“The broom has become this really handy tool for me to work around the gendered connotations that you might get from painting the naked female figure. The broom is nude but you don’t really think about it. And this enables me to place her in all sorts of scenarios.”
— Emily Mae Smith

Tangled in symbolism, wry and whimsical characterise the meticulous paintings by Emily Mae Smith, a Texas-born, Brooklyn-based artist who has earned significant international praise over the past two decades that only continues to grow. Looking to Pop culture, Surrealism, and revisionist historiography, Smith devours and reformulates a wide variety of references to create her unique, intricate fantasy worlds within which her iconic Broomstick character resides. Its image nods to that of the artist’s paintbrush and as a symbol of women-oriented domestic labour, with inspiration specifically taken from the dancing broomsticks in Disney’s Fantasia whom Smith aims to liberate ‘from the film’s menial labour and reproduction role’ⁱ.

Magic Brooms, Fantasia, Disney, 1940

Employed in her work as a tongue-in-cheek way to draw attention to the prevalent objectification of the female form throughout the history of art, Smith explores the motif of the broomstick to engage with the themes of feminism, gender-related complexities, and representation. Forcibly stepping into a tradition of painting that has relegated women to the sidelines for centuries, Smith is widely celebrated for her imaginative visual universe, as exquisitely encapsulated in Broom Life, whereby pervasive parameters are dismantled through wit and humour to reveal her subject matter’s deeper ramifications.

Broom Life

Broom Life immediately strikes us with its vivid use of colours, rendered in icy blue hues that melt and pool at the bottom of the canvas, under the radiant warmth of the clementine sherbet sunset. At the centre of the composition, an effeminate, anthropomorphic broomstick sits on top of a large block of ice, illustrated in a bleached blonde wig with circular mod girl sunglasses, lush red lips, and lounging with a cocktail drink in hand, evoking the joy and relaxation of a holiday in the sun.

Emily Mae Smith, Dust, 2019
Sold at Phillips in Association with Poly Auction, Hong Kong, on 3 December 2020
Estimate HK$200,000 – 300,000 / Sold for HK$1,134,000

The protagonist of the painting draws an instant comparison to the subject of Dust (2019), a canvas created by Smith five years later that sold on 3 December 2020 at Phillips Hong Kong in Association with Poly Auction, far surpassing its pre-sale estimates. In both works the broomstick subject is depicted seated at the centre of the work, however, in Dust, their figure is cast in a silhouette shadow, turned away from the viewer as if our presence is unknown. Similarly, in Alien Shores (2018), Smith’s current auction record work which Phillips London achieved in 2020, the broom gazes out at a Surrealist sunset with their back also turned. Contrasting both Dust and Alien Shores, in the present painting, the subject exudes confidence and charisma, looking directly at the viewer as she confronts us from behind her white, circular frames, enticing us to join with her drink raised out as if toasting a ‘cheers’.

A Contemporary Voice Within the Realms of Traditional Portraiture

With Broom Life, Smith follows a long tradition of representing the female nude in the history of art, engaging with the provocative parameters of traditional portraiture in a light-hearted, witty manner, challenging the historical notions of fetishisation and the voyeuristic male gaze. From the early portrayals by the Old Masters, of coy deities who are cloaked in mythology with an impeccable beauty, the representation of the female form has slowly transformed over the centuries as more artists have challenged the expectations of eroticism in association with the nude. Indeed, the image of the passive female sitter has since been interrogated by artists from Manet to contemporary feminist icons including Cindy Sherman and the Guerilla Girls, who critique in their art power constructs, reclaiming sovereignty over the representation of women.
- Guerilla Girls, Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met Museum?, 1989
  Courtesy of Tate, London
  
  Overall, the way in which Smith removes the figure but keeps the attributes, such as pose, of famous odalisques is similar to the Guerilla Girls’ reinterpretation of Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque (1814), firmly establishing Smith amongst the ranks of some of the most notable feminist artists of our time. Pointing out the extreme inequalities in the art world and canons of art history, whilst naming themselves the ‘conscience of the art world’, the Guerilla Girls used posters, billboards and fliers to disseminate startling discrepancies and injustices that went untold. Particularly, Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met Museum? (1989) takes Ingres as its model, placing a gorilla head onto the reclining nude, declaring ‘less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female’, a sad statistic highlighting the prevalent, perhaps sometimes subconscious, belief that women are objects to be looked at, rather than artists whose work ought to be admired.
- Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, 1485-1486
  Collection of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence
  
  Initially under the guise of mythology, the female form has been depicted in the nude for centuries, referred to as the goddess of love in order to free the male gaze from any notions of indecency. Sculptures of Aphrodite and Venus inspired the works of early artists, such as the early Italian Renaissance painter, Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1485-1486), novel at the time for its reproduction of the nude in painting, but embraced for years to come as the ideal depiction of glorified beauty.
  
