Rose Wylie

Rose Wylie went to the movies for the first time in 1937 to see Walt Disney’s cartoon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She was impressed by the cinematic version of the fairy tale, even though the portrayal of the main character seemed problematic: Snow White takes great pleasure in housework and fulfils her dream by marrying a prince. When asked whether this painting has a feminist message, Wylie stress[1]es that her subjects can never be reduced to a concrete interpretation.

For Wylie, illustrators like Walt Disney and Max Fleischer, the creator of the Betty Boop comics, are role models because they created autonomous imagery that make no claim to realistic representation. In their cartoon worlds, they were not bound to conventional rules, such as accurate proportions or a convincing sense of distance. The influence of this style is evident in Wylie’s use of black outlines and in the ways her figures often seem to float against the background or appear disproportionate to one another. Wylie also disrupts the sense of time by showing two consecutive moments from a story side by side. In this painting, Snow White is both doing housework and lying in a coffin. Wylie is familiar with simultaneous representation not only from comics but also historical sources, such as cave paintings and early Renaissance frescoes.