Anna Weyant: Wait for It

In Anna Weyant’s Slumber (2020), danger lurks just around the corner. A champagne-hued blonde is tucked into bed. Although her mouth is curiously agape, her lips remain soft, hardly the tense expression of a scream; her body, too, is languidly reposed. Her vision shielded by a satin eye-mask, she fails to see the flame of a long-stemmed candle perilously brushing against a curtain behind her. Comfortably nestled against cream-hued sheets, she is blissfully unaware of the risk of impending disaster.

Set just before the moment of action, the scene opens onto several possibilities, ranging from the uneventful (the candle extinguishes) to catastrophic (the room alights in flames). Similar depictions of unresolved ambiguity recur in Weyant’s work, as the artist introduces almost imperceptible elements that create suspense within otherwise serene scenarios. The work’s title, Slumber, most commonly refers to a light sleep; it also connotes a sense of naivete. While this kind of obliviousness is often seen in terms of imminent danger, it likewise relates to Weyant’s ongoing explorations of female adolescence, during which identity oscillates between innocence and precociousness, eagerness and trepidation about the future.

Representations of anticipation continue in Weyant’s adjacent body of vanitas-inspired still lifes, as objects are shown on the verge of disintegration or collapse: semideflated balloons, partially undone bows, almost wilting flowers in their last moments of bloom. In Buffet (2020), a table is neatly set with three groups of objects related to consumption. At center is a cluster of hard-boiled eggs, piled gracefully in a wicker basket lined with a delicately embroidered cloth. The unnatural angle of the lining may be the first indication that things in this depicted world operate according to rules different from our own. Flanking the container of eggs—conventional symbols of rebirth, fertility, and transformation in the still life tradition with which Weyant is in dialogue—are two food items that undermine the generic nature of the depicted scene: On the left is a slice of bread, shown with a silver butter knife embedded deeply into its crust. At right, a pair of piranhas atop a silver tray, their teeth bared in menacing snarls, seem out of place—a rare delicacy in South America but rarely served as a dish in New York, where Weyant lives and works. The festive tenor of the meal is tinged with an ominous sensibility that suggests a threat still to come.

Emblematic of the artist’s signature aesthetic, such explorations of temporality are the focus of Weyant’s first-ever museum exhibition, which opens at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, this summer. Across the twenty-six paintings and drawings on view, the decisive moment of action is continually deflected—a point echoed by the novelist Emma Cline, who has described Weyant’s paintings and drawings as having “the quality of waiting.”¹ In deciding to capture a state of expectation, the artist differs from many of her artistic forebears, who often emphasize the moment of heightened drama. Take Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (c. 1620), which famously depicts female revenge at its goriest and most dramatic moment. In contrast, Weyant’s self-possessed subjects coolly look out onto their worlds with a teenage ennui. While both artists position women at the center of agentic decisions, Weyant’s paintings stage suspense rather than conflict, unsettlingly hinting at possibilities just outside them.

As part of a newly established exhibition program based on the Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, Weyant was invited to choose pieces from the museum’s permanent collection to be shown alongside her own. Her selections, which span from the dusky, chiaroscuro-laden palettes of the Italian Baroque to the uncanny eroticism of Neue Sachlichkeit painting, elaborate on the suspense that permeates her own compositions. Mattia Preti’s The Concert (c. 1630–35), for instance, in contrast to the jubilant and lively performance suggested in its title, captures a trio of musicians who appear to be warming up, engaging in a private moment right before their debut in front of an audience. This depiction of the intimate preparations that one undertakes before engaging in public self-display is alluded to in Weyant paintings such as Untitled (2018), in which a young woman, clad in Ivy League gear from rival universities, stands listlessly among objects connoting celebration, without any active festivities on view. Surrounded by markers of success, Weyant’s subject seems to be caught in a moment of self-reflection, presumably just before beginning her social obligations at the event.

