The Choice 1886

Curator: Frances Macdonald's "The Choice," painted in 1886, draws us into a world thick with symbolism, a key feature of the Art Nouveau movement. It’s currently housed here at the Walker Art Gallery. What's your immediate take on it? Editor: Ethereal. It feels like peering into a dream, or maybe a half-remembered myth. The colors are so muted, almost ghostly. Are they trapped in a memory? Or are they a symbol of choosing a path and having to leave others behind? The figures and roses swirl together... it is like an eerie perfume bottled in a painting! Curator: The roses are key! They're densely layered. We see these repeated throughout the canvas; and Macdonald’s decision to depict them signals Victorian notions of femininity and beauty, intertwined with an undercurrent of decay and, well, a sharp awareness of the limitations placed on women. Editor: It almost feels like the roses are trapping the figure rather than her existing amongst them. Speaking of which, what do you make of those stark figures in the background? They could be sisters, spectres from another time. There is one looking up. Longing to escape their static stance. What are they meant to symbolize? Curator: Many see them as representing societal expectations, maybe the constraints placed on the central figure, judging her possible choices. That string of golden dots… It is easy to interpret them as representing opportunity but there also appears a heaviness, an un-ignorable weight. The use of the nude figure also touches upon ideals of beauty versus vulnerability, as this canvas represents one of the earliest forays into feminist art. Editor: So, a lot of expectation and constraint swirling amongst all the rose imagery... Even today you feel the power of what she managed to pull together in her artistry. The ambiguity makes it perversely timeless. Even in the whispers of the painting, it has a lot to say about the idea of options versus the reality of what freedom we have. It gives pause. Curator: Absolutely, it is a wonderful demonstration of visual encoding to carry weighty context through images. These were themes MacDonald continued to explore throughout her work. Editor: Exactly, something in the mood clings to you even after you turn away. An amazing way to summarize all the ways that a choice can resonate... across a life and even across time itself!