Editor's Pick

Into the Woods, Once Again

Little Red Cap I

Part of a series devoted to the tales of the Brothers Grimm — selections of which are now on view at the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas — Natalie Frank’s Little Red Cap I, 2011–14, presents the wolf from “Little Red Riding Hood” in an especially sinister light. Top: Frank in her Brooklyn studio, with two of her expressive portrait paintings. Photo by Phil Chang, all images courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art

When artist Natalie Frank decided to tackle some of the most ingrained stories in Western culture — the Brothers Grimm fairy tales — it wasn’t owing to a childhood obsession with princesses, Prince Charming or “happily ever after.” On the contrary, Frank says she was determined to reconsider such classics as “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Snow White” and “Cinderella” from a feminist perspective.

Her resulting series of gouache and pastel drawings blend intensely strange, surrealistic compositions with lurid, Fauvist colors to illuminate not only sexual politics but also the violence and humor that are rife throughout the stories. Some 75 of these drawings are included in an updated collection of Tales of the Brothers Grimm, published by Damiani, with an introduction and a new translations by fairytale scholar Jack Zipes. And more than 30 are on view in “Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm,” an expanded version of an exhibition that premiered at New York’s Drawing Center last spring, now at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, in Frank’s hometown of Austin, through November 15.

The drawings’ debt to abstraction and Expressionism aside, the power of Frank’s work comes from her unblinking figuration. The damsels are not exactly pretty, and the animals are anything but cute. Though Frank claims she doesn’t see it, there’s an unmistakeable grotesqueness to the images.

Frank grounds her series, which took three-and-a-half years to complete, in the stark truths of 19th-century German domestic life reflected in the original, dark tales. These were bourgeois women’s stories, after all, maintained in an oral tradition that eventually reached Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (although the brothers initially claimed they had gathered the fables from peasants all across Germany).


The damsels are not exactly pretty, and the animals are anything but cute. There’s an unmistakeable grotesqueness to the images.


With their Fauvist colors, flattened perspectives and explicit imagery, Frank’s gouache and pastel drawings breathe new life into the Grimms’ 200-year-old stories of morbidity and woe. Above: The Juniper Tree I (left) and The Juniper Tree III, all works 2011–14.

From left: Briar Rose I, Briar Rose II and Briar Rose III

Left: The Bremen Town Musicians I; right: The Bremen Town Musicians II

From left: Hansel and Gretel I, Hansel and Gretel II and Hansel and Gretel III

Left: Snow White II; right: Snow White IV

From left: The Six Swans I, The Six Swans II and The Six Swans III

Cinderella II

Some of the drawings in the series, such as Cinderella II, pack a lot of action into a single image, distorting time and space.

Back then, it was common for women to die in childbirth and for stepmothers to enter the picture, often competing with their stepchildren for the fathers’ resources and affections, à la “Cinderella,” “Hansel and Gretel” and other Grimm stories. Frank notes that even some of the details that modern readers are inclined to take as allegory — cannibalism and talking animals, for example — were familiar topics of discussion when the Grimms assembled their stories, which were originally intended for adults.

Brooklyn-based Frank began the series in 2011, after visiting her friend and fellow artist Paula Rego in her London studio. Rego, whose own best-known art deals with folktales and feminism, suggested that Frank read the Grimm stories. The juxtaposition of danger and wit appealed to the Yale-educated Frank. She found herself amused by the cross-dressing wolf wearing the grandmother’s clothes in “Little Red Riding Hood” (Zipes translates it as “Little Red Cap”) and by the scene in “The Juniper Tree” in which the unsuspecting father eats a stew of his murdered son. “I didn’t find it gruesome,” she says. “I found it hilarious” — particularly because the story ends with the son being resurrected and the murderous stepmother killed.

Then again, as a young girl in Austin, Frank delighted in her father’s reading “completely age-inappropriate” bedtime stories to her. “I think it did something obviously perverse in my imagination, but I loved it,” she says.

Frank’s complex handling of the fables’ unsettling themes was one reason that Veronica Roberts, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Blanton, thought viewers would connect with the images. “It’s so dystopian, and I think we’re in a dystopian moment,” Roberts notes. “Instead of ‘happily ever after,’ these are more honest and reflective of our time.”

In Rapunzel II, the title character has an unexpectedly haggard face, but she is still identifiable by her strong golden locks and an “R” branded on her forehead.

The centrality of female characters, even stereotypically dimwitted ones like Snow White, was also key to Frank. “So many of the stories deal with women not in terms of beauty and marriage as the end prize but in terms of their cunning and intelligence,” Frank says. She points to “The Clever Farmer’s Daughter,” in which the title character’s street smarts and resourcefulness win over the king. Though, alas, he’s still the prize, there’s no mention of the heroine’s looks at all, and most of the male characters are portrayed as fools. Frank’s rendering of the king infantilizes him, placing him in a crib, his arms folded to his chest in a gesture of vulnerability.

That Frank was drawn to the Grimms’ subtle subversion does not surprise Robert Gunderman, a co-owner of ACME, Frank’s Los Angeles gallery. “The work she’s known for making as an artist lends itself to illustrating the Grimm tales — dealing with issues of femininity, sexuality, violence,” he says. Her most recent paintings are on large-scale shaped canvases with limbs and other dangling “appendages” attached on hinges to allow movement.

The Grimm drawings can be tricky to read. Frank’s flattened perspective gives them a chaotic energy, as if all the action were happening at once. Roberts calls the drawings “claustrophobic.” In some instances, it can even be difficult for the viewer to gauge who’s who with certainty. One drawing for the story of “Rapunzel” is a close-up of a haggard-looking woman with the kind of bulbous nose that’s typically associated with a witch. But the figure also has the long golden locks immediately identifiable as the heroine’s and an “R” written on her forehead like a brand. (Rapunzel was, to be sure, treated like a possession: traded for a head of lettuce, locked up in a tower and used as a human ladder.)

Frank, it should be noted, does not consider the drawings to be illustrations. “My aim was not to be in service of the text,” she says, but rather to take pivotal scenes and explore the darkness between women and men, or between women. “So much of the Grimms is about shifting power. I wanted them to be graphic.”

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