[ref] Identity Art: Feminist Art – jojo in the artland

Art Since 1950 (Part II) | Art History Teaching Resources

Based in Washington DC, Virginia B. Spivey (author) received her A.B. in art history from Duke University, and M.A. and Ph.D. in art history and museum studies from the joint program at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. She has over 20 years teaching art history in museum and higher education settings, including MoCA Cleveland, UNC-Asheville, Georgetown University, and the Maryland Institute College of Art; and as an independent educational consultant, she developed expert content and learning resources for clients such as Smarthistory.org and Pearson-Prentice Hall’s Higher Education Division. Her professional service includes tenure as chair of CAA’s Education Committee and a member of ISSOTL’s Advocacy and Outreach Committee.

Prior to her current position as Director of AP Art History at The College Board, she served on AHTR’s leadership collective as a contributing editor and editor in chief, and she spearheaded AHTR’s 2015 initiative to establish Art History Pedagogy and Practice, where she continues to serve as co-founding editor.

Jon Mann (editor) is an Adjunct Lecturer at Lehman College, a Senior Contributor at Artsy, and a lecture contributor and editor at Art History Teaching Resources and Art History Pedagogy and Practice.

Like Antin and Lacy, a number of female artists of the 1970s turned to body art and performance as a powerful way to assert artistic and individual agency. Inspired by the Feminist Movement, the pioneering work of Carolee Schneemann and Ana Mendieta finds a parallel in younger artists like Cindy Sherman, Catherine Opie, Lorna Simpson, and Janine Antoni, who combine their use of the body with photography and other media to explore ideas of gender and sexuality.

The Body in Art

The body appears as a key theme in much art of the late 20^th century for artists interested in issues of identity, physical perception, and human interaction. Marina Abramovic‘s work Rhythm 0 (1974) and the works of Bruce Nauman demonstrate how artists explored these ideas through a broad range of media and forms that remained grounded in the artist’s, and/or the viewer’s, physical experience. Ann Hamilton, Matthew Barney, and Tim Hawkinson demonstrate how contemporary artists have expanded on these ideas by staging elaborate installations and addressing the increasing role of technology to augment bodily sensation and perception.

In the 1970s, the body became central to essentialist feminist thought, which distinguishes women’s experience according to female biological characteristics. Artists involved with the Woman’s Art Program at California Institute of the Arts celebrated women with art that highlighted female domestic roles and taboo subjects as menstruation in their landmark exhibition Womanhouse. Works like Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–9) raised awareness of women’s significant cultural and historical contributions by validating the importance of women’s domestic life and social networks and rejecting fine art practices in favor of ceramic painting, embroidery, weaving, and other craft arts traditionally done by women.

Feminism & Art | Art History Teaching Resources

Alice J. Walkiewicz (author) is a Ph.D. Candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has taught at Parsons School of Design since 2011 and the Pratt Institute since 2013. She specializes in nineteenth-century European and American art, and her dissertation explores the intersection of gender, labor, and art in the late nineteenth century.

Amy Raffel (editor) is a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has a Master’s degree in Contemporary Art history from the Institute of Fine Arts (NYU) and has taught Introduction to Modern Art as a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Lehman College since 2010. Currently, Amy is a genome contributor for Artsy and editor and contributor of Art History Teaching Resources.

Saisha Grayson-Knoth (author) is a PhD Candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center and an Assistant Curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

Kaegan Sparks (editor) is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Publication Associate in Critical Anthologies at the New Museum, New York.

When Judy Chicago became an art professor, she decided to work with a group of female students to investigate questions such as: what would a woman’s art look like if she wasn’t trying to make it look like a man’s? How do we build a visual language of our own, when the entire history of art, the entire range of visual culture has been defined by and organized around the ideals and achievements of men? Why have women’s creative work and the mediums available to them—tapestry and textile, ceramics and pottery, and other crafts—been demeaned, and can we bring them into the high art classification? And why does history only consider individual achievement, focusing always on lone producers and innovative sudden creation, instead of communal, traditional, and evolutionary achievements building on continual progress through the work of many? (This is a more accurate understanding of historical movements, after all.)

