Through Women's Eyes, Finally: Women are Taking Control of Their Own Image Making
Chive Mynde
Through Women's Eyes, Finally
After centuries of conforming to female stereotypes created by men,
women are taking control of their own image making. By HOLLAND COTTER
Sex Object: The growing prevalence of female artists has forced a
re-examination of the traditional male perception of women as objects
of sexual adoration. Titian's "Venus and the Lute Player" (circa 1565,
top) is revamped in Suzanne Valadon's "La Chambre Bleu" ("The Blue
Room," 1923), in which the subject is now a clothed model who smokes
and reads books.
The history of women in art is such a great unruly subject that any
curator trying to pull together a representative exhibition would
probably start by having her head examined. Titian, to mention just
one old master inspired to greatness by the female, made at least 39
paintings of the Madonna and 19 Venuses. At that, choosing from among
the many thousands of similar works in the traditional Western canon
might be easier than deciding which pieces among today's outpouring of
paintings, sculptures, videos and installations are meant for the
ages.
Yet it would be derelict to let these thousand years go by without
acknowledging how deeply our cultural reflexes, and our sexual
politics, have been influenced by images of women: woman as mother, as
goddess, as muse or sex object and, ultimately, woman as master of her
own place in the creation of art. And if the task is approached with
humility, one can at least show a few fragments of this overwhelming
history.
Art, to begin with, is about power, plain and simple; about who owns
the tools, who makes the rules, who gets to shape the image of the
world. Traditionally, in high art, men were the image shapers -- and
not coincidentally men were the ones with access to training, peer
support and patronage, as the art historian Linda Nochlin pointed out
in a landmark 1971 article, "Why Have There Been No Great Women
Artists?" The exceptions always tended to prove the rule: certain
medieval nuns famed for their manuscript illustrations; a handful of
Renaissance painters, including Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia
Fontana. It was not until our own century, and particularly in the
last 30 years, that this pattern started to change significantly, with
women systematically claiming art and the life of the artist as their
own.
The images on these pages are meant to suggest the progress of that
movement.
The earliest example is a 12th-century French carving of the Virgin
and Child. The sculptor, whoever he was, paid scrupulous attention to
human details of his subject: mother and child, with their drooping
eyes and pursed lips, share an endearing family resemblance. But the
import of this work is transcendental, not personal. Despite the
woman's dominant size, the weight of authority is with her son: in the
medieval Christian scheme of things, He embodies Divine Wisdom; she is
Wisdom's throne.
Half a millennium later, around 1639, the Flemish artist Peter Paul
Rubens painted a secular version of the Holy Family, in which he
hovers somewhat anxiously over the figure of his wife, Helena
Fourment, and their infant son. In this case, it is the mother, an
aura of light playing around her head, who looks childlike. (Fourment
was 16 and Rubens 53 when they married.) With her guileless face and
baby-fine hair, and encased in silk and satin, she seems to be led
haltingly forward by her husband's paternal hand.
But see how the atmosphere relaxes and comes alive when family
portraits are painted by women. In 18th-century France,
Elizabeth-Louise Vig 1/8e-Le Brun paints a portrait of herself and her
young daughter, Julie. The two figures, dressed in the newly
unencumbering fashions of the day, look candidly outward as they
embrace like sisters. And in that affectionate, egalitarian hug, old
hierarchies of power seem to melt away.
One senses the presence of a new kind of wisdom, confidently rooted in
the here and now, in Alice Neel's forthright 1978 portrait of a nude,
pregnant woman. (Neel painted the theme over and over because she felt
it had been neglected in art.) There's a mirror in the picture, that
ancient emblem of vanity and self-examination, but it's behind the
sitter, as if she isn't aware or doesn't care that it is there. Her
alert eyes stare straight ahead; her body, awkwardly perched on a
stiff, little, dust-ruffled chair, is literally filled with life but
also self-contained.
Paintings in which women play the role of artistic muse are similarly
varied, particularly when this time-honored theme is transformed in
the hands of women. For a canonical example of the type, consider Jan
Vermeer's "Allegory of Painting" (1667). It depicts an artist at work
at his easel; his female model, dressed as Clio, the muse of history
-- from which, it is implied, all art seeks inspiration -- standing
passively before him.
But a version of the same motif done some decades earlier by the
Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi had already radically revised the
convention. In her extraordinary "Self-Portrait as the Allegory of
Painting" (1630), Gentileschi depicts herself, paintbrush raised, eyes
focused intently on the canvas before her. Her unkempt hair and the
gold chain around her neck were standard symbols for creative passion
and the rewards of artistic accomplishment, but in this case, artist,
model and muse are one and the same person.
The multifaceted image of woman as muse comes up-to-date in painted
quilts from the 1990's by the African-American artist Faith Ringgold.
By using the quilt as a medium, Ringgold touches on the vast, rich
tradition of art by women in media usually referred to as crafts. And
her works shrewdly rewrite the story of women's role in modern
painting. In one, the fabulous Josephine Baker makes herself at home
as an erotic odalisque in Matisse's studio.
The history of the image of women as erotic objects in art is endless
and, for modern eyes sharpened by the critical insights of feminist
thought, endlessly problematic. One can only hint at how many ways it
has been reshaped in women's hands.
A nude Venus in the style of Botticelli and another by Titian are
embodiments of Neoplatonic ideals. But in both cases women are also
sensuous, passive ornaments intended primarily for the male gaze. This
is particularly so in the case of the Titian painting, which not only
provides a surrogate audience in the figure of an ogling musician but
also models its Venus on a courtesan type familiar in 16th-century
Venice.
Beside these two canvases one might instructively place more recent
paintings. Suzanne Valadon's "La Chambre Bleu" ("The Blue Room," 1923)
is one, with its clothed model who smokes cigarettes, reads books and
doesn't make her bed. And then there is a recent self-portrait in male
attire by the young California artist Catherine Opie, a witty study in
the fluidity of gender, and a striking icon of same-sex desire,
offering a perspective that gives those Venuses a whole new lease on
erotic life.
All of the work mentioned so far is Western in origin, and mostly from
the past. But new art is global in scope, and much of its expansionist
impulse is a direct result of concerns with self-identity -- visual
and psychological -- generated by the feminist movement.
You can see this at work in revisionist examples of that most
venerable of female images, the goddess. The young Japanese-born
artist Mariko Mori has based a recent series on a pan-Asian image of a
female Buddhist deity associated with nature. Using elaborate
multimedia technology she has transformed herself into a goddess
floating in the cool nirvana of cyberspace.
The Mexican-American artist Yolanda Lopez, meanwhile, has adopted the
icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe, that potent New World symbol of
political affirmation and resistance, for her own self-portrait, with
results that depart radically from the serenity of the original.
Wearing running shoes and carrying a serpent, Lopez bursts forth from
the Virgin's traditional flaming mandorla, throws off her
star-spangled cloak and dashes straight toward us, beaming, into the
future.
The merging of past into future is what this painting is all about.
There are countless more transformative visions where this comes from
-- the freed imaginations of women.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company