The Magic Mirror

Anna Brochet is in life an extraordinarily charming and attractive woman, but as an artist she stoically continues to battle with the glamorous standards of female seductiveness which are thrust from the outside upon the better half of humanity. Every unifying canon is impersonal - even when it deals with the face - totally codifying the "correct" form of eyebrows or lips, determining which makeup is fashionable, and specifying the single correct hair length. On the impersonality of fashion matrixes - obligatory for all clientele of beauty salons and readers of glossy magazines - there is nothing to do but answer with an especially personal, expressive artistic gesture, the maestria of "pure art". And Anna Brochet acts in this way, paradoxically combining in her aesthetics topical anti-consumer themes, the social pathos of female independence, technical innovations and…