So after creating the Feminist Art Program at California State University, Fresno in 1970, Chicago started to work on a project in 1974 that would seek not only to revise the male-centric Western canon, but to challenge many of the values that went along with it. The Dinner Party uses “central core” imagery instead of phallic forms to unify the table and the plates. The work was produced by a community, with many hands and helpers involved, and showcases crafts associated with women’s work.

Not only a massive artistic undertaking, it was an intense historical research project that helped uncover and share knowledge about over 1,000 women whose stories had been lost. Remember, this was before Google, so finding each name and information on these women was more than a click away—and yet, in early 2014, the Brooklyn Museum sponsored a special Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon to add many of the women from The Dinner Party to Wikipedia. The most common source for quick knowledge on a subject, Wikipedia is created by volunteer submissions and each article requires easily sourced materials, meaning the site often reproduces the biases of traditional histories and the volunteer-editors, who are predominantly male.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills #7 and #21, 1978, Black and white photographs

(More about this project is here, and a Smarthistory essay is here.)

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (We Won’t Play Nurture to Your Culture), 1983, and Untitled (We Don’t Need Another Hero), 1987, Photostats

(Further discussion is here and a good overview and images are here.)

Similarly, Barbara Kruger’s iconic red and white posters use the visual language of marketing and magazine design to counter the very ideas it is usually used to promote—consumerism, power relations, stereotypical gender roles, the cult of individual achievement, autonomy, and upward mobility—which mark the American ethos, especially during the revived conservatism of the Ronald Reagan years. Having worked as head designer for Mademoiselle magazine, Kruger subversively tweaks the combination of familiar (often nostalgic-seeming), found black-and-white images and slogan-style text bars which are typically used to aggressively sell products but also calibrated to subliminally sell ideas about who you are as a reader, audience, consumer, etc. Kruger makes clear the way advertising asks us to position ourselves in relation to the ideas it is selling by always using ambiguous personal pronouns (we, you, they, us) in her texts. This means that the “We” in “We don’t need another hero” is determined by the imagination or inclination of the person reading it. Is the “We” spoken by the little girl in pigtails, by women as a category, by all people who read the poster, by all anti-heroes? Who is the “You” in “We won’t play nature to your culture”? Whose culture and why is it separate from nature? Who would be asked to play nature and do you include yourself in that group or the other?

summarize strategies, subjects, mediums, and theoretical approaches found in the works covered in class.

Martha Rosler’s Martha Rosler Reads Vogue

Bodytracks Timeline

Cindy Sherman’s multiyear project Untitled Film Stills consists of almost a hundred photographs, each of which appears to be a still from a movie featuring a lone female protagonist. What information can we gather from each image? What do we think we know about these women? What about the movies they are in? Why do we think we can make these guesses? The clichéd nature of these images remind us that the outward signs we are reading—clothing, poses, lighting, framing—are legible because they are familiar, shared by our social conditioning. Therefore, just as publicity stills can rely on these signs to tell audiences what to expect, we as individuals learn and then position ourselves in relation to these kinds of signs, or performances of personality. This performance, and its flexibility and manipulability, are made clear by the fact that Sherman was the model for all 80+ of the images—doing her makeup and costuming and setting her stages so that she could be thoroughly convincing as each and every one of these women in entirely fictional and unrealized film projects.

By showing the same person, these are “self portraits” of the artist, but without ever showing the “real” Cindy Sherman, they call the idea of a stable, set, “real” individual into question. Andy Warhol, who had his own critique of media culture, famously said in a 1966 interview, “I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real starts.” Here we see the impossibility of constructing an authentic identity outside of all of the artificial images that we are fed, which provide models of womanhood, American-ness, whiteness, success, seduction, etc. that we use to construct identity.

