Women, Art,

and Society
Whitney
Chadwick

Thames & Hudson

 Whitney Chadwick
was educated at Middlebury College and
The Pennsylvania State University. She specializes in
twentieth-century European and American art and
her other books include Myth in Surrealist Painting,
Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, Significant
Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership (edited with
Isabelle de Courtivron), Leonora Carrington: la realidad de
la imaginacion and Amazons in the Drawing Room: The Art
of Romaine Brooks. She is a frequent contributor to art
periodicals and has lectured widely on Surrealism, feminism,
and contemporary art in the United States, Canada, and
Great Britain. She is currently Professor of Art at
San Francisco State University.

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 Whitney Chadwick

Women, Art,
and Society
Third edition

302 illustrations, 78 in colour

rut Thames & Hudson

For Moira

This book is heavily indebted to the many feminist scholars whose work has charted this new
art historical territory and to my students on the Women and Art course at San Francisco State
University whose questions helped me shape and refine the material. Linda Nochlin, Moira Roth,
and Lisa Tickner have read the manuscript and made many helpful suggestions.JoAnn Bernstein,
Cristelle Baskins, Susie Sutch, Pat Ferrero, Josephine Withers, Janet Kaplan, Mira Schor, Judith
Bettelheim, and Mary Ann Milford-Lutzker offered valuable critical commentary on specific
chapters. Darrell Garrison and George Levounis spent many hours checking bibliography and
references. Moira Roth provided valuable advice and constructive criticism in the preparation
of the revised edition. I would also like to thank Monique Gross for her diligent bibliographic
research. I am especially indebted to Nikos Stangos and the staff at Thames & Hudson who
enthusiastically undertook this book and who have cheerfully coped with my hesitations and
doubts as the manuscript expanded far beyond our original projections.

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First published in the United Kingdom in 1990 by

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Third edition 2002

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Contents

Preface

Introduction: Art History and the

Woman Artist

ONE The Middle Ages

TWO The Renaissance Ideal

THREE The Other Renaissance

FOUR Domestic Genres and Women Painters in

Northern Europe

GIVE Amateurs and Academics: A New Ideology of

Femininity in France and England 139

SIX Sex, Class, and Power in Victorian England 15

SEVEN Toward Utopia: Moral Reform and American

Art in the Nineteenth Century 205

BIGEED Separate but Unequal: Woman’s Sphere and

the New Art 228

NINE Modernism, Abstraction, and. the New

Woman, 1910-25

TIEN Modernist Representation: The Female Body

ELEVEN Gender, Race, and Modernism after the

Second World War

TWELVE Feminist Art in North America and

Great Britain

THIRTEEN New Directions: A Partial Overview

FOURTEEN Worlds Together, Worlds Apart

Bibliography and Sources

List of Illustrations
Index
Preface

Among the founding members of the British Royal Academy in 1768

were two women: the painters Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser.
Both were the daughters of foreigners and active in the group of male
painters instrumental in forming the Royal Academy, which no doubt
facilitated their membership. Kauffmann, elected to the prestigious
Academy of Saint Luke in Rome in 1765, was hailed as the successor
to Van Dyck on her arrival in London in 1766. The foremost painter
associated with the decorative and romantic strain of classicism, she
was largely responsible for the spread of the Abbé Winckelmann’s aes-
thetic theories in England and was credited, along with the Scotsman
Gavin Hamilton and American Benjamin West, with popularizing
Neoclassicism there. Moser, whose reputation at the time rivaled that
of Kauffmann, was the daughter of George Moser, a Swiss enameler
who was the first Keeper of the Royal Academy. A fashionable flower
painter patronized by Queen Charlotte, she was one of only two floral
painters accepted into the Academy. Yet when Johann Zoffany’s group
portrait celebrating the newly founded Royal Academy, The
Academicians of the Royal Academy (1771-72) appeared, Kauffmann and
Moser were not included among the artists casually grouped around
the male models. There is clearly no place for the two female acade-
micians in the discussion about art which 1s taking place here. Women
were barred from the study of the nude model which formed the basis
for academic training and representation from the sixteenth to the
nineteenth century. After Kauffmann and Moser, no woman was
allowed membership in the British Royal Academy itself until Annie
Louise Swynnerton became an Associate Member in 1922 and Laura
Knight was elected to full membership in 1936.
Zofftany, whose painting is as much about the ideal of the academic
artist as it is about the Royal Academicians, has included painted
busts of the two women on the wall behind the model’s platform.
Kauffmann and Moser have become the objects of art rather than its
producers; their place is with the bas reliefs and plaster casts that are
the objects of contemplation and inspiration for the male artists. They

1 Johann Zoffany The Academicians of the Royal Academy 1771-72 (detail)

have become representations, a term used today to denote not just
painting and sculpture, but a wide range of imagery drawn from pop-
ular culture, media, and photography, as well as the so-called fine arts.
Zoffany’s painting, like many other works ofart, conforms to wide-
ly held cultural assumptions that have subsumed women’s interests
with those of men and structured women’s access to education and
public life in accordance with popular, though often erroneous, beliefs
about women’s “natural” roles and capabilities. Its composition and
figural groupings reinforce assumptions about art and art history that
are not unique to eighteenth-century England: artists are male and
white, and art a learned discourse; the sources of artistic themes and
styles lie in the classical past; women are objects of representation
rather than producers in a history commonly traced through “Old
Masters” and “‘masterpieces.”
The striking paradox of Zoftany’s painting focuses attention on the
dissimilar positioning of men and women in art history. It also points
to what has become one of the central focuses of feminist art histo-
ries: the question of how categories often understood as mutually
exclustve—like “woman” and “art”—can intersect. In the early
1970s, feminist artists, critics, and historians began to question the
apparently systematic exclusion of women from mainstream art.
They challenged the values of a masculinist history of heroic
art which happened to be produced by men and which had so
powerfully transformed the image of woman into one of possession
and consumption.
Modeled on the civil rights and anti-war movements of the late
1960s, the contemporary feminist movement in the arts emphasized
political activism, group collaboration, and an art practice centered
around the personal and collective experiences of women. Feminist
art historians and critics explored the ways that art historical institu-
tions and discourses have shaped the dynamics that continually sub-
ordinate female artists to male. They examined women’s lives as artists
in the context of debates about the relationship between gender, cul-
ture, and creativity. Why had art historians chosen to ignore the work
of almost all women artists? Were the successful ones exceptional
(perhaps to the point of deviance) or merely the tip of a hidden ice-
berg, submerged by a society demanding that women produce child-
ren, not art, and confine their activities to the domestic, not the public,
sphere? Could, and should, women artists lay claim to “essential” gen-
der differences that might be linked to the production of certain kinds
of imagery? Could the creative process, and its results, be viewed as
8
androgynous or genderless? Finally, what was the relationship between
the “craft” and “fine art” traditions for women?
Early feminist analyses focused new attention on the work of
remarkable women artists and on unequaled traditions of domestic
and utilitarian production by women. They also revealed the way that
the work of women has been presented in a negative relation to
creativity and high culture. Feminist analyses pointed to the ways
that the binary oppositions of Western thought—man/woman,
nature/culture, analysis/intuition—have been replicated within art
history and used to reinforce sexual difference as a basis for aesthetic
valuations. Qualities associated with “femininity,” such as “decora-
ve. = precious, =aamieemre.) sentimental, * “amatenr, sete:, have
99 66

provided a set of negative characteristics against which to measure

“high art.”
During the 1970s, American feminism expressed itself in a
generally celebratory attitude towards the female body and female
experience, and an embrace of personal and collaborative approaches
to artmaking. Some artists and critics explored the notion of a “female
imagery as a positive way of representing the female body, reclaiming
it from its construction as a passive object of male desire. Others, how-
ever, challenged existing hierarchies of production and representation.
The wish to reclaim women’s histories, and to resituate women with-
in the history of cultural production led to an important focus on
female creativity. It also directed attention to the categories “art” and
“artist” through which the discipline of art history has structured
knowledge. Originating in the description and classification of
objects, and the Mlentiiying ofaclas ofindividuals own asarts
art history has emphasized style, attribution, dating, authenticity, and
Pecdiscovers ofMeee ts Reece
hero, it has maintained a conception of art as individual expression or
as a reflection of reality, often divorced from the contemporary social
and circulation.
of production
conditions
Art history concerns itself with the analysis of works of art; sexual
difference has been shown to be inscribed in both the objects of its
inquiry and in the terms in which they are interpreted and discussed.
If, as Lisa Tickner and others have argued, the production of meaning
is inseparable from the production of power, “then feminism (a politi-
cal ideology addressed to relations of power) and art history (or any
discourse productive of knowledge) are more intimately connected
than is popularly supposed.” Early feminist investigations challenged
art history’s constructed categories of human production and _ its

9
reverence for the individual (male) artist as hero. And they raised
important questions about the categories within which cultural
objects are organized.
Some feminist art historians began to question ahistorical writing
about women artists that used gender as a more binding point of con-
nection between women than class, race, and historical context.
Others found the isolation in which many women artists have
worked, and their exclusion from the major movements through
which the course of Western art has been plotted by historians, insur-
mountable barriers to reinscribing them into art history as it is con-
ventionally understood. Again and again, attempts to re-evaluate the
work of women artists, and to reassess the actual historical conditions
under which they worked, have come into conflict with the funda-
mental construction—by and for men—of traditional art history: an
identification of art with the wealth, power, and privilege of the indi-
viduals and groups who commissioned or purchased it.
After more than two decades of feminist writing about women in
the arts, there remains a relatively small body of work in the history of
Western art between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century that
can, with some certainty, be firmly identified with specific women
artists. Whenever, for example, the painters Sofonisba Anguissola,
Artemisia Gentileschi, and Judith Leyster have been admitted to the
canon, they have been forced into linguistic categories defined by tra-
ditional notions of male genius, and isolated as exceptions: Sofonisha
Anguissola: The First Great Woman Artist of the Renaissance (1992);
Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art
(1989); and Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World (1993).
“Greatness,” “Hero,” and “Master,” however, are_terms that return us
to notions of originality, intentionality, and transcendence as defined
by male creativity. Excluded from the patterns of artistic lineage that
secure “greatness” as a male prerogative, often isolated from the cen-
ters of artistic theory and from roles as teachers, few women have been
able directly to bequeath their talent and experience to subsequent
generations. The category “woman artist” remains an unstable one, its
meanings fixed only in relation to dominant male paradigms of art
and femininity.
No matter what theoretical model or methodology we select to
shape our investigation into the problematic position of the “woman
artist,” formidable problems present themselves. Questions relating to
attribution, the determination of authorship and oeuvre, or the size
and significance of a body of work, remain unresolved for many

IO
women artists. Attempts to juggle domestic responsibilities with
artistic production have often resulted in smaller bodies of work, and
often works smaller in scale, than those produced by male contem-
poraries. Yet art history continues to privilege prodigious output and
monumental scale or conception over the selective and the intimate.
Finally, the historical and critical evaluation of women’s art has
proved inseparable from ideologies which define their place in
Western culture generally.
From its beginnings, feminist art and criticism confronted inherent
contradictions. Feminists of color and lesbian feminists challenged
attempts to identify an inclusive “female imagery” or female experi-
ence, arguing that such attempts collapsed female identity into a uni-
versalized category that was, in reality, heterosexual and white, not to
mention middle class. Moreover, a desire to see the work of women
exhibited, discussed, published, and preserved within existing dis-
courses of high art often conflicted with a recognition of the
need to critique and deconstruct those same discourses in order to
expose ideological assumptions based in systems of domination and
difference.
As part of the attempt to address these problems and contradictions,
feminist scholars working within academic institutions have turned to
structuralism, psychoanalysis, semiology, and cultural studies for theo-
retical models that challenge the humanist notion of a unified, ration-
al, and autonomous subject that has dominated study in the arts and
humanities since the Renaissance. They have also emphasized that
since the “real” nature of male and female cannot be determined, we
are left with representations of gender (understood as the socially cre-
ated and historically specific difference between men and women).
Griselda Pollock has argued that “feminism signifies a set of positions,
not an essence; a critical practice, not a dogma; a dynamic and self-
critical response and intervention, not a platform. It is the precarious
product of a paradox. Seeming to speak in the name of women,
feminist analysis perpetually deconstructs the very term around which
it is politically organized.”
The body of writings that inform Pollock’s insistence on the insta-
bility of the position “woman” draws on the structural linguistics of
Ferdinand de Saussure and Emile Benveniste, the Marxist analysis of
Karl Marx and Louis Althusser, the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund
Freud and Jacques Lacan, the theories of discourse and power associat-
ed with Michel Foucault, the analyses of culture and society provided
by Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, and Jacques Derrida’s critique
I]
of metaphysics. All forms of poststructuralism assume that meaning 1s
constituted within language and is not the guaranteed expression of
the subject who speaks it, and that there is no biologically determined
set of emotional and psychological characteristics which are “essen-
tially” masculine or feminine. Poststructuralist texts expose the role of
language in deferring meaning and in constructing a subjectivity
which is not fixed but is constantly negotiated through a whole range
of forces—economic, cultural, and political. They have undermined
long-cherished views ofthe writer or artist as a unique individual cre-
ating in the image of divine creation (in an unbroken chain that links
father and son as in Michelangelo’s God reaching toward Adam in the
Sistine Chapel frescoes), and the work of art as reducible to a single
“true” meaning. And, not least, they have demonstrated how patri-
archy is structured through men’s control over the power of seeing
women. As a result, new attitudes toward the relation between artist
and work have begun to emerge, many of which have important
implications for feminist analysis. Now artistic intention can be seen
more clearly as just one of many often overlapping strands—ideologi-
cal, economic, social, political—that make up the work of art, whether
literary text, painting, or sculpture.
One result has been changes in the ways many feminist art histo-
rians think about art history itself. As an academic discipline, it has
categorized cultural artifacts, privileging some forms of production
over others and continually returning the focus to certain kinds of
objects and the individuals who have produced them. The terms of art
history’s analysis are neither “neutral” nor “universal”; instead they
reinforce widely held social values and beliefs and they inform a huge
range of activities from teaching to publishing and to the buying and
selling of works of art.
The connection between meaning and power, and the attendant
sexual and cultural differences, have secured and corroborated the
relations of domination and subordination around which Western
culture is organized. This has been a preoccupation of recent thinkers
from Michel Foucault and Stuart Hall to Cornel West and bell hooks.
Foucault’s analysis of how power is exercised—not through open
coercion, but through its investment in particular institutions and dis-
courses, and the forms of knowledge that they produce—has raised
many questions about the function of visual culture as a defining and
regulating practice, and the place of women in history. His distinction
between “total” and “general” history in his Archeology of Knowledge
(1972) seems applicable to the feminist problematic of formulating a
12
history that is responsive to women’s specific experiences without
positing a parallel history uniquely feminine and existing outside the
dominant culture.
European, particularly French, psychoanalytic writings have
focused attention on women, not as producers of culture, but as signi-
fiers of male privilege and power. Jacques Lacan’s rereading of Freud
stresses the linguistic structure of the unconscious and the acquisition
of subjectivity (at the point where the individual becomes the speak-
ing subject) into the symbolic order of language, laws, social processes,
and institutions. The writings of Lacan and his followers have been
concerned with a psychoanalytic explanation about how the subject is
constructed in language and, by extension, in representation. The
place assigned woman by Lacan is one of absence, of “otherness.”
Lacking the penis, which signifies phallic power in patriarchal society
and provides a speaking position for the male child, woman also lacks
access to the symbolic order that structures language and meaning. In
Lacan’s view, she is destined “to be spoken” rather than to speak. This
position of otherness in relation to language and power poses serious
challenges to the woman artist who wishes to assume the role of
speaking subject rather than accept that of object. Yet Lacan’s views
have proved important for feminists interested in clarifying the posi-
tioning of woman in relation to dominant discourses and have provid-
ed the theoretical base for the work of a number of contemporary
women artists, several of whom are discussed in the last chapter
of this book. Moreover, the psychoanalytically oriented writings
of Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, for example,
have posed the issue of woman’s “otherness” from radically different
perspectives.
As a result of these and other theoretical developments, much
recent scholarly writing has shifted attention away from the categories
“art” and “artist” to broader issues. These include race, ethnicity, and
sexual orientation, as well as gender. Within the dominant paradigms
of Western culture, it is not only biological difference that constitutes
“otherness.” The lesbian feminist artist Harmony Hammond has
summed up this dynamic with the words, “I see art-making, especially
that which comes from the margins of the mainstream, as a site of
resistance, a way of interrupting and intervening in those historical
and cultural fields that continually exclude me, a sort of gathering of
forces on the borders. For the dominant hegemonic stance that has
worked to silence and subdue gender and ethnic difference has also
silenced difference based on sexual preference.”

13
 A radical rethinking of the forces that have worked to exclude dif-
ference from artistic, cultural, and historical debate characterizes both
Queer Theory and cultural studies. Like feminism, both have com-
bined theory and practice in order to create new languages, rupture
disciplinary boundaries, decenter authority, and develop strategies that
reassert the relationship between agency, power, and struggle. Both
have viewed representation as a site of struggle in enabling decoloni-
zation and diversity; both have addressed issues of sexism and racism.
“The fierce willingness to repudiate domination in a holistic manner
is the starting point for progressive cultural revolution,’ critic bell
hooks has written.
Within feminism, there are now multiple approaches. They are
mediated by the requirements of academic and institutional discourses
on the one hand, and by the demands of activist politics on the other.
And they are shaped by issues of social, cultural, and sexual difference.
Some feminists remain committed to identifying the ways that femi-
ninity is evidenced in representation, others to producing a critical
practice that resists positioning women as spectacle, or object of the
male gaze. Still others are concentrating on critiquing and/or trans-
forming coercive, hierarchical structures of domination.
Cultural theory, cultural politics, and cultural activism inform much
contemporary feminism. The gradual integration of women’s histori-
cal production with recent theoretical developments has been aided
by a growing body of literature concerned with the construction and
intersection of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. As
a result, a reexamination has occurred of the woman artist’s relation-
ship to dominant modes of production and representation. Issues of
women’s desire and sexual pleasure, and the situating of the feminine
as mythic and historically specific, are now beginning to be explored,
as is the defining of female pleasures that are not exclusively depen-
dent on the positioning of woman as visual spectacle.
This book is intended to provide a general introduction to the his-
tory of women’s involvement in the visual arts. It discusses women
who have chosen to work professionally in painting, sculpture, or
related media, and the ideologies that have shaped production and
representation for women. It seeks also to identify major issues and
new directions in research that might enrich the historical study of
women artists and to summarize the work which has been done to
date. The focus on the intersection between women as producers of
art and women in representation helps to unravel the discourses that
construct and naturalize ideas about women and femininity at specific
14
historical moments. It 1s also at the crossover of production and repre-
sentation that we can become most aware of what is not represented or
spoken, the omissions and silences that reveal pe power of cultural
ideology. |
The limitations of art history as a discipline meee been articulated
by many other feminist art historians. Nevertheless, after almost two
decades of feminist art historical writing, it is clear that critical issues
of women’s historical production remain unanswered. While many
women artists have rejected feminism, and others have worked in
media other than painting and sculpture, none has worked outside his-
tory. Although I am aware of the difficulty of organizing a book suc
as this in a way that avoids positing an alternative canon of “great”
women artists, or a “herstory”’ based_on assumptions and values which
many of us have come to distrust, we must keep in mind the fact that
it is the discipline of art history itself that has structured our access_to
women’s contributions in specific ways. As a feminist art historian, I
remain deeply critical of notions like “genius” and “hero.” Yet at the
same time, in choosing to discuss women’s productions within estab-
lished historical frameworks, and in adhering to the survey format
simply because this approach provides the majority of university stu-
dents their primary introduction to the history of Western art, I rec-
ognize that I shall end up privileging specific female artists and works
along the path of the complicated history I am presenting here.
Given the tremendous range of women’s activities in the visual arts,
it has been necessary to limit the scope of the present investigation. I
have focused on painting and sculpture because it is here that issues of
production and representation are most often in conflict for the
woman artist. Rather than attempting an inclusive survey of all women
artists now known to us, I have organized the book around a series of
specific historical conditions which have led women to negotiate new
relationships to issues of representation, patronage, and ideology.
As an introductory text, this book provides neither new biographi-
cal nor archival facts about women artists. Instead, it is entirely depen-
dent on the research of others and seeks primarily to “reframe” the
many issues raised by feminist research in the arts. Sources are
acknowledged in the bibliographical section at the end of the text.
Among the many problems confronting such a study is the question
of how to “name” women artists. Although many writers have chosen
to designate women by their given names rather than their patronyms,
the use of familiar names has also been used to diminish women artists
in relation to their male contemporaries. Thus I have adopted the

15
more historically common form of address by patronym. The fathers
of artist daughters are identified by full name while the daughters are
most often referred to by family name; for example, Gentileschi refers
to Artemisia Gentileschi, while her father is called Orazio Gentileschi.
The problem of naming is only the first of acomplex set ofissues to
do with women and language, the first of which is explored in an
introductory chapter on the writing of art history and women artists.

Preface to the third edition

Since the publication of Women, Art, and Society in 1990, feminist debate
in the visual arts has been reshaped by new theoretical, historical, and
cultural paradigms leading to the rethinking of issues long familiar to
feminist scholarship. These include female subjectivity, women’s con-
tributions to visual culture, and the persistence of Woman as a category
within visual representation. Today class, race, gender, sexuality, family,
ethnicity, and country are understood to mediate both cultural pro-
duction by women and representations that deal with configurations
of gender and sexual difference. The implications of these changes for a
history of women artists were addressed more extensively in the book’s
second edition, which appeared in 1996. Since that time, globalization,
rapidly shifting demographic and geographic realities, and new tech-
nologies have transformed our perceptions of the world, and prompted
yet more critical consideration of the ways that gender and sexual dif-
ference may be mapped onto questions of geography and culture.
In recent years, large international exhibitions have assumed
growing importance as sites where transnational and transcultural
developments in contemporary art are identified, circulated, and con-
sumed. Within academic and critical discourses, the field of postcolo-
nial studies has focused attention on minority cultures, relationships
between centers and peripheries, and postcolonial processes of dis-
placement that include cultural hybridity, fragmented selves, multiple
identities, new speaking voices, and languages of rupture. The decision
to concentrate on the government-sponsored exhibitions of the past
ten years as a means to explore gender and the new internationalism in
the visual arts was not taken lightly. These shows represent neither a
neutral nor an inclusive exhibition practice, nor do their politics neces-
sarily encourage displays of the most challenging art. Nevertheless,
they provide a more international perspective, and a frame through
which to consider a range of artistic practices by women that intersect
with institutional, critical, and market forces in a globalizing art world.
16
 INTRODUCTION

Art History and the Woman Artist

The origins of art history’s focus on the personalities and work of

exceptional individuals can be traced back to the early Renaissance
desire to celebrate Italian cities and the achievements of their more
remarkable male citizens. The new ideal of the artist as a learned man
and the work ofart as the unique expression of a gifted individual first
appears in Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise, On Painting, published in
1435. The emphasis of modern art historical scholarship, beginning in
the late eighteenth century and profoundly influenced by idealist
philosophy, on the autonomy of the art object has closely identified
with this view of the artist as a solitary genius, his creativity mapped
and given value in monographs and catalogues. Since the nineteenth
century, art history has also been closely aligned with the establishing
of authorship, which forms the basis of the economic valuing of
Western art. Our language and expectations about art have tended to
rank that produced by women as below that produced by men in
“quality, ’resulting in lesser monetary value. This has profoundly influ-
enced our knowledge and understanding of the contributions made
by women to painting and sculpture. The number of women artists,
well known in their own day, but whose work apparently no longer
exists, is a tantalizing indication of the vagaries ofartistic attribution.
Any study of women artists must examine how art history 1s writ-
ten and the assumptions that underlie its hierarchies, especially if the
numerous cases of attributions to male artists of works by women are
to be reviewed. Let us consider three paradigmatic cases from three
centuries: Marietta Robusti, the sixteenth-century Venetian painter;
Judith Leyster, the seventeenth-century Dutch painter; a group of
women artists prominent in the circle of Jacques-Louis David, the
eighteenth-century French painter; and Edmonia Lewis, the black
nineteenth-century American sculptor. Their_stories elucidate the
way art history’s emphasis on individual genius has distorted our
amaerstanding oFworkshop procedures andthenature ofcollaborative
istorys close alliance with art market economics has affected the

17
attribution of women’s art and how the knowledge of gender can
affect the ways in which we literally see works of art.
Marietta Robusti was the eldest daughter of Jacopo Robust, the
Venetian painter better known as Tintoretto. Her birth, probably in
1560, was followed by those of three brothers and four sisters. Her
sister Ottavia became a skilled needlewoman in the Benedictine nun-
nery of S.Amia di Castello; Robusti and her brothers Domenico and
Marco (and possibly Giovanni Battista) entered the Tintoretto work-
shop as youths. It is known that she worked there more or less full-
time for fifteen years and that her fame as a portrait painter spread as
far as the courts of Spain and Austria. Her likeness of Jacopo Strada,
Emperor Maximilian II’s antiquarian, so impressed the emperor that
she was invited first to his court as painter and subsequently to the
court of Philip I] of Spain. Her father refused to allow her to leave and
instead found her a husband, Jacopo d’Augusta, the head of the
Venetian silversmiths’ guild, to whom she was betrothed on condition
that she not leave Tintoretto’s household in his lifetime. Four years
later, aged thirty, she died in childbirth.
The model of artistic production in Italy had shifted from that of
crafts produced by skilled artisans to works of art by the inspired
genius of an individual creator. In sixteenth-century Venice, where
the change occurred more slowly than in Florence and Rome, the
family was still a unit of production (as well as consumption), and fam-
ily businesses of all sorts were a common feature. Tintoretto’s work-
shop, organized around the members of his immediate family, would
have been classified as a craft under guild regulation. Similar to the
dynastic family workshops of Veronese and Bellini in Venice,
Pollaiuolo, Rossellino, and della Robbia in Florence, the workshop
provides the context within which to examine Robusti’s career (or
what little we know of it). At the same time, that career is inextricably
bound up with Tintoretto’s, understood since the sixteenth century as
the expression of an individual temperament.
As Tintoretto’s daughter, Robusti’s social and economic autonomy
would have been no greater than those of other women of the artisan
class. Nevertheless, remarks by Tintoretto’s biographer Carlo Ridolfi
about her musical skills and deportment, published in 1648, suggest
that she was also part of a changing ideal of femininity that now
emphasized musical and artistic skills for women, as well as some
education. Other accounts of Tintoretto and his workshop offer a
series of paradoxes with regard to a daughter whose hand was
apparently indistinguishable from that of her father, whose painting
18
2 Marietta Robusti
Portrait of an Old Man With Boy
C.15§85

was sufficiently good to be confused with his, and whose fame must
have continued after her death since Ridolfi placed her among the
most illustrious women of all time.
Robusti, like her brother Domenico (who inherited the workshop
on Tintoretto’s death and was thus considered the new “master’’),
learned to paint portraits in her father’s style. It is commonly assumed
that her achievements were largely due to his influence. This facile
assumption, however, 1s a product of modern scholarship. Sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century sources point in two directions: Robusti’s
close ties to her father and his production, and her independent
achievement. Although Ridolfi mentions portraits by Robusti of all
the members of the silversmiths’ guild, Adolfo Venturi in 1929 was
alone among twentieth-century art historians 1n tentatively identifying
as hers a group of paintings in the manner of Tintoretto; his dubious
but all too common grounds ofreasoning was that they display a “‘sen-
timental femininity, a womanly grace that is strained and resolute.”
Most modern scholars attribute only a single work to her, the Portrait
of an Old Man With Boy (c. 1585). Long considered one of Tintoretto’s
finest portraits, it was not until 1920 that the work was found to
signed with Robusti’s monogram. Even so, the reattribution has subse-
quently ceil questione ;

19
 The workshop’s prodigious output, a subject of much comment
ever since the humanist Pietro Aretino first commended Tintoretto’s
“speed in execution accompanied by excellence” in the sixteenth
century, has helped to define the artistic genius of its Master. Though
many Tintoretto scholars acknowledge the problems of attribution
in the workshop, they generally embrace a model of almost super-
human production and use it to build an image of “greatness” for
the artist.
Hans Tietze in 1948 proposed a “Tintorettesque style” to encom-
pass the varied hands at work: “The Tintorettesque style is not anly
an impoverishment but also an enrichment of the style of Tintoretto;
it enters into innumerable combinations with ae personal style,

sigmonts hiseffecHveHes and OTIS Gpportunity TorHyg outona

larger scale artistic principles which in reality are his own persona
property. us the collective style calle intorettesque” 1s used to
prove the individual genius of the artist Tintoretto, leading inexorably
to Tietze’s conclusion that, “Works in which pupils certainly had a
considerable share—as for instance the two mighty late works in San
Giorgio Maggiore—are among his most important and most personal
creations.” Constructions such as this make it all but impossible to dis-
entangle Robusti from her father. Since women were not credited
with artistic genius, an art history committed to proving male genius
can only subsume women’s contributions under those of men.
Although in many extant Tintoretto portraits an “amazing variability
of brushstroke” is detected, this has not led to new interpretations of
workshop production that differ significantly from conventional views
of individual creation.
It is widely assumed that Robusti assisted in the preparation of
large altarpieces, as did all workshop assistants. Yet surely we should
question Francesco Valcanover’s 1985 assertion that in the 1580s,
“assistants were largely confined to working on less important areas
of the canvas, not only because of the family tie and the submission
that could be expected but also because of the imperiousness of the
recognized master that Tintoretto had by now become... . What
responsibility they may have been allowed must therefore have been
partial and at best modest.’ It is clear from Robusti’s renown by the
180s that she had achieved considerable status as a painter, although.
we do not know precisely what that meant. Nor do we know how it
related to her continuing participation in the workshop. The model
Valcanover assumes for the Tintoretto workshop is more conservative
20
and hierarchical than that of many other sixteenth-century artists’
studios, but we lack the documentary evidence to challenge his view
conclusively.
The imposition of modern views of originality and artistic individ-
uality on workshop production obscures the actual development of
painters like Robusti and her brother Domenico by putting them all
under the name of Tintoretto despite contemporary evidence of
independent achievement. Although it is clear that as a female mem-
ber of Tintoretto’s household Robusti was subservient and that her
short life resulted in limited production, 11S i factmodern selo’at=
ship that has buried her artistic life under that_of her father and
brother. Rather than seeing the workshop as a site of a range of pro-
moder scholars
Faction,"modern scholars tave redefined it
have redefined as a
it-ay a place wieve lowly
place where lowly
assistants painted angels’ wings while_a “Master” artist breathed life
into the Madonna’s features. Even Ridolfi’s remark about the slacken-
ing of Tintoretto’s “fury for work” upon Robusti’s death in 1590,
which he and others have attributed solely to a father’s grief at the
ERIE ofabolovedida mai demands reveldin melon ofthe
of
ght cela
loss
so pabl
ofca e t.
an assistan
By the nineteenth century, interest in Robusti expressed itself pri-
marily by transforming her into a popular subject for Romantic
painters. Attracted by the familial bonds and the melancholy of her
early death, they recast her as a tubercular heroine passively expiring as
she stimulated her father to new creative heights. Leon Cogniet’s On Pob us

Tintoretto Painting His Dead Daughter, exhibited at the Musée Classique death
du Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle in 1846, influenced both Karl Girardet and

followed by Philippe Jeanron’s Tintoretto and His Daughter of 1857, in

which the female pai as become _a_muse m for her
father. During this period Robusti also figured in a novel by George
Sand and a play by the painter Luigi Marta, Tintoretto and His
Daughter. First staged in Milan in 1845, the play includes a deathbed
scene in which the dying young woman now inspires Paolo Veronese.
the woman
The bizarre but all too common transformation_of
artist from a producer in her own right into a subject for representa-
tion forms a leitmotif in history
the of art.Confounding subject an
object, it undermines the speaking position of the individual woman
artist by generalizing her. Denied her individuality, she is displaced
from being a producer and becomes instead a sign for male creativity.
Zofftany’s depictions of Kauffmann and Moser turned them into por-
trait types in which their individual features are barely discernible.
21
Robusti’s metamorphosis into a dying muse turns her into an ideal of
quietly suffering femininity.
The second case concerns the pressure that financial greed exerts
on correct attribution. Since the monetary value of works of art is
inextricably bound up in their attribution to “named” artists, the
work of many women has been absorbed into that of their better-
known male colleagues. Although not restricted to the work of
women, such misattributions have contributed to the perception that
women produce less. Ironically, some women have suffered from the
overattribution to them of inferior work. To reassemble the oeuvre
of the eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giulia Lama, Germaine
Greer reported, scholars were forced to borrow from the work of
Federico Bencovich, Tiepolo, Domenico Maggiotto, Francesco
Capella, Antonio Petrini, Jan Lyss, and even Zurbaran. Thus it comes
as no surprise that Judith Leyster, one of the best-known painters
of seventeenth-century Holland, was almost completely lost from
history from the end of that century until 1893, when Cornelius
Hofstede de Groot discovered her monogram on The Happy Couple
(1630) which he had just sold to the Louvre as a Frans Hals.
Judith Leyster, the daughter of a small ware-weaver who later
became a brewer, was born in Haarlem in 1609. She is believed to have
studied with the painter Frans Pietersz de Grebber and, by 1633, was a
member of Haarlem’s Guild of St. Luke. The only female member of
the painters’ guild known to have had a workshop, and the only
woman painter actively involved in the art market, her early work
shows the influence of Hendrick Terbrugghen and the Utrecht
Caravagegisti. Determined to meet the demands of the open market,
she modeled her painting style on that of Frans Hals (with whom she
may have worked briefly) and his younger brother Dirck.
The attribution of her work has been further complicated by the
paucity of her oeuvre (around twenty paintings are presently known)
and by the fact that they were all executed within a relatively short
period of time—between 1629 and 1635. This clearly makes it diffi-
cult to trace stylistic developments evident in the work of artists—
usually male—whose output spans many years; often uninterrupted
by childcare and domestic responsibilities.
The fact that in 1635 Leyster 1s recorded as having three male pupils
is a good indication of her status as an artist, as is her inclusion in
Samuel Ampzing’s description of Haarlem in 1627. In 1636, she mar-
ried the painter Jan Miense Molenaer, with whom she had five child-
ren. Twenty years later she seems to have been completely forgotten.
22
Judith Leyster The Happy Couple 1630 4 Judith Leyster The Jolly Toper 1629

As Frima Fox Hofrichter, author of a recent catalogue raisonné, points

out, prior to 1892 no museum held any paintings attributed to her,
her name was not recorded in sale catalogues, and no prints after her
paintings were inscribed with her name.
As early as the eighteenth century, when Sir Luke Schaub acquired
The Happy Couple as a Hals, her work had already begun to disappear
into the oeuvres of Gerard van Honthorst and Molenaer, as well as
Hals. Prices for Dutch painting remained painfully low until the latter
part of the nineteenth century; then the emergence of “modern” art
with its painterly surfaces and sketch-like finishes, the aesthetic tastes
of the British royal family, and the appearance of wealthy private col-
lectors all contributed to a burgeoning demand for Dutch paintings.
As late as 1854 the connoisseur Gustav Waager could write of Hals
that “the value of this painter has not been sufficiently appreciated”’;
by 1890 demand outpaced supply.
In the early 1890s, when Hals prices were rising dramatically,
Leyster’s name was known, but no work by her hand had been identi-
fied. Hofstede de Groot’s discovery that the Louvre’s Happy Couple
4 Jolly ‘Toper as a Hals; a work sold in Brussels in 1890 bore her mono-
gram crudely altered to read as an interlocking FH. Another Jolly
Toper, acquired by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum in 1897, and one of
‘Hals’s” best-known works, bears her monogram and the date 1629.
Her emergence as an artist in her own right, however, was blurred in
turn by her close connection to Hals and the many copies after Hals
subsequently attributed to her. The attributions in Juliane Harms’s
series ofarticles on Leyster published in 1929 have been challenged by
de Groot and, more recently, by Frima Fox Hofrichter.
Leyster’s reemergence as an artist of stature in the twentieth centu-
ry, however, remains subject to all the vagaries of interpretation. Some
critics have felt it necessary to remind their readers that she was, after
all,a woman and a sexual being. Hofrichter notes that in 1928 Robert
Dangers suggested that Leyster was Rembrandt’s lover (the suggestion
was subsequently repeated in some general histories); others have
speculated on a relationship with Frans Hals, for which there is no evi-
dence. Walter Liedtke, reviewing the 1993 exhibition of her work and
quoting from the exhibition catalogue, argues that “Leyster’s fading
from fame was in a sense self-imposed, considering that 1n a career of
only seven years, she ‘made a determined effort to break into this
[Haarlem’s] exclusive and demanding market, hoping to achieve some
measure of recognition by imitating her contemporaries Frans Hals,
Dirck Hals and Jan Miense Molenaer’.” Such refusals to explore the
actual conditions of Leyster’s production only lead to insinuations that
her reputation, when finally secured, was not truly deserved.
Leyster’s work, though painted in the manner of Hals, is not the
same. Nevertheless, the ease with which her works have been sold as
his in a market eager for Hals at any price offers a sober warning to art
historians committed to a view of women’s productions as obviously
inferior to those of men. “Some women artists tend to emulate Frans
Hals,” noted James Laver in 1964, “but the vigorous brushstrokes of
the master were beyond their capability. One has only to look at the
work of a painter like Judith Leyster to detect the weakness of the
feminine hand.” Yet many have looked and not seen; the case ofJudith
Leyster offers irrefutable evidence of the ways that seeing is qualified
by greed, desire, and expectation.
That there is a direct relationship between what we see and what
Wwe expect to see is nowhere clearer than in the case of three well-
known “David” paintings in American museum collections. The
7 Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Portrait of Mademoiselle Charlotte du Val
d’ Ognes (c. 1801) was purchased as a David for $200,000 in 1922 under

24
the terms of a bequest. In 1952, The Frick Collection purchased a
Portrait ofAntonio Bruni (1804) through Knoedler & Co., and in 1943 6
the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University acquired a Portrait of 5
Dublin-Tornelle (c. 1799) from a bequest. All three were believed to be
by David.
Jacques-Louis David, chronicler of the Revolution and painter to
Emperor Napoleon, was France’s foremost artist from the 1780s until
his exile in 1816. As a popular teacher when reforms initiated by the
Revolution had opened the Salons to unrestricted participation by
women (the number of exhibiting women artists increased dramati-
cally from 28 1n 1801 to 67 in 1822), David played a not inconsiderable
role in the training and development of female talent in the early years
of the nineteenth century. Moreover, he encouraged his women pupils
to paint both portraits and historical subjects, and to submit them reg-
ularly to the Salon. George Wildenstein’s publication of a list of all the
portraits exhibited at the Salon in Paris between 1800 and 1826 great-
ly aided attempts to sort out the profusion ofportraits executed in the
Davidian style. It contributed directly to the reattribution of the
Charlotte du Val d’Ognes to Constance Marie Charpentier in 1951, the
Portrait of Antonio Bruni to Cesarine Davin-Mirvault in 1962, and
that of Dublin-Tornelle to Adélaide Labille-Guiard in 1971. All three
women were followers or pupils of David and their portraits, like the
works by David which inspired them, are characterized by the strong
presence of the sitter against simple, often dark backgrounds, clarity of
form, academic finish, and candid definitions of character. The exis-
tence of three such outstanding examples of late eighteenth-century
portraiture should provoke future art historical investigation into
David’s role as a teacher of women.
The finding, during reattribution to lesser-known artists, that
works of art are “simply not up to the high technical standards” of the
“Master” is common. The shifting language that often accompanies
reattributions where gender 1s an issue is only one aspect of a larger
problem. Art history has never separated the question of artistic style
from the inscription ofsexual difference in representation. Discussions
of style are consistently cast in terms of masculinity and femininity.
Analyses of paintings are replete with references to “virile” handling
of form or “feminine” touch. The opposition of “effeminate” and
“heroic” runs through classic texts like Walter Friedlaender’s David to
Delacroix, where it is used to emphasize aesthetic differences between
the Rococo and Neoclassical styles. Such gendered analogies make it
difficult to visualize distinctions of paint handling without thinking in

25
5 Adélaide Labille-Guiard 6 Césarine Davin-Mirvault
Portrait of Dublin- Tornelle c. 1799 Portrait ofAntonio Bruni 1804

terms of sexual difference. The case of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes is also a

revealing example of how expectations about gender color “objec-
tive” viewing and its qualitative evaluations.
André Maurois, although not an art historian, had concluded of the
Metropolitan’s painting that it was “a perfect picture, unforgettable.”
The museum itself had identified the work as exemplary of “the aus-
tere taste of the time.’ Yet in 1951 Charles Sterling, arguing that the
painting was not by David, asserted that the “treatment of the skin and
fabric is gentle” and “the articulation lacks correctness.” Finally, he
stripped the work entirely of its former stature: “Its poetry literary
rather than plastic, its very evident charms and cleverly concealed
weaknesses, its ensemble made up of a thousand subtle artifices all
seem to reveal the feminine spirit.” One is forced to wonder not only
how such characterizations will hold up in the light of recent allega-
tions that the work is not by Charpentier after all, and may well have
been painted by either Gerard or Pierre Jeuftrain, but also how
Maurois’s characterization so quickly turned to “cleverly concealed
weaknesses” in the eyes of the beholder. It is as if Charpentier herself
had set out to dupe her audience! Not until 1977, twenty-six years

20
 Y
7 Constance Marie Charpentier (attributed to) Portrait of Mademoiselle Charlotte
du Val d’Ognes c. 1801
after Sterling’s article appeared, did the Metropolitan Museum of Art
remove David’s name from the label. In 1980 the label was changed
again to read “unknown French painter.”
The cases of Marietta. Robusti, Judith Leyster, and the “Davids”
reveal the role played by modern assumptions in the aesthetic evalua-
tion of works ofart. The existence of these and other falsely attributed
works by women artists in major museum collections continues to
challenge easy assumptions about “quality.” Using such examples as
Charpentier, feminist art historians have continually exposed the gen-
der biases of art historical language. The word “artist’’ means man
unless qualified by the category “woman.” Feminizing the term “Old
Masters,’ as Elizabeth Broun and Ann Gabhart did in their 1972 exhibi-
tion of women artists at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, collapses
an original speaking position ofauthority into a sexualized pun.
Throughout the history of Western art there has been a tendency
to exoticize the woman artist as an exception, and then paradoxically
to use her unique status as a weapon to undermine her achievement.
When attitudes towards race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, as well as
gender, intervene to shape the artist’s relationship to the discourses
and institutions of art, her situation becomes even more complicated.
The black American sculptor Edmonia Lewis (c. 1843-1911), the
first North American artist of color to achieve international recogni-
tion for her work as a sculptor, joined other expatriate artists and writ-
ers in Rome in the 1860s. The daughter of aChippewa Indian mother
and a black father, Lewis was educated at Oberlin College, a private
liberal arts college which had admitted African-Americans since 1835.
After leaving school, Lewis moved to Boston where she quickly
met that city’s unique mix of artists, intellectuals, and social reformers,
among them the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and the sculp-
tors Edward Brackett and Anne Whitney (1821-1915). Boston, how-
ever, provided few resources for formal training in sculpture for
women. Lewis's contemporary Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908) had been
turned away from anatomy lectures at the Harvard Medical School;
Anne Whitney and other women studied privately, or not at all.
Brackett lent Lewis fragments of sculpture to copy in clay and offered
critiques of her exercises. As far as is known, this was the extent of her
formal training.
Throughout her career, Lewis would refuse instruction and cri-
tiques from other sculptors; according to Whitney, she felt that her sex
and her race left her all too vulnerable to charges that her work was
not her own (similar accusations forced a public defense of her
28
8 Edmonia Lewis Old Indian
Arrow-maker and His Daughter
1872

working methods from Hosmer in 1864). Moreover, it has been

argued that her decision to suppress physical signs of ethnicity in her
female figures resulted, in part, from her fear that the public would
view the works as self-portraiture. Art historian Kirsten Buick notes
that “Lewis did not want viewers to make any correlations between
her women and her ‘self’. In a sense, she suppressed ‘autobiography’ so
that she could not be read into her sculptures.” Such considerations
may help explain why her choice of a Native American theme like
Minnehaha (1868) would be interpreted through the mediating figure
of the white poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Lewis first modeled portrait busts and medallions of anti-slavery
leaders and Civil War heroes like Garrison, John Brown, Charles
Sumner, Wendell Phillips, and Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Culti-
vated by the white liberal community in Boston, she quickly found
her personal heritage inseparable from her artistic practice in the eyes
of her benefactors. As early as 1863, she was forced to request that her
work not be praised because “I am a colored girl.” Yet the Boston art
community continued to vacillate between genuine support and well-

29
meant but misguided indulgence. Social reformer Lydia Maria Child,
for example, offered financial support, while at the same time trying to
discourage Lewis from attempting ambitious projects.
The success of Lewis’s plaster portrait of Robert Gould Shaw, leader
of the first black regiment in the Civil War, enabled her to finance her
trip to Rome. Established there during the winter of 1865-66, she
began carving in marble, working within the prevailing Neoclassical
manner, but with a greater degree of naturalism on themes and images
directly related to the oppression of her people. The presence of a
group of professional female sculptors in Rome was cause for com-
mentary, but Lewis’s mixed heritage further singled her out as an ex-
otic curiosity: “... one of the sisterhood, if Iam not mistaken, was a
negress, whose colour, picturesquely contrasting with that of her plas-
ter material was the pleading agent of her fame,’ Henry James noted
dismissively in his biography of the sculptor William Wetmore Story.
While most foreign sculptors in Italy hired native artisans to enlarge
their clay and wax models in marble, Lewis for some time insisted on
doing the carving herself. This hands-on approach greatly impressed
the suffragist Laura Curtis Bullard, editor of the periodical Revolution,
who wrote: “So determined is she to avoid all occasion for detraction,
that she even ‘puts up’ her clay;a work which scarcely any male sculp-
tor does for himself?’ Lewis’s need to “avoid all occasion for detrac-
tion,’ however, also forced her to maintain an unusual degree of
control over her practice. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she
often made marble sculptures before receiving commissions for them,
or sent unsolicited works to Boston patrons with a request that they
raise funds for materials and shipping. Her disregard for the profes-
sion’s conventions, Lynda Hartigan notes, was “perceived alternately as
an attempt to exploit her heritage and as an expression of youthful
impetuosity and the naiveté associated with her background.” Lewis,
far more than her white audience, understood the racial and sexual
barriers confronting her, and how suddenly the work to which she
had committed her talent and resources might be denied her. Her
career, though it departs from the model laid down by her male con-
temporaries, remains a testament to her determination to achieve
legitimacy as a sculptor on her own terms.
In traditional art history, literary evidence is used to “prove” visual
interpretations. Research by feminist art historians has contributed to
demonstrating that literary sources themselves have been appropriated
to particular ideologies and cannot be uncritically applied to works of
art. Roland Barthes and others proposed that we explore the idea of
30
the text as a methodological field in which writer, reader, and
observer (critic) function equally in formulating meaning. The
historical texts need constant rereading as we attempt to understand
better the problematic of femininity and the role of images in the
social production of meaning. The brief survey that follows indicates
how writing about art has confused the issue of women artists by
inscribing social constructions of femininity on them.
“It is a great marvel that a woman can do so much,’ noted the
German painter Albrecht Direr in 1520 after purchasing an illuminat-
ed miniature of Christ by the eighteen-year-old painter Susan
Hornebout for one florin. By the nineteenth century, the polarization
of male and female creativity was complete. “So long as a woman
remains from unsexing herself, let her dabble in anything,’ notes one
commentator, “The woman of genius does not exist. When she does,
she is a man.’ Quotations such as these reveal an overwhelmingly
inconsistent pattern of recognition and denial, constructing and re-
iterating stereotyped categories for women’s productions; they have
come to be seen as natural, but are in fact ideological and institutional.
Durer is but one of a series of artists who recorded the names of
prominent women artists and celebrated their achievements, simulta-
neously emphasizing their status as exceptions. Eliding artistic
achievement and “feminine” accomplishment, they put the woman
artist in a context in which artistic genius, the final measure of
achievement, was a male prerogative. The humanist ideals which
inform these texts over three centuries continue to dominate the
teaching of art history despite current challenges.
The first consistent attempt to document the lives of Italian artists,
and the work which set the tone for much subsequent commentary,
was Vasari’s Vite de’... Pittori Scultori, ed Architettori . . ., first published
in 1550, revised and expanded by the author in 1568. Vasari saw in
his own culture, that of sixteenth-century Florence, a rebirth of the
values and ideals of the classical past. He traced the development of
Renaissance culture from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth,
using artists’ biographies to establish the artistic greatness that he con-
sidered culminated in Michelangelo’s work. Although Vasari distin-
guishes few artists of his day as inspired by the genius that invokes
divinity, and none of them are women, the second edition of his Vite
mentions at least thirteen women artists. Vasari’s work enables us to
identify the first prominent women artists of Renaissance Italy, but it
draws its vision of the woman artist from multiple discourses on
women ranging from medical knowledge and antique sources to
31
medieval literature and contemporary treatises on female deportment.
Vasari’s praise of women is genuine, but it is qualified. To the woman
artist belongs diligence rather than invention, the locus of genius.
Should women apply themselves too diligently, notes Vasari in his dis-
cussion of the sculptor Properzia de’ Rossi, they risk appearing “to
wrest from us the palm of supremacy.” While men can achieve nobili-
ty through their art, women may practice art only because they are of
noble birth and/or deportment. Above all, Vasari’s model for the _
woman artist reflects the growing Renaissance subordination of
female learning and intellectual skill to rigid prescriptions about
virtue and deportment.
Vasari’s model for naming women artists is Pliny the Elder (Ap
23-79), whose Historia Naturalis, in addition to discussing the origins
of painting and sculpture in the classical world, mentions the names of
six female artists of antiquity. Three are Greek women painters who
lived before his time: Timarete, Aristarete, and Olympia, about whom
he provides no information, either biographical or historical. Of the
remaining three, all Hellenistic artists, two are identified as the daugh-
ters of painters. Pliny relates nothing about Kalypso and tells us only
that Helen of Egypt was known for painting a Battle of Issus, which
included Darius and Alexander. Iaia of Kyzikos (sometimes identified
as Laia or Lala of Cizicus) was famed for her portraits of women,
worked with amazing speed and was said to have outranked her male
competitors while remaining “perpetua virgo.’ Content to catalogue
briefly, Pliny neither analyses nor describes works of art. Nor did he
concern himself with the daily lives and personalities of the artists.
The first edition of Vasari’s Vite included the female painters cited
by Pliny; the second recorded their descendants—Suor Plautilla, a nun
and the daughter of the painter Luca Nelli, who painted a Last Supper
(now in the refectory of Santa Maria Novella in Florence); Lucretia
Quistelli della Mirandola, a pupil of Alessandro Allori; Irene di
Spilimbergo, who studied with Titian but who died at eighteen hay-
ing completed only three paintings; Barbara Longhi, the daughter of
the Mannerist Luca Longhi; five female miniaturists; Sofonisba
Anguissola, the best-known woman painter of sixteenth-century Italy,
and her sisters; and three Bolognese women, Properzia de’ Rossi,
Lavinia Fontana, and Elisabetta Sirani—as proof that Renaissance Italy
could claim {ts own women oflearning and achievement.
Not content merely to identify the better known of these women,
as did his classical sources, Vasari also situated them in relation to a vast
body of Renaissance treatises on the education and deportment of
5
Ww
Vo) Properzia de’ Rossi Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife c. 1520

women which included hundreds of books on the subject produced

between 1400 and 1600. Distinguishing intellectual capabilities from
deportment, Vasari reports that the sculptor de’ Rossi was not only
excellent in household matters, but was also very beautiful and played
and sang better than any woman in her city, while Lavinia Fontana, the
daughter of the Bolognese painter Prospero Fontana, was from a cul-
tured household. De’ Rossi’s relief, Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, is praised
for being “A lovely picture, sculptured with womanly grace and more
than admirable.’ Qualities such as tenderness and sweetness are as

72
desirable in the woman artist as are the “grace, industry, beauty, mod-
esty and excellence of character” that Vasari saw combined with “all
the rarest qualities of the mind” in the painter Raphael Sanzio. If
women artists lack the spark of genius and are sometimes forced to
labor diligently rather than work with facility, they are nevertheless
worthy of great praise.
The noble birth, good education, and deportment that Vasari iden-
tifies with women like Sofonisba Anguissola, however, are not merely
female traits affirming sexual difference but are signs of class and of the
newly elevated social status of the artist. Descriptions such as these
reassured Vasari’s readers that women artists conformed to the social
expectations and duties of noblewomen of the period, removing
them from the satiric barbs often directed at middle- and lower-class
women. Praise for women’s achievements is part of asexual control 1n
which intellectual and artistic freedoms might be exchanged for rigid
adherence to the demands of chastity.
Humanist treatises on the nature and education of the Renaissance
woman, while advocating the education of women, particularly
noblewomen, so that they might be better wives and mothers, and
more virtuous exemplars of the Christian ideals of chastity and obedi-
ence, also set forth significantly different ideals for men. Often they
reiterate the biases of medieval Christian tracts which reflected both
the doctrinal opposition of Eve and Mary and a long history of
misogyrmst writing about women. The new man’s life of action and
self-sufficiency represents a clear break with the rigid hierarchies of
the feudal world, but women remain locked in a medieval model
which still stresses chastity, purity, and obedience.
Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus (1355-59), a collection of 104
biographies of real and mythical women drawn from Greek and
Roman sources such as Plutarch’s Moralia, was the first Italian human-
ist work to concern itself entirely with the improvement of women’s
minds and the first of many Renaissance treatises that reinforce
woman's subordinate position. Plutarch, challenging Thucydides’s
remark that the best woman 1s the one about whom there is least to
say, had argued that only by placing women’s lives beside those of men
was it possible to understand the similarities and the differences
between the virtues of men and women and had concluded by
suggesting that paintings by men and women might very well exhibit
the same characteristics. Boccaccio opened his treatise by recalling
these women. “By emulating the deeds of ancient women,” he began,
“you spur your spirit to loftier things.’ Among the ancient women
4
os)
10 “Thamar” from Boccaccio’s De Claris 11 Christine de Pisan in her study,
Mulieribus 1355-59 miniature from The Works of Christine
de Pisan, early fifteenth century

proposed as models by Boccaccio are three women painters of

antiquity: Thamyris, Irene, and Marcia. “I thought that these achieve-
ments were worthy of some praise,’ he notes, “for art is very much
alien to the mind of woman, and these things cannot be accomplished
without a great deal oftalent, which in women is usually very scarce.”
Boccaccio departs from his antique model in articulating a specific set
of character traits for the ideal woman. She must be gentle, modest,
honest, dignified, elegant in speech, pious, generous in soul, chaste, and
skilled in household management. By the time Vasari’s Vite appeared,
Boccaccio’s model was well in place in works such as Fra Filippo da
Bergamo’s De Claris Selectibus Mulieribus of 1497, but it had also
provoked rebuttals by women writers, the most famous of whom was
Christine de Pisan.
In the Cité des Dames (1405), Christine de Pisan, a French writer
born in Italy and the first professional woman writer in Western his-
tory, responded to Boccaccio by constructing an allegorical city in

35
which great and independent women lived safe from slanders of men.
Pisan belonged to the transitional period between the Late Middle
Ages and the Renaissance. The daughter of an Italian-born doctor and
astrologer at the court of King Charles V of France, she took up writ-
ing after the death of her husband and became a respected writer on
moral questions, education, the art of government, the conduct of
war, and the life and times of Charles V. She was also a renowned poet
and the author of two major works on the lives and training of
women at the end of the Middle Ages. Pisan’s attack on Jean de
Meun, the author ofthe second part of the Roman de la Rose, that great
medieval tribute to courtly love with its vicious denunciation of
women and marriage, is remarkable for the age. She cannot under-
stand, she says, why men write so scathingly about women when they
owe their very existence to them. And she asks, in a question
rephrased throughout history, how can women’s lives be known when
men write all the books?
Pisan’s allegorical city includes female saints and contemporary
women, as well as the women ofantiquity collected by Boccaccio. She
ofters evidence of women’s great achievements in place of his disdain-
ful references to women’s “inherent inferiority” and she includes
examples to prove her points. Among those she lists 1s a contemporary
Parisian painter of miniatures named Anastaise, whose work has not
yet been identified by modern scholars.
The Cite des Dames has been called the first “feminist” text of the
French canon for its courageous defense of women in the face of cen-
turies of misogynist writings. De Pisan also raises all the ambiguities
about what form of expression a female voice might take (alternating
between metaphors of masculinity and femininity like “penetration”
and “‘germination”) that are later theorized by French postmodern
critics from Héléne Cixous to Luce Irigaray.
Little more than a hundred years later, Baldassare Castiglione
reopened the debate between the medieval view of woman as a defect
or mistake of nature and the Renaissance humanist vision of male and
female as separate and complementary though not equal. Castiglione’s
influential work, I/ Libro del Cortegiano, contains a fictionalized discus-
sion about the characteristics of the perfect courtier at the court of
Urbino in 1528 and devotes considerable space to a discussion of
the role of woman in political and social life. On the one hand,
Castiglione’s Renaissance lady of the court is presented as the equiva-
lent of the courtier with the same virtues of mind and education. On
the other, education and culture are accomplishments only for the
36
noblewoman. Her task is to charm; his is to prove himselfin action.
Again, it is beauty and moral qualities that constitute perfection for
the Renaissance woman.
Vasari’s Vite, while it was an important model for later chroniclers
of art and initiated a tradition in which exceptional women artists did
have a place in art history, reflected the multiple discourses shaping an
ideal of femininity for the Renaissance woman. Moreover, it initiated a
model for “reading” the achievements of women artists which was
quickly adapted by subsequent generations of commentators. Women
artists appear in Vasar1’s Vite in ways that would come to characterize
their relationship to painting and sculpture in the literature ofart from
the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries: as exceptions; as the authors
of works small in scale and modest in conception at historical
moments which equated size with profundity, importance, and
“authority”; as. evidence of the modern world’s right to the mantle of
antiquity; as signs of talent legitimized for women by combination
with other, “feminine” virtues; as defining and affirming “essential”
differences between men and women in choice ofsubject and manner
of execution; an t least implicitly, as the proof of mascu-
line dominance and superiority in the visual arts,
roughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the literature
of art continued to record the presence of exceptional women artists.
In Italy, Ridolfi and other seventeenth-century commentators fol-
lowed Vasari’s model, listing the women artists of antiquity before
turning to the present. Ridolf1’s Meraviglie dell’ Arte, published in 1648,
contains only Spilimbergo and the contemporary painters Lavinia
Fontana, Chiara Varotari, and Giovanna Garzoni, beginning a tradi-
tion whereby the names of women artists appear in, and disappear
from, the literature with astonishing arbitrariness.
During those two centuries, Italian writing on art became increas-
ingly partisan as the work of women artists, like that of their male
contemporaries, was annexed to the desires of male writers to glorify
specific cities and their artists. The achievements of women artists are
cited to prove the range of artistic ta re-
ative cities. ount Malvasia, director of the Accademia del Nudo
and an influential nobleman and discriminating collector in seven-
teenth-century Bologna, opened his Felsina Pittrice of 1678 with an
attack on Vasari and his bias toward Florentine painters: “I will not
fight here over the origins of painting, that is over how, when and
from whom it was born. I will not record the different learned opin-
ions of ancient writers. | am not writing on art, but on artists, or rather

os
only the artists of my native city.’ He then took personal credit for the
development of the painter Elisabetta Sirani whose fame was used to
prove the uniqueness of Bologna. Anguissola, Fontana, and Fede
Galizia are isolated at the bottom of a list of male portraitists, but
Malvasia’s praise of Sirani, which continues the tradition of confound-
ing person and painter, is part of a larger celebration of Bologna’s
newly won status as a producer of artists who rival those of Rome: “I
lived in adoration of that merit, which in her was of extreme quality,
and of that virtue, which was far from ordinary, and of that incompa-
rable humility, indescribable modesty, inimitable goodness.”
Although northern European commentaries followed the Italian
model, they are generally more moderate in tone. The earliest north-
ern European commentary, Karel van Mander’s Het Schilder Boeck,
published in 1604, omitted the five Netherlandish women mentioned
by Vasari, but the works of subsequent Dutch and Flemish authors
acknowledge the significant numbers of women artists active in the
Northern Renaissance. The third edition of Arnold Houbraken’s
Groote Schouburgh (1721) listed eleven women painters. Yet despite a
flurry of interest in women artists in seventeenth-century Holland,
where the Protestant Reformation had liberalized attitudes toward
women, by the eighteenth century, commentators had begun to shift
the emphasis toward what became a primary aesthetic concern ofthat
age: the identifying and defining of a “feminine sensibility” in the arts.
Lairesse, writing on flower painting in his Het Groot Schilderboeck
(1707), commented that “it is remarkable that amidst the various
choices in art, none is more feminine or proper for a woman than
this.”
Women were isolated from the theoretical and intellectual debates
that dominated the arts because in most cases they were barred from
membership of the academies in Rome and Paris, the major centers of
art education during the eighteenth century. Excluded from life draw-
ing classes, they were insufficiently trained to work in prestigious gen-
res like history painting. The birth of modern art criticism during this
period renewed interest in a hierarchy of genres in which history
painting reigned supreme.
The eighteenth century opened with the Rococo period and a
courtly, elegant style in which artifice, sentiment, and pleasure domi-
nated the concerns of aristocratic men and women. By the second half
of the century, philosophical inquiries into the nature of sexual diffe-
rence had begun to reshape gender identity. A transition took place
from older forms ofpublic life to the modern division between public
38
and private that underlies the formation of the modern family. In
parallel, a modern notion of gender was built around the opposition
between a public sphere of male activity and a private and female
domestic realm.
Although seventeenth-century French writers celebrated “femi-
nine reason,’ and writers from Corneille to Descartes admired female
intelligence and perception, during the eighteenth century a critique
of women became the basis for aesthetic judgments. Jean de la
Bruyere, following the lead of classical authors like Quintillian who
had contrasted “made-up” emasculated rhetoric with the healthy elo-
quence of the virile orator, drew an analogy between a critique of
women and a condemnation of make-up. Carried over to representa-
tion, such analogies became the basis for denouncing overly refined
brushwork and immoderate pleasure in color. Charles Cochin, writ-
ing during the reign of Louis XV, warned artists against applying color
as if they were women putting on make-up. Artists working in the
newly fashionable medium of pastel used many of the same ground
pigments that found their way onto women’s faces. Casting art in the
forms of femininity has persisted to the present. Writing about the
Rococo style in 1964, Jean Starobinski cautioned that it “could be
defined as a flamboyant Baroque in miniature: it crackles and scintil-
lates, making the mythological images of authority childlike and
effeminate. It 1s the perfect illustration of a form of art in which a
weakening of underlying meaningful values is combined with an
expansion of elegant, ingenuous, facile, smiling forms.”
Aesthetic debates between nature and artifice took place in the
context of Enlightenment attempts to apply scientific models to the
study of human nature. Central to these was the attempt to determine
which characteristics and qualities of human existence stem from
nature, and thus from unchanging natural law, and which aspects of our
lives result from custom and man-made laws. Voltaire, Antoine
Thomas, Montesquieu, and others contributed to a natural law theory
of equality, but a significant group of other thinkers explicitly denied
the equality of men and women on grounds of law or nature. It 1s
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas on the proper place of women in the
social and political order that became identified with the new, modern
world. His argument is important both because it supported the
separation of work-place and home which underlay the development
of modern capitalism and because it is consistent with a lengthy
Western tradition which has rationalized the separation and oppression
of women in patriarchal culture. Rousseau not only believed women to

39
be naturally inferior and submissive, but he also put great emphasis on
the notion that the sexes should be separated. Believing that women
lacked the intellectual capacities of men, he argued that they had no
ability to contribute to art and the work ofcivilization apart from their
domestic roles. The influence of Rousseau lay behind an increasing
identification of femininity with nature in the second half of the eigh-
teenth century. Although his position can be seen as a response to the
very real political and artistic power held by a number of women earli-
er in the century, and part of the complex dialogue explored here in
Chapter §, by the end of the century it dominated the popular imagi-
nation. In the novel Emile, published in 1762, Rousseau presents a
lengthy list of feminine qualities which he considers innate, among
them shame, modesty, love of embellishment, and the desire to please.
“T would have you remember, my dear,’ Samuel Richardson wrote in a
letter to his daughter in 1741, “that as sure as anything intrepid, free,
and in a prudent degree bold, becomes a man, so whatever is soft, ten-
der, and modest, renders your sex amiable. In this one instance we do
not prefer our own likeness; and the less you resemble us the more you
are sure to charm....” The rigid polarizing and “naturalizing” of sexu-
al difference came to dominate discussions of women’s role in the arts.
Not only was women’s work evaluated 1n terms of what it revealed of
its maker’s “femininity,” it was also consigned to media and subjects
now considered appropriate and “natural” to women. “To model well
in clay,’ notes George Paston in his Little Memoirs of the Eighteenth
Century, “is considered as strong minded and anti-feminine but to
model badly in wax or bread is quite a feminine occupation.”
As the division between the Man of Reason and the charming but
submissive woman widened, women had less access to the public
sphere which governed the production of art. The characterization of
women’s art as biologically determined or as an extension of their
domestic and refining role in society reached its apogee in the nine-
teenth century. It was most clearly expressed in a bourgeois ideology
which defined separate spheres for activity by men and women,
including the practice of art. John Ruskin’s “angel in the house”
presided over a world in which class and gender were strictly defined,
female labor devalued, and the family increasingly privatized. “Male
genius has nothing to fear from female taste,’ wrote Léon Legrange in
the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1860, “Let men conceive of great archi-
tectural projects, monumental sculpture, and the most elevated forms
of painting, as well as those forms of the graphic arts which demand a
lofty and ideal conception of art. In a word, let men busy themselves

40
with all that has to do with great art. Let women occupy themselves
with those types of art which they have always preferred, such as pas-
tels, portraits, and miniatures. Or the painting of flowers, those prodi-
gies of grace and freshness which alone can compete with the grace
and freshness of women themselves.”
The demand that women artists restrict their activities to what was
perceived as naturally feminine intensified during the second half of
the century, particularly in England and America. The growing num-
bers of women pursuing advanced training in art in these countries
led many women to negotiate new relationships with prevailing
ideologies of femininity. A few, such as Elizabeth Thompson and Rosa
Bonheur, were isolated as “exceptional” and freed from the constraints
of their femininity, but critics continued to evaluate the work of most
women in terms of gender. The novelist and critic J. K. Huysmans
located Mary Cassatt’s ability to paint children in her womanhood
rather than in her artistic skill: “Woman alone is capable of painting
childhood. ...” he declared. Remarks such as these advance ahistorical
and unchanging views of “feminine” nature. And they ignore the
commitment, hard work, and sacrifices which many women artists
have made in order to contribute to the shaping of visual culture.
It is also to nineteenth-century art history that we must look for
the origin of the categories ‘““woman artist” and “female school.” The
wholesale rewriting of the history of art as separate and distinct line-
ages for men and women laid the groundwork for twentieth-century
accounts in which, once separated, women and their art could easily
be omitted altogether. Ruskin’s was the dominant voice ofthe period,
but it was Anna Jameson who was the first writer to define herselfas a
specialist in the history of art. Jameson also believed in the existence
ofa specific and separate female art, equal to that of men but different
from it: “I wish to combat in every way that oft-repeated but most
false compliment unthinkingly paid to women, that genius has no sex;
there may be equality of power, but in its quality and application there
will be and must be, difference and distinction.”
Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art (1848) outlined woman’s not
inconsiderable place within the Christian tradition and its art. Her
association of charity and purity with a female point of view and her
emphasis on character, emotion, and moral purpose as feminine
virtues were quickly adopted by her Victorian audience. A number of
books about women soon followed, with most authors declaring
themselves in favor of what women had done, often expressing a belief
in the inevitability of equality as an historical certainty, and quick to
Al
assume and articulate a biologically determined sphere of activity for
women. The first of these were Ernst Guhl’s Die Frauen in der
Kunstgeschichte (1858) and Elizabeth Ellet’s Women Artists in All Ages
and All Countries (1859). They were followed by Ellen Clayton’s
English Female Artists (1876), Marius Vachon’s La Femme dans l’Art
(1893), Clara Clement’s encyclopedic Women in the Fine Arts from the
7th Century BC to the 20th Century (1904), Walter Sparrow’s Women
Painters of the World (1905), and Laura Ragg’s Women Artists of Bologna
(1907). Their arguments serve as a caution that we must look at art
historical and critical evaluations of art produced by women with a
healthy skepticism, and they reveal why it is that much contemporary
feminist art has chosen language as the site of the struggle over con-
tent and meaning in art.

12 Illustration in a Bodleian Library manuscript, Ms 764, f. 4 Iv.

 CHAPTER ONE

The Middle Ages

The contemporary practice of distinguishing between the fine arts

and the crafts originated in the reclassifying of painting, sculpture, and
architecture as liberal arts during the Renaissance. The general exclu-
sion of women from highly professionalized forms of art production
like painting and sculpture, and the involvement of large numbers of
women in craft production since the Renaissance, have solidified a
hierarchical ordering of the visual arts. Feminism in the arts has
protested against the distinction between “art” and “craft” grounded
in their different materials, technical training, and education (see
Chapter 11). It has also rejected inscriptions of “feminine”’ sensibility
on craft processes and materials, while pointing out the dangers of
sanctifying an artisanal tradition by renaming it “art.’ A contemporary
return to pre-Renaissance values and a feudal division of labor 1s
not possible, but we can look to the Middle Ages for models of
artistic production that are not based on modern notions of artistic
individuality.
Our knowledge about the daily lives and customs of women in the
Middle Ages owes much to representations emphasizing their labor, as
in a thirteenth-century manuscript illumination of awoman milking
a cow. Similar scenes—carved onto the capitals of Romanesque and
Gothic churches, embroidered into tapestries, and painted with jewel-
like precision in the borders of manuscripts—offer a diurnal counter-
part to the sacred imagery of the Virgin Mary and Child that
dominates medieval visual culture. Whether laboring in the service of
God or for daily subsistence, the lives of most medieval men and
women were organized around work. Although the names of anum-
ber of powerful women who were the patrons and benefactors ofsuch
representations are known today, we know little of the authors, for few
of them signed their names and the preservation of their individual
biographies had no role to play in their productions.
The Christian Church, as the dominant force in Western medi-
eval life, organized communication and culture, as well as religion
and education. Assuming what Foucault called “the privileges of

43
knowledge,” the Church exercised the religious and moral power
which gave shape to human expression: “The need to take a direct
part in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth which lies in
the Book—all that was a struggle for a new subjectivity.” The
Church’s hierarchical organization reinforced the class distinctions in
society; its patriarchal dogma included a full set of theories on the
natural inferiority of women which can be traced back to ancient
Greece and the Old Testament. While medieval writers and thinkers
discussed at length issues concerning women and their proper status in
society, Christian representation was focused on the opposition of Eve
and Mary, seducer and saint.
Recent careful work by social historians has illuminated the
ambiguous situation of women between the fourth and the four-
teenth centuries. Scholars have demonstrated significant differences in
men’s and women’s rights to possess and inherit property, in their
duties to pay homage and taxes, their civil and legal rights, and their
rights to present evidence or serve as judges or priests. The confusion
of sovereignty with personal property (the fief) contributed to the
emergence of a number of powerful upper-class women at a time
when most other women were restricted to the home and economi-
cally dependent on fathers, husbands, brothers, or sovereigns. The
rigidity of social divisions, and the gulf that separated upper and lower
classes, meant that upper-class women had more in common with the
men of their class than with peasant women.
While women’s social roles remained circumscribed by a Christian
ethic that stressed obedience and chastity, by the demands of maternal
and domestic responsibility, and by the feudal legal system organized
around the control of property, there is evidence that their lives, as
those of men, were also shaped by economic and social forces outside
ecclesiastic control, at least during the period of the early Middle
Ages. Women’s lives do not appear to have been privatized and their
social functions subordinated to, or defined by, their sexual capacities.
Symbiotic modes of production and reproduction, no clearly defined
physical boundaries between domestic life and public and economic
activity, and the physical rigors of medieval life, encouraged women to
take significant part in the management of family property and in
general economic life. And there is evidence that they participated in
all forms of cultural production from masonry and building to manu-
script illuminating and embroidery.
Most art during this period was produced in monasteries. Access to
education and the convent, the center of women’s intellectual and

44
artistic life from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries, was often deter-
mined by noble birth. Historians of the medieval Church divide its
history into two periods separated by the late eleventh-century
reforms of Pope Gregory VII (1073-85). The division is important:
not only did the Gregorian Reform, which coincided with the devel-
opment of feudal society, lead to a dramatically restricted role for
women in the church and to the emergence of a new tradition of
female mysticism, it also emphasized an ideology of divine woman-
hood which reached its apogee in the twelfth-century cult of the
Virgin Mary. As most medieval painter nuns discussed in feminist art
histories belong, in fact, to twelfth-century Germany and the particu-
lar political and social forces that defined an expanded place for edu-
cated women in that culture, it is necessary to distinguish between
early and late medieval production.
The origins of female monasticism can be traced to the solitary
ascetic Christian lives first led by male and female hermits in the third
century. Antony 1s usually credited as the first of these hermits, but
before he withdrew into the Egyptian desert, he placed his sister with
a community of nuns in Alexandria. In AD 512 Bishop Caesarius of
Arles founded a convent to be headed by his sister, Caesaria, and
ordered that “Between psalms and fasts, vigils and readings, let the vir-
gins of Christ copy holy books beautifully.’ The foundation initiated
a tradition of nuns as learned women, even as monasticism continued
to convey in its writings a repugnance for sexuality and a distaste for
women.
Within the convent women had access to learning even though
they were prohibited from teaching by St. Paul’s caution that “a
woman must be a learner, listening quietly and with due submission. I
do not permit a woman to be a teacher, nor must a woman domineer
over a man; she should be quiet.” From the sixth century on,
Benedictine Rule (written by Benedict of Nursia [c. 480-547] shaped
the community life of both men and women with two contradictory
attitudes defining gender in religious life. While on the one hand,
women were suspect as sexual threats to male chastity, on the other,
spiritual commonality rather than gender differentiation was the ideal
of the Benedictine Rule and hence of monasticism. During the
Middle Ages the convent provided an alternative to marriage, offering
a haven for nonconformists and female intellectuals. Although women
shared equally with men in conversion to the faith and the learning
that accompanied it, they were barred from the forms of power by
which the Church exercised control: preaching, officiating in church,

45
 and becoming priests. Nevertheless, the Rule of Saint Benedict, sanc-
tioned the founding of double monasteries in which monks and nuns
lived communal lives and often worked side by side. Before their abo-
lition by the Second Council of Nice in 787, many of these monaster-
ies were run by abbesses famous for their learning, among them
Anstrude of Laon, Gertrude of Nivelle, Bertille of Chelles, and Hilda
of Hartlepool.
Although traditional art history has omitted women from discus-
sions of the productions of the double monasteries, there is consider-
able evidence that by the eighth century powerful and learned
abbesses from noble families ran scriptoria in which manuscripts were
copied and illuminated. Little evidence remains as to how they were
produced and it is impossible to identify whether the authors or
scribes were male or female, yet we can assume from the existence of
the double monasteries that both monks and nuns were involved in
composing, copying, and illuminating manuscripts. Documents from
the period reveal impressive lists of women’s names attached to manu-
scripts after AD 800 when the Convent of Chelles, under the direction
of Charlemagne’s sister Gisela, produced thirteen volumes of manu-
scripts including a three-volume commentary on the Psalms signed by
nine women scribes. Early medieval saints’ lives contain references to
female illuminators and a letter written in 735 by St. Boniface to
Eadberg, the abbess of Minster in Thanet, thanks her for sending him
eifts of spiritual books, and requests that she “copy out for me in gold
the epistles of my Lord Saint Peter. . . 2”
Despite the evidence of women active in British and Carolingian
scriptoria, the first documented example of an extended cycle of
miniatures worked on by a woman is Spanish. The most remarkable
visionary manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries depict the
Apocalyptic vision of St. John the Divine in the Book of Revelation.
They include a group of manuscripts (there are about twenty-four
known copies with illustrations) containing Commentaries on the
Apocalypse compiled around 786 by the Spanish monk Beatus of
Liebana (c. 730-798). Their paintings are executed in the distinctive
Moaarabic style of Spanish illumination produced by Christian artists
strongly influenced by the Moslem formal and decorative tradition.
14 The monk Emetrius worked on the so-called Beatus Apocalypse of
Gerona. This manuscript was written and illuminated in a monastery in
the mountains of Léon in northwest Spain by a priest called Senior,
who may have assisted in the painting by Emetrius, whose hand has
been identified from an earlier manuscript, and by a woman called
46
Ende. Ende titles herself DEPINTRIX (paintress) and DEI AIUTRIX
(helper of God), following the custom of noblewomen of the time.
She has been identified with a school of illuminators and limners in
medieval Spain which also included the poetess Leodegundia.
The Beatus Apocalypse mingles the fierce visionary and fantastic
imagery of St. John’s vision with pure ornament and a careful atten-
tion to naturalistic detail. Most of the illustrations are in the flat
decorative style characteristic of Mozarabic illumination with stylized
figures set against broad bands of colors. In other places, rich colors
and ornamented grounds are set off by delicate tones and subtle plays
of line.
Although we shall perhaps never know the precise role played by
Ende and her contemporaries in early medieval illuminations, the
modern assumption that only monks worked in the scriptoria is clear-
ly erroneous. By the tenth and eleventh centuries the development of
feudalism and the effects of Church reform had begun to deprive
women of powers they had exercised during the earlier Middle Ages.
Only in Germany, where the Ottonian Empire fostered an unprece-
dented flowering of female intellectual and artistic culture, are we able
to trace the work of individual women.
Despite the liabilities of feudalism elsewhere, under it women did
not lose all legal rights, status, and economic power. Often they man-
aged large estates while men were at war or occupied elsewhere on
business; by the thirteenth century the rapid growth of commerce and
city life had even produced a class of urban working women.
The decline of the monastery as a place of female culture and
learning in the British Isles can be traced directly to the monastic
reforms of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Tenth-century reform in
England placed the king as guardian of the rule in monasteries and his
queen as guardian and protector of the nunneries. No new abbacies
for women were created. Instead, prioresses were placed in charge of
smaller and less important priories subordinated to male abbots. The
disappearance of the double monastery, often under the rule of a
powerful abbess, gradually led to a diminished tradition of learning
for women and a subsidiary role for the convent.
The Norman Conquest of 1066 introduced the feudal system into
England. The events leading up to the Norman invasion, culminating
in the defeat of Harold at the Battle of Hastings are the subject of the
Bayeux Tapestry. Produced around 1086, it is not a tapestry at all but a
silk on linen embroidery twenty inches high and more than two hun-
dred feet long. The “tapestry” contains a sequence of separate scenes,

47
each of them dominated by a few images organized to be read hori-
zontally and identified by a running text in simple Latin. The frieze-
like figures are stiffand simplified, but there is drama and energy in the
story of the journey across the sea, the preparations for battle and,
finally, Harold’s defeat. It is dominated by three figures—Edward
the Confessor, Harold who succeeded him, and William Duke of
Normandy. The emphasis is on battles, bloodshed, and feasting. A
wealth of naturalistic detail in the picturing of carts, boats, costumes,
armor, and everyday life infuses the work with a convincing energy
and has made the tapestry a rich source of information about the
military aspects of medieval life.
The only surviving example of Romanesque political embroidery
of the eleventh century, the Bayeux Tapestry has been called the
“most important monument ofsecular art of the Middle Ages.” Yet its
origins remain obscure, and the history ofits production has been dis-
torted by modern assumptions that medieval embroidery was an
exclusively female occupation. A tradition identifying Queen
Mathilda as the work’s main embroiderer can be traced at least to the
early eighteenth century, even though there is absolutely no evidence
for identifying her with the tapestry. In the nineteenth century, as
Roszika Parker has shown, the legend of Queen Mathilda’s labor
became the cornerstone of attempts by writers to confer aristocratic
status on the art of needlework practiced by thousands of middle-class
women. Recasting embroidery as an aristocratic pursuit, they present-
ed Mathilda asasource of inspiration for women isolated inthe home
a ee ee Parker is
alone, however, in suggesting that the tapestry was produced in a pro-
fessional embroidery workshop by male and female labor; most other
historians believe that it was made at an estate or nunnery, possibly
in Canterbury or Winchester where embroiderers had long enjoyed
royal patronage, and probably by women, as contemporary documents
include no mention of male needleworkers.
The Bayeux Tapestry’s narrative structure is close to that of the
chansons de geste. Its actors are military heroes, its subtexts concern
loyalty, bravery, treachery, and male bonding through oath-taking and
military action. Its organization into registers of words and images
affirms a consolidation of power, but it is worth noting that the work’s
structure and language displace women from power. Among the
scores of male figures, there are only three women in the central regis-
ter. One appears as a mourner in the scene of King Edward on his
deathbed, another holds a boy by the hand as they flee from a burning
48
13
/Elfgyva and the Cleric,
from
The Bayeux Tapestry
c. 1086

house. The third figure represents the only break in the work’s narra-
tive. Although the scene of Alfgyva and the Cleric must have been
familiar to eleventh-century audiences, its meaning has been lost in
the course of centuries of rewriting history so that it details only the
exploits of men. The incident depicted was probably scandalous—the
presence of a nude male priapic figure in the margin below may indi-
cate a sexual content—but our inability to identify it today and the
general lack of female figures situate women outside the medieval
discourse ofpolitical power under feudalism.
Even as the status of women was beginning to decline in other
parts of Europe, and as cultural production was becoming both profes-
sionalized and secularized, great convents continued to flourish as
places of learning in Germany, the first area in Europe to reestablish a
stable government after the death of Charlemagne in 814 and the

49
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disintegration of his empire. By the middle of the tenth century, the

German kingdom of Otto I was the most secure power in Europe.
Otto’s marriage to Adelaide of Burgundy strengthened ties between
Germany and Italy; her appearance on coins and her signature on
diplomas testify to her political power and prestige. She was a staunch
protectress of the Abbey of Cluny and commissioned many books for
use in her various foundations. There were other powerful women in
Ottonian Germany, including Otto’s sister Mathilda, the Abbess of
Quedlinburg, who ruled in his name during his absences.
In 947 Otto had invested with supreme authority the Abbess of
Ganderscheim, a house founded in 852 and led by a series of abbesses
drawn from the reigning families. Such women could legally keep and
control landed property and became, in effect, the rulers of a small,
autonomous principality with its own courts, army, coinage, and papal
protection. Despite these powers, monastic women remained bound
by the Church’s demand for humility and obedience from women.
Thus Hrotsvit of Ganderscheim (c. 935-975), the first poet of Saxony
and the first German dramatist and historian, was among those who
used the diminutive and expressed herself with self-deprecation in an
exaggerated convention of female humility. This contrasts with her
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female characters who conquer male oppressors intellectually as well

as spiritually. The independence of cloistered royal women may also
have suited the political needs of the Ottonian dynasty; giving unmar-
ried women of royal blood religious power and intellectual authority
was one way of lessening the chances that they would marry potential
rivals outside the family.
Debate continues among historians about whether women in the
later Middle Ages founded and entered communities because of reli-
gious desires or because of family lineage and marriage strategies.
Nevertheless, the presence of well-endowed convents during the
eleventh and twelfth centuries encouraged large numbers of women
to take up religious lives; cults of female saints proliferated alongside
the cult of the Blessed Virgin. In western France the desire to free the
institution from lay control led to calls for a return to the evangelical
purity of the early Church. There is considerable evidence of women’s
participation 1n this spiritual revival. It was accompanied by the culti-
vation of early desert saints such as Pelagia, Mary the Egyptian, and
Mary Magdalene, who served as models for later female saints of the
Merovingian period. Their lives were believed to emulate those of the
women Judith Oliver has called “the early Christian Desert Mothers.”

