Connections/The Ideal Woman

My name is Joseph Loh, and I'm an educator here at the museum. About two years ago I married my ideal woman. Of course I ask permission from her to do anything, and fortunately today she gave me permission to talk about the ideal woman.

I suppose there's no one way to define the ideal woman. She can be anything from

a silent dancer caught in mid-pose to the powerful

intellectual, well read, and artistic. But the ideal woman can also be someone

who's just a memory or an essence, or a figment of someone's imagination.

This Female Dancer is Chinese. It's a small figurine, and her pose is quite dramatic. She reflects to me this notion of eternity.

If I was hoping to be buried with sculptural figures I wouldn't want stuffy soldiers or warriors or other people of rank, but rather I would like to have someone like her. She can give me solace, she can provide me with some comfort through the afterlife.

Gertrude Stein embodies in many respects the ideal woman. What makes this intriguing for me is her mask-like face. I think for so many people who lived in the circle of artists and writers in Paris during that time,

Gertrude Stein provided patronage and friendship, and she was such an important influence in their lives.

When I think of the ideal woman, one quality that comes to mind is that of grace. Queen Victoria is so majestic. You see her ascending up the steps, about to take her throne. We have so many images of Queen Victoria after her husband Albert's death. We imagine her as being this plump old lady dressed in black, but here, she's young and radiant and her whole life is before her.

Princesse de Broglie is my ideal woman for a very interesting reason. I look at her dress, I look at her skin, I look at the jewels that she wears, but what makes this so powerful to me, it's not the surface of the painting, but rather the memory that it evoked, because the Princesse de Broglie died when she was 35. I had learned that her husband had this portrait painted of her

and he hid this painting behind curtains, and he would only view her during times in which he wanted to remember her. So for her husband, she was the ideal woman that he did not want to share with anyone else. I often go through the museum looking for paintings that surprise me.

Madame X. She stands, glancing off to the right, waiting for her husband to enter, her lover, perhaps, or just demanding to see where the waiter is with the next glass of champagne. But her white alabaster skin, contrasting with her black velvet dress, her pose gives this impression that she was just talking to me a moment ago and then something else that's more important stepped into the room. It's as if the ideal woman has left me and I'll never be able to gain her back.

I love my mom, and if I had to draw a picture of her, I wonder what she would look like. Here in this etching, Rembrandt has captured so many facets of his mother's personality. Even though she looks a little bit tired, you can still capture that sense of love and tenderness and devotion, and you can see that she probably had a very close relationship with her son.

Sometimes my ideal woman is the woman you don't actually see. This photograph by Aguado is perhaps one of the most arresting portraits. We have to imagine what her face might look like: whether she's frowning or smiling, or if her eyes are blue or gray or brown. So it leaves so much to the imagination. When I was in graduate school I majored in Japanese art, and I think of all the paintings that I studied, my favorite is a type that's known as

tagasode or "whose sleeves?" When you look at this pair of screens, there is no woman depicted but rather her kimono robes. We can look at the robes that she

was wearing, the robes that she will be wearing.

So this perhaps is the most powerful expression of what the ideal woman is, because it embodies so much of what she is, without actually having her in the image.