Excerpts from

Mannerism Redivivus:
Noah Becker’s Femme Fatales

By DONALD KUSPIT 
November 19, 2023

           “With her absurdly long neck, Noah Becker’s female Figure in Profile, 2023 is clearly the secular sister of Parmigianino’s Madonna With The Long Neck, 1535-1540, the post-Renaissance masterpiece that inaugurated mannerism. Becker’s many new portraits of sophisticated ladies, not to say upper class femme fatales —all strangely haughty, remote, their eyes often veiled by sunglasses, their lips lushly, not to say luridly red, temptingly kissable—are mannerist in spirit, not to say subliminally surreal. Mannerism is indeed the ancestor of surrealism, as the art historian Arnold Hauser convincingly argued.”

“The portrait of one, wearing a beret, a surreally huge collar, half pink, half blue, and a flourishing black tie suggests that they may be bisexual, if not lesbian.  Another portrait of a young, blonde woman, blue-eyed and red lipped, wearing a man’s black jacket and a black tie, also suggests sexual ambiguity.  Three young men, also with flashy red lips, stare us down, their green caps suggesting they are children of nature, unlike the female sophisticates, seemingly bred in social hothouses.  Some of the couples seem bizarrely aristocratic, as their high hats and aloof demeanor suggest.  Some confront us with full faces, some we see in profile.  Some of the women wear fashionable grand hats, some are in turtlenecks.  However tempting their lurid flashy red lips, and however much the couples seem like lovers—certainly seriously intimate, as the elderly female couple, with their contrasting scarves and berets, make touchingly clear—they are emotionally inaccessible to us, oddly cold-blooded however hot-lipped.  The very white skin of many of them gives them a corpse-like pallor.  They stare us down, as though we’re beside the point of their insularity and intimacy, and their perverse beauty.  They seem disdainful of the male spectator, however much they confront him.”