Read

Throughout the history of art, the image of the female bather has been intertwined with representations of the female nude. Women are caught in the act of undress, portrayed bathing, washing, and grooming. When recalling these images, one might think of woodcuts made by Kitagawa Utamaro, or the paintings of Edgar Degas or Pierre Bonnard, even work by Rembrandt, or George de la Tour’s infamous Woman Catching a Flea (1640), an intimate depiction of an unrobed woman removing an insect from the soft flesh of her naked stomach. These artworks inevitably prompt complex questions surrounding notions of passivity, permission, and (the invasion of) privacy. It is a pleasure, then, to encounter an exuberant work like Eileen Mayo’s Turkish Bath (1930), an experimental four-colour block linocut, in which a group of women are shown at leisure, enjoying and luxuriating in a collective bathing experience. One woman lies supine reading a book, her long hair hanging off the end of the recliner, wrapped in a red and white striped towel. In the foreground, another woman smiles and fans herself, cooling off and at ease, her breasts exposed and resting over her black and yellow patterned sarong.                                                                                                                                                      

Turkish Bath was exhibited in the ‘Second Exhibition of British Lino-Cuts’ at Redfern Gallery in 1930, organised by Claude Flight, who had taught Mayo the technique at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art. Following the exhibition, Mayo made numerous printed works in a similar vein, such as Woman at a Dressing Table (1931) and Morning Tea (1933), with their shared emphasis on thick black lines, and the vibrant use of orange, yellow, and red. In Turkish Bath, the hot pink outlines of their fleshy bodily curves are juxtaposed with the grey and white chequerboard floor tiles. Mayo’s distinctive illustrated style can be aligned with Mary Cassatt’s Women Bathing (1890-1), which similarly emulates the graphic aesthetic of Japanese woodblock prints. In Cassatt’s domestic scene, the female subject is captured with her back facing the viewer, bent over the wash basin, in a refusal of the male gaze.

The sense of intimacy and female kinship in Turkish Bath and Woman at a Dressing Table both bring to mind multiple paintings and woodcuts made by Suzanne Valadon, where unclothed women and children swim together in rivers, or are depicted washing in the tub, towelling off, or combing their hair, sometimes in pairs. Similarly, in her figurative linocut The Bathers (1923), Paule Vézelay captured the liberated students at the Margaret Morris dance summer school on the French Riviera, who would often spend their breaks swimming naked and tumbling from the rocks. In addition to her contemporaries, Mayo’s fluorescent colour palette and depiction of free-spirited camaraderie also recalls artists working today, such as Cathy Josefowitz, Caroline Coon, or the cavorting characters rendered across walls and ceilings in France-Lise McGurn’s site-specific installations.

The positive reception of Turkish Bath allowed Mayo to fully commit to her artistic career, and she continued to exhibit work at Redfern. Previously working as an artist model, Mayo had been painted by Laura Knight, Edith Lawrence, Bernard Meninsky, and Dod Procter, in addition to posing for Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Perhaps influenced by these experiences—particularly her fruitful mentoring relationship with older female artists, notably Knight—there is also an aura of empathy running through Mayo’s style. As she wrote in 1930, “I have almost entirely given up posing as a model. I want to be a painter […] I don’t think I shall ever have the heart to have a model myself. I know only too well the difficulties and the strain of posing.” The result is a series of images that feel strikingly modern and familiar: the first cup of tea drunk from a crumpled bed in the morning, styling someone’s hair before a night out, or swimming with a group of friends on a hot summer’s day.