Galerie Martina Kaiser in Cologne.