Observing a woman get ready to go out is, for many girls, an early glimpse at the ritualistic preparations that femininity can entail. For the artist Christina Ramberg, watching her mother getting dressed for parties'in particular, putting on a corset called a merry widow, which gave her an hourglass figure'revealed the extent to which the female form was a ruse. 'I can remember being stunned by how it transformed her body, how it pushed up her breasts and slendered down her waist,' Ramberg later observed. 'I used to think that this is what men want women to look like; she's transforming herself into the kind of body men want. I thought it was fascinating,' she said. 'In some ways, I thought it was awful.' These dueling reactions, fascination and repulsion, come up in Ramberg's paintings, which, especially early in her career, fixated on the artifice of the female body'all the different ways that women construct themselves, with the aid of the mass market. Her striking portraits of...
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