JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID'S GENDERED IMAGERY.docx (original) (raw)

Gender complexity in Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon”: The precedent of the “Sleeping Hermaphroditus” sculpture

Boletín de Arte, 2024

This essay visually reinterprets details of the two central figures in Picasso's breakthrough, epochal painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), to propose that these bodies, long presumed female, also can be interpreted as «gender-flexible» and genderplural. Such a strategy is shown to be connected to Picasso's lifelong interest in bi-directional figures, as analyzed by Leo Steinberg. The connection is explored in depth with reference to Version B of Picasso's Women of Algiers series. All of this material is then recast as deriving from the precedent of the famous classical Sleeping Hermaphroditus sculpture, which Picasso likely saw at the Louvre and at the Prado (in its copy, commissioned by Velázquez), and as allusions in works by other artists. The essay concludes with speculations about reasons for this precedent not having been considered until now, and about its current implications. These include finding fresh and contemporary relevance in a canonical painting whose imagery and gender dynamics seem well known and have been deemed stereotypically regressive.

A Ruin: Jacques–Louis David’s Sabine women

Art History, 1997

Fre de rique Desbuissons Unfortunately, only a few things remain of the painting Sabine Women which Jacques-Louis David exhibited in 1799: a small number of descriptions, some commentaries and the painting, now kept in the Muse e du Louvre (plate 49). The exhibition of Sabine Women opened on 21 December 1799 at the Louvre. This private enterprise ± the first paying exhibition ever organized by an artist in France ± had benefited from government help in several ways: the loan of a studio for the completion of the painting, 1 a frame paid for by the administration (four thousand francs) 2 and even the space for the exhibition within the Louvre (the old meeting hall of the Acade mie d'Architecture which had been lying vacant since the society's dissolution in 1793): This room, reached by a staircase from the rue du Coq, is attractively decorated, and, even though it is usually divided by a mobile partition, it extends across the whole width of the pavilion [Pavillon Marengo], and, thanks to another room which is perpendicular to it at one end, receives light from the place de l'Oratoire on the north and from the courtyard of the Louvre on the south. 3 The first floor of the Pavillon Marengo, described in the nineteenth century by David's grandson, now contains the Louis XV and Cressent galleries of the De partement des objets d'art du Grand Louvre. The Sabine Women painting was placed in the meeting hall of the Acade mie which overlooked the Cour Carre and the room formerly reserved for the models was used as an antechamber. 4 In spite of the entrance fee (1,80 francs), the exhibition was a success; it closed at the end of May 1805, when the artists residing in the Louvre were expelled from the building. At the entrance, a leaflet written by David was distributed with the ticket. The text comprised three parts: a justification of the principle of a paying exhibition, an explanation of the exhibited painting's subject, and an argument in favour of the nudity of the figures. In the section dealing specifically with the mode of the exhibition the tone is defensive. The painter strives to legitimize a choice which would seem debatable to his contemporaries: a mercantile enterprise incurred academic disapproval aimed against any overt artistic commerce. A long list of justification gave the transaction undertaken by the artist (namely, to receive money in exchange for showing his work, like a street performer) an aspect of

The Mythic Feminine in Symbolist Art: Idealism and Mysticism in Fin-de-Siecle Painting

This is an early thesis examining the phenomenology of the image of the feminine in Symbolist Art. Much of the work here formed the foundation for later published papers including, 'Nature and the Ideal in Fernand Khnopff's Avec Verhaeren: Un Ange and Art, or the Caresses'. The framework of this study could still be a stimulus for further research into this neglected area of the field of Symbolist Art and its symbolism and iconography. The end chapter is a draft paper that suggests strong links with the Jungian perspective on the nature of the anima. There are many historical and intellectual links between the iconography of Symbolist Art and Jung's ideas that are worth exploring further.

‘Gender Images in Art’ (encyclopedia entry)

Jodi O’Brien (ed.), Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, 2 vols. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009)

It is difficult to imagine visual representations that do not evoke gender: portrayals of human beings and their interaction would be obvious examples of gender images in art, but landscape and still life also involve gendered positions, as embodied perspectives of gender-specific cultural experience, a gendered way of viewing the world and, possibly, a gendered aesthetic approach to its representation. The analysis of gender images in the visual arts and media has been a major concern in feminist and queer approaches to art history and cultural studies, and has shaped the practice of artists whose work is informed by gender politics. The following sections highlight some key moments in the history of gender-inflected discussions of visual representation, and examine how these have influenced feminist and queer strategies in the production of images.