While titled as a portrait, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta’s Portrait of a Young Woman in Profile with a Mask in Her Right Hand (c. 1720–30), a partial view of a young woman anticipating the thrill of a costume ball, captures a similar feeling of expectation: it minimizes personal subjectivity to communicate instead the performativity of identity, as suggested by the mask held in the protagonist’s hand. Weyant often uses this mode of figuration as well. In A Disaster, Such a Catastrophe (2022), for instance, she depicts two figures, one with eyes closed, rendered in a realistic style, and the other in a jocular, cartoonish guise. While there are similarities that might suggest two adjacent renderings of the same subject, neither representation communicates a clear expression of a specific individual. Despite their stylistic differences and the uncanniness of the juxtaposition, both figures seem to be wearing “masks,” obscuring their inner selves in distinct outwardly manners.

In Pearls (2021), a delicate rendering of two necklaces in a jewelry case, Weyant uses the traditional principles of the still life genre as a stylistic convention for exploring allegorical themes of transience, whether in terms of the eventual termination of existence or of notions of value that shift and evolve over time. This concept is further explored in She Drives Me Crazy (2022), wherein a trio of silver-hued cookware items set on a table visualize a portent of mortality by capturing a person wielding a knife in the gleaming reflections in the metal. Weyant adds complexity to objects often associated with domestic labor or fashion, fields typically seen as the domain of women. Her reframing of the still life as linked to contemporary female experiences that complicate conventional stereotypes offers a feminist take on what might otherwise be considered staid artistic subject matter.

Like Slumber, Christian Schad’s Portrait of Dr. Haustein (1928), another of Weyant’s selections from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, suggests a premonitory threat of tragedy rather than an actual one. Schad’s depiction of Doctor Hans Haustein, a prominent dermatologist in Weimar-era Berlin, is haunted by a large shadow that looms over the sitter. Schad said that the ghostly figure represented the doctor’s mistress, a model named Sonja; however, given the suicide of both Doctor Haustein and his wife, Friedel, in the coming years—Friedel because of her husband’s romantic indiscretions, Hans in anticipation of his imminent arrest by the Gestapo—the silhouette assumes an omenlike presence.

Weyant’s selection of Balthus’s The Card Game (1948–50) captures the two artists’ shared interest in the developmental age between adolescence and adulthood. Taking a subject favored by artists including Caravaggio and Cezanne, Balthus presents his cardplayers as two young teenagers. The protagonist is undoubtedly the girl, whose erect posture and confident if slightly bemused facial expression indicate her strong hand. In contrast to her partner, whose face is cast in shadow and who duplicitously holds a card behind his back, the girl is illuminated, as if positioned under a soft spotlight.

“Children in Balthus are uncertain of their bodies,” curator and art historian Jean Clair once declared; this is often true of Weyant’s subjects as well.² While their poses and makeup seem coquettish, their expressions convey ambivalence and their figures are often unarticulated, more childlike than womanly. They are stylishly dressed in understated but sophisticated clothing—white button-down shirts, taffeta party dresses, pleated plaid skirts, accents of fur, designer jewelry. Their surroundings are similarly refined: manicured lawns, well-groomed horses, crisp linens, silver tableware, tastefully patterned wallpaper. Although not expressly uncomfortable in their settings, the young women are often shown as emotionally detached from their environs, their eyes closed or averted. The sunglass-clad, partly nude subject of Semi-Charmed Life (2021) exemplifies this point.

Weyant’s seemingly perfect scenes upended by peculiar, logic-defying events recall René Magritte’s Surrealist compositions, one of which she chose to be in dialogue with her work. In The Key of the Fields (1936), Magritte uses the visual device of a window to play with expectations around depth perception and illusionism. Sharply broken shards of what appears to be glass from a window above them are revealed as something more puzzlingly inconclusive—opaque objects rather than a clear pane. Weyant adopts a similar approach in Escape Artist (2019), in which an Art Deco–inspired picture frame seems to surround a window through which we see a pair of precariously hanging bare legs, accompanied by a dangling rope whose presence is either benevolent or sinister.

Considered alongside Weyant’s works, these five historical paintings from the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza’s permanent collection offer context for the various influences on her art. Yet this dialogue between past and present also provides an important point of contrast, demonstrating how Weyant has developed a thoroughly modern take on temporality and identity for young women in the age of social media, digital avatars, and global interconnection. Turning to the past as much as reflecting upon the contemporary world around us, Weyant gives weight to the experience of female adolescence, the move between childhood and adulthood, often only cursorily explored but hugely formative. As such, Weyant’s compositions are thoroughly contemporary, a fresh artistic vision that looks backward and forward at once.