Constructs and Performances of Masculinity and Femininity

the context of American culture just before feminism gained momentum. On one hand, the 1950s and 60s in America had perhaps some of the most rigid ideas of what was appropriate and acceptable behavior for each gender since the Victorian era, and in post-war America, the rise of TV and mass media culture allowed those ideals to be naturalized and widely disseminated, regardless of how attainable or true they might be to people’s actual experience

. For example, the idea that all women could or should be happy housewives was a powerful message across the nation, despite the fact that women had proved capable of working in a variety of fields during WWII, and that poor women and women of color were never really factored into this fantasy of femininity.

At the same time that people’s expectations and experiences were being highly policed according to gender, the values of high art were focused on the universal, transcendent potential of abstraction—the idea, as we talked about in relation to Abstract Expressionism, that art was meant to be a purely visual medium, only about itself and its own potential for innovation, and as such an expression of human creativity, freedom, and existence in abstract and universal terms. Art “about” something specific was seen as trivial and the implication was clear that those who weren’t moved by abstract art were just not culturally evolved enough to appreciate it, rather than that it might not be as relevant for some people’s experiences as for others’.

Action Paintings: the canvas as an “arena on which to act.” In Pollock’s context all of these interpretations were cast in the most masculine terms—bravery, facing the abyss, attacking an opponent (notice it isn’t a stage for dancing, but an arena, like a boxing match). The next generation of artists would be inspired by the idea of the body itself becoming part of the work, or the medium of art itself, but feminist artists in particular would focus on the performance of the body as not just any body, but always a gendered body that is read differently, expected to have certain qualities and behaviors, and therefore bound to interact, perform in, and experience the world differently. This fact that the artist’s body plays a part in his/her work, as well as the idea of art as a performance rather than an object, are taken to their literal culmination in the series of photographs directed by artist Carolee Schneeman called Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions (1963).

Carolee Schneeman, Interior Scroll, 1977, Performance

(See here for further information.)

Carolee Schneeman, who trained and thinks about herself primarily as a painter, has continued to work in ways that blur the boundaries between static and durational formats.

Schneeman’s most widely reproduced work, Interior Scroll (1977), is a performance during which she unravels and reads a text from her vagina. Through the images alone, this piece seems to be very rooted in the experience of the body, about nature and fertility from the womb, but the text Schneeman reads has nothing to do with vaginas, wombs, or fertility, as you can see from the excerpt on the screen [perhaps ask students to read aloud, or the instructor can read aloud and ask for an interpretation/summary in response]. The text is really a snarky, pointed response to the gendered value systems of the art world, which may pose as neutral but were set up to privilege male voices and only allow women to speak if they agree to speak like men. Schneeman is challenging what seemed to her (and others) as the suspicious side-effect of Greenbergian Modernism and the minimalism and linguistic conceptualism that followed.

That is, the time when it was first possible for women and minorities to find voices in the larger culture and access the refined halls of high art conveniently coincided with a push for art to have no narrative, to be something purely aesthetic or conceptual about the nature of art, rather than the story of the artist; or to be entirely about the viewer<‘s interpretation of an abstract, analytic proposition instead of reflecting the artist’s personal experience.

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964, Performance

(Extended discussion here, artist’s reflections here)

Vito Acconci, Following Piece, 1969, Performance

(Smarthistory essay here)

Performance became a favored medium for feminist artists because it was both new, without a long history that excluded them, like painting’s, but also because it always foregrounded the degree to which experience is based in bodies that are differentiated by gender, as well as race, class, and other such socially divisive categories. These two powerful performance pieces emerged at almost the same moment from what we might say was a gender-neutral interest in Conceptual Art, that is in making work using instructions as a way of relinquishing or limiting the artist’s control over the work.

Both investigate issues of control and ego as well as the relationship between the individual and others in a social/relational field, but in comparison also suggest oppositions such as passivity versus aggression. It is interesting that Acconci’s idea of giving up control looks like stalking, and Ono’s looks like submission.

