Black Widow Strikes a Ballet Pose in a Ruined Theater — Print & Oil Painting

The format is wide and the building takes almost all of it. Two tiers of balconies curve around a circular auditorium, the columns between them are stripped back to bare brick, the plasterwork has come off in sheets, and the floor is a field of rubble and dust running from one edge of the canvas to the other. A single shaft of pale light drops from an opening somewhere overhead and lands in the middle of it.

She is standing in that light on the point of one foot, the other leg bent with the toe drawn up to the knee, the right arm lifted high and slightly curved and the left extended to the side with the wrist held soft. It is a recognised classical position, held correctly, by somebody dressed for a very different kind of evening.

Everything about the costume is working equipment. A black articulated suit with a belt, red hair falling loose to the shoulder, and no theatrical concession anywhere in it. Around her, driven upright into the rubble, half a dozen dark angular shafts stand out of the floor at different heights.

This is the least saturated canvas in its group by a wide margin and the contrast reading is low as well, because almost the entire image is grey stone, grey dust and one grey column of light. Her hair is the only colour anywhere in it, and the artist has kept it small.

She was never the only one. The programme that produced her was run as a class rather than as a private education: dozens of girls taken young and conditioned together in the same building, several of whom have published careers of their own, including at least one sent out afterwards specifically to take the working name away from her. An enormous empty auditorium with one person in the middle of it and nobody in any of the seats is a strange place to perform something you were taught in a group. From our Marvel collection, next to the same position seen from further back beneath the dome and the same suit against a scraped grey wall.