“Are You Qualified?,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (special issue: What is the Woman Artist Today?) v. 41 n. 8 (November 2012): 891-903. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Genius and gender: Women artists and the female nude 1870-1920
British Art Journal (Volume XIX, 3), 2019
This article considers examples of female nudes produced by women artists between 1870 and 1920 in the light of their artistic training, with particular reference to the life-class. It also addresses other significant educational influences that affected these artists as well as factors in their personal lives that made it important for them to seek artistic expression in the female nude. In the 19th century, the female nude became the dominant vision of nudity, embodying abstract notions of ideal beauty. It has been said that mastering these portrayals was not only crucial for artistic success but also ‘central to the construction of artistic identity’, but in any event, for centuries, perfection in the depiction of the nude form was perceived as one of the pinnacles, perhaps the pinnacle, of an academic art education, and the life-class was central to achieving this goal. As social and educational change was gaining momentum, more women began to participate in the art world and in 1871 the British census recorded 1,069 professional women artists, whereas in 1841 there had been only 278. By 1871, after a reluctant start, the Royal Academy had admitted a total of 117 women to its Schools, and yet it continued to keep the doors of the life-class firmly shut to them. Ambitious women artists felt this exclusion keenly and began to demand access to the life-class – or at least to a draped nude. As Linda Nochlin, the first feminist writer to explore ‘the Question of the Nude’, pointed out: ‘To be deprived of this ultimate stage of training, meant, in effect to be deprived of the possibility of creating major art works, unless one were a very ingenious lady indeed.’ This article explores the explores the obstacles women artists had to overcome and the strategies they deployed in their attempts to do so.
How Images Got Their Gender: Masculinity and Femininity in the Visual Arts
A Companion to Gender History, edited by Merry Wiesner-Hanks and Teresa Meade (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 146-69, 2004
Art historians have long concerned themselves with images of women, at least of specific women. Among the subjects taken up in traditional iconographic studies, we find devotional icons of the Blessed Virgin Mary, portraits of queens, and mythological stories featuring Venus or Diana. Scholars have used an iconographic approach to interrogate a range of issues, including the correspondence between an image and the patron's religious affiliations, and the relation between an image and contemporaneous tenets of faith or philosophy. Such studies interpret pictures through their visual conventions and symbolic objects, drawing on historical, theological, or literary texts to account for aspects of the subject matter. Iconographers view female figures as saints, rulers, and deities, but not as positioned in the category "woman." Formalist art historians also looked at images of women, which they treated as either an evocation of an artist's manner or part of a broader stylistic trend. Older histories of modernism, for example, focused on the nude woman in Edouard Manet's Olympia (1865) to recount how painters rejected illusionism. In this story, Olympia might as easily be a male nude, since the flattening of form-not the cultural construction of the sexed, racial body-was at issue. Neither traditional iconographic studies nor formalist art histories considered how a woman's image related to conceptions of sexual difference or to notions of the proper woman's role in society. And neither did those analyses allied to the social history of art, a mode of interpretation that associated works with contemporary political or social ideologies. By using class as an analytic category, those social historians of art who drew on Marxist theory helped open the way for considerations of gender. Yet Marxism, per se, did not warm to gender. The intertwining of Marxist and gender analysis could only come later after feminist theory challenged what Griselda Pollock called "the paternal authority of Marxism under whose rubric sexual divisions are virtually natural and inevitable" (Pollock, 1989: 5). Before the early 1970s, interpreters-even those concerned with social issues-gave little thought to gender, to sexual difference, or to how images of women shaped and were shaped by prevailing constructions of femininity. Male figures, be they saints, heroes, or nudes, received the same treatment, and only later would scholarship acknowledge
American Women's Art: Gender from Pre-feminism to Post-feminism
2006
Este ensayo analiza la evolucion del arte americano realizado por mujeres en un periodo que cobre desde las primeras decadas hasta el final del siglo xx. La primera artista que se estudia es Georgia O'Keefe, quien se convirtio en simbolo de la mujer artista y en un modelo a seguir por su relacion con las cuestiones de genero durante la segunda mitad de ese siglo. La fotografa Diane Arbus representa a la generacion prefeminista que aparecio tras las ss Guerra Mundial, mientras que la pintora Judy Chicago fue una pionera de lo que se deonmino como la Segunda Ola Feminista en los anos sesenta. Otras artistas calificadas como posrfeministas a pattir de los anos ochenta, como la escultora Maya Lin, Cindy Shermao y la fotografa Sally Mano, se han manifestado a traves de nuevas sensibilidades en cuanto al genero y han llevado a cabo practicas artisticas diferentes a las generaciones anteriores
ProQuest, 2016
Art history instructors generally use textbooks in their classrooms in colleges around the world. Many of the authors of these textbooks have excluded female artists and female artists of color. Studies have shown this lack of inclusion still exists today. This study examined six art history textbooks for these themes: Female artists compared to men artists; artists of color compared to white artists; to see if more female artists have been included in art history textbooks then the last century. The six art history text books chosen for research samples include: Exploring Art: A Global Thematic Approach, The Art of Seeing, Art Forms: An Introduction to the Visual Arts, Understanding Art, The Power of Art, and Art Fundamentals: Theory and Practice. The study’s research questions were: To what extent are female artists represented in six widely used art history textbooks? What is the ratio of the inclusion of female artists compared with male artists? This study will contribute to the scholarly studies concerning the presentation of female artists in art history textbooks. The findings confirm that female artists are only 20% as an average in the six most widely used art history textbooks from 2010 to 2015. Although women are starting to capture a larger presence in the 20th and 21st century, women are setting precedent foundations for future female artists. Keywords: Female Artists, Critical Pedagogy, Feminist Pedagogy, Feminism, Art, Art History, Art History Textbooks, Cultural Diversity, Oppression, Women, Minorities, Culturally Responsive Teaching
‘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.
The International Journal of Social, Political and Community Agendas in the Arts, 2022
Cecily Brown, born in 1969 in London, is a contemporary painter who lives and works in Manhattan, New York; today, she is one of the few living female artists whose artwork sales command over the million-dollar mark. Brown’s painting style that pastiches the Gestural Abstract Expressionism blended with her subject matter of sexualized content has been her oeuvre’s consistent motif since she began her professional career in the late-1990s. Her oeuvre is not representing a new genre of imagery nor is it standing in the shadows of the original New York Abstract Expressionists of the 1940 and 1950s, all of whom had long passed. Instead, her oeuvre represents an emerging trend of signifiers—“the female artist”—and signified—sexual and graphic subject matter—in New York in the late-1990s. Her art was innovative because it flipped the body politics of identity and desire and subverted the male gaze. Or was it so innovative? Brown’s oeuvre is a pastiche of the abstract expressionist movement—the most masculine of art genres, sexualized imagery—adopting the male gaze, and painting—which through the nineties was considered dead—to position herself as one of the world’s most expensive female artists on the market. I suggest society’s attitude toward art has not been as progressive with female equality as one would think. To be one of the world’s greatest female star artists, she must look to the past and represent what has been canonical to arts’ history.