The Metropolitan Museum of Art is sprawling and often labyrinthine, but Anna Marie Tendler knows exactly where we’re going. Dressed in chunky New Balances, black bike shorts, and a T-shirt bearing the title of Martin Scorsese’s 1985 film, After Hours, she steers us through the Great Hall and Medieval Arts section, both bustling with tourists on a sultry Sunday morning in July. The ambient noise level drops noticeably, and we enter a quiet gallery showcasing French decorative arts under the rule of Louis XV and XVI. A series of furnished rooms bathe us in the opulence of prerevolution France, their mirrors and gilded moldings gleaming in the soft light that emanates from wiggling electric tapers.
We’ve come here to see a particular painting by Rose Adélaïde Ducreux, whose father was one of Marie Antoinette’s portrait artists. When Tendler was a graduate student in New York University’s costume studies program, where she earned a master’s degree in 2021, she wrote a paper on this painting, a self-portrait that shows Ducreux standing at a harp in a luminous striped gown. It would have taken a great deal of skill to render the fabric of the dress with such realism, Tendler tells me, from its crumpled skirt to the translucent ribbon wrapped around the artist’s waist.
“This painting is like sneaky self-promotion. She painted herself in this very typical, feminine environment,” says Tendler. “But if you look at the painting, it is a technical masterpiece. So she’s also showing off, like, ‘Look at what I can do.’”
Recently, Tendler has been engaging in her own kind of self-portraiture. Although she has led a creative life, working as a hairstylist, makeup artist, and a crafter of Victorian lampshades, she was for many years best known to the public as John Mulaney’s wife—a feisty but abstract figure in the comedian’s stand-up sets. In the months before they announced their divorce, in May 2021, she began posting a series of ornate self-portraits on Instagram, works she would later exhibit at the Other Art Fair. Photographed in the 1930s Connecticut home where she still lives, the mood shifts from picture to picture: grief, anger, a flicker of private satisfaction. On August 13, Tendler will publish a memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy (Simon & Schuster), which illuminates certain aspects of the time surrounding her divorce, including her stay in a psychiatric hospital for self-harm, disordered eating, and suicidal ideation. Her budding photography project, she writes, was a means of survival: “I needed to remind myself that I still existed.” One of Tendler’s haunting self-portraits serves as the book’s cover.