The Personal is Political—and Art is Personal and Political

The Personal is Political—and Art is Personal and Political (whether it’s obvious or ideologically naturalized)

By investigating how different types of bodies have different experiences in the world, and lead to different interpretations and responses to artworks, feminist artists helped make visible the powerful insight of the slogan “The Personal is Political,” which was used widely by the Women’s Rights Movement. As women around the country came together to talk about what felt like isolated, private experiences—from sexual abuse to dissatisfaction with housework—that society tended to cast as individual failings on the woman’s part, they realized their “personal” problems were in fact widely shared, and politically structured aspects of society.

Likewise, women and minority artists started resisting the idea that art would only be valid if it wrestled with concepts that transcended the “personal,” especially if speaking of personal, but shared, experiences had the power to unite classes of people who felt isolated by the silence surrounding anything that differentiated their experience from the “universal.” For if art was to be important to people’s lives, shouldn’t it be able to address highly personalized and yet widely-shared experiences such as sexism and racism? If art was always appealing to the universal human, it was bound to ignore the specific challenges and exclusions placed on certain categories of humans. Also, the question was raised whether there was really anything universal and neutral in art related to mathematical logic or formal abstraction, since these were all areas that had been dominated by and played to the (socialized) strengths of upper class, white men. Maybe Minimalist sculpture was just as personal for the men making it—speaking to the industrial towns they came from, their technical training and fondness for engineering, spare aesthetics, and a denigration of emotionality.

Adrian Piper, Mythic Being: Cruising White Women #1 of 3, 1975, Photograph of performance
Adrian Piper, My Calling Card #1, 1986, Lithograph

The personal is political – Wikipedia

her feminist manifesto, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, in 1970

Verso (versobooks.com)

Shulamith Firestone. The Women’s Rights Movement in the U.S.A. 1968 (marxists.org)

Biography: Shulamith Firestone – Activist – The Heroine Collective

The Dialectic of Sex was a bestseller and therefore attracted a lot of attention within the women’s liberation movement, but due to the radical proposals within it, it received negative attention from the media. Following the publication of The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith left political activism and took up painting. In 1987, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and she was repeatedly hospitalised over the following years. She found support in her friends and published her second book Airless Spaces, a collection of short stories on mental illness and poverty, in 1998.

Shulamith Firestone died in Manhattan in 2012 at age 67. At her funeral, her sister Tirzah Firestone ended her eulogy with a fitting epitaph: “Shulie was a model for Jewish women and girls everywhere, for women and girls everywhere. She had children — she influenced thousands of women to have new thoughts, to lead new lives. I am who I am, and a lot of women are who they are, because of Shulie.”

If Men Could Menstruate, by Gloria Steinem, at MUM

If Men Could Menstuate by Gloria Steinem (haverford.edu)

Gloria Steinem: “If Men Could Menstruate” – Madame Gandhi | BLOG

Female Hero’s Journey

Transpersonal Tidbits: Joseph Cambell’s The Hero’s Journey: Summary of the Steps & A Large Collection of Monomyths | | The RunningFather Blog (wordpress.com)

In Mythic Being (great article on this here), Piper overidentifies with the role most feared by the art world—instead of being the token, unthreateningly pretty, light-skinned African-American girl, she would show up as a revolutionary-looking, urban black man with an Afro.

Piper did performances dressed as the Mythic Being, going to gallery openings, dancing at the bus stop, and walking the streets muttering lines from her diary to herself over and over. In Cruising White Women (1975), she performs the stereotype at the root of the racist fear of black men on the sexual prowl for white women, and returns it as commentary.

And what could be more personal—both the way people are type-cast and judged by their appearances, and the reactions of the traditional gallery-going audience to the eruption of politics in their pristine white spaces?

In a later work, Piper again used artistic intervention as a tool for combating her real-world experiences with racism and sexism, producing “calling cards” that she would hand out discretely in social situations, which call people out on racist or sexist behavior.

Martha Rosler, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (Giacometti), 1967–72, Photomontage
Martha Rosler, Body Beautiful or Beauty Knows No Pain (Cargo Cult), 1967–72, Photomontage

(Further discussion here; overview/review of artist’s retrospective here.)

