Gender and Art

This part of the course is mainly concerned with the role of women and femininity in art, but it is also important to consider the role of gender in its entirety. The role of women in art as artists and models has reflected their role in society. The depiction of women and femininity in sculpture and painting has often focused on female sexuality and from a masculine or male point of view. Feminist histories of art from the 1960s have led to much debate concerning the representation of sexuality in all aspects of visual culture.

Gill Perry (DVD, course material) discuses the traditional role of women as models, subjects - objects (of 'the gaze') and femininity in allegorical and symbolic images and public sculptures.

The male gaze is summarized by Margaret Olin as a long ardent look...concerning pleasure and knowledge (which are generally displaced by it) in the service of power, manipulation and desire (quoted by Gill Perry on p27, book 3).

John Borneman (in the London Review of Books, December 18th, 2008) refers to the gaze in her discussion of the muslim veil: 'Today young middle class girls all over the world seek to look adult and attractive; they wear make-up, super-tight jeans, mini skirts and push-up bras...I see the same thing in Aleppo, Damascus and Beirut, except that sometimes the girls also wear the hijab and cover their hair. When the enhanced visibility of the body is accompanied by by a head covering, I suspect that many men project, consciously or not, an image of a glamourous western women onto the women behind the veil. The veil, in short, heighten's men's fantasies about women, making it easier to perceive them as a generic category of desirable object. The more that is hidden or concealed, the greater the spur to the imagination of the viewer. (The analysis of Allen Jones' work in course book 3 draws on the psychology of fetishism and the roles of the conscious and unconscious mind in this connection.)

In France, the Stasi Commission report found that many young muslim women in France wore head covering to avoid sexual harrassment in public. Anne Phillips in Multiculturalism 'without 'Culture, Princeton University, 2009, says that where the law (as in France) operates a blanket prohibition, it means that no young woman is to be permitted to wear a head-scarf to school because some are being pressured to do so. Should women have the right to choose?

The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie by Malu Halasa & Rana Salam, Chronicle Books, 2008 is attractively presented; it contains revealing but not intrusive interviews and several photographs introducing the reader (and viewer) to a wealth of extremely racy lingerie to be found openly in the city souks. It provides an account of the commercial transactions that take place between mainly male shop-keepers and women out to buy for themselves or their daughters for example.

The Sleep of Endymion, 1791, by Anne-Louis Girodet. The painter presents the radiant body of Endymion to the viewer. He painted it seven years after Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii with its stentorian males and supine females (discussed on pp108-9 in the course book) which clearly shows the polarisation of gender roles in the French Academy in the 18th century, and yet Endymion's languid body compares with the bodies of David's women and with the way women, real or mythical, were depicted generally.

The hierarchy of painting genres as set out for the Académie Française by André Félibien in 1669 in indisputably gendered terms, from the intrinsic masculinity of History painting down to the lesser and more domestic feminine genre of Still-life, endured right until the modern era in the mid 19th century when there was a gradual break with the academic tradition. Nevertheless, the issue of gender continued to have the effects of social type-casting and of restricting women to certain kinds of subject matter and to the less 'weighty' decorative arts until well into the post-war period.

In the Women's Art Journal (Fall 2005/Winter 2006) Heidi Strobel discusses 18th century female artists other than Kauffman & Moser in England and Vigée-Lebrun & Labillee Guiard in France, in her article on patronage and 'matronage'. Matronage is also discussed in relation to Lavinia Fontana in another article in the same issue of this magazine.

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Grayson Perry, a Turner Prize winner, is one contemporary artist who has broken the old gender conventions both in his work as a potter (recognised as high art by the Turner Prize team) and by the way he dresses as a transvestite.

(I can't help wondering what kind of male clothing women would have to wear to be actually described as transvestites, because there are a number of women writers and artists, past and present, who have dressed in an obviously masculine way. It seems ironical that this part of the course covers the attention art historians and critics have paid to the physical appearance of women artists.)

When I read Linda Nochlin's essay 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? ' in the course reader Art And Its Histories, Ed. Steve Edwards, where she questions the notion of a distinct feminine (or masculine) style, in addition to her other examples I was reminded of the similarity in the styles of Dante Rossetti and Evelyn de Morgan, especially in the way they painted women's lips!

