Annunciations

John Wesley worked with the visual language of popular culture, tracing his figures from photographs in magazines and emulating the flat, simplified forms and hard contour lines of comic strips. Annunciations proposes a modernized version of a traditional European religious subject: the angel Gabriel’s announcement to the Virgin Mary that she will miraculously conceive a son. Wesley’s update of this theme was timely: the FDA’s approval of a contraceptive pill in 1960 granted American women greater self-determination in their sexual and family lives, a right protected by the Supreme Court in 1965’s landmark Griswold v. Connecticut decision. The narrow compartments dividing Wesley’s composition recall not only comic-strip cells, but also the panels containing full-body portraits of saints often found on the wings of altarpieces. They evoke a confinement which these women, whose toes, knees, and bellies just transgress their compartments’ borders, quietly resist. Nevertheless, the figures’ mannered poses reflect their origins in fashion magazines, suggesting the growing influence of secular and consumerist, yet still reductive, ideals of womanhood.