$3
 19 The Syon Cope, late thirteenth
early fourteenth century

The output of Ottonian scriptoria was voluminous, and the maj-

ority of women illuminators of the Middle Ages were active as part of
this cultural flowering. Among them is Diemud of the Cloister of
Wessobrun in Bavaria. A sixteenth-century text lists forty-five books
by her hand which are distinguished by ornate initial letters. Another
nun, named Guda, tells us that she wrote and painted a Homiliary of
Saint Bartholomew. The contributions of these women to the history of
the illustrated book are well documented. They range from a richly
illuminated astronomical treatise from Alsace, which includes a dedi-
cation miniature showing the Virgin flanked by the scribe Guta and
the illuminator Sintram, and a representation of the Abbess Hitda
offering her Gospel Book to the cloister’s patron, St. Walburga
IS (c. 1020), to a charming self-portrait by one Claricia, who dangles
with joyous abandon as the tail of the Q in a psalter from Augsburg
(c. 1200). Claricia’s hand is just one of several in this manuscript,

S4
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leading Dorothy Miner to conclude on the basis of her dress—uncov-

ered head, braided hair, and a close-fitting tunic under a long-waisted
dress with long tapering points hanging from the sleeves—that she
was probably a lay student at the convent.
A new type of Christian illuminated encyclopedia emerged during
the twelfth century. Lambert’s Liber Floridus, written in Flanders in
1120 and based on the work of the ancient encyclopedist Isidorus, 1s
one of the earliest examples of the new interest 1n cosmological, ethi-
cal, and eschatological aspects of the world which found its fullest
expression in the work of Herrad of Landsberg and Hildegard of
Bingen. Herrad’s illustrated encyclopedia, the Hortus Deliciarum, or
Garden of Delights, written between 1160 and 1170, and Hildegard of
Bingen’s visionary book of knowledge, The Scivias, begun in 1142 and
completed ten years later, are two of the most remarkable religious
compilations by women in Western history. Although neither book

BS
was necessarily illustrated by its author, and questions remain as to the
specifics of production in both cases, the illustrations and texts are so
closely integrated that the works’ visual contents cannot be separated
from their authors’ conceptions. Pioneers of visual autobiography,
both women were part of the twelfth-century move toward a more
personal spirituality. Yet both were also able administrators and active
in the political and social life of their day.
In 1167 Herrad was elected Abbess of Hohenburg near Strasbourg.
The Hortus Deliciarum, a massive folio of 324 sheets of parchment, had
636 miniatures which were probably executed in a professional work-
shop in Strasbourg shortly after her death in 1195. Both an anthology
and a religious encyclopedia, it includes nearly 1200 texts by various
authors, as well as several poems which appear to be in Herrad’s hand.
In addition to her literary and editorial work, she almost certainly
supervised the scheme of the illustrations and she may have con-
tributed to the outline drawings. The manuscript remained in the
Abbey of Hohenburg throughout the Middle Ages. Tragically, the
bombing of Strasbourg 1n 1870 destroyed the original and we are left
with only a small number of illustrations reproduced in engravings
during the nineteenth century and a few fragments with pictures later
acquired by the British Museum.
The fullest description of the work comes to us from Engelhardt, a
nineteenth-century commentator who remarked on the brilliant
smoothness and finish of the original manuscript. The style of the
miniatures rests between the conventions of Byzantine illumination
and the greater realism of Gothic art, and Engelhardt also pointed
out the similarity between certain images and those of Greek ninth-
century manuscripts.
Herrad dedicated the Hortus Deliciarum to the nuns of her convent:
“Herrad, who through the grace of God is abbess of the church on the
Hohenburg, here addresses the sweet maidens of Christ. . . . I was
thinking of your happiness when like a bee guided by the inspiring
God I drew from many flowers of sacred and philosophic writing this
book called the Garden of Delights; and I have put it together to the
praise of Christ and the Church, and to your enjoyment, as though
into a sweet honeycomb. . . 2’ The work opens with a miniature
showing six rows of female heads and includes the name of each nun
and novice. Among them are the names of the area’s landed gentry,
suggesting that Hohenburg, like most medieval convents, drew its
members from the upper class. Herrad intended the Hortus Deliciarum
as a compendium of desirable knowledge in religious and secular
56
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subjects for the education of the young girls in the convent. Her
inclusion on the last page of Relindis, her teacher and predecessor as
abbess, offers tangible evidence of the transmission of learning
between women in medieval Germany.
The Hortus Deliciarum includes a comprehensive history of
humankind, as well as a natural history of the world quoted from the
variety of authors mentioned in the introduction. Its illuminations
number monumental representations of figures like Philosophy, wear-
ing the garland characteristic of the seven Liberal Arts, narrative pic-
tures from the Old Testament, Gospels, and Acts, scenes from
Judgment Day, and allegories of the Virtues and Vices, as well as gar-
dening hints, and scenes from contemporary life. The miniatures
which illustrate the Creation are introduced by diagrams and digres-
sions on astronomy and geography.

$7
 The subjects of the Hortus Deliciarum come from a long tradition in
Western and Byzantine art, but their fresh and spontaneous treatment,
and the author’s close attention to the costumes, life, and manners of
her age, have made the work a unique and valuable source for our
understanding oflife at the time. Herrad’s decision to add to each pic-
ture the name of every person or implement in Latin or German, or
sometimes both, has greatly assisted modern research into medieval
terms and their usage.
Late eleventh-century Church reform had focused new attention
on prohibitions against clerical marriage. Increasing restrictions
against ecclesiastical women, including cloistering as a form of social
control, had accompanied the rigid imposition of rules of clerical
celibacy. During the same period medieval scholars, particularly
Thomas Aquinas, were rediscovering Aristotelian thought, as well as
that of Hippocrates and Galen with their insistence on the natural
inferiority of women. Women made no contribution to the scholastic
philosophy and dominant theology which grew out of these debates.
They were excluded from the intellectual life of cathedral schools and
universities in which students were legally clerics, a rank not open to
women. Instead, they turned increasingly to mysticism and, through
vivid imagery and inspired commentaries, were influential in an alter-
native discourse, though one certainly not unique to women.
Hildegard of Bingen left a body of work unparalleled in its range.
The texts in which she describes her religious experiences form only
a small fraction of her literary output, but they are of particular inter-
est to art historians because of their visionary imagery. Scholars have
noted strong similarities in the drawings in Hildegard’s prayerbook
and Herrad’s Hortus Deliciarum as further evidence of the strength and
endurance of the female tradition of learned women. Yet Hildegard’s
sphere of influence was not confined to the cloistered world of
women and she played a significant public role as one of many voices
raised in support of the Gregorian Reform.
A great contemplative nun, as well as a politically active woman
who corresponded with Henry II of England, Queen Eleanor, the
Greek Emperor and Empress, Bernard of Clairvaux, to mention a few,
Hildegard was born in 1098 to well-to-do parents in a Rhineland vil-
lage. Her father was a knight attached to the court of the Count of
Spanheim. Hildegard’s childhood visions of shimmering lights and
circling stars may have influenced her family’s decision to enroll her as
a novice in the convent at Disibodenberg at the age of seven or
eight. The four-hundred-year-old Benedictine Abbey there had only

58
recently added a community of women under the rule ofJutta, the
Count of Spanheim’s sister, who took charge of the education of
Hildegard, training her in scripture, Latin, and music. She took the
vows of a Benedictine nun in 1117 and was elected abbess in 1136.
Hildegard confided the existence of her troubling visions to
Bernard of Clairvaux, whose desire to raise the Church above worldly
concerns through renewed faith and deep mystical contemplation set
the moral tone for the period. Recognizing in her a new ally for his
efforts to rejuvenate spiritual life, he urged the pope that he “should
not suffer so obvious a light to be obscured by silence, but should
confirm it by authority.’ Papal recognition established Hildegard’s
reputation as a prophetic voice within the Church. In addition to the
Scivias (begun 1142), The Divine Works ofa Simple Man (begun 1163),
and the Meritorious Life (1158), Hildegard wrote sixty-three hymns, a
miracle play, and a long treatise of nine books on the different natures
of trees, plants, animals, birds, fish, minerals, metals, and other sub-
stances. Her visions encompass much of the scientific and religious
knowledge of her time and she has the distinction of being the only
woman who has a volume of the Church “fathers’” official Patriologia
Latina devoted entirely to her works.
The Scivias (Know the Ways of the Lord) consists of thirty-five visions
relating and illustrating the history of salvation. The earliest copy,
made before her death in 1179, apparently under her direction,
though probably not by the nuns ofher cloister, has been missing from
the Wiesbaden library since the Second World War. The book opens
with the words: “And behold! In my forty-third year I had a heavenly
vision. ... 1 saw a great light from which a heavenly voice said to me:
‘O puny creature, ashes of ashes and dust of dust, tell and write what
you see and hear.” The persona adopted by Hildegard for the expres-
sion of her visionary theology is, like those of many other twelfth-
century mystics, that of aweak person, a passive vessel into which 1s
poured the word of God. She herself claimed to be nothing more than
a receptor, “a feather on the breath of God.’ A gift from God to a
weak but chosen woman, the vision circumvents the medieval
Church’s denial of power or authority to women. It disrupts mascu-
line control over knowledge by separating the body of woman from
thought. Conservative by temperament, background, and upbringing,
Hildegard did not challenge the Church’s views on the subjection of
women. Her conception of the religious role of woman derived from
a strong sense of female otherness in relation to male authority and a
vision of woman as complementary to man.

xg
 21 Hildegard of Bingen
Scivias f. Ir, 1142—§2

Hildegard’s Scivias appears to be the first medieval manuscript, apart

from the Beatus Apocalypse, in which the artist uses line and color to
reveal the images of a supernatural contemplation. The paintings,
while stylistically remote from other contemporary northern
European manuscript illuminations, have a freshness and energy
despite their almost naive drawing. They are characterized by a highly
individualized sensibility, and it is reasonable to assume Hildegard’s
close supervision in their making. The first miniature depicts
Hildegard and the monk Volmar in the monastery at Bingen to which
Hildegard had moved her nuns in 1147. Two small rooms with red
cupolas and gilded dormer windows frame a larger room. Hildegard
Wears a cowl clasped at the waist and a veil, which the artist has given
the look of a black wool shawl, the dress of courtly women of the
time. As the vision descends in a great flash of light from heaven,
piercing Hildegard’s eyes and head, both she and Volmar prepare to
record it on a wax tablet.
The illustrations for the Scivias range from representations of the
Church in human form, or as a city, to fallen angels, the Antichrist, the
60
struggles of the soul, and the battles of the Virtues and Vices. In her
excellent study of Hildegard of Bingen, Barbara Newman identifies
her as the first Christian thinker to deal seriously and positively with
the idea of the feminine, shown as Eve, Mary, and Ecclesia, or Mother
Church. At the heart of her spiritual world are the images of Sapientia
and Caritas, visionary and female forms of Holy Wisdom and Love
Divine, and she 1s the first of the female theologians to personify love
as a consummately beautiful woman.
Churchmen who wrote about female mystics tended to emphasize
their inspiration and minimize their education. Vincent of Beauvais
confirmed that Hildegard had dictated her visions in Latin, but
claimed that she had done so in a dream as she was otherwise illiterate.
More recently, scholars have pointed out that, although expressed in
terms of vision and revelation, her ideas unmistakably indicate her
familiarity with the works of St. Augustine and Boethius as well as
contemporary scientific writers and Neoplatonic thinkers.
Hildegard’s place in the spiritual life of the twelfth century 1s grad-
ually being clarified. Although in 1928 Charles Singer advanced the
view that her visions were only the auras of chronic migraine, others
have pointed out that such glib views fail to distinguish between the
pathological basis of the visions and their intellectual content and spir-
itual import. Barbara Newman has placed her firmly within a school
of Christian thought that centers on the discovery and adoration of
“yore a - eC Mee Md las
22 Hildegard of Bingen
Scivias f. §, 1142-52
divine wisdom in the works of creation and redemption expressed
through images of the feminine aspect of God, Church, and Cosmos.
She has been credited with embracing the full breadth of the
Christian revelation in a fresh and original way, with seeking to inte-
grate all aspects of life, and with presenting female authority as a resti-
tution of the natural order, not a threat or challenge to it.
In an age ripe for prophetic literature, Hildegard’s writings not only
seemed to anticipate events later associated with the Protestant revolt,
but her appeal to free the Church from corruption and worldliness
had a profound impact on the feminine religious movement of the
thirteenth century known as the Beguines. As a prophetic voice cho-
sen by God, she was able to assume many sacerdotal functions which
the Church saw as male prerogatives. This aspect of female mysti-
cism—with its imagery of confused consciousness, loss of subject-
hood, and divine flames that transform the soul into a fluid stream
dissolving all notions of difference—has led contemporary theorists
such as Luce Irigaray, one of a group of French women who broke
away from Lacan’s teaching, to view mysticism as the one important
break with the medieval polarities that placed women in a subordinate
position. Irigaray has argued that in patriarchal cultures that deny
“subjectivity” to women, the mystical experience is the one that dis-
solves the subject/object opposition, and the one area of high spiritual
endeavor in which women have excelled. Thus it has become an
important area of inquiry in feminist attempts to explore the positions
from which women have spoken and interrupted male control over
language and institutional life.
However important individual women like Hildegard and Herrad
were to the cultural and spiritual life of the later Middle Ages—a
period in which anonymity was the norm, if not the rule—a full
examination requires that we consider patronage as well as produc-
tion, exploring both the reception of works of art and their function
in institutions in which women played prominent roles. Hildegard of
Bingen’ letters, among other sources, point to a strong tradition of
female patronage in Ottonian Germany that included aristocratic
women such as Agnes of Prague, Hedwig of Silesia, and Elisabeth of
Thuringia as the benefactors of monasteries built by and for them.
Around 1100, another social shift occurred as an outgrowth of the
Crusades. The establishment of new trade routes helped encourage a
gradual shift from an agrarian to a more urban civilization in which
many women benefited from expanded roles in guild production.
Nevertheless, guild treatment of women varied widely and women
62
were often concentrated in “women’s industries” such as work in silk,
embroidery, millinery, and special garment crafts.
The growth of towns during the thirteenth century created a new
class of women—urban working women whose managerial skills
were in great demand due to a high degree of mobility among men.
Deep-seated changes in the social position of women—their acquisi-
tion of the right of inheritance and the feudal privileges normally
associated with it—integrated them more firmly into the economic
structure of the later Middle Ages. Henry Kraus has convincingly
related the newly humanized image of the Virgin Mary that culmi-
nates in Gothic art to social changes which had to accommodate the
new status of women active in trade, particularly the femmes soles, or
unmarried and widowed women.
The importance of women for the medieval economy won them a
place in the guilds, despite restrictions, and the right to carry on
family businesses after the death of a husband or father. The woman
merchant, as the Wife of Bath tells us in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,
had full civic status. Women are shown working at several occupations
in the sculptural series called the “Active Life” on the north porch of
Chartres Cathedral, and in Etienne Boileau’s Book of Trades, written 1n
the thirteenth century, which lists a hundred occupations in Paris, six
of them were governed solely by female guilds. Eighty other occupa-
tions, from cloth production to dairying, included women. The mar-
gins of Gothic manuscripts often show images of women holding
distaffs and spindles, and women were active in the textile industries in
Flanders, northern France, Champagne, and Normandy. It is impor-
tant once again to recognize that few trades were exclusively practised
by either men or women. The division oflabor according to sex is a
modern invention, often manifested in attempts to identify female
sexuality with activities like needlework. Throughout much of the
Middle Ages, although noblewomen did indeed embroider in their
homes and castles, and other women spun, combed, carded, and wove
the cloth for the family’s clothes, both women and men worked side
by side in guild workshops and in workshops attached to noble house-
holds, monasteries, and convents.
In England, an expanding international market for the kind of
ecclesiastical embroidery known as Opus Anglicanum led to a shift from
domestic production, often by women scattered widely around the
country, to tightly organized, male-controled guild workshop in
London. The Syon Cope is a late thirteenth- or early fourteenth- 19
century example ofthis highly developed medieval art which equaled

63
painting and sculpture in status. Technically intricate and wonderfully
expressive, Opus Anglicanum incorporated silk and metal threads,
pearls, jewels, and beaten gold on a ground oflinen or velvet, working
the materials into shimmering scenes of everyday life and Biblical
events. As the demand for Opus Anglicanum spread throughout
Europe, letters from Pope Innocent IV to the abbots of England
requested large quantities. The richly worked vestments of Opus
Anglicanum identified the riches of earthly power—signified by pre-
cious materials and superb craftsmanship—with divine rule, as the
movement of the body under the cope transformed its surface into a
transcendent blaze of light. After the middle of the thirteenth century,
women seem to disappear from professional production and modern
accounts identifying this form of needlework with individual femi-
nine achievement have greatly obscured the means of its production.
The thirteenth century also witnessed the rise of secular scriptoria
as the production and illustration of books moved outside the monas-
tery. Book making, now a luxury industry, was carried out close to
urban centers of money and power. The term imagier, which appears
in the tax rolls of Paris, may refer to a painter, illuminator, sculptor, or
even architect, making it difficult to determine specific activities of
women. Nevertheless, analysis of the tax rolls of Paris between 1292
and 1313 reveals that the percentage of women in these trades is con-
siderably lower than in other fields. Robert Branner, investigating
manuscript makers in mid-thirteenth-century Paris, discovered the
records of a parchmenter named Martha who worked with her hus-
band; Francoise Baron, in an examination of tax records in various
parishes of Paris from the later thirteenth and early fourteenth cen-
turies, found references to eight female illuminators though we have
no examples of their work. We know that Maitre Honoré, the
founder of the great Parisian school of illuminators at the end of the
thirteenth century, was assisted by his daughter and her husband, but
the work was executed anonymously, within the strict conventions of
a style, and nothing survives that can be firmly identified with her
hand. Millard Meiss has attributed a number of the finest miniatures
in the collection of the Duc de Berry to Bourgot, the most famous of
the professional female illuminators of the fourteenth century, and
her father, Jean le Noir. Shortly after the marriage of Yolande de
Flandre in 1353 the pair executed a delicate Book of Hours which
combines the elegant style of the illuminator Pucelle with a sturdier
expressionism, but here again individual hands cannot, and should
not, be identified.

64
23
Bourgot and le Noir
Book of Hours c. 1353

These examples indicate the impossibility of fitting medieval visual

productions in many media into art historical categories that stress
individual creativity and assume that the artist 1s a man. Recent studies
by social historians have provided rich material that deserves careful
scrutiny by art historians interested in tracing the changing circum-
stances of men’s and women’s participation in medieval cultural life.
Further research is necessary into the nature of medieval collabora-
tions and into the role of visual representation in structuring women’s
relationship to “the privileges of knowledge.”

65
CHAPTER TWO

The Renaissance Ideal

Jacob Burckhardt, the foremost European Renaissance historian of his

day, asserted unequivocally in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
(1860) that: “To understand the higher forms of social intercourse in
this period, we must keep before our minds the fact that women stood
on a footing of perfect equality with men.” Burckhardt’s assumption
that equality of the sexes followed the humanist rediscovery of the
“freedom and dignity of man” dominated historical accounts of the
Renaissance until it began to be repudiated by feminist scholars in the
1970s. In “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971)
Linda Nochlin explored artistic talent and the institutions that have
traditionally nurtured it. This essay inaugurated feminist challenges to
the prevailing view of Renaissance art as a naturalistic reflection of
reality rather than a set of constructed and gendered myths. A few
years later, the historian Joan Kelly-Gadol elaborated the relationship
between literary ideals of female equality and changing property
relations, forms of institutional control, and cultural ideology as they
affected women. Her conclusion was that the very developments
opening up new possibilities for Renaissance men, particularly the
consolidation of the state and the development of capitalism, adverse-
ly affected women by leaving them with less actual power than they
had enjoyed under feudalism. Although this has been further qualified
in excellent recent studies by historians such as Margaret King,
David Herlihy, and Christine Klapisch-Zuber, her essay has proved an
important source of revisionist thinking. These and other studies can
help us to understand why the history of art contains no female
equivalents of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and other
“master” artists of the period, but they stop short of exploring
women’s relationship to the new Renaissance ideals of pictorial repre-
sentation.
The development of capitalism and the emergence of the modern
state transformed economic, social, and familial relationships in
Renaissance Italy. Art historians continue to look to fifteenth-century
Florence for the sources of the new ideals of artistic genius and
66
individuality that distinguish the modern world from that of the
Middle Ages. It is here that we find the origins of modern capitalism
and the privatization of the family, as well as the beginning of the
redefinition of painting and sculpture as liberal arts rather than crafts.
And it is in Renaissance Florence that linear perspective developed—a
mathematical system that organized pictorial space illusionistically and
defined the viewer's relationship to the picture surface in ways that
dominated Western painting until the end of the nineteenth century.
The absence of women’s names from the lists of artists responsible
for the “renaissance” of Western culture in fifteenth-century Florence
deserves careful scrutiny. It is in the cultural ideology that supported
women’s exclusion from the arts of painting and sculpture that we
find the roots of the subsequent shift of woman’s role in visual culture
from one of production to one of being represented. As the wealthiest,
and perhaps most conservative of the Italian city-states, Florence is in
some ways an extreme model to adopt. Yet Florence was also where
individual power was relocated in the public rather than the private
sphere. Looking at early Renaissance Florence helps to explain why
the first well-known woman artist of the Renaissance, Sofonisba
Anguissola, is found in the sixteenth rather than the fifteenth century,
and why she is associated with the provincial city of Cremona rather
than the artistic centers of Florence and Rome, and the court of Spain
rather than the civic and papal patronage of Italy.
The dialogue between past and present—between the ideals of
classical antiquity and the realities of late medieval Italy—ushered in
the Renaissance. Central to that debate, as revealed in the works of
Boccaccio, Christine de Pisan, and others, were discussions about the
lives and comportment of women. The intensity and complexity of
these debates complicated later attempts to understand the relation-
ship between prescriptive literature and historical fact, and between
idealized depictions and lived realities.
A tradition of educated and skilled women in religious orders
persisted in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy despite an increas-
ingly secularized society. Nuns actively commissioned works for foun-
dations, such as, for example, the splendid polyptych ordered by the
Benedictine nuns of San Pier Maggiore in Florence for their high
altar. Outside the convent walls, however, women were barred from
participating in the governmental patronage that created the public
face of Renaissance Italy, and they played no part in guild commis-
sions. Catherine King has shown that women participated only in
restricted areas of patronage outside the convent: as middle-class

67
widows commissioning funerary altarpieces and as the consorts of
rulers, the most important of whom during the fifteenth century was
Isabella d’Este of Mantua. The only women artists whose names have
come down to us from fifteenth-century Florence were nuns such as
Maria Ormani, who included her self-portrait in a breviary of 1453;
the painter Paolo Uccello’s daughter, Antonia, who was in the
Carmelite Order in Florence, none of whose works have survived; and
the miniaturist Francesca da Firenze. The few works that remain indi-
cate that while convent life still made it possible for some women to
paint, Church reform and the isolation of most convents from the
major cities in which the guilds were assuming control over artistic
production meant more insularity for religious women. It is to the
cities and their guilds that we must look.
Florence grew rich in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from
the silk and wool industries and from banking. Moralists then might
have argued about whether education was a good thing for girls, but a
literate wife was becoming essential to the mercantile families that
formed the new Florentine middle class. The chronicler Giovanni
Villani reported that by 1338 eight to ten thousand Florentine child-
ren, male and female, were attending elementary school to learn their
letters: yet by the fifteenth century, women’s roles in general eco-
nomic life had become more circumscribed.
By the middle of the fourteenth century the Guild of Linen
Manufacturers was flourishing as one of the Seven Great Guilds
which regulated cloth production. Noblewomen, as well as many reg-
ular workers 1n linen thread, took up the art of lace-making. Nuns
were considered particularly proficient teachers of a skill practiced
across class lines by both amateurs and professionals. The revision of
guild regulations in 1340 reaffirmed the women’s right to be admitted
to full privileges and duties in the guild. At the same time, however, as
revised statutes restricted membership to active entrepreneurs, women
and less skilled workers were left almost entirely without rights. Most
of the highly skilled artisans were now men; women were relegated to
areas that required fewer skills, or skills of a kind that could be easily
transferred to new households upon marriage.
Florence produced a small quantity of simple woolen cloths along-
side the more elaborate woolens and silks for which the city became
famous. Social historians have shown that a small number of women
appear in the account books of the Florentine wool manufacturers as
weavers of the plainer and coarser wools. None, however, worked as
weavers in the silk industry, which was entirely devoted to luxury
68
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tur im fine omit; Al Weier ccee rev.-7E. urs im ps.

caploz toti ann. al oY Exfron ies. 2 nr. Er ne.
Woy”Londite: ali Set ‘ba. Abfolunio. ~~
Y. Rozate cel; vefup. q Cyrano one yhu ope pees
kes pluant witum.2Apiat EES tuoz TimiPere nb,
T:
Agermmnetfaluaroaem, Ae TAL qcum pie Thufeo wie -z1e
ih DLW A snatin
mifetafelox.1% Am.

24 Maria Ormani Breviarium cum Calendario 1453

cloths and requireda high degree of skill. With the evolution of a new
constitution for the city in the fourteenth and early fifteenth century
the guilds became agencies of communal authority rather than corpo-
rate interest groups. Women’s relationship to the guilds became insep-
arable from their broader social role—a role which was being radically
transformed by the city’s new wealth and political power, and by the
new opposition of public and private spheres.
Women were relegated to unskilled activities in the guilds at an his-
torical moment when the demand was growing for “designers” who

These skills were inseparable from the skills of artists who, still consid-
ered artisans, worked at a variety of tasks that ranged from painting
altarpieces to decorating furniture and designing banners for heraldic
events. As the social status of Florentine painters gradually improved
during the fourteenth century, they broke away from the Guild of
Doctors and Apothecaries and, in 1349, formed the Confraternity of
Saint Luke, also known as the Confraternity of Painters. Generally
drawn from the artisan class, painters worked to the demands of their
patrons in workshops in which they had served at least four-year
apprenticeships. A master’s signature on a work of art meant that the

69
work met the standards of the workshop, not that it represented an
individual production.
A statute of 1354 provided that: “those who inscribed themselves
on the Roll of Membership—whether men or women—should be
contrite and should confess their sins...’ Yet guild records of the sec-
ond half of the fourteenth century reveal virtually no women’s names,
though it is possible that husbands signed for wives as their legal repre-
sentatives. Women’s names are also missing from the employment
rosters of construction projects in Florence, a sharp departure from
evidence of their participation in medieval building trades.
By the early decades of the fifteenth century, art was acquiringa
bourgeois and secular character in an increasingly prosperous society.
Many ofits patrons were now mercantile and professional men, acting
as members of confraternities or as individuals Peasants, women, and
the urban poor had almost no part to play in a cultural renaissance ori-
ented toward the growth and embellishment o
vic pride, and stressing

umplicit powe ,
Fifteenth-century writers viewed artistic acctivity as a public
affirmation of the artist’s role as citizen and the new republic’s stature.
Wealthy individuals became private patrons of a magnificent public,
civic art. Rucellai suggested that art (patronage) gave him contentment
and pleasure, “because they [objects] serve the glory of God, the
honor of the city, and the commemoration of myself.’ Leonardo
Bruni and other “civic” humanists stressed that men must set aside
their private concerns in order to assume public roles. But citizenship
in fifteenth-century Florence was restricted to a small elite group of
wealthy men who were set apart from women, even those of wealth
and privilege. “Everyone seeks me out, honors me... .”’ Bruni wrote of
the city’s adulation of him, “And not only the first citizens, but even
the women of the highest rank.’ For Bruni, the central motif of
Florentine history is the creation of a public space; the symbolic focal
points of ecclesiastical and political power in the city soon became the
great public assembly spaces of the Duomo and Baptistry and the
Palazzo della Signoria, as well as the private palaces of wealthy
Florentine families like the Medici, Strozzi, and Rucellai.
The division between public and private in Florence at that time
restructured art as a public, primarily male, activity. This ideology was
strengthened as the Republic and later the Medici princes organized
Renaissance society as a culture in which male privilege and male lines
7O
of property and succession were strongly valued. The Florentine kin-
ship system stressed patrilineal descent and patrilocal residence.
Women’s loyalty was often suspect; it was believed, for example, that
the technical secrets of the Della Robbia family workshop were
divulged by a disgruntled female relative.
Although Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise, On the Family (1435), 1s
often cited as exemplary of the new humanist ideal, it is in fact the
major Renaissance statement on the bourgeois domestication of
women and an important indication of male anxiety in response to
social change. Reworking Xenophon’s Economics, Alberti transformed
his source into a rigid prescription for women’s lives. Women’s vir-
tues are chastity and motherhood; her domain 1s the private world of
the family. Cautioning men not to confide affairs of business to
women, but to look to their wives for family and comfort, Alberti,
himselfa life-long bachelor, advances the humanist model of modesty,
purity, passivity, physical attractiveness, chastity before marriage, and
fidelity ever after. “It would hardly win us respect,’ he cautions, “if
our wife busied herself among the men in the marketplace, out in
the public eye.”
Prescriptive literature contributed to shaping women’s lives and
participation in general economic and public life. Our view of the
fifteenth century in Italy 1s being constantly revised as research brings
new documents to light. We now know of a small group of women
humanists, most of them from wealthy and prominent northern Italian
families, whose writings specifically addressed the situation of women.
They were extravagantly praised by male humanists, as were women
artists in the following century, but were also urged to chastity and
limited expectations. Often forced to choose between marriage and
learning, a significant number of them entered cloisters or secluded
themselves otherwise. It appears that the same attitudes worked to
keep other women out of occupations that required mobility and
public exposure, like the arts. And although modern historians have
documented far more complex marriage patterns than those pre-
scribed by Alberti, his ideal reinforces the polarization of Florentine
society along strict gender lines.
When the architect Filippo Brunelleschi was commissioned to
make a maquette for the construction of the dome for Florence
Cathedral in 1418, he and his collaborator, the sculptor Ghiberti, inau-
gurated a new artistic model. Brunelleschi was the first of anew type
of architect, one who had not served an apprenticeship in a mason’s
lodge; instead he had received a liberal education as the son of a well-
Fa
to-do Florentine notary. As humanist ideas with their stress on nature
and the Antique began to influence the visual arts, education and eru-
dition became prized qualities for artists, as well as scholars and poets.
Filippo Villani’s De Origine Florentiae et de eiusdem famosis civibus, writ-
ten at the end ofthe fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century,
includes an account of the principal Florentine artists of the day.
Characterizing them individually, he points particularly to Giotto,
whom he describes as a man of education and learning, for returning
art to the study of nature and to the fundamental principles of antiqui-
ty. That the first artists separated from the mass of craftsmen active
during this period are those—such as Masaccio, Donatello, Uccello,
and Ghiberti—whose interests lay mainly in scientific and theoretical
knowledge reveals the close links between humanist thought, science,
and art at the time. Mathematics, and its teaching, was the connection,
and mathematical training was now organized by gender.
Although humanist thinkers advocated a certain equality of educa-
tion for the daughters and sons of wealthy burghers and patricians, by
the fifteenth century the practice of sending girls to public schools
had apparently been discontinued. Girls recetved their education,
which concentrated on Christian virtues and moral teachings, primar-
ily at home or in the convent. Boys progressed from schooling at
home to public education organized around the affairs of the com-
munity; girls were trained for marriage or the cloister. Public educa-
tion consisted of reading, writing, and arithmetic, with mathematics
taking precedence because of the business orientation of Florentine
society. Skill in mathematics and an ability to draw were now required
of the artisan-engineer. Commercial mathematics, adapted to the
needs of a growing merchant class, used skills which were also deeply
ingrained in the principles of representation underlying fifteenth-
century painting.
The first fully developed adaptation of linear perspective to prob-
lems of artistic composition occurred in Masaccio’s fresco, The Trinity
(1425), at Santa Maria Novella in Florence. The treatment of the
architectural setting gives the illusion that we are looking through an
arch into a tunnel-vaulted chapel in the style of Brunelleschi. The
vanishing point of the fictive architecture, which allows the viewer
to experience the two-dimensional surface as if it were a three-
dimensional space, is exactly five feet nine inches off the floor, the
height of the ideal male Florentine viewer. Alberti, in his treatise on
painting (1435-36), which stresses the mathematical sciences as a
means of controling visible reality, relates the system of representation
72
25 Masaccio The Trinity 1425

to the proportions of the male body; the Florentine unit of measure-

ment, called a braccio, measured twenty-three inches, or the length ofa
male arm. An understanding of the principle of gauging (a way of
establishing spatial relationships and measurements based on the regu-
lar dimensions of common objects like cisterns, columns, and paving
stones) educated the spectator in seeing and understanding the spatial
relationships in the new illusionistic painting.
The close connections between the concerns of merchant and artist
in fifteenth-century Florence can be seen in Piero della Francesca’s
treatises on geometric bodies and perspective, and in his mathematical
handbook on the abacus for merchants with its rules for assessing the
cubic capacity of barrels and similar objects. The practice ofillusion-
ism, through which the fifteenth-century viewer understood pictorial
space, elides artist and viewer through the act of seeing—by organi-
zing the pictorial surface so that the viewer takes up a position identi-
cal to that originally occupied by the painter. It re-creates the spaces of
public life, the piazza and the marketplace, and assumes a spectator
used to measuring and quantifying space. The new ideal ofthe artistic

2
masterpiece was based on Alberti’s association of the antique use of
perspective with isforia, a term which included monumentality and
dramatic content and which gradually provided new criteria against
which to measure the male artist’s ambitions.
It would be simplistic to suggest that women were unable to under-
stand the new painting, but it is true that as pictorial seeing established
itself along learned and scientific principles taught only to men, it was
increasingly organized according to male expectations and conven-
tions. Painting became one of a growing list of activities in which
women had intuitive, but not learned, knowledge and to whose laws
they remained outsiders. The humanist encouragement of education
for women did not include mathematics, rhetoric, or the sciences.
Bruni specifically cautioned against the study of rhetoric, the one
discipline with which a woman might participate publicly in intellec-
tual debate: “To her neither the intricacies of debate nor the oratorial
artifices of action and delivery are of the least practical use, if indeed
they are not positively unbecoming. Rhetoric (and mathematics) 1n all
its forms ... lies absolutely outside the province of women.” When
Bruni and other humanists advanced their view of Florence as a
microcosm of divine order and proportion or explained, as did
Nicolaus Cusanus in his Idiota (c. 1450), that the ability to measure is
God’s greatest gift to man and therefore the root of all wisdom, they
were reinforcing woman's removal to a place on the edge of the domi-
nant discourses of Renaissance Florence.
Woman's position on the fringes of the new system of representa-
tion mirrored her place in society generally. Not only was public space
associated with the arts of painting, sculpture and architecture, it also
became the site of vision, of the looking and the visual contemplation
associated with aesthetic experience. Scholars have traced the path by
which the gaze became a metaphor for the worldliness and virility
associated with public man and women became its object. While the
display of material wealth through the lavish dresses worn by wealthy
Florentine women provoked the archbishop of Florence in 1450 to
inveigh against the “gratuitously elaborate costume” as “one of the
things which do not serve to arouse devotion but laughter and vain
thoughts,’ some women sought escape from the imbrication of vision
and materiality. The Dominican Clare Gambacorta (d. 1419) hoped to
avoid scrutiny by establishing a convent “beyond the gaze of men and
free from worldly distraction.”
It is not surprising that it was at precisely this moment that
the “male” art of painting was elevated above the “female” art of

74
embroidery. Under guild regulation painters did not distinguish be-
tween the designs produced for altarpieces, tapestries, banners, chests,
etc. The painters Neri De Bicci, Sandro Botticelli, and Squarcione, as
well as Antonio Pollaiuolo, all produced designs for professional
embroiderers. Although Parker has shown how the technique called or
nue, in which gold threads are laid horizontally and shaded by colored
silk in couching stitches, enabled embroiderers to achieve the same
perspectival effects as painters, and was used by painters like Pollaiuolo
in his embroidery The Birth of John the Baptist, it was during this
period that embroidery became the province of the woman amateur.
Redefined as a domestic art requiring manual labor and collective

domesticity and “femininity.”

Although much of the art of fifteenth-century Florence remained
religious 1n content and patronage, there was also a shift from the
representation of secular figures as mere adjuncts to religious scenes
to the emergence of the individual portrait. The appearance of the
profile portrait in the middle of the century conflated subject and
patron in images which described worldly position, identity, wealth,
and social standing, and refocused attention on women’s costume,
demeanor, and material embellishment.
The transfer of property and the social realignments that accompa-
nied marriage in Renaissance Florence isolate this as the key moment
in the life of a young girl; one in which free choice and physical
attractiveness played little or no part. The profile portrait, with its
emphasis on linear design and two-dimensionality, and on “mapping”
the surfaces of body and garments rather than realizing the figure volu-
metrically, results in an image that is closer to a schematic rendering of
reality than a naturalistic portrayal. Its sources show that it was an
affirmation of material reality. Influenced by the profile paintings of
Gothic Italy, it originated around 1440 in cast medals by Pisanello
which recall the coins of the Roman emperors but which now com-
memorated individuals of high achievement and/or patrician rank
who wished to immortalize themselves. Art historians have generally
examined profile portraits in relation to their stylistic sources, but
these new representations of secular men and women became in the
1980s an important source for analyses of gender in the early
Renaissance.
Patricia Simons has convincingly demonstrated how female profile
portraits by Pisanello, Piero della Francesca, Ghirlandaio, and others

75
produce a version of femininity, wealth, and lineage through a careful
cataloguing of the objects of the wealthy Florentine household:
meticulously delineated gold and seed jewelry, brocades and silks,
emblems and family crests. Through marriage and family alliances,
women became signs for the honor and wealth which defined social
prestige for Florentine citizens. Alberti himself suggested a careful
visual inspection of the female goods which would bear the husband's
inheritance, advising future grooms to act “as do wise heads of
families before they acquire some property—they like to look it over
several times before they actually sign a contract.” At the same time, he
urged men to seek moral and spiritual qualities in a bride; “a man
must first seek beauty of mind, that is, good conduct and virtue.” In
these idealized portraits, material and spiritual qualities are elided, as if
wealth were legitimized in the eyes of God through the spirituality
conveyed by the remote gazes and severe poses of the female sitters.
Their demeanor one of virtue, piety, and submission to the authority
of husband, Church, and state, these female figures do not look; they
are turned away and presented as surfaces to be gazed upon. The same
convention holds for male profile portraits, but it is surely significant
that by mid-century the profile view was largely abandoned in repre-
sentations of male figures in favor of three-quarter views. Not until
the 1470s do portraits of women follow this example.
Ghirlandaio’s Giovanna Tornabuoni née Albizzi (1488) emphasizes
Giovaniza’s role as a chaste, decorous piece of her husband's lineage.
His initial L appears on her shoulder and his family’s triangular
emblem is embroidered onto her garment. The inscription behind the
figure (“O art, if thou were able to depict the conduct and soul, no
lovelier painting would exist on earth”) commends virtuous conduct
and spiritual quality. The portrait is commemorative for Tornabuoni
died in 1488 during her pregnancy. Framed in front of a niche, she
appears as a beautiful object of contemplation at a time when women
were banned from displaying themselves at windows and when
sumptuary laws barred ornate and lavish dress.
Not until the sixteenth century did a few women manage to turn
the new Renaissance emphasis on virtue and gentility into positive
attributes for the woman artist. Their careers were made possible by
birth into artist families and the training that accompanied it, or into
the upper class where the spread of Renaissance ideas about the
desirability of education opened new possibilities for women. Many
of them benefited from the Counter Reformation’s emphasis on piety
and accomplishment; for all of them, their social and professional
76
26 Domenico Ghirlandaio
Giovanna Tornabuoni
née Albizzi 1488

accomplishments were conflated so that their success as artists was

inseparable from their virtues as women.
Sofonisba Anguissola’s example opened up the possibility of paint-
ing to women as a socially acceptable profession, while her work
established new conventions for self-portraiture by women and for
Italian genre painting. Like many subsequent women artists, she has
been subjected to wildly fluctuating critical evaluations: from
Baldinucci’s assertion in the seventeenth century that she was the
equal of Titian in portraiture, to Sydney Freedberg’s complete dis-
missal of her in 1971 for lacking skill in drawing. Her relative lack of
training, compared with that of major male artists of her day (three
years of private instruction in the studios of Bernardino Campi and
Bernardino Gatti as opposed to the minimum four years of workshop
training for male painters) is historical fact, yet she remains the only

TT
woman of her time credited with the ability to infuse an image with
life; and her work was both appreciated and understood by her
contemporaries. Although she may not rank with Titian, she is of
considerable interest to anyone seeking to understand sixteenth-
century portraiture and court patronage.
The high regard in which Anguissola’s work was held by seven-
teenth- and eighteenth-century collectors did not survive into the
nineteenth century, an epoch that saw many of her paintings assigned
to male artists, among them Alfonso Sanchez Coello, Giovanni
oroni, and Titian. The publication of two monographs on
Anguissola since 1987 and a major retrospective exhibition (her first)
and catalogue in 1994, have done much to clarify her naturalism and
inventiveness in a type of genre scene pioneered in Lombardy; her
significance as a link between Italian and Spanish portraiture of the
sixteenth century; and her influence on later Italian self-portraiture.
She is,as Ann Sutherland Harris notes, unique in her astonishing vari-
ety of portraits, and in producing more self-portraits than any artist
between Ditirer and Rembrandt. At least one work by Anguissola,
Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola (probably late 1550s)
suggests that not only was she aware of her own image as an exemplar
of female achievement, but also that she understood the importance of
the artistic lineage between pupil and master, and her unique role as a
producer of images of women. Here she paints herself as if she were
being painted, perhaps the first historical example of the woman artist
articulating the complex relationship between female subjectivity and
agency, Its positioning within patriarchal structures of knowledge, and
the role of woman as an object of representation.
The exact date of Anguissola’s birth is unknown. Based on available
facts concerning her early lite, and self-portraits which can be firmly
dated, most scholars place it around 1535, or perhaps slightly later. She
was the daughter of Amilcare Anguissola, a widower and nobleman
who apparently decided to educate his seven children according to
the humanist ideals of the Renaissance in the belief that they would
bring honor to their city. Among Amilcare Anguissola’s friends was
the prelate and humanist Marco Gerolamo Vida from Cremona who
had taken up the career of another young woman, the poet and
humanist Partenia Gallerati. Three of Anguissola’s sisters also became
painters and Amulcare Anguissola’s ambitions for his daughter are
expressed in two letters in which he solicited the support of
Michelangelo. In the first of these, dated 1557, he thanked him for his
advice: “We are much obliged to have perceived the honorable and
78
affable affection that you have and show for Sofonisba; I speak of my
daughter, the one whom I caused to begin to practice the most hon-
orable virtue of painting....I beg of you that ... you will see fit to
send her one of your drawings that she may color it in oil, with the
obligation to return it to you faithfully finished by her own hand. ...”
Michelangelo, who is known to have helped a succession of young
artists by sending them drawings, had requested from Anguissola a
difficult subject—a weeping boy. She sent him a drawing of her
brother, Asdrubale, titled Boy Bitten by a Crayfish (before 1559). A letter 28
from Michelangelo’s friend Tomaso Cavalieri, written to Cosimo de
Medici on January 20, 1562, included the drawing as a gift along with
another drawing by Michelangelo. The drawing situates Anguissola
firmly within traditions of artistic experimentation in Lombardy that
followed Leonardo da Vinc1’s studies of physiognomy. An early paint-
ing, the charming Three Sisters Playing Chess (1555), with its genre-
like theme and emotional directness and intimacy, initiated a new
direction in Italian painting.
It was the Duke of Alba, advised by the governor of Milan, who
called the attention of the Spanish Court to her work. She was escort-
ed to Spain with great ceremony in 1559, where she served as Court
painter and lady-in-waiting to the successive Queens, Isabel of Valois
and Anne of Austria, until 1573. While there she was paid in the cus-
tomary manner with a salary as a lady-in-waiting and in 1561 she was
given a lifelong pension of 200 ducats payable to her father. Her status
at Court 1s indicated by the fact that, before she left Spain, the King
arranged her marriage to a wealthy Italian and provided a dowry.
Anguissola’s social status prohibited her from selling work, and her
paintings circulated within elevated social circles in which they were
given as gifts. Thus the first woman painter to achieve fame and
respect did so within a set of constraints that removed her from com-
peting for commissions with her male contemporaries and that effec-
tively placed her within a critical category of her own. Compounding
the attribution problems surrounding her work ‘of the Spanish period,
is the fact that the Court could order multiple copies of acompleted
painting by any ofits portraitists. When Anguissola’s portrait of Don
Carlos pleased the prince in 1568, he ordered thirteen copies of it
from the King’s court painter Alfonso Sanchez Coello.
Among the small group of documented self-portraits from the
Spanish period is a Self-Portrait of 1561, depicting the artist as a serious, 29
conservatively dressed young woman at the keyboard of a spinet. She
is accompanied by an old woman, perhaps a chaperone who went

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with her to Spain. Anguissola’s presentation of herself as a modest
young woman of refinement and culture places the work in a tradition
of self-portraits which articulate the Renaissance ideal of the artist as
gentleman/woman rather than artisan. The presence of the musical
instrument may show Anguissola’s skills as a member of a cultured
noble family at a time when musical accomplishment, long recog-
nized as desirable for noblemen and women, was becoming a mark of
culture for artists of both sexes.
The self-portrait relates to a group of works executed in northern
Italy where Spanish influence had been strong since the early part of
the sixteenth century when Milan had come under direct Spanish
rule. Anguissola’s portraits, like the late portraits of Giovanni Battista
Moroni (who was born during the 1520s in Bergamo, not far from
Cremona), were executed under the shadow of Titian, the influence
of the Counter Reformation and the conservatism of Philip II’s Spain.
Moroni’s Portrait of aMan (The Tailor) (c. 1570) reveals a similar treat-
ment of the figure and the simplified dark wall. As in Anguissola’s Self-
Portrait, the figures make eye contact with the spectator; in both,
attention is drawn to the face and hands. The portrait tradition intro-
duced into Spain by Moroni and Coello during Philip II’s reign clear-
ly influenced Anguissola’s painting. Yet her self-portrait may also be
read as indicating her position at the Spanish Court and her awareness
of Philip I’s cultural aspirations. Its date, 1561, corresponds to the date
When Philip moved his court from Toledo to Madrid, where the
Prado Palace provided a regal setting for the artists who worked for
him. Philip modeled his court on the lavish Burgundians and he culti-
vated musicians as well as artists. His own love of music is well docu-
mented, and it is not surprising that in one of her first self-portraits
from Spain Anguissola should choose to emphasize the qualities that
ensured her position in the royal household.
Anguissola’s complex relationship to the traditions of northern
Italian and Spanish portraiture has led to her work being confused not
only with that of Titian, da Vinci, and Moroni, but also Van Dyck,
Sustermans, Coello, and Zurbaran. Paintings such as the Portrait of
Isabel ofValois (1561), Philip II (c. 1565), and Portrait of Queen Anne of
Austria (c. 1§70) reveal her familiarity with the formal conventions of
portraiture at the Spanish Court. They also differ from similar depic-
tions by Coello and other (male) painters employed by the Spanish
Court. Anguissola’s social standing and her status as a lady-in-waiting
mediated her relationship to the royal family in ways not necessarily
shared by all court painters, allowing her more consistent access to the
82
30 ~Giovanni Moroni Portrait of aMan 31 ‘Titian La Bella c. 1536
(The Tailor) c. 1570

female members of the Court than might otherwise have been the
case. Her portrait of Anne of Austria, Philip II’s fourth wife, for exam-
ple, concentrates on the half-figure rather than the more usual full-
length treatment, an example of which can be seen in Coello’s
well-known portrait of the queen now in the Kunsthistorisches
Museum in Vienna. The half-length format encourages a more
immediate and intimate rendering of the queen, while Anguissola’s
interactions with the royal family must have encouraged the subtle
intimacies of expression captured here and in many other of her
portraits.
As long as she stressed her status as a gentlewoman, Anguissola’s
actions as a professional painter did not conflict with the ideology of
Renaissance womanhood outlined in Castiglione’s Courtier. At the
same time, she worked in a period when the discourses of representa-
tion, sexuality, and morality were beginning to meet in representations
of the female nude. A glorification of erotic and aesthetic experience

83
 underlies the Neoplatonic influence on sixteenth-century painting. In
his Theologia Platonica, Marsilio Ficino had argued that physical beauty
excites the soul to the contemplation of spiritual or divine beauty. As
painting began to record a more sensuous ideal of beauty, writers like
Agnolo Firenzuola, author of the most complete Renaissance treatise
on beauty, published in 1548, described the preferred attributes of
female beauty. The description of the noblewoman with fair skin,
curling hair, dark eyes and perfectly curved brows, and rounded flesh
recalls a number ofpaintings of the period, including many by Titian.
Anguissola’s self-portrait is posed much like Titian’s painting called
31 La Bella (c. 1536), but there the resemblance ends. Though recognized
as a portrait, Titian’s painting is the first well-documented case of a
portrait sold as a work ofart rather than a description of a specific per-
son. Under the influence of Neoplatonism, beauty became associated
with idealized womanhood. In poetry, ideal personifications dwelled
on specific anatomical features. Although La Bella is an ideal portrait,
Titian treats his sitter—who looks out of the frame with candid gaze,
the curves of her flesh visible under the rich brocade of her bodice—
with the reserve appropriate to a high-born lady. Elizabeth Cropper
has described the portrayal of her physical beauty as a synecdoche for
the beauty of painting itself because it transposes the material world
into sp:ritual value. Paintings such as this led to a long and complex
tradition in which anonymous female beauty was identified with
sexuality, often with the sexual availability of the artist’s model or
mistress. Identifying the painting of female beauty with the artist’s
sexual access to the women who modeled for him, the poet Pietro
Aretino wrote around 1542 that Titian’s brushes were equivalent to
Love's “arrow.”
Sofonisba Anguissola’s age and sex prevented her from engaging in
an aesthetic dialogue which revolved around Neoplatonic concepts of
the metaphoric relationship between paint and beauty, the earthly and
the sublime, the material and the celestial. That Vasari and other male
writers responded to Anguissola and her sisters as prodigies of nature
rather than artists is even more understandable in the context of aes-
thetic dialogues which identify the act of painting with the male
artist's sexual prowess. Anguissola could not use paint as a metaphor
for possessible beauty without violating the social role that made pos-
sible her life as a painter. As an artist, she participated in a world of
sensation and pleasure; to do so as an unmarried woman would
exceed and violate nature. It is her virtue which both Anguissola
and her biographers stress. Her self-portraits return the focus of

84
painting to the personal, which cannot be read as heroic, or larger
than life, or divine. Instead they reveal the inner attributes of modesty,
patience, and virtue.
Among the major works believed to be by Anguissola is the largest
of the Tudor portraits in the National Portrait Gallery in London, a
full-length portrait of Philip I] long believed to have been painted by
Coello. It has been reattributed to Anguissola though the attribution
remains questionable. Although the pose apparently derives from
Titian’s full-length Philip as a Young Man (1550-51) in the Prado, the
composition is reversed. Broad surfaces of scumbled pigment, com-
bined with the candour of the representation, strip the work of the
artifice associated with much contemporary formal portraiture. A
portrait of a Cremonese doctor, also in the Prado, and signed by
Sofonisba’s sister, Lucia, reveals a similar dignity and humanity. Other

32 Lucia Anguissola
Portrait of Pietro Maria,
Doctor of Cremona c. 1560
works by Anguissola, like the late Virgin with Child, reveal her close-
ness to Correggio and Luca Cambiaso, as well as the circle of the
Campi.
Amilcare Anguissola’s decision to dedicate his daughter to art set a
precedent. Other Italian artists took on female pupils, and the intro-
duction to a collection of poems assembled on the occasion of the
death of Titian’s pupil, Irene di Spilimbergo, records that, “having
been shown a portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola, made by her own
hand, presented to King Philip of Spain, and hearing wondrous praise
of her in the art of painting, moved by generous emulation, she was
fired with a warm desire to equal that noble and talented damsel.”
Anguissola’s invitation to the court of Philip II was the precedent for
many other women artists who, excluded from institutional help—
academic training, papal and civic patronage, guilds and workshops—
found support in the courts of Europe between the sixteenth and the
eighteenth centuries. Her work also directly influenced that of Lavinia
Fontana, one of a group of important women artists produced by the
city of Bologna in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

86
 Cmioe LER THREE

The Other Renaissance

Art history’s conception of the Renaissance as an historically, geo-

graphically, and culturally unique period is based on the lives and
achievements of men. The history of women’s contributions to visual
culture does not necessarily fit neatly into categories produced by and
around men’s activities, and accepting the concept of the Renaissance
as a frame carries with it inherent risks for a feminist history. There 1s,
on the one hand, a danger of rewriting women’s production in ways
that “fit them into” preexisting categories; and on the other, the risk
of trivializing women’s achievements by seeing them through the
lens of sexual difference. Women artists such as Properza de’ Rossi,
Lavinia Fontana, Elisabetta Sirani, Diana Mantuana (also called Diana
Scultori), and Artemisia Gentileschi achieved a remarkable degree of
public visibility and renown during their lifetimes. Their achieve-
ments were cited as evidence of what a woman could do, but male
writers often followed Boccaccio’s example and asserted that famous
women were miraculously endowed with the qualities that enabled
them to succeed and thus could not serve as models for ordinary
women.
Without exception, the artists mentioned above are identified with
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries rather than the fifteenth. And
with the exception of Anguissola (discussed in the previous chapter)
and Gentileschi—whose fortunes are identified with Rome, Naples,
and Florence in the seventeenth century—all were part of the intel-
lectual and artistic flowering that took place in Bologna, a city geo-
graphically displaced from the centers of early Renaissance culture.
Our knowledge of their careers 1s far from complete, and although
they are but a few of the many names scattered through the literature
of this period, their achievements deserve serious study.
Bologna was unique among Italian cities for having both a univer-
sity which had educated women since the Middle Ages and a female
saint who painted. By the fifteenth century the organization of the
guilds under the spiritual protection of specific saints had established
St. Luke, who was believed to have painted miracle-working icons

87
including one of the Virgin Mary, as the patron saint of painters.
Painters in Bologna, where the guilds remained powerful Tong after
they had lost political and economic effectiveness in the rest of Italy,
had their own saint.
Caterina dei Vigri (St. Catherine of Bologna, canonized 1707),
whose cult flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 1s
another example of the transmission of learning and culture by
women in convents. Born into a noble Bolognese family in 1413 and
educated at the court of Ferrara, she entered the Convent of the Poor
Clares there after her father’s death in 1427. She was known for her
Latin and skill in music, painting, and illumination. Elected abbess
soon after the Poor Clares moved to Bologna in 1456, her reputation
as a painter grew swiftly. According to accounts by her friend and
biographer, Sister luminata Bembo, she “loved to paint the Divine
Word as a babe in swaddling bands, and for many monasteries in
Ferrara and for books she painted him thus in miniature.” The
best known of her writings, The Seven Weapons, recounts the spiritual
battles of a religious woman who saw her intellect and will in conflict
with the submission and obedience demanded by the Church.
Although references to Caterina dei Vigri’s painting enter the lite-
rature in the sixteenth century, attempts by feminist scholars to
assemble an oeuvre for her have proved disappointng. The small
group of works preserved in the Convent Church, the Corpus
Domini of the Order of Santa Caterina dei Vigri in Bologna, show a
naive and untrained hand, or hands, at work. X-rays taken in 1941 of
the most famous of her paintings, a St. Ursula now in Venice, reveal an
indecipherable inscription underneath her signature. Nevertheless,
although we know all too littk about her achievements, the
significance of a woman painter, saint, and patron of painters to
sixteenth-century Bologna, whose civic pride and ecclesiastical
authority then reached new heights, should not be underestimated.
St. Catherine of Bologna’s cult, stimulated by her miracles and her
mystical autobiographical writings, dates from the exhumation of her
pertectly preserved body (now enshrined in the church of the Corpus
Domini) shortly after her death in 1463. Pope Clement VII formally
authorized her cult in 1524 and in 1592 the title Beata was conferred
on her. The cult, enormous and ideally suited to the pietistic temper
of Counter-Reformation Italy, flourished through the seventeenth
century along with her reputation as a painter. Malvasia mentions her
among a group of painters active in Bologna between 1400 and 1500
and a representation of her playing her violin to an assembled
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 Heavenly Host of musical angels and plump putti appears in a
34 preparatory drawing by Marcantonio Franceschini for his fresco cycle
illustrating events from her life in the Corpus Domini.
The presence of St. Catherine’s cult in Bologna was only one of a
number of factors that worked to create an unusually supportive con-
text for educated and skilled women in that city. After the Church, the
most important institution in Bologna was the university, founded in
the eleventh century. By the time it began admitting women in the
thirteenth century, it was Italy’s most famous center of legal studies
and was also widely known as a school of the liberal arts. The city
prided itself on women learned in philosophy and law—Bettisia
Gozzadini, Novella d’Andrea, Bettina Calderini, Melanzia_ dall’
Ospedale, Dorotea Bocchi, Maddalena Bonsignori, Barbara Ariente,
and Giovanna Banchetti, who all wrote, taught, and published.
The connections between the university and the arts in Bologna
need to be documented, but we do know that the publishing houses
that grew up around the university encouraged the rise of a group of
miniaturists during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that, in
addition to women lay miniaturists, included a Carmelite nun, Sister
Allegra, and another woman identified only as “Domina Donella
miniatrix.’ Diana Mantuana (c. 1547-1612), later given the name
Diana Scultori by art historians and mentioned by Vasari in the 1568
edition of his Lives, was—as far as we know—the only female
engraver of the sixteenth century to sign her prints with her own
name. Shortly after moving to Rome in 1575, she obtained _a papal
privilege that protected her rights to produce images she brought
from Mantua and gave her the right co print and sell works under the

with the Mantuan court and a printing tradition begun with

Mantegna and continued through her family. The names of Diana
Mantuana and Veronica Fontana, a famous seventeenth-century
maker of woodcuts who illustrated Malvasia’s Felsina Pittrice in
Bologna, point to a still unwritten history of women in the publishing
trade in Renaissance Italy. Social historians have noted that in Bologna
at the beginning of the fifteenth century women outnumbered men, a
fact which may well have encouraged their participation in trades like
painting and printing which remained under guild control until at
least 1600. Luigi Crespi’s Vite de Pittori Bolognesi (1769) lists twenty-
three women active as painters in Bologna in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries; at least two of them—Lavinia Fontana and Elisabetta
Sirani—achieved international stature.

9O
35 Diana Scultori Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery 1575

Women artists in Bologna benefited from the civic and ecclesiasti-

cal patronage that accompanied the naming of the Emilian region
around Bologna as a papal state in 1512 (culminating in the election of
the Bolognese Ugo Buoncompagni as Pope Gregory VIII in 1572);
the artistic competition that developed between Rome and Bologna,
and the fact that the Renaissance ideology of exceptional women
could be ana eT
Bolognese art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was an art
of elegance and sensibility produced for learned and aristocratic
patrons and imbued with the sentiments and moral imperatives of the
Counter-Reformation attempt to reform the Catholic Church. The
abundance of work available for artists must have eased women’s
access to commissions, despite the incidents of male jealousy and
spiteful accusations that dogged the careers of de’ Rossi and others.
The Church served as an active patron throughout the sixteenth cen-
tury and noble families, desiring to demonstrate their wealth and
refinement, ordered frescoes and wall decorations for their palaces and
furnished them and churches with chapels complete with elegant and
QI
tasteful altarpieces. Encouraged to combine wealth with intellectual
and cultural pursuits, members of Bologna’s richest families joined
literary and scientific academies; a self-portrait of the 1570s by the
painter Lavinia Fontana places the artist firmly in the context of this
learned and cultivated citizenry. She depicts herself as prosperous and
scholarly, in the act of writing and surrounded by antique bronzes and
plaster casts from her private collection. Although Fontana had no
claim to noble birth, Vasari identifies her family with the educated
elite of Bologna and her early self-portraits present the image of an
educated woman. A Self-Portrait of 1578 repeats the conventions of
Anguissola’s Self-Portrait of 1561, showing Fontana at the keyboard of a
clavichord with a female servant, barely visible in the background,
holding her music. An empty easel stands in front of the window
and an inscription identifies her as LAVINIA VIRGO PROSPERI
FONTANAE.
That the women artists of Bologna were exceptional 1s without
question. While their work relates more directly to that of their male
contemporaries than to that of other women, and confirms the domi-
nant artistic and social ideologies of its time and place, the extent to
which Fontana and Sirani at least were integrated into the cultural life
of Bologna deserves far more study. They are exceptions in a history
ofartistec production by women which forces us to confront women’s
tangential relationships to artistic institutions and systems of patron-
age. It remained for Artemisia Gentileschi in the seventeenth century
to negotiate a new relationship to dominant cultural ideologies and
her case 1s considered at the end of this chapter.
The building campaign intended to make the Bologna municipal
church of San Petronio the largest in Italy after St. Peter’s brought for-
ward Properzia de’ Rossi, Renaissance Italy’s only woman sculptor in
marble. A drawing pupil of Marcantonio Raimondi, de’ Rossi first
achieved recognition for her miniature carvings on fruit stones. Her
ambitious shift from these to public commissions in the 1520s appar-
ently brought her close to overstepping the bounds of “femininity”
and Vasari, while assuring his readers of her beauty, musical accom-
plishment, and household skills, also relates that she was persecuted by
a jealous painter until she was finally paid a very low price for her
work and, discouraged, turned to engraving on copper.
De’ Rossi was first commissioned to decorate the canopy of the
altar of the newly restored church of S. Maria del Baraccano. She then
submitted a portrait of Count Guido Pepoli as a sample of her work
for the rebuilding at San Petronio and was commissioned for several
Q2
pieces. Records of payment indicate that she completed three sibyls,
two angels, and “two pictures” before abandoning the work.
The “pictures” probably refer to bas-reliefs of the Visit of the Queen of
Sheba to Solomon and a Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife (c. 1520), now in the
museum of San Petronio.
Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife perfectly expresses the persistence of the 9
classical ideal in sixteenth-century Bologna, combining it with a
notion of elegance derived from the work of the major figures of
Emilian art of the period: Correggio and Parmigianino. The Biblical
story of Joseph fleeing from his seductress was a popular one in the
early days of the Counter Reformation. The balanced and muscular
bodies, as well as their classical dress, reveal de’ Rossi’s familiarity with
antique sources, while the energy of the figure in motion points
toward Correggio’s exuberant figural groups. De’ Rossi died in 1530,
still a young woman, four years after the last recorded payment for her
work at San Petronio. The city of Bologna continued to pride itself
on having produced her, but it remained for her followers to develop
the anti-Mannerist tendencies of Bolognese art under the spiritual
influence of the Counter Reformation and the artistic influence ofthe
Carracci and Guido Reni.
Lavinia Fontana began painting around 1570 in the style of her
father and teacher, Prospero Fontana, whose work combined
Counter-Reformation pietism, Flemish attention to detail, and a
growing northern Italian interest in naturalism. The diverse strands of
classicism, naturalism, and mannerism were united in Prospero
Fontana’s desire to produce religious art that was clear and persuasive
in accordance with the teachings of Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, Bishop
and later Archbishop of Bologna, whose influence was widely felt in
the arts. Prospero Fontana’s pupils—Lavinia Fontana, Ludovico
Carracci, and Gian Paolo Zappi—inherited these tendencies.
Fontana’s early self-portraits, and the small panels intended as pri-
vate devotional pieces, combine the influence of her father with the
naturalism of the late Raphael and the elegance of Correggio and
Parmigianino. Although Fontana became best known as a portraitist,
she also executed numerous religious and historical paintings, many of
them large altarpieces. Paintings like Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata
(1579) and the Noli Me Tangere (1581) adhere closely to the religious
ideology of spiritual and social reform expressed through prayer,
devotion, and contemplation. “Popularized” religious paintings
such as Fontana’s Birth of the Virgin (1580s) and her Consecration to the BOLI
Virgin (1599) often incorporate domestic motifs or familial pieties,

93
reinforcing Paleotti’s desire to extend pastoral care to individual fami-
lies through prayer and instruction.
The Birth of the Virgin is closer to a genre scene of family life in
Bologna than to its Biblical source, despite its outdoor setting and
nocturnal illumination. It balances a sense of monumentality and
decorum with a naturalism close to that of the Cremonese school,
and was influenced by Anguissola, whose work Fontana knew and
admired and who no doubt provided an important artistic model for
her. Fontana’s Consecration to the Virgin, originally intended for the
Gnetti Chapel in S. Maria dei Servi in Bologna, combines figures
elongated according to Mannerist conventions with greater natural-
ism in the treatment of the children’s figures. Prospero Fontana’s
influence continued to be felt in Fontana’s later religious paintings, as
did that of Paleotti, for links between the Bishop and the painter's
family remained strong.
By the late 1570s, Fontana’s fame as a portraitist was firmly estab-
lished. Despite her adherence to the principles of naturalism advocat-
ed by the Carracci family, she was prevented from joining the Carracci
academy, founded in the 1580s, because of its emphasis on drawing
from the nude model. Her Portrait of aGentleman and His Son (1570s)
recalls Anguissola’s Portrait of aYoung Nobleman (1550s) in its straight-
forwaré pose and in the quiet dignity of the figures. At the same time,
the painting reveals the calculated mix of moderate social responsibil-
ity espoused by Paleotti and the worldly pretensions of the Bolognese
aristocracy which insured Fontana’s success as a portraitist. The
elegant, elongated fingers and the brilliance of the rich detail on the
sitters garments oppose their monumentality and social rank to the
sober space they inhabit.
Fontana’s marriage to Gian Paolo Zappi in 1577 was contracted
with a provision that the couple remain part of her father’s household;
her husband subsequently assisted her and cared for their large family.
When the Bolognese Cardinal Buoncompagni succeeded to the papa-
cy in 1§72 papal patronage for Bolognese artists increased. Prospero
Fontana had enjoyed the patronage of three previous popes; Fontana
received her first papal commission and a summons to Rome from the
local branch of the Pope’s family. It is a sign of her status as a painter
that she was able to postpone moving to Rome until the papacy of
Clement VIII, which did not occur until after her father died. She left
for Rome around 1603, preceded by her husband and son and a paint-
ing, a Virgin and St. Giacinto, commissioned by Cardinal Ascoli. The
painting created a demand for her work in Rome. Working in the

94
36 Lavinia Fontana
Birth of the Virgin 1580s

palace of Cardinal d’Este, she painted a Martyrdom of St. Stephen for the
basilica of San Paolo Fuori le Mura. The painting, destroyed in a fire 1n
1823, is known today only through an engraving of 1611 by Callot.
Baglione reports that the work was a failure with the Roman public
and that Fontana, in despair, renounced public commissions and
returned to portrait painting.
Late portraits, like the Portrait of aLady with a Lap Dog (c. 1598) are
worldly and sophisticated. The exquisite details of costume and fur-
nishings isolate the sitters against a space rendered in a broad and simp-
lified manner. Prices for Fontana’s portraits soared with her election to
the old Roman Academy, allowing her to pursue her interest in col-
lecting art and antiquities. Contemporaries report that she executed
portraits of Pope Paul V, as well as those of ambassadors, princes, and

95
37. Felice Casoni Lavinia Fontana 1611

cardinals, a testament to the continuing patronage of women artists by

aristocrats and ecclesiastics. Her reputation continued to grow and in
1611, shortly before her death, a portrait medal was struck in her
honor by the Bolognese medallist Felice Antonio Casoni. The face
contains a dignified portrait and an inscription identifying her as a
painter. On the reverse, an allegorical female figure in a divine frenzy
of creation sits surrounded by compasses and a square, as an earlier
Renaissance emphasis on mathematics and inspired genius belatedly
modifies the ideal of the Renaissance woman artist.
Women artists like de’ Rossi and rontana set an important prece-
dent for women ofseventeenth-century Italy, particularly in the area
around Bologna. Yet the work of the two best known of those
women—Artemisia Gentileschi (c. 1593-1652), born in Rome but
active in Florence, Naples and London, and Elisabetta Sirani
(1638-65), whose short life was spent entirely in Bologna—was even
more powerfully shaped by the pervasive influences of Michelangelo
Merisi da Caravaggio and Guido Reni. Caravaggio’s insistent natural-
ism, shallow pictorial space, and dramatic use of light generated
among his followers a large body of paintings characterized by
unidealized, boldly illuminated figures placed against dark, mysterious
backgrounds. Guido Reni, who inherited the mantle of the Bolognese
school from the Carracci at whose academy he was trained, blended
elegant refinement and naturalistic expression. In character and
personality, these two influential figures could not have been more
ele)
 E Cc
38 mal lisabetta Sir cani | he Holy F ami ly W ith a Kne e lin g Mona
4 >
stic Saint 1660
39 (above) Sofonisba Anguissola
Bernardino Campi Painting
Sofonisba Anguissola late 1550s

40 (left) Elisabetta Sirani

Portrait of Anna Maria Ranuzzi
as Charity 1665

41 (opposite) Lavinia Fontana

Consecration to the Virgin 1599
 different: Reni, educated and cultured, perpetuated the image of the
gentleman artist; Caravaggio, rebel and outlaw, epitomized a new role
for the artist as bohemian.
Like many women artists of the time, Gentileschi and Sirani were
the daughters of painters. Orazio Gentileschi was one of the most
important of Caravaggio’s followers; Giovanni Andrea Sirani a pupil
and follower of Reni, and an artist of considerably less interest than his
daughter. Gentileschi is the first woman artist in the history of
Western art whose historical significance is unquestionable. In the
case of Sirani, her early death has prevented a full evaluation of her
career despite her evident fame during her life. Sirani’s father took all
her income from a body of work which she herself, following a cus-
tom gaining favor during the seventeenth century, catalogued at 150
paintings, a figure now considered too low. Despite her catalogue, no
monograph exists and her reputation has suffered from an over-
attribution of inferior works in Ren1’s style to her. As Otto Kurz
notes: “The list of paintings to be found under her name in museums
and private collections and the list of those paintings which she
herself considered as her own work, coincide only in rare instances.”
Sirani has frequently been dismissed as one of several insignificant
followers of Reni in Bologna, and a painter of sentimental madonnas.
But the subtlety of her pictorial style, and the graceful elegance of her
touch, have prompted recent reevaluations of her significance in rela-
tion to that of contemporaries in Bologna like Lorenzo Pasinelli,
AO Flaminio Torre, and the Fleming Michele Desubleo. Sirani’s Portrait of
Anna Maria Ranuzzi as Charity (1665) is an outstanding example of
Bolognese portraiture in the second half of the seventeenth century.
The proud gaze of Madame Ranuzzi, the younger sister of Count
Annibale Ranuzzi, who commissioned the painting, and the wife of
Carlo Marsigli by whom she had two sons, is intensified by concen-
trated brushwork. Lively touches of red and blue illuminate the overall
color scheme of grays, lilacs, and browns and set off the rich purples in
garments and background which envelop the figures. Despite the
virtuoso brushwork and richness, the emphasis in the work is on
Ranuzzi’s maternity rather than her social rank.
Sirani’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes (Walters Art Gallery,
Baltimore) is perfectly in keeping with the grace, elegance, and picto-
rial refinement which secularized the subject for wealthy Bolognese
patrons. Yet it also suggests that Sirani shared the seventeenth century’s
interest in female heroines; Sirani and Gentileschi produced numerous
paintings on the theme of the heroic woman who triumphs by her
100
42 Elisabetta Sirani Portia Wounding Her Thigh 1664

virtue. In addition to several Judiths, both women painted penitent

Magdalenes and monumental sibyls. In addition, Gentileschi offered
several allegorical female figures, St. Catherine, a Cleopatra, and a
Lucretia, among others, while Sirani supplied a Timoclea (1659),
unusual in its depiction of the defiant heroine, and a Portia Wounding
Her Thigh (1664). The latter was commissioned by Signore Simone
Tassi and intended for an overdoor in a private apartment. The subject
belongs with a group of themes, including the rape of Lucretia, which
explore the relationship between public political and private, often
sexual behavior.
Sirani chose the moment at which Portia wounded herself to test
her strength of character before asking Brutus to confide in her. The
work’s sexualized content 1s evoked through the titillating image of
female wounding and the figure’s almost voluptuous disarray, but its
other meanings are more complicated and return us to the issue of
how sexual difference is produced and reinforced. Stabbing herself
deeply in the thigh, Portia has to prove herself virtuous and worthy of
political trust by separating herself from the rest of her sex—in
Plutarch’s words: “I confesse, that a woman’s wit commonly 1s too
weake to keepe a secret safely: but yet, Brutus, good education, and the
company of vertuous men, have some power to reforme the defect of
IO!
43 Artemisia Gentileschi Judith Decapitating Holofernes c. 1618

nature. And for my Selfe, I have this benefit moreover: that I am the
daughter of Cato, and wife of Brutus.”
The composition reinforces Portia’s removal from the world of
women. She is physically separated from the women who spin and
gossip in another room, betr aying their sex by talk. Presenting woman
as a “defect” of nature, Christian doctrine often used the volubi lity of
woman as a metaphor for her uncontrolled desires. Removed from the
private world of women to the public world of men, Portia must assert

