THE WHITE DRESS is the third in a trilogy of prose portraits of women artists. The first two--Exposition and Suite for Barbara Loden (LLL 12/24/2021 and 4/14/2022)--bear witness to delayed but fulfilled justice or vindication, since the Countess of Castiglione's photography project and Barbara Loden's 1970 film Wanda, disregarded and undervalued at the time of their making, did eventually find audiences and recognition. The White Dress tells a more sobering story.
Pippa Bacca was an Italian performance artist who, in 2008, was video-recording herself hitch-hiking around Europe and the Mediterranean in a wedding dress, with the goal of promoting world peace. The project was brutally ended when she was raped and murdered by a man who picked her up in Turkey (who was eventually caught because he kept and used the camera, with Bacca's footage still on it).
Braided with this story is that of Léger's parents' marriage--a story not as terrible as Bacca's, but grim enough, with Léger's father seemingly set on humiliating and wounding his wife and daughter with his flagrant infidelities. This story has previously appeared in the trilogy, in Exposition, but here Léger pays particular attention to how marriage (the white dress) damaged her mother's life.
Decidedly downbeat, then, and for that reason an unexpected way to end a trilogy about women artists whose work is brought back to life thanks to archival research. Or is the book suggesting something like that will happen in Bacca's case? A painful but worthwhile read.
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