Also in the reader (IBID), in relation to men and women's taste, there's an interesting extract from Mrs Mary Haweis's authorititive primer of taste ,The Art of Decoration. Clarence Cook also wrote The House Beautiful in 1881, and Edith Wharton co-wroteThe Decoration of Houses in 1897 on interior design, which criticised excessive ornament (associated with femininity).

The reader (IBID) contains a piece from Jacqueline Rose's Sexuality in the Field of Vision, in which she refers to Sigmund Freud's psychanalysis of Leonardo da Vinci, which arguably reveals more about Freud than Leonardo. It's now known that confusions in Freud's Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, published originally in German in 1910, arose from questionable etymology connecting the ancient Egyptian mut (vulture in English) with the German mutter (mother) and the mistranslation from the Italian original nibio (kite) into German as geier affected Freud's premise that Leonardo's extraordinary early memory of an encounter with a vulture revealed an unconscious homosexual fantasy. According to research used by Freud vultures were considered female and impregnated by the wind by the ancient Egyptians. Freud was also attracted to the idea that a vulture's outline could be seen in Mary's clothing in his Virgin, Child, Anne and John the Baptist, evidence of an unconscious projection. He also notes the apparent fusion of the figures of saints Anne and Mary, reminding us of Leonardo's affections for two maternal figures in his own life as confirmed by documents in the Museo Ideale in Vinci, Tuscany.

I don't know what Clement Greenberg had to say about the work of Helen Frankenthaler (does anyone know?) but Abstract Expressionism has been presented as a masculine enterprise. The 1960s saw the advent of Pop Art thereby setting the scene for a homophobic clash with the likes of Warhol, Johns and Rauschenberg who 'couldn't paint', especially not in the anguished way that was the mark of genius. Pop Art was too popular and mass production (viz Warhol's factory) posed a threat to that individualty and genius. Prevailing art history suggests that no such threat was posed.

For students interested in the political organisation of women towards the end of the Second Empire, when Manet painted Olympia, Courbet The Origin of the World, when Proudhon in his Pornocratie argued that sexual equality would lead to the disappearance of marriage and subsequent economic independence for women, which would inevitably lead to prostitution, then there is a website to visit: www.commune1871.org

I have found the lines of Alexander Pope's apparently misogynistic Epistle to a Lady, penned in 1735 and referred to in Book 1, Academies, Museums and Canons of Art:

Men, some to business some to pleasure take

But every woman is at heart a rake;

men, some to quiet some to public strife,

But every lady would be queen for life.

Gunta Stolzl rose to the ranks of the Bauhaus teaching staff in the early 1920s, but meanwhile it had been decided that the number of female applicants should be limited to one third of the total number, and that they should be directed towards the weaving department leaving both fine art and the technologically orientated architecture and furniture to men. Her subsequent downfall was prompted by the revelation that she had been living with a Jewish architect, Arieh Sharon, who fathered her oldest daughter Monika Stadler who now lives in Holland. From Stolzl's diaries owned by her daughter, it is clear that she suspected Kandinsky of denouncing her in a letter to the authorities at Dessau.

In the mid 19th century the financial worth of art and craft, including what we would now refer to as design, was given a great deal of consideration in relation to the national economy. In Gender and Art, case study 7, you can see how Owen Jones called for artists, manufacturers and the public to be better educated in his The Grammar of Ornament, written in 1856. This was largely aimed at middle-class women seen as home-makers and consumers of 'ornamental art'. There had been a rethink concerning the arts in political and economic terms following the Great Exhibition of 1852. The government Department of Practical Art was established to administer art education including responsibility for museums. This became the Department of Science and Art under the Board of Trade a year later, then moving to join the Education Department in 1856. This reflects the importance attached to art in terms of education and training and as a trading asset. It is interesting to trace the changes in ministerial responsibility for the arts and more broadly for culture from this time to the present day. Art For All? Their Policies and Our Culture, Ed. M.Warnock & M.Wallinger provides a fascinating read, bringing us further up to date with various opinions from Kingsley Amis to Arthur Scargill to Chris Smith on more recent governments' arts policies,