102
her control over speech before she can claim exceptional status. She
demonstrates, finally, that women who prove their virtue through
individual acts of bravery can come to be recognized as almost like
men. Yet the emphasis on bared flesh and self-mutilation eroticizes the
act of valor. The signs of female sexuality are reconfigured within the
conventions of representations of the threatening femme fatale in a
manner no doubt designed to appeal to the tastes of anew class of sec-
ular private collectors. The rich colors and the confident brushwork
displayed by the hand of a woman established Sirani’s reputation in
Bologna as a phenomenon.
Sirani’s skill and the speed with which she worked led to gossip that
her father was claiming her work as his own in order to exploit the
publicity value of afemale prodigy in the workshop. In order to repu-
diate the all too familiar allegation that her work was not her own, she
became accustomed to working in public. Around 1652, she opened a
school for women artists in Bologna. There she trained a number of
younger women artists who, for the first time, were not exclusively
from families of painters, as well as her two younger sisters, Anna
Maria and Barbara, who eventually produced their own altarpieces for
local churches.
Sirani’s death in 1665 was followed, on November 14, by a massive
public funeral in the Dominican church attended by a large and distin-
guished crowd of mourners. The funeral announcement described her
as PITTRICE FAMOSISSIMA and the lavish scheme of decoration for
the ceremony was supervised by the artist Matteo Borbone. A
catafalque, intended to represent the Temple of Fame, was erected in
the middle of the nave. The octagonai structure of imitation marble, its
cupola-shaped roof supported by eight columns of pseudo-porphyry,
had a base decorated with figures, mottoes, and emblematic pictures
and, on a platform, a life-size figure of the dead artist painting.
Sirani was eulogized in a funeral oration which was also a rhapsody
of civic pride in the city of Bologna. Her funeral, the final
identification of her fame with that of the city which had produced
her, was comparable to the funerals of other well-known sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century artists in that they were accorded the privi-
leges of other distinguished citizens. In the fifteenth century, Ghiberti
had requested that his body be interred in Florence’s Santa Croce in
the company of the noblemen to whose position he aspired as an
artist. Less than a hundred years later, Michelangelo’s body was trans-
ported from Rome back to his native Florenée in 1564, where a sumpt-
uous catafalque was erected,in the Medici family basilica of San
104
Lorenzo. In Bologna, Ren1’s funeral in 1642 was also treated as a public
event with masses offered for him in towns surrounding Bologna, and
as far away as Rome. His body was carried to San Domenico with
great pomp and honor past huge crowds in the streets. Upon Sirani’s
death, Bologna’s two most famous artists of the seventeenth century
were laid to rest side by side in the ancestral tomb of the wealthy
Bolognese, Signor Saulo Giudotti. A testament to their public civic
status as artists, the internment was also deeply ironic; during his life,
the eccentric Reni had refused to have anything to do with women,
barring them from his house in fear of poison or witchcraft at their
hands.
The fame of Sirani in Bologna during her lifetime was rivalled by
only one other woman artist in Italy: Artemisia Gentileschi, a painter
whose life and work are a challenge to humanist constructions of
feminine education and deportment. In May 1606, Caravaggio fled
Rome, accused of stabbing a young man to death. Among his follow-
ers in Rome were Orazio Gentileschi, a founder of the style that came
to be known throughout Europe as Caravaggism, and his daughter
Artemisia, whom Ward Bissell has identified as one of the two most
important Caravaggisti to reach maturity between 1610 and 1620.
Caravaggio and the Gentileschi family (which included a son as well
as the daughter born in 1593) were far removed in lifestyle and tem-
perament from the learned painters of the Bolognese school with
their emphasis on piety and refinement. Historical accounts of the
lawless bohemian artist, whose hands were as skilled with the dagger
as with the paintbrush, and in whom a revolutionary style of painting
commingled with unrestrained passions, usually begin with Cara-
vageio, though Rudolph and Margaret Wittkower have skilfully
traced its prototype to the sixteenth century. Archival research on the
Gentileschi family has produced a history rich in court orders and
libels, as well as the famous trial in 1612 of Orazio’s assistant and
Gentileschi’s teacher, Agostino Tassi, on charges that he had raped
the nineteen-year-old girl, withdrawn a promise of marriage, and
taken away from the Gentileschi house paintings that included a large
Judith. The truth of the matter remains buried under conflicting
seventeenth-century documents and modern readings of those docu-
ments which have often imposed anachronistic attitudes on seven-
teenth-century sexual and matrimonial mores. At its heart, the trial
had less to do with Artemisia Gentileschi’s virtue than with Tassi’s
relationship to Orazio Gentileschi’s legal property, which included his
daughter. Germaine Greer’s argument, ghat the trial, and the publicity
10S
which accompanied it, removed the remaining traditional obstacles to
the development of Gentileschi’s professional life, is convincing up to
a point. But it ignores the equally favorable confluence of Orazio
Gentileschi’s defiant reputation and his unswerving support of his tal-
ented daughter. Mary Garrard’s recent monograph on the artist, which
also brings together for the first time in English all the documents
relating to the artist, as well as the complete transcripts of the rape
trial, has convincingly shown how this public scrutiny of female sexu-
ality reshaped those issues of gender and class relevant to Gentileschi’s
subsequent emergence as a major artist.
The growth of naturalism in the seventeenth century led to a new
emphasis on the depiction of courage and physical prowess in repre-
sentation. Images of heroic womanhood, qualified by the moralistic
rhetoric of the Counter Reformation and well suited to the demands
of Baroque drama, replaced earlier and more passive ideals of female
beauty. This new ideal, traceable in the work of the Carracci and Reni
circles as well as in the followers of Caravaggio, coincided with
expanding roles for the artist which admitted a wider range of behav-
ior and attitudes, and assured even the unconventional Caravaggio of
the continuing patronage of the powerful cardinal, Scipione Borghese.
However colorful Gentileschi’s life, and accounts vary widely, it was
marked by a sustained artistic production (despite the fact that she
married and had at least one child) equalled by few women artists.
 YL 1) nb OR OO aaa re e+

46 Artemisia Gentileschi Susanna and the Elders 1610

§ (opposite) ‘Tintoretto Susanna and the Elders 1555-56

A
40 Among Gentileschi’s earliest works is a Susanna and the Elders,
inscribed ARTE GENTILESCHI 1610, which already displays preco-
cious evidence ofher later development. The opportunity to examine
the work (long inaccessible in a private collection) when it appeared
in the exhibition, Women Artists 1550-1950, in 1977 led to its attri-
bution to Artemisia rather than Orazio, despite a formal and coloristic
debt to the older Gentileschi. The painting’s inclusion in the 1991
exhibition of Gentileschi’s work held at the Casa Buonarroti in
Florence moved at least one art historian to argue for the work as a
collaboration between the daughter and a father, “who, in an under-
standable reversal of workshop tradition, proudly encouraged his
daughter-assistant to take the credit.” Issues of content as well as attri-
bution continue to surround the painting, and Mary Garrard’s femi-
nist readings have been challenged by other Renaissance and Baroque
scholars, among them Richard Spear and Francis Haskell.
The painting, executed in Rome only a year after she began her
career (if we are to believe Orazio’s testimony at the trial), has sources
in similar representations by members of the Carracci circle, as well as a
David and Goliath (c. 1605-10) by Orazio. The Apocryphal story of the
attempted seduction by the two Elders of Joachim’s wife, Susanna, was
extremely popular in Italy by the late sixteenth century. Garrard points
out the many interpretative traditions within which the theme has
figured. The figure of Susanna has symbolized the Church, conspired
against by Elders representing pagans and other opponents. She can
also signify deliverance (the young Daniel cleared her name and saved
her life), or a female chastity that would rather die than bring dishonor
on a husband. During the Renaissance, focus on a single dramatic
moment that eruBIERiEEdT TheTOTS Vicleay aRIR MEistic aspeceiae
the theme, replaced broader narrative themes. This focus also served to
provide a Biblical occasion for the painting of an erotic nude. The
drama is played out in terms of the sexual dynamics of looking, and the
interplay of male aggression and female resistance. Male possession of
the female body is initiated through a look which surprises the unsus-
pecting and defenseless woman at her bath. “The nude’s erotic appeal
could be heightened,” Garrard argued in an important article on the
painting, “by the presence of two lecherous old men, whose inclusion
was both iconographically justified and pornographically effective.”
The frequency with which Susanna is assigned a complicitous role in
45 this drama of sexualized looking, as we see in Tintoretto’s version of
1555-56, points to the theme as reinforcing social ideologies of mascu-
line dominance and female subordination.
108
 Gentileschi’s version departs from this tradition in significant ways.
Removing Susanna from the garden, a traditional metaphor for the
bounteous femininity of nature, Gentileschi isolates the figure against
a rigid architectonic frieze which contains the body in a shallow and
restricted space. The awkward twist and thrust of the body with its
outflung arms, transforms the image into one of distress, resistance,
and awkward physicality very much at odds with representations by
Tintoretto, Guido Reni, and others who choose to position the female
figure within attitudes of graceful display. Other representations of the
subject in Italian painting, including those by the Carracci circle and
Sisto Badalocchio (c. 1609) reinforce the masculine gaze by directing
both looks toward the female body. The conspiratorial glance of one
Elder toward the viewer in Gentileschi’s painting may be unique. It
also produces a more disturbing psychological content, as the triangle
inscribed by the three heads, and the positioning of the arms, not only
focuses Susanna as the object of the conspiracy, but also implicates a
third witness, a spectator who receives the silencing gesture of the
older male as surely as if “he” were part of the painting’s space. The
figure of Susanna is fixed like a butterfly on a pin between these gazes,
two within the frame of the painting, the other outside it, but implic-
itly incorporated into the composition. Abandoning more traditional
compositions in which Susanna’s figure is off-center, along a diagonal
or orthogonal line which allows the spectator to move freely in rela-
tion to the image, Gentileschi moves the figure close to the center of
the composition and uses the spectator’s position in front of the canvas
to fix her rigidly in place.
Gentileschi’s biography has often been read in her representations.
More remarkable for her development as a painter, however, is the
sophistication of this early intuitive and empathetic response to a
familiar subject. Susanna and the Elders offers striking evidence of
Gentileschi’s ability to transform the conventions of seventeenth-
century painting in ways that would ultimately give new content to
the imagery of the female figure.
Tassi’s eventual acquittal at the celebrated trial in Rome, which
included Gentileschi’s torture by thumbscrew in an attempt to ascer-
tain the truth ofher statements, and Gentileschi’s subsequent marriage
to a wealthy Florentine were followed by several years in Florence
where she enjoyed an excellent reputation as a painter, executed
several of her most important works, and joined the Accademia del
Disegno, the archives of which include several references to her
between 1616 and 1619. The Florentine period, which ended with
109
 47. Orazio Gentileschi
Judith with Her Maidservant c. 1610-12

her return to Rome in 1620 according to Bissell’s chronology, seems to

have included the Judith With Her Maidservant, the Judith Decapitating
Holofernes, and an Allegory of the Inclination commissioned in 1617 for
the salon ceiling in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence.
Gentileschi’s Judith With Her Maidservant is the first of six known
variations on the popular theme from the Old Testament Apocrypha
which relates the story of the slaughter of the Assyrian general,
Holofernes, by the Jewish widow, Judith, who crept through enemy
lines. to seduce and then decapitate the sleeping general. The monu-
mental composition, naturalistic rendering and strong contrasts of
light and shadow, and use of contemporary models, are all indicators
of Gentileschi’s adherence to the principles of a fully developed
Caravaggism. In this painting, as in the earlier Susanna and the Elders,
she emphasizes the psychological complicity of the two figures by
squeezing them into the same space, mirroring their bodies, and
repeating the direction of the two, in this case female, gazes. The
focused intensity of Judith’s action, reinforced by the clenched hand
that clutches the sword hilt, is a radical departure from Orazio
Gentileschi’s version of the same subject (c. 1610-12). In the latter, the
stability of the pyramidal composition created by the positioning of
the bodies of the two women emphasizes the figures’ passivity, while
the directing of their gazes outward in different directions works to
defuse their intensity and commitment to a shared goal—the death of
the enemy leader. In yet another version of the same subject, Giovan
Giosefa dal Sole’s Portrait of aWoman as Judith, executed at the end of

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 the century, the presence of Holofernes’s head lends a merely anecdo-
tal touch to the languid figure of Judith, an image of sensual pleasure
who, with breasts bared, turns toward the spectator.
Yael Evan has traced the prototype of the female hero who approxi-
mates a triumphant man in stature to Mantegna’s (or his followers’)
drawing ofJudith (1491), one of the earliest depictions to invoke the
textual portrayal of the original Vulgate Judith who is said to have
“behaved like a man.’ Tracing the changing image ofJudith through
the Renaissance and Baroque periods, Evan and others have shown
how the iconography of Judith was gradually transformed during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and have pointed out
Gentileschi’s considerable role in constructing a female hero who
transcends the female norm by displaying a capacity for moral behav-
ior in the public realm that is normally denied to women.
The most insistent feature of Gentileschi’s Judith Decapitating
43 Holofernes—the ferocious energy and sustained violence’ of the
scene—has attracted extensive critical commentary, often by writers
who have found intimations of Gentileschi’s personal experience as
the recipient of Tassi’s sexual advances in the scene. Yet the naturalistic
details—the choice of the moment of the decapitation and the blood
which jets from the severed arteries—are present in several other sev-
enteenth-century versions, including those of Caravaggio and Johann
Liss, whose Judith in the Tent of Holofernes (c. 1620) rivals Gentileschi’s 1n
lurid detail. A more relevant source for Gentileschi’s representation
may be a lost work by Rubens, known today only through an engrav-
ing by Cornelius Galle I (1576-1650), which sheds light on the paint-
ing’s iconography as well as its gruesome nature. Rubens’s work
provides a possible source for the powerful female figure with its mus-
cular arms, neck, and upper torso, but is significantly different from
Gentileschi’s rendering in its attention to the graceful and revealing
swirl of drapery around the female body. Despite pictorial sources in
Caravaggio, Rubens, and Orazio Gentileschi, there is nothing in the
history of Western painting to prepare us for Gentileschi’s expression
of female physical power, brilliantly captured in the use of a pinwheel
composition in which the interlocking, diagonally thrusting arms
converge at Holofernes’s head. It is not the physicality of the female
figures alone, however, which makes it unusual, but its combination
with restructured gazes. The coy glances and averted gazes of Western
painting’s female figures are missing here. The result is a direct con-
frontation which disrupts the conventional relationship between
an “active” male spectator and a passive female recipient. Although
I12
Gentileschi’s work shares subjects and female heroines with that ofa
great many other seventeenth-century painters from Francesco del
Cairo and Valerio Castello to Guercino, Carlo Saraceni, and Guido
Reni, and active, muscular male figures appear in works like
Bartolomeo Manfredi’s Mars Punishing Amor (c. 1610), its celebration
of female energy expressed in direct rather than arrested action was
profoundly alien to the prevailing artistic temper.
The theme ofJudith and Holofernes is repeated in the work of
other seventeenth-century women artists, but theirs contain none
of the characteristics that distinguish Gentileschi’s. A Judith and Her
Handmaiden painted by Fede Galizia, the daughter of a miniaturist
from Trento, at the end of the sixteenth century, reiterates the conven-
tions of refined female portraiture in combination with the stern,
moral message of the severed head. Sirani’s Judith, despite following
Gentileschi’s chronologically, is closer to the mannered elegance of
Bolognese painting than to the new pictorial ideals of the Gentileschi
family.
By the time Artemisia Gentileschi arrived in Naples in 1630 she
was a celebrity, living magnificently and enjoying the patronage and
protection of the nobility. An allegorical figure of Fame, dated 1632,
and a Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1630s) are important works 44
which signal her transition to a more refined later style. Self-Portrait as
the Allegory of Painting has been thoroughly analysed as a sophisticated
commentary on a central philosophical issue of later Renaissance art
theory, and an audacious challenge to the core of artistic tradition in
its creation of an image unavailable to any male artist—an allegorical
figure which is at the same time a self-image. Following Ripa’s
description of the image of Pittura, Gentileschi has given herself the
attributes of the female personification of Painting: the gold chain, the
pendant mask standing for imitation, the unruly locks of hair that sig-
nify the divine frenzy of artistic creation, and the garments of chang-
ing colors which allude to the painter’s skill. The richly modulated
colors—red-browns, dark green, blue velvet—are repeated in the five
patches of color on the palette. The work belongs to a tradition in
which painting is identified as one of the liberal arts, but here artist
and allegory are one. Unlike the self-portraits of Anguissola discussed
in the previous chapter, here, for the first time, a woman artist does not
present herselfasa gentlewoman, but as the act ofpainting itself,
a

113
CHAPTER FOUR

Domestic Genres and Women Painters

in Northern Europe

The conditions that made possible the participation of relatively large

numbers of women in the art of Northern Europe predate the seven-
teenth century. Women in the North appear to have enjoyed greater
freedom and mobility in the professions than their contemporaries in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although substantial documen-
tation is missing, women’s names already appear in fifteenth-century
archives in Flanders. Archives of the studio of Guillaume Vrelant,
which produced many volumes of illuminated manuscripts in Bruges,
mention an Elisabeth Scepens who was Vrelant’s student in 1476 and
did some work for the court of Burgundy (as did Margaretha van
Eyck earlier in the century with her brothers Jan and Hubert). After
Vrelant’s death, Scepens ran the business with his widow (who, like
many women of the time, inherited the business on the death of her
husband) and she is listed as a member of the artist’s guild from 1476
to 1489. In 1482, Agnes van den Bossche secured an important com-
mission to paint the Maid of Ghent on a banner for her hometown; in
1§20, a group of marching widows in a procession of the city guilds
caught Durer’s eye when he visited Antwerp and he noted their pres-
ence 1n his journal.
Like Anguissola in Italy, the two best-known northern women
painters of the sixteenth century were supported by royal families:
Caterina van Hemessen as painter to Mary of Hungary, the sister
of Charles V of Spain (after she abdicated her regency of the Low
Countries and returned to Spain); Levina Teerlinc at the English court
of Henry VIII. Van Hemessen, the daughter of the prominent
Antwerp painter Jan Sanders van Hemessen, was trained by her father
and may be the so-called Brunswick Monogrammist identified with
him. Her religious paintings include a Rest on the Flight into Egypt
(1555) and a Christ and Veronica, as well as several paintings by her
father on which she appears to have worked.
A pair of signed portraits, executed in 1551 and 1552, depict a
stylish couple against a dark ground in three-quarter views with the
direct and sensitive realism characteristic of her work. Van Hemessen
II4
49 Caterina van Hemessen
Portrait of aMan c. 1550

married Christian de Morien, the organist at Antwerp Cathedral, in

1554 and the pair were taken to Spain by Mary. Although she provid-
ed for the couple for life, no work remains from the Spanish period.
Levina Teerlinc, who was invited to England by Henry VIII and
retained as court painter by his three successors—Edward VI, Mary I,
and Elizabeth I—was one of a number of Flemish women artists,
among them Katherine Maynors, Alice Carmellion, Ann Smiter, and
the Hornebout family, who were active in England in the production
of miniatures, then extremely popular as articles of dress. Teerlinc was
the eldest of five daughters of the miniaturist Simon Bining and was
the only portrait miniature painter of Flemish origin known to have
been employed at court between the death of Hans Holbein the
Younger in 1543 and the emergence in 1570 of Nicholas Hilliard (the
first native-born miniaturist in English history and the man whose
subsequent career almost entirely eclipsed hers). She married a painter
named George Teerlinc and by January 1546 her name appears in
court account books as “king’s paintrix.” Not until 1599 was Hilliard
granted an annuity equal to hers, forty pounds a year, and hers was
higher than that granted to Holbein. Comparisons such as these can
ti
 so First Great Seal ofElizabeth I,
1559, probably after a design by
Levina Teerlinc

be misleading, however, as court painters were customarily paid with

eifts as well as money.
Although Teerlinc’s life at court, where she was Gentlewoman of
the Privy Chamber, is well documented, little work has been firmly
attributed to her. As gentlewoman to Queen Elizabeth, Teerlinc had
to present her with a New Year’s gift each year. They begin in 1559
with a small picture of the Trinity and include annual gifts of minia-
tures. Teerlinc 1s probably the first painter for whom the Queen sat
and Roy Strong identifies these images as important documentary evi-
dence of the appearance of the young Elizabeth before her cult trans-
formed her into an iconic image. Elizabethan state portraiture played
an important role in the vast struggle concerning images which divid-
ed the reformed and Roman churches in sixteenth-century England
and Teerlinc’s part in establishing the conventions which led to an
imperial iconography of the Elizabethan court deserves further study.
Strong has attributed the first frontal majestic images of the Queen,
the image on the Great Seal and numerous documents, to drawings by
Teerlinc and the origins of the representation of Elizabeth Virgo must
be sought in her images.
Van Hemessen and Teerlinc were part of a strong tradition of court
patronage for women from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
Court appointments exempted women from guild regulation during
the Renaissance and they provided women artists with an important
alternative to academies and other institutions which increasingly
restricted or prohibited their participation. As gentlewomen and
painters, women’s social and professional lives were elided; their

116
presence at court both affirmed the breadth of court patronage and
ensured that educated and skilled women were available as teachers
and attendants.
During the second half of the sixteenth century northern artists
continued to travel to Italy for training; after that, they increasingly
received their professional training in Holland where the guild system
remained firmly in place. Although we know of no women painters
engaged in landscape and history painting during this period, the
spread of humanism and the educational and domestic ideology ofthe
Protestant Reformation increased literacy among women in the
North and their participation in the visual arts. By the seventeenth
century, Northern European art was dominated by new, middle-class
ideals reflecting the growth of commerce and the Protestant Church.
A domestic ideology shifted attention from the church to the home,
particularly after the iconoclastic fury of the mid-century restricted
art to that produced for the home. The themes that characterize
Dutch seventeenth-century painting—still-life, genre scenes, flower
painting, and topographical landscape—treflect the prosperity of the
middle class and the emergence of painting as a secure investment for
a non-aristocratic clientele seeking art for their homes.
Dutch seventeenth-century painting continues to challenge art
history's emphasis on Italian Renaissance art as a model. When
artists—whether because of Protestant interdictions against religious
images in seventeenth-century Holland, or the later focus on leisure
by a growing middle class in nineteenth-century France—have
turned to everyday life for subjects, the results have often diverged
sharply from the conventions of Italian painting. Yet those conven-
tions continue to color our ideas about spectatorship, content, and
patronage. To paint everyday life is to paint the activities of women
and_children, as_well as those of men; and to record the realities of
domestic spaces, as well as to aggrandize_ public, historical, religious,
and mythological events.
The art that developed in Holland (the term commonly used in
English for the seven United Provinces that formed the Dutch
Republic) in the seventeenth century reflects the antihumanism of
Dutch Calvinism, the rapid growth and spread of the natural sciences,
and the wide-ranging changes in family life and urban living that
grew out of this prosperous, literate, Protestant culture. Although an
official hierarchy of subject-matter reflected in theory that of Italian
painting (with historical subjects at the top and still-life at the bot-
tom), in fact, painters of flower pieces were among the highest paid
Dr?
artists of the time. And although Calvinism recapitulated the medieval
call for chastity and obedience for women, the realities of Dutch life
encouraged a diversity of activity for women and a level of self-
development that enabled a number of them to become professional
painters. The variety of subjects in Dutch painting is far greater than
indicated here, and the relationship of Dutch artists to Italian art far
more complex, but an examination of two areas of Dutch painting—
genre and flower painting—teveals new aspects of the intersection of
gender and representation.
A famous critique of northern art attributed by Francisco de
Hollanda to Michelangelo is among the first accounts to weigh the
differences between Italian and northern painting in terms of gender.
“Flemish painting ... will ... please the devout better than any paint-
ing ofItaly,’ Michelangelo is recorded to have said. “It will appeal to
women, especially to the very old and the very young, and also to
monks and nuns and to certain noblemen who have no sense of true
harmony. In Flanders they paint with a view to external exactness or
such things as may cheer you and of which you cannot speak ill, as for
example saints and prophets. They paint stuffs and masonry, the green
grass of the fields, the shadow of trees, and rivers and bridges, which
they call landscapes, with many figures on this side and many figures
on that. And all this, though it pleases some persons, is done without
reason or art, without symmetry or proportion, without skilful choice
or boldness and, finally, without substance or vision.” This criticism of
northern painting as lacking symmetry and harmony (that 1s, mathe-
matical pyoportion and ideal form), and as therefore inferior to Italian
painting and worthy of the admiration only of women, the pious, and
the uneducated, draws striking distinctions between the painting of
northern and southern Europe. If, as Svetlana Alpers has argued,
Italian Renaissance art elaborates the viewer’s measured relationship
to objects in space, praises mastery in mathematics and literature, and
asserts a process of art-making aimed at the intellectual possession of
the world, then Dutch art functions very differently. In Dutch paint-
ing, pictures serve as descriptions of the seen world and as moralizing
commentaries on life rather than as reconstructions of human figures
engaged in significant actions. In “Art History and Its Exclusions:
The Example of Dutch Art,’ Alpers convincingly demonstrates the
implications of this distinction for the representation of women in
Dutch art and for transforming the relationship between the artist as
male observer and the woman observed: “The attitude toward
women in [Italian] art—toward the central image of the nude in
118
particular—is part and parcel of a commanding attitude taken
towards the possession of the world.’ By contrast, Dutch genre paint-
ing details women’s occupation in the activities of everyday life, while
paintings of single female figures in interiors, like Vermeer’s many
works on the themes of women reading or sewing which begin in
the middle of the seventeenth century, use the absorption of these
activities to draw attention to the elustveness of women as subjects.
No longer emphasizing the tension between a male viewer and
woman as the object of sight, available for male viewing pleasure,
Vermeer and other northern artists allowed woman her own self-
possession, her own unavailability to control by another’s gaze.
Instead, the gaze of the artist/spectator lingers over the surfaces of
objects, enjoying the play oflight on rich fabrics, the subtlety of color
and the fineness of detail that make up the painting’s surface. What
Alpers has called a “mapping” of the surfaces of objects, with its close
attention to materiality and detail, has important implications for
feminist readings. Elevating grandiose conception over intimate
observation, writers on art from Michelangelo to Sir Joshua Reynolds
have identified the detail with the “feminine.” “To focus on the
detail?’ Naomi Schor suggests in Reading in Detail, “and more particu-
larly on the detail as negativity is to become aware .. . of 1ts participa-
tion in a larger semantic network, bounded on the one side by the
ornamental, with its traditional connotations of effeminacy and deca-
dence, and on the other, by the everyday, whose ‘prosiness’ is rooted in
the domestic sphere oflife presided over by women.”
Much Dutch genre painting of this period does indeed lovingly
catalogue the images and objects of the Dutch household, and its
middle-class and Protestant orientation contributed to new social
roles for the artist and new kinds of content. The relatively low prices
paid by a large public interested in paintings as embellishment for the
home encouraged the recruiting of artists primarily from middle- and
lower-class families, and a continuing lack of distinction between
painting and other craft traditions which provided furnishing for the
home. The_role of women _as_ spectators in_seventeenth-century
Holland, actively making decisions about the circulation and con—
sumption of images, remains to be analysed and theorized.
The use of the term “genre” to describe paintings of everyday life
is relatively recent. In the seventeenth century paintings were iden-
tified by subject; scenes of daily life ranged from banquet and brothel
paintings to interiors, family groups, and women and _ servants
engaged in domestic activities. There is evidence to suggest that over
119
the century the content of these paintings, whose numbers increase
steadily up to the 1660s and then grow sharply in the 1670s, moved
from allegorical or emblematic to more descriptive. The debate
about whether to read these images as symbolic or realist continues,
but it appears that many paintings both describe actual scenes and
have pictorial sources in popular emblematic literature like Jacob
Cats’s emblem books (in which a motto, a picture, and a commentary
elicit a moral injunction).
Seventeenth-century Holland also had a large and powerful group
of non-professional practitioners of the arts. When Houbraken pub-
lished his Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en
Schilderessen (The Story of Netherlandish Painters and Paintresses) in
1718, he placed next to a portrait of Rembrandt one of Anna Maria
Schurman, an accomplished scholar and feminist who drew, painted,
and etched as an amateur (and who was admitted to the Utrecht Guild
of St. Luke in 1641). Although two self-portraits are the only works
that exist today by Schurman’s hand, the woman that Dutch poets
called their “Sappho and their Corneille” was an important voice in
the call for independent women in Dutch culture.
The Protestantism of Dutch art eliminated the Blessed Virgin as a
female model, while the lack of a strong Neoplatonic movement in
the North prevented the identification of female form with ideal
beauty in painting. Instead, the imagery of the home assumed a central
place in Dutch iconography—as a microcosm of the properly gov-
erned commonwealth and as emblematic of education and the
domestication of the senses. The well-ordered household, a condition
for an orderly society, consisted of the family, their servants and
belongings. Within the home, the primary emblem of the domestic
virtue that ensured the smooth running of society was the image of a
woman engaged in needlework, sewing, embroidery or lacemaking.
The imagery of the domestic interior provides a context in which
to observe the increasing prosperity of the Dutch Republic through
the material goods that fill the home. There are surprisingly few
paintings that have as their subject the actual commerce and trade that
underlie the seventeenth century’s wealth, for such subjects could not
easily be reconciled with Calvinist ambivalence toward the acqui-
sition of money. The domestic interior, on the other hand, was a
worldly embodiment of Christian principles and an appropriate set-
ting for the display of goods. These paintings offer a multi-layered
view of the realities of Dutch social and economic life at the time,
including the gendered division oflabor in key occupations like cloth
I20
51 Anna Maria Schurman
Self-Portrait 1633

production. They also warn of the dangers of unrestrained female sex-

uality (for example, the negative implications of men and women
“exchanging” places in activities related to cloth production).
During the course of the century, images of men and women
weaving and spinning underwent significant changes in response to
shifts in domestic ideology, as well as in cloth production. In 1602, the
governor of Leiden’s guild of say-weaving (a cloth like serge) commis-
sioned a series of eleven glass paintings depicting the process of say-
cloth manufacture in Leiden (along with Haarlem the major center of
cloth production). All that remains are eleven preparatory drawings by
Isaac Claesz van Swanenburgh. Linda Stone has shown the drawings
to depict the industry in a favorable and idealizing light. In Spinning
and Weaving, men and women work together in a large room but, as in
other depictions of labor, men do the actual weaving while women’s
activities are restricted to washing, spinning, winding, and carding the
wool. Women were prohibited from certain aspects of making cloth in
professional workshops and working conditions for women and chil-
dren were far worse than those for men. Many children, especially
orphans, worked fourteen-hour days for a couple of pennies a week.
The organization of cloth production by entrepreneurs (“drapiers”’
I2]1
52 Susanna van Steenwijck-Gaspoel The Lakenhal 1642

wealthy enough to afford the purchase of raw materials which they

then jobbed out to spinners and weavers) encouraged a strict division
of labor and the use of women and children as a means of keeping
wages low.
By the 1630s, the pure woolen industry in Leiden was prominent
enough for its guild to establish a guildhall (lakenhal) of its own. A
local artist, Susanna van Steenwijck-Gaspoel, was commissioned in
1642 to execute a painting of the new building. The wife of the archi-
tectural painter, Hendrik van Steenwiyck de Jonge, she was paid six
hundred guilders for the painting (an astonishing sum at a time when
most non-historical paintings sold on the open market for less than
fifty guilders each). The building is rendered in a simplified, almost
schematic, style which clearly emphasizes its architectural details,
including five sculptured plaques on the facade showing the cloth
production process.
[22
 By mid-century, paintings by Cornelis Decker, Thomas Wyck,
Gilles Rombouts, and others had firmly established the conventions
for depicting weaving as a cottage industry in which the weaving itself
is always done by a man (though often a woman sews or spins nearby).
Such paintings emphasize the accoutrements of weaving and the
lower-class nature of the occupation, as opposed to the large-scale
manufacture of wool and linen in Leiden and Haarlem. They rein-
force a tradition of commending workers’ industriousness which
originates in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century emblem books and
didactic tracts. In Jacob Cats’s emblems, the weaver’s shuttle is a
memento mori, a reminder that life flies past as swiftly as the shuttle
moves across the loom. There is evidence to suggest, however, that
these depictions of industrious weavers replace earlier and more vul-
gar representations carried over from medieval times which equate
the mechanical motion of the loom with copulation. Linda Stone has
located the shift from this view to a new respect for a pious laity in the
evolution of Reformation thinking. In Biblical and mythological tales,
the Virgin appears frequently as the spinner of life, a model of female
virtue to be emulated by other women. Representations of women
spinning in Dutch art increasingly refer not to the profession of cloth
production, as do those of men weaving, but to the moral character of
the spinner and the domestic nature of the activity.
The Dutch translation of Cesare Ripa’s well-known Iconologia in
1644 introduced a wide variety of allegorical female figures into
northern art, many of which were subsequently transformed into
emblems of domestic bliss. Dr. Johann van Beverwyck’s Van de

53 Illustration from
Johann van Beverwijck
Van de Wtnementheyt des
Vrouwelicken Geslachts
1643
Winementheyt des Vrouwelicken Geslachts (On the Excellence of the Female
Sex) appeared in 1643 with a portrait of Schurman as a frontispiece
and a representation of Dame World transformed into an ideal of the
family home, “the fountain and source of republics.” Martin Luther
had demanded that women labor with distaff and spindle and in the
engraving illustrating van Beverwijck’s essay, Adam labors in the fields
while Eve spins within the house. The author’s call for women’s
emancipation is carefully modulated by his continuing adherence to
domestic models in which education and the professions are legiti-
mized for women only in the presence of domestic skills: “To those
who say that women are fit for the household and no more, then I
would answer that with us many women, without forgetting their
house, practice trade and commerce and even the arts and learning.”
Cats’s emblems, on the other hand, reinforced a more conservative and
no doubt more widely held view: “The husband must be on the street
to practice his trade; The wife must stay at home to be in the kitchen.”
It was marriage and domesticity which contained women’s animal
instincts according to both popular and medical sources; it was under
the sign of the distaff and spindle that female virtue and domesticity
were joined.
One result of growing prosperity in Holland during this period was
a focus on woman’s sexuality as an object of exchange for money.
Representations of women spinning, embroidering, and making lace
often conveyed ambiguous and sexualized meanings. Judith Leyster’s
The Proposition (1631) 1s one of anumber of paintings that imbricate
the discourses of domestic virtue and sexuality. Here, the proposition
is initiated by a man who leans over the shoulder of a woman deeply
absorbed in her sewing. With one hand on her arm, he holds out the
other hand, filled with coins. Refusing to look up and engage in the
transaction, she completely ignores his advances.
Presented as an embarrassed victim rather than a seducer, Leyster’s
female figure is depicted as an embodiment of domestic virtue at a
time when the growth of Calvinism was accompanied by a resurgence
of brothels. Themes of prostitution and propositions provided an
opportunity for moralizing; paintings based on these themes often
exploit the idea that women who reject their “natural” roles become
temptresses who lead men into sin. Leyster’s treatment of the theme is
unprecedented in Dutch painting and its intimate and restrained
mood does not reappear until some twenty-five years later. It has been
cited as a prototype for later versions of the theme, such as Gerard
TerBorch’s so-called Gallant Officer (c. 1665) and Gabriel Metsu’s An
124
 55 (left) Vermeer
The Lacemaker c. 1665-68

$6 (opposite) Judith Leyster

A Woman Sewing by
Candlelight 1633

Offer ofWine (1650s), as well as Vermeer’s many paintings of men inter-

rupting women at their work.
Two other paintings by Leyster are among the earliest representa-
tions in Dutch art of women sewing by candlelight. A Woman Sewing
by Candlelight (1633) 1s one of a pair of small circular candlelight scenes
with full-length figures showing the influence of Hals and the Utrecht
Caravaggisti. Although art history has been complicit in generalizing
such representations into embodiments of domestic virtue, significant
differences in fact exist in the presentation of this type of female labor
in Dutch art, as well as in the class and material circumstances of the
women engaged in it. A series of engravings of domestic work by
Geertruid Roghman, daughter of the engraver Hendrik Lambertsz
and sister of the painter and etcher Roelant Roghman, made about the
middle of the century, emphasizes the labor of needlework rather than
the leisure and reverie that it has come to signify in paintings like
Vermeer’s The Lacemaker (c. 1665—68). In Vermeer’s painting, a stylish
young woman bends over her bobbins completely absorbed in her
126
 ene

task. In contrast, Roghman’s figures are often in strained poses with

their heads bent uncomfortably close to their laps as if to stress the
difficulty of doing fine work in the dim interiors of Dutch houses of
the period. Surrounded by the implements necessary to their activi-
ties—spindles, combs, bundles of cloth and thread—they demonstrate
the complexity and physical labor of the task. Woman Spinning
(before 1650) is the fourth in a series of five engravings whose
others are sewing, pleating fabric, cleaning, and cooking. Roghman’s
woman is without the moralizing inscription integral to emblematic
representations, and the emphasis on the woman’s concentration, her
sympathetic relationship to the watching child, and the careful
description of objects evoke a mood ofbalance and order.
If Roghman’s engravings express the utilitarian aspects of cloth pro-
duction in the Dutch home, Vermeer’s and Caspar Netscher’s paint-
ings of lacemakers rely on rich colors and fabrics to reinforce the
intimacy and sensuality of women in repose. Vermeer’s lacemaker 1s a
woman making the bobbin lace then popular among prosperous
127
Rachel Ruysch Flowerpiece after 1700
Dutch women, not for profit, but as an indication that northern
women were as accomplished at the production of luxury goods as
their better-known French and Flemish contemporaries.
Needlework and lacemaking had very different roles in the lives of
women of the upper and lower classes. The expansion of the Dutch
market for lace exports, after France imposed high duties on its own
products in 1667, renewed interest in the skill of lacemaking, long an
occupation for upper-class women. The activity became identified
with charity and the reeducation of wayward girls in domestic virtues,
and provided suitable employment for orphans. The finest bobbin lace
was done by professional linen seamstresses, but an ordinance issued by
the Amsterdam town council in 1529 indicates that poor girls could
earn a living from lacework. Bobbin lace of the kind shown in
Vermeer’s painting was also made in orphanages and charitable insti-
tutions.
The association of needlework with feminine virtue focused atten-
tion on this aspect of female domestic life as the site of a growing
struggle over conflicting roles for women. In his Christiani matrimoni
institutio, Erasmus of Rotterdam, the leading Dutch humanist of the
sixteenth century, had satirized the preoccupation with needlework at
the expense of education for women of the nobility: “The distaff and
spindle are in truth the tools of all women and suitable for avoiding
idleness. ... Even people of wealth and birth train their daughters to
weave tapestries or silken cloths. ... It would be better if they taught
them to study, for study busies the whole soul.” In The Learned Maid, or
Whether a Maid may be a Scholar, Schurman argued that girls should be
taught mathematics, music, and painting, rather than embroidery:
“Some object that the needle and distaff supply women with all the
scope they need. And I own that not a few are of this mind... . But I
decline to accept this Lesbian rule, naturally preferring to listen to rea-
son rather than custom.”
Throughout the seventeenth century, painting served both domes-
tic and scientific ends; that which was accurately observed pleased the
eye and in turn confirmed the wisdom and plan of God. Science and
art met in this period in flower painting and botanical illustration. The
task of describing minute nature required the same qualities of dili-
gence, patience, and manual dexterity that are often used to denigrate
“women’s work.” Women were, in fact, critical to the development of
the floral still-life, a genre highly esteemed in the seventeenth century
but, by the nineteenth, dismissed as an inferior one ideally suited to
the limited talents of women amateurs.
129
 Until well into the sixteenth century, the major source for plant
illustrations in popular herbal guides was not nature but previous illus-
trations. Not untl the publication of Otto Brunfels’s Herbarium vivae
eicones IN 1§30—32, with woodcuts by Hans Weidnitz, did illustrators
begin working directly from nature. Many of these herbals were hand-
painted and it is known that Christophe Plantin of Antwerp
employed women illuminators to color the botanical books he pro-
duced. The herbals formed the basis of the development of systematic
knowledge of flowering plants which took place in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Side by side with the study medicinal herbs was
knowledge through folk medicine largely handed down by country
women. In his herbal Brunfels alluded to “highly expert old women.”
Slightly later, Euricius Cordus remarked that he had learned from “the
lowliest women and husbandmen.” The rapid growth of the natural
sciences, stimulated by botanical and zoological knowledge brought
back by European voyagers and explorers, transformed the sciences of
botany and zoology. The microscope, invented in Holland in the late
sixteenth century, was applied to the study of lants and animals, and
systems of plant classification developed. The emergence o
ture as a leisure-time activity for the wealthy led to the development
of the flower book, the transition from the medicinal and practical
model of the herbals to the appreciatt r beauty alone that encour-
aged the practise of Hower painting.
Before 1560, most garden plants were European in origin; during
the seventeenth century colonization and overseas exploration led
to the importation of vast numbers of new species. According to
Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738), “practically no captain, whether of
a merchant ship or of a man-of-war, left our harbours without spe-
cial instructions to collect everywhere seeds, roots, cuttings and
shrubs and bring them back to Holland.” The century’s passionate
interest in the cultivation and illustration of flowers proceeded hand-
in-hand with a belief that all the world could be brought into the
home fo
The laying out of gardens extended the idea of the kunstkamer (col-
‘lections of rare objects and curiosities including shells, minerals, and
fossils). Pattern books of floral designs, like Pierre Vallet’s Le jardin du
roy tres chrestien Henry IV (1608), dedicated to Marie de Medici who
later commissioned some expensive flower pieces, served as sources
for embroidery designs. Crispijn van de Passe’s Hortus floridus, pub-
lished in Utrecht in 1614, and an immensely popular work, contained
over two hundred plates in which the naturalism of the floral
130
presentation was heightened by the addition of insects and butterflies
to the plant stalks. Jacques de Gheyn was a pioneer among painters of
flowers and a man who engraved, limned, and painted on glass as well
as oils. During the century, many women also practiced the ancillary
arts ofbotanical illustration or flower painting for textile and porcelain
manufacturers, but only two women, Maria van Oosterwyck and
Rachel Ruysch (see below), appear to have had a steady and presti-
cious clientele for their flower paintings.
Between 1590 and 1650, Utrecht and Antwerp emerged as the
major centers of flower painting in oils, perhaps influenced by
Antwerp’s prominent role in botanical publishing during the second
half of the previous century. The first school of Netherlandish flower
painting developed in Antwerp around Jan “Velvet” Breughel and his
followers. The earliest group of painters of still-lifes and flowers
included Clara Peeters, who was born in Antwerp in 1594 and who
worked there with Hans van Essen and Jan Van der Beeck (called
Torrentius). The term “still-life” did not appear in the Netherlands
until about 1650 and these works were more commonly identified by
type: little "bamguet, “little breakfast; =«flower piece;* etc. Peeters
signed and dated her first known work in 1608. Of the fifty or so
paintings by her hand which have been identified, five represent

58 Clara Peeters Still-life 1611

 Bouquets; the others are descriptive paintings featuring glasswares,
precious vases, fruits and desserts, breads, fish, shells, and prawns, some-
times with flowers added. Harris and Nochlin have identified her
work as earlier than almost all known dated examples of Flemish still-
life painting of the type she made, commonly known as the “breakfast
piece” because of its assembly offruits and breads. Although she some-
times included flowers in her still-life compositions, pure flower
paintings by her are rare and their arrangements are simple and natur-
al in comparison with Breughel’s and Beert’s more formal and profuse
compositions.
Peeters’s major contribution was in the formation of the banquet
and breakfast piece; four paintings dating from 1611 include elaborate
wnoO displays of flowers, chestnuts, bread rolls, butter, and pretzels piled into
pewter and delft dishes and presented against austere, almost black
backgrounds. In one of them, multiple reflections of the artist’s face
and a window are just discernible in the bosses of an elaborately
worked pewter pitcher. These paintings are among the most note-
worthy of seventeenth-century still-life, a fact made all the more
remarkable by the youth of the artist. Peeters’s meticulous delineation
of form and the imposing symmetry of her paintings, along with her
virtuoso handling of reflective surfaces must have encouraged the
spread of still-life painting later in the century, but little documentary
material about her remarkable career or her patrons has yet surfaced.
The growing interest in botanical illustration, the emergence of the
Dutch as Europe’s leading horticulturalists in the seventeenth century,
and the development of flower painting as an independent category
all contributed to the passion for floral illustration of all kinds. Flowers
were often included in vanitas and other kinds of moralizing represen-
tation as signs of the fleeting nature of life. Their emblematic and sym-
bolic associations followed them into still-life and flower painting.
During the 1630s the tulip, first brought from Turkey to England
during the reign of Elizabeth I, came under intense speculation.
Between 1634 and 1637 fortunes were won and lost and “tulipoma-
nia’ dominated economic news with the most famous blooms selling
for thousands of times more than any flower painting; by 1637 the
craze had burned out. Although Judith Leyster is best known today for
her genre scenes, she was a skilled watercolorist who made botanical
illustrations that included prized striped tulips like the Yellow-Red of
Leiden for “Tulip Books,” sales catalogues commissioned by bulb
dealers to enable them to display their wares to customers when the
flowers were not in season.
[32
 sant.
SS
Note
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ane
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s9 Judith Leyster Yellow-Red of Leiden 60 Illustration from Jan Commelin

5635 Horti Medici Amstelodamensis Rariorum
Plantarum Descriptio et Icones 1697-1701

Commissions such as these were profitable for artists like Leyster,

although the majority of these books were copies of originals made b
unskilled artists. Women did, however, participate in the production of
engravings for botanical works and a particularly fine and detailed
example of the work of the many women active in illustrations for
books can be seen in Jan Commelin’s Horti Medici Amstelodamensis
Rariorum Plantarum Descriptio et Icones (1697-1701). The original paint-
ings made for the illustration of this and other books by the two
Commelins are mainly the work of Johan and Maria Moninckx.
The Dutch colonies in the East and West Indies, South America,
India, and the Cape acted as a further stimulus to botanical and zoo-
logical illustration. Seven volumes of natural history drawings made in
Brazil by Albert van der Eckhout, Zacharias Wagner and other artists
are now in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Other drawings from the
Dutch East Indies are in Leiden. However, the most remarkable of
these illustrations were by Maria Sybilla Merian who transformed the
field of scientific illustration. Primarily an entomologist, Merian has

133
Maria Merian African Martagon 1680 62 Rachel Ruysch Flowers in a Vase after 1700

also been called one of the finest botanical artists of the period follow-
ing the death of Nicholas Robert in 1680.
Born in Germany of a Swiss father and a Dutch mother, Merian’s
art, nevertheless, derived almost entirely from the great flower painters
of seventeenth-century Holland. Her father was an engraver of some
note who contributed the illustrations to the florilegium of Johann
Theodor de Bry. Shortly after his death, when Merian was an infant,
her mother married the Dutch flower painter Jacob Marrell. Merian
showed an early interest in insect life and as a youth began to work
with Abraham Mignon. In 1664 she became a pupil of Johann
Andreas Graff, and subsequently his wife. In 1675, her first publica-
tion, volume one of a three-part catalogue of flower engravings, titled
Florum fasciculi tres, was issued in Nuremburg. The second volume fol-
lowed in 1677, and both were reissued with a third in 1680. Together
they were known as the Neues Blumen Buch (New Flower Book), a
work which, although less well-known than her work on insects, con-
tains delightful, hand-painted engravings of garden flowers, colored
with great delicacy. The plates in several cases depend closely on her

134
 LiL thoar bite

63 Maria Merian Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium 1705S

 father’s edition of de Bry’s Florilegium of 1641 and on Robert's Variae ac
multiformes florum species expressae .. ., published in Rome in 166s.
Merian was also a skilled needlewoman and the book was intended to
provide models for embroidery patterns, and perhaps also for paintings
on silk and linen.
In 1679 Merian published the first of three volumes on European
insects illustrated with her own engravings, Der Raupen wunderbare
Verwandelung und sonderbare Blumennahrung (The Wonderful Trans-
formation of Caterpillars and Their Singular Plant Nourishment), and
the work was enthusiastically received by the scientific community.
“From my youth I have been interested in insects,” she remarked,
“first I started with the silkworms in my native Frankfurt-am-Main.
After that ...I started to collect all the caterpillars | could find to
observe their changes ...and painted them very carefully on parch-
ment.” The insects are shown 1n various stages of development, placed
among the flowers and leaves with which they are associated. The
second and third volumes appeared in 1683 and 1717 and together the
works comprise a catalogue of 186 European moths, butterflies, and
other insects based on her own research and drawings. The fact that
the insects were observed directly, rather than drawn from preserved
specimens in collectors’ cabinets, revolutionized the sciences of
zoology and botany and helped lay the foundations for the
classification of plant and animal species made by Charles Linnaeus
later in the eighteenth century.
Merian left her husband in 1685 and converted to Labadism, a
religious sect founded by the French ex-Jesuit, Jean de Labadie
(who later married Anna Maria Schurman). The Labadists did not
believe in formal marriage or worldly goods, rejected infant baptism, -
denied the presence of Christ in the Eucharist; they also established
missions, including one in the Dutch colony of Surinam. Spending
the winter with her two daughters in the Labadist community in the
Dutch province of Friesland, Merian had access to a fine collection of
tropical insects brought back from Surinam. Goethe relates that,
determined to rival the exploits of the French naturalist Charles
Plumier, and sponsored by the Dutch government, she set sail for
South America in 1698 with her daughter, Dorothea. They spent
nearly two years collecting and painting the insects and flowers there;
63 the result was the magnificent Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium
which appeared in 1705 and was translated into several languages.
Merian did not undertake the engravings, as she had for her earlier
works, and the sixty large plates were engraved by three Dutch artists
136
who used the superb watercolor studies she had made. Although
Merian’s work continues to be of interest to art historians as well
as naturalists, its impetus was always scientific inquiry. The book’s
finest plates are among the most beautiful scientific illustrations of
the period.
The latter half of the seventeenth century also witnessed the second
major period of flower painting. Jan Davidsz de Heem, Maria van
Oosterwyck, Willem van Aelst, and Rachel Ruysch achieved interna-
tional stature as painters of floral pieces. Flower painters rarely if ever
made their paintings directly from nature; instead they relied on draw-
ings, studies, and botanical illustrations. The paintings often include
blossoms with widely differing blooming seasons. Elaborate montages
of colors and textures, they are spiritual responses to the world of
nature, rich collages of blooms in an age when flowers were common-
ly grown in separate beds by species and combined only after they had
been cut and were soon to die.
Maria van Oosterwyck, the daughter of aDutch Reformed minis-
ter and one of a growing number of women painters who were not
the daughters of artists, was sent to study with the prominent flower
painter Jan Davidsz de Heem in Antwerp in 1658. She later worked
at Delft, where she was the only female professional painter of the
century (but does not seem to have been a member of the guild),
Amsterdam, and The Hague. Her earliest dated work, a Vanitas of
1668, expresses a moral on the transience of worldly things and the
vanity of earthly life. Oosterwyck included a great range of objects, all
lovingly painted, including pen and ink as symbols of the professional
life, account book and coins pointing to worldly wealth and posses-
sions, and musical instruments and a glass ofliqueur as signs of world-
ly pleasures soon to pass away. The accompanying flowers, animals, and
insects reinforce the theme of the transience of life and the constant
presence of sorrow and death.
Oosterwyck worked slowly, building up tight, complex composi-
tions with marvellous surfaces. A Still-life with Flowers and Butterflies
(1686) displays a glass of flowers resting on a ledge and containing sev-
eral kinds of roses, iris, and two butterflies, the last perhaps symbols of
life’s transience. Louis XIV’s purchase of one of her flower paintings
was followed by the patronage of other royalty, including Emperor
Leopold, William III of England, and the Elector of Saxony; this
painting, one of her last still-lifes, was either commissioned or pur-
chased by King William and Queen Mary from the artist, who visited
England in the year after it was painted.

137
 Rachel Ruysch was born in 1664 to Frederick Ruysch, a professor
of anatomy and botany in Amsterdam, and Maria Post, the daughter of
an architect. Encouraged in her love of nature by her father’s vast col-
lection of minerals, animal skeletons, and rare snails, she was appren-
ticed at the age of fifteen to the celebrated flower painter, van Aelst,
the originator of the asymmetrical spiralling composition which
became Ruysch’s hallmark. Compositions like Flowers in a Vase balance
a swirl of twisting blossoms along a diagonal axis. The variety of
blooms and colors, and the painter’s subtle touch and impeccable sur-
SF face treatment distinguish her work. In 1701, Ruysch and her hus-
band, the portrait painter Juriaen Pool, became members of the
painters’ guild in The Hague. Between 1708 and 1713, she was court
painter in Dusseldorf, but on the death of her patron, the Elector
Palatine Johann Wilhelm, she returned to Amsterdam where she
worked until her death in 1750 at the age of eighty-six.
Ruysch’s status and undeniable achievement encouraged many
other Dutch women to become painters. Among those who went as
painters to the courts of Germany in the eighteenth century were
Katherina Treu (c. 1743-1811), Gertrued Metz (1746—after 1793), and
Maria Helena Byss (1670-1726). Other women, like Catherina Backer
(1689-1766), famous in her time as a painter offlower and fruit pieces,
and Margaretha Haverman,a Dutch flower painter who enjoyed great
success in Paris and who was unanimously elected to the Académie
Royale in 1722, were instrumental in the spread of flower painting
among women and a testament to the expanding roles for women in
seventeenth-century Holland.

138
 GHMAPTER FIVE

Amateurs and Academics: A New Ideology of

Femininity in France and England

If we are to believe the Goncourt brothers’ account of life in

eighteenth-century France, written a century later, “woman was the
governing principle, the directing reason and the commanding voice
of the eighteenth century.’ Never before in Western Europe had so
many women achieved public prominence in the arts and intellectual
life of a restricted aristocratic culture. Never had a culture been so
immersed in the pursuit of qualities later derided as “feminine,”
namely artifice, sensation, and pleasure. It is not surprising that the for-
tunes of the best-known women artists of the century, among them
Rosalba Carriera, Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Adélatde Labille-
Guiard, and Angelica Kauffmann, are inextricably bound up in the
changing ideologies of representation and sexual difference that
accompany the shift from a courtly aristocratic culture to that of pros-
perous middle-class capitalist society.
The emergence of professional women painters of the stature of
Kauffmann in England, and Vigée-Lebrun, Labille-Guiard, and Anna
Vallayer-Coster in France during the second half of the century 1s
astonishing given the increasingly rigid construction of sexual differ-
ence that circumscribed women’s access to public activity. Neither
their position as exceptions nor later dismissals of them as pandering
to the most insipid demands of their age for sentimental paintings
account for their phenomenal success or their official status as court
painters. They were able to negotiate between the taste of their aristo-
cratic clients and the influence of Enlightenment ideas about woman’s
“natural” place in the bourgeois social order, and this fact deserves
much closer attention than it has received.
As long as the woman artist presented a self-image emphasizing
beauty, gracefulness, and modesty, and as long as her paintings
appeared to confirm this construction, she could, albeit with difficulty,
negotiate a role for herselfin the world of public art. In this chapter,
I will show, firstly, that the reasons for the success of female
Academicians in their own day became the cause of their dismissal by
subsequent generations of art historians; secondly, that the ability of

P39
these artists to absorb into their persons the qualities which critics
sought in representations of women became the most pervasive stan-
dard against which to judge their work; and finally, that women artists,
professionals and amateurs, played a not insignificant role in construct-
ing, manipulating, and reproducing new ideologies of femininity 1n
representation.
In the course of the eighteenth century, the court art of French
monarchs from Louis XIV, the “Sun King,’ to Louis XVI was sup-
planted. This was at first due to the artistic tastes of awealthy urban
elite identified with the interests of the king, but also determined to
use the visual arts to legitimize their own aristocratic pretensions and
subsequently, consolidated by the republican demands of a growing,
progressive middle class. In his Painters and Public Life, Thomas Crow
has shown that the revolutionary political discourse that emerged in
France during the second half of the century originated in the bour-
geois public sphere of the city. Oriented around language and speech,
it evolved out of acomplex dialogue with the discourse of an earlier,
absolutist public sphere—that of the court of Louis XIV at Versailles
with its resplendent visual imagery centered on the bodily image of
the father/king.
During the rule of Louis XIV (1643-1715), coins of the realm and
engravings carried representations of the king as pater familias. Murals
at Versailles, painted during his reign, incorporate symbolic images of
his ministers as naked children, putti in extravagant painted scenarios
confirming the divine right of French kings. The Académie Royale de
Peinture et de Sculpture, founded in 1648 under royal auspices as a
way of avoiding guild control over the visual arts, stressed the role of
the academicians as learned theorists rather than craftsmen or amateur
practitioners. Assuming control ofartistic education, it controled style.
Establishing a hierarchy of genres with history painting at the top—
followed by portraiture, genre, still-life, and landscape—it determined
prestige. At the core of the Academy program was the course of
instruction in life drawing. Closed to women, it provided the training
for the multifigured historical and mythological paintings so impor-
tant in reinforcing and reproducing the power of the court.
Vast processions and theatrical court spectacles in Louis XIV’s time
reproduced an exclusively masculine dynamic of power in which
the elevation of the king to divine status constructed a hierarchy
under which all his subjects, male and female, were subordinated.
“Domesticated” and “unmanned” were the charges later leveled by
Enlightenment authors who came to despise the “effeminized” status
140
64 Engraving with
Louis XIV as pater familias,
late seventeenth century

of non-royal men under the absolutism of the ancien régime. In this

hierarchical social structure, class was a more powerful determinant of
status than gender; upper-class women were more closely identified
with men of their class than with women of the lower classes and
paintings emphasize and reinforce these class distinctions.
When the Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757), invited by
the financier and art collector Pierre Crozat, arrived in Paris in 1720—
with her mother, sister, and brother-in-law, the painter Gian Antonio
Pellegrini (1675-1741)—Louis XIV had been dead for five years.
Under his successor, the boy king Louis XV (1715-74), the court was
removed to Paris, where it remained for seven years. It was the artists of
the Crozat circle (which briefly included Carriera as well as Antoine
Watteau) who provided the new ruler with a visual imagery that com-
pleted the transition from the previous century’s iconography of power
to an aristocratic decorative style with international appeal.
The return of a circle of wealthy aristocrats from Versailles to Paris
led to a great demand for paintings to decorate elegant townhouses.
Instead of an art revolving exclusively around the court, the decorative
style later known as Rococo also incorporated the interests of the
urban nobility, as well as important commercial groups. The sumpt-
uous, pleasure-loving art which resulted—with its curvilinear surface
patterns, lavish gilding, dainty decorations of flowers and garlands,
elaborate costumes, and stylized manners—gave visual form to feeling
141
and sensation. Although the court returned to Versailles in 1722, Paris
remained a major artistic center. Large commissions resulted in hand-
some incomes for favored painters. The Rococo style belonged to a
world in which birth determined social status, adultery was accepted
as a necessary antidote to loveless, arranged marriages, and servants
and wet-nurses relieved upper-class women of many of the burdens of
keeping house and nursing infants.
Carriera stayed in Paris for only one year, as part of an international
group of artists drawn to the city by wealthy patrons like Crozat. Yet
in that short me her work contributed to form) e new, aristo-
cratic taste which adapted the conventions of an earlier court art to a
world in which visual display was no longer exclusively in the service_
of monarchical need. No woman painter of the century enjoyed as —
great a success, nor had as much influence on the art of her contem-
poraries, as Carriera. She was the first artist of the century to explore
fully the possibilities of pastel as a medium uniquely suited to the early
eighteenth-century search for an art of surface elegance and sensation.
She and Pellegrini (who had been commissioned to paint a huge alle-
gorical ceiling in the Banque de France) played a key role in popular-
izing the Rococo manner in France and later England, where George
III was a major collector of her work.
The daughter of aminor Venetian public official and a lacemaker,
for whose lace she drew the patterns as a child, Carriera began her
artistic career decorating snuff boxes and painting miniature portraits
on ivory. Exactly how she came to pastels we do not know. It appears
that by the early 1700s a friend of the Carriera family was sending the
chalk sticks to her from Rome. Changes in the technology of binding
colored chalks into sticks, leading to the development of a much
wider range of prepared colors, expanded the availability and useful-
ness of this medium, but it seems to have been Carriera who intro-
duced a taste for the soft fabricated chalks into France. The dry chalk
pigments were similar to those used in women’s make-up; and theater,
masquerade, make-up, and pastel portraiture formulated an aesthetic
of artifice in early eighteenth-century France, at whose center was a
woman artist: all these factors indicate important directions for future
research.
Carriera’s loose, painterly technique with its subtle surface tonali-
ties and dancing lights revolutionized the medium of pastel. Dragging
the side of a piece of white chalk across an under drawing in darker
tones, she was able to capture the shimmering textures of lace and
satin, and highlight facial features and soft cascades of powdered hair.
142
The first of her many commissions in Paris was to paint the ten-year-
old monarch, Louis XV. He cannot have been an easy subject for she
confided to her diary after one sitting that, “his gun fell over, his parrot
died, and his little dog fell ill”’ Despite the flattering depiction of the
young monarch, the artist’s careful posing of her sitter highlights his
regal bearing and inaccessibility. Only in her own self-portraits is the
superficial flattery demanded by her aristocratic clientele abandoned
in favor ofa probing realism.
The triumphant year in Paris included several meetings with
Antoine Watteau, the most prominent early eighteenth-century
French painter. Watteau, responsible for the pictorial development of
the féte galante, with its sources in the imagery of the theatrical comme-
dia dell’arte and its complete freedom of subject-matter, also struck a
new balance in his work between nature and artifice. He demonstrat-
ed his enthusiasm for Carriera’s work by asking for one of her works
in exchange for one ofhis and made at least one drawing ofher while
she was 1n Paris. Crozat, in turn, commissioned a portrait of Watteau 65
from her in 1721. Far more psychologically intense than her depiction
of Louis XV and members of the French and Austrian courts, the
pastel’s strong highlights and deep shadow illuminate his complex
personality.
Carriera’s successes in France culminated in her unanimous elec-
tion. to the Académie Royale in October 1720. By 1682 seven women,
most of them miniaturists or flower painters, had been admitted. They
included Sophie Cheéron, the daughter of the miuniaturist Henri
Chéron and a painter, enamellist, engraver, poet and translator of the
Psalms, who was unanimously elected in 1672 with a reception piece
judged “powerfully original, exceeding even the ordinary proficiency
of her sex.” With that accolade, the doors banged shut, the Académie
revised its original policy and ceased admitting women. Carriera’s
admission coincided with a brief period when the freedom, colorful-
ness and charm of the Rococo manner dominated the arts. Only
when allure took precedence over instruction did artists in France
experience some freedom from academic learning. Watteau himself
benefited from the short time of liberality in the arts at the end of
Louis XIV’s reign; both he and Carriera, who had the additional
advantage of being a foreigner, were able to circumvent earlier theo-
retical and academic requirements.
At the time of Carriera’s year in Paris, learned women were
becoming increasingly conspicuous 1n the public life of the new urban
intelligentsia. It was as leaders of salons, a social institution begun in

143
 the seventeenth century, that a few women were able to satisfy their
public ambitions and become purveyors of culture; the Salons of Julie
de Lespinasse, Germaine Necker de Stael, Madame du Deffand,
Madame de La Fayette, Madame de Sevigné, Madame du Chatelet,
and others became famous as sites of artistic, philosophical and intel-
lectual discourse. The salons flourished during a period of delicate
equilibrium between the competing claims of public and private life;
the famous saloniéres of the period succeeded in establishing them-
selves in an intermediary arena between the private sphere of bour-
geois family life and the official public sphere of the court. In this
unique social space, in gatherings attended primarily by men, certain
women spoke with great authority in support of the new Enlighten-
ment literature, science, and philosophy. For artists like Carriera and,
later in the century, Vigeée-Lebrun, the salons provided a context in
which class distinctions were somewhat relaxed and artists from
middle-class backgrounds (Vigée-Lebrun’s father was a minor painter,
her mother a hairdresser) could meet upper-class patrons on more
or less equal footing.
66 Marie Loir’s Portrait of Gabrielle-Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil,
Marquise du Chdtelet (1745-49) 1s one of a number of paintings by
women artists of saloniéres and other women intellectuals, evidence of
a tradition in which women often represented women. Loir, a mem-
ber of an artistic family active in Paris as silversmiths since the seven-
teenth century, was a pupil of Jean Francois de Troy. In 1762, she was
elected to the Académie of Marseilles, one of anumber of provincial
academies established to encourage regional artists. Unlike the
Académie Royale in Paris, they admitted amateurs of both sexes and
did not exclude women from prizes or exhibitions. Loir’s painting
depicts the Marquise du Chatelet, a prodigy who read Locke in the
original at seventeen, who became a respected mathematician, physi-
cist and philosopher, and a famous hostess. Her lovers included two
of the most prominent intellectuals of the day—vVoltaire and Pierre-
Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, essayist, scientist, and mathematician.
Although perhaps based on Jean Marc Nattier’s portrait of the
Marquise exhibited in the Salon of 1745, Loir’s composition is more
straightforward and less dramatically idealized than many contempo-
rary portraits. The marquise is shown against a wall of books. Her dark
eyes are bright with intelligence and the iconography of the painting
makes reference to her scientific and mathematical interests. She holds
a pair of dividers and a carnation, symbol oflove.
This work belongs to a time when the mannerisms, artifices, and

144
intellectual focus of salon society were repeated in the stylistic innova-
tions of the official art of the period. The decade in which Loir pro-
duced her portrait also saw Boucher decorating a love nest for the
wealthy Madame de Pompadour. Many of Boucher’s mythological
and pastoral scenes of the 1740s were commissioned by this woman,
whose role in shaping the official art of her time deserves reexamina-
tion. Art historians have tended either to underrate her, perhaps
because the “areyotemeaeperiod—architecturemimteriors, tapestries,
porcelains, and painted decorations—is an art of collaboration rather
than individual achievement, and blurs the distinctions between
“fine” and “minor” arts, or they have over-attributed the development
of a “feminine” sensibility in the arts to her influence. In fact, the
“feminizing” language of artistic production in early eighteenth-
century France predates her by years and must be explored in relation
to the construction of gender as part of the ideology of monarchical
power at the end of Louis XIV’s time. The actual role of women in the
formation of this aesthetic is still buried under layers of cultural preju-
dice and art historical bias.
Boucher’s paintings are exemplary of the new aristocratic art which
emphasized ornament, tactile sensation and mutual pleasure rather
than ideologies of power defined in terms of gender. They belong to
the intimate world of the boudoir; the palette is light, the flesh tints
pearly. While his female nudes correspond to the voluptuous conven-
tions of the Rubenesque tradition, his male figures are notably lan-
guid, attentive, and sensual, passive inhabitants of an aristocratic
Arcadia whose resources had, in fact, been sucked dry by oppressive
taxation under Louis XIV.
By the middle of the century, the brief power of the saloniéres was
being challenged by intellectuals. The public response to the dissolute
power of the aristocracy, and the women who were associated with it,
had far-reaching implications. Although primarily attended by men,
the salons signified “femininity”; first, because of the influence wield-
e the women who ran ae and, second, because of their iden-
Saco ig atc cect eam RNREcentury-ol
y-old
opposition in French painting between classicism and preciosity. The
eminine power now attributed to the saloniéres was also linked to
earlier, and widely distrusted, court traditions dominated by the image
of the father/king. Preciosity, identified with the Rococo style and the
decadence of the court, was redefined by Enlightenment thinkers as a
feminine counterpart to a new, masculine ideal of honnéteté, or virtue.
It is not surprising that writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who gave

145
 65 (left) Rosalba Carriera
Antoine Watteau 1721

66 (opposite) Marie Loir

Portrait of Gabrielle-Emilie
le Tonnelier de Breteuil,
Marquise du Chatelet
1745-49

clearest expression to middle-class values at mid-century, specifically

contested this sphere of female influence.
Rousseau viewed the saloniére as a threat to the “natural” domi-
nance of men, the salon as a “prison” in which men were subjected to
the rule of women. His writings, many of them aimed at formulating a
“natural” sphere of influence for women, are shaped by his rejection
of a public role for women as speakers, using and in control of lan-
cuage. The fiction of a “natural language” which Rousseau promotes
in his novel Emile (1762) rests on a strong connection between natural
language and politics by caricaturing female citizenship as a monstrous
aberration. It is the saloniére’s crime to usurp authority, to speak the
language of authority, of citizenship, instead of the “natural” language
of family duty. “From the lofty elevation of her genius,” Rousseau
146
notes, “she despises all the duties of awoman and always begins to play
the man... |She|ibas lett her natural state
Rousseau’s attack on the theater in his Lettre a d’Alembert (1759)
included the remark that when the mistress of the house goes wander-
ing in public, “her home 1s like a lifeless body which 1s soon corrupt-
ed.” Rousseau’s identification of the female body with the home 1s apt
in an age of rapidly changing class structure. The body is a primary
site of class conflict, manifested in customs, styles, and manners. While
the hierarchical structures of the monarchy and aristocracy favored
superior/inferior relationships, as well as complementary relationships
among men arid women of the same social class, the new bourgeois
ideology depended for its success on the location ofaffection and sex-
uality in the family. Containing the female body within the private

147
domestic sphere, as Rousseau advocates, served as a means of control-
ing female sexuality in an age obsessed with establishing paternity
because of the high illegitimacy rate. And it freed men to pursue
occupations outside the home.
The ideal of femininity produced through activities like needle-
work and drawing contributed directly to the consolidation of a bour-
geois identity in which women had the leisure to cultivate artistic
“accomplishments.” Love of needlework was, Rousseau asserts 1n
Emile, entirely “natural” to women; “Dressmaking, embroidery, lace
making come by themselves. Tapestry making is less to the young
woman’s liking because furniture is too distant from their persons. . . .
This spontaneous development extends easily to drawing, because the
latter art is not difticult—simply a matter of taste; but at no cost would
I want them to learn landscape, even less the human figure.” Although
the actual circumstances of middle-class women’s lives varied widely,
the ideology of femininity which Rousseau and others rationalized as
“natural” to women was a unifying force in making a class identity.
The artistic activities of growing numbers of women amateurs work-
ing in media like needlework, pastel, and watercolor, and executing
highly detailed works on a small scale, confirmed Enlightenment
views that women have an intellect different from and inferior to that
of men, that they lack the capacity for abstract reasoning and creativi-
ty, but are better suited for detail work. Such activities, however,
should not be understood as having been exclusively imposed
on women, for many women found both pleasure and fulfilment in
these arts. Professional women painters also helped to construct such a
femininity.
Catherine Read’s Lady Anne Lee Embroidering (1764), Angelica
Kauftmann’s Grecian Lady at Work (1773), Francoise Duparc’s Woman
Knitting, and Marguerite Gérard’s Young Woman Embroidering (1780s)
are four among many paintings executed by women artists who
worked professionally during the second half of the century which
depict women engaged in the “amateur” traditions. They cannot be
read as simple reflections of existing reality, however, for Fanny
Burney relates that Read, who produced a number of images of
women sewing, was incapable of altering a dress. Comparing
Kauffmann’s Grecian Lady at Work and a drawing of the artist herself
with an embroidery hoop reveals sharp distinctions between the
image of the embroiderer used to impose a contemporary ideal of
femininity on the classical past, and the awkward gestures that often
accompany needlework in reality.
148
67 (above) Catherine Read
Lady Anne Lee Embroidering 1764

68 (right) Francoise Duparc

Woman Knitting late eighteenth century
 In England, as in France, painters had to negotiate between aristo
cratic and middle-class taste, and between amateur and professional
classifications. Although there was a strong amateur tradition for both
sexes, Women continually found their artistic activities equated with
their femininity. For women aspiring to history painting and Academy
membership, “unnatural” ambition had to be mediated by strict con
formity to the social ideology of femininity.
English painting in the second quarter of the eighteenth century
reveals both the influence of France and the close relationship
between English and French intellectuals. Boarding schools, stafted by
impoverished gentlewomen, taught drawing and watercolor to the
daughters of the upper and middle classes. The publication of drawing
manuals, the availability of prints for study, the existence of clean,
ready-to-use watercolors, and the taste for picturesque scenery, all
contributed to the growing numbers of middle- and upper-class
women in England taking up drawing as a fashionable activity.

