Twenty reclining female nudes sprawl across three monumental canvases, painted in an array of unusual fleshy hues such as deep blue, teal, moss green, and mauve pink. The intermingling of platonic and erotic love creates a utopian sapphic narrative born from the artist’s imagination, evoking a dreamy fantasy.
While Martha Edelheit (born 1931) typically painted from individual live models whose bodies she combined in the final composition, the triptych Flesh Wall With Table (1965) deviates from that process. Edelheit’s fantastical scene rejects the male gaze and inserts her into the conversation with a self portrait overlapping the middle and right panels. Edelheit portrays herself painting a simple floral canvas, her long dark braid flowing down her spine, and constrained by a black, grey, and white rectangle that juxtaposes with the vivid, elaborate visual narrative.
Edelheit may be hinting at communal living, which emerged in the 1960s as a widespread counterculture movement that embraced cooperative, self-sufficient living and shared resources. Though she was married twice to men and has not openly identified as queer, Edelheit is clearly celebrating women’s liberation and non-normative notions of feminine sexuality during a turning point for women’s reproductive rights. In 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court decision Griswold v. Connecticut established a constitutional right to privacy regarding contraception for married couples. But Edelheit’s conversation goes beyond the social advances of the time, opening a dialogue that’s as urgent as ever amid a political attack on basic human rights.
While the New York-born artist living in Sweden is characterized as a feminist who painted erotic art in the 1960s and 1970s, Edelheit has been fluid across genres, and Flesh Wall With Table celebrates female desire, the body, and identity by subverting realism with the various poses, including some figures who appear to float or achieve impossible contortions.