Woman? Hermaphrodite? History Painter? On the Self Imaging of Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun

The Eighteenth Century Vol. 35, No. 1, 1994

In eighteenth-century France many believed that sexual desire and cultural role followed naturally from the naturally sexed body.1 Yet the naturally sexed body was itself created and policed by religion, philosophy, science, and so on, in accordance with cultural and political imperatives to maintain a particular reproductive economy and social order.2 Textual and visual images often worked to reinforce this order by establishing "Woman," the eternal feminine, as a norm for all women. Against this familiar ground I propose one woman's self portrayal as an image that challenges the simultaneous division and coherence of sex, desire, and gender forged in the "interest of society." That self portrayal was painted by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and shown at the Salon of 1783 where the artist presented herself as a history painter (Figure 1). For many contemporaries, a woman history painter was a contradiction in terms-a hermaphrodite. I approach this self-portrait first through analyzing Salon criticism and then through focusing the lens of recent feminist theory on the image. By reading this image from a position outside its contemporaneous gender ideology we can appreciate its violation of the fictional coherence of sex, sexuality, and gender posited by Lebrun's contemporaries. Some of this violation, I believe, the artist fully intended. In naming herself as a history painter Lebrun assumed a status reserved for intellectual, male artists. But the portrait crosses other boundaries as well. Whether Lebrun consciously intended or was even aware of these crossings is not at issue here. What matters is that they can be read from the painting's deployment of eighteenthcentury codes of visual representation. It is the significance of those crossings, and perhaps even their conceptualization as crossings, that are suggested by feminist thinking.

Subject to Diana: Picturing Desire in French Renaissance Art

At once a forbidden image and an object of desire, Diana embodies a series of questions about the representation of ideal beauty, and the tensions between chastity, desire, and the depiction of nudity. Beginning with the reign of Francis I [r.1515-47], but in particular during the reign of his son and successor Henri II [r.1547-59], images of Diana pervaded the French Renaissance court, and were produced in a variety of media. Whereas earlier studies have emphasized Diana as a role model exemplifying chastity and ideal courtly behavior, my study reassesses Diana’s significance for the French court in terms of intrinsically artistic concerns, such as patron identity, transference of motifs, shared imagery, and the emergence of a new style that defined French Renaissance art. This dissertation considers two major aspects that place the Diana iconography within a new context, while pointing to a set of underlying themes: namely, the symbolic association of Diana with the figure of the French king, a tradition that harks back to late-medieval manuscripts and royal hunting practices, and the connection between Diana and questions about artistic and intellectual production that emerged along with the new French aesthetics of the sixteenth century. Part I examines the allegorical hermeneutics of late-medieval manuscript traditions and their continuity into the Renaissance, in their association between chastity, hunting, knowledge, and the representation of nudity. Part II traces the development of sixteenth-century print culture and the recasting of mythological themes in sensual terms, by mapping the conflation between Diana and the Nymph of Fontainebleau. Based on a close reading of a painting by François Clouet, Part III probes the issues of representation underlying the numerous depictions of Diana and her nymphs while bathing, where nudity is simultaneously eroticized and moralized, thus returning to some of the interpretive problems discussed in Part I.

Writing//painting; l’écriture féminine and difference in the making

2013

This thesis critically interrogates the concept and practice of l’ecriture feminine as proposed by Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva to challenge phallocentric structures embedded in language and culture. It examines why abstraction has been so problematic for women and feminist artists and why, despite l’ecriture feminine being utilised in art practice it came to a standstill in the mid-1990s, ceasing to provide possibilities for women’s abstract painting. By using l’ecriture feminine as a ‘lens’ with which to see abstract painting, I have distilled particular aspects of it and put forward my own concept and practice of peinture feminine to move on from these problematics. I demonstrate that whilst the historicity of Modernist abstraction is embedded in abstract painting, it is not bound by rigid and fixed structures and conventions and these are not phallocentric per se. Peinture feminine as defined here reconceptualises abstract painting as a spatiality comprising m...