» Mary Delaney, flower collage, 1774-88 70 Anne Seymour Damer The Countes
of Derby c. 1789
 My)
silYep Py
y

Y L

SIA
Sp

71. The Damerian Apollo 1789

Mary Delaney (1700-88) was seventy years old when she began to
produce collages of cut paper flowers mounted on sheets of paper col-
ored black with India ink. The collages, botanically accurate and life-
size, drew high praise from botanists and from artists; Joshua Reynolds
claimed never to have seen such “perfection and outline, delicacy of
cutting, accuracy of shading and perspective, harmony and brilliance
of colours.’ Hugh Walpole wrote rapturously of his cousin Anne
Seymour Damer (1748-1828), the only woman sculptor of note in
England before the twentieth century; “Mrs. Damer’s busts from life
are not inferior to the antique. Her shock dog, large as life and only
not alive, rivals the marble one of Bernini in the Royal Collections.”
But Damer, a wealthy upper-class woman, was considered an eccen-
tric by her friends and was lampooned in the public press for her
effrontery in aspiring to carve academic nude figures. In a satiric
engraving published in 1789 she is shown wearing gloves as she chisels
away at the nude backside of a standing Apollo.
Women’s artistic endeavors were more readily accepted when
confined to “feminine” media and executed in their own homes, even

ISI
if the magnitude of their productions challenged what was considered
appropriate as feminine “accomplishment.” A diary entry by Suir
Walter Calverly in 1716 noted that, “My wife finished the sewed work
in the drawing room, it having been three and a half years in the
doing. The greatest part has been done with her own hands. It consists
of ten panels.’ Among Lady (Julia) Calverly’s “sewed work” recorded
in contemporary account books was a six-leaf screen stitched with
scenes from Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics (1727). Each of the leaves is §
feet 9 inches high, and 20% inches wide, but this prodigious effort
remains outside the categories on which all but feminist art historians
have focused their attention.
Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807), on the other hand, was a profes-
sional woman in the age of the amateur, and the first woman painter

72 (left) Lady Calverly,

embroidered screen, 1727

73 (opposite) Angelica Kauffmann

Zeuxis Selecting Models for His Picture
of Helen of Troy c. 1764
to challenge the masculine monopoly over history painting exercised
by the Academicians. The daughter of a minor Swiss ecclesiastical
painter, Kauffmann spent her youth traveling with her father. In Italy
in the 1760s, she copied the paintings of Correggio in Parma, the
Carracci in Bologna, and numerous Renaissance works in the galleries
of the Uffizi in Florence. Her time there coincided with the full
flowering of the English passion for work in the Grand Manner, a
heady mix of classicizing and Neoclassical tendencies introduced the
previous decade by English artists and designers such as Robert Adam,
Richard Wilson, and Joshua Reynolds, whose years of study in Rome
eventually revolutionized British taste.
In Italy, Kauffmann met the American painter Benjamin West and
became part of a group of English painters that included Gavin
Hamilton and Nathaniel Dance. Her meeting with Winckelmann in
Rome in 1763 proved decisive. She began to derive a Neoclassical
manner from his ideal of noble restraint, basing her style on the fres-
coes at Herculaneum and the romantic classicism of the German
painter Raphael Mengs. Her Zeuxis Selecting Models for His Picture of

[$3
74 Angelica Kauffmann, design in the ceiling ofthe central hall of the Royal
Academy, London, 1778

Helen ofTroy, based on a Roman copy of a Greek Venus Kallipygos in

the Museo Nazionale in Naples, which she probably copied during
her stay there in 1764, suggests both an early awareness of what were
then the most popular antique themes among English painters and a
keen attentiveness to prevailing societal constructions of women and
femininity.
Kauffmann’s determination to execute large-scale historical works,
despite no access to training from the nude model on which the con-
ventions of history painting were based, is a mark of her ambition. As
early as 1752, the Abbé Grant had lamented the obstacles that lay

154
between another woman artist and history painting. “At the rate she
goes on,” he noted of Catherine Read, the pastel artist sometimes
called the “English Rosalba,’ who had settled in Rome to complete
her artistic training in 1751, “I am truly hopeful she’ll equal if not
excel the most celebrated of her profession in Great Britain ... were it
not for the restrictions her sex obliges her to be under, I dare safely say
she would shine wonderfully in history painting too, but as it is impos-
sible for her to attend public academies or even design and draw from
nature, she is determined to confine herselfto portraits.”
Kauffmann arrived in London in 1765 or 1766. She met Reynolds
shortly thereafter; within a year she had earned enough money paint-
ing portraits of aristocratic men and women to buy a house. Her suc-
cess enabled her to begin the historical works for which her years in
Rome had prepared her and which at the time represented the only
route to consideration as a serious artist in England. The first opportu-
nity to exhibit them came in 1768 on the occasion of a visit from
King Christian VII of Denmark. She sent a Venus Appearing to Aeneas,
Penelope With the Bow of Ulysses, and Hector Taking Leave ofAndromache.
The display of these paintings the following year at the Royal
Academy exhibition, along with Benjamin West’s Farewell of Regulus
and Venus and Venus Mourning the Death of Adonis, identified
Kauffmann and West as the initiators of the Neoclassical style in
England. James Northcote, in a biography of Reynolds, commends her
history paintings as second only to two canvases submitted by West.
Subsequent exhibitions confirmed the originality of her work with its
transparent brushwork and rich color, its elegant restatement of its
classical sources, and its innovative use of subjects drawn from
medieval English history as well as from the antique. The fact that
Reynolds persuaded John Parker of Saltram, later Lord Morley, to pur-
chase all of Kauffmann’s works in addition to his thirteen portraits
probably enabled her to persist as a history painter.
Kauftmann’s academic success can be attributed to her association
with the foremost history painters of her day, and to the fact that she
arrived in London, after the study in Italy expected of all serious
painters in oils, at a propitious moment. The reasons for her enormous
popular and professional following are more complex. By the 1770s,
her works, widely known through engravings by William Ryland, had
not only inspired other painters but had also reached a much broader
audience, often through designs for the decorative arts, such as a china
service with classical motifs, based on her paintings. She is associated
with Robert Adam, the most fashionable Neoclassical architect of the

156
 76 Vase (after Angelica Kauffmann) c. 1820

time. She provided allegorical figures of Composition, Invention,

Design, and Coloring for the ceiling of the Academy in its new loca- 74
tion at Somerset House (later removed to the entrance hall of
Burlington House) and throughout the 1780s, when she traveled
abroad with her second husband, the painter Zucchi, she continued to
send major historical canvases back to London.
The 1968 exhibition, “Angelica Kauffmann and Her Contempor-
aries,’ offered a major revaluation of Kauffmann’s relationship to other
history painters and her profound influence on her contemporaries.
Twentieth-century art historians have often disregarded the plurality
of attitudes to classical art which Robert Rosenblum identifies as cen-
tral to Neoclassicism. Dismissing the romantic and decorative aspects
of the movement, they have favored the severe, heroic classicism most
fully expressed in David’s work at the end of the century and which
profoundly influenced the development of nineteenth-century paint-
ing. Kauffmann has been dismissed for her inability to “achieve much

1$7
nna Vallayer-Coster
ill-life 17
Roman gravity” and the works of her contemporaries praised for
being “‘fill-blooded” in comparison. Kauffmann’s relative lack of train-
ing in drawing, over which she had little control, has been used to
prove the inferiority of her work to that of her male contemporaries,
while her role in the development of an aesthetic of “sentiment” has
been largely ignored. The romanticizing of Kauffmann that spread her
legend to a general population through engravings also no doubt
encouraged later writers to dismiss her as charming but inconsequen-
tial, but, ironically, it was her public status and historical commissions
that were the focus of eighteenth-century attacks.
Much of the satire directed against women artists at the time coin-
cided with their efforts to enter the field of history painting and Peter
Pindar’s pointed commentary, in his “Odes to the Royal Acade-
micians,’ singled out Kauffmann’s inability to work from the nude:
Angelica my plaudits gains,
Her art so sweetly canvas stains
Her dames so gracious, give me such delight
But were she married to such gentle males
As figured in her painted tales,
I fear she’d find a stupid Wedding Night
Throughout this doggerel, despite its element of truth, runs a familiar
refrain—the woman artist should confine herself to painting “sweet,”
“eracious,” and “delightful” representations of women, representations
which reinforce descriptions of the artist herself as “charming,”
“oraceful,’ and “modest.” By the time Angelica Kauffmann arrived in
London, commentators were generally agreed that female “nature”
was produced through qualities like joyousness, delicacy, vivacity, and
excitability. These qualities were often opposed to the sense of gravity
which was believed to define masculine pursuits. According to the
ideologies of an expanding middle class, women were assigned to the
domestic sphere and labeled as being inclined toward irrationality.
Confronting such definitions directly risked marginalization. Attacks
such as those on Kauffmann mount in direct proportion to the public
stature of the woman artist and cannot be separated from the charge
that by taking up a public activity woman either unsexes herself or, in
this case, unsexes men.
Similar problems confronted academic women painters in France.
The portraits of Vigeée-Lebrun and Labille-Guiard reveal that both
painters sometimes manipulated their brushstrokes to emphasize gen-
der differences. The brusque, taut surfaces and intense gazes of the
160
male sitters in Vigée-Lebrun’s portraits of the painters Joseph Vernet
(1778) and Hubert Robert (1788) are almost entirely missing from her TS
portraits of women. The focused mental energy of these figures
(Robert’s hair springs from his head as if electrified) are in sharp con-
trast to the many portraits of women with their softened contours
and misted surfaces. Such flaccid surfaces (later criticized as ““weak’’)
cannot continue to be used to prove artistic inferiority given the
differing stylistic conventions evident in the male portraits. That these
distinctions did not escape Lebrun’s critics is evident from a poem
of 1789 which the artist included in her memoirs:
Who more than you has been so unjustly plagued?
A manly brush adorns your paintings
Thou art not praised for thy womanhood
Yet their just envy,
Its unrelenting cries
And the serpents unleashed against you,
Proclaim better than our tongues
How great a man you are.
Like Kauffmann in England, the three women painters working under
royal patronage in France during the 1770s and 1780s—Vigée-Lebrun
(1755-1842), Labille-Guiard (1749-1803), and Vallayer-Coster (1744-
1818)—were never far from critical responses conflating the woman
and the work. All except Labille-Guiard were royalists at heart, but the (ee
paintings they executed in the years before the French Revolution—
ranging from the still-lifes of Vallayer-Coster to the portraits of
Vigee-Lebrun and Labille-Guiard—reveal the awkwardness of nego-
tiating between the competing ideologies of increasingly antithetical
groups: the royal family with its aristocratic followers and expectations
that art should flatter, and the middle class with its growing demand
for paintings of moral virtue. In the years just before the French
Revolution Vigée-Lebrun and, to a lesser extent perhaps, Labille-
Guiard were significant in introducing the imagery of the “natural”
into the iconography of the aristocracy. Vigée-Lebrun’s many por-
traits of herselfand other women dressed in the simple Grecian gowns
of the Neoclassical revival helped to disseminate an image of the
unencumbered “natural” female body and the new image of mother-
hood associated with it.
The Paris in which these women worked was that of Louis XVI
and Marie Antoinette. The prestige of the Académie Royale had been
undermined at mid-century by the founding of the Académie de
161
Saint-Luc in 1751 as a belated attempt to reassert guild control over
the arts. The Académie de Saint-Luc, with irregularly scheduled exhi
bitions and no fixed residence, was nevertheless not insignificant 1n
fostering the careers of women artists. Its broad membership included
frame-makers, gilders, varnishers, women apprentices, and husband
and wife teams, in addition to painters. Both Vigee-Lebrun and
Labille-Guiard began their professional lives in its exhibitions and
Harris reports that about three percent of its members during the
second half of the century were women, most of them portraitists
working in oils, pastels, and miniatures. The resolution limiting mem-
bership in the Académie Royale to four women after the election of
Vallayer-Coster and Marie Giroust-Roslin in 1770 may have been
prompted by this rapidly expanding population of female amateurs
seeking places to exhibit.
During the 1760s, the competing exhibitions sponsored by the
Academie de Saint-Luc drew large groups and vociferous public
response. Increasingly, middle-class audiences demanded an art of
moralizing sentiment rather than the grand public narrative and his-
torical paintings that had characterized earlier Salons. Thomas Crow
has traced the development of the cult of sensibilité in French painting
to Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s (1725-1805) ability to endow the more

78 Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun
Hubert Robert 1788
79
Adelaide Labille-Guiard
Portrait of Marie-Gabrielle
Capet 1798

intimate domestic scenes, popularized by a large market for engravings

of Flemish domestic paintings, with the kind of nobility originally
associated with history painting.
The desire for an art that confirmed contemporary moral values
dominates criticism at mid-century. Diderot’s praise of Greuze and
Chardin during the 1760s for the dignity and virtue of their represen-
tations opposes them to Boucher, of whom he wrote after the Salon of
1765: “I do not know what to say of this man. Degradation of taste, of
color, of composition, of character, follow upon deprivation of morals.
What can there be in the imagination of a man who passes his life
with loose women ofthe lowest classes?”’
Anna Vallayer-Coster, like Chardin before her, was patronized both
by the court and by wealthy bankers and merchants drawn to the
modest themes and carefully crafted surfaces of her still-lifes, painted 7=
if

163
in the realist tradition of Chardin. Her patrons included the Marquis
de Marigny, whose position was close to that of minister of arts under
Louis XV, and her marriage to a wealthy lawyer and member ofparlia-
ment in 1781 ensured her social standing.
Vallayer-Coster was trained by her father, who was the king’s
goldsmith and a tapestry designer before establishing his own studio
in Paris in 1754. She submitted an Allegory of the Visual Arts and an
Allegory of Music to the Académie Royale as reception pieces in
1770. Both works were included in the Salon of 1771 and immedi-
ately drew comparisons to Chardin’s work. But although close in
spirit to Chardin, she was no mere imitator. Her works, models of
simplicity, order, and crisp realism, make only a few concessions to a
middle-class taste increasingly drawn to Chardin’s rustic kitchen
interiors with their copper and enamel wares.
In addition to paintings by Vallayer-Coster, the Salon of the
Académie de Saint-Luc in 1774 also included the work of Labille-
Guiard, Vigée-Lebrun and Anne-Rosalie Boquet. All three women
worked in pastel as well as oil. Labille-Guiard’s Portrait of a Woman in
Miniature, an oval miniature on ivory which was in fact a self-portrait,
was accompanied by a pastel Portrait of a Magistrate and a Sacrifice of
Love. Although she had not yet completed her apprenticeship (and was
at the time a pupil of Quentin de la Tour), one critic noted that these
small works showed great promise. Vigée-Lebrun had submitted as
reception pieces a Portrait of Monsieur Dumesnil, Rector of the
Academie, as well as several pastels and oils, among them three works
representing painting, poetry, and music.
Unlike Labille-Guiard, who studied both with La Tour and
Fran¢ois-Elie Vincent, Vigee-Lebrun acquired almost all her artistic
training independently. Largely self-taught, her early success was a
result of ambition, determination, and hard work. She copied numer-
ous works by old and modern masters in private collections, artists’
studios, and salon exhibitions but, like other women of the day, she

eee ater own family CUMS Get [an Baca

Lebrun—artist, restorer, critic, and dealer—established her as a major
figure in the social life of aristocratic urban Paris.
From the first exhibition of the works of Labille-Guiard and Vigée-
Lebrun, it is possible to observe the development of the often noted
“rivalry” by means of which critics opposed one woman to the other,
a “rivalry” to which we shall return as it served ends other than that of
establishing the relative merits of their work.
164
 The Salon de la Correspondance, founded in 1779, held its first
exhibition in 1782. Labille-Guiard submitted several pastels and drew
the first unsubstantiated charges that her teacher, Vincent, who also
exhibited, had touched up her works. In response to these accusations,
she invited prominent academicians to sit for her, a wise decision for,
in addition to stilling her critics, it also gained her access to politically
powerful male painters of a kind normally reserved for the young men
who had trained under them.
Again in 1782, critics made pointed references to the two women
proposed for Académie Royale membership the following year.
Labille-Guiard’s portraits of 1782, in addition to The Count of
Clermont- Tonnerre, the son of the maréchal of Clermont-Tonnerre and
a precocious military leader, included those of distinguished academic
painters. Her Portrait of the Painter Beaufort was submitted to the
Académie as a reception piece and she was admitted under the cate-
gory “painter of portraits” at the same meeting that admitted Vigée-
Lebrun. The latter, however, determined to be admitted as a history
painter rather than the lower ranked portraitist, had produced five
history paintings within the previous three years. Despite a carefully
calculated reception piece entitled Peace Bringing Abundance, she was
admitted without specific category and only on the intervention of
Marie Antoinette, whose portrait painter she had become in 1778.
Royal intervention was necessary to overcome the Director’s opposi-
tion, Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre, on the grounds that Vigée-Lebrun’s
husband was a picture dealer and election was forbidden to anyone in
direct contact with the art trade.
Vigee-Lebrun and Labille-Guiard’s first appearance together as aca-
demicians took place in the Salon of the Académie Royale in 1783. It
was then that the critics, previously content to vacillate between the
two women, unequivocally took sides. The critic in the Impartialité au
Salon identified them as “rivales de leurs gloires” (glorious rivals).
Bauchaumont was friendly toward Labille-Guiard but clearly pre-
ferred Vigée-Lebrun; the critic of Le Véridique au Salon compared
their talents.
Some sort of rivalry between the two painters was no doubt
inevitable. Vigée-Lebrun, industrious, beautiful, and socially in
demand, was the Queen’s favorite painter. Labille-Guiard, sober and
hard-working, had been appointed official painter to the Mesdames of
France, the King’s aunts, in 1785 and worked diligently for success
which seemed to the public almost thrust on Vigée-Lebrun. No
record remains of Labille-Guiard’s feelings about Vigée-Lebrun; the
165
latter’s memoirs, notable for their self-absorption, dismiss Labille-
Guiard in a few curt passages. The artificial “rivalry” thrust on them
enabled critics to give voice to accusations that reminded audiences
that famous, or infamous, public women such as these had exceeded
their “natural” domain. The price they paid was accusations of sexual
misconduct; Vigée-Lebrun was accused by one critic of having “inti-
mate” knowledge of her sitters. Even more important perhaps is the
fact that the “rivalry” preserved the separation of men and women. By
comparing two successful women artists almost exclusively to one
another, it became unnecessary to evaluate their work in relation to
that of their male contemporaries, or to abandon rigid identifications
between female painters and their imagery.
In the second half of the century there was a wide range of new
family images. Greuze’s The Good Mother, the popular attraction at the
Salon of 1765, was praised by Diderot: “It preaches population, and
portrays with profound feeling the happiness and inestimable rewards
of domestic tranquillity. It says to all men of feeling and sensibility:
‘Keep your family comfortable, give your wife children; give her as
many as you can; give them only to her and be assured of being happy
at home.’ Carol Duncan has demonstrated how, as the iconography of
painting transformed the sensual libertine of the early eighteenth cen-
tury into a tender mother by the end of it, authors following
Rousseau’s example argued that wet-nursing was against nature and
that only animals and primitive mothers were so little emotionally
bonded to their offspring that they could allow others to assume this

80 Laurent Cars The Good Mother

after Greuze, 1765
 ai
4

NRE
NNR

81 Adélaide Labille-Guiard Portrait ofMadame 82 Marguerite Gérard Portrait ofthe Architect

Mitoire and Her Children 1783 Ledoux and his Family c. 1787-90

function. A similar argument against swaddling, that it artificially con-

stricted the infant, was also a sign of the middle-class origins of these
new attitudes, for only women whose labor was entirely domestic
could attend to the needs of the liberated baby; among rural women
who needed their hands free to work in the fields swaddling persisted
well into the nineteenth century. Labille-Guiard’s pastel Portrait of
Madame Mitoire and Her Children (1783) is the first of her works
reflecting the new ideology of the bourgeois family. The painting,
showing Mme. Mitoire holding a baby to her breast while another
child gazes adoringly at her from the side, combines the voluptuous-
ness of Flemish painting and the adornments of French aristocratic
style with allusions to nature in the flowers woven into the mother’s
elaborate hairstyle. The middle-class counterpart of dedicated mother-
hood in Labille-Guiard’s work can be found in Homework, a small oval
painting in which a young mother, very simply attired, instructs the
female child who crouches at her knee. The work, whose attribution
to Labille-Guiard has recently been challenged, has the modest appeal
[607
 of a northern domestic painting, but the message comes straight from
Rousseau who, in Emile, advises women to educate girl children at
home, and from Chardin who, at mid-century, introduced themes of
middle-class domesticity into French painting.
The cult of blissful motherhood was one of the most obvious
expressions in representation of the new and evolving ideology of the
family. No longer was the family viewed as simply a lineage; instead, it
began to be conceived as a social unit in which individuals could find
happiness as husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. Marguerite
Gérard, a student and sister-in-law of the painter Jean-Honoreé
Fragonard, collaborated with him in developing the themes of mater-
nal tenderness and loving families. Although not a member of
the Académie Royale (she was prevented from membership by the
decree limiting the number of women to four), she exhibited widely,
particularly after the French Revolution when the Salon was opened
to women.
The ideology of the happy family was, however, riddled with con-
tradictions. Laws depriving women ofallrights over property and per-
son accompanied the eulogizing of marriage as a loving partnership.
Attitudes toward children also shifted dramatically in the course of the
century as earlier neglect gave way to a growing belief that the true

the eighteenth century with the first widespread use of birth control
(the average family size of 6.5 children in the seventeenth century
dropping to 2 in the eighteenth), children became more precious and
campaigns to change child-rearing practices began. Paintings like
SI Labille-Guiard’s Madame Mitoire recapitulate the iconography of the
opulent nude, but place her in a new, maternal role surrounded by
adored and adoring children.
The Salon of 1785 was a key exhibition for both Labille-Guiard and
Vigée-Lebrun. The former’s portraits consolidated her reputation and
the critical competition between the two women painters turned
toward her. As a result of her success in this Salon, Vigée-Lebrun
received the commission for her Portrait of Marie Antoinette with Her
Children, a monumental work of political propaganda which has been
called one of the great works of eighteenth-century political painting
and the last serious attempt to revive the Queen’s reputation.
Vigéee-Lebrun had been painting Marie Antoinette since 1778. Her
many portraits of the Queen—whose marriage represented a political
alliance between the royal families of France and Austria and who was
by 1778 already widely distrusted by the French citizenry—treveal her
168
ability to transform the far from beautiful queen into a memorable
likeness through the power of her idealizing abstraction.
By 1784, after the birth of her third child, Marie Antoinette had
realized the extent to which she had alienated the population, as well
as powerful factions in the court, with her frivolity and profligacy.
Widely held in contempt as queen and as the mother of future kings,
Marie Antoinette had withdrawn into a small circle of family and
friends. Her claim that “I wish to live as a mother, to feed my child
and devote myself to its upbringing” convinced no one in the face of
widely circulated attacks on her virtue in clandestine publications
with titles like The Scandalous Life of Marie Antoinette and The Royal
Bordello, the latter a pornographic tract ascribing depraved tastes to her
and treating her children as bastards.
This spectacle of the Queen as a courtesan led Louis XVI’s minis-
ters to a decision to counter the bad press by projecting a positive and
wholesome image of her with her children at the next Salon. The
result, a painting by the young Swedish artist Adolphe-Ulrich
Wertmuller, pleased no one. Exhibited at the Salon of 1785, the paint-
ing was widely denounced for depicting “an ugly queen frivolously
dressed and gamboling in front of the Temple of Love at Versailles
with her two children.” Two critics, however, called for a painting
which would present the Queen as a mother “showing her children
to the nation, thus calling forth the attention and the hearts of all, and
binding more strongly than ever, by these precious tokens, the union
between France and Austria.”
A new painting was commissioned from Vigée-Lebrun before the
Salon of 1785 had closed its doors. The political importance of it was
indicated by the fact that it issued from the office of the King’s
Director of Buildings and that Vigee-Lebrun was paid the colossal
price of 18,000 livres, more than was paid for the most important his-
torical paintings and far more than the 4,000 livres that Wertmuller
had received for his painting.
Following David's advice, Vigeée-Lebrun based her pyramidal com-
position on the triangular configurations of certain High Renaissance
Holy Families. The painting depicts Marie Antoinette dressed in a
simple robe and sitting in the Salon de la Paix at Versailles surrounded
by her children. The play oflight and shadow across the figures blends
their individuality into personages who transcend their historical con-
text. The monumental and imposing image of the mater familias 1s
softened by the presence of the children grouped around her, her
son pointing at the empty cradle which commemorates a recently
169
83
Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun
Portrait ofthe Artist with Her
Daughter 1789

deceased daughter, her older daughter leaning affectionately against

the royal arm. The grouping of the children around Marie Antoinette
emphasizes the central role of women in the generational reproduc-
tion of class power at the same time that it points toward the new
ideology of the loving family.
By the time the 1787 Salon opened, the political situation had dete-
riorated. The work was hung only after the official opening from fear
of a hostile public reaction. Critical ambivalence about the work,
however, centered around the impossibility of resolving two different
ethoses: the divine right of kings transferred from the image of the
pater familias to the figure of Marie Antoinette as queen, and the new
bourgeois ideal of happy motherhood. This iconographic confusion
was widely noted and contrasted with the universally popular image
of motherhood presented in the same Salon in Vigée-Lebrun’s self-
portrait with her daughter Julie. This touching image of young moth-
erhood perfectly illustrates the contradictions between idealized
representation and lived experience. Not only was Vigée-Lebrun her-
self sent away to a wet nurse as a child, but she remarks in her memoirs
170
that the day she went into labor with her daughter, she took pride in
not allowing incipient motherhood to interrupt her at her profession-
al activity and continued to paint between labor pains.
Vigee-Lebrun’s Portrait ofMarie Antoinette with Her Children (1787) 75
was hung almost beside, and on the same level, as Labille-Guiard’s
Portrait of Madame Adelaide. The fact that the paintings were ofidenti-
cal size further called attention to them as studies in royal opposites:
Vigée-Lebrun’s an attempt to resuscitate a vilified queen, Labille-
Guiard’s a portrait of one of Louis XVI's aunts representing the virtues
of the old court.
The Salon of 1785 also included David’s The Oath of the Horatii. The 85
severity and rationality of David’s Neoclassicism, and his themes of
patriotic virtue and male heroism, are important forerunners of the
political and social upheavals of the next decade. The presentation of a
world in which sexual difference is carefully affirmed is fully realized
here. Not only are clear distinctions drawn between the male figures
who, erect and with muscles tensed, swear allegiance with drawn
swords, and the female figures who swoon and weep, but the entire
composition reinforces the work’s separation into male and female
spheres. The arcade that compresses the figures into a shallow frieze-
like space also contains the women’s bodies within a single arch. Their

84 Adélaide Labille-Guiard
Portrait ofMadame Adélaide
1787
 85 Jacques-Louis David The Oath ofthe Horatii 1785

passive compliant forms echo the poses and gestures of Kauffmann’s

female figures, but here the sexual division into separate and unequal
parts, which is intimated in so many earlier works, is given the
absolute definition soon to be institutionalized in revolutionary
Prance:
By 1789, the conflict between radical republicanism and social con-
servatism in .France was fully evident. Although Vigée-Lebrun
enjoyed unanimous critical acclaim in the Salon of that year with her
portraits of the Duchess of Orleans, Hubert Robert, Alexandrine
Emilie Brongniart, the wife of the architect Rousseau, and her daugh-
ter, her personal reputation had been destroyed by malicious rumors
about her alleged affair with the exiled finance minister Calonne,
whose portrait she had painted 1n 1785. Attacks against the Queen also
continued, many denouncing her as an inversion of everything
women were supposed to be: an animal rather than a civilized being, a
prostitute rather than a wife, a monster giving birth to deformed crea-
tures rather than children. On October 6, following the march on
172
 Versailles by women of the market protesting against the bread short-
age, Vigée-Lebrun left France with her daughter for what became a
twelve-year exile.
The attacks on prominent public women revealed the fears of the
revolutionaries that women, if allowed to enter the public realm,
would become not women but hideous perversions of female sexuali-
ty. “Remember that virago,’ the republican Chaumette warned
French women, “that woman-man the impudent Olympe de Gouge,
who abandoned all the cares of her household because she wanted to
engage in politics and commit crimes. This forgetfulness of the virtues
of her sex led to the scaffold.’ Debates over the political rights of
women raged during these early years of social unrest. Many cahiers,
or notebooks, of 1789 remind their readers that women are exclu-
ded from representation in the Estates-General; publications by
Condorcet, Olympe de Gouge, and others argue the issue of women’s
role in a revolutionary society. During the next two years the situation
of women artists changed dramatically.
On September 23, 1790, Labille-Guiard addressed a meeting of the
- Académie Royale on the subject of the admission of women (still lim-
ited to four). While proving to the satisfaction of the academicians
that the only acceptable limit was no limit, she at the same time voted

86 Amazone, Francaises Devenues

Libres c. 1791
against women as professors or administrators. The reorganization of
the Académie Royale won for women the right to exhibit at the
Salon, but the free art training offered at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
remained closed to them, as did the right to compete for the presti-
gious Prix de Rome. The Salon of 1791 was chosen by a jury of forty,
only half of them academicians. The paintings numbered 794; 190 of
them by non-academicians and 21 of them by women. The opening
of the Salon to women proved decisive and in the years after the
Revolution large numbers of women exhibited. In 1791 Labille-
Guiard, who supported the new regime, exhibited eight portraits of
deputies of the National Assembly.
It is David’s heroic brotherhood, however, that came to emblema-
tize the new Republic. Images of brotherhood displaced earlier repre-
sentations of fatherhood. Mothers, except very young ones, are also
largely absent. The image of the goddess of Liberty created in
November 1793 drew heavily on Rousseau’s ideal of the pregnant and
nursing mother to personify the regeneration of France. That year also
witnessed the repression of all women’s political societies by the
Jacobins who argued that women were intellectually and morally
incapacitated for political life.
Despite attempts to restrain the activities of women, women artists
made progress in the years after the Revolution. Although denied
admission to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the prestigious Class of
Fine Arts of the Institute until almost the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, less restricted access to the Salon, and a loosening of the domi-
nance of historical and mythological painting, led to increasing
representation of women in Salon exhibitions. In the Salon of 1801
14.6% of the artists were women; by 1835 the percentage of women
exhibiting had grown to 22.2%. Women excelled at portraiture and
sentimental genre; Marguérite Gerard, Pauline Auzou, Constance
Mayer, Mme. Servieres, Jeanne-Elisabeth Chaudet, and Antoinette
Haudebourt-Lescot were all singled out for critical notice. The most
ambitious painter of historical subjects was Angélique Mongez, a
pupil of David and Regnault, whose Alexander Mourning the Death of
Darius’s Wife was awarded a gold medal in the Salon of 1804. Themes
of women in history, myth, and love predominated in the work of
Henriette Lorimier, Auzou, Nanine Vallain, Servieres, and Mayer.
David's role as a teacher of women painters during this critical period
calls for further study, as do the circumstances in which these and
other women painters worked after the Revolution.

174
 GHP TER. Sige

Sex, Class, and Power in Victorian England

Modern feminist campaigns emerged out of acomplex of nineteenth-

century reform movements in Western Europe and America. A
commitment to the emancipation of women was characteristic of
reformers from Charles Fourier and Saint Simon in France to John
Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor, and Robert Owen and the Chartists in
England, as well as the American Fourierites and Transcendentalists.
In America, the Abolition, Temperance, and Suffrage movements pro-
foundly influenced the lives of middle- and upper-class women aspir-
ing to professional careers 1n the arts.
Nineteenth-century reform movements were part of a growing
middle-class response to widespread social and economic changes
following the Industrial Revolution. As aristocratic and mercantile
capitalism evolved into industrial capitalism, the middle class emerged
as the dominant political and social force. Novels, plays, paintings,
sculpture, and popular prints contributed to forging a coherent
middle-class identity out of the diverse incomes, occupations, and
values that made up the class in reality.
Anatomy, physiology, and Biblical authority were repeatedly
invoked to prove that the ideal of modest and pure womanhood that
evolved during Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) was based on
sound physiological principles. Even after the loosening of restrictions
on professional training, women faced obstacles in obtaining art train-
ing equal to that of male students. Not only was it widely believed that
too much book learning decreased femininity, exposure to the nude
model was thought to inflame the passions and disturb the conboDSf
female sexuality that lay at the heart of Victorian moral injunctions.
“Does CORT MROIS aeirate member oFthepublic totheBoard of
Directors of the Pennsylvania Academy in 1883, “for a young lady of a
refined, godly household to be urged as the only way of obtaining a
knowledge of true art, to enter a class where every feeling of maiden-
ly delicacy is violated, where she becomes so hardened to indelicate
sights and words, so familiar with the persons of degraded women
and the sight of nude males, that no possible art can restore her lost

175
treasure of chaste and delicate thoughts ... ?’’ Nudity, exposure to
women of questionable virtue who worked as models, stimulation of
the senses—at issue was power over female sexuality, itself arecurring
motifin nineteenth-century art and literature.
Sermons, moral tracts, and popular literature relied on the same
sources to prove that differences between the sexes were either innate
or, if environmental in origin, necessary. The Woman Question, as the
debate that raged at mid-century came to be known, circled a range of
conflicting ideals, expectations, and demands that affected women.
What capabilities did women have? What was the “natural” expres-
sion of femininity in an age in which gender was organized around an
ideology of separate spheres for men and women? What contribution
could middle-class women make to society when they were removed
from all productive labor except childbirth?
The Cult of True Womanhood was a double-edged sword. Women
were presented as morally and spiritually superior to men, and given
primary responsibility for managing the home, but their lives were
tightly restricted in other ways. The middle-class ideal of femininity
stigmatized many groups of women as deviant—those who remained
unmarried, who worked, or were slaves, or immigrants, or social radi-
cals. Even so, many middle-class women found positive identities 1n
sisterhood, celibacy, and female partnerships. Although much contem-
porary feminist scholarship has focused on the oppression of Victorian
women in a stratified society, recent work by social historians has also
emphasized the positive aspects of the separation of the sexes;
specifically, the deep friendships and community of purpose that
developed among women.
By the second half of the century, the feminine ideal, increasingly
recognized as unattainable by large numbers of “surplus” women who
exceeded men of marriageable age and by most working-class women
whose families could not afford economically dependent women, was
being challenged on both sides of the Atlantic. The census of 1851 in
Britain revealed that many middle-class men failed to earn incomes
large enough to support their female relatives. In America, Civil War
casualties and the drain of young men to the western frontier left
many women without potential partners. Economic realities and a
growing realization that many women in the new industries were
working under deplorable conditions intensified the demands for
reform by middle-class women.
Women artists existed in a contradictory relationship to the pre-
vailing middle-class ideals of femininity. They were caught between
176
a social ideology that prohibited the individual competition and
public visibility necessary for success in the arts, and the educational
and social reform movements that made the nineteenth century
the greatest period of female social progress in history. The
qualities which defined the artist—independence, self-reliance,
competitiveness—belonged to a male sphere of influence and action.
Women who adopted these traits, who turned their backs on amateur
artistic accomplishments, accepted as beautifying or morally enlight-
ening, or who rejected flower painting in watercolor for historical
compositions in oil, risked being labeled as sexual deviants. Art
reviews from the period are full of charges that aspiring women
artists risk “unsexing” themselves. While critics held up Rosa
Bonheur and Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler) as examples for
other women precisely because they did not “paint like women,’ few
women had access to Thompson’s wealth and upper-class connec-
tions or Bonheur’s unconventional and wholly supportive female
household.
Between 1840 and 1900, several hundred women exhibited in
Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, and smaller cities
throughout the British Isles. Others, including Thompson, Henrietta
Ward, Sophie Anderson, Rebecca Solomon, Joanna Boyce, and Jessica
and Edith Hayllar, exhibited at the Royal Academy and similar exhibi-
tions. Their work 1s situated at the intersection between the growing
demand for increased education and employment for women, the
artistic conservatism of British painting at the time, and the social
ideology of separate spheres.
During Victoria’s reign, the status of women changed dramatically.
In 1837, married women had few legal rights. The Divorce Act of
1857, which liberalized divorce for women, the publication in 1869 of
Mill and Taylor’s The Subjection of Women, which exposed the legal
subordination of one sex to the other as morally wrong, the Married
Women’s Property Act of 1870, which enabled women to retain their
own earnings or rent, and the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1884, were
milestones on the way to legal protection for women outside mar-
riage. Although social themes first surfaced in British painting in the
late 1830s, flourishing during the 1840s and 1850s, such events hardly
dominate British painting at the time. Nor do we find other than scat-
tered images of female activists like Florence Nightingale, the most
illustrious woman of her day, or Harriet Martineau, a widely read
writer and social commentator. Instead, Victorian painting emphasizes
the romantic, sentimental, and moralizing aspects of everyday life.

ved
 The 1850s, a period of intense agitation for educational reform for
women, witnessed the founding of The Society for the Promotion of
Employment for Women, the Victorian Printing Press, and the
Society of Female Artists. The last, formed in 1856, served as an alter-
native exhibition site for women. With the change of name in 1872 to
the Society of Lady Artists, full membership was restricted to profes-
sional women and limited to twenty-three in number. Some women,
like Anna and Martha Mutrie, who exhibited successfully at the Royal
Academy, ignored the Society; others sent smaller works, or exhibited
pictures previously shown elsewhere (a practise forbidden by the
Royal Academy).
Wider opportunities for exhibiting accompanied expanded art
education for women, but did not solve the problems of access to
official institutions and equal opportunity. The complex issue of art
training for women deserves its own study, for in demanding access to
art training and life classes women were not only challenging codes of
feminine propriety and sexual conduct; they were also claiming the
right to see and represent actively the world around them, and to
command genius as their own. As women began to press for the train-
ing that would enable them to compete as professional artists, their
struggle became part of the larger one for educational reform.
Until the founding of specialized art schools for women in Britain
and America during the second quarter of the century, the teaching of
drawing and painting to women was included with skills like embroi-
dery, lace making, dancing, and music. Beginning in the 1840s, schools
were founded to provide training in design for women who were
forced to support themselves. In America, the Woman’s Art School of
Cooper Union, the Lowell School of Design at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, the Pittsburgh School of Design, and the
Cincinnati School of Design were an important stage on the way to
women’s infiltration of predominantly male systems of education in
the fine arts, but all stressed “suitable” areas like china painting and
needlework. The association of women with these areas of produc-
tion, as well as their continuing educational segregation, fueled
charges that art by women was “mediocre.”
In Britain, the Female School of Art and Design was founded in
1843 as one of the government Schools of Design. Although men
often transferred from the schools of design to the Royal Academy, the
existence of a Female School became an excuse for not admitting
women to the Royal Academy Schools. Women art students who
were not content to be trained in design at the Female School, or to
178
 87 “Lady Students at the
National Gallery,”
Illustrated London News
November 21, 1885

be taught privately, were often held up to a mix of ridicule and

charming patronization-in popular publications like the I/lustrated
London News and Punch.
Colleges for women who desired training as governesses were
established in London in 1848, followed by the admission of women
to the National Art Training School as part of the decision to promote
women as art teachers. In 1862, the Royal Female School of Art was
founded. Some fine art training was available but not in the design
schools. Other women, among them Barbara Bodichon (1827-91) 88
and Laura Herford, studied at the Ladies College in Bedford Square
(founded in 1849) which offered some art instruction to women.
Barbara Bodichon’s liberal Unitarian family and private income
gave her far greater freedom than that enjoyed by most upper- and
middle-class women in Britain. A student of Corot, Hercules
Brabazon and Daubigny, and a friend of Mrs. Anna Jameson,
Bodichon also wrote extensively on the political, legal, and education-
al disabilities of women. She was one of several artists who belonged
to the Langham Place Circle, a group of progressive women who
founded the English Women’s Journal. During the 1850s, the group
campaigned for women’s education, employment, property rights, and

179
 88 Emily Mary Osborn
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
before 1891

suffrage. Jameson, Bodichon, and the painters Eliza Fox, Margaret

Gillies, and Emily Mary Osborn all signed the group’s petition
demanding access to the Royal Academy School in 1859. Rejected on
the grounds that it would have required setting up separate life classes,
the petition was followed by an embarrassing incident in 1860 when
Herford applied using only her initials, and was admitted. This over-
sight led to five female students being permitted to draw from ancient
statuary and plaster casts in the Antique School.
In Britain, as in America, women often worked together, sharing
models and experience, and often commemorating each other and the
members of their households in their paintings. The private house-
hold is at the center of a huge increase in works on the theme of
everyday life between 1830 and 1849. Paintings of domestic life,
courtship, Christian virtues, and the dangers of transgression
confirmed widely held attitudes, but they did little to redirect atten-
tion to other areas of concern. The many images of women in domes-
tic settings produced by respected painters like Charles Cope, John
Everett Millais, Richard Redgrave, and the Hayllar sisters shaped and
disseminated ideals that were central to middle-class life. While the
work of some women artists 1s indistinguishable from that of their
[8O
male contemporaries in its adherence to ideologies of class and gen-
der, that of others reveals a more skeptical attitude and a desire to
renegotiate the terms of feminine dependency.
The enshrinement of the Victorian middle-class woman at home
contributed to the pictorial celebration of madonna-like women and
to an emphasis on the stages of women’s lives through which feminin-
ity is defined and secured. Cope’s Life Well Spent (1862) and George
Elgar Hick’s three paintings entitled Woman’s Mission (1863), including
the panel “Companion to Manhood,’ are but a few examples of the
many paintings which stress women as nurturers and care-givers.
“Woman's power is for rule, not for battle,’ intoned one critic of the
day, “‘and her sweet intellect 1s not for invention or creation, but for
sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision. ... This is the true nature
of home—tt is the place of Peace: the shelter, not only from all injury,
but from all terror, doubt, and division.”

89 Edith Hayllar
Feeding the Swans
1889
 go Alice Walker Wounded
Feelings 1861

The removal of women to the private sphere of the family made

scenes of family life seem particularly appropriate for women artists.
“Tt may be that in the more heroic and epic works of art the hand of
man is best fitted to excel; nevertheless there remain gentle scenes of
home interest, and domestic care, delineations of refined feeling and
subtle touches of tender emotion, with which the woman artist is
eminently entitled to deal,’ noted the Englishwoman’s Review 1n 1857.
Jane Bowkett’s images of middle-class women and children at home,
Henrietta Ward’s visions of domestic bliss, and the Hayllars’ paintings
of domestic interiors all contributed to shaping representations of
domesticity without challenging widely held beliefs.
Images such as these do not, however, express a single unified atti-
tude or “feminine” point of view. While Bowkett’s An Afternoon in the
Nursery suggests that chaos results when women are absorbed in their
own pleasures (here, reading a book) rather than attending to the
89 needs of children, Edith Hayllar’s (1860-1948) Feeding the Swans
(1889) emphasizes the symmetry and order of the well-run house-
hold. The architectural setting and the deep banks of foliage in
182
 Hayllar’s painting stress the orderly human pairings within and the
clearly demarcated stages of female life.
Other paintings by women address the uneasy aspects of feminine
sexuality constructed around male protection and approval, domesti-
cation and family pleasures. Alice Walker’s Wounded Feelings (1861)
depicts a group of elegantly dressed young men and women in a fes-
tive interior. In the foreground, a darkened interior, a woman turns to
console another who has left the happy scene inside, throwing down
her glove and fan as she goes. Beyond her, in an inner room filled with
couples, women gaze intently at their male partners. Here, Deborah
Cherry has shown, rituals of courtship and the conventions of
male/female pairing are opposed to the sympathy and solidarity of
female friendship.
A more ambiguous sexuality is also characteristic of the pho-
tographs by Clementina, Lady Hawarden (1822-65). An amateur in
the tradition of Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron, Lady
Hawarden was an aristocratic woman who used her camera to capture
the intimate aspects of female life in domestic settings. The soft
romanticism of her approach and the languid grace of her subjects are

91 Clementina, Lady Hawarden, photograph of amodel, 1860s

rrrttitiiih
in sharp contrast to the feeling of entrapment produced by the walls
and mirrors against which she frequently posed her subjects.
The ideal of the clean, well-ordered Victorian home resisted repre-
sentations of the physical labor required to efface dirt and maintain
the leisure of upper- and middle-class families. Female servants gene-
rally appear in painting and photography as submissive and obedient
women confined to their duties at home. Yet the diaries of Hannah
Culwick, a working-class English woman who was photographed
between 1853 and 1874, speak another reality: “I’m getting more used
to the family now so I don’t mind them seeing me clean upstairs as
much as I used to, but I do like the family to be away for houseclean-
ing ’cause one can have so much more time at it and do it more thor-
oughly and be as black at it as one likes without fear o’being seen by
the ladies. "Cause I know they don’t like to see a servant look dirty,
however black the job is one has to do.”
Household manuals emphasizing the proper conduct of servants,
their industriousness and cleanliness, underscore the time-consuming
managerial skills required of the middle- and upper-class women who
ran large households filled with children, servants, and _ relatives.
Although they do not appear frequently in paintings, the physical
presence of servants in the home made them readily available as a sub-
ject for women artists. At least one of Augusta Wells’s sketch-books is
filled with studies of female servants, while Joanna Boyce executed
several studies and paintings of women servants in the 18sos. Her
painting, Our Servant, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1857, is
typical of these representations in giving dignity and presence to
working-class women within a set of middle-class expectations about
domestic labor.
The household was just one aspect of Victorian prosperous life
which depended on abundant “cheap” labor in order to function
smoothly and efficiently. While female servants protected richer
women from domestic drudgery and physical labor, other women, the
majority of them underpaid and forced to work in unhealthy or dan-
gerous conditions, supported the British economy. After 1841, the situ-
ation of female factory and mill workers formed a major subject of
public debate. Their plight, however, rarely enters the art of the period
before the 1850s. Even Ford Madox Brown’ epic painting Work
(1852-65), which monumentalizes the subject of labor, emphasizes the
worth of the English laboring man and relegates women to marginal
positions. Although urban working-class women are almost non-
existent as subjects for painting ofthe period (and are just beginning to
184
g2 Anna Blunden
The Seamstress 1854

appear in photography), a few representations of governesses, one of

the few paid occupations open to middle-class women, do exist.
By 1851, there were approximately 25,000 governesses in Britain
and they are the subject of works by Richard Redgrave, Emily Mary
Osborn, and Rebecca Solomon. Osborn’s Home Thoughts (1856)
emphasizes the isolation of the governess who often traveled far from
home with her employers, but who was seldom consulted in their
plans. Solomon’s The Governess (1854) contrasts the silent governess 1n
her discreet dark dress with the fashionably dressed and animated
figure of the young wife who plays the piano for her attentive hus-
band. Within the tightly structured Victorian world of home and
family, the governess has no secure place.
The plight of middle-class women who were unmarried or other-
wise forced to support themselves is the subject of Osborn’s Nameless 94
and Friendless of 1857 which depicts a young woman accompanied by
a boy entering an art dealer’s shop with a painting and a portfolio of
prints or drawings. The painting is carefully structured to emphasize
the commodification of women in the art trade and the isolation and
18§
93 (above) Rebecca Solomon The Governess 1854

94 (below) Emily Mary Osborn Nameless and Friendless 1857

95 (opposite) Evelyn Pickering de Morgan Medea 1889

 helplessness of the single woman in patriarchal society. While the
dealer studies the painting with barely disguised contempt, the other
male figures in the room focus their gazes on the woman, turning
their attention away from a print showing a dancer’s nude legs and
toward the cowering woman. The message is clear: women have no
place in the commerce of art; they belong to the world of art as sub-
jects, not makers or purveyors.
Other paintings which take into account the actual conditions of
overworked and underpaid female labor at the time include Anna
Q2 Blunden’s The Seamstress of 1854. Its subject is the needlewomen who
labored in dim light in tiny rooms to produce fine hand-sewn clothes
for upper- and middle-class customers. The painting was exhibited at
the Society of British Artists in 1854 accompanied by a quotation
from Thomas Hood’s “The Song of the Shirt” (1843), a poem which
had directed attention to the plight of the seamstress, as did the exhi-
bition of five pictures by Redgrave on the theme of women forced to
earn their own living: “Oh but to breathe the breath/ Of the cowslip
and primrose sweet/ With the sky above my head/ And the grass
beneath my feet/ For only one short hour/ To feel as I used to feel/
Before I knew the woes of want/ And the walk that costs a meal.”
The work’s quasi-religious tone, as a woman who has been laboring
throughout the night clasps her hands and gazes heavenward at the
first light of day, contrasts sharply with the reality of laboring for
hours over the tiny stitches of a man’s dress shirt. The painting was
executed in the context of an investigation into the working
conditicns of women in the clothing trades and the system of
outworking or “sweating” used in the 1840s and 1850s. The working
conditions of these women were the subject of reports in Parliament,
as well as articles in Fraser’s Magazine, the Pictorial Times, and Punch,
but middle- and upper-class reformers generally directed their energy
toward improving working conditions rather than ending this kind
of exploitative labor.
The theme of women’s labor intersects with that of female sexual-
ity and men’s control over the bodies of women. It has been argued
that the stability of the Victorian househo
existence of prostitutes; domesticated middle-class femininity was
secured THOUGH -CORSGAE TORUS with the perils
perils of
ofunregulated
unregulate
fetal see ene, the exteaaemeye2 tne“puny
and morality of the middle-class woman was defined in opposition
totheimmorality ofthe prostitute, the Westminster Review noted in
1868 that “Prostitution is as inseparable from our present marriage
188
 customs as the shadow from the substance. They are two sides of the
same shield.”
The 1840s saw the publication of a series of treatises on prostitution
including Ralph Wardlaw’s Lectures on the Female Prostitute (1842) and
James B. Talbot’s The Miseries of Prostitution (1844). It is at this moment,
as Susan Casteras suggests in her study of images of Victorian woman-
hood, that depictions ofprostitutes in painting begin to increase, peak-
ing in the 1850s and 1860s. In an age obsessed with virginity and
prostitution, themes of the prostitute and the fallen woman found a
wide audience. Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1854),
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Found (1854), Ford Madox Brown’s Take Your
Son, Sir! (c. 1857), and Augustus Ege’s Past and Present (1858) are
among the many representations of woman’s fall from virtue and
its consequences executed by members of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood.
Although middle-class women joined in support of prostitutes in
the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Act, which subjected
prostitutes in selected garrison towns to enforced examinations and
treatment, there is little to suggest that they took on this aspect of life
as a subject for painting. In contrast to the many depictions of fallen
women by male painters, we have only a description of a single work
by the feminist Anna Mary Howitt. Her painting, The Castaway
(1854), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1855, is now lost and
known only through a description by Rossetti: “Rather a strong-
minded subject involving a dejected female, mud with lilies dying in
it,a dustheap and other details.”
Images of prostitution, like the moralizing sentiments of domestic
genre painting, focus attention on one of the most complex and
ambivalent aspects of Victorian thought, the attitude to female sexu-
ality. Exploring this issue as it intersects, and is veiled by, the discourses
of medicine, vivisection, pornography, and animal imagery reveals
some ofthe ways that representation functioned in the construction of
female sexuality. It also sheds further light on the phenomenal popu-
larity in England of the French painter Rosa Bonheur.
Few subjects 1n painting drew as large an audience, or were as wide-
ly reproduced, as those pertaining to animals. British love for animals
is legendary. From Queen Victoria, who commissioned Maud Earl
and Gertrude Massy to execute portraits of the royal dogs, to John
Ruskin, who referred to his favored female painters as “pets,” large
segments of Victorian society held a special place in their hearts for
domesticated animals. Sir Edwin Landseer, the Queen’s favorite
189g
96 (above) Rosa Bonheur The Horse Fair 1855

97 (left) Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler)

Calling the Roll After an Engagement, Crimea 1874
 painter and one of the most successful animal painters in history, built
his reputation on paintings in which animals, often dogs, signify mas-
culine, class-specific moral values.
Images of animals frequently symbolized the vices and virtues of
women. Constantly exhorted to rise above their “animal” natures,
women were pursued by animal exemplars. Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s image of the caged bird in the poem “Aurora Leigh”
(1856) was exploited by both men and women as a sign of domesticat-
ed femininity. A painting of a woman pressing her lips against the bars
of a cage containing a small bird, entitled A Pet, was exhibited in 1853
by Walter Deverell, accompanied by an unidentified quotation; “But
after all, it is only questionable kindness to make a pet of a creature so
essentially volatile.” William Rossetti was quick to comment on the
work’s quasi-erotic mood of passion and intensity.
It was the search for expressions of feeling unencumbered by social
constraints that underlay both the embrace of animal imagery in nine-
teenth-century Britain and the fame enjoyed by Rosa Bonheur there.
Bonheur was the most famous woman artist of the nineteenth centu-
ry and one of the most admired animal painters in history. She came
QO to England in 1856 for a visit following the success of The Horse Fair

98 Walter Deverell
A Pet 1852-53
99 Rosa Bonheur Plowing in the Nivernais 1848

(1855) at the previous year’s Paris Salon. Born in Bordeaux in 1822,

she was an anomaly among women artists of her day. A critical and
financial success by 1853, she was radical in her personal life, but artis-
tically and politically conservative, a confirmed monarchist and a real-
ist whose reputation was soon eclipsed by the more radical pictorial
styles of French modernism.
Bonheur’s mother, who died when the child was eleven years old,
taught her to read, draw, and play the piano. Her father, a minor artist,
supervised her artistic training, convinced she would become a painter
who would fulfil his radical Saint Simonian ideals about women.
Those ideals included the androgynous clothing styles and sex roles
that shaped Bonheur’ adoption of cross dressing and the ambiguity of
her public gender identity. In an important essay on the subject, art
historian James Saslow suggests that Bonheur’s use of masculine dress
was part of an attempt to claim male prerogatives and create an
androgynous and proto-lesbian visual identity.
Bonheur’s critical reputation grew slowly but steadily throughout
the 1840s. She received a gold medal for Cows and Bulls of the Cantal in
1848, but her greatest success before The Horse Fair came in 1849
when she sent Plowing in the Nivernais (1848) to the Salon. She based
the work on a description of oxen in George Sand’s celebrated

193
 THIEBAULT
st
or

WEST HIGHLAND BULL,

100 =©West Highland Bull engraved after Rosa Bonheur, 1866

pastoral novel of 1846, La Mare au Diable (The Devil’s Pod), on her

long study of animals in nature, and on the paintings of Paulus Potter,
a Dutch seventeenth-century painter of cows whose work she
admired. Celebrating rural work in the tradition of Courbet and
Millet, Bonheur emphasized the nobility of laboring animals against a
broad expanse of sky painted with the light and clarity of Dutch sev-
enteenth-century painting.
96 Bonheutr’s Horse Fair became one ofthe best known and loved ofall
nineteenth-century paintings. A quarter-size version went to England
to be engraved by Thomas Landseer. During the next decade, the
English dealer Gambart published lithographs of her work, including
twelve horse studies. Britain, where she enjoyed her greatest fame dur-
ing the 1860s and 1870s, was also her chief source of income. On her
first visit, she met Queen Victoria, who arranged a private viewing of
The Horse Fair at Buckingham Palace, and other luminaries.
Critics were quick to note the vitality and fidelity to nature of
Bonheur’s work. “The animals, although full of life and breed, have no
pretensions to culture,” noted The Daily News in 1855. The subjects
and the detailed and accessible style of Bonheur’s paintings appealed
to British middle-class audiences. Her fame in Britain, however, also
coincided with a period of impassioned public debate about animal

194
rights and animal abuse around the issue of vivisection. The debate
touched on the lives of women as well as animals and it 1s important
for what it reveals about the way that control over the bodies of
women and animals was articulated around identifications with nature
and culture, sexuality and dominance. The same images which expose
the helplessness of animals were used to reinforce the subordinate and
powerless position of women in relation to the institutions of male
power and privilege.
As early as 1751, when Hogarth published his series of engravings
called the Four Stages of Cruelty, British art had made the connection
between the torture of animals and the torture of women. Hogarth’s
prints move from a scene in which a young Tom Nero skewers a dog
in the presence of a variety of youthful animal torturers, to his
flogging of a horse and then his murder of his mistress. Hanged, his
body given over to medical dissectors, the persecutor of animals who
became the murderer of woman becomes himself the victim of med-
ical abuses.
The message conveyed to British audiences by Bonheur’s horses
and dogs was the opposite of Hogarth’s. They emphasize the animals’
freedom and uncorrupted nature, their loyalty, courage, and grace; in
the words of one critic they were “like nature.” In a curious way,
middle-class Victorian women’s love for animals (by 1900 women
supported the antivivisection movement in numbers exceeded only
by their numbers in suffrage societies) and the widespread involve-
ment of working-class men and women in the animal rights move-
ment forged an unusual bond between the classes. The issue, however,
was more far-reaching than the plight of animals. The issue was
power, or rather the powerlessness that middle-class women and
working-class men and women experienced in the face of the institu-
tionalized authority of middle- and upper-class men.
During the nineteenth century, the new medical science of gynae-
cology removed much women’s health care from midwives’ hands,
placing women’s bodies under the control of male doctors and sub-
mitting women to the horrors of early gynaecological practice.
Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American female doctor, noted that the
popular operation which removed healthy ovaries as a treatment for
menstrual difficulties was akin to “spaying.” It 1s not surprising that
many women came to identify with the plight of vivisected and
abused animals.
The publication of Anna Sewell’s novel Black Beauty in 1877 pro- IOl

vided one focus for equating the situation of women with that of

195
animals. Referred to by its author as “the autobiography of a horse,’
Black Beauty is in fact a feminist tract deploring the cruel oppression of
all creatures, especially women and the working class. Black Beauty 1s
both a working animal, at the mercy of owners who range from kind
to cruel, and a beautiful piece of property, like a wife. The novel was
immensely popular (it sold 12,000 copies in its first year of publication
in England) partly because many Britons had come to realize that the
animal rights issue was really a human rights issue.
Black Beauty became part of the social consciousness of the age, but
the identification of women with horses also entered the Victorian
imagination in other ways. Horses and horsey dialogue were frequent-
ly used to inculcate docility in workers and assertive women. A story
which appeared in the Girls Own Paper of 1885 used the dialogue
between a horse named Pansy and Bob, her master, as a not so veiled
reference to the contemporary demand for women’s rights; “Pansy,
the mare, was a very different character. She held strong views on the
subject of equality. ...If she had lived at a tme when the question of
women’s rights and the extension of the suffrage were agitating the
feminine mind, one might have thought that Pansy had pondered the
matter in relation to horses.” However, Pansy’s strong views are soon
beaten out of her and she becomes a docile and devoted servant to her
master.
The language that “tames” Pansy the horse is the language of both
Victorian pornography and gynaecological practice. In the porno-
graphic novels, women are “broken to the bit,’ saddled, bridled,
and whipped into submission. The obverse of the ideology which
enjoined women to rise above their animal natures was a pornograph-
ic imagination which reduced them to animals in order to control
them. In gynaecological practice, women faced the language of con-
trol as they were strapped to tables and chairs for examinations, their
feet placed in footrests called “stirrups” (in general use after 1860).
Rosa Bonheur’s paintings, and the intense response they provoked
in British middle-class audiences, are inseparable from the complex
system of signification through which femininity was produced and
controlled. Horses (and women) were beautiful pets/animals; they also
represented a challenge to male domination. The parallels which I
have drawn here might not have been articulated by a Victorian audi-
ence. Nevertheless, they indicate the ways that images function, not as
a reflection of an unproblematic “nature,” but as signs within broader
systems of signification and social control. In a similar fashion
the paintings of Elizabeth Thompson (1846-1933), although they
196
 1o1 Black Beauty frontispiece, 1877

catapulted their creator to instant personal fame as a woman who had

overcome the limitations placed on her sex, must also be read as part
of the middle- and upper-class effort to assert control—in this case
over the British army.
Like Bonheur, Elizabeth Thompson refused to be restricted to
“feminine” subjects. She painted the world of war and soldiers’ lives, a
world which was understood to belong to men, and she also experi-
enced dazzling success for a relatively brief period. She has been called
“the first painter to celebrate the courage and endurance of the ordi-
nary British soldier.’
Thompson came from a wealthy and privileged background. Like
Bonheur, she had a father who believed in female education and
development and who devoted much time to his two daughters’
progress (her sister was the feminist, socialist poet and critic Alice
Meynell). Thompson began oil painting lessons in 1862 with William
Standish in London. She then enrolled in the elementary class at the
Female School of Art, but soon left because she didn’t like the design-
oriented curriculum. Returning to the advanced class in 1866, she

197
 supplemented the training available in the draped life class by attend-
ing a private “undraped female” life class.
By the early 1870s, Thompson had achieved a moderate success
with her first battle watercolors. Her choice of military history as a
subject (without benefit of military connections in her family before
her marriage or first-hand knowledge ofbattle) is a mark both of her
ambition and her realization that the subject was “non-exploited” in
British painting. Missing (1872) was accepted by the Royal Academy,
97 but it was Calling the Roll After an Engagement, Crimea (1874) which
brought her instant success when it was exhibited there. The painting
subsequently toured nationwide, attracting huge audiences and pro-
peling the artist to celebrity status (over 250,000 photographs of
the artist were sold) as a woman who transcended the limitations of
her'sex.
Calling the Roll . .. graphically depicts the Grenadier Guards mus-
tering after a battle in the Crimean War (1854-56). The influence of
Meissonier and early nineteenth-century battle painting is evident in
its large format and meticulous realism and Thompson had, in fact,
visited the Paris Salon in 1870. Despite the painting’s academic and
conservative style, its cool black and gray palette brilliantly evokes the
erim Crimean campaign with its weary soldiers and snow-covered
battlefields.
The superficially chivalrous tone assumed by critics who lauded the
work masked more derogatory messages contained in the assumption
that she must have been a nurse to have witnessed such injury and ill-
ness. “There is no sign of awoman’s weakness,’ noted The Times, while
the critic for The Spectator commended “a thoroughly manly point of
view.” Elizabeth Thompson’s marriage to Major William Butler on
June 11, 1877, ushered in a period of declining public fortune and
scant reviews, many of them unsympathetic. A combination of
factors—including competition from a growing number of battle
painters, the unsettled life of a military wife, and the difficulty of re-
conciling a career with the task of raising a family of five children—
contributed to her foundering career. Increasingly after 1881, when
Scotland for Ever! appeared, she pursued her work when domestic
duties permitted.
Butler’s marriage to an officer meant that she followed him to
foreign postings (including Egypt and Africa), which she detailed in
numerous drawings and watercolors. This experience identifies
her, however briefly, with significant numbers of English women
who, as private travelers. or loyal spouses, participated in the visual
198
representation of the British Empire and other non-European coun-
tries and peoples during the second half of the nineteenth century.
The term Orientalism has been used to refer to the way in which
Europeans, many of them travelers, explorers, artists, and writers,
imaginatively represented the Orient (a word denoting to Westerners
the lands of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, Asia
Minor, Egypt, and Syria, including the Holy Land, Palestine, and the
Lebanon). The paintings of Englishmen such as John Frederick Lewis
and William Holman Hunt, and those of the French artists Jean-
Auguste-Domuinique Ingres, Eugéne Delacroix, and Jean-Leon
Gérome, among others, as Linda Nochlin notes, often “body forth
two ideological assumptions about power: one about men’s power
over women; the other about white men’s superiority to, hence
justifiable control over, inferior, darker races... .”
The representational and discursive strategies that created the
imperial nation as masculine, and the conquered, colonized and impe-
rialized as feminine, implicate both race and gender 1n colonialist pro-
jects. Although Orientalist literature has until recently largely
overlooked the role of women as producers, they are well represented
in the photographs, engravings, and watercolors that accompany
accounts of their travel published in England in the second half of the
nineteenth century, as well as in works exhibited at the Royal
Academy, the Society of Female Artists exhibitions in London, and at
the Société des Peintres Orientals Francais in Paris.
During the previous century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an
upper-class Englishwoman who lived 1n Constantinople in 1716 as the
wife of the ambassador to Turkey, had played a considerable role in
stimulating European fantasies about the Orient. Montagu, like the
women who followed her to the East during the next century, did not
occupy the position of a privileged European male viewer (artist).
Discourses of femininity, with their emphasis on passivity and domes-
ticity, coexisted uneasily with Imperialism’s demand for decisive
action and intrepid, fearless behavior. Women’s positions in relation to
imperialist discourse were seldom fixed, despite their generally privi-
leged class position. Montagu’s gender, and her experience as a
woman, clearly informed the ways she presented Turkish women. Yet
even as she portrayed their clothing as more “natural” than that of
European women, and life in the harem as offering positive benefits to
women, she remained complicit in the European imperialist project of
constructing the Orient, and conflating it with Oriental women.
Montagu’s letters home, filled with richly evocative descriptions of

199
O2 Margaretta Burr Interior of aHareem, Cairo 1846

Turkish harems and bathhouses and published in France in 180s, pro-

vided a literary source for painters such as Ingres, who never ventured
farther from Paris than Rome, but whose paintings often featured the
exoticized locales of bathhouse and harem. Stressing the relative free-
dom and independence of Turkish women, and the physical rigors of
the bathing ritual, her accounts not only describe spaces inaccessible
to male travelers at the time, but also offer a challenging counterpoint
to representations by, for example, Ingres and Gérome, which concen-
trate on the women’s sensuality, seductiveness, and idleness.
Books illustrated with women’s drawings and watercolors, some of
them privately printed, began to appear in the 1840s. Among the ear-
liest were Lady Francis Egerton’s Journal ofa Tour in the Holy Land in
May and June, 1840 and Lady Louise Tenison’s Sketches in the East
(1846). These aristocratic compendia contained little in the way of
social commentary, but they offered fresh, and often instructive,
glimpses into non-European lands. The women who produced these
impressions represented no single point of view; nor did women trav-
el in like manner. While Elizabeth Sarah Mazuchelli (1832-1914),
the first European woman to penetrate the interior of the Eastern
200
Himalayas (a journey she recorded in sketches and watercolors pub-
lished in The Indian Alps and How We Crossed Them, “By a Lady
Pioneer”, 1869), was carried by porters while encased from head to toe
in proper Victorian dress, Lady Anne Blunt (1837-1917) wore
Bedouin cloaks and turbans, and rode camels or horses when she trav-
eled with her husband through Arabia in the 1870s. Although they
shared with their male contemporaries the need to claim and con-
struct the Orient as a European “other,’ in their writings—as well as
in sketches, watercolors, and engravings—women were less inclined
toward the prevailing themes of cruelty and eroticism which con-
cealed the violence of European colonial desires. Instead, while equal-
ly drawn to the exoticism and alterity they perceived in the East, they
focused on scenes of everyday life, and on descriptions of the lands
and peoples they encountered.
Among the most detailed visual records made by European women
are those of Margaretta Burr and Marianne North. Burr, who exhibit-
ed with the Society of Female Artists in 1859, published a portfolio of
drawings 1n 1846 which she executed 1n the course of journeys with
her husband in Egypt, Syria, Jerusalem, and Constantinople. On an
arduous journey in Egypt in 1848 in the company of the explorer Sir

103. Marianne North at

her easel, Grahamstown,
South Africa, late
nineteenth century
 104 Henrietta Ward Queen Mary Quitted Stirling Castle on the Morning of Wednesday,
April 23 ... 1863

Gardner Wilkinson, they traveled up the Nile to within 200 miles of

103 Khartoum. Marianne North (1830-90), like her contemporary Lucy
Bird Bishop (one of the first women accepted as fellows of the Royal
Geographical Society), displayed the keen eye of a naturalist. North
sought out and painted hundreds ofspecies of native plants, which she
later donated to the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew, along with a
gallery in which to show them.
The Society of Female Artists, which encouraged both amateurs
and professionals to exhibit, provided one of several important venues
for women’s work on themes of travel and the Orient. Margaret
Murray Cooksley (active 1844-1902), however, exhibited paintings on
Oriental themes, many of them showing figures in interiors, at the
Royal Academy, as did Lady Dunbar (active 1865-75). Dunbar met
Barbara Bodichon in Algeria in the 1870s and the latter, although
better known for political writings, such as A Brief Summary in Plain
202
Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women (1854), also
exhibited Algerian landscapes in England.
By the 1860s, feminists were using what they and their contempo-
raries viewed as Indian women’s plight as an incentive for British
women to work in the empire. Issues like the need for Indian female
education soon expanded Victorian social reform to the colonies.
Women’s growing voice in public life also extended to reshaping the
historical record.
Although Elizabeth Thompson was the best-known woman pro-
ducing historical paintings on a grand scale, a number of other women
turned to the writings of women and to history’s heroic women for
subjects that would enable them to enter the field of history painting.
While women artists were seldom, if ever, given public commissions
for history paintings, they nevertheless produced large and important
works which proposed new readings of historical events. Often they
retold historical incidents from a woman’s point of view, as in Lucy
Madox Brown Rossetti’s Margaret Roper Receiving the Head of Her Father,
Sir Thomas More, from London Bridge and Henrietta Ward’s Queen Mary
Quitted Stirling Castle on the Morning ofWednesday, April 23 ..., based on
Agnes Strickland’s account in Lives of the Queens of Scotland (1850).

tos Anna Lea Merritt War 1883

 The only woman other than Ward to receive high praise for her his-
torical painting during this period was Emily Mary Osborn. Her
Escape of Lord Nithsdale from the Tower (1861) stressed the active coura-
geous women who rescued Lord Nithsdale from the Tower of
London where he had been imprisoned for his support of the Stuart
cause. Other works reported women’s support and friendship, or their
9S strength. Evelyn Pickering de Morgan’s Medea of 1889 replaces con-
ventional male representations of Medea as a cruel temptress and the
murderer of her children with an image of a woman skilled in sorcery.
Not all women shared Thompson’s ambition to paint “masculine”
105 subjects. Anna Lea Merritt’s War (1883) was presented by its author as
upholding womanhood in the tace of Thompson’s challenge. Merritt,
an American trom Philadelphia who settled in London after marrying
her teacher, described it as “Five women, one boy watching army
return—ancient dress. It shows her respect for the classical tradition. It
also shows the women’s side of war—the anxieties, the fears & the
long wait as opposed to the glorification of war (q.v. Lady Butler).”
Merritt, like many other women in Victorian England, upheld the
ideology of separate spheres. Opposing the purity and passivity of the
idealized women on the balcony to the men of action parading below,
she affirms the dominant view of acceptable femininity defined in
terms of passivity and domesticity while at the same time offering a
critique of masculine enterprises. American women artists, as we shall
see, faced similar challenges.

204
 CHAPTER SEVEN

Toward Utopia: Moral Reform and American Art

in the Nineteenth Century

Women’s labor was a necessary part of the building of colonial

America and, although the legal status of women in the colonies was
limited and men played the central economic role, women enjoyed
rights and privileges denied them in Europe. Nevertheless, as the
workplace moved outside the home during the nineteenth century,
here also a growing ideology of domesticity linked women to a
specific set of sex roles. In emphasizing the split between “work” and
“home,” and centering salvation in the latter, the cult of domesticity
also established the American home as a refuge from the desecrations
of the modern business world, a place where spiritual values could be
cultivated, and a measure against which to evaluate women’s cultural
productions.
Seeking to extend the refining influence of domestic life, large
numbers of middle-class women in America were caught up in the
Christian reform movements that promoted the abolition of slavery,
temperance, and universal suffrage. The identification of these social
reform movements with an ideology of the home as a site of
edification and enlightenment has led modern feminist historians to
refer to this union of social reform and women’s rights as “domestic
feminism.”
Needlework and painting were considered appropriate handicrafts
for women and during the first half of the century women are well
represented among American folk artists. Little formal training was
available and many women, like Eunice Pinney, were self-taught ama- 106
teurs who worked at their art whenever they had free time. One of
the first professional artists in colonial America, Henrietta Johnson,
executed rather stylized Rococo portraits in pastel in Charleston,
South Carolina, in the first two decades of the eighteenth century.
She was succeeded by the miniaturists Sarah Goodridge and Anne
Hall, by the Peale women of Philadelphia, by Herminia Borchard
Dassel, who exhibited elegant portraits of wealthy New Yorkers at
the National Academy of Design, and by Jane Stuart, the daughter of
Gilbert Stuart who—despite his refusal to instruct her—ground his
205
 ‘THE CoTTERS
106 Eunice Pinney The Cotters, Saturday Night c. 1815

colors, filled in his backgrounds, and copied his works for sale after
he died penniless.
The impetus toward social reform in America was supported by a
group of progressive New England individualists, many of them
Quakers or Unitarians. Steeped in a Transcendentalism shaped by
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s credo of self-determination, the beliefs of
free-thinkers and social Utopians like Bronson Alcott often extended
to their wives and families. Louisa May Alcott became one of the most
successful novelists of her day, and her sister May’s promising career as
an artist was cut short by her death in childbirth. Anne Whitney,
Harriet Hosmer, Lilly Martin Spencer, Louisa Lander, and numerous
other prominent women artists came from families whose reformist
tendencies extended to a belief in wider opportunities for women.
By mid-century, as educational reform led to greater openings for
women, there was a schism between women who thought of
themselves as amateurs and those who had begun to think of art as a
profession.
206
 From the beginning, women’s social organizing drew on skills
inculcated at home. Needlework and textile manufacture, increasingly
polarized in the nineteenth century between a household activity
expected of virtually all women and an income-producing occupa-
tion in an industrializing society, became a focus of women’s political
organizing. Women’s traditional skills as producers of cloth were trans-
ferred to industrial production. Female workers were the first indus-
trial workers in America following the wide-scale development of
textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, around 1826. The Lowell mills
experiment, begun with the idealistic hope that the exploitation of
women workers in England could be avoided in America, failed. The
intertwined histories of labor reform, feminism, and abolition in
America can be seen in the founding of the Female Labor Reform
Association 1n 1845 in response to the deplorable conditions under
which women worked in the mills. Although unsuccessful in agitating
for a ten-hour working day and a six-day week for women in the
Lowell mills, the association’s actions led to the first government
inguiry into labor conditions in the United States.
Women quickly used their skills in needlework to connect the
domestic sphere and the public world of collective social action.
Needlework cases bearing popular abolitionist slogans appeared and, 107
by 1834, women were selling needlework items to raise money for the
abolitionist cause. “May the points of our needles prick the slave
owner’s conscience,’ declared Sarah Grimké, one of the first women
to speak publicly against slavery. Pieced quilts also began to show
reform thought. In recent years, traditional quilts have been exhibited
as “art” in galleries and museums, where they display a formal affinity
with geometric abstract painting when displayed against blank white
walls. The fact that these striking examples of women’s skill and
labor have been taken out of context and commodified must not,
however, blind us to their narrative, autobiographical, social, and
political content.
As early as 1825, the popular quilt pattern known as “Job’s Tears”
was renamed “Slave Chain.” Another pattern, called “Underground 108
Railroad” contains a series of light and dark squares leading to central
areas identified with the “safe houses” that sheltered escaping slaves on
their route north. Slavery was avoided as a subject by most literary
men in America, and it was women who often drew attention to the
abolitionist cause. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)
has been called the most important act by an individual to advance
the cause of abolition; other women, notably the British Harriet
207
 iMoe

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107 Needlework case with abolitionist slogan, c. 1830-50

Tos “Underground Railroad,” c. 1870-90

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 Martineau, the Swedish reformer Frederika Bremer, and the black
leader Sojourner Truth, were quick to draw the obvious parallels
between the condition of women and that of slaves: “the plight of
slave and woman blends like the colors of the rainbow,’ wrote
Grimke.
In the southern states, the skills and labor of slave women were also
integral to the production of visual culture. Although quilts made in
the northern states began to display the influence of the Women’s
Rights Movement in their themes and images by mid-century, those
produced by women living in the ante-bellum South remained tied to
that region’s agrarian economy, and to the social reality of slave labor.
While it has long been assumed that quilts made by slave women were
produced under the watchful eye of the white mistress and in accor-
dance with Euro-American design traditions, recent research has
shown that in addition to stitching under supervision, slaves made
quilts for personal use in their own time. Many ofthese quilts display a
boldness of design and color not seen elsewhere. The design charac-
teristics of nineteenth-century African-American quilts—vertical
stripes, strong colors and shapes, asymmetry and multiple pattern-
ing—often have roots (though sometimes disguised) in the forms and
elements of African cosmology and mythology.
The most fully documented examples of early African-American
story quilts are those of Harriet Powers (1837-1911), a woman born
into slavery in Georgia whose narratives have sources in three types of
stories drawn from oral tradition: local legends, Biblical tales, and
accounts of astronomical occurrences. Although narrative quilts like
those of Powers are a distinctly American art form, she and other slave
quilters used applique techniques that have been traced to historic
Eastern and Middle Eastern civilizations, and which have roots in
African tapestry traditions like that of the Fon people of Dahomey,
10g West Africa. One of Powers’s two well-known quilts (both now in
American museum collections) was purchased after its exhibition at a
Cotton Fair in 1886 by Jennie Smith, a southern white middle-class
artist who had studied painting in Baltimore, New York, and Paris.
Powers herself produced the detailed description of each scene that
enabled subsequent generations to decode its complex iconography.
While economic hardship forced Harriet Powers to sell her prized
quilt, other slaves were sometimes able to use their sewing skills to
effect the transition to life as free women. In an 1868 autobiography
entitled Behind the Scenes, a former slave named Mrs. Keckly—who
became seamstress to Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the sixteenth

210
president of the United States—reports that she used money earned
through her sewing skills to purchase her freedom, along with that of
her son.
The full impact of the women’s movement began to be felt with
the first United States National Women’s Rights Convention in
Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. A quilt produced just a few years
later suggests the new spirit among American women. Its series of
appliquéd squares show a woman engaging in what were at the time
radical activities for women: driving her own buggy with a banner
advocating “WOMAN RIG(HTS)”; dressed to go out while her hus-
band, wearing an apron, remains at home; and, most daring of all, giv-
ing a speech in public.
Geography and class played a significant role in shaping the experi-
ences of nineteenth-century American women artists. While many
middle-class women in the major urban centers of the East Coast
remained tied to European models of cultural and intellectual life,
the opening up of the West, and life on the frontier, dramatically
changed the lives of other women. During the second half of the
century, the Westward Expansion of European settlers across the
Plains states brought with it a wide range of new cultural interac-
tions. These ranged from benevolent trading to the displacement
and, in some cases, near extermination of native populations. Among
Native American peoples, many of whom had inhabited these lands
for thousands of years, visual culture and social life were integrated in
ways not easily assimilated to European models. Not only are the
categories and values of Western art history not applicable (many
American Indian languages lack a term comparable to “art” or
“artist, for example), it is Euro-American individuals and institutions
which have absorbed native objects into European categories of dis-
play and commodification. Among Native Americans, visual objects
were produced by many individuals of both sexes. Contact brought
new technologies such as tools, which made immediate and radical
changes to lifestyles and new materials—including beads, paint, dies,
silk, and wool cloth. In many cases, it also led to expanded produc-
tion for trade and sale. At the same time, quilts made by settlers
quickly began to reflect the patterns and colors of native weaving
and basketry.
In the Southwest, where the art of weaving cotton textiles on a
loom can be dated to approximately AD 700, and reached its apogee
with the work of the Navajo weavers of the mid-nineteenth century,
women worked with wool prepared from the fleece of sheep
211
t11 Navajo Chiet’s blanket, Third Phase, 1870s

introduced by the Spanish, and with both traditional dyes and com-
mercial yarns obtained by trade. The expansion of trade, and the later
production of objects for sale, also encouraged the emergence of
named artists like the San Ildefonso potter Maria Martinez (active
from around 1900 to the 1970s) whose works would become highly
prized collectors’ items.
Among Western settlers, in addition to competing for public com-
missions, the first generation of professional women sculptors was able
to depend on family connections and on an emerging group of
wealthy private collectors and philanthropists, many of them women.
Caught up in the tensions between the vigor of the young American
Republic and the legacy of European culture that shaped the literature
of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and others, they looked to
Europe for liberation from the restrictions placed on women at home.
Other women, like the painter Lilly Martin Spencer, as well as many
of the women trained in the design professions, were part of the pro-
fessionalizing of education for those middle-class women forced to
212
support themselves. The emergence of a new, middle-class buying
public also played a not inconsiderable role in the dissemination of
their work.
Lilly Martin Spencer (1822-1902) is an exception among nine-
teenth-century American artists: a married woman from Ohio who
depended on her art to support her thirteen children and her husband
(who stayed home and assisted her in professional and domestic
duties); a child of communitarian Fourierite parents who claimed to
have little time for politics or feminism; and an artist who refused the
opportunity to go to Europe for training as did many other American
artists.
Spencer’s painting belongs to the period when American art shifted
from an untutored folk expression to styles based on academic tradi-
tions and the study of European art. Her career is closely linked to the
growing demand for inexpensive prints to decorate middle-class
homes, and she became the most popular and widely reproduced
female genre painter of mid-nineteenth-century America. Despite her
parents’ progressive views, and an education that ranged from
Shakespeare, Locke, and Rousseau to Moliere, Pope, and Gibbon, there
is a testy note in her reply to a letter from her mother in 1850 urging
her to be more of a feminist activist. “My time dear mother,’ she
wrote, “to enable me to succeed in my painting is so entirely
engrossed by it, that I am not able to give my attention to anything
else.... You know dear mother that that is your point of exertions ...
like my painting is mine, and you know dear mother as you have told
me many times that if we wish to become great in any one thing we
must condense our powers to one point.’
The first exhibition of her work in Ohio in 1841 brought her to
the attention of Nicholas Longworth, a wealthy Cincinnati philan-
thropist who supported a number of artists then emerging from the
western frontier. Longworth offered to assist her in going to Boston to
study with Washington Allston or John Trumbull and then to Europe.
Instead, she moved with her father to Cincinnati, where she studied
with the successful portrait painter James Beard. The nature and
extent of her training are unknown.
Spencer’s first major success came in 1849 when her painting, Life’s
Happy Hour, was selected by the Western Art Union for engraving.
Subscribers to the Art Union, established 1n Cincinnati in 1847, paid a
fixed sum in exchange for an annual engraving of an “important”
painting by an American artist and a chance to win an original work
of art in an annual lottery. Although often criticized for exploiting
213
artists and vulgarizing public taste, the art unions were instrumental 1n
developing the aesthetic tastes of the new buying public.
After her work was shown at the National Academy of Design in
1848, Spencer moved her family to New York in order to obtain the
additional training that would enable her to meet the growing
demand for images of happy, self-sufficient domesticity. Her art has
been characterized as “neither an out-and-out affirmation of middle
class and patriarchal values nor an explicit rejection of such values, but
rather an uncertain response: an embrace of them while also, increas-
ingly (yet perhaps unconsciously), a teasing or mocking subversion of
them.” The good-natured humor and clumsy drawing of her work
belong to the American folk tradition of exaggerated humor and sen-
timental nostalgia. Many of her paintings, especially those depicting
children at play, like The Little Navigator and The Young Teacher, were
purchased during the 1850s and 1860s for the French firm of Goupil,
Vibert and Co. and sent to Paris to serve as the basis for lithographs,
many of them hand-colored by women working in a factory-like
process. The prints were then returned to America for sale.
The founding of the Cosmopolitan Art Association in 1854
expanded Spencer’s market through its periodical, The Cosmopolitan
Art Journal, which was aimed at a female audience with the leisure and
education to read magazines. Spencer's Fi! Fo! Fum!, exhibited at the
National Academy of Design in 1858, was produced as a frontispiece
the following year. The unpretentious and detailed rendering of Fi!
Fo! Fum! found a responsive audience among the journal’s readers for
this scene of family intimacy as a defense against threats from the out-
side world. Wide reproduction spread Spencer’s name across America
but, despite her role in defining a popular imagery, she herself strug-
eled financially throughout much of her life.
The demands placed on Spencer by the need to support her family
and to satisfy a large, often unsophisticated, middle-class audience
were very different from those confronting the first generation of
professional women artists who trained abroad during the 18sos and
1860s. Female art students, whose families were willing to support
their aspirations, flocked to Europe. Barred from art academies, they
sought private instruction in the studios of male painters and sculp-
tors, often at high cost. Their experiences abroad are detailed in May
Alcott’s Studying Art Abroad, in the diaries of Marie Bashkirtseff, a
young Russian art student in Paris in the 1880s, and in the letters of
Harriet Hosmer, Anne Whitney, Mary Cassatt, and others. “Here,”
wrote Hosmer from Rome, “every woman has a chance ifshe is bold
214
112 Lilly Martin Spencer We Both
Must Fade 1869

enough to avail herself of it, and I am proud of every woman who i

bold enough. ... Therefore I say honor all those who step boldly for
ward, and in spite of ridicule and criticism, pave a broader way for
women of the next generation.” Hosmer’s sentiments were repeated
by other women throughout the century: “After all give me France,’
wrote Cassatt in 1893. “Women do not have to fight for recognition
here if they do serious work.”
Harriet Hosmer was one of the many Neoclassical sculptors who
followed Horatio Greenough to Rome after 1825 in search of good
marble and skilled carvers, historical collections of classical sculpture,
and an inexpensive and congenial environment. She was the first of a
group of women sculptors active in Rome in the 1850s and 186o:
which included Louisa Lander, Emma Stebbins, Margaret Foley,
Florence Freeman, Anne Whitney, Edmonia Lewis, and Vinnie Ream
Hoxie.
These sculptors have entered art history bound together as Henry
James’s “strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors’ who at one

214
time settled upon the seven hills in a white marmorean flock.” James's
vivid description has obscured the real differences that existed among
them. Their training, attitudes, and level of professional achievement
varied widely, and their work ranged from the Neoclassical style and
subjects of American pre-Civil War public sculpture to the greater
realism of the late nineteenth century.
Like other successful women of their day, the members of the
“White Marmorean flock” were encouraged to pursue independent
lives and careers by liberal parents, other women involved in public
reform activity, and by the fact that the Neoclassical movement was
understood as an extension of Classical Greece when a flourishing of
the arts had accompanied political liberty. Sculpture was associated
with the elevated moral and spiritual values which legitimized female
reform activity. In a letter to her patron, Wayman Crow, written before
her departure for Rome, Hosmer explained why sculpture was supe-
rior to painting: “I grant that the painter must be as scientific as the
sculptor, and in general must possess a greater variety of knowledge,
and what he produces 1s more easily understood by the mass, because
what they see on canvas is most frequently to be observed in nature. In
high sculpture it is not so. A great thought must be embodied in a
great manner, and such greatness is not to find its counterpart in
everyday things.”
The same moral arguments which legitimized some women’s
choice of sculpture as a profession were frequently used by critics to
contain their production within the boundaries of the acceptably
feminine. Writing about women sculptors in Rome, the art critic of
the Art Journal noted in 1866 that they were “Twelve stars of greater or
lesser magnitude, who shed their soft and humanizing influence on a
profession which has done so much for the refinement and civiliza-
tion of man.” He went on to argue, however, that sculpture by women
belonged in a domestic setting where it was “destined to refine and
embellish many a home.”
Mainstream feminism in nineteenth-century America was refor-
mist at heart, directed toward righting social wrongs rather than radi-
cally restructuring relationships between the sexes. In competing for
public commissions, and in producing work that was, however conser-
vative in style, largely indistinguishable from that of their male con-
temporaries, and which was often monumental in scope and
conception, these sculptors succeeded more than any other women
before them in integrating themselves into a male system of artistic
production. Although their work includes numerous representations
216
of women, they often chose to depict strong, active females and they
struggled to escape the devaluation that accompanied the identi-
fication of their work as “feminine.”
The “sisterhood” was among the first group of American women
to exchange marriage and domesticity for professional careers; all
except Hoxie remained single. “Even if so inclined,’ remarked
Hosmer, “an artist has no business to marry. For a man, it may be well
enough, but for a woman, on whom matrimonial duties and cares
weigh more heavily, it is a moral wrong, I think, for she must either
neglect her profession or her family... ”’ Instead, Hosmer’s profession
became her “family” and she constantly referred to her sculptures as
“children,” using the term which reassured the Victorian middle class
that, although some women had turned their backs on marriage, they
remained bound by the codes of respectable femininity. “Rosa
Bonheur may not have had that wonderful spark of genius . . ”’ wrote
Gertrude Atherton in 1899, “[but] she always finished a picture with
the loving care of aconscientious mother, who insists that her children
shall be clean and well-dressed... .”
Women embarking on professional careers at mid-century were
constantly confronted by circumscribed views of femininity. Only
friendships with other women provided some measure of freedom
from the demands of marriage, family, and home. Intense, passionate,
and committed relationships between women offered a quasi-
legitimate alternative to marriage. The passionate nature of women’s
relationships with one another was accepted because ofa widely held
belief that, since genital sexuality was exclusively defined in relation
to men, women’s love for one another could only be an extension of
their pure and moral natures. Hosmer, on the other hand, who open-
ly defied convention by riding her horse astride through the streets of
Rome and meeting male sculptors for breakfast in cafés, diffused crit-
icism by adopting the persona of a playful tomboy rather than a
grown woman. Although the sculptor William Wetmore Story was
enchanted with her as a talented child, others were not convinced.
“Miss Hosmer’s want of modesty is enough to disgust a dog,” wrote
the sculptor Thomas Crawford. “She has had casts for the entire female
model made and exhibited them in a shockingly indecent manner to
all the young artists who called upon her. This is going it rather
strong.”
Harriet Hosmer is often coupled with William Wetmore Story
as the leading American sculptors of their day. She was the first
woman to go to Rome and almost all of her most important work was
217
executed during her first decade there. Born in Watertown,
Massachusetts, in 1830, Hosmer was educated at a liberal school and
decided early to become a sculptor. Refused admission to an anatomy
class in Boston, she enlisted the aid of a school friend’s father in St.
Louis. Wayman Crow, who became her most loyal and consistent
patron, arranged for her to take anatomy lessons from Dr. J. N.
McDowell. The Medical College of St. Louis was one of the few
places that allowed women to study the human body; even so, Hosmer
received her instruction privately in the doctor’s office while the rest
of the class met as a group.
Hosmer carved her first full-size marble, Hesper or The Evening Star
(1852), by herselfin her Watertown studio, often working ten hours a
day. The work, inspired by Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam,’
received positive critical notice and Hosmer’s friends, who included
the Boston actress Charlotte Cushman, encouraged her to go to Rome
for further study. She sailed with her father and Cushman in 1852.
Famous among other things for her theatrical portrayals of male
roles like Romeo and Cardinal Wolsey, Cushman became a pivotal
figure among the Anglo-Americans in Rome, providing Hosmer with
rent-free lodging for the next seven years. Although Cushman is now
primarily associated with women sculptors, Hosmer was merely the
first of a circle of artists, both men and women, who benefited from
the actress’s friendship and professional support. Cushman and Story
were rivals for social leadership in Rome and the venomous com-
ments sometimes directed at women artists in her circle (like
Crawford’s denunciation of Hosmer) must be read in the light of this
factional rivalry.
Cushman encouraged the sculptor John Gibson, who did not nor-
mally accept pupils, to instruct Hosmer. He agreed after seeing pho-
tographs of Hesper and gave her a studio in his garden. Dapline (1854)
and Oenone (c. 1855), Hosmer’s first full-length allegory, followed her
apprenticeship with Gibson. Although critics commended Oenone’s
simplicity and classic grace, Hosmer’s first public success came not
with a full-size figure but with a “fancy” or “conceit.” Puck on a
Toadstool (1856) was the first of several “conceits” which her contem-
poraries found “native to a woman’s fancy.” Replicas of the work, one
of them purchased by the Prince of Wales, eventually earned the artist
some $50,000 and ensured her fame, but the decision to produce a
purely commercial work was precipitated by her father’s sudden
financial losses and her need to be financially independent in order to
remain in Rome.