In British art colleges, now usually art faculties in universities, there have been great changes in the ratio of male/female students in the various specialisms since the early 1970s when I was an art student at Hornsey. In relation to issues discussed in Gender and Art I think it's interesting that in the year 2009-10 approximately 62% of the total art students graduating from Brighton University were female. Females graduating in that former male bastion of fine art painting amounted to 47%, whereas in sculpture it was 66%, while in 3D females amounted to approximately 80%. In photography it was approximately 70%. In textiles/fashion approximately 95% were female and in illustration 60%. The only areas in which male students formed a small majority were architecture (52% male) and quite large majorities in graphics (77%) and digital music (80%). Additional statistics which are of interest in relation to Book 5, Views of Difference: Different Views of Art, concern overseas students i.e. foreign students able to afford very expensive fees. These students constituted approximately 18% of total art graduates. 35% of architecture students were from overseas and 25% of graphics students. Another point of interest that relates marginally to the final part of the course, Book 6, Contemporary Cultures of Display, concerns the extent of sponsorship and involvement in the art faculty.

In Lisa Tickner's thoroughly researched and annotated examination of the 1968 Hornsey College of Art sit-in of 1968, Hornsey 1968, The Art School Revolution, Frances Lincoln publishers, 2008, she considers the roles of women as students and staff members in the art educational climate being negotiated at the time. In 1968 there were 1,772 men studying Fine Art and 1169 women; Graphics, 920 men and 704 women; Fashion & Textiles, 137 men and 887 women; 3D design, 835 men and 508 women; while women outnumbered men on the pre-graduate Foundation course. Tickner also quotes Griselda Pollock, '(art schools were bastions) of "reactionary ideas about art, teaching, self-expression and above all individualism...positions sustained by these ideas (were) difficult if not impossible for women to adopt without some severe distortion or negation of aspects of their particularity as persons" (p97 note72 and p99).'

In 17th century Holland a few female artists worked in the still-life genre, especially the sub-genre of flower painting, considered eminently suitable for the fairer sex. Clara Peeters is mentioned in Gender and Art, case study 2. There was also Maria Merian, Maria van Oosterwyck and Rachel Ruysch. The latter was given more prominence than her painter husband by Johan van Gool, the 18th century biographer of Dutch artists. She was apparently still painting in her eighties. This painting used to be in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich until 1938 when it was sold, apparently because the Nazis were suspicious of Rachel's Jewish sounding name. They were seemingly unaware that 17th century Calvinists were keen readers of the Old Testament.

Vase of Flowers by Rachel Ruysch, 1687, oil on canvas, 47 X 40 cm, Ashmolean Museum. Oxford

The artistic careers of many women married to or closely associated with male artists have not developed. Despite the undoubted disadvantages of lack of encouragement, low expectations and critical bias women have been faced with until comparatively recently in western society, it cannot of course be assumed that they all deserved more recognition than they received. Some examples of women artists whose efforts have been obscured by more successful husbands are: Josephine Nivison Hopper (wife of Edward), Hilda Carline (first wife of Stanley Spencer), Lee Krasner (partner of Jackson Pollock).

Two Paris based female artists committed suicide soon after their husbands' or partners' deaths. Jeanne Hébuterne killed herself after hearing of Modigliani's death in 1920; and Georgette Agutte, Fauve painter and only woman to attend the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, killed herself in 1922 immediately after te death of her husband, former socialist minister, Marcel Sembat.

The first part of the course talks a lot about the ideal male form in the classical tradition. One of the earliest stories concerning the idealisation of women is Ovid's 'Pygmalion' who prayed to Venus not for the statue to be his wife but for a wife like his statue. (The story provides many facets to explore: As he initially narcissistically loves the sculptural object before it changes into a woman he is in love with his own artistic ability. When the object is brought to life it or she is no longer an artistic marvel.) Further reading can be found in RAMUS, Vol 20, No1, 1991.

Cindy Sherman has said she prefers to be thought of as an artist than as a photographer. The distinction is possibly valid because much of work doesn't simply consist of photographs of women (often herself) and objects or scenes with feminine associations, but is 'about' photographic representation of women etc, for example as in magazine centre-folds, B movies, fashion pics, pornographic magazines and old paintings.

The Body Shop displayed this poster below that put the dream of female physical 'perfection' into perspective. It carried the caption 'There are 3 billion women who don't look like supermodels and only eight who do.' I wonder how much effect it had.

