Whitney Chadwick. Women, Art, and Society

Women, Art, and Society
Whitney Chadwick

In Chapter 10, “Modernist Representation: Female Body”, the author points out that the gradual development of different forms of expression about the “self-consciousness” which defines modern art, conceded with the materialization of the first group of women artists. The artist refers to the “avant-garde” as the “dominant ideology of artistic production”(p.279) which was used to relegate women artists as has happened before in different times in art history. The author states that there never existed a female Bohemia or artistic myth of the woman artist. She argues that women don’t have a history of art, therefore, it is difficult to place, or name, or mythologize women’s art. The author argues that if expressionism and feminism are in conflict, then the relationship of some artists like Modersohn-Becker and Kathe Kollwitz to Expressionism is difficult to state clearly. “Stylistic innovation and monumental size”(p.279) leave the production of many artists like Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo in an position in which art and femininity are opposites. The author points out that artists like Monet, Gauguin, Renoir and Picasso merge “the artistic creation with male sexual energy, presenting women as powerless” (p.279) and as sexual objects.

The author refers to Carol Duncan’s article, “Domination and Virility in Vanguard Paintings” in which Duncan makes clear the equalization of creativity and the male’s sex desire in the work of several artists who formed part of the Fauves, the Cubists, and the German Expressionists. She claims that “the vanguard myth of individual artistic freedom is built on sexual and social inequalities” (p.280). The subject of the female is diminished to “flesh”, defenseless to the artist and viewer. The female form is transformed based on the “sexual” desire of the artist. Whitney points out the importance of Duncan’s essay to argue about the representation of the female body. Duncan brings up the concept of the female nude as a form for male pleasure. Contemporary feminist art historians should further investigate the issues around sexualized looking, other forms of looking and female subjectivity.

In the modern art movement, while women were pushed out of the political and aesthetic discussion, many women focused on the female body as a principal subject. The author points out that many critics are split between essentialism and constructivism of femininity, as well as a “psychoanalytic construction of sexual differences”(p.282). The author states that in order for us to understand and get access to conceptualization about the female body, we need to access it through medical, art, and legal discourses. The work of female artists about gender, representation of female body, and esthetic conventions, represent important “precedents”(p.282).

Valadon and Modersohn-Becker were two important female painters whose work about the female nude form challenged the way the female form was represented - figures connected to nature, and controlled by emotions and biology. Critics couldn’t find Valadon’s nudes a “signifier for male creativity” (p.282), and for this the artist was relegated for her “femininity”. The author describes Valadon’s nudes as figures in control of their surroundings and of their own movements.

The author describes a change from the seductive femininity created by Symbolist painters and the idea of ‘natural-womanhood’ (p.286). The idea of the natural female body was developed extensively by Gauguin. Between the artist related to the German Expressionism there are Paula Modersohn-Becker and Kathe Kollwitz, which exposed a clear conflict between the modernist beliefs and the “social reality” (p.286). Modersohn-Becker had trouble trying to create images merging both experiences. Kathe Kollwitz focused on the production of social images. Modersohn-Becker focused on the term of “earth mother”, and through her models she developed an interest in embodying the “elemental nature” (p.286).

The author points out that critic Karl Scheffler states the incapacity of women to be part of the production of culture due to her connection to nature, and of course “her lack of spiritual insight” (p.289). Modersohn-Becker made this ambivalence clear through a poem and defined her ambitions as masculine. The author continues to analyze the work of Gauguin and points out the contrasting relationship between native women and the white artist in a “colonized society” (p.290).

The author refers again to Modersohn-Becker and Kathe Kollwitz. About the first the author points out the death of the artist after giving birth, and questions the disparity between the idea of motherhood and “the biological reality of fecundity”(p.290). In the case of Kathe Kollwitz she addressed the concept of motherhood in a “perspective of class and history”. Kollwitz through her work stood for the social purpose of art and in this way she broke with “the modernist cultivation of individual artistic freedom”(p.292).

Finally, the author refers to the surrealism in which the segmented and re-created female body became the “Surrealist signifier” (p.310). Many female artists felt attracted to surrealism for its anti-academic character, as well as its emphasis on personal expression. However, female artists were confronted with the idea that the creative role was only played by a male role, as well as the metaphorical destruction of the “object and subject with the violent assault on the female image” (p.310). Even though women made important contributions to surrealism, in many cases their interest in the movement was develop not for their political or theoretical similarities, rather for their personal relationships with male artist. However, women artists changed “the erotic violence of male artist for a magical fantasy” (p.311) and their images of the body were claimed as “Self”. Different images of the female body, in surrealism, were identified with a “creative nature” (p.311), and artists like Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Dorothea Tanning developed fantastic themes in their work. Eliminated from Surrealism theory, women artists focused on their own reality. Surrealism recreated women as a “magic object and sites on which to project male erotic desire” (p.313). The work of artists like Frida Kahlo, Maria Izquierdo and Leonora Carrington shows how the work of females artist is important and “the use of mirror to assert the duality of being, the self as observer and observed.”