So “The Personal is Political” can mean that our personal experiences, and the world that shapes them, is inherently and overtly political, and it can be the ground for political movements and the reason for political change (as in the Women’s Rights Movement, seeking political responses to women’s inequality). But “The Personal is Political” also means that each of us, as an individual, exists in a political nexus, acts as an economic, social, political being, and is part of the body-politic that acts on our behalf—whether in local or international matters. In the context of the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement, the Women’s Movement, and the counter-culture, sexual liberation, and leftist politics of the 60s and 70s, “The Personal is Political” also meant that the micro-level choices each of us make on a daily basis are unavoidably political at macro-level, and need to be examined. As feminist art pushed against abstraction to re-introduce subject matter and overt political critique into work, the critique of sexism could be seen in relation to other kinds of political critique.

The late 1960s and early 1970s magazine collages of Martha Rosler center around American capitalism and the degree to which desire, as guided by mass media imagery from magazines, TV, film, and advertising, drives consumption. On the one hand, this system helps create and then profit from our pursuit of restrictive, highly gendered, and generally unattainable social ideals. On the other, it necessitates the aggressive economics of globalization and spurred the politics of the Cold War, in which any country (like Vietnam) that didn’t accept American economic imperialism would face American military imperialism.

The question of how one could see such images of carnage, however, from the comfort and safety of the American home and not be moved to action is one that these collages seem to ask but are unable to answer.

On the right, the beauty rituals of perfect white models are pasted onto shipping containers being loaded by dark-skinned men from places far away onto cargo ships, linking capitalism’s success in focusing women on the relentless pursuit of physical perfection with the relentless pursuit of cheaper labor markets in the third world.

History, Myth, and Narration—Deconstructed and Reconstructed

what are the subjects or issues raised by this work? What are the goals it pursues? How does the form of the work, the mediums and iconography used, and the method of display relate to its subjects and its goals?

To give historical context, remind students that this was before women’s studies classes, at a time when one of Chicago’s college professors felt comfortable declaring that women had made no important contributions to history, and when the best compliment most art teachers would bestow on their female students was that they “paint so well, [one] can’t tell a woman did it.”

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This class will look at how feminist thinking has impacted the arts—both by looking at the work of women artists influenced by these ideas since the 1960s, and by considering how a feminist lens can change the way we look at art made throughout history, and even the category of art itself.

Chronologically, “Feminist Art,” a category of art made by women consciously aligning their art practices with the politics of the Women’s Rights Movement and feminist theory, emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Consider past material covered with the class—how have women appeared within the course? As subjects mostly, as patrons occasionally, and very infrequently as artists, writers, or figures of power. How much have we learned about the lives and impact of women throughout history from online resources used over the semester, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Timeline of Art History or the BBC’s The History of the World in 100 Objects? Why might that be?

all of human history looks to the stereotype of a professor or scientist, visually suggesting the women and minorities were unlikely candidates to fill either role.

Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ARTnews (January 1971), 22–39, 67–71.

Griselda Pollock, “Feminist Interventions in the Histories of Art” (1988), in Eric Fernie, ed., Art History and Its Methods (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 296–313.

Anna Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts 64:5 (January 1990), 44–63.

he Brooklyn Museum’s Curatorial Overview for Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party

Blake Gopnik’s review of the exhibition WACK!

Nancy Spero, Kara Walker, and Kiki Smith, and museum-produced videos, like this great interview with Wangechi Mutu

the uncut interviews used for !Women Art Revolution, are hosted by Stanford and perfect for crafting a class report/research assignment

Tate’s recently posted “Where are the Women?” featuring Girls star and aspiring painter Jemima Kirke.

