Aside from popular clichés, the witch is an ancient and polymorphous figure that has inspired artists since the late Middle Ages. From the « witch hunt » to feminism, through the Romantic imagination, her appearance and symbolism continually evolve. Artists and their witches narrate the filigrane history of women in the West.
Through a series of paintings, drawings, engravings, sculptures and photographs, this inexhaustible myth allows us to better understand the place of women, their relationship to the body, to sexuality, but also to nature.
By Alix PARÉ, author and art historian specialising in European painting (17th – 20th centuries)
