The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork is sprawling and infrequently labyrinthine, however Anna Marie Tendler is aware of precisely the place we’re going. Wearing chunky New Balances, black bike shorts, and a T-shirt bearing the title of Martin Scorsese’s 1985 movie, After Hours, she steers us by the Nice Corridor and Medieval Arts part, each bustling with vacationers on a sultry Sunday morning in July. The ambient noise degree drops noticeably, and we enter a quiet gallery showcasing French ornamental arts beneath the rule of Louis XV and XVI. A sequence of furnished rooms bathe us within the opulence of prerevolution France, their mirrors and gilded moldings gleaming within the gentle gentle that emanates from wiggling electrical tapers.
We’ve come right here to see a specific portray by Rose Adélaïde Ducreux, whose father was one in every of Marie Antoinette’s portrait artists. When Tendler was a graduate scholar in New York College’s costume research program, the place she earned a grasp’s diploma in 2021, she wrote a paper on this portray, a self-portrait that reveals Ducreux standing at a harp in a luminous striped robe. It might have taken a substantial amount of talent to render the material of the gown with such realism, Tendler tells me, from its crumpled skirt to the translucent ribbon wrapped across the artist’s waist.
“This portray is like sneaky self-promotion. She painted herself on this very typical, female setting,” says Tendler. “However should you have a look at the portray, it’s a technical masterpiece. So she’s additionally exhibiting off, like, ‘Take a look at what I can do.’”
Not too long ago, Tendler has been participating in her personal sort of self-portraiture. Though she has led a inventive life, working as a hairstylist, make-up artist, and a crafter of Victorian lampshades, she was for a few years greatest identified to the general public as John Mulaney’s spouse—a feisty however summary determine within the comic’s stand-up units. Within the months earlier than they introduced their divorce, in Could 2021, she started posting a sequence of ornate self-portraits on Instagram, works she would later exhibit on the Different Artwork Truthful. Photographed within the Nineteen Thirties Connecticut dwelling the place she nonetheless lives, the temper shifts from image to image: grief, anger, a flicker of personal satisfaction. On August 13, Tendler will publish a memoir, Males Have Referred to as Her Loopy (Simon & Schuster), which illuminates sure features of the time surrounding her divorce, together with her keep in a psychiatric hospital for self-harm, disordered consuming, and suicidal ideation. Her budding images challenge, she writes, was a method of survival: “I wanted to remind myself that I nonetheless existed.” One in every of Tendler’s haunting self-portraits serves because the e-book’s cowl.