Deconstruction: a method of critical analysis of philosophical and literary language that emphasizes the internal workings of language and conceptual systems, the relational quality of meaning, and the assumptions implicit in forms of expression. (via Merriam-Webster)

Feminist art: work that is rooted in the analyses and commitments of contemporary feminism and that contributes to a critique of the political, economic and ideological power relations of contemporary society. It is not a stylistic category nor simply any art produced by women. (via Grove Art Online)

Historical revisionism: the reinterpretation of orthodox views on evidence, motivations, and decision-making processes surrounding a historical event. Though the word “revisionism” is sometimes used in a negative way, constant revision of history is part of the normal scholarly process of writing history. (via Wikipedia)

Performativity: an interdisciplinary term often used to name the capacity of speech and gestures to act or consummate an action, or to construct and perform an identity. Performativity reverses the idea that an identity is the source of more secondary actions (speech, gestures). Instead, it inquires into the construction of identities as they are caused by performative actions, behaviors, and gestures. Performativity problematizes notions of intention and agency; it complicates the constitution of gender and subjects. (via Wikipedia)

Postmodernism: a host of late-twentieth century movements, many in art, music, and literature, that react against Modernist tendencies and are typically marked by revival of historical elements and techniques. Postmodernism is often associated with deconstruction and post-structuralism because its usage as a term gained significant popularity at the same time as twentieth-century post-structural thought. (via Wikipedia)
Feminism first manifested in the arts as a sudden eruption of questions and criticism—an awakening among women artists, writers, and thinkers who believed they had serious grounds upon which to challenge the notion that women were naturally less talented, less motivated, or less interested/interesting than men. Instead they argued that women had been systematically and structurally kept from paths of achievement, but also that even when they overcame those limitations, their achievements were in other ways co-opted, ignored, or erased; and finally, that the notion of achievement was itself relative and defined by male values.

black/female art

Gender in Nineteenth-Century Art | Art History Teaching Resources

issues of gender—masculine and feminine

the nineteenth century had very strong (and pervasive) ideas about how a “man” or a “woman” should behave. Men belonged to the public sphere, in the realms of politics, commerce, religion, and academia. They should be physically strong and serve as the breadwinners of their families. Women, on the other hand, belonged to the private sphere, raising the family and caring for the home, and should be delicate and demure.

Defining Gender Roles

Jacques-Louis David. In works like Oath of the Horatii (1785) or The Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons for Burial (1789), David clearly illustrates the gender roles of the time: men are energetic, muscular, and heroic, while women are soft, fragile, and emotional. Moreover, David underlines this division through his clear, ordered composition by physically separating the genders so that the women slump over, weep, and mourn on one side of the painting, while the men take charge and prepare for battle or deal with the difficult decisions of a leader on the other.

In a somewhat less dramatic way, Edwin Landseer conveys similar ideas about the roles of men versus women in his Windsor Castle in Modern Times (1841-45).

Victoria plays the role of the modest and devoted wife and Prince Albert the virile, bread-winning husband (with his recent kill scattered about his feet).

Female Artists

In contrast to their male counterparts, bourgeois women could either stay home or venture out in select public spaces only if accompanied by a proper chaperone. Because of these restrictions, female artists had fewer experiences to draw from than their male colleagues. Griselda Pollock’s landmark essay “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” discusses the way that contemporary gender roles impacted the subject matter depicted by the female versus male Impressionist artists. As Pollock points out, social restrictions prevented female Impressionist artists like Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt from being able to attend the new nighttime entertainment spots that occupied their male colleagues, like the café-concert or the cabaret.

Pollock provides two grids in which she outlines the various venues that frequently appear in Impressionist paintings, the types of women/occupations often represented, and the artists who depict them, divided into two columns, male and female.

Women started to push back against their prescribed gender roles toward the end of the nineteenth century, and called for more liberty and socio-political rights. As female gender roles began to change, the figure of the New Woman—an educated, independent career woman—emerged. Many men were wary of the New Woman and the autonomy she demanded. They lashed back against this early form of feminism with warnings of the dangerous power of women, and depictions of the femme fatale, or a dangerous, evil woman, in art and popular culture.