218
113. Harriet Hosmer Zenobia in Chains 1859

114 (left) Emma Stebbins Industry 1860

115 (below) Harriet Hosmer Beatrice Cenci 1857

Vif
Wii//

Be oe .
 In 1855, Louisa Lander (1826-1923) arrived in Rome, having previ-
ously modeled portrait busts in Washington, D.C. Her Virginia Dare
(1860) takes its subject from Richard Kakluyt’s writings about Virginia
Dare, the first white woman born in the New World. The fate of the
young woman, who disappeared with the rest of the Roanoke Colony,
is not known, and Lander’s sculpture is a symbolic portrait. Her nudi-
ty, and the fishnet she holds, are unusual interpretations of the theme
and the figure’s erect stance and bold gaze are a departure from the
usual Neoclassical convention ofdisplaying the female nude with chin
dropped and gaze lowered.
Emma Stebbins (1815-82), who began as a painter, became inter-
114 ested in sculpture after meeting Cushman in Rome in 1856. The
actress’s companion for many years, and later her biographer, Stebbins
worked on historical and religious subjects, followed in 1867 by a large
Columbus, which now stands in Brooklyn, New York. Cushman stead-
fastly supported Stebbins’s professional life; among other works, a stat-
ue of the educator Horace Mann for the State House in Boston and
the Angel of the Waters Fountain (c. 1862) for New York’s Central Park
were commissioned with the actress’s help.
Women Neoclassical sculptors also produced a number of images
of women responding with fortitude and moral courage to the vicissi-
tudes of fate and the powerlessness experienced by women under
patriarchy. They range from Whitney’s Lady Godiva (1861) and Roma
(1869), and Lewis’s The Freed Woman and Her Child (1866) to Hosmer’s
115 Beatrice Cenci (1857) and Zenobia in Chains (1859). Beatrice Cenci was
Hosmer’s response to the moment in Shelley’s verse drama, The Cenci,
when, through sleep, Beatrice temporarily escapes the horror of
having murdered her odious and incestuous father. The sculpture
responds to the spirit of Shelley’s poem, as does a dialogue in blank
verse entitled “The Cenci’s Dream: In the Night of Her Execution,’
written by Whitney and published 1n 1857. Hosmer’s version also has
sources in Guido Ren1’s portrait of the young woman, then the most
admired seventeenth-century painting in Rome, and in Stefano
Maderno’s Saint Cecilia.
The story of Zenobia, the third-century Queen of Palmyra who
was defeated and captured by the Romans, had been popular for over a
century. Although the theme has many nineteenth-century literary
sources, visual representations are rare and Hosmer’s is unique in its
archeological detail. The draped figure is proportioned according to
antique canons; the features are based on an antique coin and the gar-
ment and ornaments on a mosaic in San Marco in Florence. Hosmer

220
also consulted frequently with Mrs. Jameson, who had included a
chapter on Zenobia in her Celebrated Female Sovereigns (1831).
Departing from her literary sources, she presents a queen who does
not succumb to defeat, who responds with fortitude to her capture
and humiliation. Unlike the many writers who linked Zenobia’s
downfall to personal failings, Hosmer instead chose to emphasize her
intellectual courage, fusing Christian ideals with a nineteenth-century
feminist belief in women’s capability.
The first exhibition of Zenobia in Chains in England in 1862 be
brought a disappointing critical response and Hosmer, like many
women artists before her, was forced to respond to charges that her
work was not her own, and might even have been produced by John
Gibson, her former teacher. In December 1864, Hosmer responded to
the charges in an article in Atlantic Monthly in which she explained
that all Neoclassical sculptors depended on skilled artisans, working
from models produced by the artist, to do the actual carving:
“The artist is a man (or woman) of genius; the artisan merely a man
of talent.”
Exhibited in the United States the following year, Zenobia in Chains
was a triumphant success, taking its place alongside Hiram Power’s
Greek Slave (1847) as a testament to nineteenth-century moral ideals.
But although both figures are captive and not in control of their fates,
Zenobia’s resolute dignity stands as a rebuke to the Greek Slave’s pruri-
ent, 1f allegorical, nudity. More than one critic lauded Hosmer’s figure
as an embodiment of the new ideal of womanhood. Newspaper arti-
cles acclaimed the work and 15,000 people clamored to see it in
Boston.
The success of Zenobia in Chains enabled Hosmer to establish her-
self in an impressive studio in Rome, but although she produced large
fountains for Lady Eastlake and Lady Marion Alford, who also sup-
ported Gibson and Elisabet Ney, her production gradually declined
for reasons which are not yet clear.
Nathaniel Hawthorne published his novel The Marble Faun in
1859 and immortalized the women sculptors of Rome in the charac-
ters of the artists Hilda and Miriam who play out a drama of art,
morality, and human frailty. Hawthorne himself was far from recon-
ciled to the idea of independent women: “all women as authors are
feeble and tiresome,” he wrote to his publisher, “I wish they were
forbidden to write on pain of having their faces deeply scarified with
an oyster shell.’ His novel becomes a kind ofliterary revenge on the
new womanhood as he rewrites female creativity, making the gentle
221
and pure Hilda’s “art” nothing more than exquisite copies of Italian
masterpieces, and constructing a tragic end for Miriam’s more pas-
slonate creativity.
The novel elicited mixed reactions: Emerson dismissed it as “mere
mush,” while Hosmer, rejecting the plot as “nothing,” was drawn to its
“perfection of writing, beauty of thought, and for the perfect combi-
nation of nature, art and poetry....” The strongest denunciation came
from Whitney: “The Marble Faun, which | am trying hard to read, 1s a
detestable book,” she wrote to the painter Adeline Manning in 1860,
emphatically rejecting Hawthorne’s characterization of the woman
artist.
Women artists continued to go to Rome well into the 1860s. The
last two women to set out before the Civil War were Margaret Foley,
who arrived around 1860, and Florence Freeman, who came in 1861.
Foley (1827-77) had begun carving and modeling in Vermont where
she was born. Recruited for the textile mills in Lowell, she taught
Saturday art classes there before going to Boston to become a cameo
cutter and sculptor. Her bronze Stonewall Jackson, cast in London in
1873, was the first Confederate Civil War monument in America.
Freeman (1836-76), who had studied with Richard Greenough in
Boston, specialized in bas-reliefs and was closely connected to
Cushman’s circle. Her bust of Sandophon, the Angel of Prayer, based on a
Longfellow poem, was owned by him.
It is the work of Anne Whitney and Edmonia Lewis that is most
powerfully connected with the human rights issues of their day, which
often demanded a less allegorical and more naturalistic sculptural
treatment. During the Civil War years, and before going to Rome,
both sculptors worked in Boston where for part of the time they
maintained studios in the same building. Whitney, like Hosmer, came
from a liberal Unitarian family in Watertown, Massachusetts, that
traced its roots to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Lewis (1845—after
1909) was the only major American woman artist of color in the nine-
teenth century. Part black, part Chippewa Indian, part white, she was
educated at Oberlin College, one of 250 students of color enroled
there before the Civil War. Accused of poisoning two friends with
drugged wine in what appears to have been a prank turned tragic, she
was beaten by vigilantes, arrested and tried, and defended by the most
famous black lawyer, John Mercer Langston, before being released and
making her way to Boston.
In Boston, Lewis had an introduction to William Lloyd Garrison
and through him she met other abolitionists and suffragists. Her
222
116 Margaret Foley
William Cullen Bryant 1867

introduction to the Boston art community, however, was less positive.

After three male sculptors refused to instruct her, she copied fragments
of sculpture lent her by the portrait sculptor Edward Brackett and
turned to Whitney for informal lessons. Conscious of the extent to
which the white community regarded her as an exotic, and afraid that
she would be accused of not having done her own work, Lewis later
refused additional training.
In 1864, she was at work on a bust of Robert Gould Shaw, the
leader of the Negro regiment from Massachusetts during the Civil
War and the subject of works by Whitney and Foley. Lewis also mod-
eled medallions in clay and plaster of John Brown, Garrison, Charles
Sumner, and Wendell Philips. Among her earliest works is a bust of
Maria Weston Chapman, an ardent worker for anti-slavery.
Whitney (1821-1915) was a poet before she became a sculptor and
the publication of her fifteen sonnets,““To Night,” in 1855 in Una, the
first women’s rights publication, brought her to the attention of the
leading feminists of the day. Her friendships with Elizabeth Blackwell,
Lydia Maria Child, whose History of the Condition of Women in Various
Ages and Nations had been published in 1835, and Lucy Stone, the
women’s rights leader and first woman from Massachusetts to receive
o2%
a college degree, were crucial to her decision to pursue a career 1n
sculpture.
By 1863, Whitney had executed her first life-size sculpture, a
Lady Godiva (1861), based on Tennyson’s heroine who _ braved
mockery and humiliation for the sake of an oppressed peasantry.
Her social concerns were strengthened through attendance at eman-
cipation meetings and anti-slavery conventions. Her Africa, executed
in 1863, the year of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation,
portrayed a symbolic mother of an African race rising ‘from slavery.
After arriving in Rome in 1866, Whitney again took up themes of
social and political importance. Roma (1869-70), an allegorical
image of the city as an old beggar, combines a critique of the effects
of papal authority with a sympathetic portrayal of the city’s poorest
citizens. Her inclusion of a satirical mask of a well-known cardinal
in an early version of the sculpture caused a storm of criticism
when it was first exhibited in Rome in June. Whitney subsequently
sent the piece to Florence for safekeeping, and the offending detail
was removed in later versions (including the one like that installed
today at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where the sculptor later
taught).
Whitney’s interest in political subjects was shared by Edmonia
Lewis, who also took up residence in Rome in 1866. With Chapman’s
and Cushman’s professional support, Lewis began a series of works on

117. Edmonia Lewis

Forever Free 1867
118 Anne Whitney Charles Sumner 1900 119 Vinnie Ream Hoxie
Abraham Lincoln 1871

black and American Indian themes. Later that year she completed her
first ideal work, The Freed Woman on First Hearing of Her Liberty (1866),
followed by Forever Free (1867). Both works take up the subject of
emancipation; both produce social statements on the experience of
slavery using the aesthetic conventions of Neoclassicism’s idealized
figures. Lewis’s choice of Neoclassicism may be read as a sign of her
intention to see her works accepted not as ethnographic curiosities,
but as contributions to an ongoing debate about ideal form and uni-
versal values in American sculpture.
The Freed Woman and Her Child (now lost) and Forever Free recall the
strong sentiments of the Emancipation Proclamation: “all persons held
as slaves ...are,and henceforward shall be, free.’ In the former work, a
woman hearing of her emancipation kneels in thanksgiving with her
child. Lewis described the subject as “a humble one, but my first
thought was for my poor father’s people, how I could do them good
52%
 in my small way.’ The female figure reappears in Forever Free, original-
ly called The Morning ofLiberty, kneeling beside a male slave who rais-
es his left arm in triumph, brandishing his broken chains and standing
firmly on a cast-off ball and chain.
On October 18, 1869, Lewis returned to the United States for the
dedication of Forever Free at Tremont Temple in Boston. In the com-
pany of prominent Abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison,
she saw her work installed as a monument to freedom and self-
determination. The Reverend Leonard A. Grimes, the prominent
abolitionist minister to whom the sculpture was dedicated, was him-
self a free person of African descent who had dedicated his life to
helping runaway slaves.
Edmonia Lewis’s later life remains obscured by rumor and mystery.
Whitney’s return to Boston in 1871, on the other hand, was followed
by a government commission for a marble statue of Samuel Adams for
the Capitol in Washington and the loss of acompetition in 1875 for a
118 statue of Charles Sumner when it was learned that a woman had won.
The bronze was finally erected in Harvard Square in 1902.
By the time Whitney received her commission for Samuel Adams,
the first federal commission had already gone to another woman.
119 Vinnie Ream Hoxie’s imposing figure of Abraham Lincoln was
unveiled in Statuary Hall in the Capitol in 1871. In many ways, the
circumstances surrounding the commission sum up all the ambiva-
lence expressed toward this first generation of professional American
women. Hoxie, born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1847, studied there
briefly before moving to Washington in 1862, where she received
some training in sculpture. After executing a portrait bust of Lincoln,
she met the President. Her model of the man who, in her words, was
one “such as will elevate the human race and ennoble human nature,’
was entered in the congressional competition for a memorial to the
slain leader in 1866. The final congressional deliberations included
attacks on Hoxie’s youth and inexperience by several senators; others
praised her beauty and charming demeanor. The criticism quickly
deteriorated into attacks on female sculptors and the inappropriate
behavior of women desiring to execute large monuments, which in
fact masked profound artistic differences between the East Coast artis-
tic and intellectual elite and challenges to its hegemony from the
South and West.
The commission was finally awarded to Hoxie. Her moving depic-
tion of the weary and bowed president was enthusiastically received
and the young sculptor became an instant celebrity. The mood of
226
celebration was short-lived. The New York Tribune attacked Hoxie’s
technical abilities, describing her Lincoln as a “frightful abortion,’ and
the artist as a “fraud.” Charging once again that the sculpture was not
her own work, the sexualized language ofthe critical attack reveals the
unconscious belief that female ambition exceeded and violated
nature.
As the ensuing controversy widened, Whitney applauded an article
in the feminist weekly, The Revolution, in which the author “deprecates
all this personal twaddle about hair and eyes... . And I hope, in mercy,
suffrage and other things that belong to us will come soon and lift us
out of—get us above, I mean—hair, eyes, and clothes.’ Hosmer also
came to her defense: “We women artists will not hear that we are
imposters without asking for proof... . [Hoxie] 1s as much entitled to
the credit of her work as any artist I know.... We resent all such accu-
sations as unjust, ungenerous, and contemptible.”
Hosmer’s emphatic response, and her faith in women’s abilities,
reflected the increasing public confidence that American women
were displaying during the 1870s and 1880s. By 1876, when the
Centennial Exposition opened its doors in Philadelphia, women
represented almost one fifth of the labor force and their part in the
“century of progress” celebrated by the fair was evident in more
than six hundred exhibits displaying their achievements in journalism,
medicine, science, business, and social work. During the second half
of the century, women also contributed to defining a new art.

227
CHAPTER EIGHT

Separate but Unequal: Woman’s Sphere and the New Art

The Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 represented a mile-

stone In women’s struggles to achieve public visibility in American
cultural life. Approximately one tenth of the works of art in the
United States section were by women, more than in any other coun-
try’s display. Emily Sartain of Philadelphia received a Centennial gold
medal, the only one awarded to a woman, for a painting called The
Reproof (now lost). Sartain’s painting was displayed in the United States
section, but the exhibition also boasted a Women’s Pavilion with over
40,000 square feet of exhibition space devoted to the work of almost
1500 women from at least 13 countries.
Presided over by Elizabeth Duane Gillespie, Benjamin Franklin’s
ereat-granddaughter and an experienced community leader, the
Women’s Centennial Executive Committee had raised over $150,000
amid considerable controversy. The building’s existence as a segre-
gated display area had been contested from the beginning. “It would,
in my opinion,’ wrote the Director of Grounds, “be in every respect
better for them to occupy a building exclusively their own and devoted
to women’s work alone.” To others, the presence of a separate
exhibition facility for women at the Exposition signaled an institu-
tionalizing of women’s productions in isolation from those of men.
Sensitive to the implications of exhibiting women’s art only in relation
to other areas of feminine creative activity, and angered because no
attention was given to women’s wages and working conditions, radical
feminists refused to participate. “The Pavilion was not a true exhibit
of women’s art,’ declared Elizabeth Cady Stanton, because it did not
include samples of objects made by women in factories owned by
men. Ironically, the building became both the most powerful and con-
spicuous symbol of the women’s movement for equal rights and the
most visible indication of woman’s separate status.
The Pavilion’s eclectic and controversial exhibits included furni-
ture, weaving, laundry appliances, embroideries, educational and sci-
entific exhibitions, and sculpture, painting, and photography, as well as
engravings. Jenny Brownscombe, a graduate of Cooper Union and

120 Jenny Brownscombe The New Scholar 1878

one of the first members of the Art Students’ League of New York,
sent examples of the genre subjects she drew for Harper’s Weekly.
Among the many paintings by women were the landscapes of Mary
Kollock, Sophia Ann Towne Darrah, and Annie C. Shaw; the still-lifes
of Fidelia Bridges and Virginia and Henrietta Granberry; drawings of
old New York by Eliza Greatorex; historical subjects by Ida Waugh
and Elizabeth C. Gardner; and portraits by Anna Lea Merritt. The
Philadelphia sculptor Blanche Nevins sent plaster casts ofan Eve and a
Cinderella; Florence Freeman offered a small bust. Foley and Whitney
sent bas-reliefs and statuettes, and Whitney also provided a bronze cast
of the Roma, a bronze head of an old peasant woman asleep, and a
fountain for the center of the Horticulture Hall.
The lumping together of fine arts, industrial arts, and handicrafts,
and of the work of professional and amateur artists implicitly equated
the work of all women on the basis of gender alone. Critics were
quick to challenge the displays for their lack of “quality” and women
once again found themselves confronting universalizing definitions of
“women’s” production in a gender-segregated world.
In 1876 Louisa May Alcott, using the proceeds from her writing to
pay for her sister’s European art education, sent May to Paris for fur-
ther study. May Alcott’s copies of Turner’s paintings had won Ruskin’s
 praise in London and she was determined to succeed as an artist. Her
letters home describe a comfortable lifestyle with a supportive group
of female art students sharing meals and encouraging each other's
ambitions. The woman they most admired in Paris was Mary Cassatt;
she and several other painters became the first women to align them-
selves with a stylistically radical movement.
Cassatt (1844-1926), daughter of a wealthy Pennsylvania business-
man, became a student at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1861, taking
her place among a number ofdedicated women students which even-
tually included Alice Barber Stephens, Catherine A. Drinker, Susan
i) i) MacDowell Eakins, Anna Sellers, Cecilia Beaux, and Anna Klumpke.
By 1866, she was settled in Paris where she was soon joined by the rest
of her family. Her teas were a mecca for younger women, she was
generous with introductions and advice, and her professional commit-
ment was an inspiration to the young students. “Miss Cassatt was
charming as usual in two shades of brown satin and rep,’ wrote May
Alcott to her family in Concord, “being very lively and a woman of
real genius, she will be a first-class light as soon as her pictures get a
little circulated and known, for they are handled in a masterly way,
with a touch of strength one seldom finds coming from a woman’s
fingers.”
Alcott’s comments reveal the conflicts still facing the woman artist
caught within an ideology of sexual difference which gave the privi-
lege to male expression and often forced women to choose between
marriage and a career. These conflicts make up Louisa May Alcott’s
short novella Diana and Persis (written in 1879 but only recently pub-
lished). The novel’s female characters were modeled on herself and her
sister, and on their friends among the White Marmorean Flock. One
chapter is entitled “Puck” in reference to Hosmer’s successful piece.
Alcott explores the connections between art, politics, spinsterhood,
and the female community. Persis, a young painter funded by her fam-
ily to study abroad, wins minor recognition in the Paris art world
(where May Alcott had a still-life accepted in the Salon of 1877).
Devotion to her art and devotion to home and family are her con-
suming passions, but after first choosing art, Persis discovers that as a
True Woman she cannot deny her feelings and her desire for domestic
life. May/Persis demanded the right both to marital happiness and
artistic success, but her expectations ran counter to the structures of
patriarchal nineteenth-century society. She proclaims her allegiance to
an earlier, heroic generation of female artists such as Rosa Bonheur,
but in the end her choice of marriage limits her options as an artist.
230
121 Alice Barber Stephens The Female Life Class 1879

During the years when Cassatt, May Alcott, and other young
women flocked to Paris for study, the city itself was undergoing dra-
matic changes. The rebuilding of Paris by Baron Haussmann and
Napoleon III in the 1850s and 1860s physically transformed the city.
T. J. Clark, Eunice Lipton, Griselda Pollock, and others have ably
demonstrated the evolution of a new social matrix as artists and writ-
ers, prostitutes and the new bourgeoisie were drawn into the streets
and parks, the cafés, and restaurants. Baudelaire’s call for an art of mod-
ern life emphasizing the fleeting and transitory moment, and the fugi-
tive sensation was embodied in the contemporary focus and realist
approach of Degas’s and Manet’s paintings, in the broken brushstrokes
and fleeting gestures of Impressionism, and in the poetic imagery of
the flaneur, that exclusively masculine figure who moved about the
new public arenas ofthe city relishing its spectacles.
The collapse of the Second Empire in 1870 and the establishment
231
of the Third Republic in 1875 produced an increasingly democratized
middle-class culture. By the 1870s, an active consuming public
thronged the boulevards, department stores, and international exposi-
tions. The painters later known as the Impressionists—Claude Monet,
Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard
Manet, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Mary Cassatt, and others—pro-
duced their own version of modernity, but their stylistic innovations
and their new subject-matter must be seen in the larger context of a
restructuring ofpublic and private spheres.
In “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,’ Pollock maps the
new spaces of masculinity and femininity and articulates the differ-
ences “socially, economically, subjectively” between being a woman
and being a man in Paris at the end of the century. Some women were
drawn to Impressionism precisely because the new painting legit-
imized the subject-matter of domestic social life of which women had
intimate knowledge, even as they were excluded from imagery of the
bourgeois social sphere of the boulevard, café, and dance hall. Recent
feminist scholarship has focused on the fact that, as upper-class
women, Morisot and Cassatt did not have access to the easy exchange
of ideas about painting which took place among male artists in the
studio and the café. Yet despite Morisot’s inability to join her male
colleagues at the Café Guerbois, the Morisots were regulars at Manet’s
Thursday evening soirées, where they met and talked with other
painters and critics. Likewise, Cassatt and Degas regularly exchanged
ideas about painting. And there is considerable evidence to suggest
that Impressionism was equally an expression of the bourgeois family
as a defense against the threat of rapid urbanization and rapid industri-
alization: domestic interiors, private gardens, seaside resorts. Although
Morisot’s access to public sites was limited, critics of the time appear
not to have ranked the subject-matter of her work in any way differ-
ently from that of her male colleagues, though most of them agreed
that her presentation of it was more “agreeable.”
Work now being done on the social meanings produced by
Impressionist paintings suggests a complex relationship between the
new painting and the new middle-class family (to which most of the
Impressionists belonged). Moreover, the decision to work en plein air
and to forego the historical subjects, with the complex studio set-ups
and multiple models they required, transformed the relationship
between the painter’s daily life and his or her studio life; this aspect of
Impressionism deserves more study for it profoundly shaped women’s
relationship to the movement.
det Sat)
=—j-+
RE
MES
tdi
erecta,
ERR
 During the earlier nineteenth century, academic painters in France
often maintained studios in, or near, their homes, but it was the deci-
sion to paint scenes of everyday life that moved the easel into the
drawing room. Visiting Mme. Manet, Morisot’s mother is able to offer
a commentary on Manet’s painting-in-progress of Eva Gonzales, as
the women sit in the studio while Manet works. When Degas sketch-
es in the Morisot garden after lunch, Mme. Morisot provides her own
critique: “Monsieur Degas has made a sketch of Yves, that I find
indifferent; he chatted all the time he was doing it... 2” “Your life must
be charming at this moment,” Edma Morisot wrote enviously to her
sister in 1869, “to talk with Monsieur Degas while watching him
draw, to laugh with Manet, to philosophize with Puvis.”
Recent publications by Pollock, Tamar Garb, Kathleen Adler, and
other feminist art historians have exhaustively documented the work
of women Impressionists in relationship to the new painting. Tracing
the constraints placed on women like Cassatt, Morisot, Gonzales, and
Marie Bracquemond by the social ideologies of bourgeois culture,
they have explored the development of their work and isolated their
specific contributions to the imagery of Impressionism.
Berthe Morisot numbered Manet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, and
Monet among her friends. Written about by Emile Zola and Stephane
Mallarmé, among others, she was described in 1877 by the critic for
Le Temps as the “one real Impressionist in this group.” Yet unul the
appearance of revisionist art histories, and the first major retrospective
of her work in 1987, art historians almost exclusively tramed her work
within the structures of her associations with male painters. There is
no evidence that Morisot, or Cassatt, were patronized by their painter
friends. Yet they moved in an artistic circle in which the threat of
women was never entirely silenced. “I consider women writers,
lawyers, and politicians (such as George Sand, Mme. Adam and other
bores) as monsters and nothing but five-legged calves,” declared
Renoir. “The woman artist is merely ridiculous, but I am in tavor of
the female singer and dancer.” Renoir’s comment divides women by
class and occupation. Working-class women are admired tor _enter-
taining men; professional women with public roles are seen as
usurpers of male authori vers of domestic harmony, as they
Were earlier pictured in Honoré Daumier’s_lithogr The Blue
Stockings (1844). The modern feminist movement in France, launched
in 1866 by Maria Deraismes and Léon Richer, organized the first
international congress on women’s rights in 1878, at the height of
Impressionism, but Impressionist painting records no traces of this
>
4
ie)
aspect of contemporary life. Nor does it acknowledge the increasing
numbers of middle-class women who were seeking training and
employment outside the home (in 1866, there were 2,768,000 women
employed in non-agricultural jobs in France) for Impressionism pre-
sents us with few images of women at work outside the domestic
environment.
Morisot and Cassatt’s ability to sustain professional lives and negoti-
ate relationships of some parity with their male colleagues was class
specific. Morisot’s marriage to Manet’s brother Eugene, and her fami-
ly’s wealth and continuing support were factors in her success;
Cassatt’s role as an unmarried daughter carried with it time-
consuming domestic responsibilities, but it also provided the secure
network ofrelationships from which she drew her art. Bracquemond
(1841-1916), on the other hand, did not come from a prosperous, cul-
tured family and enjoyed no such support. Marriage to the engraver
Félix Bracquemond in 1869 provided an introduction into artistic cir-
cles, but his jealousy of her work inhibited her development and today
she is the least well known of the women Impressionists.
The Paris of the Third Republic offered a variety of artists’ societies
and exhibition venues from the official Salon to the Union des
Femmes Artistes which, shaped by Rosa Bonheur’s example, conduct-
ed an annual Salon des Femmes. Women Impressionists related to
these exhibitions in varying ways. Gonzales, a friend and pupil of
Manet’s who had studied at the Chaplin atelier, exhibited only at the
official salons. Her Little Soldier (1870), influenced by the straightfor-
ward realism of Manet’s The Fifer (1866), was exhibited at the Salon of
1870. Bracquemond and Cassatt exhibited with the Impressionists
from 1876. Morisot, on the other hand, was one of the original mem-
bers of the group, exhibited with them in 1874, and continued to par-
ticipate in every exhibition save the one held in 1878, the year her
daughter was born. She was also included in the group’s auction at the
Hotel Drouot in 1875, where her painting, Interior (now called Young
Woman with a Mirror, c. 1875), brought 480 francs, the highest price
paid for any painting. .
Born in 1841, the youngest of three daughters of awealthy French
civil servant, Morisot and her sister Edma displayed an early talent for
drawing. Their second teacher, Joseph Guichard, was moved to warn
Mme. Morisot of the implications of such precocious talent:
“Considering the characters of your daughters, my teaching will not
endow them with minor drawing room accomplishments, they will
become painters. Do you realize what this means? In the upper-class

235
Berthe Morisot Mother and Sister of the Artist 1870
124 Mary Cassatt Mother and Child c. 1
 milieu to which you belong, this will be revolutionary, I might say
almost catastrophic.” Further instruction by Corot and Oudinot
strengthened the naturalism of their work and the two sisters exhibit-
ed together in four successive salons beginning in 1864. Edma’s mar-
riage to a naval officer in 1869 ended her professional life, a fact she
lamented in letters to her sister. Despite the support of her family, and
that of her husband Eugéne Manet, whom she married in 1874,
Morisot’s letters frequently express her own hesitations and doubts
about her work. “This painting, this work that you mourn for,’ she
wrote to Edma in 1869 shortly after the latter’s wedding, “is the cause
of many griefs and many. troubles.”
Morisot’s subjects, like those of Gonzales, Cassatt, Bracquemond,
and their male colleagues, were drawn from everyday life. The casual
immediacy, straightforward approach to subject-matter, and feathery
brushstrokes of paintings like Catching Butterflies (1873), Summer’s Day
i) eS) (1879), and Mother and Sister of the Artist (1870) meld contemporary
subjects with the Impressionist desire to capture the transitory effects
oflife. Gonzales’s Pink Morning, a pastelof 1874, is typical of her many
interiors with women, while Marie Bracquemond sited many of her
works in the family garden, perhaps a secure spot in her troubled life.
Morisot and Cassatt met around 1878, probably through Degas,
who encouraged Cassatt to exhibit with the Impressionists after the
painting she submitted to the Salon was rejected. “At last | could work
with complete independence without concerning myself with the
eventual judgment of a jury,’ she later said. “I already knew who were
my true masters. | admired Manet, Courbet, and Degas. I hated con-
ventional art. I began to live.” Cassatt had been exhibiting for more
than ten years when she joined the Impressionist group. Like Morisot,
her subjects evolved within the boundaries of her sex and class.
Prevented from asking men other than family members to pose, limit-
ed in their access to the public life of the café and boulevard, they con-
centrated on aspects of modern domestic life. Pollock has ably —
demonstrated how Morisot’s and Cassatt’s paintings demarcate the
spaces of masculinity and femininity through their spatial compres-
sions and their juxtapositions ofdiffering spatial systems. Long consid-
ered a painter of unproblematic depictions of mothers and children,
Cassatt in fact brought an incisive eye to bear on the rituals and ges-
tures through which femininity is constructed and signified: crochet-
ing, embroidering, knitting, attending children, visiting, taking tea.
The intellectual concentration and self-contained focus of
Cassatt’s depiction of her mother in Reading “Le Figaro” (1883) is now
238
125 Eva Gonzales Pink
understood as relating more directly to representations of the intellec
tual life of men, seen in, for example, Cézanne’s Portrait of Louts-
Auguste Cézanne Reading L’Evenement (1866) than to the history of
representations of women. Her painting of her sister Lydia driving a
trap, Woman and Child Driving (1879), may be unique in late nine-
teenth-century French painting in depicting a woman doing the dri-
ving while a coachman sits idly by; and her many paintings of women
and children, though influenced by Correggio’s madonnas and chil-
dren, which she greatly admired, are less universalized depictions of
maternity than responses to the specific ways that social class is repro-
duced through the family.
Paintings like Morisot’s Psyche (1876) and Cassatt’s Mother and Child
(c. 1905) return to the conventional association of women and mir-
rors. The private daily rituals of women at their toilette were a pop-
ular subject for painters in the 1870s and 1880s. Morisot’s Psyche, with
its double-play on the mythological tale of Venus’s son Cupid who
fell in love with a mortal and on the French term for mirror, or psyche,
turns on the adolescent woman’s contemplation of her own image.
Garb and Adler have pointed out that, as there are no representations
of men bathing and dressing, we must assume that although symbolic
associations with Venus and Vanitas are abandoned, such paintings

128 Mary McLaughlin,

Losanti porcelain, c. 1890
129 Berthe Morisot
Psyche 1876

nevertheless perpetuate notions of vanity as “natural” to women. Yet

Morisot’s painting is a deeply sympathetic representation of self-
awareness and awakening sexuality, while Cassatt’s painting empha-
sizes the role of the mirror in inculcating an idea of femininity as
something mediated through observation.
The complex and gendered organization of a subject is brilliantly
articulated in Cassatt’s Woman in Black at the Opera (1880). The subject 130
of the ball, concert, or opera was a popular one among the
Impressionists and one in which event and audience could be col-
lapsed into the same spectacle. Cassatt, however, suppresses details of
the event in order to concentrate on the figure of ayoung woman in
black. Intent on the opera, she focuses her glasses on the stage.
But in this public world, she herself has become part of the spectacle,
and the object of the gaze of a man in the balcony who turns his
glasses on her.
Feminist theory has often held to the premise that the viewing field
is organized for a male subject who exercises power through looking,
and in this way asserting visual control over the objects of his desire
241
(usually female). More recently, art historians have begun to explore
the ways that modern women mobilized a new range of female gazes
within a developing consumer society. Women’s growing participa-
tion in the consumer culture that increasingly defines modernity
during the second half of the nineteenth century, as Ruth Iskin
demonstrates in her analysis of Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere, chal-
lenges earlier notions of the social relegation of women to completely
separate, usually domestic, spheres. Although women’s role as spectacle
continues to dominate much of the period’s visual culture, female
spectatorship begins to emerge as a social reality within spaces like
those of crowds, department stores, and mass-market advertising.
Paintings such as Cassatt’s Woman in Black at the Opera may be seen as
taking their place within this emergent culture of female spectatorship
in the public arenas of the modern city.
Issues of public and private space, and amateur and professional
production, also reshaped the design fields during the second half of
the nineteenth century. The new focus on the middle-class home, and
the self-sufficient world which it signified, is central to the reform of
the decorative arts in England and America. Here also, women played

130 Mary Cassatt Woman in

Black at the Opera 1880
a considerable, if complicated role. (See discussion of Mary Louise
McLaughlin’s work on p. 246.)
There were markedly more women in the design fields by the
1860s as a result of institutionalized arts education for women. By
1870, Hannah Barlow, trained at the Lambeth School of Art and
Design in London and one of the first and most important art pottery
decorators, was producing freelance designs for Doulton Pottery. The
surge of interest 1n art pottery was sparked by the efforts of the two
most famous ceramic firms in Britain—Muinton and Doulton—to
produce hand-crafted ware on a large commercial scale for middle-
class homes. Commercial production, however, was organized around
traditional divisions of labor. While male designers received credit for
their designs for china surfaces, the painters, usually female and often
working and artisan class, remained anonymous. At the same time, the
popularity of china painting as a hobby for upper-class women grew
rapidly, becoming an amateur craze after 1870.
A similar situation prevailed in the production ofprofessional secu-
lar embroidery. The Royal School of Art Needlework was founded in
1872 to provide suitable employment for gentlewomen and to revive
the craft of ornamental needlework. By 1875, with Queen Victoria as
its patron and Lady Marion Alford its vice-president, the school’s
embroidery department was producing crewel work from designs by
leaders in the Arts and Crafts Movement like Edward Burne-Jones,
William Morris,and Walter Crane.
The first major exhibition of work from the Royal School of Art
Needlework took place at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in
1876 where its success launched the craft revival in America. Between
1876 and 1891, when new facilities opened at Jane Addams’s Hull
House in Chicago with an exhibition borrowed from Toynbee Hall—
London’s center for the application of Arts and Crafts theory to
improving the lives of the urban poor—large numbers of women
contributed to the reform of design. |
At the heart of the Arts and Crafts Movement, as it came to be
known in Britain and America, was a pre-industrial medieval ideal of
a fusion of the designer and the maker. Revolting against the anony-
mous authorship and shoddy craftsmanship of industrially produced
goods, William Morris dreamed of a socialist utopia in which individ-
uals were not alienated from their labor. The origins of theMovement
in Britain lay in nineteenth-century medieval revivals like Gothic,
but the spirit of rural craft collaboratives which Morris envisioned
belonged to the nineteenth century’s idealization of a rural way oflife

243
fast giving way to industrialization and urbanization. Wishing to make
art available to everyone, and to unite artists, designers, and craftwork-
ers around the ideals of craftsmanship, good design, and the renewed
dignity of labor, Morris dreamed of setting up small workshops and
countrywide organizations which could revive dying traditions like
lace-making and crewel embroidery.
Morris anticipated a day when the sexual division of labor within
the arts would vanish and even domestic life would be equably shared
by the sexes. Anthea Callen’s Women Artists of the Arts and Crafts
Movement (1979) elaborates another reality—the gradual evolution of
an entirely traditional sexual division of labor within the Movement
itself, with women staffing the embroidery workshops and men con-
ducting the business and serving as named designers. Above all, Callen
emphasizes, it was men who evolved the Movement’s philosophy,
articulated its goals, and organized the major aspects of its production.
Women, primarily family or friends of Morris and his colleagues,
were involved in the Morris firm itself from the beginning. In the
1850s, Morris and his wife Jane had revived the lost art of crewel
embroidery by studying and “unpicking” old examples (an undertak-
ing which has generally been credited to Morris alone). Morris then
left the production of embroideries in medieval techniques to his wife
and her sister Elizabeth. In 1885, Morris placed his daughter May in
charge of the embroidery workshop. Georgiana Burne-Jones, the wife
of Edward Burne-Jones, was also soon involved in embroidery and
wood engraving while Charles Faulkner’s sisters, Kate and Lucy, paint-
ed tiles, executed embroidery and, Kate at least, designed wallpaper.
Apart from the embroidery section, however, the Morris firm
employed few women in its workshops and the general involvement
of women was heavily weighted in the direction of traditionally “fem-
inine” undertakings like lace and needlework.
In addition to embroidery designed by Morris, Burne-Jones, and
Crane and executed at the Royal School of Art Needlework, the dec-
orative arts displayed at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in
1876 included Doulton pottery, Ernest Chaplet’s “Limoges” glazes,
and Japanese-influenced proto-Art Nouveau ceramics. Ceramics and
embroidery had the greatest impact on American women.
The American Arts and Crafts Movement was more stylistic than
ideological (with the exception of Gustav Stickley and Elbert
Hubbard’s ideal of a return to the simple, community life of
pre-industrial America). Yet it provided many middle-class women
with a socially respectable and humanitarian outlet for their artistic

244
 Saye Nae
v4 ’
&.
ws SEE

131 Kate Faulkner, wallpaper design for Morris and Company, after 1885

productions. Candace Wheeler, a wealthy and progressive New Yorker, 13

5
ys)

was impressed by the embroideries of Morris and Company. Struck by

the fact that needlework could have financial value, “for it meant the
conversion of the common and inalienable heritage of feminine skill
in the use of the needle into a means of art expression and pecuniary
profit,’ she envisioned a society similar to the Royal Society of Art
Needlework which would organize the sale of needlework, china
painting, and other crafts, by women who needed income. Between
1877 and 1883, Wheeler organized the Society of Decorative Art of
New York City and worked with Tiffany in setting up a company
called Associated Artists, in which she was in charge of textiles,
embroidery, tapestry, and needlework, while Tiffany took charge of
glass design. By 1883, she was running an enormously successful tex-
tile company composed entirely of women and producing printed
silks and large-scale tapestries.

245
 The display of china painting by members of the Cincinnati
Pottery Club at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition represented
the vanguard of a surprising number of American women who went
on to professional careers in the field of art pottery, despite the fact
that women’s involvement in the Arts and Crafts Movement began
with socially prominent women wishing to perfect their skills as an
accomplishment.
Among the many visitors to the ceramics display was Mary Louise
McLaughlin (1847-1939) of Cincinnati, whose experiments with
reproducing the underglaze slip decoration on Haviland faience
pieces became the prototype for art pottery decoration in the United
States for the next quarter century. Women, many of whom began as
amateur china painters, were behind the formation of the Newcomb,
Pauline, Robineau, and other American art potteries. McLaughlin’s
rival was Maria Longworth Nichols (later Storer, 1849-1932), who
had also begun experimenting with underglaze techniques at the
Dallas Pottery in Cincinnati after the Philadelphia Exposition. In
1879, Nicholas Longworth offered his daughter premises of her own
and the Rookwood Pottery was founded in the Spring of 1880.
Her family’s wealth, her father’s long history of artistic patronage,
and her own social standing in Cincinnati made possible Nichols’s
increasing professionalism. Her work was viewed as both morally and
artistically charitable for she “follows the traditions of her family in
devotion to the wellbeing and advancement of her native place.” She
summarized her objective as “my own gratification” rather than the
employment of needy women; perhaps not surprisingly, most of the
early Rookwood pieces were produced by amateurs. In 1881, Nichols
began the Rookwood School of Pottery Decoration. Two years later,
she employed her old friend, William Watts Taylor, to take over the
administration and organization of the pottery. Taylor, who had little
sympathy for lady amateurs, soon closed the school as a pretext for
evicting the amateurs, who were then largely replaced by men.
Despite its labor practices, which included a division between
designer and decorator that became the model for most art potteries,
the Rookwood Pottery played a formative role in the development of
art pottery in America, winning a gold medal at the Paris Exposition
Universelle of 1889. The full history of women’s involvement in the
art pottery movement, including the Cincinnati women’s training
centers and art clubs, remains to be written. What little we know of
the careers of Mary McLaughlin, Mary Sheerer, the Overbeck sisters,
Pauline Jacobus, and Adelaide Robineau offers tantalizing evidence of
246
132 Candace Wheeler, printed silk, c. 1885 133. Maria Longworth Nichols
(Storer), vase, 1897

a female presence in the American Arts and Crafts Movement which

extended to other areas of production as well. Intimately connected
with women’s roles as domestic and social reformers, the art pottery
movement also represented a move by American middle-class women
to professionalize the decorative arts.
By the time the World’s Columbian Exposition (or World’s Fair)
opened in Chicago in 1893, American women had evolved a new
sense of identity and purpose. Goals and strategies varied widely
among feminists, and there were still many women not involved in the
struggle for equal rights and the vote, but representatives of all groups
came together to organize a woman’s building intended to prove that
women’s achievements were equal to those of men. “The World’s
Columbian Exposition has afforded woman an unprecedented oppor-
tunity to present to the world ajustification of her claim to be placed
on complete equality with man,” stated the preface to the official edi-
tion of Art and Handicraft in the Woman’s Building, edited by Maud
Howe Elliott.
The direction of the Woman’s Building was in the hands of Mrs.
Potter Palmer, a wealthy Chicago art collector, and her 117-member

247
Board of Lady Managers. Palmer herself did not advocate equal rights
for women, but her belief in women’s potential was characteristic of
mainstream middle-class feminism at the time. Although women had
made great strides in education, art training, and social organizing,
they still lacked the vote. And they remained caught between the
demands of careers and motherhood, struggling continually against
the limitations placed on them by the social category of femininity,
against the trivializing of their work in relation to that of men, and
against the mythologizing ofits “otherness.”
Elliott’s description of the Woman’s Building, designed by Sophia
G. Hayden, a young graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology architecture and design program, expressed her own
acceptance of the ideology of separate spheres: “At that time [the first
half of the nineteenth century] the highest praise that could be given
to any woman’s work was the criticism that it might be easily mistak-
en for a man’s. Today we recognize that the more womanly a woman’s
work is the stronger it 1s. In Mr. Henry Van Brunt’s appreciative
account of Miss Hayden’s work, the writer points out that it is essen-
tially feminine in quality, as it should be. If sweetness and light were
ever expressed 1n architecture, we find them 1n Miss Hayden’s build-
ing.’ Sweetness and light are not, however, the criteria generally
applied to architecture and Hayden’s building, in fact, was admirably
suited to the Neoclassical Beaux-Arts style which dominated the
Fair’s buildings.
The tensions underlying Ellott’s and Van Brunt’s comments were
felt throughout the exposition, and nowhere more keenly than in the
Woman’s Building. In 1889, tension was already evident between the
Woman’s Department, which had as one ofits goals the building ofa
women’s exhibition space, and the Queen Isabella Society, a suftragist
group which did not want a segregated women’s exhibition. The
divisions between the various factions involved in the Woman’s
Building make a complex chapter in the history of late nineteenth-
century American feminism. Nevertheless, women’s creative presence
was more powerfully felt in Chicago in 1893 than at any other time in
the country’s history.
The Board of Lady Managers had solicited historical and contem-
porary artifacts from around the world with the intention of demon-
strating that women “were the originators of most of the industrial
arts,’ having been the original makers of household goods, baskets,
and clothing. Ethnographic displays sent by the Smithsonian
Institution documented women’s work in the form of embroidery,
textiles, and basketry from American Indian, Eskimo, Polynesian, and
African tribes. Women’s contributions to industries from sheepshear-
ing and raising silkworms to patents for household aids were included
and the Women’s Library, organized by the women of New York,
included seven thousand volumes written by women around the
world. Frederick Keppel, a well-known print dealer, provided 138
prints by women etchers and engravers from the late Renaissance to
the present, including Diana Ghisi, Elisabetta Sirani, Geertruid
Roghman, Maria Cosway, Marie de Medici, Angelica Kauffmann,
Caroline Watson, Marie Bracquemond, Rosa Bonheur, Anna Lea
Merritt, and Mary Cassatt. Visitors to the Woman’s Building passed
beneath murals of Primitive Woman and Modern Woman executed by
Mary McMonnies and Cassatt.
Some professional women continued to resist exhibiting alongside
amateurs in a building that included everything from household
goods to embroidery, and others wished to exhibit with men in the
Fine Arts Building. The result of the segregation and the wide range
of amateur and professional production, wrote one critic, was a “gor-
geous wealth of mediocrity.’ Although the Metropolitan Museum of
Art declined a request to send Bonheur’s Horse Fair, the fine arts exhi-
bition in the Woman’s Building included works by respected artists
like Cecilia Beaux, Vinnie Ream Hoxie, and Edmonia Lewis, as well
as cat paintings by a seventy-two-year-old Belgian artist named
Henrietta Ronner and two paintings of dogs by Queen Victoria.
Elizabeth Thompson’s Quatre Bras and Anna Klumpke’s Portrait of Miss
M.D. were displayed, along with busts by Anne Whitney and Adelaide
McFayden Johnson of prominent women in the suffrage, women’s,
and temperance movements. The largest exhibitions at the Fair were
from women’s craft associations in Britain. Rookwood Pottery and the
Cincinnati Pottery Club were also well represented.

134 Sophia Hayden, Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition,

Chicago, 1893
 In the end, despite the unevenness of its displays and the critics’
argument that mediocrity was the only possible result when “femi-
ninity was the first requisite and merit a secondary consideration,’ the
Woman’s Building overwhelmed visitors by the sheer magnitude and
ambition of its displays. The building summed up women’s past
achievements, and made visible the multiple ways they had renegotiat-
ed the ideology of separate spheres, but the future belonged to a new
generation and a new century. Mrs. Palmer’s speech at the opening of
the building did not ignore the fact that, by 1893, radical American
women perceived the ideology of separate spheres as a male invention
and a male response to feared competition in the work place.
The same decade that welcomed the Women’s Building as a visible
sign of women’s advances in education and professional life, also wit-
nessed an escalation of rhetoric drawing on discourses of science to
legitimate women’s “natural” inferiority and difference from men in
fields from art to medicine. Critics like William Ordway Partridge
recommended “manhood in art’’—discipline, bigness, purity, sanity,
nobility—which he opposed to the failure of French art, “falling into
250
decadence because her virility is cankered at the heart through aban-
donment to the senses.”
By 1893,a new female heroine had emerged in the popular literary
imagination, though her presence is barely recorded in painting. The
novels of Grant Allen, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing present
female heroines who were in direct conflict with the traditional values
of conservative society. Flaunting convention, the New Woman
drinks, smokes, reads books, and leads a healthy athletic life. The pho-
tographer Frances Benjamin Johnson (1864-1952) burlesqued her
delightfully in a self-portrait photograph and she is the subject of
Albert Morrow’s 1897 poster, The New Woman, for Punch. Also in
1897, the Ladies Home Journal serialized six illustrations by Alice
Barber Stephens which collectively outlined the facets of new wom-
anhood. Along with The Woman in Religion, The Woman in the Home,
and The Beauty of Motherhood, they included The Woman in Business,
The Woman in Society, and The American Girl in Summer. By 1900, femi-
nists were demanding not just voting rights for women, but their right
to higher education and the right to earn an income, and the modern
woman had appeared.

135 (opposite, left) Frances Benjamin

Johnson Self-Portrait c. 1896

136 (opposite, right) Albert Morrow

The New Woman 1897

137 (right) Alice Barber Stephens

The Woman in Business 1897
CHAPTER NINE

Modernism, Abstraction, and the New Woman, 1910-25

Abstraction in painting and sculpture developed simultaneously in a

number of European capitals during the first decade ofthis century. Its
course, inextricably bound up with the formal developments of Post-
Impressionism and Cubism, and with a desire to break with nature
and infuse the resulting art with a profound spiritual content, has been
extensively traced. In this chapter, I want to discuss several less often
explored aspects of the development of abstraction in the early twen-
tieth century. First, there is the extent to which its visual language
derives from that of the decorative arts, particularly textiles, and why.
Second, how did the fashion designs that resulted from geometric
abstraction, when worn, come to signify modernity and, at the same
time, to obscure very real kinds of social change that would ultimately
erode the ideal of individual artistic freedom so prized by modern
artists at the beginning of this century? Finally, how are we to view the
unusual fact that women functioned both as producers of this new
visual culture and as the signifiers of its meaning?
Between 1863, when Baudelaire situated fashion at the heart of the
modernist imperative (“Be very sure that this man [Constantin Guys]
makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may
contain of poetry without history, to distill the eternal from the transi-
tory’) and 1923, when the Russian avant-garde artist Alexandra Exter
defended the Industrial Dress (“The rhythm of modern life demands a
minimum loss of time and energy... . To present day fashions which
change according to the whims of the merchants we must counter-
pose a way of dressing that 1s functional and beautiful in its simplici-
ty’), fashion has played a complex, contradictory, and sometimes
quixotic role in defining the attitude toward the art which we now
think of as modernist.
Baudelaire discerned the signs of modern life in “the ephemeral,
the fugitive, the contingent,” locating them in individual style and ges-
ture, and opposing them to the eternal (by which he meant the classi-
cal tradition which underlay French official art of the mid-nineteenth
century). More recently, art historians have argued for a view of
252
modernity as more than just the desire to be “of the time.’ The emer-
gence of new kinds of painting in late nineteenth-century France has
been tied to the concurrent development of new sets of myths about
modernity shaped by the new city of Paris under the Second Empire.
Central to the new territory of modernity were “leisure, consump-
tion, the spectacle and money.” Modernity is both linked to the desire
for the new that fashion expresses so well, and culturally tied to the
development of a new vi e for the twenti =
abstraction.
Art Nouveau, an international style in the decorative arts character-
ized by stylized linear surface motifs derived from natural forms,
arrived in Germany in 1896 with Hermann Obrist’s exhibition of
thirty-five monumental embroideries at a Munich gallery. By the turn
of the century, the Arts and Crafts Movement pervaded all aspects of
Munich’ artistic life. The new aesthetic demanded a new relationship
between art and life, a sanctioning of the present, and a merging of the
fine arts and crafts. For artists like Wassily Kandinsky, who arrived in
Munich in 1896, the move toward an abstract formal language carried
with it an implicit threat—that of “decoration” devoid of content. “If
we were to begin today to destroy completely the bond that ties us to
nature, to steer off with force toward freedom and to content ourselves
exclusively with the combination of pure colour and independent
form,” warned Kandinsky in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910, pub-
lished 1912), “we would create works that would look like a geomet-
ric ornament, which, grossly stated, would resemble a tie, a carpet.”
There is no doubt both of the influence of Jugendstil or Art
Nouveau design on early Kandinsky paintings like Moonrise (1902),
and of the early critical success of those works of his which were
“ornamental” or “decorative.” In her study of Kandinsky in Munich,
Peg Weiss has located the artist’s gradual move toward abstraction in
the convergence of strong Jugendstil tendencies embracing abstract
ornamentation with a symbolic move toward inner significance and
spiritual revolution influenced by Symbolist poetics.
Throughout the Munich period, Kandinsky continued to work
both in painting and in crafts. In 1904, he had become actively
involved in The Society for Applied Art in Munich and the catalogue
for the 1906 Salon d’Automne lists seven items of craft designed
by him. Another member of the Society was Margaretha von
Brauchitsch, a talented craftswoman whose embroidery designs had
attracted notice at the World Exposition in Paris in 1900. Brauchitsch
used highly stylized motifs from nature, as well as fantastic, abstract

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“improvisations” in her embroidery designs. Examples from 1901 to

1904 show a close relationship with work of the Wiener Werkstatte in
Vienna, a design collaborative founded in 1903. Weiss identifies her
greatest influence on Kandinsky, however, as coming through her par-
ticipation in the Reform Dress Movement.
By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the issue of reforming
women’s dress had become one aspect of wider feminist concerns.
The bustles, whalebone stays, and tight lacings so fashionable in the
1880s came under attack in progressive circles as criminal in their
manipulation and obstruction of female movement and breathing.
Aesthetic, medical, social, and anthropological discourses finally con-
verged in a fundamental redesign of the ideal female figure that
replaced the corset’s exaggerated and constricting curves with the
more flexible serpentine curvature of the modern body. In Britain in
the 1890s, dress reform was often linked to Socialism, though some
historians have argued that by that date reform dress had become
more an issue oftaste than politics. The new “healthy” styles, however,
indicate a shift from earlier notions of clothing as indicating class and
occupation to a more modern preoccupation with clothing as a means
of creating identity. Kandinsky’s experiments in fashion design also
take into account the practical goals of the reform movement. His
designs are important in identifying women’s fashion as one of the
arenas within which modernist artists, determined to free themselves
from representation, explored new kinds of meaning.
Paintings by Kandinsky from the Munich period were influenced
by Russian folk art, Tunisian abstract geometric motifs, and, through
5
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 his companion Gabriele Munter’s intervention, Bavarian glass paint-
ing. Munter (1877-1962) had come to Munich 1n 1901 in search of
training. Denied access to the Munchener Akademie, women were
forced to seek private instruction or attend the studios of the
Kunstlerinnenverein, the association of professional women artists.
Quickly bored with academic teaching, Munter moved to the Phalanz
School where Kandinsky encouraged her. The couple first visited
Murnau in 1908 with the painters Jawlensky and Marianne Werefkin,
settling there the following year. It was in Murnau that both took the
decisive step toward greater abstraction. Reducing form to simplified
color shapes bounded by dark contour lines, Miinter synthesized the
expressiveness of Fauve color with an ordered formal organization
often based on pyramidal forms. Her Boating (1910) replaces the infor- 144
mality of Impressionist paintings on the theme with a tightly struc-
tured and hierarchical ordering in which Kandinsky dominates the
group compressed into the shallow space of the boat. Against the
striking backdrop of the Murnau landscape, Kandinsky assumes a
commanding role in the composition while Mutinter rows the boat.
Access to his image is controlled by Minter’s position at the bottom
of the canvas; we see him as she sees him.

139 (above) Wassily Kandinsky, dress

design, c. 1904

140 (right) Gabriele Minter

Portrait ofMarianne von Werefkin 1909
140 Miinter’s Portrait of Marianne von Werefkin (1909) situates the figure
in her multicolored flower hat and violet scarf against a striking gold
background. The simplification of the figure into blocks of color, the
pyramidal form, and the replacement of modeling by a heavy black
outline are characteristic of her Murnau paintings with their debt to
Bavarian glass painting. Minter, not Kandinsky, first collected exam-
ples of this folk tradition and both artists subsequently experimented
with pure colors on the back sides of plates of glass. While Minter
retained an interest in the bold patterns and broad planar
simplification of this painting, the translucent colors and flat simple
shapes provided Kandinsky with a new formal syntax. As he moved
toward pure abstraction between 1909 and 1912, these new ways of
thinking about surface plane became the carriers for the spiritual con-
tent which he believed would ultimately define the “new” art and
remove it from the domain of the decorative.
During these same years, artists in England and in France were also
abandoning naturalism in favor of stylized abstractions. In London,
the major critical and theoretical voice was that of Roger Fry, soon
identified with the painters and writers of the Bloomsbury circle.
The work of Vanessa Bell (1879-1961), Roger Fry, Duncan Grant,
Wyndham Lewis, and others associated with Fry’; Omega Workshops
(an experiment in home design by artists) was equally concerned with
fusing a pictorial language derived from the decorative arts with a new
content associated with the formal lessons Fry deduced from Post-
Impressionism. Between 1910 and 1912, Fry organized two major
Post-Impressionist exhibitions in London out of a desire to attack the
philistine tastes of the British middle class. In his introduction to the
catalogue for the first exhibition, which opened at the Grafton
Galleries in the winter of 1910, he noted: “There comes a point when
the accumulations of an increasing skill in mere representation begin
to destroy the expressiveness of the design... .”
Within a year of the 1910 exhibition, Bell and Grant had begun
their experiments in decoration with lacquered boxes, introducing
geometric patterns derived from mosaic and tile work. In May 1913,
Fry opened the Omega Workshops in Fitzroy Square, London. As
indebted as this collaborative experiment in modern design was to the
theories of Post-Impressionism, its closest models were not the Arts
and Crafts Movement (for Fry staunchly rejected the socialism and
architectural orientation of that movement), but the Wiener
Werkstatte and the experimental fashion and design studios of Paris
which Fry had visited in 1911. Since 1910, Fry had been building a
250
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141 (left) Firescreen designed by
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142 (above) Vanessa Bell Cracow 1913

coherent theory of aesthetics upholding the supremacy of form over

narrative content. The publication of Clive Bell’s Art in 1914 with its
emphasis on “significant form” also promoted an aesthetic in which
design and color alone were to carry content.
The Omega Workshops became a meeting place for like-minded
artists and gave them a livelihood through designing and decorating
fabrics, furniture, pottery, and other small items. Their innovative
significance lay in the fact that they were modeled on haute couture
fashion experiments in Paris and, like the Arts and Crafts Movement
in the previous century, they sought to challenge the Victorian dis-
tinction between high and low art, or between art and craft. As no
contracts were given to participating artists, their products were tacitly
understood to be privileged, distinct from other forms of labor and
indistinguishable from “art.” That many of the workshop’s patrons
were wealthy women—Lady Desborough, Lady Curzon, Lady
Ottoline Morrell, Lady Cunard, Lady Drogheda—the same women
who patronized the fine arts and the couture houses, set up a relation-
ship between class and modernity that had far-reaching implications.
Omega designs for curtains, bedspreads and boxes were prominent-
ly displayed at venues like the Daily Mail Ideal Home exhibition and
the Allied Artists exhibition. Typical of the items shown were screens

257
 143 (left) Vanessa Bell
The Tub 1917

144 (opposite) Gabriele Minter

Boating 1910

141 with stylized nearly abstract motifs designed by Grant and Bell and
142 embroidered by Morrell, and abstract printed linens like Cracow,
designed by Bell in 1913. Many of the designs were based on oil paint-
ings. Like the early abstractions of Kandinsky and Mondrian, those of
Bell and Grant were derived from nature; the process of formal sim-
plification and abstraction resulted in tightly structured compositions
which replaced anecdotal content with absolute aesthetic values. The
exaggerated distinctions which art historians have made between
Bell’s easel paintings and her decorative work has obscured the
significant role of decoration in the development of the structure and
lyrical and sensuous color harmonies that underlie her later figurative
works.
The eight works which Bell exhibited in “The New Movement in
Art” at the Mansard Gallery in London in 1916 included four abstract
paintings closely related to her current work in fabrics. The previous
year, she had taken charge of a new program introducing dressmaking
145 into the Omega. The smock-like simplicity of dresses modeled by the
painters Winifred Gill, Bell, and Nina Hamnett recall earlier Reform
Dress styles. The Omega experiment in dress design was not a success
258
and few sold, perhaps because the designs were too exotic for the
Omega’s clientele. Even Bell’s sister, Virginia Woolf, was shocked by
the bold colors and patterns: “My god! What clothes you are responsi-
ble for! Karin’s clothes wrenched my eyes from the sockets—a skirt
barred with reds and yellows of the violent kind, a pea-green blouse
on top, with a gaudy handkerchief on her head, supposed to be the
very boldest taste. I shall retire into dove color and old lavender, with a
lace collar and lawn wristlets.”
During the years when Omega was most active, ease of movement
and primacy of color as expressive medium also characterized Sonia
Delaunay’s work in both painting and decoration. Delaunay (1885—
1979), a Russian artist who moved to Paris in 1905 and in 1910
married the Cubist painter Robert Delaunay, synthesized Post-
Impressionism, early Matisse, and Russian folk art 1n paintings such as
the Portrait of Tchouiko (1906) and Young Finnish Woman (1907). Like
her husband, Delaunay soon became firmly convinced that modernity
could best be expressed through a dynamic interplay of color har-
monies and dissonances which replicated the rhythms of modern
urban life. Robert Delaunay’s Red Eiffel Tower of 1911 derived its inter-
locking facets and dynamic forms from Picasso’s Cubist paintings of
the same years, and its highly keyed palette from Fauve painting. Sonia
Delaunay’s first piece of decorative art, and first completely abstract

y 145 Winifred Gill and Nina Hamnett

modeling dresses at the Omega
‘,§ Workshops, c. 1913
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146 Sonia Delaunay Couverture 1911

work, however, was a pieced quilt influenced by Russian peasant

designs and made shortly after the birth of her son in 1911. It devel-
oped from many sources, including Delaunay’s knowledge of early
Cubist painting. She later attributed her move away from painting
to a desire to put her husband’s career first: “From the day we started
living together, I played second fiddle and I never put myself first
until the 19S0s.”
Delaunay’s work with textiles and embroidery encouraged her to
break down forms and emphasize surface structure. She quickly
began designing book covers, posters, lampshades, curtains, cushion
covers, and other objects for her home. Throughout 1912, while
Robert Delaunay experimented with a theory of simultaneity based
on the use of light to unify contrasting colors, Delaunay produced
objects through which the theory was submitted to the play of actu-
al light. Her painting of 1912, Simultaneous Contrasts, reveals an inter- 147
est in the dynamics of surface design which then became _ her
primary concern, whereas Robert Delaunay’s Simultaneous Windows
of the same year reflects his consuming interest in the problem of
spatial illusion. In retrospect it is perhaps significant that Robert
Delaunay, who worked so closely with her, was convinced that it was
261
 through textiles that Delaunay learned to use color freely, later com-
menting of her painting that “The colors are dazzling. They have the
look of enamels or ceramics, of carpets—that 1s, there is already a
sense of surfaces that are being combined, one might say, successively
on the canvas.”
Dissatisfied with the inherently static qualities of painting as a
medium, during the Summer of 1913 Delaunay began to make simul-
taneous dresses, in reaction against the drabness of current fashions.
Their patterns of abstract forms were arranged both to enhance the
natural movement of the body and to establish a shimmering move-
ment of color. The poet Blaise Cendrars’s remark of 1913 that “On
her dress she wears her body,’ suggests that the female body itself was
being perceived as an important signifier for modernity. In the twenti-
eth century, as we shall see, it was fashion which translated the princi-
ples of abstraction to, and defined modernity for, a broad public. At
the same time, the production of art as commodified object is linked
to the commodification of the female body after the First World War.
News of Delaunay’s simultaneous dresses spread swiftly. According
to Cendrars, someone, “sent a telegram to Milan, describing our gen-
eral get-up and, precisely, and in detail, Mrs. Sonia Delaunay’s ‘simul-
taneous dresses.’ Milan spread this information through the world as a
Futurist manifestation, so that our behavior, gestures, and harlequin
‘costumes ... were known to the entire world, particularly to the
avant-garde, which wanted to be up with the latest Paris fashions. Our
extravagances especially influenced the Moscow futurists, who mod-
elled themselves after us.”
By 1913, the Italian Futurists were exploiting the idea of clothing as
a signifier for revolutionary modernism. Futurist attitudes toward
feminism, however, were deeply compromised from the beginning by
their cult of virility. “We want to glorify war—the only cleansing act
of the world—niilitarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the anar-
chists, beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt of women,’ pro-
clamed the Futurist manifesto of r909. “We want to destroy
museums, libraries, to combat moralism, feminism and all such oppor-
tunistic and utilitarian acts of cowardice.”
Giacomo Balla, the movement’s foremost theorist, proclaimed
dress as an element in a philosophy of dynamic change and novelty
(now identified with avant-garde modernism), in which Futurism
was to move out of the gallery and museum and into the street, but
most Futurist costume design was for male dress and was conceived
as an assault on social conventions. Balla’s 1914 manifesto, “The

262
147. Sonia Delaunay Simultaneous Contrasts 1912

Antineutral Dress,’ proposed replacing the drabness of men’s suits

with a “living plastic complex.’ “Futurist clothes,’ he commented,
“will be dynamic in form and colors.” Balla’s manifesto owes
much to Delaunay’s pioneering experiments, and the designs which
resulted, in both Paris and Milan, marked the beginning of a new
wave in fashion which rose to general popularity a decade later.
Intervening, however, were both the First World War and the
October Revolution of 1917.
Nowhere 1s the defining of modernity more firmly rooted in social
idealism than in the Russian avant-garde to which Cendrars referred.
Russian art in the first decade of the twentieth century was divided
between artists like Vladimir Tatlin, Alexandra Exter, Liubov Popova,
and Kasimir Malevich who welcomed European innovations in the
arts, and those like Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov who
believed that only by reference to their own cultural traditions could
203
Russian artists express ideas of any importance. The unusual impor
tance of women in the Russian avant-garde—where they were treated
as full equals—grew from nineteenth-century radical political move-
ments in which women of the intelligentsia were motivated by a
strong desire to serve the people, but their lasting success as producers
of the new art owes much to the breakdown of traditional distinctions
between the fine and applied arts.
Russian art in the years before the Revolution of 1917 developed
along two broad paths. While some artists worked primarily in two
dimensions, others emphasized construction, texture, and design.
Neoprimitivism, Cubofuturism, Rayonism, Suprematism, and Con-
structivism coexisted and artists looked to both Paris and Moscow for
support. The ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev’ exhibition of
younger Russian artists at the Salon d’Automne in 1906 brought the
painter Mikhail Larionov to Paris, and his long-time companion
Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962) exhibited first in the same exhibi-
tion. Her Neoprimitivist work was succeeded by the Rayonist paint-
ings which began before 1914 when she left Russia to work with
Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris. Paintings like Rayonist Garden:
Park (c. 1912-13) fuse Fauvism, Cubism, and indigenous Russian

148 Natalia Goncharova

Rayonist Garden: Park
Cc. 1912-13
149 Nadezhda Udaltsova
At the Piano 1914

Decorative-Primitivism in the refracted rays of light which scatter

color across the canvas surface.
In 1912, Larionov and Goncharova participated in the second Blaue
Reiter exhibition in Munich and in Fry’s second Post-Impressionist
exhibition in London. That same year, Larionov’s manifesto, “The
Donkey’s Tail,” published in Moscow, proclaimed the independence
of his group from Western art values and their commitment to devel-
oping a Russian national art. The first Rayonist exhibition included
Goncharova, Larionov, and Malevich, whose abstract work was greatly
influenced by that of Goncharova, plus examples of children’s art, sign
painters’ work, and traditional popular woodcuts (luboks).
The work of Tatlin, Exter, Popova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova, on
the other hand, was more closely tied to Cubism. Tatlin’s 1913
Counter-reliefs, his first experiments with real materials in real space,
originated after a visit to Picasso. Udaltsova (1885-1961), after attend-
ing the Académie de la Palette and receiving instruction from the
Cubist painters Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, and Segonzac in Paris in
1911, returned to Russia in 1913 and worked with Popova in Tatlin’s
Moscow studio where they combined Cubist principles with Russian
205
st. Liubov Popova Painterly Architectonics 1918
 folk art and used letters and fragments of words in collages, paintings,
and constructions. Exter (1884-1949), an early associate of David
Burliuk (whose manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” [1912],
advocated the principles of disharmony, dissymmetry, and discon-
struction), met the Cubists in Paris in 1912. By 1913, Exter’s collages
were producing effects of expansive space through wedges of flat,
crude color.
Futurist costume entered the Russian vocabulary in exhibitions,
lectures, and demonstrations by Burliuk, Olga Rozanova, Larionoy,
Goncharova, and other Cubofuturists. Marinetti’s Futurist tour of
Russia in 1914 led Exter, Rozanova, and Archipenko to participate in
the “Free Futurist Exhibition” at the Galleria Sprovieri in Rome in
1914. The years from 1914, when Russia was forced into intellectual
and cultural isolation, to 1917 are the zenith of the avant-garde move-
ment in Russia, as many artists who had been living abroad—among
them Marc Chagall, El Lissitsky, and Kandinsky—were forced to
return home. The leading artists shared a beliefin the coming political
revolution and in the need to produce a new art for the people. Their
sources lay in Russian peasant art and in European modernism, but
their vision was utopian. Their search for a new aesthetic language
compatible with the modern reality of industrializing Russia led them
to anti-illusionistic, two-dimensional compositions in which the sur-
face plane and/or painterly texture became the focus.
Popeva (1889-1924), the daughter of a wealthy family, first studied
painting in Moscow. She spent the winter of 1912-13 in Paris where
she worked under Le Fauconnier and Metzinger at La Palette and met
Udaltsova. Also influenced by Futurism, her reliefs from around 1918
Eat develop their abstract idiom from what she called “the painterly archi-
tectonics,’ interpreting Cubism and Futurism as “the problem of
form” and “the problem of the movement of color.’ “Texture is the
content ofpainterly surfaces,’ she wrote in 1919.
While Popova emphasized color and texture, other painters, such as
Rodchenko and Exter, emphasized line which they considered the
pictorial counterpart of rhythm. Exter’s Line-Force Constructions of
1919-20 develop a logical system of lines in relation to each other
that was eventually most fully realized in her innovative costume and
theater designs of the 1920s. But it was the needs of a revolutionary
society which forced artists to abandon painting in favor of utilitarian
applications of the principles of modernism.
After the Revolution, several art schools were combined to form
the SVOMAS (Free State Art Studios). Since established artists were
2608
often opposed to the goals of the Revolution, the way was opened for
young avant-garde artists to enter the state educational system.
Rozanova (1886-1918), a friend of Malevich, turned to Suprematism
following Cubist and Futurist experiments. Believing that art
belonged to the proletariat and should reflect the essential elements of
industrial and urban life, she founded in 1918 an Industrial Art Section
of IZO Narkompros (the Visual Arts Section of the Commissariat for
Public Education), which she headed with Rodchenko. Although she
died suddenly of diphtheria in November of that year, her work set
the tone for what was to follow.
By 1921 Productivism—the belief that art should be practiced as a
trade and that the production of well-designed articles for everyday
use was of far greater value than individual expression or experi-
ment—dominated the teaching of art in Russia. In that year, Popova
embraced the utilitarian position of Constructivism along with
Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova (1894-1958), with whom she
later designed textiles. In September 1921, Rodchenko, Stepanova,
Alexander Vesnin, Popova, and Exter organized an exhibition called
“$x § = 25” to display the results of their past year’s work in “labora-
tory art.’ The catalogue announced the “end of painting” as an
expressive medium and in the “Productivist Manifesto” which
accompanied the exhibition Stepanova and Rodchenko called for
artists to serve the public. Textile and dress design were central in the
Productivist desire to fuse completely the artistic and technological
aspects of production, but before examining this aspect of Russian art
in the 1920s it is important to consider what had happened in western
Europe in the intervening years.
Sonia and Robert Delaunay had spent the war years in Spain and
Portugal. It was while in Barcelona in October 1917 that they heard
the news of the Russian Revolution, an event which signaled the end
of the income from Sonia’s wealthy family on which they had relied.
Nevertheless, they celebrated the change. Delaunay was resolved to
find a market for her creations in the applied arts, so they moved
to Madrid to earn a living. Her first opportunity came through
Diaghilev, whose ballet sets and costumes were instrumental in com-
bining visual art and theatrical design. Invited to design costumes
(while Robert Delaunay designed the sets) for Cléopdtre, one of the
most successful ballets in the company’s repertory, Delaunay produced
a two-dimensional geometric ordering of discs and boldly frontal
geometric designs ideally suited to the angular processional quality of
the ballet’s movements. Lengths of fabric wrapped around the human
269
 form animated the body of the dancer. Through Diaghilev, Delaunay
was introduced to prominent members of Spanish society and, with
backing from an English bank, she soon opened a small shop, the Casa
Sonia, which introduced modern design to Spain.
Returning to Paris in 1921, the Delaunays quickly became absorbed
into the Dada milieu there. They were accepted by the nihilistic Dada
group largely because, due to Delaunay’s integration of painting and
decoration, they lived their art 1n every aspect oftheir lives. Moreover,
they shared their commitment to breaking free from the static quality
of painting by applying the language of abstraction as widely as possi-
ble with other Dada collaborators. Jean Arp and his wife, Sophie
Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943), had been active participants in Zurich
Dada since the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916; Raoul
Hausmann and Hannah Hoch (1889-1978), whose pioneering experi-
ments with photomontage helped sever the photograph from its exis-
tence as an autonomous artifact and emphasize its role in ideological
production, were members of Berlin Dada. Hoch’s DADA-Dance
(1919-21) juxtaposes machine parts with a female dancer and a model
who is elegantly dressed and posed but whose head has been replaced
by that of a black. Violent distortions of scale and a rejection of con-
ventionalized femininity undermine the commodification of the

152 Sonia Delaunay, costume for Cléopdtre 1§3. Hannah Hoch DADA- Dance
with Chernichova in the title-role, 1918 1919-21
 Mlposkte: cnopt-ofemp~us

154 Sonia Delaunay, appliquéd coat, 1920s 155 Varvara Stepanova Designs
for Sports
Clothing 1923

idealized female body and its relationship to mass-produced goods. In

collages like The Tailor’s Flower (1920), forms signifying abstraction are
set uneasily next to the cultural signs of femininity so that gender and
art are shown as social productions.
The emergence of an abstract geometric style in Taeuber-Arp’s
work around 1915 reflected her interest in the work of Kandinsky,
Robert Delaunay, and Paul Klee, but probably derived its horizontal/
vertical syntax from her training in textiles. She had specialized in tex-
tiles at the schools of applied arts in Saint Gallen and Hamburg, and
she was a Professor of Textile Design and Techniques at the School of
Applied Arts in Zurich from 1916 to 1929. Working between media,
she explored the relation of color and form in the belief that there was
little distinction between ornamentation and “high art” when the
“wish to produce beautiful things—when that wish is true and pro-
found—falls together with striving for perfection.” She and Jean Arp
271
began working collaboratively in 1915, producing paintings, collages,
embroideries, and weavings with shared motifs, like a collage and the
embroidery based on it which date from 1916.
Working with paper, cloth, embroidery, and other materials enabled
Arp and Taeuber-Arp to free themselves from pictorial traditions. In
an introduction to the catalogue for an exhibition, “Modern tapes-
tries, embroideries, paintings, drawings,” held in Zurich in 1915 Arp
had written: “These works are put together from lines, planes, forms,
and colors. They try to approach the unfathomable and eternal values
above mankind. They are a reaction against egotistical human con-
cerns. They show hatred for the shamelessness of human existence, a
hatred of paintings as such.”
The Dada contempt for traditional painting as a static, materialistic
form, unable to communicate the vitality of modern life, found a sym-
pathetic spirit in Delaunay, but it was her employment of a variety of
media and her liberal attitude to breaking down the distinction
between art and craft that probably inspired the Dadaists. The poet
René Crevel left a moving description of the vitality of the Delaunay
apartment: “At the entrance ... there was a surprise. The walls were
covered with multicolored poems. Georges Auric, a pot of paint in
one hand, was using the other to paint the notes of a marvelous treble
clef. Beside him Pierre de Massot was drawing a greeting. The master
of the house invited every new guest to go to work and made them
admire the curtain of gray crépe de Chine on which his wife, Sonia
Delaunay, had through a miracle of inexpressible harmonies deftly
embroidered in linen arabesques the impulsive creation of Philippe
Soupault with all his humor and poetry... . After five minutes at
the home of Sonia Delaunay no one 1s surprised to find that it con-
tains more than a certitude of its happiness ... you enter the home
of Sonia Delaunay and she shows you dresses, furniture, sketches
for dresses, drawings for furniture. Nothing that she shows you
resembles anything you have ever seen at the couturiers or at furniture
displays. They are really new things... 2” In 1922, Delaunay began
producing embroidered and simultaneous scarves for sale. A
maquette for “Curtain-Poéme” by Soupault in 1922 led to a series of
“dress/poems” on which colors and words were brought into ever-
changing relationships through the movement ofthe body. Dada poets
wrote poems for Delaunay’s creations and Tzara, Crevel, and Louis
Aragon all wore clothes she had designed and made.
In early 1923, the Union of Russian Artists in Paris organized
an evening of dance, performance, and exhibition at the Bal Bullier
156 Jean Arp Paper Cut with Paper Cutter 157 Sophie Taeuber-Arp Vertical Horizontal
I9I8 Composition c. 1916-18

(a popular dance hall frequented by avant-garde artists). The partici-

pants included Delaunay, Goncharova, Larionov, and Fernand Léger.
Delaunay designed a booth of modern fashions which displayed her
scarves, ballet costumes, embroidered vests, and coats. It was her first
presentation of clothing and design in a fully unified exhibition set-
ting, and the first of many fancy dress events of the 1920s in which
artists and socialites joined, fusing production and consumption of the
new image of the modern. Later in 1923, Dada artists in Paris restaged
Tzara’s play Le Coeur a Gaz. Costumes by Delaunay exhibited the
same frontal abstract and geometric conception soon to be displayed
on the backs of fashionable society women in Paris who bought her
appliqued coats. So successful were these designs that they were pur-
chased by architects like Gropius, Mendelsohn, and Breuer for their
wives, and by actresses like Gloria Swanson, whose purchase spread
the new fashion to America.
Delaunay’s designs were also well represented in an evening orga-
nized by the collector Laurent Monnier the following year at the
Hotel Claridge. In a parade of fashions from past, present, and future,
her designs represented the style of the future. Poems by Jacques

273
 Delteil accompanied the models and summarized Delaunay’s ideals;
“Immobility is dead and this is the reign of movement/ Movement 1s
born at the heads to spread among the stars/ The circular colored
movement which is at the center of everything/ which is everything/
And look, a dress is a dance.”
The evolution of Delaunay’s fashion and textile designs, which by
1923 were being comme srcially produc ed, reflects both the French
textile industry’s attempt to recover quickly from the slump caused by
the War by identifying their designs with contemporary avant-garde
art, and new ways of thinking about the body and display. Avant-garde
spectacles like Dada performances helped break down earlier notions
about clothing as a cover for the body, replacing them with an image
of the body as a fluid screen, capable of reflecting back a present con-
stantly under going redefinition and transformation.
Although ‘Delaunay’ s designs included costumes worn by male
artists, their. commercial development was entirely directed toward
women’s wear. The avant-garde myth that these transformations of
the relationship between the body and modern life were prompted by
the acts of unique individuals was soon challenged as competing ide-
ologies began to use images of the body as signifiers for other kinds of
social meanings.
The years during which Delaunay was most involved in textle and
clothing design in Paris correspond to the period when Russian artists
sought to find socially useful applications for their aesthetic theories.
In Russia, many architectural and other plans by avant-garde artists
remained theories only because of crippling shortages of raw materials
atter the Revolution and the Civil War of 1918—21. Yet Moscow had a
large textile industry and designs for textiles and clothes were valuable
for the practical application of Constructivist ideas about materials
and the application of design principles to everyday life.
At the beginning of 1923 an article appeared in Pravda urging artists
to address industrial problems. The first artists to respond were
160 Popova, Rodchenko, Stepanova, Tatlin, and Exter who sent sketches
to the First State Textile Factory in Moscow, but only Popova
and Stepanova entered mass production. The results were bright,
simple geometric patterns. “Anonymous” geometric/mechanical and
abstract motifs articulated the individual’s place within industrial civi-
lization, while kinetic forms symbolized emancipation and mobility.
Tatlin and Rodchenko developed clothing designs that offered
solutions to the new social functions of clothing, but it was Popova
and Stepanova who rethought the whole cloth and clothing design

274
 process within the framework of the existing industry. Both wanted to
link textile design to the principles of dress design and in an article of
1929, “Present Day Dress—Production Clothing,’ Stepanova defined
the challenge facing them: “The basic task of the textile artist today is
to link his [sic] work on textiles with dress design ...to outlive all the
craft methods of working, to introduce mechanical devices ...to be
involved in the life of the consumer ...and most importantly to know
what happens to the cloth after it is taken from the factory.”
Stepanova’s article rejects the pre-revolutionary concept of fashion
which stressed form and decoration and instead defines the aesthetic
effect as a by-product of the physical movement required in everyday
activities. Popova’s 1923 essay, “The Dress of Today is the Industrial
Dress,’ also argued for a redefinition of dress as function rather than
object: “Fashion, which used to be the psychological reflection of
everyday life, of customs and aesthetic taste, is now being replaced by a
form of dress designed for use 1n various forms of labor, for a particu-
lar activity in society. This form of dress can only be shown during the
process of work. Outside of practical life it does not represent a self-
sufficient value or a particular kind of ‘work of art.”
In Paris Russian and French design came together in 1925. That
year an Exhibition of Decorative and Industria] Arts was organized to

158 Alexandra Exter, costume design for a woman 159 Page from Sonia Delaunay, ses peintures,
for La Fille d’ Hélios 1y22 ses objets, ses tissus simultanes 1925

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 exalt the fusion of art and commercial enterprise in decorative design.
Delaunay set up a shop called The Simultaneous Boutique with
the furrier Jacques Heim; Russian artists sent clothing, fabric, and
industrial objects. Close similarities between Soviet “Communist”
and Western “capitalist” textile designs were immediately apparent,
raising questions about the actual content of the new fashion. In 1925,
Vogue magazine also showed abstract textiles in an article entitled
“Paris Paints its Frocks in Cubist Patterns.” “Like wash drawings,
accented with one note of color, are these new modernist costumes
and accessories ...” proclaimed the editors. Quickly spreading across
Western Europe and America, and shifting from one-of-a-kind
designs for wealthy women to mass-produced clothing for the middle
class, “modern” textile and clothing designs by Delaunay and Russian
IS9 artists carried the image of the New Woman to a wide public, but this
new image served ends that had little to do with actually changing the
conditions of life for most women.
That the New Woman 1s the Modern Woman 1s reiterated in mass-
market publications of the 1920s. She 1s Nancy Cunard, wealthy and
bohemian daughter of the English shipping family, whose exploits are
177 documented in Dada memoirs of the period. She is Coco Chanel,
doyenne of the French fashion world who around rgto had adapted
sportswear to daily life and capitalized on feminizing masculine
fashion, posing in the “little black dress” that became the hallmark of
 1930s fashion and was photographed by Man Ray. Above all, in the
popular imagination, she is Victor Marguerite’s Monique Lerbier, the
heroine of La Gargonne, an enormously popular novel which sold
twenty thousand copies 1n advance ofits 1922 publication date and, by
1929, was translated into many languages and had sold over one mil-
lion copies. Monique Lerbier wore her hair and skirts short, danced,
played sports, took courses at the Sorbonne, and worked in an inter-
esting job.
The real relationship between a 1920s ideal of fashion and glamor
which stressed the modern woman’s youth and sexuality and the real-
ity of most women’s lives was far more complex. The ideal that had
been derived originally from avant-garde art masked profound eco-
nomic and cultural changes, but it is the images produced by mod-
ernists like Delaunay and the Russian artists which became the basis of
a modern ideology in which the commodified image of woman
signifies her expanded role as consumer. According to Stewart Ewen,
those in industry in Western Europe and America were often the
most enthusiastic proponents of the new womanhood for they real-
ized that liberated women were more able consumers. One result was
the many advertisements which show the fashionably dressed flapper
at work. Manufacturers were happy to present women with a recon-
stituted ideal which gave much notice to their new identity as indus-
trial workers and consumers. Industries that marketed cosmetics and

160 (opposite) Liubov Popova, design

for a flannelette print and a coat and skirt
using these, c. 1924

161 (right) Cubist dress from Vogue

October 1925
other personal care items mushroomed in the 1920s and the “new
look,” which had come from the innovations of the avant-garde,
became ideologically useful as a banner standing for newness and
innovation generally as purchasable properties.
Finally, this manipulation of working woman’s independent pur-
chasing power also masked her increasingly routine work life, as well
as complex and far-reaching changes in the institution of the family
that accelerated after the First World War. The growth of rationalized
labor—or assembly line production—after the War came to define
jobs for women as rote and contributed to growing conflicts between
work and family activities for many women. Working women’s inde-
pendent purchasing power threatened the traditional structure of the
family and became the basis for an ideology of gender relations which
defined women as managerial, in charge of consumption in the fami-
ly. Although men were still viewed as breadwinners, women were now
cultivated as general purchasing managers. The threatening underside
of these new gender relations 1s well expressed in articles which
appeared in Vogue and other popular publications in 1925. “While
there are yet vestiges of family life about us, and households, as house-
holds, still exist, it would surely be seemly to examine the characters of
those who once held the position of leadership in them. We refer to
fathers,’ opens one such lament.
The popular advocacy of the image of the New Woman was inter-
national in scope. And although the specific social and economic situ-
ations of different countries after the War affected the ways that her
image was conflated and appropriated for ideological purposes, the
image itself is generally most responsive to the needs of industrial
capitalism no matter in which country. Renate Bridenthal, Atina
Grossman, and other historians have argued that despite much
rhetoric about the rights and liberation of women, and despite a
coherent visual imagery celebrating the sexually free working woman,
no fundamental changes in women’s traditional roles are evident in
Weimar Germany. And in France, the New Woman may have been
sexually liberated, but she did not win the right to vote until 1946.
In the end, the image that promised a new world for the modern
woman in twentieth-century industrial society would exist as a reality:
only for wealthy and privileged women. As it filtered to masses of
working women, it functioned more and more as a fantasy, remote
from the realities of most women’s lives but strenuously asserted
through media campaigns as a means to promote consumption—
selling youth, beauty, and leisure along with the latest fashions.
278
 CHAPTER TEN

Modernist Representation: The Female Body

The emergence of a self-conscious set of practices and characteristics

through which the modern in art is understood developed gradually
and coincided with the appearance of a first generation of women
artists with more or less equal access to artistic training. However, the
related notion of an “avant-garde” as the dominant ideology of artis-
tic production and scholarship served to marginalize the woman artist
as surely as did the guilds in the fifteenth century, and the academies
in the seventeenth and eighteenth. There is no female Bohemia
against which to measure the exploits of a Suzanne Valadon, no
psychoanalytic equating of artistic creativity and female sexuality,
no Romantic legacy of the woman artist as an intense and gifted
outsider. If Expressionism, as feminist art historians have argued,
stands as a revolt of “sons” against “fathers,” the relationships of Paula
Modersohn-Becker, Kathe Kollwitz, among others, to German
Expressionism 1s difficult to elucidate. Valorizing stylistic innovation
and monumental size, Modernist mythologizing leaves little room
for the modest, stylistically consistent paintings of Gwen John and
Florine Stettheimer. Identifying woman with nature, and imaging
femininity in its instinctive, enigmatic, sexual, and destructive aspects
places women artists from Georgia O’ Keeffe and Emily Carr to Frida
Kahlo and Leonor Fini in an impossible double-bind 1n which femi-
ninity and art become self-canceling phrases.
Another aspect of the early Modernist myth, which 1s receiving
increasing attention from feminist art historians and critics, concerns
the extent to which the major paintings—and sometimes sculptures—
associated with the development of modern art wrest their formal and
stylistic innovations from an erotically based assault on female form:
Manet’s and Picasso’s prostitutes, Gauguin’s “primitives,’ Matisse’s
nudes, Surrealism’s objects. Modern artists from Renoir (“I paint with
my prick”) to Picasso (“Painting, that is actual lovemaking”) have
collaborated in fusing the sexual and the artistic by equating artistic
creation with male sexual energy, presenting women as powerless
and sexually subjugated.

