Medusa, Alice Pike Barney (c.1892) | Mini Series

Medusa, Alice Pike Barney (c.1892)6x6 Mini Series Who would guess this is a family portrait? In November 1901, American artist Alice Pike Barney held her first solo exhibition, showcasing her talent for reimagining loved ones as mythical monsters. Medusa (Laura Dreyfus Barney) depicts her daughter Laura as the legendary gorgon, while another work cast her other daughter, Natalie Clifford Barney, as Lucifer. These choices reflected not family discord, but Barney’s passion for Symbolist art—where metaphor reigns. In Medusa, Laura’s face is frozen in horror, her hair a nest of snakes, one coiling tightly around another as it climbs her body. The figure, engulfed in swirling blacks and blues, seems caught between emerging from shadow and the beheaded fate told in Perseus’s myth. Some see her expression as sympathetic and feminist, recalling that Medusa’s curse followed her assault by Poseidon in Athena’s temple. Fortunately, Laura took no offense at her mother’s monstrous tribute.