Women were not only limited in the spaces they could inhabit, they were also limited in their educational opportunities—especially in terms of art production. Before the French Revolution of 1789, the French Academy limited the number of female admissions to four, and following the Revolution, women were then excluded from the Academy until 1897. As Linda Nochlin outlines in her canonical essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” women were expected to restrict themselves to the polite arts of flower and porcelain painting and were denied access to nude models because it was deemed improper—especially if the model was male. This exclusion severely impacted female artists’ ability to effectively execute large figural paintings and compete on the same level as their male colleagues. Nochlin’s essay is an important feminist art-historical text, largely because it moves beyond the early impulse to uncover forgotten female artists and approaches the discussion of female artists from another perspective. By admitting that there actually haven’t been any “great women artists,” Nochlin examines why that is and what prevented female artists from becoming “great.”

Gender and the Nude

“masculinity” versus “femininity,”

Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

Griselda Pollock’s “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity.”

Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne. New York: Phaidon, 1970.

D’Souza, Aruna and Tom McDonough, editors. The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008.

Garb, Tamar. “Berthe Morisot and the Feminizing of Impressionism.” In Readings in Nineteenth-Century Art, 230-46. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996.

_______. “Gustave Caillebotte’s Male Figures: Masculinity, Muscularity and Modernity.” In Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France, 25-53. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998.

_______. “Painterly Plenitude: Pierre-August Renoir’s Fantasy of the Feminine.” In Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France, 144-177. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998.

Nochlin, Linda. “Issues of Gender in Cassatt and Eakins.” In Nineteenth-Century Art: A Critical History, 349-67. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1994.

_______. “Morisot’s Wet Nurse: The Construction of Work and Leisure in Impressionist Painting” In Women, Art, and Power: And Other Essays, 37-56. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988.

_______. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In Women, Art, and Power: And Other Essays, 145-78. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988.

Ockman, Carol. Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Pollock, Griselda. “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity.” In Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art, 70-127. New York: Routledge Classics, 1988.

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997.

Glossary:

Flâneur: literally a “stroller” or “lounger” in French. In the nineteenth century, a flâneur refers to a bourgeois man of leisure, who strolls around the city observing his surroundings. During this decade, the flâneur is the archetype of the urban modern male experience.
Femme Fatale: an attractive, mysterious, and dangerously seductive woman who will ultimately bring disaster to any man who becomes involved with her.
New Woman: a feminist; an educated, independent career woman. The New Woman was a feminist ideal that emerged in the late nineteenth century as a counterpoint to the traditional definition of woman as a demure homemaker dependent upon a man to care for her.

Suggested Images:

Defining Gender Roles:

Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1785
Jacques-Louis David, The Lictors Brining to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons for Burial, 1789
Edwin Landseer, Windsor Castle in Modern Times, 1841-45
Gustave Caillebotte, Boulevard Seen from Above, 1880
Gustave Caillebotte, Traffic Island on Boulevard Haussmann, 1880
Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877
Gustave Caillebotte, Le Pont de l’Europe, 1876
Édouard Manet, Masked Ball at the Opera, 1873
Édouard Manet, Concert in the Tuileries Gardens, 1862
Mary Cassatt, The Opera, 1877
Pierre-August Renoir’s The Loge, 1874
Mary Cassatt’s Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge, 1879
Berthe Morisot, The Cradle, 1872
Mary Cassatt, The Bath, 1891-92
Pierre-August Renoir, Maternity, 1885
Berthe Morisot, On the Balcony, 1872
Gustave Moreau, Salome Dancing before Herod, 1876
Fernand Khnopff, Caresses, 1896

Female Artists:

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Self-Portrait with Two Pupils, 1785
Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair, 1853
Rosa Bonheur, Plowing in the Nivernais, 1849
Gustave Courbet, White Bull and Blonde Heifer, 1850
Berthe Morisot, The Wet Nurse, 1880

Gender and the Nude:

Jacques-Louis David, Death of Socrates, 1787
Anne-Louis Girodet, The Sleep of Endymion, 1791
Jean Broc, The Death of Hyacinth, 1801
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Venus Anadyomene, 1808
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque, 1814
Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Large Bathers, 1887
Edgar Degas, The Tub, 1886
Paul Cezanne, Large Bathers, 1906
Gustave Caillebotte, Man at His Bath, 1884
Thomas Eakins, Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, 1871