279
162~~) Paula Modersohn-Becker Mother and Child Lying Nude 1907

In her article, “Domination and Virility in Vanguard Painting,’

Carol Duncan traces the sexualizing of creativity in the work of the
Fauves, the Cubists, and the German Expressionists, and she argues
that the vanguard myth of individual artistic freedom 1s built on sexual
and social inequalities. Reduced to flesh, the female subject is rendered
powerless before the artist/viewer: “... her body contorted according
to the dictates of his erotic will. Instead of the consuming femme-fatale,
one sees an obedient animal. The artist, in asserting his own sexual
will, had annihilated all that is human in his opponent. ... The socially
radical claims of a Vlaminck, a Van Dongen or a Kirchner are
thus contradicted. According to their paintings, the liberation of the
artist means the domination of others; his freedom requires their
unfreedom.”
Duncan’s essay points toward a long history in which the represen-
tation of the female body has been organized for male viewing plea-
sure. The subject of the nude in art brings together discourses of
representation, morality, and female sexuality, but the persistent pre-
sentation of the nude female body as a site of male viewing pleasure, a
280
 self-Por trait
we

a ula Modersohn-Becker W it h A ~ ~~ DSY ~

T
ecklace 1
commodified image of exchange, and a fetishized defense against the
fear of castration has left little place for explorations of female subjec-
tivity, knowledge, and experience. The difficulty of distinguishing
between overtly sexualized (i.e., voyeurism, fetishism, and scopophilia)
and other forms of looking, the issue of female subjectivity, and the
identification of the female body with nature, generation, and
the instinctual life have become important areas of investigation for
contemporary feminism. The roots of those investigations (if not
their theoretical formulations), however, lie with earlier generations of
women artists.
Marginalized in the aesthetic and political debates swirling around
modern art movements in the early decades of the twentieth century,
many women turned to the female body as the primary subject of a
woman’s experience. Although contemporary critics remain deeply
divided about essentialism—the belief in a female essence residing
somewhere within the body of women—and many have instead cho-
sen a theoretical practice that addresses the social construction of fem-
ininity and the psychoanalytic construction of sexual difference, the
search for the sources and self-imaging of women’s creative energy
remains very much with us. As we become more conscious ofthe fact
that we do not possess unmediated access to our own bodies—that
our understanding and conceptualization of the body is structured by
discourses from those of art to medicine and law—the work of earlier
generations of women artists who addressed the interaction of gender,
class, artistic conventions, and milieux in representations of the female
body provides important precedents.
Valadon and Modersohn-Becker were two of the first women artists
to work extensively with the nude female form. Their paintings collude
with, and challenge, narratives that construct female identity, through
connections to nature, and that view women as controled by emotions,
sexual instincts, and biology. Confronted with Valadon’s powerful
nudes, critics were unable to sever the nude from its status as a signifier
for male creativity; instead, they severed Valadon (not a respectable
middle-class woman) from her femininity and allowed her to circulate
as a pseudo-male, complete with “masculine power” and “virility.”
‘And perhaps in this disregard for logic,’ wrote Bernard Dorival, “in
this inconsistency and indifference to contradiction, lies the only femi-
nine trait in the art of Suzanne Valadon—that most virile—and great-
est—of all the women in painting.”
Dorival’s critical position is similar to that taken by many twenti-
eth-century critics who, omitting one of the two sexes neatly divided
282
164 Suzanne Valadon Grandmother and Young Girl Stepping into the Bath c. 1908

as to attributes and capabilities by a nineteenth-century social ideolo-

gy that stressed separate spheres for men and women, have confidently
asserted that “art has no sex.’ At the same time, they have often
bestowed canonical status only on a few, selected women artists whose
work they have termed “virile.” Nevertheless, Valadon’s status in the
eyes of Dorival and other contemporary critics was not sufficient to
ensure her place in histories of modern art. Although she exhibited at
the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, the Indépendants, and at pri-
vate galleries like Berthe Weil and Bernheim-Jeune, and although
Ambroise Vollard published and sold her engravings in 1897, by the
1920s her work was all but ignored.
Valadon became an artist’s model in the early 1880s after working as
a circus performer. Posing for Puvis de Chavannes, Toulouse Lautrec,
Renoir, and other artists, she was part of the sexually free Bohemian
life of early twentieth-century Paris. Her entrée into the world of art
283
 yo eatin,”

5<
1907-09
~
Gwen John A € 4 orner of the Arti ST Room, Paris
166 Suzanne Valadon The Blue Room 19273

came not through education, for she was largely self-taught, but
through her identification with a class of sexually available artists’
models, an association which liberated her from any lingering expec-
tations about respectability and allowed her to enter into the easy rela-
tionships with other artists and with her patrons which we seldom see
in the careers of middle-class women artists of those years.
Valadon’s female nudes fuse observation with a knowledge of the
female body based on her experience as a model. Rejecting the static
and timeless presentation of the monumental nude that dominates
Western art, she emphasizes context, specific moment, and physical
action. Instead of presenting the female body as a lush surface isolated
and controled by the male gaze, she emphasizes the awkward gestures
of figures apparently in control of their own movements. Valadon
often placed her figures in specific domestic settings, surrounding
them with images of domesticity and community as in Grandmother 164

285
 and Young Girl Stepping into the Bath (c. 1908). Works such as these
represent a striking departure from the practices of her contempo-
raries, like Renoir, who referred to his models as “beautiful fruit.”
Like Degas, who recognized and encouraged her talent, Valadon
often turned her bathers away from the viewer and depicted them
absorbed in their own activities. But in her emphasis on the tension of
the body as it executes specific movements there 1s little or no attempt
to establish the closely framed single point of visual connection
between viewer and model that is the hallmark of Degas’s many pas-
tels of bathers. The nakedness of Valadon’s figures is specific to the act
166 of bathing. Her nudes are full-bodied, weighty, and sturdy. Although
sensuous, they stand in opposition to the archetypal and fertile female
figures so prevalent in the avant-garde circles of Gauguin and the
Fauves.
The shift from the imagery of seductive and devouring femininity
produced by Symbolist painters and poets to an ideology of “natural
womanhood” which identified the female body with biological
nature was historically and culturally specific, part of a reaction against
feminism and the neo-Malthusians. Modest gains made by women in
education and employment in France at the end of the nineteenth
century provoked an intense anti-feminist backlash. It culminated in
the battle over control of reproductive rights in France. Indignation
among demographers over declining birth rates at the end of the
nineteenth century was taken up by literary figures such as Zola,
whose novel La Fecondité (1899) gave fictional form to a growing cult
of fertility: “There is no more glorious blossoming, no more sacred
symbol of living eternity than an infant at its mother’s breast.” The cry
was taken up by artists, including Gauguin, whose colonization of the
“natural” female Tahitian body reinforced early Modernism’s exalta-
tion of the “natural” female body always subject to the literal and
metaphoric control of man.
Among the work of women artists associated with Expressionism,
that of Paula Modersohn-Becker and Kathe Kollwitz most clearly
reveals the clash between Modernist ideology and social reality.
Caught between the artistic and social conservatism of the
Worpswede painters and the influence of French Modernism,
Modersohn-Becker struggled to produce images that embodied both
poles of experience. Kollwitz (1867-1945) was committed to an art of
radical social content unrivaled in her day. Her choice of graphic
realism as a style, her exclusive use of printmaking media, and her
production of posters and humanitarian leaflets, all contributed to
286
 later devaluations of her work and its dismissal by art historians as
“yllustration” and “propaganda.”
Born in Dresden in 1876, Modersohn-Becker was the child of
comfortably middle-class parents who encouraged her artistic interests
until she showed signs of serious professional ambition. She made her
first visit to the Worpswede artists’ community in northern Germany
in the summer of 1897 where she began to study with Fritz
Makensen. The Worpswede painters were nature painters in the
Barbizon tradition. Encouraged by Julius Langbehn’s eccentric book,
Rembrandt as a Teacher (1890), and by their interest in Nietszche,
Zola, Rembrandt, and Dtirer, they embraced nature, the primitive
simplicity of peasant life, and the purity of youth. Langbehn’s book
became the textbook of the “Volkish” movement, a utopian reaction
against industrialization which celebrated the rural values of the peas-
antry. Although she settled more or less permanently in the village
after completing her studies in 1898, later marrying the painter Otto
Modersohn, Modersohn-Becker did not share the group’s disdain for
academic training; the flattened and simplified forms that mark her
mature style derive from the influence of French painters, particularly
Cézanne and Gauguin, whose work she saw during four visits to Paris
between 1899 and 1903, four years before her premature death.
Modersohn-Becker’s interest in her models as personifications of
elemental nature developed in the context of the Worpswede artists’
cultivation of the theme of the “earth mother,’ but it was not until
after her first trip to Paris in 1899 that it entered her work as a major
theme. One of Fritz Mackensen’s first Worpswede canvases was a life-
sized Madonna of the Moors and as early as 1898 Modersohn-Becker
recorded her impression of a peasant woman suckling a child in her
diary: “Frau Meyer, a voluptuous blonde. ... This time with her little
boy at her breast. I had to draw her as a mother. That is her single true
purpose.” Linda Nochlin has also pointed to sources for Modersohn-
Becker’s cultivation of the imagery of fecund maternity in JJ.
Bachofen’s Mutterecht (1861), reissued in 1897 and widely circulated
among artists and writers. Surrounding her figures with flowers and
foliage, Modersohn-Becker ignored conventional perspective and
anecdotal detail to produce monumental images ofidealized mother-
hood: “I kneel before it (motherhood) 1n humility,’ she wrote.
Her diary records her ambivalence toward marriage, motherhood,
and art. Modeled after the diaries of Marie Bashkirtseft, Modersohn-
Becker, unlike the former, had little sympathy for the growing
women’s movement. Although Karl Scheffler’s misogynist Woman and
287
167 (left) Frida Kahlo
The Broken Column 1944

168 (below) Leonora Carrington

Self-Portrait 1938
Art (Die Fraue und die Kunst) was not published until 1908, the year
after her death, its sentiments were commonly accepted throughout
the period of Modersohn-Becker’s development as an artist. Scheffler
emphasized woman’s inability to participate in the production of
culture because of her ties to nature and her lack of spiritual insight.
Modersohn-Becker’s own ambivalence on these points 1s recorded
in an allegorical prose poem in which she acknowledges her artistic
ambitions as “masculine” and remarks on the mutual exclusivity of
sexual love and artistic success.
Modersohn-Becker participated in the second group exhibition in
the Bremen Kunsthalle in 1899, despite an attempt by its director to
dissuade her. Negative critical response focused mainly on the work of
the women artists in the colony and Modersohn-Becker left almost
immediately for Paris. There she entered the Académie Colarossi and
visited galleries showing the work of Puvis de Chavannes, the
Barbizon painters, Courbet, and Monet. Gradually rejecting the
Worpswede artists’ commitment to a crude naturalism, her work
began to record influences from Rodin, Japanese art, Daumier, Millet,
and other French painters. By 1906, she had requested a copy of
Gauguin’s autobiography, Noa Noa, from her sister in Paris and had
thrown off her husband’s artistic influence.
Viewing Gauguin’s retrospective exhibition in Paris in 1906 helped
move Modersohn-Becker’s figurative works in the direction of a
search for primordial power through images of nature. Her nude self- 163
portraits may be the first such paintings in oil by a woman artist, but as
such, they reveal all the contradictions inherent in the woman artist’s
attempt to insert her own image into existing artistic conventions.
Rejecting Gauguin’s romantic nostalgia, she carries the simplification
of form to an extreme which blunts the sensuality normally assigned
female flesh in the nistory of Western art. Whereas his nudes recline
in states of dreamy reverie or emerge from the imagery of an exoti-
cized otherness (i.e., the Tahitian landscape constructed as “feminine”
through an overemphasis on its exoticism, bounteousness, and “prim-
itivism” in relation to Western cultural norms), hers dominate their
surroundings. The immobility, monumentality, and generalized sur-
faces of these self-portrait nudes place them within conventions that
work to universalize the female nude as a transcendent image. At the
same time, the careful scrutiny of the female body with its gravelly
surfaces, and the frank confrontation between the woman and the
artist, disrupt the conventions of the female nude, fusing the issues of
femaleness and creativity in new ways.
289
 Modersohn-Becker’s archetypal fertility images of 1906 and 1907,
162 Mother and Child Lying Nude and Mother with Child at Her Breast are
closely related to Gauguin paintings such as the Kneeling Day of the
God, but they clothe the subject of fertility and nurture with dignity,
while at the same time collaborating with a late nineteenth-century
ideology of timeless, unvaryingly “natural” womanhood. The subtext
of violence and control that accompanies Gauguin’s representations of
Tahitian women is missing from Modersohn-Becker’s paintings with
their lowered viewpoint and direct gaze. Gauguin’s many paintings of
Tahitian women replay the unequal relationship of the male artist and
the female model in the inequities of the white male artist’s relation-
ship to native women in a colonialized society. His paintings bind
women to nature through repetitions of colors, patterns, and con-
tours; crouching female figures are placed in a submissive relationship
to the downward gaze of the male artist and the women’s implacable
gazes offer little insight into the specifics of their lives.
Modersohn-Becker’s death a few days after giving birth provides an
ironic commentary on the gulf between idealized motherhood and
the biological realities of fecundity. Nochlin has pointed out this dis-
junction, observing that it is Kathe Kollwitz’s depictions of women
and children that insert motherhood “into the bitterly concrete con-
text of class and history.”
Kollwitz replaces the archetypal imagery of female abundance with
the reatities of female bodies marked by a poverty which often pre-
vents women from nourishing their children or enjoying their moth-
erhood. In Portraits of Misery Il, a lithograph, and in many other
works, pregnancy without material support is cause for grief rather
than rejoicing. Kollwitz, the first woman elected to the Prussian
Academy of the Arts in 1919, and the foremost graphic artist of the
first half of the twentieth century, was encouraged to draw as a child
by her father. Studies in Berlin and Munich followed a period oftrain-
ing in Konigsberg (now Karliningrad) under the engraver Rudolph
Maurer. In 1891, she married Dr. Karl Kollwitz and settled in Berlin
where she came in contact with the industrial workers of Berlin
through his practice. A socialist, feminist (founder of the Women’s
Arts Union [Frauen Kunstverband | in Berlin in 1913), and pacifist, the
themes of war, hatred, poverty, love, grief, death, and struggle domi-
nate her mature work.
Influenced by Max Klinger’s engravings, by Zola’s realism, and by
the memory of her father reciting Thomas Hood’s “The Song of the
Shirt” with its passionate appeal on behalf of working women, she
290
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169 Kathe Kollwitz, “Attack,” The Weaver’s Revolt 1895-97

turned to themes of social conditions and to the expressive mediums

of engraving and lithography. Kollwitz’s first major success came with
a cycle of three engravings and three lithographs entitled The Weavers’
Revolt (1895-97), based on Gerhart Hauptmann’s play, The Weavers,
about the revolt of the Silesian weavers in 1844.
As a result of the success of The Weavers’ Revolt (which proved so
politically effective when exhibited in 1898 that the Kaiser refused to
award Kollwitz the gold medal she had won), Kollwitz was appointed
to teach graphics and nude studies at the Berlin Kunstlerinnenschule.
Her subsequent concentration on the mother and child theme devel-
oped hand in hand with a series of personal tragedies which included
the death of a son 1n the First World War and the loss of a grandson 1n
the Second. Documenting the suffering that results from war and
poverty led Kollwitz away from the expressions ofindividual torment
that mark the work of her contemporaries Edvard Munch and James
291
Ensor and that would soon dominate German Expressionism.
Although her work shares the graphic expressiveness of the prints of
the members of the Briicke and Blaue Reiter groups, she increasingly
came to see Expressionism as a rarefied art of the studio, divorced from
social reality. “I am convinced,’ she wrote in a diary of 1908, “that
there must be an understanding between the artist and the people
such as there always used to be in the best periods 1n history.”
Kollwitz’s insistence on the social function of art divorced her
work from the Modernist cultivation of individual artistic freedom.
Although very different in its social and political imperatives, the work
of the British painter Gwen John (1876-1939) also challenges the
scope, and often the scale, of Modernist ambitions. To link these artists
in a chronological discussion—although it may make their histories
available for survey classes and introductory texts—risks inscribing
them in a fallacious lineage that replicates art history’s emphasis on a
seamless narrative of individual genius. In extracting Gwen John’s life
from the historical circumstances in which she lived, from the lives of
the hundreds of other women painters working in London and Paris
in the same years, and from the emergence of the social and intellectu-
al networks and systems of support that enabled women’s creative
lives, even feminist art historians become complicit in positioning
the woman artist to be continually “rediscovered” as an exception and
represented as unique.
Though she knew Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Rodin, and many other
contemporary artists, and read widely, John had little interest in the
theoretical aspects of artistic movements. Nor was she a joiner. Yet her
marginalized relationship to the formative Modernist movements also
produced its own myths about her as a woman artist. Despite regular
exhibitions, she, like Valadon, was until recently most often presented
as an “unknown,’ to be regularly rediscovered by subsequent genera-
tions of curators and critics, always in relation to masculine figures
such as her brother Augustus John, whose work bears little similarity
to hers; her lover, the sculptor Auguste Rodin; and her patron, the
American John Quinn.
Born and raised in Wales, John was educated at the Slade School in
London, and worked in Whistler’s studio. She went to France at the
age of twenty-seven and remained there for the rest of her life. Her
work contains superficial affinities to the work of Rodin, Puvis de
Chavannes, Vuillard, Bonnard, Modigliani, and Roualt, but its dry sur-
faces, restrained color and patterned brushwork are closer to the
paintings produced by the Camden Town Group in London than to
170 Gwen John Young Woman
Holding a Black Cat c. 1914-15

the French Modernists. Her reliance on intimate subject matter was

shaped by her early experiences at the Slade and her paintings, muted
in color, subdued in tone, and formal in arrangement, evoke powerful
emotional responses. Their intimate scale and personal subjects—
often the figure of the artist herself seated on the edge of her bed,
gazing intently into the mirror—have also helped fuel the widespread
myth in which the woman artist’s life is seen as providing the principal
source of meaning for the work.
John first exhibited in 1900 at the New English Art Club, returning
to Paris after that exhibition partly to escape Augustus John’s influ-
ence over her life. She supported herselfby posing as an artist’s model,
often for English women artists. Distinctive themes emerged in her
work during this period, among them simple interiors bathed in soft 105
light and isolated female figures set against textured walls. Formally
constructed, these works capture specific moments filled with light
and atmosphere. The repetition of compositions again and again 1s
characteristic of her mature work and provided a means for the formal
investigations which were her primary concern as a painter.

293
 By the summer of 1904, John was also posing for Rodin. Her rela-
tionship with the sculptor belongs to the difficult history of women
who, lacking familial and societal support for their endeavors, have
annexed their talent to that of male mentors and have seen their own
careers suffer as a result. Rodin defined his own artistic genius in sexu-
al terms and his critics followed suit: “The period when Rodin was
caught up in the grand passion of his life coincided with the creation
of his most impassioned works,’ notes one twentieth-century critic—
“Such was his innate vigor, even in decline, that everything which
flowed from his hands with such dangerous facility bore the imprint
of genius... .” But what of the women who moved, however briefly,
into the sculptor’s orbit? John, like the sculptor Camille Claudel (1864—
1943) who entered Rodin’s studio as an assistant in 1883 and remained
to become model, lover, and collaborator, saw her creative life sub-
sumed into a myth of romantic love in which the role of muse eclipses
that of artist.
John’s reflective, dedicated life allowed her to live largely indepen-
dent of the social obligations placed on most women of her class and
historical period, while Claudel’s later life, and institutionalization, was

171 Camille Claudel

La Valse 1895
172 Marie Laurencin Group ofArtists 1908

subject to familial control exercised by her brother, the poet Paul

Claudel. Neither artist, however, escaped subsequent critical searches
for signs of the “essentially feminine” in her work. This and related
terms have also been used to define categories within which to view
the work of other women who moved in avant-garde circles during
the first half of the twentieth century, but whose idiosyncratic styles
find no place in vanguard mythology. Indeed there is growing evi-
dence that both Marie Laurencin and Florine Stettheimer collaborat-
ed in the fashioning of the mythology of the feminine that allowed
each a voice, even though it ensured that they would never be taken as
seriously as their male colleagues.
Educated at the Lycée Lamartine and at the Academie Humbert,
where she met the Cubist painter Georges Braque, Marie Laurencin
(1885-1956) had a long, stormy affair with the poet Guillaume
Apollinaire, which placed her at the center of the group of artists who
gathered around Picasso in the studio at the Bateau Lavoir, a run-
down former wash house in Montmartre. Her painting, Group of
Artists (1908), includes Apollinaire, Picasso, herself, and Picasso's
companion, Fernande Olivier, but the presence of herself and Olivier
in the painting points to the binding ties of friendship rather than to
shared artistic goals.
In his 1913 treatise, Les Peintres Cubistes: Meditations esthétiques,
Apollinaire called her a “scientific Cubist,’ but in fact her work
has little to do with Cubism’s conceptual and formal investigations.
Instead it was her “femininity” that became the artistic yardstick
against which her work was measured. She brought “feminine art to
major status,” claimed Apollinaire, but it was as his muse that she
entered the Modernist mainstream. It was this construction which was
to provide the Surrealists with a new image of the creative couple.
Henri Rousseau’s painting of Apollinaire and Laurencin, The Muse
Inspiring the Poet (1909), presents her as a nature goddess. Apollinaire
designated her “a little sun—a feminine version of myself,” thereby
removing her entirely from the creative ferment that propeled his
male friends. “Though she has masculine defects,’ he wrote, “she has
every conceivable feminine quality. Theg greatest error of most women
artists is that they try to surpass men, losing in the process their taste
and charm. Laurencin is very different. She is aware of the deep differ-
ences that separate men from women—essential, ideal differences.
Mademoiselle Laurencin’s personality 1s vibrant and joyful. Purity is
her very element.”
Laurencin exhibited alongside the Cubists in 1907, and from 1909
to 1913, but as part of the shifting circle of artists whose presence has
often served Modernist art history’s need for other talents to be subor-
dinate to the genius of Picasso. Florine Stettheimer also became better
known for her friends than for her work. She had only one single solo
exhibition during her lifetime and, after 1916, she exhibited only at
the Independent Society of Arts Annuals. Instead she used her wealth
and social position as a defense against art world intrusion, elaborating
her notion of the “feminine” through wispy calligraphic paintings in
which physical bodies were dematerialized and details of costume and
accessories were exaggerated for eftect.
Born in Rochester, New York, in 1871, Florine Stettheimer was the
youngest of five children in a prosperous German-Jewish family. She
studied at the Art Students League in New York from 1892 to 1895
and then traveled in Europe with two of her sisters, taking painting
lessons in Germany and visiting museums. The outbreak of war in
1914 forced the Stettheimer sisters to return to New York where the
family home soon became famous as the social center of a group
of avant-garde art déalers, dancers, musicians, artists, and writers.
296
173 Florine Stettheimer
Cathedrals ofArt 1942 (unfinished)

Stettheimer’s paintings of this period are bright, amusing sketches full

of personal symbolism, anecdote, and social satire. Her unique person-
al style was evolved out of a rigorous academic training, but her paint-
ings focus almost exclusively on the social milieu in which she lived.
The Studio Party (1917), like many of her other works, includes the
members of her social and artistic circle: Maurice Sterne, Gaston and
Isabelle Lachaise, Albert Gleizes, Leo Stein, and her sisters. After
brushing in the details, she used a palette knife to apply a thick paste of
paint to the surface. Touches of white paint lend a shimmer to the
thickly applied blue pigment.
Stettheimer produced paintings as part of a self-consciously culti-
vated lifestyle which drew few, if any, distinctions between making art
and living well. Protected by her wealth from having to exhibit or sell,
she further insulated herself from the professional art world through
her demand that any gallery wishing to exhibit her works be redeco-
rated like her home.
Personal wealth also shielded Stettheimer’s countrywoman
Romaine Brooks from having to exhibit or sell her work, though she
did both. Brooks, like Stettheimer, linked her pictorial style to her
environment, decorating her apartment with the subdued shades of
black, white, and gray that she chose for her palette, seeking in her life

297
AQUA NATTY
174 (above) Romaine Brooks
White Azaleas or Black Net 1910

75 (left) Romaine Brooks

‘ The Amazon (Natalie Barney) 1920

176 (opposite) Romaine Brooks

Self-Portrait 1923
the understated elegance and simplicity that characterized her paint-
ings. But Brooks, though she, like Stettheimer, left a pictorial record of
her cultural and social milieu behind, is best known today as the first
woman painter consciously to forge a new visual imagery for the
twentieth-century lesbian.
An American, born in Rome in 1874, Brooks spent most of her life
in Paris fleeing from the physical and psychological cruelties she had
suffered at the hands of her mother and her insane brother St. Mar,
which she detailed in her unpublished autobiography, No Pleasant
Memories. She met the wealthy American poet Natalie Barney in 1915
and, although she participated only indirectly in the literary salon
which Barney made famous, the two women spent the rest of their
lives in close proximity at the center of acommunity of women com-
mitted to producing serious art.
Brooks’s first one-person exhibition took place at the prestigious
Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1910, the same gallery that had first shown
the work of the Impressionists. The paintings exhibited that year were
almost all of women, and ranged from portraits to figure studies of
unnamed models such as The Red Jacket and White Azaleas or Black Net
 (both 1910), which evoke the melancholy and morbid eroticism of the
Symbolist poets. The exhibition included paintings employing a
restricted palette based on a range of gray tonalities and executed dur-
ing earlier stays in Cornwall and London under the influence of
Whistler and the English Symbolist painters and poets. There were
also portraits and delicately rendered studies of young women con-
fined within the shallow spaces of balconies, one of the nineteenth
century's primary public spaces of female spectatorship.
Brooks has often been marginalized in histories of modern art
because of her decision to work primarily as a portraitist, and because
of her apparent disinterest in the stylistic innovations and movements
that have defined the Modernist avant-garde. Although she has been
presented as relatively untouched by the Modernist ferment swirling
around her in the Paris of the 1910s, the paintings themselves suggest a
more self-conscious dialogue with vanguard tendencies. The painting
The Balcony (1910), and the Portrait of Jean Cocteau (1914), which
shows the poet posing with insouciant elegance in front of the skeletal
framework of the monument that had come to stand for the modern
city, cannot but evoke comparisons with other accepted monuments
in the history of Modernism, such as Manet’s The Balcony (1868—69)
and Robert Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower (1910). There is more than a little
wit in this deliberate insertion of an effeminate Cocteau into the
Modernist spaces of femininity so widely utilized by the Impressionist
painters. And more than a little of Berthe Morisot’s attention to the
attitudes and rituals that mark the social construction of femininity in
Brooks’s paintings of young women gazing out at the modern city.
Brooks once referred to her favored nude model, the dancer and
actress Ida Rubinstein, as “Olympia’s sister’? The painting White
Azaleas was the first of a series of paintings of slender, small-breasted
reclining nudes that would prove as daring as Manet’ Olympia
(1863-65) 1n their simultaneous eroticizing of the female body within
the context of lesbian spectatorship, and their repudiation of the
conventions of the voluptuous female nude in Western art. Brooks’s
search to forge a new visual representation of the modern lesbian
would lead her to a series of powerful images of amazons and warrior
175 women that include Boréale (also called Chasseresse) and The Amazon
(Natalie Barney) (both 1920). They lead finally to the groundbreaking
self-portrait of 1924 through a series of works that visually articulate
the modern lesbian’s relationship to contemporary medical literature
on homosexuality, as well as to pictorial traditions that destabilize the
categories of masculinity and femininity.
300
 The emergence around 1900 of a cross-gender figure whose behav-
ior and/or dress manifested elements commonly identified as ““mascu-
line” corresponded to an early twentieth-century medical model
which constructed lesbianism around notions of perversion, illness,
inversion, and paranoia. The ideology of the “third sex” advanced by
pioneering sexologists like Havelock Ellis and Kraft-Ebing was rooted
in homophobic attitudes. These theories, although their merits are still
debated, did provide new models for artists and writers early in the
twentieth century, enabling women to break the asexual mold of
romantic friendship through which nineteenth-century women had
expressed their relationships with one another.
The imagery of intellectually and physically powerful femininity
and that of the lesbian New Woman of the early twentieth century
intersect in Brooks’s paintings which rely on the imagery of cross-
dressing. In her Self-Portrait of 1923, she shows herself rigidly con- 176
tained against a landscape of ruined buildings. The face is mask-like,
the eyes shadowed by the brim of a top hat, one gloved hand clenched
in front of her. The gaze is watchful, the costume stylish but severe.
Combining the thematics of romantic independence and endurance,
and the sartorial signs of wealth and independence, Brooks produces a
powerful female image.
Literary critic Susan Gubar has written of Brooks’s self-depiction as
that of an outsider, “Byronic in her . . . revolt against social conven-
tions ...an outsider marked by her shaded brow like Byron’s Cain.” It
is also possible, however, to see Brooks’s choice of equestrian garb as
positioning the figure within sets of visual codes dating at least from
the eighteenth century, when the two Ladies of Llangollen—
Elizabeth Butler and Sarah Ponsonby—adopted the less gender-
bound clothing of equestrians as signs of the greater freedom to which
they aspired, and evident a century later in Rosa Bonheur’s representa-
tions (see Chapter 6).
The possibility of gender mobility implied by the choice of
ambiguous clothing styles has also characterized the dress of the dandy
and the New Woman. Brooks inserts her figures into a long line of
well-dressed men about town, from Beau Brummell, whose attire in
Robert Dighton’s painting of 1805 finds an echo 1n Brooks’s own por-
trait of Elisabeth de Gramont, Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre (c. 1924) to
Max Beerbohm. The dandy, like the lesbian, stands outside bourgeois
culture, flouting conventions of dress and social roles, and it is this
tradition to which the society portraitists that Brooks admired—
Whistler and Boldini—also belonged.
301
 177. Man Ray Coco Chanel
1935

By the first decade of the twentieth century, dandyism and

Modernism had intersected in those men and women whose sexual
lives also had a life in their art, and the cross-dressed figure of the
woman artist had gained particular currency. At an historical moment
when radical feminists were advocating “androgyny,’ and designers
like Coco Chanel were “masculinizing’”’ women’s fashions, the “new
look” also began to make its presence felt in the visual arts. In 1918,
Alfred Stieglitz photographed Georgia O’Keeffe’s pale face and hood-
ed eyes emerging from the inky darkness of a black bowler hat and
high-necked coat. Sexual ambiguity also defined O’Keefte’s moderni-
ty; like Brooks and her circle, the American painter had adopted a
wardrobe of simple and elegantly tailored black-and-white costumes
which she would wear for the rest of her life.
Despite the fact that her own body was often on display through
the eroticized nude photographs which her husband Alfred Stieglitz
took of her, and that an obsession with the female body has always
been read in her work, O’Keeffe spent much of her life trying to
escape attempts by critics and a well-meaning public to read her life in
her work. O’Keeffe’s place in the history of American modern art,
while far more secure than that of many other women artists, remains
circumscribed by critical attempts to create a special category for her.
302
Her career, critic Hilton Kramer later wrote, “is unlike almost any
other in the history of modern art in America” for it embraced its
whole history, from the founding of Stieglitz’s gallery with its shock-
ing displays of European Modernism to the eventual acceptance of
modern art in America. And it anticipated by some years the color
field paintings of Clyfford Stull, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth
Kelly, Barnett Newman, and others. Recently elevated to major status
among American twentieth-century artists, the “rediscovery” that
began her meteoric rise to the forefront of American art came only
with her retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1970
when a new generation of viewers were drawn to the uncompromis-
ing example of her life and the quiet integrity of her work.
Her relationship to her colleagues in the circle around Stieglitz,
with whom she began living in 1919—the painters Marsden Hartley,
Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, and the photographer Paul Strand
was often equivocal. Referring to them as “the boys,” she later com-
mented that “The men liked to put me down as the best woman
painter. I think I’m one of the best painters.” O’Keeffe chose to live
much of her life away from New York, developing her paintings in
relation to the vast, austere landscape of the southwestern United
States, particularly the area around Abiqui, New Mexico, where she
moved permanently after Stieglitz’s death in 1946.
Born in 1887, O’Keeffe studied anatomical drawing with John
Vanderpoel at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905; two years later she
was 1n New York studying painting at the Art Students League.
Quickly losing interest in academic styles derived from European
models, she left to work as a commercial artist in Chicago. After
attending a course on the principles of abstract design taught by Alan
Bement—a follower of the art educator Arthur Wesley Dow—she
taught Dow’s principles in schools in Virginia, South Carolina, and
Texas. She met Stieglitz after she sent a batch of abstract charcoal
drawings based on personal feelings and sensations to Anita Politzer, a
friend in New York who subsequently took them to Stieglitz.
In 1916, Stieglitz was one of the organizers of “The Forum
Exhibition of Modern American Painters.” The only woman includ-
ed among the seventeen leading American Modernists whose work
was shown was Marguerite Zorach (1887-1968), a California artist
who helped introduce Fauve painting into the United States, but who
is better known for her brilliant abstract tapestries. Thus, O’Keefte was
not the only woman shown by Stieglitz at his avant-garde 291 Gallery,
but her situation there was unique.

303
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179 Georgia O’Keeffe Black Hollyhock, Blue Larkspur 1930

O’Keeffe’s paintings of the 1920s—from the planar precisionist

studies of New York’s buildings and skyline to the New Mexico
landscapes with their distilled forms and intense colors, and the many
paintings of single flowers—are intensely personal statements
expressed in the reductive language of early Modernism. Her emer-
gence during the early 1920s as an artist of great promise coincided
with what appeared to be more liberal attitudes toward women
including their increased attendance in art schools. Between 1912 and
1918,a number of women students at the Art Students League, among
them Cornelia Barnes, Alice Beach Winter, and Josephine Verstille
Nivison, contributed drawings and illustrations to the radical Socialist
magazine, The Masses, which promoted women’s causes from suftrage
to birth control. Other women produced paintings addressing current
social realities, like Theresa Bernstein’s Suffragette Parade (1916) and
Waiting Room—Employment Office (1917), which depicts a group of
weary women waiting for jobs.
Throughout the 1920s, the complex associations between
O’Keeffe’s paintings of natural forms and the female body elicited
readings which the artist herself recognized as ideological construc-

305
tions. Responding to the widespread popularizing of Freud's ideas in
America, Henry McBride noted: “Georgia O’ Keeffe is probably what
they will be calling in a few years a B.F (before Freud) since all her
inhibitions seem to have been removed before the Freudian recom-
mendations were preached upon this side of the Atlantic. She became
free without the aid of Freud. But she had aid. There was another who
took the place of Freud. ...It is of course Alfred Stieglitz. ...”
The ideology of femininity, which presented O’ Keeffe as Stieglitz’s
protegée and which constructed her considerable talent as “essentially
feminine,’ legitimized male authority and male succession. “Alfred
Stieglitz presents” read the announcement for O’Keeffe’s 1923 exhibi-
tion at his gallery; the following year he declared: “Women can only
create babies, say the scientists, but I say they can produce art—and
Georgia O’ Keeffe 1s the proof of it.”
In a decade of declining birthrates women were confronted by a
barrage of literature urging them to stay home where, as mothers and
homemakers, they became perfect marketing targets for a new peace-
time economy based on household consumption. Throughout the
1920s, O’Keefte was forced to watch her work constantly appropriat-
ed to an ideology of sexual difference built on the emotional differ-
ences between the sexes which supported this social reorganization.
Men were “rational,” manipulating the environment for the good of
their families; women were “intuitive” and “expressive,” dominated by
their feelings and their biological roles. She was shocked when, in
1920, the painter Marsden Hartley wrote an article casting her abstrac-
tions in Freudian terms and discussing “feminine perceptions and
feminine powers of expression” in her work and that of Delaunay and
Laurencin. “No man could feel as Georgia O’Keeffe,’ noted the
Modernist critic Paul Rosenfeld in 1924, “and utter himselfin precise-
ly such curves and colors; for in those curves and spots and prismatic
color there is the woman referring the universe to her own frame, her
own balance; and rendering in her picture of things her body’s sub-
conscious knowledge ofitself.”
Criticisms such as these constructed a specific category for
O’Keefte. Hailed as the epitome of emancipated womanhood, she was
accorded star status, but only at the top ofa female class. The biologi-
cal fact of her femininity took precedence over serious critical evalua-
tions of her work. While Edmund Wilson lauded her “particularly
feminine intensity,’ and the New York Times critic declared that “she
reveals woman as an elementary being, closer to the earth than men,
suffering pain with passionate ecstacy and enjoying love with
306
180 Emily Carr Landscape with Tree 1917-19

beyond-good-and-evil delight,’ O’Keeffe threatened to quit painting

if Freudian interpretations continued to be made. Complaining that
Hartley’s and Demuth’s flower paintings were not interpreted erotical-
ly, she struggled against a cultural identification of the female with the
biological nature of the body which has long been used to assign
woman a negative role in the production of culture. It is hardly sur-
prising that she responded with so little sympathy to attempts by fem-
inist artists and critics during the 1970s to annex her formal language
to the renewed search for a “female” imagery.
O’Keeffe met.the Canadian painter, Emily Carr (1871-1945), at
Stieglitz’s gallery in 1930. Although no details remain of the brief
meeting, these two major figures in North American landscape paint-
ing were evidently sympathetic. If O’Keeffe finally found the art
world’s insistent refusal to allow her painting to stand in relation to
that of her contemporaries a burden and a barrier to her development
as a painter, Carr’s isolation in British Columbia saved her from most
such intrusions. After studying painting in San Francisco, London,
and Paris in relatively short intervals between 1890 and rg1o, Carr’s
strong, brooding paintings of the Pacific northwest and its Indians
went almost completely unnoticed until the 1920s, when she met
Mark Tobey and the painters of Canada’s Group of Seven. Although

307
never formally a member of the group, she exhibited with them
beginning in 1927 in an exhibition called “Canadian West Coast Art:
Native and Modern.” Like O’Keefte, Carr built an intensely personal
style from a range of influences and, like the American painter, she
distilled essential forms from a monumental and imposing nature and
presented them without sentiment, moralizing, or anecdote. The
breadth of these painters’ visions calls for a redrawing of the bound-
aries between woman, nature, and art.
During the 1930s, European artists like Barbara Hepworth and
Germaine Richier also elaborated the connections between nature’s
cycles of generation and erosion in abstract and representational
works. Hepworth (1903-75), one of England’s leading sculptors,
studied at the Leeds School of Art and at the Royal College of Art in
London where she and Henry Moore became fascinated by the inter-
play of mass and negative space. Visits to the studios of Constantin
Brancusi and Jean Arp in Paris in 1931 encouraged Hepworth to
explore biomorphism within an increasingly abstract vocabulary.
Living with the painter Ben Nicholson during the 1930s, she was an
active participant in the development of abstraction in England.
Working steadily, even after the birth of triplets in 1934 slowed her
sculptural production, she gradually evolved a totally abstract, geomet-
ric vocabulary.
Adrian Stokes, the painter and essayist, was a member of the group
in England—along with the painter Paul Nash and the physicist J.D.

181 Germaine Richier The Batman 1956

182 Barbara Hepworth Two Forms 1934

Bernal—who helped define this formal vocabulary. Writing in The

Spectator in 1933 after her exhibition at Reid and Lefevre, he noted:
“These stones are inhabited with feeling, even if, in common with the
majority of ‘advanced’ carvers, Miss Hepworth has felt not only the
block, but also its potential fruit, to be always feminine... .”
This generative metaphor was deeply internalized by artists work-
ing under the influence of Surrealism. In a poem written in the early
1930s and dedicated to Max Ernst, the English poet David Gascoyne
celebrated “the great bursting womb of desire.” Jean Arp also chose
procreation as a metaphor for artistic generation, writing in 1948 that
“art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant or like a child in
its mother’s womb.” The reasons for this particular trope lie outside
the present work, but its effects proved nowhere more conflicting than
for women artists in the Surrealist movement.
No artistic movement since the nineteenth century has celebrated
the idea of woman and her creativity as passionately as did Surrealism
during the 1920s and 1930s. None has had as many female practition-
ers, and none has evolved a more complex role for the woman artist in
a modern movement. André Breton’s romantic vision of perfect union
with the loved woman as the source for an art of convulsive disorien-
tation that would resolve polarized states of experience and awareness

309
into a new, revolutionary surreality was formulated in response to a
culture shaken by war. He advanced his image of the spontaneous,
instinctive woman in a social context in which women were demand-
ing the right to work and to vote, and the French government was
promoting pronatalism as a strategy for repopulating the war-ravaged
country. “The fate of France, its existence, depends on the family,”
declared a slogan of 1919, the same year that Breton, recently demobi-
lized, returned to Paris. The following year a law was passed forbid-
ding the mere advocacy of abortion or birth control; by 1924, when
the First Surrealist Manifesto appeared, Breton had dedicated himself to
liberating woman from such “bourgeois” considerations.
The image of ethereal and disruptive womanhood, which enters
Breton’s poetry of the 1920s, owes much to Apollinaire’s imbrication
of erotic and poetic emotion, to the poet’s reliance on Symbolist
polarities to express the duality of female nature, and to his presenta-
tion of Marie Laurencin as muse and eternal child. But the Surrealist
woman was also born out of Freud’s ambivalent and dualistic posi-
tioning of woman at the center of the creative and the subversive
powers ofthe love instinct in her incompatible roles as mother and the
bearer oflife, and destroyer of man. The works of male Surrealists are
dominated by the presence of a mythical Other onto whom their
romantic, sexual, and erotic desire is projected. The female body—
assaulted, fragmented, rewritten as subject and verb, interior and exte-
rior—became the Surrealist signifier par excellence, the visual point at
which the polarities of Western thought collapsed into a new reality.
During the 1930s, women artists came to Surrealism in large num-
bers, attracted by the movement’s anti-academic stance and by its
sanctioning of an art in which personal reality dominates. But they
found themselves struggling toward artistic maturity in the context
of a movement that defined their role as one of confirming and
completing a male creative cycle, and that metaphorically obliterated
subject/object polarities through violent assaults on the female image.
Not surprisingly, most women ended by asserting their independence
from Surrealism.
Almost without exception, women artists saw themselves as outside
the inner circle of poets and painters that produced Surrealist mani-
festos and formulated Surrealist theory. Most of them were young
women just embarking on artistic careers when they came to Paris;
many of them would do their mature work only after leaving the
Surrealist circle. Often they came to Surrealism through personal
relationships with men in the group rather than shared political or
310
theoretical goals. Yet they made significant contributions to the lan-
guage of Surrealism, replacing the male Surrealists’ love of hallucina-
tion and erotic violence with an art of magical fantasy and narrative
flow, and moving, however tentatively, toward laying claim to female
subject positions within male-dominated movements. Moreover, their
images of the female body, conceived not as Other but as Self, antici-
pate a feminine poetics of the body—imaging and celebrating the
female body’s organic, erotic, and maternal reality—that would fully
emerge only with the Feminist movement of the 1970s.
Surrealism’s multiple and ambivalent visions of woman converge 1n
identifications of the female body with the mysterious forces and
regenerative powers of nature. Women artists were quick to draw on
this identification of woman with creative nature, but they did it with
an analytic mind and an ironic stance at that. Artists like Leonora
Carrington, Leonor Fini, the American painters Kay Sage and
Dorothea Tanning, and the Spanish-Mexican artist Remedios Varo
received varying degrees of formal training. Yet they worked in a
meticulous manner, building up tight surfaces with layers of small and
carefully modulated brushstrokes. However fantastic their imagery,

183 Leonor Fini Sphinx Regina 1946

 me me

they often worked with the precision and care of illustrators, as iftheir
creative model was scientific investigation rather than Surrealist
explosiveness. Fini’s many paintings of bones and rotting vegetation—
like Sphinx Regina (1946)—and Varo’s carefully crafted scientific fan-
os)
tasies such as Harmony (1956) and Unsubmissive Plant (1961), resituate
the woman artist in the worlds of science and art.
Women artists dismissed male romanticizing of nature as female
and nurturing (or female and destructive) and replaced it with a more
austere and ironic vision. Bizarre and unusual natural forms attracted
the photographic eye of Eileen Agar and Lee Miller, while the Czech
painter Marie Cerminova, called Toyen, in a series of paintings and

184 (above) Eileen Agar Ploumanach 1936

185 (left) Toyen The Rifle-Range 1940

186 (opposite) Kay Sage In the Third Sleep 1944

drawings executed during and after the Second World War, presents
nature as a potent metaphor for inhumanity.
Toyen’s (1902-80) use of nature as a metaphor for political reality
finds an echo in the work of Kay Sage (1898-1963), who met the
Surrealists in Paris in 1937 and who spent the war years in New York
with the Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy. Her paintings are among the
most abstract produced within a Surrealist circle and embraced sym-
bolic figuration as the key to the language of the dream and the
unconscious. A predilection for sharp, spiny forms, slaty surfaces, and
subdued melancholy light infuses her landscapes with an air of empti-
ness and abandonment; she herself identified strongly with these bar-
ren vistas stripped of human habitation.
Alienated from Surrealist theorizing about women, and from the
search for a female muse, women turned instead to their own reality.
Surrealism constructed women as magic objects and sites on which to
project male erotic desire. They re-created themselves as beguiling
personalities, poised uneasily between the worlds of artifice (art) and
nature, or the instinctual life. The duality of Kahlo’s (1910-54) life—
an exterior persona constantly reinvented with costume and orna-
ment, and an interior image nourished on the pain ofa body crippled
in a trolley accident when she was an adolescent—invests her painting
with a haunting complexity and a narrative quality disturbing in its
ambiguity. This is also characteristic of much of the work of another
contemporary Mexican artist, Maria Izquierdo (1902-S 5).
07, LOS Like Kahlo’s The Broken Column (1944), the Self-Portrait (1938) of
Leonora Carrington (b. 1917) reinforces the woman artist’s use of the
mirror to assert the duality of being, the selfasobserver and observed.
In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir holds up the image of
the mirror as the key to the feminine condition. Women concern
themselves with their own images, she asserts, men with an enlarged
self-image provided by their reflection in a woman. Kahlo used paint-
ing as a means of exploring the reality of her own body and her cons-
ciousness of its vulnerability; in many cases the reality dissolves into a
duality, exterior evidence versus interior perception of that reality.
The self-image in the work of women artists in the Surrealist move-
ment becomes the focus for a dialogue between the constructed social
being and the powerful forces of the instinctual life which Surrealism
celebrated as the revolutionary tool that would overthrow the control
exerted by the conscious mind.
When it came to taking a position vis-d-vis Surrealism’s inflamma-
tory erotic language, women artists vacillated. More often than not
they approached the issue of eroticism obliquely, focusing attention on
aspects of the erotic that were not exclusively woman’s sexual desires.
Carrington rejected Freud and turned to alchemy and magic for

187 (left) Dorothea Tanning Palaestra

[947

188 (below) Remedios Varo Celestial

Pablum 1958
subjects; Dorothea Tanning (b. 1912) transferred sexuality from the
world of adults to that of children. Paintings like Palaestra (1947) and
Children’s Games (1942) reveal nubile young girls caught in moments
of ecstatic transformation. Their bodies respond to unseen forces
which sweep through the room, animating drapery and whipping the
children’s hair and garments into the air.
Unmoved by Surrealist theorizing on the subject of erotic desire,
and by Freud’s writings, women appear to have found little theoretical
support for .the more liberated understanding of sexuality that
Surrealism pursued so avidly. Turning to their own sexual reality as
source and subject, they were unable to escape the conflicts engen-
dered by their flight from conventional female roles. The imagery of
the sexually mature, sometimes maternal, woman has almost no place
in the work of women Surrealists. Their conflicts about this aspect of
female sexuality reflect the difficult choices forced upon women of
their generation who attempted to reconcile traditional female roles
with lives as artists in a movement that prized the innocence of the
child-woman and attacked the institutions of marriage and family.
Less than positive views of maternity also carry over into their
work. The most disturbing images of maternal reality in twentieth-
century art are to be found in Tanning’s Maternity (1946), Varo's
Celestial Pablum (1958), and Kahlo’s My Birth (1932), Henry Ford
Hospital (1932), and other paintings on this theme. In Varo’s Celestial
Pablum, an isolated woman sits 1n a lonely tower, a blank expression on
her exhausted face, and mechanically grinds up stars which she feeds
to an insatiable moon. The somber palette and mat surface cast their
own pall over the work. These paintings are remarkable for their pow-
erful imaging of the conflicts inherent in maternity: the physical
changes initiated by pregnancy and lactation, the mother’s exhaustion
and feared loss of autonomy. The element oferotic violence so preva-
lent in the work of male Surrealist artists makes its first appearance
here in works by Tanning, Oppenheim, and Kahlo that deal with
childbirth and motherhood. Now it is violence directed against the
self, not projected onto another—violence inseparable from the phys-
iological reality of woman’s sexuality and the social construction of
her feminine role. For Kahlo, as for other women artists associated
with the Surrealists, painting became a means of sustaining a dialogue
with inner reality. Surrealism sanctioned personal exploration for men
and women; in doing so, it legitimized a path already familiar to many
women and gave new artistic form to some of the conflicts con-
fronting women in early twentieth-century artistic movements.

315
CHAPTER ELEVEN

Gender, Race, and Modernism after the Second World War

The emergence of an American avant-garde, along with a body of

formalist criticism centered in the writings of Clement Greenberg
and his tollowers, dominates traditional art historical accounts of the
period after the Second World War. Nevertheless, abstract and figura-
tive art coexisted despite the increasing critical and curatorial atten-
tion directed toward the Abstract Expressionists and their successors
after 1948. The ways that the meanings of this Modernist art have
been produced, reinforced, and challenged can be observed in the
shifting relationship of women’ art to broader social formulations and
mainstream art during this period. The origins ofthese shifts lie in the
1930s, the period when American artists began self-consciously to
formulate a social role for the visual arts.
During the Depression, American artists under government
patronage became an integral part of the workforce and evolved a
socially conscious visual language. Working outside the dealer/
critic/museum system, male and female artists identified themselves
with the labor force. Federal arts projects, like the Works Progress
(later Protects) Administration (WPA, 1934-39), supported women’s
struggles for professional recognition; a 1935 survey of professional
and technical workers on relief revealed that among artists receiving
aid, approximately forty-one percent were women. The federal sec-
tion of Fine Arts, a non-relief program which funded murals for pub-
lic buildings, awarded its commissions on the basis of anonymous
competitions in which artists submitted unsigned sketches. Louise
Nevelson, Lee Krasner, Isabel Bishop, and Alice Neel were first sup-
ported by such programs. WPA patronage also extended to artists of
color. During the 1930s, the sculptor Augusta Savage (who was one of
the few visual artists involved in the previous decade’s cultural move-
ment known as The Harlem Renaissance, and one of the most influ-
ential artists working in New York’s Harlem) lobbied the WPA to
include African-American artists in its programs. Later, she became an
instructor at the WPA-supported Harlem Community Art Center
and a major force in the training of younger African-American artists.

316
18g Pablita Velarde Animal Dance 1939-45

In 1939, Pueblo painter Pablita Velarde was commissioned by the

WPA to paint the customs and ceremonies of the Pueblo people in 84
paintings for the Bandelier National Monument,just outside Santa Fe,
New Mexico. The iconography of the paintings that resulted devel-
oped from library research and interviews with the elders. Velarde
went on to become the most prominent Indian woman easel painter
in North America during the 1950s, but by the time she won the
Grand Purchase Award at the Philbrook Art Center in 1953, post-war
American painting had become synonymous with Abstract Expres-
sionism in the eyes of critics and museums.
Despite such achievements, women of color often faced formidable
political and social barriers. Mine Okubo, Elizabeth Catlett, and Lois
Maillou Jones were among a larger group of artists who, for a variety
of reasons, were displaced from their communities of origin. Okubo
(b. 1912), who trained at the University of California in Berkeley and
exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1940, was
incarcerated two years later along with over 100,000 persons of

317
Japanese ancestry. While living in relocation centers at Tanforan and
Topaz, she executed many paintings and drawings in charcoal, pen
and ink, gouache and watercolor that forcefully express the effects of
dislocation on the lives of America’s Japanese communities and their
families.
Catlett’s work has roots in the social consciousness of the Harlem
Renaissance and Depression eras (she studied with the Regionalist
painter Grant Wood at the University of Iowa) and the art of the
Mexican muralists. Upon receiving a fellowship in 1945 to execute a
series of prints on the lives of black women, she traveled to Mexico
and participated in the Taller de Grafica Popular, a collective print
workshop concerned with the social function of art. In Mexico,
Catlett also studied with the sculptor Francisco Zuniga. During the
1960s, when she was harassed by the House Un-American Activities
Committee for her left-wing political beliefs, Catlett decided to
become a Mexican citizen. Not until 1971, when the Studio Museum
in Harlem organized a retrospective of her work, was she allowed to
re-enter the United States. Catlett was one of a significant group of
American artists and writers of color who, at least since the 1920s, had
sought an escape from racism and restricted professional and social
opportunities by removing themselves to other countries. Lois
Maillou Jones (b. 1905), on the other hand, voluntarily chose to live as
an expatriate for extended periods of time rather than suffer racism at
home, and to connect more intensely with the artistic traditions of
France and, later, Haiti.
The New Deal’s non-discriminatory policies, and the number of
women active professionally in the arts, form only part of a larger pic-
ture. A backlash against women wage earners during the 1930s took a
devastating toll. Caroline Bird has dated the origin of the move to
return women from work back into the home to the 1930s, rather
than after the Second World War, as is commonly believed, and labor
statistics confirm her contention. Mass-market publications, as well as
statistics compiled during the 1930s, point to the contradictions
between New Deal policies, with Roosevelt as President and Frances
Perkins, the first woman in the U.S. Cabinet, as Secretary of Labor, and
extensive public hostility toward working women. On the cultural
front, at the same time that Marion Greenwood, Minna Citron, Doris
Lee, Lucienne Bloch, Neel, Bishop, Nevelson, Krasner, and others
Were participating in mural projects which explored the social realities
of unemployment and life under the Depression, Hollywood was pro-
ducing the first of a series of films popularly known as “weepies.”
318
Addressed to a female audience, their female protagonists confronted
issues or problems specified as “female’—domestic life, the family,
maternity, self-sacrifice, and romance.
Women artists active in public arts programs during the 1930s
found themselves on a less secure footing in the next decade as gov-
ernment patronage gave way to private art galleries, and as social ideo-
logies promoted sexual difference as cause for removing women from
productive labor. In the early 1940s, before the consolidation of
Abstract Expressionism, artists in New York worked in styles ranging
from Social Realism to Geometric Abstraction. Realists like Isabel
Bishop (1902-88) sought to connect the grand manner of classical tra- 190
dition and Renaissance composition with contemporary urban sub-
jects. Other painters, including John Graham, Stuart Davis, Irene Rice 19]
Pereira (1902-71), and Balcomb Greene, continued to espouse the
principles of Geometric Abstraction. Still others, influenced by the
presence of many Surrealist artists during the War, moved to a bio-
morphic abstraction responsive to the Surrealist belief that automa-
tism released the rich imagery of the unconscious mind.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, today perceived as the
major cultural institution enshrining Modernist art, in fact came to
support the new painting only gradually. The consolidation of
Abstract Expressionism as the dominant practice in American modern
art pushed to the margins not only women moving toward artistic
maturity in other “modern” styles during the 1940s, but also many
women professionally active in what would come to be seen as “con-
servative’ and “outmoded” figurative styles. The paintings of women
whose careers developed within Abstract Expressionism are not repre-
sentative of the wide range of work actually executed by women at
this time. Nor did these women form a unified “group.” Nevertheless,
their engagement with this and other issues that defined Modernist
art after the Second World War brought them into direct confronta-
tion with artistic and social practices that shaped many women’s rela-
tionships to mainstream art after the War.
Explanations for why so few women attempted to align themselves
with Abstract Expressionism during its early years must be sought 1n
the confluence of historical, artistic, and ideological forces in Ameri-
can modernism. Lee Krasner’s career during the 1940s and 1950s, for
example, points up the precarious place of the feminine within the
rhetoric and institutions of Abstract Expressionism. Krasner was
involved in the search by New York painters for a synthesis of abstract
form and psychological content from the beginning. She trained first

319
190 Isabel Bishop Virgil and Dante in Union Square 1932

at the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union and at the National

Academy of Design. After meeting Jackson Pollock in 1941, she gave
up working from nature and turned to automatism. Her gradual
emergence as an abstract painter occurred in the context of an
intensely personal struggle to define herself as an artist, and to establish
her artistic difference from Pollock, whom she married in 1945.
The critical language of Abstract Expressionism that developed
alongside Pollock’s drip paintings of the late 1940s isolated and cele-
brated certain features—notable among them scale, action, and ener-
gey—using terms that became,as art historian TJ. Clark noted, part of an
“informing metaphorics of masculinity.” The gendered language that
opposed an art of heroic individual struggle to the weakened (i.e.,
“feminized”’) culture of postwar Europe positioned women outside an
emerging model of subjectivity understood in terms of male agency
articulated through the figure of the male individual. Krasner, engaging
with Action Painting’s intuitive gestural language with its emphasis on a
subjectivity produced through the physical actions of the body in rela-
tion to the canvas, was forced to confront the ways her own body was
inscribed as “feminine.” Anne Wagner has argued that Krasner’s art
during this period was marked by its refusal to produce a self in paint-
ing. She concludes that Krasner resisted, allowing herself to emerge in
her art out of fear that it would betray her femaleness in a movement
that prized male heroics. Resisting certain aspects of Pollock’s art,

IQI (opposite) Irene Rice Pereira Untitled 1951

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particularly his evocations of mythic and primitive imagery and his
reliance on psychologically loaded symbols, she attempted to establish a
difference that could not be dismissed as the otherness of woman.
To position herself independently of Pollock’s forceful artistic per-
sonality, Krasner had to separate herself from the construction of mas-
culine subjectivity embedded in Abstract Expressionism, as well as
from a European tradition that included Hans Hoftman and the
Cubists, previously the strongest influence on her work. Moreover, the
shift from government-sponsored, non-discriminatory art projects to
the emerging world of the private dealer/gallery/critic also meant
seeing Mrs. Pollock/wife overshadow Lee Krasner/painter in New
York’s art world.
As she struggled to lay claim to the all-over images produced
through automatism, Krasner began to approach painting as a medita-
tive exercise. Seeking to obliterate figurative references and hierarchi-
cal composition, she worked and re-worked her canvases, scraping
them down until nothing remained but granular gray slabs two to
three inches thick, most of which she eventually destroyed. Not until
1946 did images that satisfied her begin to appear out of the effaced
“grounds” of gray. The “Little Image” paintings that resulted oppose
the mural-size canvases that were later accepted as defining the ambi-
tion of the (male) Abstract Expressionists. Their untranslatable hiero-
elyphic surfaces suggest unconscious linguistic structures.
The elegant intimacy of Krasner’s “Little Images” may be linked to
her fascination with Irish and Persian illuminated manuscripts, or with
the Hebrew inscriptions familiar from her childhood. The process out
of which they emerged, however, and the crisis which generated
them, demand rereading in the light of psychoanalytically oriented
theories of the 1970s and 1980s about women’s relationship to writ-
ing, a term which must be understood in the larger context of mean-
ingful mark-making. The oscillation between women’s annexation of
male forms and the denial of those same forms that often leads to
blankness and silence as women try to find their place within what
Xaviere Gauthier has called the “linear, grammatical linguistic system
that orders the symbolic, the superego, the law,” has provoked intense
debates among feminists. “It is by writing ... and by taking up the
challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that
women will confirm women in a place other than that which is
reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence,”
argues Héléne Cixous, for example, in “The Laugh of the Medusa”
(1975). Art historians have only recently begun to explore the impli-
2 ie,
os)
192 Lee Krasner Noon 1947

cations of the Abstract Expressionist gesture as a rhetorical device and

their investigations promise to shed new light on this important area.
Krasner and other women Abstract Expressionists were well aware
of the operations of sexual difference within artistic practice. During
the 1940s and 19s0s, they confronted the widely held view that
women “couldn’t paint.” Teachers like Hofmann, following an exam-
ple set earlier by Freud’s disciple, Havelock Ellis, believed that “only
men had the wings for art.’ The highest praise he offered his female
students, including Krasner, was contained in the remark: “this paint-
ing is so good you'd never know it was done by a woman.”
The tensions between an ideology of sexual difference—one that
assured jobs for returned servicemen, supported the shift of popula-
tion to the suburbs, and provided “meaningful” work for women
through homemaking—and vanguard art can be seen in painting and
sculpture, by men as well as women. The sculptor David Smith,
whose complicated relationship with the sculptor Dorothy Dehner

323
(b. 1901) inflected the work of both during the 1940s, linked the
body of woman to home in The Home of the Welder, a bronze of
1945-46 with the torso of a woman in bas-relief on one side, and a
stylized mother and child in bas-relief on the other. For Smith, the
body of woman signified not only physical home, but also the men-
tal and emotional source of male creative activity. For Dehner, the
demands of marriage and art proved incompatible and she began to
work professionally as a sculptor only after leaving Smith and her
home in 1950.
Many women artists, encouraged by their teachers to divorce art
practice from female experience and self-awareness in order to suc-
ceed professionally, found themselves painfully aware of the contradic-
tions between artistic and personal identity. The nexus of body/
home/art is central to the early work of Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911)
whose femme-maison paintings were exhibited in 1947. Although
Bourgeois pointed to the home as a place of conflict for the woman
artist, critics read the paintings as affirming a “natural” identification
between women and home. Her paintings of 1947 evolved out of ear-
lier ones based on the grid, a structural form familiar to her from her
early weaving and tapestry, and from her training in Cubist abstrac-
tion. Under the influence of Surrealism, she developed the personal,
quasi-figurative imagery of these femme-maison paintings with their
houses perched on top of women’s bodies in place of heads. In these
disquieting works, domesticity, imaged through blank facades and
small windows, defines women but denies them speaking voices.
“Hers is a world of women,’ wrote one critic. “Blithely they emerge
from chimneys, or, terrified, they watch from their beds as curtains fly
from a nightmare window. A whole family of females proves their
domesticity by having houses for heads.”
The presence of a politics of gender in Bourgeois’s work has been
recognized only in retrospect, in the light of more recent feminist-
inspired investigations into the workings of socially assigned notions
of difference and the gradual acknowledgment of Bourgeois’s contri-
bution in creating a body of work remarkable for its personal, associa-
tive, autobiographical, and emotional content.
Her exhibition as a sculptor in 1949 included a group of tall,
narrow wooden sculptures, several of which display moving “arms.”
Art historian Ann Gibson points to these works as examples of
Bourgeois’s use of the language of war as metaphor for gender.
Drawings, prints, paintings, and sculpture produced during these years
of the Cold War display images that oscillate between vulnerability

324
 pene.
a et 7
Or w/

193 Dorothy Dehner 194 Louise Bourgeois 195 Louise Nevelsor

Scaffold 1983 Femme-Maison c. 1946-47 Totem IT 1959

and an “aggressive machismo,’ figures that suggest both spears and

phallic instruments of penetration. “It is a period without feet,”
Bourgeois recalls. “During that period things were not grounded.
They expressed a great fragility and uncertainty. ...If Ipushed them,
they would have fallen. And this was self-expression.”
In 1949, the Club and the Eighth Street Club were founded and
became, along with the Cedar Bar, the major public meeting places for
the New York School painters, whose intense discussions with critics
and curators concerning the new avant-garde admitted women large-
ly as audience. Confined to the margins ofa largely male discourse,
women functioned as decorative accessories of Bohemia, their pres-
ence often seen as confirming the heterosexuality and “masculinity”
of their partners. Although Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Elaine de Kooning,
and Mercedes Matter were among the club’s few female members, the

325
painters Paul Brach and Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923), who regularly
attended meetings, remember no women at board meetings or policy
discussions. Women were “treated like cattle” at the Cedar Bar,
Krasner later recalled. Between 1948 and 1951, Art News ran articles
on Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Stull, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock,
and Arshile Gorky. By 1951, Art News and Thomas Hess’s Abstract
Painting, published that year, were championing the older artists asso-
ciated with the new painting. Krasner, still struggling to define her
relationship to the new abstraction, found herself placed among a
“second generation” that soon included Helen Frankenthaler, Joan
Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Hedda Sterne, Elaine de Kooning, Sonia
Getchoff, and Ethel Schwabacher.
Mitchell, Frankenthaler, and Hartigan were ambitious artists who
received positive critical support during the early 1950s and whose
work was included in major Abstract Expressionist exhibitions. Yet all
of them struggled, as did Krasner, to define a difference from the
painting of their male contemporaries that could not be reduced
to the difference of women. Mitchell (b. 1926) arrived in New York
from Chicago in 1949 and participated in the Ninth Street Show in
1951, exhibiting canvases in which amorphous forms, influenced by
Gorky’s biomorphic shapes, flow in and out of ambiguous spaces.
Paintings like Untitled (1950) and Cross Section of a Bridge (1951) show a
tension between direct, vigorous brushstrokes and sensuous surface
color. Hartigan’s (b. 1922) period of abstraction, on the other hand,

196 Joan Mitchell Cross Section ofaBridge 1951

7/ Gr cace Harti oO
fo)
an Per Ay ian Jac et 1952
 was brief, lasung only unul 1952, but she produced painungs charac-
terized by strong, gestural brushwork and clashing colors and lines,
One of the first abstract women artsts of her generation to earn an
1Q7 international reputation, her paintung Persian Jacket (1952) was pur-
chased by the Museum of Modern Art in 1952. However, Harngan’s
subsequent decision to give up abstraction and introduce recognizable
forms into her work—many of them reminiscent of de Kooning’s
women—was prompted, at least in part, by ambivalence over her atti-
tude toward the visual language of Abstract Expressionism. In 1974,
she referred to the problem of feeling that her images were derived
from the more established male arusts: “I began to get guilty tor walk-
ing in and freely taking their form . . . without having gone through
their struggle for content, or having any context except an under-
standing of formal qualities.”
In 1949, Krasner and Pollock had exhibited in Sidney Janis$ group
exhibition “Man and Wife.” The very ude of the exhibition organized
women’ productions into a subsidiary, socially defined category. The
experience, and the negative reviews of her work, proved wrenching
and Krasner did not exhibit again untul 1951, later destroying most of
the paintings trom this period. Other women shared her awareness of
the deep divisions in the play of sexual ditference within social ideol-
ogy and artistic practice. Krasner and Elaine de Kooning both chose to
sign their works with initials only, while Hartigan briefly adopted the
sobriquet “George” (in homage to George Sand and George Ehot). In
each case, the decision to erase gender as part of the creative process
was less an attempt to hide their identties as women than to evade
being labeled “feminine” by becoming the man/woman whose cre-
ative efforts earned praise.
Helen Frankenthaler (b. 1928) is the only woman painter of
the period who has consistently dismissed gender as an issue. Yet
critics since the early 1950s follow the model used to contain the
considerable talents of O’Keeffe and other previous women artists.
Constructing a special category for her work in which color and
touch are read as “feminine,” they ceased examining it in relation to its
specific historical context and instead linked it to an unchanging and
essentalized tradition of women’s work.
In 1952, Frankenthaler began staining color directly into large
pieces of unsized, unprinted duck laid on her studio floor. Mountains
and Sea (1952), her first major stained canvas, contains richly colored
masses and fluid forms reminiscent of Gorky’s and Willem de
Koonings biomorphism. Although Frankenthaler benefited from
328 >
 Si Sage of (Votes