The first (1960s) stage of feminism was opposed to the depiction of women in erotic terms, seeing it as exploitative and demeaning. I don't believe any self respecting artist or purveyor of images (in its broadest sense!) would admit to producing pornography because of its negative connotations, but erotic imagery is of course everywhere, and it cannot be assumed that women as a whole are unable and unwilling to enjoy erotic images of men and/or women. However, in order for work appearing outwardly as erotic to be taken seriously or humourously as art, it should arguably not be intended and indeed perceived to be an end in itself. I think it's interesting that sex, sexuality and sexual identity is no longer seen by so many people as fixed or immune to social and psychic construction. Furthermore, many female artists have entered this domain. Further reading can be found in Gender, Race and Class in the Media, Ed. Dines and Humez. Here, Kathy Myers in 'Towards a Feminist Erotica', suggests questions worth asking when producing or appraising images of women in the media: How is the image produced? Whose fantasy is being recorded? What is the power relationship between model and photographer? What is involved in the process of model selection? How will the image be distributed?

The National Gallery exhibition of Ed (now deceased) and Nancy Kienholz's installation 'Whore's Canal' (November 2009) features life-size figures of expressionless women posing in the windows of brothels, replicating Amsterdam's red light district. Nancy Kienholz said the work is for voyeurs and not against prostitution per se. The curator Colin Wiggins points out the numerous works in the gallery's permanent collection that represent such subjects as prostitution, incest, rape and even bestiality (viz Leda and the Swan by Michelangelo) that provide an appropriate context for this installation. For students on this course this in an opportunity to consider 'the gaze', but the critic Adrian Searle (Guardian, 18/11/09) opposes this exhibition, accusing the gallery of attempting to 'sex it up with contemporary art'. He describes it as 'squalid and depressing, the women (mannequins) as objects that elicit no sympathy, desire or compassion' (in contrast to the 17th century Dutch genre paintings at the National Gallery).

An exhibition at the Tate Modern 'Voyeurism,Surveillance & the Camera', summer 2010, featured among the other exhibits a series of photographs taken by Koshei Yoshiyuki in a Japanese park at night in 1979. This was a place where couples were making love and young men were looking on and even crawling towards them in order to touch the bodies without being noticed. Yoshiyuki behaved like the voyeurs but he was equipped with a small camera. A voyeur of voyeurs. When first shown the photographs were placed in a darkened room and exhibition visitors were given small flashlights to view them.

An interesting article by Dina Mirkin on the Mexican artist, Aurora Reyes, appeared in the Woman's Art Journal (Fall 2005/Winter 2006). She is less well known than her contemporaries such as Rivera, Orozco, Isquierdo, Tamayo and Kahlo. she was a committed teacher of art (a dangerous job in the 1930s) and became a member of the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (LEAR) in 1936. Despite setbacks connected to her female gender, associated with lack of strength and 'natural' lack of public (as opposed to domestic) spirit she completed public murals.

An article by Geraldine Bell (Observer, 6 June,2004) talks about some of the 'forgotten' sixties artists. Jann Haworth, former wife of Peter Blake, now Sir Peter, with whom she collaborated on the famous Sergeant Pepper's album cover (which was about fame wasn't it ?). She remembers one of her former tutors at the Slade telling her that the girls were only there to keep the boys happy. Her use of textiles (dismissed as women's work by Kenneth Tynan, amongst many others I dare say) in the sixties didn't help advance her status. She was apparently working on murals in Salt Lake City in 2004. However, it hasn't always been female artists who drew the short straw when working with their male partners or husbands. Peter Sedgley isn't a household name, although his former partner Bridget Riley is, or at least she's an artworld name thanks to her controversial eye-befuddling Op Art , imaculate studio and work as an art critic. In the sixties He was part of a group which included the late John Latham. One of the marks he made on the cityscape was the dotty tiles at Pimlico tube station. He was also involved with Riley and others in a big scheme 'Space' for acquiring studio space for artists in London' East End. He now works in Berlin. Frank Bowling, born in British Guyana, had his art education in Britain. He felt frustrated as a student at being pushed into producing the Afro-Caribbean kind of art that was expected of him. He didn't 'conform' and eventually moved to New York where he now works.

