WS, White Snow and Prince on Horseback

Paul McCarthy

2012 · Black walnut · Modern and Contemporary Art

For over four decades McCarthy has made work that complicates myths of innocence and artistic virtue through often extreme acts of scatology and transgression. Recently, the artist has reconsidered classic fairytales in part to address their darker implications and psychosexual underpinnings. Here, the Snow White of the Brothers Grimm (1812) and Walt Disney (1937) is renamed White Snow, riding away with her prince after breaking her evil stepmother’s poisoned apple spell. Their bodies and those of their horse are intertwined and doubled in hallucinatory fashion—a complex interweaving of forms that McCarthy accomplished by artfully combining and scaling up three-dimensional scans of figurines then carving with computerized machines. The result is an uncanny intermeshing of folklore and phantasmagoria.

Artist

Paul McCarthy

Date

2012

Medium

Black walnut

Department

Modern and Contemporary Art

Credit line

Gift of Victoria and Samuel I. Newhouse Jr., 2016