Venus pudica – a term used to describe a classical figural pose in Western art. In this, an unclothed female (either standing or reclining) keeps one hand covering herself. The resultant pose is somewhat asymmetrical and often serves to draw one’s eye to the very spot being hidden. (via http://arthistory.about.com/cs/glossaries/g/v_venus_pudica.htm)
objectification – this term is often used in a general way to describe an emphasis on physical beauty and/or a dismissal of the objectified person’s full personality and attributes. Feminists have critiqued the process by which objectification denies the humanity of the “object,” for example images that treat women as sexual objects. A sex object may seem to exist only for the viewer’s gratification, without regard to any other mental, physical, or spiritual aspect of the person. (via http://womenshistory.about.com/od/sexualityandsex/a/Objectification.htm)
nudity / nakedness – this distinction was theorized by the art historian Kenneth Clark as a binary whereby nudity refers to a culturally transcendent and virtuous depiction of an unclothed body, while nakedness refers to an exposed, vulnerable, and embarrassing image of an unclothed body. In the convention of the reclining female nude in western art history, women are considered “nude” and thus morally suitable subjects of fine art.
male gaze – the male gaze is a concept coined by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey. It refers to the way visual arts are structured around a masculine viewer and describes a tendency in visual culture to depict the world and women from a masculine point of view (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_gaze)
odalisque – representations of a female slave or concubine in a harem, especially within the context of Orientalism as it developed among western artists such as Ingres and Delacroix in the nineteenth century.
Orientalism – a concept developed by the cultural critic Edward W. Said. It refers to a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates, and distorts differences of Arab peoples and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S.. It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous. (via http://www.arabstereotypes.org/why-stereotypes/what-orientalism)
racial fetishism – involves fetishizing a person or culture belonging to a race or ethnic group that is not one’s own. Therefore it involves racial/ethnic stereotyping and objectifying bodies and cultural practices that are stereotyped. In the history of art, racial fetishism is related to the concept of primitivism, a European art practice of borrowing visual forms from non-Western or prehistoric peoples, a practice central to the development of modern art.
- (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_fetishism and https://www.boundless.com/art-history/textbooks/boundless-art-history-textbook/europe-and-america-from-1900-1950-ce-36/european-art-223/picasso-primitivism-and-cubism-788-6925/)
Heternormative (via dictionary.com) – denoting or relating to a worldview that promotes heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexual orientation.
Queer (via urbandictionary.com) – originally pejorative for gay, now being reclaimed by some gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered persons as a self-affirming umbrella term. Caution, still extremely offensive when used as an epithet.
Transgender (via dictionary.com) – denoting or relating to a person whose self-identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender.
Intersectionality (via dictionary.com) – the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin 1972).
Anna Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power.” Arts Magazine (vol. 64 no. 5, January 1990): 44-63. http://faculty.winthrop.edu/stockk/contemporary%20art/Chave%20Minimalism.pdf
Whitney Davis, “Founding the Closet: Sexuality and the Creation of Art History.” Art Documentation 11 no. 4 (Winter 1992): 171-175.
Carol Duncan, “Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting” Artforum (December 1973), 30-39. (http://www.columbia.edu/itc/barnard/arthist/wolff/pdfs/week6_duncan.pdf)
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (Vintage, Reissue Edition 1990).
Sander Gilman, Sexuality: An Illustrated History (Echo Books + Media, Reprint, 2014).
bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation, 1992,reprint edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2015).
Amy K. Levin, Gender, Sexuality and Museums: A Routledge Reader (2010).
Alyce Mahon, Eroticism and Art (Oxford History of Art, 2007).
Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (1992, Routledge).
Edward-Lilly Smith, Sexuality in Western Art. (1991, Thames and Hudson).
Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983, University of Chicago Press, 2^nd edition, 1997).

Online resources:

Heilbrunn Timelines on the History of Art (Sex https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hi/hi_sex.htm.

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