An exhibition in October 2006 at the soon to be expanded and refurbished Whitechapel Gallery in London's East End showed the work of two 20th century European surrealist artists for whom the world appeared to be an erogenous zone: Hans Bellmer and Paul Klossowski. Their work is interesting for its relation to fetishism and preoccupation with the female body.

Between 25 October 2007 and 2 March 2008 Esther Shalev-Gerz is exhibiting at the Queen's House, Greenwich. This is where Orazio Gentileschi, possibly assisted by his daughter Artemisia, painted Allegory of Peace and the Arts under the English Crown on the ceiling. It comprised a female figure of Peace surrounded by 23 other female holding objects symbolising astronomy, reason etc. The painting was later moved to Marlborough House. Shelev-Gerz's exhibition alludes to these 17th century allegories with sculptures and photographs of women who have inspired her.

The Singh Twins' exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from March 11th to June 20th, 2010.

An exhibition devoted to Camille Claudel, the female sculptor associated with Auguste Rodin but subsequently reappraised as a sculptor in her own right, took place in Sorgues, a town in the Vaucluse in Southern France, in the summer of 2011. For only 3€ there was a comprehensive introduction to the life and work of Claudel, the exhibition of work attributed to her and a 30 minute dramatised documentary on the life of this artist who had to spend her last three decades in a mental asylum near Avignon (it still exists but more as a hospital than an 'asylum'). It is a gruelling story which has been much written about. There is also a feature film on her life story starring Isabel Adjani and (not surprisingly) Gérard Depardieu.

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Can you trust the family with its name? Well, Paloma Picasso used the family name to promote perfume a few years ago. Now its the turn of Freda Kahlo, or rather her heirs. An article in The Guardian (26/11/05) reported on a row that has arisen from the decision by Freda's niece Isolda to launch Freda Kahlo Tequila. In answer to her critics, the niece has said "we are looking after Frida's image. We do it for Mexico, for the culture, so people know more about our traditions." Ah well it's all in the spirit (ha ha) of post-modernist enterprise.

22,000 documents, 5,000 photographs, 179 items of clothing, an X-ray of Freda Kahlo's broken back (caused in a bus crash) and a child-like puppet theatre have all recently been uncovered from behind a wall in the bathroom of her house 'La Casa Azul' (now a museum) in the southern suburbs of Mexico City. (July, 2007)

The Channel 4 TV series 'Art Shock' ran for four consecutive nights in the Middle of March (2006). Evidence of recent female incursions into such traditional bastions of male dominance as patronage, curatorship and the art market was discussed, as well as gender issues such as the attribution of essential femaleness to works by women artists. The series featured Maggi Hambling, Rachel Whiteread and the work of Freda Kahlo and Barbara Hepworth and was presented by the inimitable Tracey Emin who is, as she told viewers, facing a crossroads in her own career.

An article in the Guardian (May 31, 2009) by Henry Porter relates how Helen Gorrill had to apply to the police for their judgement on whether her work at Cumria University might be too offensive to exhibit. The administration at the University felt they should bring the police in rather than risk prosecution. Some of her work reverses gender stereotypes such as female submissiveness by depicting males in positions of sexual subjugation.

Rozsika Parker died on November 5, 2010. She joined Spare Rib, the feminist magazine, in 1972. In 1981 she co-wrote Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology , Routledge, with Griselda Pollock, and in 1984 she wrote The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, Women's Press.

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Anna Lea Merritt, Henry Tuke, George Bellows, Christian Schad, Hilda Carline, Dorothea Tanning, Dora Carrington, Freda Kahlo, Jacques Herold, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Annette Messager, Balthus, Elizabeth Frink, Melanie Monchot, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville, Liza Lou, Grayson Perry, Dorothy Cross, Paula Rego, The Singh Twins

The Trouble with Beauty, Wendy Steiner, Heinemann, 2001, looks at romanticist, modernist and postmodernist attitudes to classical ideas of female and male beauty in art. In it, she examines Mary Shelley's 'horrified response' to Kantian aesthetics in Frankenstein.

Germaine Greer's book The Boy, published in 2003, opens up the subject of a 'female' gaze.

In Bathers, Bodies, Beauty, Harvard, 2006, Linda Nochlin confronts those issues posed in representations of the female body in particular, in the art of the impressionists, modern masters and contemporary realists.

The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie, Malu Halasa & Rana Salam, Chronicle Books, 2008.