Menopause Art – Review #1

Old Women Drunk by Iliya Beshkov

I came across Old Women Drunk by Iliya Beshkov in a book about Bulgarian art long before I hit the edge of menopause. I loved Beshkov’s wonderful dancers from the moment I first saw them and I love them more deeply now the Crone has turned her face towards me.

The picture gives us two joyous old women, pleasing themselves. Their shoes are so flimsy and immaterial the dancers could be bare-footed, only we can see that they’re shod in much the same way they are clothed: for careless comfort. Their dance steps don’t need much effort. Instead the women put everything into the gesture and the momentum of their circle.

The woman on the right tosses back her head but not in abandon. Both her head and her hand gestures offer the viewer a glimpse of the precision in her pleasure: a real knowing. The woman on the left steps into the grove and beat of the dance and her posture is both in harmony with, and in counterpoint to, her sister’s. I ask myself: is there any music? are they alone? is their drunkenness nothing more than an excess of satisfaction?

It’s interesting that there are no musicians in this picture, no children, no men and no landscape. Yet, these women lack nothing. They hear the music and they dance: for indulgence’s sake; for the pure joy of it. When I look at this image, I know there is always a village, there are always men and children and houses and landscapes, but somehow none of that matters in the face of the freedom Beshkov’s old women are promising me.

A word about Beshkov…
Beshkov was a prominent 20th century Bulgarian artist, activist and teacher who was born in 1901 and died in 1958. He first studied law, then painting and completed his career as a lecturer at the National Academy of Fine Art in Sofia. There is an art gallery named after him in Pleven, which is in central northern Bulgaria.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilia_Beshkov
http://plevengallery.hit.bg/uk/beshkov.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Academy_of_Arts
http://www.nha-bg.org/