She is the central character in dark stories in which men succumb to the charms of a seductress.

In a sense, Eve, Delilah and Circe are all femmes fatales, just like the vamps of silent movies or Hitchcock’s blondes. And like all myths, it is interesting to deconstruct, in order to understand the clichés on which the trope is based.

In this regard, “Femme Fatale: Gaze – Power – Gender” brings together 200 works of art covering a wide range of media and periods.

Among them are paintings by Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John William Waterhouse, as well as symbolist paintings by Fernand Khnopff, Edvard Munch and Franz von Stuck.

The exhibition also features contemporary works by Nan Goldin, Mickalene Thomas and Zandile Tshabalala, bringing a feminist perspective to the myth of the femme fatale.

Beautiful and desirable, free, even independent, a creature of desire and pleasure, the femme fatale evokes contradictory feelings – contempt, mistrust, fascination and fear – and reinforces misogynistic clichés, reducing (time and again) women to the status of temptresses.

“As a result of #MeToo, and in times of queer and intersectional feminist approaches, as well as extremely permeable gender boundaries, we might have expected the topic of the femme fatale to wane in significance, as it is based on the idea of a gender binary,” Markus Bertsch told The Art Newspaper.

“Looking at today’s cultural and media landscape, however, the opposite seems to be true.”

Indeed, femmes fatales are omnipresent in the movies, from Rita Hayworth in “Gilda” to Sharon Stone in “Basic Instinct” and, more recently, Cate Blanchett in “Nightmare Alley.”

The American photographer Nan Goldin draws on this staple trope of the movie world in the short film “Sirens,” a hypnotic work that comments on the experience of drug addiction.

“Current feminist artists no longer have to fight the image of the femme fatale, but can re-appropriate and re-use it,” Markus Bertsch told the specialist publication.

“Femme Fatale: Gaze – Power – Gender” runs until April 10, 2023, at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany.

It is accompanied by a chatbot that makes it possible to converse with six femme fatales featured in the exhibition in four languages (German, French, English and Turkish).

Art lovers wanting to know more about these figures can scan QR codes installed throughout the exhibition, or go to the Hamburger Kunsthalle app.