  In The Birth of Venus, Venus, the goddess of love, is blown onto the beach by wind billowing in from the left, where she is welcomed by the maiden on the right. There is a softness to her gaze, not confronting the viewer but instead shyly looking away, passively allowing the viewer to take in the entirety of her appearance. Her almost translucent, ivory skin is strikingly unblemished, and her long flowing locks cascade over her shoulders as if liquid gold, covering her modesty and thus arousing an air of respectability.
- Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1583
  Collection of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence
  
  Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1583) is perhaps the typification of the female nude that Smith is critiquing and reformulating in Broom Life, portraying a lady stretched out on her bed, looking seductively out at the viewer. The sitters of such paintings were usually presented as passive objects for the pleasure of the spectator, who is presumed to be male, especially as women were not allowed into Salons at the time of Venus of Urbino’s creation. This painting oozes sensuality and is highly suggestive in the way Venus places her hand to cover her modesty while enclosing flowers in the other. Titian’s skilled application of a soft, incandescent paint further adds to the eroticism, as like the Venus of Botticelli’s creation, she is perfect. At the time, the work was greatly celebrated for its skilled depiction of the goddess, elevating the female form beyond the realms of reality.
- Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque, 1814
  Collection of the Louvre, Paris
  
  The French Neoclassical painter, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres continued this precedent set years earlier by Titian, depicting his odalisque with an elongated torso looking seductively over her shoulder, and the romanticised curvatures of form as seen in the lengthened curve of her spine.
- Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863
  Collection of Musée d'Orsay, Paris
  
  Significantly in 1863, Édouard Manet turned Titian’s model on its head, stripping away its mythology and representing instead the image of a courtesan in Olympia (1863), not idealised or airbrushed in any way, and staring out directly at the viewer instead of avoiding our gaze. Olympia was a common name for a prostitute at the time, and thus through this depiction of the female nude, Manet was challenging the expected ideals of female representation in Academic art. Due to the way the viewer is confronted by Olympia’s sexuality, the painting was considered very vulgar to the 19th Century Parisian audience, with critics saying her pale skin outlined in black resembled a corpse, and the shadows of her hands made her appearance dirty. To the ire of the public, Manet did not present the illusion of perfection, his brushstrokes are visible and the female figure is not fully modelled.
- Yasumasa Morimura, Portrait (Futago), 1988
  Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
  
  In 1988, the Japanese conceptual photographer and filmmaker, Yasumasa Morimura, known for his self-transformation and insertion into iconic works often from the Western cultural canon, transformed himself into Manet’s Olympia, taking the reinvention of iconic female characters further in the context of the late 20th Century. In doing so, he creates a space for the alternate depiction of gender, race and ethnicity, inverting the male gaze and playing with the notion of objectivity and subjectivity, as he himself becomes subject, object, looker and maker.
- Alice Neel, Pregnant Woman, 1971
  
  Smith’s oeuvre situates itself amongst the feminist artists of our contemporary times, including the likes of Alice Neel, Cindy Sherman and the Guerilla Girls. For example, working in the 20th Century, Alice Neel was a pioneer American artist whose sincere interest in humanity led her to depict friends, family, neighbours and acquaintances in her paintings. With her work, she aimed to repudiate traditional gender roles and stereotypes, depicting people, especially women, as she saw them. Pregnant Woman (1971) portrays a heavily pregnant woman in a startling raw and honest way. The focus of this painting is not the sexual appeal of this woman, the nude sitter, but instead on the toll pregnancy is taking on her body. There is nothing erotic about this painting, with Neel purposefully employing musty tones of a sickly green and harsh lines that are more reminiscent of Manet’s Olympia than they are of the deities of the Old Masters.
- Cindy Sherman, Untitled #94, 1981
  Collection of The Board Museum, Los Angeles
  
  Like Smith, Cindy Sherman references the historic models of Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) and Manet’s Olympia (1863) in her influential Centerfolds series from 1981, critiquing the historical examples of framing the woman as a passive object to be consumed by the male gaze. In Untitled #94 (1981), sold by Phillips New York in May 2012, Sherman is depicted as distant and unavailable, reclining but fully clothed, her placement on the floor next to a wooden chair very different to the soft silk sheets of Titian’s Venus. Overall, Sherman’s practice of changing her appearance in different guises reinforces her reclamation of the agency of women, declaring that women can be many things— they are not passive objects of the male gaze, but instead should have the right to be who they want to be and portray themselves how they desire.
  