-¢ Mountains and Sea 19§2

ver Cat Image 19 as

57
 Clement Greenberg’s consistent critical support, it was not until the
painters Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis adopted her technique
that she was accorded status as an “innovator.” She was not the first
artist to stain canvases but she was the first to develop a complete for-
mal vocabulary from the technique. “It is free, lyrical, and feminine—
very different from the more insistent and regular rhythms of the best
and most typical Pollocks of the late 40s and early 50s,” wrote a later
critic, overlooking the fact that both Pollock’s and Rothko’s use of the
staining technique had resulted in softened and sensuous colors.
Atmospheric and landscape references remained strong in the
works of Mitchell, Frankenthaler, and Schwabacher during the
1950s, for Hofmann’s influential teachings emphasized nature as a
source. All of the artists involved with Abstract Expressionism identi-
fied the process of generating images with “nature” (“I am nature,”
Pollock declaimed), but the differing relationships of male and
female painters to this very important aspect remain to be clarified.
Schwabacher (1903-84) made the transition to Abstract Expres-
sionism through images directly equating biological reproduction and
artistic genesis, and both she and Willem de Kooning produced con-
troversial images of women which specifically referred to a nature/
culture dichotomy.
After Pollock’s death in 1956, Krasner turned to large-scale, hybrid
anthropomorphic forms in a series of disturbing paintings which
Barbara Rose has called “an exorcism of her feelings of rage, guilt,
pain, and loss.” A period of intense creative activity followed during
which she fully developed a unique idiom. Deliberately choosing col-
ors with “feminine” connotations, she used them in ways that negated
199 their traditional associations. In paintings like Cat Image (1957), pastel
tones, foliate shapes, and egg forms combine with brushwork and
ageressive loaded forms to produce the large works that ultimately
secured her place in Abstract Expressionism.
Louise Nevelson (1900-88), like Krasner, also worked with cast-off
5 and recycled materials during the 1950s. They, and other women of
their generation, worked steadily for many years before receiving the
recognition given their male contemporaries at a much earlier date.
Despite exhibiting since 1941, and having her work widely acknowl-
edged abroad, Nevelson did not receive a solo museum exhibition 1n
the United States until 1960. Germaine Richier (1904-59), who had
exhibited in Europe since 1934, had her first solo exhibition in New
York in 1957; Barbara Hepworth’s first retrospective exhibition in
London, followed by the public commissions that finally enabled her

330
to work at the scale she had long desired, took place in 1954, after
twenty-five years of steady work.
Despite a lack of institutional support, however, the period from the
mid-1950s to the mid-1960s was important in bringing recognition to
a number of women sculptors. Nevelson had studied painting with
Hofmann in Munich during the 1930s and won her first sculpture
competition at the A.C.A. Galleries, New York, in 1936, but the
blatantly sexist critical response to her first major exhibition at the
Nierendorf Gallery, also New York, in 1946 drove her from the gallery
world for almost ten years. “We learned the artist was a woman, in
time to check our enthusiasm,’ wrote one critic. ““Had it been other-
wise, we might have hailed these sculptural expressions as by surely a
creat figure among the moderns.”
In 1955, Nevelson exhibited, and was acclaimed for, her first envi-
ronment, Ancient Games and Ancient Places. Fusing Cubism and
Constructivism, Dada readymade and Surrealist dream-object, she
began constructing entire walls out of crates, boxes, architectural frag-
ments, pieces of pianos, stair railings, chair slats, and other urban bric-
a-brac. The mat black of the-elements, painted before assemblage,
unified form and surface, and the wall-size constructions created new
environments within the gallery. Moon Garden Plus One (1958), her
first entire wall, was arranged in the Grand Central Moderns Gallery
to take advantage of its unusual light. “Appalling and marvellous,’
wrote Hilton Kramer, “utterly shocking 1n the way they violate our
received ideas on the limits of sculpture ... yet profoundly exhilarating
in the way they open an entire realm of possibility.” Yet part of the
astonishment was directed at a woman working in sculpture and on a
scale that rivaled that of male artists.
By the end of the 1950s many artists were turning away from the
drama of Abstract Expressionism and denouncing symbolic, mythic,
and subjective content as rhetorical devices. A younger generation of
artists embraced the mechanical processes and everyday imagery
of Pop art, or the non-relational, colorful surfaces of Postpainterly
Abstraction and the industrially fabricated geometrical solids of
Minimal sculpture. Although faithful to the scale and direct impact of
Abstract Expressionism, younger artists cultivated detachment from
the process of making images. The exhibition organized by Greenberg
at French & Co. in 1959-60 emphasized pure color as an expressive
vehicle in works which favored flat, non-textured paint surfaces and
non-illusionistic space. Frankenthaler,Jo Baer, Schapiro, Agnes Martin
(b. 1912)—whose pencilled grids aimed at a balance between the

53%
200 Agnes Martin Untitled #9 1990

individuality of the mark and the impersonality of the structure—and

the British Op artist, Bridget Riley (b. 1931), were among the women
who adapted to this dominant language of formalist abstraction.
Riley and Martin, working relatively independently of art world
fashion, have pursued uncompromising visions of a reductive abstrac-
tion that continue to influence younger painters. Martin’s barely per-
ceptible grids and delicate pencil lines against faintly modulated
backgrounds evoke feelings ofjoy, light and infinite expanses. “My
paintings have neither objects nor space nor time nor anything,” she
has said. “They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness
breaking down forms.” Riley’s uncompromising non-figurative work,

332
201 Bridget Riley Winter Palace 1981
202 Lee Bontecou Untitled 1960

which first attracted critical attention during the Op art movement of

the 1960s, addresses itself to the formal issues of painting: the nature of
color and pictorial space, shape and flatness, the relation of feeling to
color and image, the historical traditions of painting.
The relative lack of attention paid by mainstream galleries and crit-
ics to artists working in alternative ways helped perpetuate the fiction
of the mainstream as monolithic and masculine, a world in which
women functioned only as exceptions, or in which they were forced
to deny any identification with other women. Riley seemed to speak
for many ambitious women when she later said: “Women’s liberation
when applied to artists seems to me a naive concept. It raises issues
which in this context are quite absurd. At this particular point in time,
artists who happen to be women need this particular form of hysteria
like they need a hole in the head.”
It is significant, however, that anong the women who received the
greatest critical attention during the early 1960s were three sculptors
whose work, in fact, embodied highly subjective responses to main-

334
203 Marisol Self-Portrait 1961-62

stream concerns. In retrospect, the work of Bontecou, Marisol, and

Niki de Saint Phalle appears ever more pointedly at odds with the cul-
tivated detachment and cool imagery of mainstream art, as well as
with the slick media-derived female imagery of Pop art.
Bontecou (b. 1931) studied sculpture at the Art Students’ League
with William Zorach and spent several years in Rome on a Fulbright
Fellowship. Her large, rugged constructions were fabricated from
worn-out commercial laundry conveyor belts which she sewed onto
steel frames. First shown in 1960, they were compared to everything
from airplane engines to female sexual parts. They exerted a consider-
able influence on Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, and other Process artists
interested in exploring the use of non-traditional industrial materials
in sculpture in the late 1960s.
Marisol, born in Paris of Venezuelan parents in 1930, had lived in
New York since 1950. Around 1954, influenced by Jasper Johns’s
Target with Four Faces, she began putting little terracotta figures in
boxes. Her exhibition at the Stable Gallery in 1962 catapulted her

359
204 (above) Niki de Saint Phalle Nana c. 1965

205 (left) Louise Bourgeois Fillette 1968

into the public eye. “The first girl artists with glamour,’ Andy Warhol
declared and his remark was followed by extensive media attention to
Marisol’s life, her beauty, and her enigmatic silences. Marisol’s repre-
sentational images based on American figures were immediately
linked to Pop art, but her work in fact has sources in Precolumbian
art, early American folk carving, and Surrealist dream images. A 1964
exhibition included The Wedding, Andy Warhol, John Wayne, Double
Date, and The Babies. Women encased and imprisoned in wooden
blocks and stultifying social roles, endlessly repeated figures, mon-
strous babies, and Pop heroes dominated. Often she incorporated
parts of herself in her work and her obsessive use of self-images, when
combined with stereotypical presentations of women living out cir-
cumscribed roles, built a chilling picture of American middle-class life
in the 1960s.
Saint Phalle (b. 1930) also offered up images of women that ran
counter to formalist aesthetics during the years when Pop art gave us
slick nudes, pin-ups, and sex objects. Her work, with its playful absur-
dity and ephemeral objects, made little critical impact in a New York
art world dedicated to Minimalism, but her monstrous female figures
were impossible to ignore. A member of the Nouveaux Reéalistes, a
group of European neo-Dada artists active during the 1960s, Saint
Phalle’s work is a kind of precursor to feminist art concerns of the
1970s. Her large-scale female figures evolved out of earlier assemblage
and collage pieces of statuary, figurines, toys, dolls, and other found
objects which she reassembled into chaotic tableaux.
The early “Nanas,” gaily painted and exaggerated figures at once
child-like and monstrous, archetypal and toy-like, were constructed
on chicken-wire frames covered with fabric and yarn to create intri-
cately textured surfaces. Aggressive but also wildly funny, they were
like Willem de Kooning’s Women stripped of the violence and
misogyny. At the same time, they refused the mythic and romantic
fantasies projected by men onto images of women.
In 1966, Saint Phalle produced Hon (She), a temporary monument
at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm on which she collaborated
with Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt. Eighty-two feet long, Hon
lay on her back on the ground, knees raised, heels planted. Spectators
entered the figure through the vagina and found themselves in a
female body that functioned as playground, amusement park, shelter,
and pleasure palace with a milk-bar installed in one breast and an
early Greta Garbo film playing elsewhere. Saint Phalle’s Hon
reclaimed woman’s body as a site of tactile pleasure rather than an

sos
object of voyeuristic viewing; the figure was both a playtul and col-
orful homage to woman as nurturer and a potent demythologizer of
male romantic notions of the female body as a “dark conunent” and
unknowable reality.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, challenges to the hegemony
of Modernism began to take place on many, often overlapping, fronts.
Decisions by many artists to work outside the mainstream gallery/
dealer system were part of a reaction against the growing commodifi-
cation of the art object and the dehumanization of Pop, Postpainterly
Abstraction, and Minimal art. Process artists reacted against the glamor
of the object, replacing machine-finished and expensive industrial
materials with the by-products of industrial civilization: raw wood,
rubber, felt, and other materials of no intrinsic value. Conceptual
artists replaced objects with framed propositions and ideas. And, after
1970, many women began to formulate specifically feminist works
based on a commitment to radical social change that addressed the
ways that women’s experience has been suppressed and/or marginal-
ized in Western culture.
During the later 1960s, challenges to Modernism’s focus on aes-
thetic purity and transcendence, and the closely linked formalist
aesthetic theories of Clement Greenberg with their emphasis on the
work of art as self-contained and engaged with a critique of the medi-
um, occurred on many fronts, not all of them feminist, and not all of
them restricted to women. Areas in which the work of women artists
would have a significant and lasting impact included the use of new
materials and processes, the development of collective and collabora-
tive ways of working, performance and body art, minimalism, earth-
works and public art, and of course feminist art (that is, art that
self-consciously embodies an aspect of feminism’s political agenda; see
Chapter 12). While this work is not necessarily or intrinsically femi-
nine, art historian Ann Gibson has suggested that it is historically
feminine in its opposition to the reductive, totalizing, patriarchal
aesthetics that have characterized Modernism. Although these
developments took place internationally, the close identification of
post-Second World War Modernism with institutions and practices in
New York encourages a closer look at that cultural context. It is not
possible to acknowledge the contributions of the many women work-
ing during this period, and the brief survey that follows can only iden-
tify a few major tendencies and touch upon representative issues raised
by women.
By the mid-1960s, a number of New York artists were incorporat-
*
8
a oe)
ing non-art materials and new technologies into their work. Shigeko
Kubota (b. 1937), who graduated from Tokyo University with a
degree in sculpture, moved to New York in 1964. Inspired by the
work of John Cage and David Tudor, she became involved with the
avant-garde Fluxus Group, which also included Yoko Ono, George
Maciunas, Alan Kaprow, and Nam June Paik. A decade-long obsession
with Marcel Duchamp, whom she met on the way to Buffalo for the
opening of Merce Cunningham’s ballet, Walk Around Time, led to a
series of sculptural installations that incorporate video. Using shifting
camera angles and image processing techniques, she produced a ver-
sion of Duchamp’s 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase that
represents the mechanized nude from a female perspective.
Around 1964 Eva Hesse (1936-70),a New York artist whose family
had fled Nazi Germany when she was three years old, began to use
industrial materials in sculpture that resisted the geometric and archi-
tectural ambitions of Minimalism. She worked with rope, latex, rub-
berized cheesecloth, clay, metal, and wire mesh in pieces that are
additive, tactile, and radical in their witty and iconoclastic use of
media. In 1966, feminist and critic Lucy Lippard included Hesse’s
work in the exhibition “Eccentric Abstraction” (which introduced
the term “process art”). Along with Richard Serra, Carl Andre, Keith
Sonnier, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Sol Le Witt, and others,
Hesse adopted emotionally associative materials and structures in
which layering, displacement, and serialization focused attention on
process, anti-industrial technologies, and siting. Her notes and diaries
from this period form an integral part of the investigative process that
made up her work. Although she did not identify herselfas a feminist,
she was acutely aware of the contradictions between her commitment
to her art and the social expectations demanded of women. “I cannot
be so many things,” she wrote in her diary in January 1964. “I cannot
be something for everyone. ... Woman, beautiful, artist, wife, house-
keeper, cook, saleslady, all these things. I cannot even be myself or
know who | am.”
Hang Up (1966), a spare rectangular frame with a thin but flexible 206
rod looping out from it and then back, is characteristic of her work in
refusing to declare its meaning or to locate an inner “truth”; the frame
presents a self-contained object, but the line which registers the mark
of the artist is drawn in space, not captured permanently on a surface.
Critics have remarked on the erotic qualities of Hesse pieces like
Ringaround Arosie (1965) and Accession II (1967) with their spongy 207
membranes, their interiors bristling with soft projections, and their

339
 206 Eva Hesse Hang Up 1966

use of accretion to build up forms. Like Robert Morris’s Cock/Cunt

sculpture of 1963, with its schematic imagery of sexual difference and
copulation, they suggest that the most abstract forms may be coded in
ways that index the body metaphorically rather than literally. During
the later 1960s, Louise Bourgeois’s work also began to display a more
tactile eroticism and her personal, intuitive sculptural forms became
a rallying point for many younger women artists. Bulbous, abstract
shapes and penile forms are replicated in a variety of materials from
marble, bronze and plaster to latex, sometimes merging organically
into composite forms, often part phallic, part fecal. The primary sen-
sual world she evokes is undifferentiated and “polymorphously per-
i) A verse.’ One critic described her latex Fillette (1968) as “a big,
suspended decaying phallus, definitely on the rough side.’ Other
pieces, like her series of small, female figures in plaster, clay, bronze,
wax and marble, are both aggressive and vulnerable.
The work of Bourgeois, Hesse, Marisol, and Saint Phalle implied
content that could not be accommodated by formalist aesthetics, or by
reducing the significance of gender to the sex of the artist or to her
conscious intentions. By 1966, the first rumblings of dissent were

340
207. Eva Hesse Accession II 1967

beginning to be heard in America and elsewhere. Within a few years,

the cultural conflicts that divided a generation of Americans—racism,
sexism, and militarism—invaded the art world, until then secure in the
belief that aesthetic issues were unrelated to or transcended social con-
cerns. It is black artists and women (black and white)—Romare
Bearden, Raymond Saunders, Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, Elizabeth
Catlett, May Stevens—who first gave visual form to the growing gulf
between the white American dream and the black American reality.
Although Pop’s embrace of American media imagery occasionally
included images ofblacks, their presence had tended to confirm white
conventions and stereotypes. It 1s Romare Bearden’s collages, the
sculpture and prints of Elizabeth Catlett, and the paintings of
Raymond Saunders and Faith Ringgold that focused attention on the
distance between the black community and the American main-
stream.
Among Catlett’s (b. 1915) works from the 1960s are several on the
theme of equal rights, including the series Civil Rights (1969), and the
figurative sculptures Black Unity (1968) and Homage to My Young Black
Sisters (1969), which later became icons in the struggle for social jus-

341
208 Faith Ringgold Die 1967

tice. She used the technique of linocut to commemorate black leaders

in Malcolm X Speaks For Us (1969) and Homage to the Panthers (1970).
During the 1960s Ringgold (b. 1930), an African-American raised
in Harlem, and May Stevens, a white painter from New York, also
investigated the connections between patriarchy, racism, and imperial-
ism. Ringgold’s American People Series (1963-67) was influenced by the
writings of James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones). In
1966, she participated in the first exhibition of black artists held in
Harlem since the 1930s. The following year Ringgold exhibited Die, a
twelve-foot wide mural of a street riot painted 1n a simplified repre-
sentational style influenced by the 1930s realism of painters like Jacob
Lawrence and Ben Shahn.
By 1968 May Stevens (b. 1924), who had also played an active role
in the Civil Rights Movement, was producing images in response to
the current racial strife. In Big Daddy, Paper Doll (1968), fragmented
but menacing male figures are used to explore the relationship
between patriarchal power in the family and in social institutions like
the American judicial system. At about the same time, the California
artist Betye Saar (b. 1926) began incorporating stereotypic images of
blacks in collages and constructions. Inspired by Joseph Cornell’s
boxes, their content, however, was political and angry rather than
dream-like and Surrealist. The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), one of
a group of works dealing with white culture’s stereotypical images of
blacks, included an Aunt Jemima image holding a small revolver in

342
209 May Stevens Big Daddy, Paper Doll 1968

210 Betye Saar

The Liberation ofAunt
Jemima 1972

4
3
*
.
2
4
7
#
one hand and a rifle in the other in a box papered with “mammy”
pictures.
A series of events in late 1969 and early 1970 led to the first protests
against racism and sexism in the American art world; out of these
interventions, and the growing Women’s Liberation Movement, came
the feminist art activities of the 1970s. In December 1969, New York’s
Whitey Museum Annual opened with 143 artists, only eight of
whom were women. Demonstrations against the museum led to the
formation of Women Artists in Revoluuon (WAR) within the Art
Workers’ Coalition; Ringgold organized Women Students and Artsts
for Black Art Liberation (WASABAL); and the New York Art Strike
Against War, Racism, Fascism, Sexism and Repression, organized by
the Art Workers Coalition, closed New York museums for one day in
May 1970. Ringgold and WASABAL also launched a highly effective
protest against an exhibition at the School of Visual Arts in New York
organized by Robert Morris which attacked United States policies of
war, repression, racism, and sexism but included no women artists
(later amended due to the effectiveness of the protest). By 1970, the
Art Workers’ Coalition had collapsed and women artists in New York
formed the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee, a loosely organized
group that devoted the bulk of its energies to challenge successtully
the number of women in the Whitey Annuals and to tound the
Women’s Slide Registry. In the face of protests by blacks, students, and
women, the fiction of an art world isolated from broader social and
political issues by “objectivity,” “quality.” and “aesthetics” began to be
exposed.
The work of Barbara Chase-Riboud (b. 1930) and Betve Saar was
shown at the Whitney Museum (the first major museum exhibition of
the work of contemporary black women artists) and Chase-Riboud
dedicated the sculpture in her first solo show in New York to the
memory of Malcolm X. When the percentage of women artists repre-
sented in the Whitney Annual rose from fifteen in 1969 to twenty-
two in 1970, “museum officials conceded, somewhat reluctantly, that
pressure from the women’s groups was effective.”
The feminist movement in the arts—that is, the commitment to an
art that reflects women’ political and social consciousness—pro-
foundly influenced artistic practice in America during this period
through its constant questioning of and challenge to patriarchal
assumptions about ideologies of “art” and “artist” (see Chapter 12).
A renewed interest in art produced by women generally also spread to
a number of artists from an earlier generation, many of whom had

344
been professionally active since the 1930s. The work of Bourgeois,
Neel, Bishop, Kahlo, Nevelson, and others began to receive the critical
and public attention it had long deserved. While some women
defined their practice in feminist terms, others rejected the designa-
tion altogether. Still others continued to work within abstraction, but
saw their work inflected in new ways by their political and social
consciousnesses. Although they chose to pursue non-figurative ways
of working, artists from Joan Jonas and Dorothea Rockburne to Jackie
Ferrara and Mary Miss have pointed to the efficacy of women’s polit-
ical organizing in the early 1970s 1n bringing curatorial and critical
attention to their work.
During the early 1970s, women artists of the previous generation
responded to the new, more open climate in a variety of ways. While
some continued to insist that issues of gender were irrelevant in mak-
ing art, others spoke out. Nevelson (1900-88), interviewed by Cindy
Nemser, made her views of how women were treated in the New
York art world very clear. Bourgeois participated in feminist meetings
and took part in protests while Krasner, insisting that she was not a
feminist, nevertheless picketed the Museum of Modern Art along
with other women. In Mexico, Carrington designed an early
Women’s Liberation poster, Mujeres conscienscia, while in New York
and Paris, Dorothea Tanning and Meret Oppenheim announced their
opposition to exhibitions of art that “ghettoized” women.
Throughout the decade, women identified and defined a multiplici-
ty of relationships to feminist and mainstream concerns: “... we were
all asking about feminism and what it means to be a woman,” Joan
Jonas later remarked. “The women’s movement profoundly affected
me; it led me, and all the people around me, to see things more clearly.
I don’t think before that I was aware of the roles women played... .
There is always a woman in my work, and her role is questioned.”
Throughout the decade, women continued to question existing defi-
nitions of form and materials. While some of this work was specifical-
ly feminist, other women, ignoring the sex of maker and audience,
developed their forms within conceptual and pictorial interrogations
of materials and processes which had begun during the 1960s but
gained new momentum and support from the Women’s Movement.
The pioneering minimalist dances of Yvonne Rainer and the Judson
Dance Group exerted a profound influence on artists like Joan Jonas
and Dorothea Rockburne, as they worked to break the boundaries
between sculpture and performance/video, and painting and sculp-
ture. Jonas’s performances Jones Beach (1970) and Delay, Delay (1972)

345
mix sound, movement, and image in complex statements, while
Rockburne’s (b. 1935) carbon paper drawing/installations and folded
paper and linen-based paintings attached directly to the wall drew
on mathematical Set Theory and dance movement in works that
redefined the illusionism of the painted image and the physicality of
sculpture.
The combining of an abstract formal vocabulary with materials and
forms inflected by female associations is also characteristic of the work
of Joan Snyder, Lynda Benglis, Ree Morton, and others. Snyder's
(b. 1940) paintings of the 1970s related to older traditions of abstrac-
tion, while increasingly using personal signs and marks. She first linked
ostensibly non- referential passages 1n the paintings Flesh/Art (1973)
and Symphony III (1975), where loose painterly fields coexist with
fragmentary figurative references, and brushstrokes assume a variety of
meanings, from drips, spills, and grids to gashes, tears, and blood. Small
Symphony
forWomen (1974), Vanishing Theater (1974-75), and Heart-On
(1975) combine and re-combine themes and images, transforming the
individual consciousness behind the Abstract Expressionist gesture
into a political response, born out of an awareness of the collective

346
 OME EELeLLite:

Was

211 (opposite) Joan Snyder

Heart-On 1975

212 (right) Audrey Flack

Leonardo’s Lady 1974

213 (below) Lynda Benglis

For Carl Andre 1970

“9 Ys
—
 214 Jackie Winsor
Bound Grid 1971-72

experiences of war, the student riots of the late 1960s, and the
Women’s Movement.
Snyder espoused feminist principles as she worked to infuse the
language of abstraction with a content that was not formalist. Benglis
(b. 1941), after first making narrow wax paintings as long as her arm,
began pouring polyurethane pieces, moving from single freestanding
objects to rows of extruded forms attached to the wall. Her subse-
quent use of rubber and latex was influenced by Hesse’s choice of
materials and by the work of Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago in
California with its developing iconography of female imagery and
costuming (see Chapter 12). Flack (b. 1931) repainted the vanitas as an
icon of femininity using the neutral vision and meticulous brushstroke
of the photorealists, while a number of artists, including Idelle Weber,
Sylvia Mangold, and Janet Fish introduced new subjects into realist
painting.
Hesse and Bourgeois used materials that had hardly ever been used
before in sculpture to form objects that were powerfully tactile and
suggestive, yet relied on an abstract formal language. By the early
1970s, a larger group of women artists had formed in New York,
focusing on explorations into materials, process, and time. The natural
and public worlds had been shaped by a series of exhibitions that
began in 1966 with “Eccentric Abstraction,’ organized by Lucy

348
Lippard for the Fischbach Gallery, and continued with “Anti-IIlusion:
Process/Materials,’ organized by Marcia Tucker at the Whitney
Museum in 1969, and “Twenty-Six Contemporary Women Artists’ at
the Aldrich Museum in 1971. Among those who exhibited at the
latter, also organized by Lippard, were Alice Aycock, Mary Miss,
Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, Jackie Winsor, and Barbara Zucker.
At an historical moment when feminism was encouraging many
women to explore issues of autobiography, narrative, and personal
identity in their work, other women embarked on investigations
motivated by their interest in history, archaeology, and anthropology.
Nancy Graves (b. 1940), in her camel sculptures, and Jackie Winsor
(b. 1941), in pieces made from plywood, pine, rope, twine, trees, lath
and nails, also addressed issues of material and process. The labor-
intensive process of binding used by Winsor in works such as Bound
Grid (1971-72), and 30 to 1 Bound Trees (1971) also recalls a hidden his-
tory of female productivity in areas like needlework, basketry, and
quiltmaking. Winsor’s work made visible what has historically been a

21§ Michelle Stuart

Niagara IT 1976
hidden process—the complexity and labor of women’s traditional
handicrafts—establishing it in dialogue with traditional mainstream
sculptural concerns such as those of scale and material.
Many artists chose to put their works in the landscape rather than
in the gallery. Graves’s desire to connect the processes of art-making
with other systems of knowledge, and Winsor’s interest in natural
materials and sites, were shared by other artists who, during the 1970s,
began to use landscape forms and sites. In many cases, a desire to work
in public developed in relation to an expanded view of social con-
sciousness shaped by the social protest movements of the late sixties,
the group experiences of feminism, and access to new sources of pub-
lic funding in the arts. Although the move into the landscape corre-
sponded with a growing public concern for the environment,
earthworks had less to do with ecology in most instances than with
expanding the boundaries of art. Although the works of, for example,
Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, Nancy Holt, Walter DeMaria,
Mary Miss, Alice Aycock, Michelle Stuart, and Michael Heizer took

216 Jennifer Bartlett Rhapsody 1975-76 (detail)

me OX
RAASAK
SAQA
RASAAA
place in nature, much of the work found its way back into the gallery
in the form of materials and documentation. The monumental scale at
which Smithson, DeMaria, Heizer, and Oppenheim worked is shared
neither by women artists, nor by many of their European contempo-
raries, men or women. The reasons, however, have less to do with
innate differences between men’s and women’s sensibilities, or their
relationship to the earth and to nature, than with their differing access
to the patronage which funded earthworks.
The work of many women sculptors reveals a concern with issues
of geological time, the perception and experience of landscape, and
the earth’s annual cycles. It is about experiencing nature in terms of
architectural sites, and about psychological, mythical, and historical
associations with such sites. Michelle Stuart’s (b. 1938) Earth Scrolls or
drawings between 1973 and 1976 evoke a sense of geological time 215
through the use of earth as a medium and the pulverization ofrocks as
a way of marking the paper. Literally using earth as her medium,
Stuart’s selections of rocks from different strata and geographic

217 Pat Steir The Breughel Series (A Vanitas of Styles) 1981-83 (detail)
218 Alice Aycock Maze 1972

locations were based on her direct experience when growing up of

the fissures and layers of southern California.
Miss, Aycock, George Trakis, Holt, and Michael Singer used sculp-
tural form in their work to construct the landscape as the site of a
visual and tactile experience. French sculptors Anne and Patrick
Poirier invested in theirs archeological forms with mythic and fantas-
tic associations. Miss’s (b. 1944) Perimeters, Pav ilions Decoys (1978)
included three towers and an underground atrium excavation as
places from which to see and experience the land and sky. The scale
was human and the whole work provided visual and experiential
paradoxes: towers that could be seen into but not entered, under-
ground chambers that could be entered but not seen. Aycock’s
(b. 1946) Maze (1972) makes use of a form rich in associations, ancient
and contemporary, as do other structures by her such as the Battery
Park installation (1980).
Sun Tunnels (1973-76) by Nancy Holt (b. 1943) also addresses issues
of the timeless quality ofthe earth and its annual cycles. On a forty-acre
oI op
J)=
site which she purchased in the Great Basin Desert in northwestern
Utah, four concrete tunnels are laid in an open X shape marking the
seasonal extreme positions of the sun on the horizon. Holes of 7, 8, 9,
and 10 inches in diameter in the upper half of the tunnels correspond
to stars in four different constellations. Again, an interest in the archeo-
logical and mythical past informs the exquisitely detailed reconstruc-
tions of imaginary, or partly imaginary, cultures made by the Poiriers.
Ostia Antica (1971-73) is an elaborate ten-yard long terracotta recon-
struction in model form that is neither fiction nor reality.
During the same period, a number of younger women painters, not
necessarily feminist, made significant contributions to the elaboration
of mark and shape as expressive pictorial devices. The work of
American artists Jennifer Bartlett and Dorothea Rockburne, and the
Europeans Hanne Darboven and Edwina Leapman, grew out of a
conceptually based non-gestural abstract language; that of Elizabeth
Murray, Susan Rothenberg, Miriam Cahn, Pat Steir, Paula Rego,
and Maggi Hambling was centered in figuration and the new
Expressionism of the later 1970s. They combine research, discovery,
and analysis in their approach to the formal issues of painting and their
work refuses easy categorization within Modernist paradigms.
Around 1965 Darboven (b. 1941), a young German artist, began
developing simple but flexible numerical systems. Recorded first
in notebooks, the pages of which provided modules for larger

219 Hanne Darboven 24 Gesdnge—B Form 1970s

 installations, the best known of her systems were based on day, month,
year, century—the digits added and multiplied until they became
unmanageable and were then broken down into progressively smaller
areas which could in turn be re-expanded. Graphic records of process
and time, the individual pages were combined into wall or room-sized
installations.
Shortly after graduating from Yale in 1965, Bartlett (b. 1941) began
to pursue chance as a way of selecting paint colors and steel plates for
flat surfaces that would adhere to walls. In 1976, she completed
216 Rhapsody, a large environmental painting made up of 988 square steel
plates which took up approximately 154 feet of wall space. Described
by the artist as “‘a conversation, where you start with a thought, bring
in another idea to explain it, then drop it,” the work had a total of
twelve themes, including four kinds of lines, three shapes, four arche-
typal images (mountain, house, tree, ocean) and twenty-five colors of
the kind commonly found in plastic model kits.
Bartlett’s interest in systematizing the marks, dots, and strokes that
make up representation and her analysis of shape were shared by other
artists. Elizabeth Murray’s (b. 1940) formal vocabulary developed out
of a collection of simplified shapes based on common household and
studio objects. Their fragmentation, layering, and re-combination in
daring compositions that are part sculpture, part painting shift the
emphasis from figuration to abstraction, and from formal play to the
conceptual framing ofideas. Pat Steir’s (b. 1938) multi-panel paintings,
a massive summing up ofpainting-about-painting, on the other hand,
challenge cultural assumptions about artistic “individuality.” The
Breughel Series (A Vanitas of Styles) (begun in 1981) is a two-part,
eighty-panel work in which a still-life of flowers in a vase becomes a
visual puzzle combining artistic styles from the High Renaissance to
Abstract Expressionism. Assuming the “hands” of painters from
Watteau to Pollock, Steir investigates the essence of style, theirs and
hers. At the same time, other women continued to explore figurative
and abstract pictorial languages that related more directly to the polit-
ical goals of the Women’s Movement.

354
 Car DER TWELVE

Feminist Art in North America and Great Britain

Banding together around 1970 for the first time in modern history,
women in North America and Great Britain gathered politically to
protest their exclusion from male-dominated exhibitions and insti-
tutions. In New York, women artists and critics challenged the
Museum of Modern Art and other New York art institutions, calling
for continuous, non-juried exhibitions of women’s work, more one-
woman shows, a women artists’ advisory board, and $0 percent inclu-
sion of women in all museum exhibitions. In Southern California,
the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists met in the Fall of 1970
to protest the exclusion of women artists from the important “Art
and Technology” exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art. Pointing out that only one percent of work on display at the
museum was by women, they demanded an “Educational Program
for the Study of Women’s Art.” The Los Angeles County Museum
of Art responded with two important shows: “Four Los Angeles
Artists” in 1972, and the monumental 1976 exhibition “Women
Artists: 1550-1950,’ organized by Linda Nochlin and Ann
Sutherland Harris.
Around the same time, organizing efforts by British women artists
paralleled those in the United States, but took place within a smaller
professional art world and emphasized socialist politics rather than a
politics of difference. The first Women’s Liberation Art Group formed
in London in 1970. The following year, it mounted its first exhibition
at the Woodstock Gallery in London with works by Valerie Charlton,
Ann Colsell, Sally Frazer, Alison Fell, Margaret Harrison, Liz Moore,
Sheila Oliver, Monica Sjoo, and Rosalyn Smythe. Around the same
time, the Woman’s Workshop of the Artists’ Union dedicated itself
to combatting the isolation of women through collective creative
action. In 1971, a display of Margaret Harrison’s drawings became the
first solo feminist exhibition in London, and was quickly closed down
by the police because of “offensive” material, in this case a drawing of
Playboy’s founder and editor, Hugh Hefner, depicted as a “Bunny girl”
with a “Bunny penis.”

hfe
 By 1974, the work of women—much of it multi-media, conceptual,
and cross-disciplinary—was evident in a number of venues outside the
mainstream. Kate Walker and Sandy Gollop organized “Feministo,’ an
exchange of small art works through the mail. Later exhibited as
“Portrait of the Artist as Housewife,’ the works initiated a sustained
dialogue on the ideology of domesticity and femininity which circu-
lated outside the commercial art gallery system. In May, an exhibition
organized by the American critic Lucy Lippard and and entitled “Ca.
7,500” opened at the Warehouse in Earlham Street, London. The show,
which included the work of 26 American and European artists, had
been exhibited at a number of prestigious American galleries, but was
refused at the last minute by the Royal College of Art. A year later,
Mary Kelly, Margaret Harrison, and Kay Hunt collaborated on an
important documentary exhibition called “Women and Work” based
on a group of workers in a Metal Box Company factory in Southwark,
London. The desire to reach broader, non-art world audiences was also
evident in performance works by Susan Hiller and others. In 1973 and
1974, Hiller worked on large public performances such as Street
Ceremonies and Dream Mapping, which required the collective involve-
ment of large numbers of participants.
Throughout the United States and Britain, in groups large and
small, public and private, women in the arts were raising questions—
from where to exhibit as women and how to find space for working,
to political, theoretical, and aesthetic issues. Feminist artists in many
countries shared similar concerns, and feminism developed as an
international movement, with local socio-economic and ideological
factors shaping its expression in different ways. The reclaiming of past
histories was only one of several areas of feminist investigation. Many
women sought forms through which to valorize women’s experience
and the early 1970s saw an explosion of work that consciously rein-
serted women’s personal experiences into art practice.
Much of this work was disseminated through feminist publications.
A collective of women founded the British feminist journal Spare Rib
in 1972; in New York, the first issue of The Feminist Art Journal
appeared the same year. A few years later, women artists and critics
met to organize a feminist art publication, and Heresies was born in
1977, the same year that Chrysalis began publication in Los Angeles.
The emergence of a consciously feminist art practice in the United
States is closely linked to developments on the West Coast, and to the
artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. Chicago (b. 1939), who had
been working with minimal abstraction while a graduate student at

356
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220 Judy Chicago, “Virginia Woolf,’ The Resurrection Triptych 1973

the University of California, Los Angeles, began making groupings of

plexiglass Domes in 1968. Though abstract in form, she associated
them with female anatomy—breasts, belly and vulva—and with sensa-
tions of sexual and emotional pleasure. A year later, she began a series
of geometric abstractions, the Pasadena Lifesavers, which featured
hexagonal forms with large central openings.
Chicago taught the first feminist art course at Fresno State College
in 1970. The following year, she and Schapiro joined to offer a femi-
nist art program at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. In
studios restricted to women, students were encouraged to share their
experiences and to work in ways that made specific references to
women’s experiences of themselves and their bodies. In January 1972,
women from the feminist art program opened a site-specific installa-
tion in an old house in a residential neighborhood of Hollywood.
Called Womanhouse, the series of installations included Chicago’s

ey)
‘Menstruation Bathroom,’ Kathy Huberland’s “Bridal Staircase,’
Miriam Schapiro and Sherry Brody’s “Dollhouse,” Faith Wailding’s
“Womb Room,’ among a number of other daring explorations into
sexual, social, and psychological constructions of femininity.
At the same time, Chicago and Schapiro were advocating the use of
forms in which open, central shapes, and layered, often petal-like
images predominated, images that related to what Chicago identified
as “a central core, my vagina, that which made me a woman.” The
self-conscious investigation of female subjectivity through images of
the body was one aspect of the desire to celebrate female knowledge
and experience. But as early as 1973, Chicago and Schapiro co-
authored an article in Womanspace Journal in which they asked, “What
does it feel like to be a woman? To be formed around a central core
and have a secret place which can be entered and which 1s also a pas-
sageway from which life emerges?” and Lucy Lippard listed a series of
possible female characteristics in art: “A uniform density, an overall
texture, often sensuously tactile and often repetitive to the point of
obsession; the prepondrence (sic) of circular forms and central focus ...
layers or strata; an indefinable looseness or flexibility of handling; a
new fondness for the pinks and pastels and the ephemeral cloud-
colors that used to be taboo.” Clearly, the issue of a biologically deter-
mined imagery was already attracting critical response. While Chicago
and Schapiro pointed to prototypes in the work of O’Keeffe and other
women artists, some critics argued against celebrating difference in the
terms in which it had already been laid down.
From the beginning, many feminists reacted strongly to the idea of
womb-centered imagery as just another reworking of biological
determinism and a restrictive attempt to redefine femaleness. The
notion of an unchanging female “essence” remained to be tested
against theories of representation which argue that the meaning of
visual images is culturally and historically specific and unstable; that is,
with no fixed “truth” that can be uncovered. Yet central core imagery
remained an important part of an attempt to celebrate sexual difter-
ence and express pride in the female body and spirit.
Although critics writing from the perspective of the 1980s often
linked central core imagery to the search for essential biological difter-
ences between women and men, from the beginning Chicago and
Schapiro warned against the dangers offailing to take into account the
ways that female experience is socially and culturally shaped, rather
than biologically determined. In their article “Female Imagery”
(1973), they cautioned that the imagery they described should not be

358
viewed simplistically as “vaginal or womb art,’ but should be under-
stood by providing a framework within which to reverse devaluations
of female anatomy in patriarchal culture.
The ways that sexual difference 1s produced through representa-
tions, and through the stories that reinforce them, were central to the
work of many women active in a social movement that sought to
break down women’s isolation from one another through conscious-
ness-raising techniques that stressed story-telling. Feminist artists chal-
lenged the assumptions and conditions of patriarchy using a variety of
strategies and political tactics—from political actions demanding
equal representation in schools and exhibitions to setting up alterna-
tive exhibition sites, and from celebrations of the power and dignity of
women’s sexuality and fertility/creativity to analyses of the ways that
class, race, and gender structure women’s lives.
The work of the American artists May Stevens (b. 1924) and Nancy
Spero (b. 1926), exhibited in Britain as well as America, proved central
to mapping the terrain of the social body 1n representation. Trained at
the Art Institute of Chicago, Spero began work as a figurative artist
during the abstract 1960s, and as a political artist in a formalist art
world. She chose to work on paper rather than canvas as a rebellion
against art world conventions of size and material, using the atom
bomb and war as subjects for The War Series (1966-70), her first series.
Experiments with collaging figures onto rice paper a few years
later led to the Codex Artaud (1970-71), a work that explored the 2212222
extremes of language and its limitations, drawing on the example of
the French writer Antonin Artaud, whose madness liberated him
from the conventions of language. As a woman in an unsympathetic
art world, Spero identified with Artaud’s own position as an outsider.
Later, she would find support for her investigations into the proble-
matic area of feminine subjectivity and language in the writings of
Héléene Cixous, who proposed an écriture feminine, a writing of the
female body which she opposes to the authoritarian forms of patriar-
chal discourse.In Spero’s Codex Artaud, fragmented images, fragments
of words, tongues that swell into the phallus of the Symbolic Order
which governs language in patriarchy, are all used to reinforce the
marginality of Artaud’s, and by extension woman’, language.
In 1972, Spero began thinking again about political subject-matter.
With the Torture of Womenin Chile (1974), she decidedto use only
images of women in her work. She juxtaposed quotations detailing
repression and torture with fragments of text and the fragmented bod-
ies of women to analyse the conditions of the torture of women

509
 (which always implies sexual control over the bodies of women) and
to explicate the tmelessness of this practice. Later, using the female
body image as protagonist, and parody, quotation, and repetition as
linguistic devices, Spero explored women’s unstable and shifting iden
tities within culture, their physical and spiritual strengths, their oppres-
sion under patriarchy, and their mythic and historical power.
The work of May Stevens examines specific women’s lives in rela-
tion to the patriarchal structuring of class and privilege, and the polar-
ities of abnormal/normal, silent/vocal, acceptance/resistance. Weaving
her biography with that of her mother and Rosa Luxemburg, the
Polish-German revolutionary and political activist, in the series of
works called Ordinary/Extraordinary (1977) she layered her own
memories and feelings with the personal and public images of two
women, one of whom lived her life entirely within the confines of

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223 May Stevens Rosa from Prison 1977-80

family and work, the other of whom played a public historical role
Stevens exposed the false dichotomy between the public and the pri-
vate in art and in history. Employing paintings, collages and the artist’s
book, she revealed the human side of Luxemburg and made public the
silent life of her own working-class mother, whose personal suffering
represents the political oppression of all disadvantaged women for
whom collective action is impossible without knowledge of history.
Given feminism’s focus on exploring women’s lives, it is not sur-
prising that performance and video became major media for women
who, seeking to celebrate the body’s rhythms and pains, build new
narratives of female experience, and explore relationships between the
body as the performing agent and the subject of the activity and the
body as site of the woman as spectacle. “A woman must continually
watch herself,’ noted the critic John Berger, elaborating on Simone de
Beauvoir’s observation in The Second Sex (1949) that femininity is

361
formed in part from the reflected or mirror images against which
women are taught to measure themselves.
Some early performance works in America by Yoko Ono, Yvonne
Rainer, and Carolee Schneeman were connected with “Happenings,”
experimental dance and theater events, and Minimal and Conceptual
art that had begun in the 1960s. By 1970, Joan Jonas, Mary Beth
Edelson, Adrian Piper, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and others had
begun performance works which relied heavily on narrative and auto-
biography. During the 1970s, these themes were also central to the
work of Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman, Suzanne
Lacy, Rachel Rosenthal, Faith Wilding, and Hannah Wilke. More
recently, conceptual and performance artist Lorraine O’Grady has sin-
gled out the year 1971, when Adrian Piper (b. 1948) first performed
Food for the Spirit, in which she photographed her physical and meta-
physical changes during a prolonged period of fasting and reading
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, as “the catalytic moment for the subjec-
tive black nude, introducing her into a history from which she had
been excluded, symbolically castrated and/or stereotypically depicted
as nurturing mammy or insatiable jezebel.”
During the early 1970s, Faith Ringgold (b. 1930) also began to
articulate the realities of black women’s lives in works that quickly
moved beyond the confines of the stretched canvas to become
unframed tankas and masks, performances, and three-dimensional soft
sculptures in which narrative voices tell the stories of their lives (“Wilt
Series” and “Couple Series,’ 1974; “Harlem Series,’ 1975). In Wake
and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro (1976), one of Ringgold’s
major works of the decade, narrative assumed new dimensions as she
traveled the country performing the piece. The installation consisted
of four main figures of life-size soft sculpture (Bena, Buba, Moma
and Nana) that lie on the floor and stand against the wall, five mask
figures hanging on the walls, and a number of subsidiary dance masks.
Through performing the piece, Ringgold articulated a specific story of
family tragedy, loss, and redemption.
Other women, too, chose fabric, thread, and glitter for their associ-
ations with women’s cultural traditions. Harmony Hammond chose
rags (because they are neither precious nor easily damaged) which she
stained, folded, coiled, and hung in abstract shapes; Anne Healy
(b. 1939) floated large, gossamer banners; Rosemary Mayer (b. 1943)
draped transparent fabric in circles. The use and development of non-
traditional materials in art, combined with feminist consciousness
about the relationship between certain materials and processes and
362
224 Magdalena Abakanowicz Backs 1976-82

women’s cultural and historical traditions, led to an intense question-

ing of art traditions. Why was Hesse’s use of rope exhibited in “art”
galleries and museums, while Claire Zeisler’s rope pieces remained in
“cratt’ galleries? Why were Jackie Winsor’s grids “art” and Lia
Cook’s grids “craft?” As some distinctions between “art” and “craft” 2124
seemed to break down, or at least fray around the edges, why did
some women prefer to continue creating within the “fabric structure
process” while others sought to abolish the distinction between
erat. and “art#
The 1971 exhibition, “Deliberate Entanglements,” at the University
of California in the Los Angeles Gallery, did much to further the
international development of art in fiber during the 1970s, and the
work of Zeisler, Leonore Tawney, Sheila Hicks, and Magdalena
Abakanowicz received international attention with many critics argu-
ing for a rejection of the art/craft dichotomy. The idea of using fabric
as an art material both summed up the iconoclasm of the 1970s and
established a context within which to mount a feminist challenge to
the way art history honored certain materials and certain processes
instead of others.

363
 225 Miriam Schapiro
American Memories 1977-80

The movement known as Pattern and Decoration held its first

exhibition, “Ten Approaches to the Decorative,” at a SoHo gallery in
1976. The new tendency, which attracted both men and women, for-
malized the use of fabric and surface elaboration as an assault on the
rhetoric of Geometric Abstraction and the gender-based, and often
pejorative, use of the term “decorative.” In California in the early
1970s, Schapiro and Joyce Kozloff (b. 1942) had turned to decorative
imagery as a source for feminist paintings. Around the same time, stu-
dents and the faculty at the University of California at San Diego had
begun exploring the motifs and philosophy of Asian design.
In 1973, Schapiro, building on her use of needlework and fabric in
The Dollhouse, began combining fabric collage and acrylic painting in
abstract paintings which she called “femmages,’ defining the term as
‘a word invented by us to include all of the above activities (i.e., col-
lage, assemblage, decoupage, photomontage) as they were practiced by
women using traditional women’s techniques to achieve their art—
sewing, piecing, hooking, cutting, appliquéing, cooking and the like—
activities also engaged in by men but assigned in history to women.”
Two of Schapiro’s femmages were exhibited in 1976—Cabinet for All
Seasons, and Anatomy ofa Kimono, a fifty-foot wide painting in which
scale is used to “reinvest what has previously been dismissed as modest
with the scope of history painting.”

364
226 Muriam Schapiro Anatomy of aKimono 1976 (detail)

The first artist-organized Pattern and Decoration exhibition

included Valerie Jaudon’s invented surface patterns based on Islamic
and Celtic traditions and Kozloff’s Hidden Chambers (1975), a work
derived from Islamic tile patterns and based on the opposition of two
decorative systems in which the superimposition of colors and pattern
leads to a shifting sense of space.
The critic Jeff Perrone, analysing the Pattern and Decoration
movement, which extended well beyond the few artists discussed
here, noted in 1976 that, in the process of taking over surface patterns,
decoration always loses the meaning it had in its historical culture.

227. Joyce Kozloff Hidden Chambers 1975

More recently, critics have questioned appropriations that are ahistor1-
cal and transcultural and universalize as a formal device surface deco-
ration from non-Western peoples without regard to its specific origins
and meanings. At the same time, many feminists remained divided
over whether the attempt to valorize the neglected “other” of high
art does not instead perpetuate it as an alternative tradition—a
“woman's” tradition.
In 1977, artist and critic Hammond became one of the first to
address the question of the role of abstraction in feminist art in an
essay published in Heresies. Hammond observed that of the many arti-
cles written on feminist art which tried to define a feminist sensibility,
few went beyond the recognition that feminist art is based on the per-
sonal experiences of women. Recognizing that the identification of
formalist criticism with an exclusionary Modernism had often result-
ed in feminist writings that dealt exclusively with political issues led
her to focus on abstract art in order that it might also have a feminist
and therefore political—rather than elitist—basis. She argued that
abstract art, which has often been used to further the myth ofthe artist
as an alienated and isolated (male) genius and has absorbed an illusion
of apolitical “objectivity,” might instead be seen in relation to a history
of women’s visual culture which has often utilized abstraction.
Cultural context also mediated women’s uses of the body during
the 1970s. While North American women generally operated within
early feminism’s generally autobiographical and celebratory stance
vis-a-vis the female body, women artists in Europe, where there was
no coherent feminist tradition, often worked in more confrontation-
al, sociological and psychoanalytical ways. Avoiding aligning their
practices with a specifically feminist agenda, artists like the French
Gina Pane (1939-90), the Austrian Valie Export (b. 1940), and the
Yugoslav Marina Abramovic (b. 1946) often used the body as an
artistic medium because it circumvented the conventions of both art
and language. |
Hammond was also instrumental in making public the history and
experiences of lesbians. The Lesbian Art Project established by Arlene
Raven at The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles in 1977 used writ-
ings, art groups, salons, and performances as ways of recuperating and
making public lesbian histories. The following year, Hammond orga-
nized “A Lesbian Show” of sixteen artists at 112 Green Street.
Generally considered the first such exhibition in New York, it includ-
ed pieces by herself and Louise Fishman, Betsy Damon, Maxine Fine,
Jessie Falstein, Mary Ann King, Kate Millett, Don Nelson, Flavia
366
Rando, Sandra de Sando, Amy Scarola, Janey Washburn, and Fran
Winant. Most of the work in the exhibition was painting and sculp-
ture; much of it was abstract. “In my search for contemporary lesbian
artists,’ Hammond wrote at the time, “I spend much energy wonder-
ing and fantasizing about women who rejected passive female roles
and committed themselves to art. After all, they did have young
women as assistants and companions. But there is a space between
s—time . J aesuemeceas larce as the desexgebecause history has
ignored lesbian visual artists. The patriarchy has taken them.”
Sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity mediated women’s attempts to
define what it meant to be a woman, to experience life from within a
woman’s body and to understand one’s subjectivity as feminine.
“People are frightened by female organs because they don’t know
what they look like,’ Hannah Wilke (1940-93) observed of her piece
called S.O.S. (1972) with its neat arrangements of rubber erasers
chewed and modeled into labial forms. Wilke’s mimicry of standard
poses of femininity, her use of her own body and nudity, and her
model-like good looks often led to highly conflicting readings of her
art. She was among the first group of women to enact their feminism
on their own bodies 1n ways that linked their practice to the body art
of male artists though, as Lippard pointed out in 1976, “. . . whereas
female unease [with the self | 1s usually dealt with hopefully, in terms
of gentle self-exploration, self-criticism, or transformation, anxiety
about the masculine role tends to take a violent, even self-destructive
form.”
Ongoing attempts to define differences between men’s and
women’s deployments of their bodies often reiterated cultural stereo-
types about masculinity and femininity. Although artists like Chris
Burden, who had himself shot in the arm by a friend in 1971, and Vito
Acconci, who masturbated under a wooded gallery floor in Seedbed
(1971), were often applauded for stretching limits—both of art and of
the body—women artists tended to attract very different critical
responses.
In 1971, French artist Gina Pane climbed up and down a ladder
embedded with sharp protrusions again and again until her bare feet
and hands were cut and bleeding like stigmata in a performance
entitled Ascent. For the most part, American feminist critics consid-
ered her an anomaly, or dismissed her as a masochist, despite the
metaphorical linking of her ordeal with women’s struggles “to climb
the ladder ofsuccess.” In other pieces, Pane chewed raw chopped meat
until she vomited, and used razor blades to cut her flesh in ritual

307
actions that gained her a following 1n Europe, but were largely ignored
in Britain and the United States. While Gina Pane shocked audiences
with her visceral edgy body art, and Valie Export confronted the
Viennese public with her “action pants” (which bared her pubic area
and genitals with a boldness that was an exception), the rest of Europe
saw much less overtly feminist art and suspicion toward representa-
tional modes continued to characterize European feminist art and
critical discourse. The first European survey of feminist art was not
held until 1977 when the Kunstlerinnen International was mounted
in Berlin.
European artists and critics were generally more inclined to
identify essentialist views with political fascism, while in the United
States, artist actions were often identified with earlier, particularly
Abstract Expressionist traditions of the artist as heroic (male) individ-
ual. For critics like Max Kozloff, the ability of artists like Burden and
Acconci to sustain extreme states of physical punishment voluntarily
was testimony to the the male body’s capacity for strength and
endurance. In contrast, he positioned women’s body art as an inquiry
into surface and appearance, and suggested that Wilke’s and Benglis’s
performances were styled “to conform to the image of the glamorous
sex object—with the usual glorified epidermis.” Lippard, one of the
first feminist critics to review the work of women artists who were
working with their own images and their ability to change them at
will, suggested in her essay “Transformation Art” that experiments
with role playing such as Adrian Piper’s Catalyst Pieces (1970), in
which the artist wandered in public in clothes smeared with rancid
butter or soaked in foul smelling liquid, represented interventions into
social conventions as part of an ongoing investigation into the limita-
tions of patriarchal models of femininity. Piper described these street
performances as “at times .. . violating my body; I was making it pub-
lic. | was exposing it;]was turning into an object.”
Foregrounding bodily experience often left women artists open
to charges of narcissism, though such charges were seldom, if ever,
lodged against their male contemporaries. And male critics often
praised Benglis, Wilke, and Schneeman for qualities that are aligned
with femininity. In a 1972 review of an exhibition of Wilke’s vaginal-
shaped sculpture, her work was described as having an “overriding
sense of delicacy and taste that restrains them in a state of overt, deco-
rative pubescence.” Citing Benglis’s statement that her latex pour
sculptures were the product of her masturbation in the studio, critic
Cindy Nemser posited a clearly and biologically defined masculinity

228 (opposite, above) Las Mujeres Muralistas, mural, 1974

229 (opposite, below) Judy Chicago The Dinner Party 1974-79

230 Sylvia Sleigh The Turkish Bath 1973

and femininity. She advocated a celebration of the vaginal and recog-

nizably temale as a way to combat the privilege assigned to the phal-
lus. Such readings contributed greatly to growing attempts to theorize
gender, subjectivity, and sexuality as less rigidly fixed, more unstable
and open to negotiation.
Investigations into conventions of representing both male and
female bodies were also conducted by women painters. Sylvia Sleigh’s
male nudes combine portrait genre with the nude as a representational
type. In Philip Golub Reclining (1971), The Turkish Bath (1973), and other
paintings of the 1970s, Sleigh reverses a history in which men contem-
plate the naked bodies of women. Other painters shifted the vantage
point or challenged the idealizing conventions of Western art.
Alice Neel (1900-84) had been working figuratively since the
1930s, but it was not until 1974 that she had her first major museum
retrospective. Refusing superficial pleasantries, her portraits are vigor-
ous and direct. A series of paintings of pregnant women refused to
generalize the expectant female within the conventions of fertility

370
231 Alice Neel Pregnant Maria 1964

figures and earth mothers; instead, as Nochlin suggests, they dwell on

the unnaturalness of pregnancy for modern urban women. In Joan
Semmel’s (b. 1932) larger-than-life paintings of the sex act, cropping
the figures negates the distance and wholeness that fixes the image as
a site of voyeuristic viewing pleasure. Surveying her own body, she
presents the female image so that we see what she sees.
Other women, arguing that religious and symbol systems focused
around male images of divinity affirm the inferiority of female power,
chose to work with the archetype of the Great Goddess. They isolated
this image as a symbol of the life and death powers and the waxing
and waning cycles of women, the earth, and the moon. Drawing on
traditions of goddess worship in the ancient Mediterranean, pre-
Christian Europe, Native America, Mesoamerica, Asia, and Africa,
Edelson, Damon, Monica Sjoo, Beverly Skinner, and Marika Tell used
the imagery of the Goddess and goddess-worshipping religions as an
affirmation of female power, the female body, the female will, and
women’s connections and heritage.

S72
 Monica Sjoo (b. 1942) published “Woman Power” in the first issue
of Enough, a women’s liberation journal produced in Bristol, England.
A self-taught artist, Sjoo spent many years studying ancient women’s
lunar mysteries and goddess-worshipping religions and was instru-
mental in organizing the first “Women’s Liberation Art Group” exhi-
bition in 1971. Two years later, Sjoo’s God Giving Birth (1969), a birth
image inspired by a goddess-worshipping religion and exhibited in
the “Womanpower” exhibition, aroused intense controversy and the
artist was threatened with legal action on charges of blasphemy and
obscenity.
Working from a different cultural perspective, that of a displaced
Cuban living in the United States, Ana Mendieta (1948-85) first used
blood in a 1973 performance protesting against rape. Mendieta’s artis-
tic roots lay in feminism and in the anti-commodification tendencies
of earth, performance, and process work in the 1970s. Subsequently,
she began imposing the traces of her five-foot body on the earth in
the environs of Iowa City, lowa, Oaxaca, Mexico, and other sites, out-
lining it with ignited gunpowder, stones, flowers, and fireworks or
having herself bound in strips of cloth and buried in mud and rocks.
Her work made powerful identifications between the female body

233 Ana Mendieta

Untitled (Silueta Series) c. 1977
 234 Judy Baca The Great Wall ofLos Angeles begun 1976 (detail)

and the land in ways that annihilated the conventions of surface on

which the traditions of Western art rest. Only traces of the mediated
interaction between body and earth remained.
Work in the landscape often intersected with a desire by women
artists to work in public places in order to affect the lives of people
outside the closed confines ofthe art gallery and museum worlds. The
imagery for many public mural projects, as well as for other public art
and performance, evolved in dialogue with local people to produce
a socially concerned and visually strong art. In San Francisco, the
228 Mujeres Muralistas, the first women’s mural collective, produced stun-
ning public murals fusing the rich tradition of the Mexican muralists
with contemporary history. In Los Angeles in 1976, after completing
murals at a state women’s prison and at a religious convalescent home,
Judy Baca (b. 1949) began a monumental history painting. Stull an
ongoing project, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, the longest mural in the
world, runs half a mile along a flood control channel in the San
Fernando Valley. Made possible through the collaboration of 40 ethnic

374
scholars, 450 multicultural neighborhood youths, 40 assisting artists,
and over 100 support staff, the mural contains a history from the pre-
historic pueblo to the present, organized in images that include the
1781 founding of Los Angeles, the coming of the railroad, scenes of
the deportation of Mexican-Americans in the 1930s and Japanese-
Americans the following decade, and the 1984 Olympic Games in Los
Angeles.
Los Angeles was also the site of Suzanne Lacy’s (b. 1945) first city-
wide organizing feat, Three Weeks in May (1977), a three-week exami-
nation of and protest about rape. That year Lacy began collaborating
with Leslie Labowitz (b. 1946), an artist and theorist who had studied
with Joseph Beuys. Their first collaboration, In Mourning and in Rage
(1977), was performed outside the Los Angeles City Hall. It brought
women together to address the media’s sensationalized coverage of a
series of murders and, more generally, the spread of violence against
women in American cities. Lacy and Labowitz founded “Ariadne: A
Social Network,’ an organization intended to bring together women

Ee.
in the arts, media, and government who were committed to feminist
issues.
Feminist-inspired public works like these would play a significant
role in decisions by many women to work in public, collaborative,
and/or socially activist ways during the next decade. Women’s collec-
tive histories also inspired Judy C hicago’ s The Dinner Party (1974-79).
A monumental testament to women’s historical and cultural contribu-
tions, it incorporated sculpture, ceramics, china painting, and needle-
work. Begun in 1974 with the help of the industrial designer Ken
Gilliam, by 1979 it had been worked on by more than one hundred
women. The piece attracted some of the largest crowds ever to attend
a museum exhibition—it was viewed by some 100,000 people—when
it opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in April 1979.
It consisted of an equilateral triangle of 48 feet a side with 39 place
settings commemorating women in history and legend with an addi-
tional 999 names inscribed on the marble floor beneath. Each place
included a ceramic plate, with a central raised motif designed by
Chicago to symbolize the woman honored, a brilliantly colored run-
ner executed in needlework techniques appropriate to the subject’s
period, and a chalice. The workshop nature of the piece mobilized the
energies of many women and its influence was expanded through an
ongoing quilt project and events like Lacy’s The International Dinner
Party, organized to accompany the work 1n San Francisco.
Chicago’s desire to promote social change by creating respect for
women’s history and productions, to articulate a new language with
which to express women’s experience, and to address such a work to
the widest possible audience was controversial. While some critics
applauded the work’s social and political intent, others attacked
Chicago’s central-core images as literal vaginal depictions rather than
metaphoric celebrations of female power. Still others viewed the work
as playing out the grand scale of conservative Salon painting and
reproducing the structures of the Renaissance workshop with its
‘“master’’ artist and its anonymous apprentices (even though Chicago
scrupulously listed the names of all her assistants at the entrance to the
gallery). African-American novelist Alice Walker criticized The Dinner
Party in Ms. Magazine for ignoring women of color in history (specifi-
cally black women painters), and for representing black female subjec-
tivity in the Sojourner Truth plate, the only plate that contains a face
of the woman represented.
Over the next decade, The Dinner Party’s assumption of a fixed and
timeless female lineage and sensibility, its investment in biologically

376
based theories of sexual difference, brought it into increasing conflict
with theories that posited femininity as socially produced rather than
innate. By the time Laura Mulvey’s pivotal article, “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema” appeared in Screen 16, published in London in
1975, British feminists—though not their American counterparts—
were beginning to employ poststructuralist psychoanalytic theory to
challenge such theories of sexual difference. Mulvey’s review of artist
Allen Jones’s exhibition in London, “Fears, Fantasies and the Male
Unconscious, or You Don’t Know What’s Happening, Do You Mr.
Jones,” had appeared in 1973. It proved enormously influential in redi-
recting attention to psychoanalytic theory, shifting the focus from the
female nude as an image ofmale desire or lust to the representations of
the nude as an expression of male castration anxiety, and therefore as
more about male concerns, fears, and desires than about women.
From the late 1970s onward, broad shifts in feminist theory and
practice occurred. Increasingly they pointed away from an emphasis
on activism, group collaboration, and notions of feminist art as an
articulation of female experience toward the examination of feminin-
ity as constructed through representations, many of them derived
from mass media and popular culture sources. A strong critique of the
so-called “male gaze” (emphasizing male sexual pleasure in certain
kinds of looking, such as voyeurism) also developed. Though 1970s
feminists understood that biology and culture were both present in
our understanding of femininity, their often celebratory stance toward
the female body and female experience would increasingly be criti-
cized as essentialist (this term is used to identify the belief in a com-
mon female identity buried under layers of patriarchal conditioning).
As French psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory came to the
attention of feminist scholars and artists in England through journals
like m/f, Screen, and the Feminist Review, artists such as Marie Yates,
Susan Hiller, Mary Kelly, and Sarah MacCarthy began to combine
feminist analysis, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism, as well as
Marxist theory, in their work. At the same time, British feminist schol-
ars like Griselda Pollock argued strenuously for a repudiation of visual
pleasure in the body (on the grounds that the female body when
directly imaged is too easily co-opted for male viewing pleasure).
Instead she suggests replacing realism with representational strategies
that expose the ways that Western representation supports the domi-
nant position ofpatriarchal white men and how they critique the role
of mass media culture in producing and circulating the images that
reinforce our notions of femininity and female sexuality.

SUF
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

New Directions: A Partial Overview

By the late 1970s, a reaction against pluralism, and women and

minorities, was evident within dominant institutions and discourse of
the art world in the United States, Britain, and many parts of Europe.
The publication of Susan Faludi’s bestseller, Backlash: The Undeclared
War Against American Women, 1n 1991 revealed that resistance to
women’s rights had acquired social and political acceptability during
the conservative years of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Communism and military
conflict in the Middle East, the Falklands, and then Bosnia, signaled
new challenges to military and political hegemony, and to cultural
relations of dominance and subordination. The rise of the Moral
Majority in the United States, the Education Reform Bill in Britain,
the influence of Queer Theory and Cultural Studies, the increasing
bitterness of the abortion-rights debates and the worldwide spread of
the AIDS epidemic all contributed to changes in the social climate
that profoundly affected women.
The discussion that follows focuses on developments in the United
States and Britain not because there were more, or more important,
artists active in these locations, but because many of the issues that
shaped the artistic practices common to the 1980s and 1990s—includ-
ing sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and race—were widely theorized and
circulated in English language journals and exhibition catalogues. It is
also in these contexts that feminism left its strongest legacy on art by
women.
Although some American women artists achieved superstar status
in the early 1980s—among them Jennifer Bartlett, Cindy Sherman,
and Susan Rothenberg—they tended to do so in work in which
gender was not isolated as an issue. “When I’m in the studio,
I’m just a painter,” Rothenberg remarked, before stating in 1984 that
she would no longer participate in exhibitions in which she was
the token woman. At the same time, exhibitions celebrating the
“return” to painting, and focusing on a new generation of male
Neo-expressionists—for example, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, and

378
Francesco Clemente—were remarkable for their exclusion of vir-
tually all women: “Zeitgeist” (Berlin, 1982, 40 artists, 1 woman); “The
Expressionist Image: American Art From Pollock to Now” (New
York, 24 artists, 2 women); and “The New Spirit in Painting”
(London, 1981, no women). In 1984 the Museum of Modern Art in
New York mounted an ambitious exhibition on the occasion of its
reopening after a period of renovation. An “International Survey of
Recent Painting and Sculpture” contained only 14 women among 165
artists.
Shifts jn emphasis also became clear within feminism as the collab-
orative and activist politics of the 1970s gave way to the institutional-
izing of gender studies within American academic structures during
the 1980s and the influence of European psychoanalytically based
theories of sexual difference. In 1981, British feminists Griselda
Pollock and Roszika Parker argued that the iconography of Judy
Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974-79), specifically its vaginal 1imagery, was 229
retrograde because it set itself up for exploitation: “It 1s easily retrieved
and co-opted by a male culture because [it does] not rupture radically
meanings and connotations of woman in art as body, as sexual, as
nature, as object for male possession.” Six years later, the American art
historians Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews argued for a
“first generation” of feminist writing that was engaged with questions
of recuperation and biological difference, and a “second generation”
aligned with the deconstructive impulse of European poststructural-
ism and psychoanalytic theory. Other scholars, however, pointed to a
multiplicity of positions within feminist thought. In 1988, British art
historian Lisa Tickner chose the term “feminisms” in an article map-
ping this terrain; and in 1995, American cultural historian Janet Woolf
could emphatically state that “there is no ‘correct’ feminist aesthetic.”
In 1993, when Christos Joachimedes and Norman Rosenthal orga-
nized “American Art in the 20th Century,’ a survey of American art
from a European perspective that traveled from London’s Royal
Academy to Martin Gropius-Bau in Berlin (at the now-invisible wall
between the former East and West Berlins), it once again appeared
that some things never change. Among the exhibition’s 66 artists and
250 works were a mere five women: Georgia O’ Keeffe, Agnes Martin,
Eva Hesse, Jenny Holzer, and Cindy Sherman.
During the 1980s, however, some critics more sympathetic to femi-
nism were pointing to the wide range of practices in which women
were currently engaged—from photography, abstract painting, col-
lage, and drawing, to constructed sculpture, installations and public art,

be,
and more or less traditional methods of art-making—and to the influ-
ence of certain kinds of feminist practice in shaping debates
on Postmodernism. While some women artists have been politically
engaged, others have embraced philosophical or theoretical models,
and still others are working intuitively. Feminist critics remain sensi-
tive to the dangers of confusing tokenism with equal representation,
or the momentary embrace of selective feminist strategies with the
ongoing subordination of art by and about women to what is, in the
words of Griselda Pollock, “falsely claimed to be the gender free Art
of men.” It is also important to bear in mind the fact that, although
recent critical debates within the mainstream have often focused on
deconstructive art practices, many women artists continue their com-
mitment to political activism and to evolving images, materials, and
processes that address concerns central to women’s experiences and to
their personal, sexual and cultural identities.
It is not possible to address all the issues currently being raised by
the work of women artists in a brief survey, but in this chapter I want
to point to a few of the ways that work by women artists is both
engaging with, and shaping debates around, contemporary art world
issues. These include, but are certainly not limited to work that derives
from media images and employs critical strategies of deconstruction,
appropriation, and language; critiques of the social production of fem-
ininity and sexuality using deconstruction and a Brechtian strategy of
distanciation (a politically based rejection of realism); explorations
based in conceptual and socio-political paradigms; an engagement
with public and/or activist concerns; work that directly addresses
issues of the transgressive body, intimacy, abjection, sexual identity, and
censorship; and examinations of narrativity and identity politics, per-
sonal and cultural.
The term Postmodernism has been used to characterize the break-
ing down of the unified (though hardly monolithic) traditions of
Modernism. From the beginning, feminism in the arts, committed to
exposing the assumptions underlying many of the beliefs that defined
vanguard art, engaged in a dialectic with Modernism. The complex
relationship between feminist practices, which are both oppositional
and also shaped by the terms of Modernism, and dominant cultural
forms has been the subject of much recent critical writing. The
fact that Postmodernism draws heavily on existing representations,
rather than inventing new styles, and that it often derives its imagery
from mass media or popular culture, has focused attention on the ways
that sexual and cultural difference are produced and reinforced in
380
236 (left) Barbara Kruger
Untitled (Your Gaze
Hits the Side of My Face) 1981

237 (below) Jenny Holzer

Selection of Truisms 1982
 these images. The emergence of a set of critical practices within
Postmodernism has led to critiques of the ways that media images
position women, and how the social apparatus reinforces by images
cultural myths of power and possession. During the late 1970s and the
1980s, a growing number of artists, male and female, worked to decen-
ter language within the patriarchal order, exposing the ways that
images are culturally coded, and renegotiating the position of women
and minorities as “other” in patriarchal culture. Some of these strate-
gies were feminist, others were part of more generalized Post-
modernist discourses.
By the 1980s, it was a commonplace of feminist theory to view
visual representation as a field divided along gender lines, with an
active male artist or spectator opposed to a passive female object.
Film critics and theorists like Laura Mulvey and Mary Ann Doane
demonstrated how the camera assumes the controling position of
the male spectator in order to produce voyeuristic pleasure for
the male-positioned viewer presented with the fetishization of
woman as spectacle. Women, on the other hand, can only either be
narcissistically fascinated with the spectacle, or assume a complicated
and conflicted cross-identification with the camera.
Barbara Kruger’s (b. 1945) blown-up, severely cropped photographs
236 of women, and their short accompanying texts subvert the meanings
of both image and text in order to destabilize the positioning
of woman as object. She emphasizes the ways in which language
manipulates and undermines the assumption of masculine control
over language and viewing, by refusing to complete the cycle of
meaning, and by shifting pronouns in order to expose the positioning
of woman as “other.”
Like many artists working to extend conceptualism into Post-
modernism, Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) also stresses art as information.
237 Her anonymous posters of “Truisms” and “Inflammatory Essays,’
originally printed in black italic type on white paper, later appeared as
billboards, as epitaphs carved onto stone benches, computerized
moving signs, and installations. Their messages seem to offer informa-
tion, but the “Truisms” are mostly opinions and the “Essays”
are demands. The topics range from the scientific to the personal
and include “thoughts on aging, pain, death, anger, fear, violence,
gender, religion, and politics.”’ Although they sound completely
familiar to our ears, Holzer invents and polishes them until they
assume the authoritative “voice” of mass culture: “Morals are for
little people/ Mostly you should mind your own business/ A little
382
238 Cindy Sherman Untitled 1979

knowledge goes a long way/ Action causes more trouble than

thought,’ to mention a few.
Cindy Sherman’s (b. 1954) photographs reveal the instability of
gender, and challenge the idea that there might be an innate, unmedi-
ated female sexuality. She does this by exposing the fiction of a “real”
woman behind the images that Western culture constructs for our
consumption in film and advertising media. In 1978, she began plac-
ing her own body in the conventions of advertising and film images
of women. Many of them were drawn from the 1950s and 1960s; their
use enabled her to act out the psychoanalytic notion of femininity as
a masquerade—that is, as a representation of the masculine desire to
fix the woman in a stable and stabilizing identity. Sherman’s work
denies this stability. Although her photographs were always self-
portraits, they never revealed anything about Cindy Sherman the
person. In her recent work—based on positioning herself within an
art historical tradition that has for centuries objectified and fetishized
the female body, or on delving into fairy-tale grotesqueries that
deform the body through the use ofprostheses, bodily surrogates, and

383
 239 Sherrie Levine
After Walker Evans (1936)

theatrical illusion—her image functions as an object both of contem-

plation and of repulsion.
Sherrie Levine (b. 1947), on the other hand, has rephotographed
and repainted canonical works of Modernist art, from the photographs
of Walker Evans and Edward Weston to the paintings of Kasimir
Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. Rephotographed works, like Walker
Evans’s Alli May Burroughs (1936), which she has exhibited as her own,
raise questions about originality and works of art as property in a cul-
ture which experiences much art only through its reproduction.
Levine’s work not only contests notions of originality and author-
ship, but it situates those ideas within the premises of patriarchy. She
does not pretend to be the maker of the original image; nor does she
merely emphasize that “originality” in mechanical reproductions is
ambiguous. Hers is an act of refusal: refusal of authorship, rejection of
notions of self-expression, originality, or subjectivity.
Challenges to Modernist notions of male authorship, originality,
and the autonomy of the art object have become central features of

384
postmodern critical theory. The work of the Americans Kruger,
Sherman, Levine, Holzer, and Mary Kelly—all of whom achieved
public prominence during the 1980s—is often cited as indicative of
a merging of Postmodernist and feminist thought. While it is true
that feminism (and gay and lesbian critical theory) share
with Postmodernism a critique of an earlier model of a unified,
autonomous “master” subject and a belief in a “decentered” subject
(that is, a notion of agency subjected to, and created through,
language), many feminists are critical of Postmodernism’s assumption
of a position of cultural authority, its tendency to nihilism, and its
emphasis on theory at the expense ofsocial activism.
Feminists have also pointed to the influence of feminist theory on
the writings of male critics like the Americans Hal Foster, Craig
Owens, and Douglas Crimp during the 1980s. Both Owens and
Crimp eventually linked their own public acknowledgment of their
gay identity to the example of feminists, and reassessed the relationship
of their own criticism and Postmodernism. Together with gay and les-
bian critical theory (which emerged at about the same time and was
also shaped by early feminist investigations), feminist theory has con-
tinued to challenge conventional assumptions about sexuality and
gender, to raise issues of identity, and to engage 1n debates about ideol-
ogy, the mass media, and the workings of authority.
Recognizing the dangers of a split between theory and activist
politics during the 1980s, feminists and gay and lesbian activists have
employed similar strategies of challenge and disruption. While groups
like the Guerrilla Girls (active since 1987) have targeted racism and
sexism in the art world with statistics, poster displays, and lecture/per- 271
formances, the short-lived Women Artists Coalition (WAC), founded
in New York in the early 1990s, targeted a wide range of social issues
from abortion to AIDS. Similar groups have formed to draw attention
to more specific issues. The AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT
UP), also founded in New York in 1987, has employed feminist strate-
gies in a series of massive public demonstrations aimed at affecting
public and social policies around the issue of AIDS. Another example
of the overlapping of art, feminism, sexual identity politics, and social
activism can be seen in the Vancouver-based collective, Kiss and Tell.
In an installation entitled Drawing the Line (1990), which toured
Canada, the United States, and Australia, they presented 100 pho-
tographs of lesbian sexuality, “arranged from less to more controver-
sial.” Visitors to the exhibition were invited to record their responses
to the display, and the comments of women (written on the walls

385
around the photographs) gradually added new layers of meaning to
the installation.
The siting of woman as “other” has taken place in societies that
have rationalized both sexual and cultural oppression. During the
1970s, while white feminists pointed to women’s shared experiences
under patriarchy, feminists of color and lesbian feminists often took
issue with the tendency to collapse female identity into a unified—
and implicitly heterosexual and white (not to mention middle class)—
category. Growing awareness that the Women’s Movement reflected
the dominant voice of white, middle-class women led to later investi-
gations into more specific forms of oppression, and the processes of
differentiation which establish race and gender positions. Michele
Barrett’s analysis of difference as experiential points to class and racism
as two major axes of difference among women. Some women of
color, like Faith Ringgold, Adrian Piper, and Betye Saar, had played
formative roles in the feminist art movement from the beginning.
Now feminism (or “post-feminism”) in the 1980s conceptualized
both race and sexual orientation as major components of identity
politics under the influence of the rise of Queer Theory (a body of
writings that often presented sexual orientation as a way of talking
about gender) and poststructuralism, with its emphasis on difference
rather than untversalizing tendencies as the basis of politics.
The controversial exhibition “Primitivism and Modern Art,’ orga-
nized by Rubin and Varnedoe at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York in 1984, stimulated intense debate concerning Modernism’s taste
for appropriating otherness by annexing tribal objects to Western
desires for artistic innovation. Since then, postmodernist theory has
examined constructions of “otherness” in several overlapping forms,
including the feminine Other of sexual difference, and the Other of
discourses of the Third World and/or cultural diaspora.
A series of exhibitions during the 1980s considered women’s pro-
ductions within specific multicultural discourses around which there
remains no totalizing or consensual concept. The British artist Lubaina
Himid (b. 1954), in her essay, “We Will Be,” mapped the range ofissues
confronting black women artists in Britain: “We are making ourselves
more visible by making positive images of black women, we are
reclaiming history, linking national economics with colonialism, and
racism with slavery, starvation, and lynchings. There are some women
whose work revolves around home, childhood and family, all of which
are inextricably linked with racism in education, the challenging of
racial stereotypes, and breaking through tokenism and sexism. These,
386
240 Sonia Boyce Missionary Position No. 2,from Lay Back, Keep Quiet and Think
About What Made Britain So Great 1985

and the broader themes of black heroes and heroines of the struggle for
equality and freedom, international politics and the theft of our culture
over hundreds of years show a personal/general, general/political,
political/personal spiral in our work.”
In London, the exhibition “Four Indian Women Artists” at the
Indian Artists United Kingdom Gallery in 1981 was followed by
“Between Two Cultures” (Barbican Centre, 1982), “Nova Mulher—
Contemporary Women Artists Living in Brazil and Europe”
‘Daroican Centre, 1983)and “Five Black Women #GAtrica Centre,
1983), the first of several exhibitions on the work of black and Afro-
Caribbean women.
Himid’s argument that cultural appropriations must be placed in a
dialogue between cultures in order to displace the relationships of
dominance/subservience that have used the artifacts of non-Western
cultures to “prove” the superiority of white culture reemerges in
Sonia Boyce’s multipanel Lay Back, Keep Quiet and Think About What
Made Britain So Great. Here the image of woman is displaced to the

387
margin as the artist inserts an iconography of colonialism into the foli-
ate forms of a decorative surface that recalls the cheerful domesticity
of wallpaper. Himid’s painting, Freedom and Change (1984), and her
reworking ofPicasso’s Three Musicians as a mural for a black art center
in London challenge the Modernist artist’s appropriations of African
tribal masks and ceremonial figures. She stated that her paintings are
“about several things: they’re about Africans today not using tradition-
al music.... A lot of my work has been about how European masters
took African artefacts. ... I’m trying to say a lot about the kind of
swapping of culture; how both sides, how everybody is taking from
everyone else, to make a better art.”
Himid and Boyce (b. 1962) are two of the British artists from Afro-
Caribbean backgrounds who are committed to exposing the reality
behind the distortions that pretend to say what it is like to be black
and female in white, male-dominated society. “‘Black art, if this term
must be used,’ argues Rasheed Araeen in the introduction to the cata-
logue of “The Essential Black Art” exhibition in London in 1988, “is
in fact a specific historical development within contemporary art
practices and has emerged directly from the joint struggle of Asian,
African, and Caribbean people against racism, and the art work itself
... specifically deals with and expresses a human condition, the condi-
tion of Afro-Asian people resulting from ...a racist society and/or, in
global terms, from western cultural imperialism.”
Issues of race and gender also underlie the three triptychs that make
up Mitra Tabrizian and Andy Golding’s installation, The Blues (1986—
87). A collaboration between a London-based Iranian woman and a
British man, The Blues draws on conventions offilm-noir, black musical
culture, hard-boiled detective novels, and Degas’s painting The Interior
(also known as The Rape) of 1867. Together the images and text elicit
the viewers’ fantasies about the “role” of black men and women in
scenarios of sexuality, aggression, and victimization. Using narrative
strategies, the work raises questions about whose stories we are wit-
nessing, and how confrontations between self and other are invested
with meaning.
A series of exhibitions in the United States also addressed the polit-
ical aspects of multiculturalism by bringing together works that
addressed the ways that identity—racial, ethnic, or sexual—is
imposed, contested, or fantasized. In 1985, Harmony Hammond
(b. 1944) and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith organized “Women of
Sweetgrass, Cedar and Sage” for the Gallery of the American Indian
Community House, New York. The exhibition included paintings,
388
 241 Shelley Niro Portrait of the Artist Sitting with a Killer Surrounded
by French Curves 1991

drawings, and handicrafts by Native American women. Some had pre-

viously shown their work in art world contexts; others worked outside
the commercial system. In her introduction, Quick-to-See Smith
noted that: “Bringing forth the old forms and materials, building on
them, and revitalizing them 1s a process which Indian women have
done for eons. Like New York artists incorporating and reacting to
western art history, we respond to our visual history while crossing
into new territories. But in this case, we are bridging two cultures and
two histories of art forms. Transcending tradition, Indian women have
gone on to set new standards for Indian art and have shown that the
work of Indian women belongs in the mainstream of world art histo-
ry.’ Herself a painter, Quick-to-See Smith has linked the discourses
of historical Indian art and the contemporary art world in her work. ie) i)

Her paintings and pastels frequently combine images of Indian pic-

tographs with those derived from Western artists like Jackson Pollock,
whose painting was directly influenced by the art of the Southwest
American Indians.
While Quick-to-See Smith and other Native American artists have
addressed the uneasy meeting of multiple, and sometimes opposed,
cultures and geographies, Shelley Niro (b. 1954), a Mohawk painter,
sculptor, photographer, filmmaker, and self-proclaimed “intellectual
terrorist,’ who was raised on the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford,
Ontario, in Canada, has used her photographic practice to undermine

389
cultural stereotypes. A hand-tinted photograph of 1987 entitled The
Rebel shows Niro’s mother lounging atop the family car, an AMC
Rebel. The photograph undermines the stereotypes of both the
Indian princess and the earth mother, while at the same time also
challenging the cultural trope of sexy women selling sexy cars.
As the committed pluralism of exhibitions such as “The Decade
Show” (jointly organized by three New York cultural institutions in
1990), gave way to the foregrounding ofthe political aspects of multi-
culturalism in exhibitions like “Mistaken Identities” (which opened at

390
242 (opposite) Jaune Quick-to-See
Smith Site: Canyon de Chelly 1980s

243 (right) Catherine Opie

Bo 1994
244 (below) Millie Wilson Merkins, from
The Museum of Lesbian Dreams 1990-92
 245 (left) Allison Saar
Love Potion No. 9 1988

247 (opposite)
Adrian Piper Vanilla
Nightmares No. 2 1986

the University Art Museum at the University of California, Santa

Barbara, in 1992), a growing emphasis on the provisional, multi-
faceted nature of identity construction can be seen. The work of
Korean-American artists Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Yong Soon
Min, the collaborations of Latino artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena with
the Americans Emily Hicks and Coco Fusco, and the installations and
murals of Chicanas Yolanda Lopez and Juana Alicia, and African-
Americans Lorraine O’Grady and Allison Saar all address the shifting,
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unstable ground on which notions of cultural identity rest. To com-

memorate the sooth anniversary of the Conquest of the Americas in
1992, Fusco and Gomez-Pena undertook a series of site-specific per-
formances in which they lived in a gilded cage for three days in
Columbus Plaza in Madrid, Covent Garden in London, the Smith-
sonian Institution in Washington, and several other American muse-
ums. In each case, presenting themselves as aboriginal inhabitants of an
island in the Gulf of Mexico that had been overlooked by Columbus,
they challenged the expectations and assumptions of their visitors.
A number of women in Britain and the United States have adopted
deconstructive strategies as a means of exposing the assumptions
underlying cultural constructions of gender, race, and sexuality. In the
United States, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Pat
Ward Williams, and Lorraine O’Grady all use racially conscious

246 (opposite) Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena Tivo Undiscovered

Amerindians Visit Madrid, performed at the Walker Art Center, 1992
COO Mlo , VUQO SW

248 (left) Rosemarie Trockel

Cogito, Ergo Sum 1988

249 (below) Rosemarie Trockel

Untitled 1983

250 (opposite) Paula Rego

The Family 1988
photo/text and performance works to call into question media-based
and visual representations of race and identity.
Simpson’s (b. 1960) work has been preoccupied with the invisibility
of black women and their erasure from history and from white cons-
ciousness. In Guarded Conditions (1989), a brown-skinned woman
dressed in a shapeless shift 1s shot from behind in a series of frames,
so that every aspect of her subjectivity—bodily and facial—is both
multiplied and obscured. Snippets of text accompanying these generic
images further complicate the enigmatic presence of her black model.