  “I wanted to comment on the nature of centerfolds, where you see a woman lying there, and then you look at it closer and suddenly realize, Oops, I didn’t mean to invade this private moment. I wanted to make people feel uncomfortable.” — Cindy Sherman
- Guerilla Girls, Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met Museum?, 1989
  Courtesy of Tate, London
  
  Overall, the way in which Smith removes the figure but keeps the attributes, such as pose, of famous odalisques is similar to the Guerilla Girls’ reinterpretation of Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque (1814), firmly establishing Smith amongst the ranks of some of the most notable feminist artists of our time. Pointing out the extreme inequalities in the art world and canons of art history, whilst naming themselves the ‘conscience of the art world’, the Guerilla Girls used posters, billboards and fliers to disseminate startling discrepancies and injustices that went untold. Particularly, Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met Museum? (1989) takes Ingres as its model, placing a gorilla head onto the reclining nude, declaring ‘less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female’, a sad statistic highlighting the prevalent, perhaps sometimes subconscious, belief that women are objects to be looked at, rather than artists whose work ought to be admired.
- Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, 1485-1486
  Collection of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence
  
  Initially under the guise of mythology, the female form has been depicted in the nude for centuries, referred to as the goddess of love in order to free the male gaze from any notions of indecency. Sculptures of Aphrodite and Venus inspired the works of early artists, such as the early Italian Renaissance painter, Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1485-1486), novel at the time for its reproduction of the nude in painting, but embraced for years to come as the ideal depiction of glorified beauty.
  
  In The Birth of Venus, Venus, the goddess of love, is blown onto the beach by wind billowing in from the left, where she is welcomed by the maiden on the right. There is a softness to her gaze, not confronting the viewer but instead shyly looking away, passively allowing the viewer to take in the entirety of her appearance. Her almost translucent, ivory skin is strikingly unblemished, and her long flowing locks cascade over her shoulders as if liquid gold, covering her modesty and thus arousing an air of respectability.
Print advertisement created by Fred & Farid for Orangina, France

Notably, the composition of Broom Life shares distinct similarities to the widely successful, global ad campaign ran by French beverage company Orangina in the mid-2000s, which sparked massive controversy, later to be banned in America. Designed by acclaimed advertising agency Fred & Farid, the TV commercial featured a menagerie of buxom, scantily clad animals and plants, who shimmied, jiggled, and danced together in an animated, forest world. These creatures were then put into the spotlight over a series of printed adverts, with each portraying a different pin-up subject, sat atop a melting block of ice. Bursting from the bottom corner of each advert is an Orangina bottle, spraying the popular orange-flavoured fizzy soda over the figure and into the background where the tagline ‘Naturally Juicy’ is printed – a wordplay that contributes to the overall raunchy allusion whilst also juxtaposing the Orangina animals’ humanised forms. Feeling the adverts did not set a good example to the carbonated beverage’s main consumer base of children, teenagers, and young adults, complaints were made due to the sexualised depictions of the animal and plant xiforms, such as the cactus who, despite appearing without a face or eyes to confront the advert’s audience, is depicted with long legs that are covered in lacy stockings and have been shaved to remove all the plant’s prickly spines.

The broomstick in Broom Life is too, sat atop a melting ice cube with a drink in hand, under the rays of the hot sun which shines out from the top corner of the composition. Using the historical format of the nude as a starting point but also humorously nodding to contemporary references, Smith subsequently subverts any sensual expectations by injecting the broomstick character into the scene, replacing the passive female subject with a personal, active voice of the artist. The broomstick motif transforms across Smith's oeuvre, mischievously masquerading in its lexicon of symbolic imagery and detailed scenery. As such, Smith’s painting act as a reflexive response to the social, cultural, and emotional connotations associated with the iconography of both the figurative paintings she refers to, but also the portrayal of women in popular culture today.

Detail of the present work

Moreover, Broom Life is personal to the artist, as whilst the broom motif recalls the form of a paintbrush, it also emulates the voice of a female artist, destabilising historically dominant social narratives of gender roles and notions of power found within art, in Smith’s playful, tongue-in-cheek way. The highly finished quality of this painting and the confidence in its strong, polished appearance further disrupts any expectations of a soft femininity, reinforcing the image of feminine strength and independence that is notably displayed across Smith’s acclaimed oeuvre.

Collectors Digest

Smith’s humorous and thought-provoking body of work continues to attract popular and critical attention around the world. She has been honoured with solo exhibitions at Galerie Perrotin, New York; Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Belgium; Le Consortium, Dijon; and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Connecticut, and her works are now in the major collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Blanton Museum of Art, Texas; and Arsenal Contemporary Art, Montreal. Most recently, Smith presented a solo exhibition titled Speculative Objects at Galerie Rodolphe Janssen in Belgium, which ran from 27 February – 30 March 2021.

ⁱEmily Mae Smith, quoted in Maurizio Cattelan, ‘Emily Mae Smith’, Purple MAGAZINE, S/S, issue 25, 2016, online
- Provenance
  Laurel Gitlen, New York
  Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2014