BOS
Williams’s (b. 1948) What You Lookn at? (1987), originally installed in
the windows of the gallery at Moore College of Art and Design in
Philadelphia, uses photographs and text to confront spectators with
life-sized images of five black men. Their presence, in conjunction
with the challenging line of text used as the work’s title, engages
a wide variety of cultural stereotypes and fantasies. Provoking
unacknowledged or unrecognized racism, while at the same time
exposing cultural assumptions about whiteness or blackness, is also the
purpose of Adrian Piper’s (b. 1948) video/installation, Cornered (1989).
Two birth certificates of Piper’s father mounted on the wall behind
the monitor give his race as white or black. Piper’s monologue
announces her as black, and then interrogates a range of possible
viewer responses to this assertion and explores the impact of a history
of interracial sexual relations on American beliefs about racial identity.
Shifting the focus from racial to sexual identity, the work of
Catherine Opie, Millie Wilson, and Nan Goldin uses photographs and
objects to dismantle the putative fixities of sexual identity. Wilson’s
(b. 1948) project, The Museum of Lesbian Dreams (1990-92), combines
and draws on pseudo-scientific and medical discourses on lesbian
dreams and their imagery with various constructions of lesbian desire.
Her work articulates the historical inaccuracy, often absurdity, of social
constructions of lesbianism within dominant heterosexual discourses.
Such discursive formations often work to “fix” identity within, and
outside, normative paradigms. Nan Goldin’s (b. 1953) large, ciba-
chrome photographs of drag queens and transsexuals defiantly cele-
brate the instability of contemporary gender roles. Catherine Opie
(b. 1961) has also benefitted from the spaces opened up by the trans-
gressive photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, and
others, and the social space provided by gay liberationists, feminists,
and sex radicals engaged in anti-censorship critiques of pleasure and
sexuality. Considering herself primarily a social documentary photog-
rapher, she has done work ranging from studies of master-plan com-
munities in Southern California to S/M erotica for lesbian-owned sex
magazines. Her recent portraits document both the California gay
leather scene and the lesbian community in cross-dressed images that
destabilize gender boundaries.
The work ofsignificant numbers of women during the 1980s strenu-
ously resists unmediated expressions of “meanings,’ emphasizing
instead ironic commentaries on categories of human knowledge from
morphology and metaphysics to sociology and archaeology. The
work of Rosemarie Trockel, Eva Maria Schon, Elvira Bach, Rachel

396
Whiteread, to name a few, was influenced by conceptual and socio-
political art, and the emergence of a new, “heroic” Expressionism in
European and American painting and sculpture during the 1970s.
Trockel (b. 1952) 1s one ofseveral artists—including Joyce Scott and
Elaine Reichek—who rework domestic, ethnographic, and anthropo-
logical material. Her machine-knitted paintings incorporate political 248
symbols or company logos into their fabric. Her intentionally styleless 249
and naive drawings, like the paintings of Elvira Bach, often use female
images to parody the sexual stereotypes of German painting. In
England, Paula Rego (b. 1935) returned to the figurative tradition of
history painting but used heroic scale, harsh lighting, and theatrical
compositions to present a pantheon of female figures traditionally
suppressed in accounts of male exploits. The Soldier’s Daughter (1987),
The Cadet and His Sister (1988), and other works propose a new
iconography for the female heroine. Many contemporary women

251 Marina Abramovic

The Inner Sky for Departure
1991
252. Rebecca Horn The Turtle Sighing Tree 1994 (detail)

sculptors, including Magdalena Jetalova, a Czechoslovakian artist now

living in West Germany, Heidi Fasnacht in New York, Rachel
Lachowicz in Los Angeles, and Alison Wilding and Rachel Whiteread
in Great Britain, also use materials and work at a scale that defies
stereotyped notions about “women’s” art.
In the mid-1980s, Fasnacht (b. 1951) began making cascading
cocoons of raw, distressed wood that billowed out from the wall at eye
level like big encephalic masses that recalled Lynda Benglis’s exuberant
wall sculptures of the 1970s. While Lachowicz (b. 1964) parodied the
shapes of minimal sculpture in glistening blocks oflipstick, Whiteread
(b. 1963) drew new parallels between the detachment of geometric
abstraction and the intimacy of domestic architecture. Whiteread’
House, a concrete cast of the interior of an entire three-storey London
row house won the prestigious Turner prize in 1993 before being
destroyed. Conceived as a commentary on the state of housing in
Britain, its size, material, and austere physicality forced a new
encounter with sculptural form, and with what is often unseen.
Treating language as both target and weapon, these and other con-

398
 rchara
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253 Rachel Whiteread House 1993

temporary artists consciously use it to explore the ways that informa-
tion is socially and culturally coded. Susan Hiller’s (b. 1940) studies in
anthropology informed her early understanding of “otherness” and
her analysis into how language functions as the basis of social struc-
tures. Since the late 1960s, her basic materials have been found things,
cultural artifacts, including postcards, photo-booth pictures, memorial
inscriptions, puppet shows, and wallpaper transformed in ways that
uncover layers of meanings and paradoxes. Working to dissolve
boundaries and borders fixed by the traditional spaces of rooms,
streets, parks, and conceptual places, such as “home” and “abroad,” she
has continually redefined the relationship between actual and imagi-
native spaces. “What I am always trying to do, I suppose,’ she noted,
‘is to bring into view those areas which are repressed socially and cul-
turally, those areas which we do in fact share, and to retrieve for all of
us ...a sense of ourselves as part ofa collective, to insert the notion of
ourselves as the active makers rather than the passive recipients of
a culture.’ During the 1980s, Hiller produced several multimedia
installations that address issues of language and silence (Elan, 1982, and
Magic Lantern, 1987). In these works, which include soundtracks com-
bining her own voice with sounds recorded by the Latvian psycholo-
gist Konstantin Raudive, who claimed to have taped the voices of the
dead, the artist explores silence—as loss and emptiness, but also as a
ground for memory and imagination, themes which are further
explored 1n later works such as An Entertainment (1991).
In 1985, the exhibition “Difference: On Representation and
Sexuality” brought together the work of a number of British and
American artists—including Ray Barrie, Victor Burgin, Hans Haacke,
Kelly, Kolbowski, Kruger, Levine, Yves Lomax, Jeff Wall, and Yates—
which deals specifically with the intersection of gender and represen-
tation. In her introduction to the catalogue, Kate Linker noted that:
“In literature, the visual arts, criticism, and ideological analysis, atten-
tion has focused on sexuality as a cultural construction, opposing a
perspective based on a natural or ‘biological’ truth. This exhibition
charts this territory in the visual arts... . Its thesis—the continuous
production of sexual difference—offers possibilities for change, for it
suggests that this need not entail reproduction, but rather a revision of
our conventional categories of opposition.”
Refusing the image of woman as “sign” within the patriarchal
order, these artists have chosen to work with an existing repertory
of cultural images because, they insist, feminine sexuality is always
constituted in representation and as a representation of difference.
400
254 Susan Hiller An Entertainment 1991

Kolbowski (b. 1953) uses fashion photographs because of their promi-

nent role in structuring the female body as an object of desire and
displacing desire from the body to a product which can be con-
sumed. The Model Pleasure Series, begun in 1982, consists of ten iw) WN (

parts, each composed of a wall grouping of images of models from

fashion and advertising prints, re-photographed, and reassembled into
eridded compositions. They are juxtaposed with other images, for
example a drawing of a turkey, the leg of which is being carved,
OF 2 diawine of 4 foot entitled Charm Anklet;’ and a text that
reads: “There was something she carved/craved; something which
cost/cast its spell upon me, while it still remaimed/remained unscene/
UnSéeii ee
The work of British artists Yves Lomax and Marie Yates (b. 1940)
investigates the relationship between the so-called enigma of feminin-
ity and the “truth” of photographic representation. Parodying psycho-
analytic theories of sexual difference, Lomax uses irony to expose their
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295 Silvia Kolbowski 7 he Model Pleasure Series IQS4

256 Marie Yates The Missing Woman 1982-84 (detail)

Affair between image and self image

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257. Mary Kelly Post Partum

Document, Documentation VI
1978-79 (detail)

phallocentricity. Yates’s The Missing Woman (1982-84) consists of four

panels ofvisual and verbal signs and fragments which invite the view-
er to construct the identity of awoman who 1s revealed only by the
traces of her social engagements—the family, property rights, legal
ceremonies.
Mary Kelly (b. 1941), an American who lived in London during
the 1980s, also refused the direct representation of women in her
work in order to subvert the use of the female image as object and
spectacle. In 1979, she exhibited the opening section of her Post
Partum Document (begun in 1973) at the Institute of Contemporary
Art, London. This multi-sectioned work, like Chicago’s Dinner Party 229
of the same years, addressed the positioning of woman in patriarchal
culture, but the assumptions underlying the two works, as well as their
visual and conceptual articulation, pointed to the earlier impact of
psychoanalytic theories of sexual difference on British and European
artists. Kelly’s work emphasized sexuality as an effect of social

403
 @

S UPPLICATION

258 Mary Kelly Corpus 1985

(supplication section)

discourses and institutions and stresses the potentially oppressive

socio-psychological production of sexuality.
The Post Partum Document, a 6-section, 165-part work, used
multiple representational modes (literary, scientific, psychoanalytic,
linguistic, archaeological) to chronicle Kelly’s son’s early life and her
relationship with him. Kelly deconstructed psychoanalytic discourses
on femininity and the assumed unity of the mother and child in order
to articulate the mother’s fantasies of possession and loss, and the
child’s insertion into the patriarchal order as a gendered (male) sub-
ject. Post Partum Document draws heavily on Lacan’s analysis of lan-
guage and sexuality, and on Foucault’s emphasis on sexuality as an
effect of social discourses and institutions. Later works by Kelly, as well
by the American artists Martha Rosler (Semiotics of the Kitchen and
Vital Statistics of aCitizen, Simply Obtained [1975 and 1978]) and Carrie
Mae Weems (Family Pictures and Stories |1978—84]) also interrogate the
ways that women’s roles are formed within the family and in society.

404
Kelly’s photo/text installation Corpus (1985), the first section of a larg-
er piece entitled Interim, explores femininity and representation by
addressing the issue of aging, the period when the two are thrown into
crisis. Articles of female clothing are photographed and juxtaposed
with fashion photographs, nineteenth-century images of female hys-
terics, and a handwritten text tracing women’s complex relations to
the body, desire, and representation. The conceptual and actual—
book-works, mail pieces, photographs, performances, and videos of
Rosler—deal with motherhood, domesticity, femininity, class, and sex-
uality. She has analysed the uses and abuses of food through works
based on anorexia nervosa, food adulteration, TV cooking lessons,
waitressing, and restaurant unionizing.
During the 1980s, not all women embraced appropriation or media
technologies as representational strategies. Women using paint as a
medium also found themselves negotiating a complex territory as
they continued to look for ways to locate themselves within a tradi-
tion where they have been historically discriminated against, and
which has been defined in male terms. Women painters have been
forced to confront numerous assumptions about the creative process,
artistic “style,” and/or methods of applying paint, subject, etc. While
some women have approached these issues through deconstructing
visual imagery and challenging art history’s omissions of almost all
women from its canon, others have critically explored the processes of
image-making and the relationship between mark-making and social
constructions of femininity.
Gillian Ayres, Alexis Hunter, Therese Oulton, and Fiona Rae in
Britain, and Nancy Spero, Sue Coe, and Ida Applebroog in the United
States, are among the many women painters committed to re-orient-
ing painterly conventions. In the late 1970s Ayres (b. 1930), a British
artist whose earlier works were Hard Edge abstractions, began using
heavily impastoed surfaces and stressing the painterly mark as an
expressive device. Around 1980, Hunter, who had come to London in
1972 from New Zealand, turned from conceptual and textual work
addressing debates within the Women’s Movement, to mythic, expres-
sive painting. Her paintings of the 1980s emphasize the materiality of
paint and the expressive gesture as a political stance used to interrogate
older conventions of painting. Spinner (1986) is one of a series of
paintings called Letters to Rose which refuse traditional ways of “read-
ing” by disrupting conventional modeling, chiaroscuro, and surface.
Directed to the trivializing of women (as flowers and decorative
objects) and women’s work (spinning and weaving), they belong

405
 259 Alexis Hunter Considering Theory 1982

within a “crisis in representation” initiated by feminist resistance to

202
the imagery of the female body. More recently, Rae has confronted
issues of abstraction and figuration directly in paintings that incorpo-
rate both gestural strokes and popular imagery.
The work of Nancy Spero (b. 1926) and Ida Applebroog (b. 1929)
links violence and sexuality, and associates inumacy with often
204 murderous rage. Applebroog’s simplified cartoon-like spaces reveal
fragmented scenes of domestic spaces in which humanity seems to
have run amok and there 1s little to distinguish the ordinary and the
bizarre.
Resistance to the imagery of the female body was also challenged
during the 198os. As social debates over abortion rights, censorship,
AIDS, and the representation of sexuality, male and female, heterosex-
ual and gay and lesbian, intensified, some artists and critics called for
more explicit confrontations with issues of the body and intmacy.
In 1990, social historian Janet Woolf published an essay enttled

400
“Reinstating Corporeality: Feminism and Body Politics,’ in which she
argued for the female body as a legitimate site of cultural politics. By
that date, signs of the body and its intimate processes—maternal,
“monstrous, ’sexually explicit, pleasure-loving, consuming, and con-
sumed—were widely visible in images that broke down the bound-
aries of the body, addressing Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject, as well
as public discourse of pain, sickness, fluids, and the meaning of arti-
facts. Two important exhibitions, “Corporal Politics” at MIT’s List
Visual Arts Center in 1992-93 and “Rites of Passage: Art for the End
of the Century” at London’s Tate Gallery in 1995, addressed issues
concerning the meanings attached to representations of the body in
recent art. “Corporal Politics,’ which attracted widespread media
attention, in part for the National Endowment for the Arts’ withdraw-
al of funding in response to several of the works’ explicit content, was
defined by historian Thomas Laqueur as “making manifest the body
in all its vulnerable, disarticulated, morbid aspects, in its apertures,
curves, protuberances where the boundaries between self and world
are porous....” “Rites of Passage,’ on the other hand, articulated the

260 Mona Hatoum Recollection 1995

260 ‘contributions of women like Louise Bourgeois, Mona Hatoum, Susan
Hiller, and Jana Starbak to new formations of the body/individual
within artistic practices that mark crucial transitions from life to death,
matter to whatever its opposite may be, the present and the coming
millennium.
Other exhibitions articulated self-conscious reactions against the
moralistic tone of some 1970s and 1980s feminism in order to recon-
cile politics with pleasure, or to reinsert anger and confrontation as
aspects of representation. The term “Bad Girls” was used in the titles
of exhibitions that took place at the Institute of Contemporary Art,
London, in 1993, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New
York, 1994, and The Wight Art Gallery at UCLA, 1994. Often the
work on display seemed to relate more closely to the Surrealist-
inspired work of Meret Oppenheim and Louise Bourgeois than to the
didactic and deconstructive feminist art of Kruger, Levine, Kelly,
and others.
Although some of this work seemed like a return to 1970s feminist
celebrations of the female body and female sexuality, it differed in its
insistence that unmediated images of the female body were no longer
possible, and its conceptualizing of the female body—often fragment-
ed or rendered through substitutes like clothing—as radically poly-
morphous rather than representable through a unified image or
symbol.
The work of Louise Bourgeois has remained at the forefront of
explorations of gender, sensibility, and sexuality expressed through
images of the body and bodily surrogates since the 1940s. Her inde-
pendent and powerful body of work, and the freedom with which she
has experimented with materials and form, have left traces in the
265 works of many younger artists. Arch of Hysteria (1993) evolved out of
an important work, Cell (Arch of Hysteria) which was made in the pre-
vious year and first shown in the US pavilion of the 1993 Venice
Biennale. In the 1992 version, the reclining man’s headless torso is
arched in the typical pose of hysteria, the body cast in mirror-like pol-
ished bronze. In Arch of Hysteria the torso is further arched, the arms
meeting the feet forming a circle, and the sculpture is suspended pre-
cariously from a string. Kiki Smith’s (b. 1954) works often contain vis-
ceral references to internal organs, bodily fluids, and isolated limbs. In
266 Untitled (1986), twelve empty glass water bottles bear the names of
various bodily fluids spelled out in pseudo-scientific Gothic script:
blood, tears, pus, urine, semen, etc. Hannah Wilke’s (1940-93) last
photographs of her own body ravaged by cancer, radiation, and
408
261 (above)
Annette Messager
Histoire des Robes 1990

262 (left) Fiona Rae

Untitled (green with
stripes) 1996
 chemotherapy (exhibited in 1993) positioned the body within current
medical and political battles. Works like Kiki Smith's Tale (1992), in
which a mannequin trails clumps of excrement and Christine
Lidrbauch’s Menstrual Blood Wallpaper (1992), deconstructed the equa-
tion of femininity and the visually pleasing. Other works, including
those by Rachel Lachowicz, Millie Wilson (b. 1943), and Annette
Messager, speak the body through its fetishized surrogates: the dress,
261 the robe, the wig, and lipstick. Messager’s Story of Dresses or Histoire des
Robes examines and critiques Western cultural representations of
female identity, intimate relations, sexuality, and power. She does this
through a photographic dismemberment of the male and female body
and its re-presentation in clusters of tiny black-and-white images of
penises, pubic hair, breasts, nipples, buttocks, noses, and mouths sus-
pended on strings in circles or pinned onto dresses. While earlier fem-
inist works like Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964) and Eleanor Antin’s
Ballerina performances of the 1970s had addressed issues of femininity
and female sexuality through costume and dress, their work never
attempted the confrontational shock of Jana Starbak’s (b. 1955 in
Prague) Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (1987), a red dress
made of 60 pounds of raw flank steak draped over the female body.
Starbak’s “dress” draws attention to processes of decay and to the tran-
sience of earthly pleasures, and addresses the boundaries between our
lives in culture and our biological make-up. Yet even Starbak’s oozing
corpus owed something to earlier works like Gina Pane’s Sentimental
Action (1973) in which the artist had transformed herself into a slab of
meat, dripping with blood and Carolee Schneeman’s Meat Joy (1964)
with its plucked chickens and raw sausages.
Recent representations of the body have also frequently acknowl-
edged its social existence as a political battleground. Rona Pondick’s
sculptures of mutated shoes, multiple mouths, and piles of breasts sug-
gest ambivalent responses to Freud’s writings on anal and oral fixations
and obsessions, and to cultural fears and repressed anxieties concern-
ing sexuality, bodily functions, and traditional gender roles in works
that move from the “deadly serious to the darkly and comically
absurd.” Mona Hatoum’s (b. 1952) desire to explore the world beneath
the flesh has sources in childhood games in Beirut in which she
observed her neighbors through binoculars. Years later, while an art
student in London, she began to do performances and video installa-
tions which focused on exchanges of clothed and naked bodies. A
later work, Corps Etranger (Foreign Body) of 1994 documented the sur-
face of the skin, then moved to the internal landscape of the body
AIO
263 Dorothy Cross Spurs 1993

through imaging processes commonly used in medicine today

(endoscopy and colonoscopy).
Other women used humor and irony to challenge social construc-
tions of gender. Irish artist Dorothy Cross’s (b. 1956) installation The
Power House (1991) addressed issues of class and the gendered division
oflabor and space. A group of recent works made from stretched cow
udders (inspired by a sieve made from a cow udder seen in a
Norwegian museum) evoke images ofthe rural past, while at the same
time subverting a long history in which nurture, servitude, domestic
labor, and sexual availability often overlapped. British artist Helen
Chadwick (1953-96) also uses animal skin in works with a fetishistic,
obsessive quality. In Glossolalia (1993), discarded Russian fox furs are 207
arranged like a circular trophy on a large, round table. The centerpiece
of this sleek, furry ring is a cone of small, overlapped lamb’s tongues
cast in bronze. Around the top of the cone, five little tongues open up
AII
264 Ida Applebroog
Don’t Call Me Mama 1987
265 Louise Bourgeois Arch ofHysteria 1993

266 Kiki Smith Untitled 1986

267. Helen Chadwick Glossolalia 1993

around a hole, a kind of anal orifice with connotations of oral sex and
rimming. “It’s no longer a singular phallus,’ Chadwick noted. “You
could read all of the tongues as a cluster of phallic forms, but no more
than the corolla of a flower. | wanted to make a work that would play
off how you read gender and yet be impossible to define, so that a
phallic structure 1s not simplistically penile and something more sup-
posedly feminine also doesn’t quite live up to that stereotyping. Its
eroticism 1s difficult to locate or fix... .” Because of the modulations of
the fur as it spans out, you get this sense of a thrusting movement
which emerges in the cone of tongues.
For some women artists the taboo of intimate themes and sexually
explicit images has a subversive edge, and the work of Karen Finley,

414
Nan Goldin, Annie Sprinkle, and Holly Hughes has attracted contro-
versy in its explicit referencing of pornography’s normally hidden
imagery. Women’s insistence on defining their own normative social
and sexual categories, and their refusal to be absorbed into models of
white heterosexuality has also led to a number of works that make
explicit their lesbian content. Nicole Eisenman’s (b. 1963) figurative
drawings and murals teem with voluptuous sexuality. US Lesbian
Recruitment Centre has been called “every misogynist’s and homo-
phobe’s worst nightmare,’ while Tiash Dance (1992), in which a
woman performs in a lesbian bar in a way both celebratory and sexy,
offers a striking departure from Modernism’s frequent assaults on the
nude female, and from feminist exposes of sexual violence against
women in works like Sue Coe’s (b. 1951) painting of a widely publi-
cized rape in a New Bedford bar. Eisenman’s Minotaur Hunt (1992)
makes lesbianism the norm against which all other sexualities
are gauged and challenges art that celebrates and mythologizes male
sexual prowess.
Other narrative strategies of the 1980s and 1990s also use multiple
personae and voices, the fusing of fact and fiction, and re-tellings of
history and biography to deconstruct patriarchally based cultural
forms. One of the points of connection between current investiga-
tions into sexual and cultural difference and earliest feminist explo-
rations continues to be visible in women’s choice of autobiography
and narrative as structures within which to explore female experience
and subjectivity.
In 1985-86, Faith Ringgold (b. 1930) executed Change: Faith
Ringgold’s Over 100 Pound Weight Loss Story Quilt. The quilt not only
records Ringgold’s gain and loss of weight over two decades, but also
became a pictorial transcription of her autobiography, visually record-
ing her transformation through childhood, adolescence, marriage,
motherhood, and career. In a series of story quilts begun in 1990 and
entitled The French Collection, Ringgold’s alter-ego Willia Marie
Simone travels through France and encounters the heroes of French
art and literature (Van Gogh, Picasso, Gertrude Stein) and the heroines
of black history (Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks).
“My process is designed to give us ‘colored folk’ and women a taste of
the American dream straight up,’ she has said. “Since the facts don’t
do that too often, I decided to make it up.” In making their history
hers, Ringgold also establishes a powerful voice for the black female
artist within the spaces of Modernism from which she had previously
been excluded, except as model and servant.

415
hel beld
Lqahare te help Bie
 Ringgold’s use of narrativity in the production of new feminine
identities was shared by other artists, many of whom had been shaped
by 1970s feminism. In 1988, Miriam Schapiro returned to the theme
of “collaborations,” in two series of paintings that took as their subject
themes and images previously expressed in the work of historical
women artists from Natalia Goncharova to Frida Kahlo. In 1978,
Yolanda Lopez (b. 1942) had produced multiple versions of the image
of the Virgin of Guadalupe—as herself, her mother, and her grand-
mother. A decade later Margo Machida, who was born in Hawaii,
painted a series of self-portraits in the guise of powerful male figures
like Yukio Mishima. In “A Cosmography of Herself: The Auto-
biology of Rachel Rosenthal,’ Bonnie Marranca coined the term
“autobiological” to characterize Rosenthal’s acceptance of natural his-
tory as a part of the history of the world and part of her history.
Rosenthal, who often adopted the persona of the woman warrior,
assumed three roles—a mad old woman, a young handsome Year King
and the wounded and revengeful mother-earth goddess Gaia—in the
1982 performance Gaia, Mon Amour.
In addition to adopting multiple personae, women artists today are
also choosing a variety of public roles. During the 1980s, the National
Endowment for the Arts encouraged proposals that integrated art
directly into the site, and promoted artists’ direct participation in all
aspects of site selection and planning. Joyce Kozloff, Mary Miss, Jackie
Ferrara, Ann Hamilton, Nancy Holt, and others, often worked in
collaboration with architects and community groups. Holt’s (b. 1943)
environmental works address the ways we perceive and experience
nature. Dark Star Park, begun in 1979 in Rosslyn, Virginia, as part of an
urban renewal project, salvaged a blighted two-thirds acre site as a park
for local residents. Other land reclamation projects include Patricia
Johanson’s Fair Park Lagoon (1981)—which involved turning a stag-
nant, polluted urban body ofwater in Dallas, Texas, into a functioning
ecosystem of plants, birds, fish, and reptiles—and Newton and Helen
Harrison’s project on the Sava River in former Yugoslavia (1988-90).
Working with botanists and ornithologists, the Harrisons returned
one of Europe’s last great floodplains—then polluted with sewage and
chemical waste—to a corridor ofthriving wetlands.

268 (opposite, above) Margo Machida Self-Portrait as Yukio Mishima 1986

269 (opposite, below) Faith Ringgold The Wedding: Lover’s Quilt No. 1 1986

A417
 Joyce Kozloft’s public art involves collaboration with architects,
planners, and community groups. It represents the natural growth of
her earlier interest in ornament, historical sources, and the cultural
content of patterning. Between 1979 and 1985, Kozloff completed five
major public art commissions: Harvard Square Subway Station;
Wilmingon Delaware, Amtrak Station; San Francisco Airport;
Humbolt-Hospital Subway Station, Buffalo, New York; and the
Suburban Train Station, Philadelphia. Tile and mosaic-work celebrate
each site’s visual and cultural history through intricate patterning and
detail.
Not all public work executed during this time was collaborative, or
specifically feminist. Working individually, Maya Lin, a young archi-
tecture student, gave new form to the idea of the public monument in
her Vietnam War memorial for Washington, D.C. (dedicated in 1982).
An austere black granite wall slicing into the ground near the
Washington Monument, its surface inscribed with the names of the
thousands of soldiers who gave their lives 1n a war that deeply divided
American society, it succeeded as no monument before it in calling
forth and embodying a culture’s conflicted response to its history.
Social and political contexts form the basis for the public projects
and installations of Suzanne Lacy, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the
Guerrilla Girls, Margaret Harrison, Lorraine Leeson and Peter Dunn,
and others. In 1978, Ukeles became the unsalaried, self-appointed
artist-in-residence at the New York City Sanitation Department. In a
performance called Touch Sanitation (1978), she shook hands with
8,500 sanitation workers in the five boroughs of New York City. In
1985, she began a piece called Flow City, a walk-through installation
that introduces visitors to the complex processes through which a
major city’s waste is removed and relocated.
Lacy’s (b. 1945) Crystal Quilt, a performance of 1987, resulted from
two and a half years of work to develop a network of five hundred
volunteers, twenty staff members, and a team of fifteen collaborating
artists, to produce a monumental spectacle honoring 430 elderly
women participants. Performed on Mother’s Day in the glass enclosed
atrium of a Philip Johnson-designed building in downtown Minnea-
polis, the women, sixty to one hundred years old, met around tables
designed in a quilt pattern by artist Miriam Schapiro and shared their
stories, their problems, and their accomplishments.
Social activism also motivated artists in Britain to work in public. In
1980, Lorraine Leeson and Peter Dunn began collaborating to develop
a series of community-based strategies aimed at slowing commercial
418
development in London’s Dockland’s area along the River Thames. In
1989, Margaret Harrison, a central figure in the British feminist art
movement ofthe 1970s, installed Common Land/Greenham at the New
Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. The piece told the story
of the Greenham Common Movement, a group of women who
camped (and in many cases were arrested) at a cruise missile site out-
side London in an attempt to close down the base. Arguing that as
commoners they had long-established rights to the land, they became
the pillars of agrowing international peace movement.
During the 1980s, other artists turned to artworld politics, and to
the spaces and practices of the museum as sites for ongoing investiga-
tions into the ways that culture 1s collected, institutionalized, and

419
 THE ADVANTAGES
OF BEING
AWOMAN ARTIST:
Working without the pressure of success.
Not having to be in shows with men.
Having an escape from the art world in your 4 free-lance jobs.
Knowing your career might pick up after you're eighty.
Being reassured that whatever kind of art you make it will be labeled feminine.
Not being stuck in a tenured teaching position.
Seeing your ideas live on in the work of others.
Having the opportunity to choose between career and motherhood.
Not having to choke on those big cigars or paint in Halian suits.
Having more time to work after your mate dumps you for someone younger.
Being included in revised versions of art history.
Not having to undergo the embarrassment of being called a genius.
Getting your picture in the art magazines wearing a gorilla suit.
Pl
cosesond s ondcomrens o- Gaye PRILL A GIRLS
d $ and
conscinceor me ax wom

WHEN RACISM & SEXISM ARE

NO LONGER FASHIONABLE,
WHAT WILL YOUR ART
COLLECTION BE WORTH?
The art market won't bestow mega-buck prices on the work
of a few white males forever. For the 177 million you just spent
ona single Jasper Johns painting, you could have bought at
least one work by all of these women and artists of color:
Bernice Abbott Elaine de Kooning Dorothea Lange Sarah Peale
Anni Albers Lavinia Fontana Marie Laurencin Liubova Popova
Sofonisba Anguisolla Meta Warwick Fuller Edmonia Lewis Olga Rosanova
Diane Arbus Artemisia Gentileschi Judith Leyster Nellie Mae Rowe
Vanessa Bell Marguérite Gérard Barbara Longhi Rachel Ruysch
Isabel Bishop Natalia Goncharova Dora Maar Kay Sage
Rosa Bonheur Kate Greenaway Lee Miller Augusta Savage
Elizabeth Bougereau Barbara Hepworth Lisette Model Vavara Stepanova
Margaret Bourke-White Eva Hesse Paula Modersohn-Becker Florine Stettheimer
Romaine Brooks Hannah Hoch Tina Modotti Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Julia Margaret Cameron Anna Huntingdon Berthe Morisot Alma Thomas
Emily Carr Mey Howard Jackson Grandma Moses Marietta Robusti Tintoretto
Rosalba Carriera Frida Kahlo Gabriele Minter Suzanne Valadon
Mary Cassatt Angelica Kauffmann Alice Neel Remedios Varo
Constance Marie Charpentier Hilma af Klimt Louise Nevelson Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun
Imogen Cunningham Kathe Kollwitz Georgia O'Keeffe Laura Wheeling Waring
Sonia Delaunay Lee Krasner Meret Oppenheim
oe tie’s. Sotheby

ce sends ond ements: Gye ppn tA GIRL Sconces. an

| d$and
272 Sophie Calle Ghosts 1991

displayed. The Guerrilla Girls, a group of activists who work anony-

mously behind large rubber gorilla masks, began installing posters
around New York’s SoHo in 1985. The posters use statistics to target
racism and sexism in gallery and museum shows, and in art publica-
tions. While Fred Wilson’s installations drew attention to the exclu-
sion of African-American history from institutions like the Maryland
Historical Society, Sophie Calle (b. 1953) and Andrea Fraser (b. 1965)
have used photographic installations and performance/videos to
expose the cultural and class biases and assumptions shaping museum
practices. In 1992, Calle replaced a selection of works in New York’s
Museum of Modern Art with written labels in which museum
guards and other employees were invited to supply their own visions
and interpretations of the works. Zoe Leonard’s (b. 1961) 1992 photo
installation (widely characterized as the “pussy intervention’’) insert-
ed small photographs of female genitals into the Neue Galerie’s
collection of eighteenth-century German portraits of well-dressed
wives, mistresses, and daughters, as part of the ninth “Documenta”
exhibition in Kassel, Germany. The photographs, appropriated from
A21

271 (opposite) Guerrilla Girls, poster, c. 1987

Gustave Courbet’s infamous The Origin of the World (1866), a long
“lost” work, recently located in the apartment of Sylvia Bataille, for-
mer wife of both Jacques Lacan and Georges Bataille—and absorbed
with considerably public fanfare into the permanent collection of
France at the Musée d’Orsay—foregrounded issues of Western art’s
reliance on the representation of female sexuality: disguised, idealized,
or overt.
Although there is little consensus among women at the present
time about where to go next, and although many goals of the
Women’s Movement have not been met—there is still violence
against women, discrimination in education and employment, racism,
and sexism in daily life—contemporary art by women reveals the for-
mulation of complex strategies and practices through which they are
confronting the exclusions of art history, expanding theoretical
knowledge, and promoting social change.

422
 mAb ARR FOURTEEN

Worlds Together, Worlds Apart

May 1989 saw the opening in Paris of an ambitious international show

titled “Magiciens de la Terre” (Magicians of the Earth). Organized by
French curator Jean-Hubert Martin, the exhibition brought together
fifty well-known contemporary artists from Europe and North
America and fifty newly introduced, non-studio-trained artists whose
work derived mainly from folk, religious, and artisanal traditions.The
show was widely acknowledged as an exhibition of major historical
significance, and it proved to be a model for many subsequent global
art events. But despite its breadth and dazzling juxtapositions of
objects, and the fact that it prepared the ground for an explosion
of international exhibitions in locations such as Taiwan, Johannes-
burg, Kwangju, Shanghai, Dakar, Fukuoka, Brisbane, and Istanbul,
‘““Magiciens” drew considerable criticism, since its good intentions
were perceived by some commentators as patronizing, if not “neo-
imperialist.” It was criticized especially for showcasing cultural
difference without explanation, for its “paternalism,” and for its Euro-
pean-based curatorial practices and its assumption that shifting folk,
ritual, and popular arts from anthropological to art contexts would
automatically remedy Western prejudicial and hierarchical systems of
evaluation and classification.
When it came to gender, too, “Magiciens de la Terre” proved
markedly conservative. Fewer than one 1n ten of the artists represented
were women, a group that included, among others, Marina Abramovic
(Yugoslavia), Louise Bourgeois (USA), Rebecca Horn (Germany),
Barbara Kruger (USA), Esther Mahlangu (South Africa), and Nancy
Spero (USA). Questions of gender were also largely overlooked in art-
press discussions of an exhibition that ostensibly set out to reconsider
categories ofinclusion/exclusion, art/craft, center/periphery, all issues
that had been central to feminist debates since the 1970s.
Between 1989 and 1999, however, the representation of women in
international exhibitions changed dramatically. At the 48th Venice
Biennale, which opened in June 1999, women made up a quarter ofall
the artists represented in the national pavilions and the “d’APER Tutto”

423
section (the expanded accompanying exhibition) and walked away
with half the prizes. Over the past decade, many commentators have
spoken about the death of feminism and the globalization ofculture.
Perhaps it is time to look a little more critically at the intersection
between art that explores questions of feminine identity and exhibi-
tions that claim to represent national aspirations and dominant trends
in contemporary art.
During the 1990s the new international exhibitions that took their
place alongside the more established biennials like Venice, Sao Paulo,
and Havana became cultural spectacles competing for both art world
attention and a share of the growing market for art identified with
non-European centers. They also provided an arena for the emergence
of a truly international cadre of artists, some of them women who live
and work at a distance from their countries of origin, and whose work
draws on the complexities and contradictions of their cultural her-
itages and identities. This group includes Shirin Neshat (Iran/USA),
Mona Hatoum (Lebanon/UK), Tracey Moffatt (Australia/US), Doris
Salcedo (Colombia/USA), Shahzia Sikander (Pakistan/USA), Mella
Jaarsma (Holland/Indonesia), and Mariko Mori (Japan/USA), among
many others.
In parallel with the expansion in number and frequency of these
large-scale global exhibitions has been the emergence of a growing
international art press. Four important publications, in particular, have
provided consistent coverage of such events, extending their discus-
sion to issues as well as artists. Art in America, a monthly art magazine
published in New York, has for over a decade featured critical reviews
of all major international exhibitions, as well as periodically longer
essays devoted to specific subjects. Third Text, which first appeared in
London in 1987, outlined a more theoretical and radical position vis-
a-vis current discourse on art and culture as it sought to represent
‘a historical shift away from the center of the dominant culture to its
periphery in order to consider the center critically.’ The two other
major sources of coverage in English, both of them specific to Asian
and Pacific developments, are the journals Asian Art News, published in
Hong Kong, and ARTAsiaPacific, an Australian quarterly.
In the wider art press, however, discussion of political, nationalist,
and art-market concerns continues to eclipse issues of gender and
class. It is tempting to assume that the so-called New Internationalism,
with its embrace of work by some women artists, has produced an
international “level playing field,’ one in which gender issues are con-
sidered of secondary importance, if not altogether irrelevant. But even

424
a cursory review of the literature suggests a far more complex picture,
one that prompted British art historian Katy Deepwell, writing in
n.paradoxa, the international feminist art journal she founded in 1996,
to ask “How can we discuss an internationalism in feminism?” Her
question has no easy answers. Yet the fact remains that at the same time
that international biennials and triennials are perceived as being
market driven and concerned mainly with artists who have relocated
to art world centers and whose work reinforces mainstream preoccu-
pations, they have also provided an important forum for a more
diverse set of artistic practices by women. In many cases, these prac-
tices, with their focus on issues of cultural and sexual identity and their
engagement with debates about materials and processes, recall earlier
feminist histories. As women artists from the periphery define new
areas of common concern, and as they occupy a wide range of posi-
tions in today’s global exhibitions—from international art stars to
carriers of local traditions or voices for new forms of feminist dialogue
taking place away from Europe and North America—the biennials
and triennials offer one kind of frame within which to explore the
ways that countries have begun to think beyond their own borders,
and the ways that women are contributing to international artistic
debates that concern issues of historical, sexual, and cultural identity.
To focus on these global exhibitions inevitably means ignoring
important artists who are not exhibiting in this particular, and often
biased, context, and it risks overdetermining the effects of gender
among artists who may have little or nothing in common ideologi-
cally, culturally, and/or aesthetically. Yet even a highly selective survey
provides a new perspective on what 1s happening today.
While some recently established biennials—both in the First World
and the Third—have followed the Venice model of national exhibi-
tions and curators, others have evolved practices that reflect the
specificities of their geography and regional identity. For example, the
Biennale of Sydney of 1990, organized by German art dealer and
curator René Block, focused mainly on internationally recognized
Western artists whose work utilizes the qualities of deconstruction,
irony, and critique that have come to define Postmodernism in Europe
and North America. It included a number of women among its 120
artists from 30 countries. The work of Shigeko Kubota (Japan/USA),
Rebecca Horn (Germany/France), Barbara Bloom (USA), Rosemarie
Trockel (Germany), and Jill Scott (Australia) was linked less by issues
of gender than by its adherence to a current interest in conceptually
based installation work among contemporary artists. Only Scott’s

425
Machinedreams, an installation that included an interactive sound
element and juxtaposed photographs of women caressing various
domestic appliances with an installation of stark black versions of these
same objects on pedestals, conveyed a more overt political content.
Even so, in displaying an ambivalent relationship toward early feminist
engagements with the signs of domesticity, Scott pointed up genera-
tional conflicts within the contemporary women’s movement that
have been expressed by many younger women artists working in the
1980s and 1990s. And her installation suggested that global reinterpre-
tations of feminism would be as diverse and specific to place and time
as the women who define them.
The Western focus of the 1990 Biennale of Sydney was countered
by the cultural and aesthetic diversity evident in the Third and Fourth
Havana Biennials of 1989 and 1991, respectively. While both Havana
exhibitions showcased the art of Latin America and the Third World,
the 1991 Biennial also displayed a strong commitment to international
postminimalism, with “high” art mixed with popular art, national
shows exhibited within non-national groupings, and displays of con-
temporary arts and crafts. Critical responses to the 1991 Biennial often
diverged sharply. While director Llilian Llanes addressed the discrep-
ancy between the benefits that the promotion of contemporary art
420
(and the media coverage that accompanies it) had brought artists 1n the
First World and the almost complete absence of significant publica-
tions on contemporary art of the Third World, many First World critics
remarked on the increased visibility the growing international market
was bringing to non-European artists. If the art market held out the
promise of positive support, however, it also contained the danger that
artists of the periphery would increasingly become tools of that very
market and of the industrialized West’s desire to consume the newly
fashionable, or to assert the radical “otherness” of the so-called non-
Western world. The expanding demand for work produced outside
European and North American centers also encouraged artistic
migration, an issue of central concern to Cuba.
The work of a number of Cuban artists, male and female, who
appeared in the Havana Biennials of 1989, 1991, and 1994 centered on
the issue of migration. This was explored both by the artists who had
remained in Cuba during the period of economic deprivation
brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the United States’
economic boycott, and by those who had either emigrated or traveled
and lived abroad for extended periods. Among the latter were
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959) and Marta Maria Pérez
Bravo (b. 1959), two artists whose work draws on the racial and ethnic
heterogeneity of Caribbean culture as theorized by cultural historians
such as Stuart Hall and Edward Glissant, themselves of Caribbean
descent. Glissant has argued that in these islands a multiplicity of

273 (opposite) Jill Scott

Machinedreams 1990 (detail)

274 (right) Marta Maria Pérez Bravo

Proteccion 1990 y"
 historical and cultural traditions has led to the dismantling of any
notion of “pure” culture, encouraging processes of hybridization.
By 1990 Campos-Pons, whose early work had focused on explo-
rations of feminine sexuality filtered through the prism of Central
American myth, was living in the United States. There she increasingly
drew on the African diaspora (the subject of her Havana Biennial
installations). Focusing on the history of her ancestors, who had been
brought to Cuba from Nigeria as slaves in the nineteenth century, she
combined objects specific to that history with childhood memories
of spiritual practices and sacred objects derived from the rich inter-
mixing of African and Caribbean cultures.
Pérez Bravo, who today lives and works in Mexico and Cuba, began
using the medium of photography to explore the boundary between
the real and the power of the imaginary in 1984. Her most extensive
series—“To Conceive” and “Memories of Our Baby” (mid-1980s)—
rely on a number of performative self-representations in which the
artist enacts different roles and identities. In them she combines images
relating to certain beliefs about conception within santeria (a modern
Cuban religion derived from a fusion of Afro-Caribbean and Roman
74 Catholic beliefs) with photographs of her body taken by her husband
Flavio Garciandia that suggest a kind of ironic distance produced
through the choice of a documentary style and the construction of self
as an object of study. Her photographs bypass ritual and essentialized
representations of female power in order to explore feminine identity
and the conditions of being female in ways that counter patriarchally
constructed stereotypes of womanhood.
Pérez Bravo 1s part of a generation of Cuban women artists who
were deeply influenced by Ana Mendieta’s return to Cuba in 1980-81,
her first visit since leaving the country for the United States in 1960,
when she was twelve years old. Mendieta’s performances and site-
specific earthworks in Cuba, many of which incorporate images and
beliefs associated with santeria, provided both a way of reconnecting
with her homeland and a spiritual system—earth-based, featuring
female deities (orishas), as well as male and female priests (santero and
santera)—in keeping with her feminist concerns.
Other artists within Cuba to address the complex issue of migration
during this period included Tania Bruguera (b. 1968) and Sandra
Ramos (b. 1969). Bruguera, who for some years had identified herself
with Mendieta, whose work she has re-created in different venues,
constructed a narrative installation for the Fifth Havana Biennial in
1994 in which she situated herself as an emigrant displaying a large
428
collection of parcels hastily packed with her most precious documents
and belongings, as if in preparation for a fictitious departure. Ramos’s
installation at the same event, Migraciones IJ, included ten open suit- 276
cases—their insides painted with scenes of hopeful voyages and lost
dreams—placed against the wall. Sony cassette players, blue jeans, and
liquor, collapsing rafts, and the images of families left behind evoked a
powerful sense of the perilousness of crossing the Straits of Florida to
the United States.
Bruguera also organized a concurrent exhibition of young women
artists at the Centro Provincial de Artes Plasticas y Diseno in Old
Havana in 1994. The fact that much of the work on show shared a
concern with the conditions through which femininity is lived sug-
gested that many of these artists were involved with some version of
feminism, though not necessarily articulated as such or defined in
terms familiar to a North American contemporary women’s move-
ment shaped by the needs of middle-class white women. Indeed, the
specific historical/cultural context of Latin America requires the
mapping of constructions of gender onto other facets of identity
formed under colonialism, such as racial and cultural hybridization
and the mythologizing of the feminine. While some women in the
show engaged in dialogues with European art history or combined
“feminine” materials such as lace and embroidery with observations
on the realities of Cuban life, others, like Ines Garrido (b. 1966) in
El secreto de Duchamp, tackled issues of gender. In a nearby gallery,
Magaly Reyes (b. 1968) exhibited a group of colorful and quirky self-
portraits in the manner of Frida Kahlo that addressed social issues
through questions of her own identity.
Among the Fifth Havana Biennial’s other younger Cuban artists
was Yaquelin Abdala (b. 1968), who exhibited a group of brightly
colored, intimately scaled “faux” paintings and installation work that
had as its subject an inquiry into memory, relationships, identity, and
biography. Drawing on anecdotes, dreams, and folk tales with herself as
protagonist, Abdala combined mythologies of urban and rural Cuba
with particular attention to their cultural collision.
The Havana Biennials have also strongly featured the work of
Central and South American artists. Work by Monica Castillo
(Mexico), Alicia Herrero (Argentina), Maria Cardoso (Colombia),
Sylvia Gruner (Mexico), Helen Escobedo (Mexico), and Graciela
Iturbide (Mexico) was prominently displayed in all three of the exhi- 275
bitions discussed here. The latter’s powerful photographs of women
from the matriarchally organized culture of the Tehuantepec isthmus,

429
275 (right) Graciela Iturbide
Magnolia, Juchitan, Oaxaca, Mexico
1937

276 (below) Sandra Ramos

Muigraciones Il 1994

277 (opposite) Monica Giron Ajuar

para un conquistador 1994
widely exhibited in Europe and North America during the past
decade, have brought her international recognition. A concern with
environmental and social issues, issues that have become central to the
practices of many artists worldwide today, provided a focus for the
work of Argentineans Monica Giron (b. 1959) and Rosana Fuertes
(b. 1962), both of whom use painting and textiles. Giron’s Ajuar para un
conquistador (Irousseau for a Conqueror) included a row of dangling
birds’ legs and feet, interspersed with knitted vestments for Argentine
birds in danger of extinction. Fuertes, in Pasion de multitudes (The
Passion of Crowds), exhibited a series of small paintings of shirts, each
one bearing the colors and designs of different causes or organiza-
tions, from soccer teams to The Mothers of La Plaza de Mayo, a group
of women who emerged as a powerful political force in Argentina in
the 1980s when they demonstrated in the famous Plaza de Mayo in
Buenos Aires to demand information about the disappearance of their
loved ones. Dressed all in black, the women continue to this day to
demonstrate 1n the square every Thursday at 3.30 in the afternoon.
The topical and populist leanings of works such as those by Abdala,
Giron, and Fuertes, among others, provided a contrast with instal-
lations by artists who have embraced the large scale and pronounced
materiality of much international work today. Artists from the

431
periphery who have migrated to European and North American
centers—and who are sometimes referred to as “nomadic” because
they often appear to live and work within global networks of interna-
tional exhibitions and markets—were also represented in the early
Havana Biennials. Among them were two women whose later career
trajectories would be closely linked to their regular participation in
international exhibitions and the press coverage that such exhibitions
generate: Mona Hatoum and Doris Salcedo (b. 1958).
Hatoum’s Over my dead body (1988), one of three works she exhib-
ited in Havana in 1989 that related to the war in Lebanon that had
forced her to take up more permanent residence in London, was a
giant photo-poster originally made for an urban billboard project, in
which a defiant young woman confronts the forces of state in the form
of a soldier in battle dress who scales her profile. In Salcedo’s Atrabiliar-
ios (Close-Up) of 1991, displayed at Havana that year, a collection of
shoes each pair placed in a mesh sack—hangs from the wall. Remi-
niscent of Christian Boltanski’s installations on the subject of loss and
memory, the shoes bore silent witness to the subject of political vio-
lence and to those Colombians who have disappeared as a result, often
without a trace, other than an occasional shoe or article of clothing.
By June 1993, when the 45th Venice Biennale—the oldest of the
bienmials and an exhibition whose 1895 founding date corresponds
with the height of Europe’s expansionist colonial period—opened,

278 Mona Hatoum Over my dead body 1988

279 Yayoi Kusama Agegregation—Rowhboat 1963

international art events were generally displaying a strong orientation

toward regional identity, internationalism, and multiculturalism. The
Biennale, which had taken as its theme the subject of cultural
nomadism, was notable in several ways. For instance, the selection of
Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) for a solo exhibition in the Japanese pavilion
made her the first and only woman ever selected as Japan’s sole repre-
sentative at a Venice biennial. Kusama, who arrived in New York
from Japan in 1958, had gained considerable notoriety during the
years of Pop art. Her polka-dot environments and domestic objects
and installations encrusted with stuffed phallic projections anticipated
feminist challenges to the structures of sexual difference, while her
uninhibited performances and the hallucinatory and obsessive quali-
ties of her practice attracted widespread attention. Returning to Japan
in 1973, Kusama has lived and worked for some years in the relative
isolation of a Japanese mental institution. Her re-emergence on the
international art scene in 1993 marked the beginning of a string of
international solo exhibitions that included “Love Forever: Yayoi
Kusama, 1958-1968,’ which opened at the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art in 1998 and traveled to New York’s Museum of

433
Modern Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Tokyo’s Met-
ropolitan Museum of Contemporary Art.
The United States’ selection of Louise Bourgeois (France/USA) as
its national representative made her only the second woman (after
Jenny Holzer in 1990) to represent that country. Like Kusama, Bour-
geois showed work that was already familiar to art audiences in an
exhibition titled “Louise Bourgeois: Recent Work.” The show fea-
tured her “Cells,”’ a series of installations in which the unit of the cell
serves as a basic room-sized building block. The title alludes both to
the cells that form living organisms and to the cell as a place of con-
finement. Bourgeois’s cells are often places of contemplation formed
from walls of found steel or glass doors and windows. Inside they
contain objects used as memory devices, and Bourgeois has written
that, “The Cells represent different types of pain: the physical, the
emotional and psychological, and the mental and intellectual.”
Ireland also had a female representative in Dorothy Cross, while the
section of the Biennale devoted to new faces (called “Aperto 93”)
included a number of young women whose work had already been
critically discussed as having shaped new directions for the 1990s.
Among them were the Americans Kiki Smith, Janine Antoni, Renee
Green, Laura Aguilar, and Sue Williams, as well as Sylvia Fleury
(Switzerland) and Salcedo. The participation of South Africa for the
first time shortly after apartheid was abolished proved important in
emphasizing the variety of cultural traditions within that country and
in setting the stage for the first Johannesburg Biennale in 199s.
The growing visibility and influence of international art events
during the 1990s also coincided with shifts of emphasis in academic
curricula. Many universities and colleges now offer courses in post-
modern critical theory (with its emphasis on cultural difference and a
worldwide interconnectedness promoted by mass media, new tech-
nologies, trade agreements, and the internet), and others in cultural
and/or postcolonial studies or “postcoloniality” (as with many other
aspects of contemporary cultural dialogue there is little agreement
about terms and usages, but both engage with the particular historical
conditions and aftermath of colonial occupation). Locating a space of
representation that is not projected from a center outward, not defined
by the terms of conquest and subordination, not restricted by the sin-
gularities of “race,” or “class,” or “gender” as primary conceptual and
organizational categories, has become an imperative for many artists
today. “Beginnings and endings may be the sustaining myths of the
middle years,” cultural critic Homi Bhabha writes, “but in the fin de

434
siécle, we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time
cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and
present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.”
In The Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha suggests that one effect of
colonization is the production of hybridization rather than the visible
imposition of colonial authority or the silent repression of native tra-
dition. The result is a change of perspective that opens a space for new
representations. Doris Salcedo is one of a number of contemporary
artists educated in Europe or North America (she received her
Master’s degree in sculpture from New York University) who are con-
versant with poststructuralist and postcolonialist theory. Her work
often raises issues germane to Bhabha’s writings, as well as to
Bangladeshi feminist critic Gayatri Spivak’s influential essay “Can the
Subaltern Speak,” first published 1n 1988.That essay, based on the writ-
ings of a collective of historians engaged in a project called “subaltern
studies,’in which they are rewriting the history of colonial India from
the point of view of peasant insurgency, shaped much subsequent
debate about the forms of representation available to colonized
peoples. The desire to give voice to oppressed groups (rather than
having them represented from “above,” that is, from cultural positions
of authority) has played a not inconsiderable role in the practices of
artists who wish to assert their cultures within the spaces of the inter-
national art world, but to do so in a recognized international visual
language that traces its roots to European Modernism.
Salcedo’s installation for the 1993 Venice show was one of several
that addressed issues of representation within this growing debate.
Untitled included stacks of white shirts and metal bed frames with 280
attached springs leaning against the wall and placed on the floor. The
freshly laundered shirts, neatly folded and stacked in piles, were
pierced by a black metal stake near the collar of the top shirt. The
piece’s ambiguous references had the potential to elicit multiple read-
ings. What to a European or North American audience might be
viewed as a high-class boutique display actually originated in a specific
political/social/geographic context familiar to the artist (the shirts
suggest domestic labor and Colombian men’s funeral attire, an associa-
tion strengthened by the fact that Salcedo created this installation after
talking to Colombian women who had witnessed the killing of their
fathers, husbands, and sons on the doorsteps of their own homes
during the 1988 Banana Plantation Massacre of La Honduras and La
Negra). The work is indicative of the extent to which many artists
from the periphery had by the mid-1990s become adept at fusing the

435
280 Doris Salcedo Untitled 1990

specificities of political and social events that took place far from
European centers with a formal language derived trom munimalism
that often emphasized conceptual rigor and surtace opacity.
Italian critic Giorgio Verzotti, discussing the work of Doris Salcedo,
Renee Green, Daniel Martinez, Botala Tala, Rigoberto Torres, and
Laura Aguilar in the October 1993 issue of Artforum in the context of
recent writing on the hybrid nature of contemporary work that draws
from multiple cultural traditions, argued that these artists had trans-
formed white Western modes of expression into positive vehicles
through which to transmit marginalized collective identities. Others
were less sure. They argued that the formation and circulation of an
international visual language rooted in the productions of a Western
European and North American vanguard remain controversial, as does
the relationship between the practices of artists from the periphery
430
who had left their native lands and were now living and working
abroad and those whose work remains shaped by the cultural and eco-
nomic realities of Third World countries.
During the mid-1990s, international exhibitions continued to vac-
illate between the expectations of a First World-based art market and
Third World desires to represent popular and indigenous traditions as
wel] as vanguard practices in regional exhibitions. Under the direction
of French curator Jean Clair, the 46th Venice Biennale of 1995 turned
into a mammoth historical show titled “Identity and Alterity: Figures
of the Body 1895-1995” that focused almost exclusively on European
and North American artists. That same year, the organizers of the first
Johannesburg Biennale chose the same theme. Despite the latter exhi-
bition’s stated intention to focus on regional identity, the majority of
the invited curators and artists were European, and some visiting
critics remarked on the paucity of black artists from outside Johannes-
burg. Exhibited in a number of different sites throughout the city, the
work of South African artists included Jane Alexander’s composite
skeletons, as well as a group of fanciful figurative sculptures in wood
produced by the so-called Venda artists, a group of non-studio-trained
black artists from the northern rural area near the borders of Zim-
babwe and Mozambique that included Esther Maswanganye.
Despite reservations expressed by many First World critics, the
Johannesburg Biennale did provide exposure for many non-European
artists. Among them were four Indian women whose work was
included in an exhibition curated by Geeta Kapoor and whose names
would become increasingly familiar to international audiences during
the 1990s: Sheila Gowda, Nalini Malani, Pushpamala N., and Nilima
Sheikh.As professional women artists, all of them owed a debt to the
pioneering figure of Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-41), an Indian painter of
Hungarian birth active during the 1930s who helped pave the way for
younger women, and each in her own way would develop narratives
of female experience, combined with allusive references to embodi-
ment, that were individual, complex, and open ended.
Sheila Gowda (b. 1956), who lives and works in Bangalore, studied
at the Royal College of Art in London, as well as at Baroda and Santi-
niketan, two important art schools in India. During the 1990s she was
one of several Indian artists who began to move from painting to
installation art, the latter a relatively recent development within Indian
contemporary art practice. She was also one of a number of artists who
have cited the political violence of the late 1980s and early 1990s as a
watershed in their ways of thinking about the relationship between

437
 281 (left) Sheela Gowda
Untitled 1993

282 (opposite) Nuilima Sheikh

view of “Songspace”
installation 1995

their social concerns and their artistic practices. Whereas Gowda’s

earlier paintings had dealt with the relationship between violence, sen-
suality, and ritual, her work has gradually evolved into a kind of
figurative abstraction in which bodily wholeness has given way to the
fragment. During this period she began to work with the medium of
cow dung, smearing it on the paintings by hand and using it to form
objects in installations. Cow dung, signifying both the sacred and the
profane, also has a long ritual use in Indian society, where it is predom-
inantly handled by women and 1s used to produce and recall both folk
objects and religious meanings. Gowda often concentrates on images
of torsos, sometimes covering them with thin washes of cow dung
with bits of paper or a kind ofcloth used by village women and denot-
ing cheapness and availability.
Gowda’s 1995 installation in Johannesburg also included abstract
wall pieces made from coconut fiber, a kind of jute. These works refer-
ence both the environment and a long history of women’s work
understood in relation to community and nation. Her awareness of
Indian traditions and her resistance to established boundaries and
social institutions join with a knowledge of international contempo-
rary art and the role of culture in the production of postcolonial
identities. Gowda 1s aware that from European perspectives her use of
materials, particularly dung, risks appearing to confirm the West’s
desire for non-Western cultural expressions that appear “exotic” or
radically “other,” that 1s, untouched by Western colonialism. Gowda
and other Indian women whose work alludes to traditional or ritual

438
practices often position themselves as resisting the expectations of
both Western and Indian contemporary art.While some artists in India
have chosen to eschew all references to tribal, rural life, others, includ-
ing Gowda and Sheikh, have sought ways of integrating Indian
traditions with modernist expectations, despite the latter’s associations
with colonial rule.
Nilima Sheikh (b. 1945), who lives and works in Vadodara, India,
contributed a series of casein tempera paintings called “Songspace”’ to
the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale. The paintings have sources in the
allegories, legends, and beliefs of the artist’s own cultural history that
have been transmitted through literary, oral, and musical traditions.
Sheikh belongs to a generation of Indian artists who were in a sense
“liberated” from tradition by a previous generation of artists drawn to
Western Modernism, but who have embraced forms of cultural
hybridity 1n their work. She has attributed her strong sense of cultural
identity to the fact that, unlike many artists of her generation, she was
unable to travel outside the country until she was in her thirties. In her
painting, she has endeavored consciously to resist becoming alienated
from her own cultural roots despite the formidable influence of both
contemporary multiculturalism and long years of colonial rule.
The ten “Songspace” paintings, hung vertically and painted on each
side of five unstretched 305 X 1§2 cm scroll-like canvases, unfold in
time like some form of epic narrative. “I am interested in the whole
concept of journeys built into these tales,’ the artist has said. “These
are not just about narratives, but about the narrator too, and also about
various asides.’ Throughout the paintings, nature is elicited through
color and shape rather than linear definition. When figures appear,
they are sketchily outlined with hollow, transparent interiors. Sheikh
procures her pigments from assorted traditional sources, blending
them with casein to achieve sensitive, translucent veils of color in
works that owe something to Chinese andJapanese painting, as well as
to Islamic art and European Modernism.
Indian figurative painter and ecofeminist Nalini Malani, who was
born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1946, today lives and works in Mumbai
(former Bombay). During the past decade her work, which includes
performance, installation, and painting, has been exhibited in India,
Australia, and Britain. Malani’s interest in issues of female subjectivity
underlies her search for a postcolonial Indian modernism in both her
own and other oppressed cultures. She identifies strongly with women
artists from the past with mixed cultural heritages, like Frida Kahlo (of
German and Mexican-Indian parentage) and Amrita Sher-Gil (half-
Hungarian, half-Indian). Her Body as Site, a room installation of large,
mixed-medium wall drawings of paint, chalk, and charcoal and six
works on milk-carton paper, explored the effects of man-made events
like the mutations seen after atomic bombs and nuclear tests in the
Bikini Atoll in the 1950s. Her “mutants,” stains made with dye on
milk-carton paper, are juxtaposed with bodies that are recognizably
female. Malani has described the act of painting these women’s bodies
as an ““incantory ritual’ that has permitted her to record and then erase
the effects of the violence that European and American colonialism
has unleashed on the world.

440
 One ofthe two main Johannesburg Biennale locations was an aban-
doned and somewhat forbidding industrial warehouse known as the
“Electric Workshop.” It was here that Thailand’s Araya Rasdjarmrearn-
sook (b. 1957) installed her Prostitute’s Room, an exploration of the
Western tourist’s perception of the Asian woman’s body as a sexual
playground. She presented three small, curtained-off rooms, each of
which enclosed a shallow square hole filled with blood, oil, ash, or
water. The combination of these architecturally defined spaces, sym-
bolic of the confinement of the Asian women within patriarchal,
Western stereotypes, and the “offerings” that Rasdjarmrearnsook
views as metaphors ofsuffering and violence, pointed both toward the
sexual exploitation of women and cultural dominance. In the cata-
logue, Rasdjarmrearnsook wrote,“I am like most Asian women raised
according to culture, beliefs and paths ofthe past, until one day I found
that the truth as we know it changes.”
In a conference organized to coincide with the Biennale, speakers
addressed the challenges that political transformation (like that in
South Africa) posed to artists whose cultural expression had long been
shaped by brutal confrontation with “the enemy.” Others spoke about
the relationship between local and culturally specific traditions, mate-
rial, and practices, and those that had gained a more universal currency
in an international art world, and about the place of artists of color 1n
national and international arenas.

283 (opposite) Nalini Malani

Body as Site installation view
1996 (detail)

284 (right) Araya

Rasdjarmrearnsook Prostitute’s
Room 1995
 By 1997, international biennials provided key sites at which to con-
sider the tremendous diversity of practices that had emerged among
women artists worldwide.
The 23rd Bienal de Sao Paulo followed the
conventional organization by nations (though many artists did not live
in their assigned locales), offset by solo exhibitions organized by
invited curators, and by the so-called “Universalis” exhibitions that
were devoted to specific regions of the world. Solo exhibitions
included work by Louise Bourgeois, who exhibited Cell Clothes
(1996), and the Australian Tracey Moffatt, whose films, photographs,
and videos often address issues of cultural identity through explo-
rations of her mixed white and aboriginal heritage. Her installation
Scarred for Life (1994), the first of two such series that Moffatt produced
in the 1990s, included unframed and captioned prints of tableaux
staged by the artist that played out the horrors of adolescence, domes-
tic violence, homophobia, and racism in scenes that appeared like
snapshots. They included couples bowling, a father’s angry reaction to
his son’s playing a female role in a theater production, etc.
The North American section in “Universalis,” organized by curator
Paul Schimmel, focused on six emerging artists, most of them from
New York and Los Angeles (the omission of Canadians perhaps points
up the extent to which curators 1n international exhibitions often rely

285 Tracey Moffatt Pantyhose Arrest 1973, from “Scarred for Life II” series 1999
286 Elizabeth Peyton Lady Diana reading Romance Novels 1997

on work with which they are already familiar).The group, presented as

a “next generation,’ was primarily made up of women, a fact that
appeared to confirm what many have seen in recent years as an art
world fascination with youth and femininity (evident mainly in press
coverage in New York and London). Moreover, the work of all of the
artists in the North American section—Julie Becker, Jennifer Pastor,
Jim Hodges, Kathleen Schimert, Elizabeth Peyton, and Tom Fried-
man—displayed the strong identification with mass media, popular
culture, craft, and decoration that characterizes the work of many
younger North American artists today. Becker’s labyrinthine installa-
tion developed around almost full-size his-and-hers doll houses as
model spaces for fictional children, such as Danny Torrance from the
movie The Shining. The jumble of corridors and chambers was filled
with everyday objects, including a coffee pot and cup, worn furniture,
a sleeping dog, and posters, journals, and notes. Peyton’s slickly var-
nished oil-on-wood portraits included pop stars Kurt Cobain and Sid
Vicious, while Pastor contributed an enormous painted copper corn-
stalk, and Schimert produced an opalescent tabletop loaf that went
under the title Porcelain Landscape: Love on Lake Erie.

443
 The 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, organized by the Nigerian
curator Okwui Enwezor on the theme of“Trade Routes: History and
Geography,’ on the other hand, challenged national borders by assert-
ing the importance of diasporic identities in contemporary art
practices. Instead of placing the works in the usual national pavilions
with their segregation by country and culture, the exhibition was
organized along the lines of sub-themes that emphasized sameness and
similarity among diasporic artists in particular, and other cultures in
general, as alternatives to regional origin and identity. Advertised as the
first major exhibition to present contemporary African, Caribbean,
South American, and Asian artists as equals, the Biennale was heralded
by some commentators as the most important exhibition since “Magi-
ciens de la Terre” in 1989. Although the organizers dealt explicitly
with issues of colonization, race relations, and identity in South Africa
and elsewhere, they were nevertheless accused of privileging an inter-
national art audience and of failing to engage with the local
community. Like many revisionist events of recent years, the exhibi-
tion raised complex, and perhaps unresolvable, questions about whose
story, history, religion, meaning were being addressed.
Many works in the exhibition by Africans and members of the
African diaspora from North America, Britain, and the Caribbean
dealt with the legacy of colonialism. Among them was the white
South African artist Penny Siopsis’s video installation What a Lovely
Day, subtitled What Do You Know of Massacre, Disaster and Catastrophe?
Through the story of an English woman married to a Greek and living
deep in the African veld, Siopsis explored various aspects of her white
colonial identity using clips from family movies and narrative subtitles
provided by her grandmother. The Americans Carrie Mae Weems and
Pepon Osorio, Canadian Stan Douglas, Britain’s Isaac Julien, and
the South African Pat Mautloa were among the artists whose works
addressed issues of diasporic identity, while Betye Saar and John
Outterbridge exhibited work they had previously shown in Sao Paulo
that alluded to aspects of African-American experience. Tania
Bruguera took as her subject the Angolan—South African War, in
which Cuban soldiers had been sent as state-controlled mercenaries,
in terms of its Cuban casualties. This more contemporary work res-
onated strongly with a “historical” exhibition of mostly living artists
organized by Cuban curator Gerardo Mosquera that included Sophie
Calle and Ana Mendieta.
Two performances by women addressed topical political and social
situations. Lucy Orta (b. 1966), who is based in Paris, was the only artist

444
actively to bring issues of class into the Biennale. Her Collective Wear,
one of a series of ongoing projects of a “situational” nature, was based
on work she did with women from a local shelter (migrant laborers
who came from the countryside to Johannesburg seeking work, only
to find nothing available). Although she worked with—and paid—the
women for ten days before their performance, most people noticed
the project only when the group paraded through the Biennale
grounds and nearby streets on the last day of the exhibition singing
Nkosi Sikelel’i Africa (God Bless Africa), the new South African
national anthem, and other inspirational hymns. After the Biennale
closed, Orta continued to work on establishing a permanent founda-
tion through which these women would be able to manufacture and
sell their own clothing designs, based upon the skills they had learned
while working on her project.
American artist Coco Fusco (b. 1960) chose to set up a mock
control point at the Biennale’s entrance, where visitors were forced to
buy “passbooks” for entry to the exhibition. These were almost exact
replicas of the passbooks that black South Africans had to use during
apartheid, and reaction to the piece was mixed, with some locals
regarding it as trivializing or condescending.
The Biennale’s invited curators were encouraged to pair an artist
from their own country with a South African. Jean-Hubert Martin
chose to show unstretched paintings by Esther Mahlangu (b. 1935),
similar to the house murals she had included in the earlier “Magiciens
de la Terre,’ alongside recent sculptures by French artist Bertrand
Lavier. Elsewhere in the exhibition, women’s contributions ranged
from the sculptural and video installations of Rona Pondick and Sam
Taylor-Wood to Shahzia Sikander’s pictorial (and cultural) fusions of
centuries-old techniques drawn from the traditions of Persian and
Indian miniature painting with provocative contemporary forms. A
case in point, and a recurring image in Sikander’s mixed-media pieces,
was that of a voluptuous veiled female body with a plethora of extra
limbs who wields swords as she balances on fashionable platform
shoes. Sikander (b. 1969), who was born in Pakistan in 1969 but now
lives and works in New York, has developed an artistic practice that
moves easily between the borders and boundaries out of which the
shifting identities of transnational artists are created. Her miniatures
mingle Muslim and Hindu imagery, which she uses as vehicles
through which to transmit the hybridity of her experiences. In a semi-
autobiographical work titled The Scroll (1992), she adopted the formal 287
style of manuscript painting, with its broken and varied perspectives

445
287 Shahzia Sikander The Scroll 1991-92

and simultaneous views of multiple events, to depict a family’s intri-

cate domestic life and rituals through images that manipulate cultural,
familial, and geographic traditions.
The growing international visibility of art from Asia and the Pacific
region reinforces contemporary tendencies toward building subject
positions and identities through processes of fluidity and indetermi-
nancy, and fusing artistic practices that look to Europe and North
America with those that are based in regional and indigenous tradi-
tions. Patriarchal, and in many cases strongly traditional, Asian cultures
often proved resistant to Western-style feminism. At the same time,
travel, education, political and social concerns, and the spread of mass
culture have shaped a wide range of sophisticated and often critical
artistic practices, many of them rooted 1n a concern with issues of dis-
placement, imperialism, economic colonization, sexuality, and identity
that are shared by many artists working around the world.
It was not until the 1980s, a period when the term “postfeminism”
gained a certain academic currency in North America and Britain,
that Asian women artists began to organize themselves systematically
in order to make their voices heard as a collective force. Among the
first to agitate in this way was Yun Suk Nam, one of South Korea’s

446
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leading artists of the older generation. Born in 1937, she took up

painting in her thirties and studied in New York during the 1980s
before returning to Korea. Working with three other women, she
organized the first public event in the emerging women’s movement,
a show called “Group Exhibition” at the Kwanhoon Gallery in Seoul
in 1985. As the editor of the Korean feminist magazine IF (for iden-
tity), Yun Suk Nam continues to be a major voice in Asian feminism.
The presence of the United Nations—sponsored “International Year
of the Woman” conference in Beiying in 1995 focused worldwide
attention on women’s issues 1n the Asia-Pacific region and led to
greatly expanded coverage of women artists, beginning with ART
AsiaPacifics special number on women, which appeared in April of
that year. The conference contributed to a new feminist awareness
among women artists (many of whom choose not to employ that term
specifically) and led to collective actions such as the setting up in 1998
of the Siren Art Studio by four Beying-based women artists—Li
Hong, Cui Xiuwen, Feng Jiali, and Yuan Yaomin—who have
embraced a feminist agenda in their work that includes drawing atten-
tion to the inferior status of women in modern Chinese society and
challenging traditional gender roles.

447
 The conference was followed two years later by an exhibition of
seven international women artists in Taiwan. “Lord of the Rim—lIn
Herself/For Herself” brought together artists from Taiwan, Korea, and
Japan with feminist Judy Chicago from the United States in an exhibi-
tion and project that included women textile workers from the
Taiwanese town of Hsin Chuang and focused attention on the women
who labor unknown and unrecognized in the area’s small textile facto-
ries. It was not until 1998 that the first all-Thai group exhibition of
women, called “Woman Opportunity,’ took place at the Tadu Gallery
in Bangkok, the capital of Thailand. That same year saw “Century
Woman” at Beijing’s China Art Gallery, an exhibition that incorpo-
rated women’s perspectives and included two of the seven (out of a
total of fifty-eight) women artists represented in the major traveling
exhibition “Inside Out: New Chinese Art” organized by the Asia
Society in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The following year, “Womanifesto II,’ the second international
women’ art festival, opened in a park in Bangkok.
The responses of Asian women artists to gender issues reveal a
diversity shaped by generation and culture, making generalization dif-
ficult, if not impossible. Nevertheless, much of the work produced by
women from Asian countries in recent years displays a profound
concern with the relationship between personal identity and social
conditions. Moreover, new awareness of collective goals has encour-
aged the emergence of more critical practices, including those that
challenge or incorporate changing attitudes toward regional and/or
indigenous traditions, critiques of political and social conditions, and
deconstructions of gender and sexual difference in historically patriar-
chal societies.
Today, two major exhibitions focus on the hybrid nature of the
region’s contemporary art, and on the growing interest in Asian con-
temporary art generally. In 1993, the Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT), held
at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane every three years, joined
the already well-established Biennale of Sydney. Although there is
considerable overlap of artists between these exhibitions, they have
often addressed regional concerns in different ways. The organization
of the Tenth Biennale of Sydney in 1996, for example, reinforced the
Australian art community’s ongoing interest in international tenden-
cies and the country’s awareness of its own complex biculturalism. Its
first female artistic director, Lynne Cooke, the Australian-born curator
of New York’s Dia Center for the Arts, was assisted by Whitney
Museum of American
Art curator Elisabeth Sussman. The fact that in

448
Australia today an estimated one third to one half of the country’s
visual art production is created by indigenous people, many of them
women, who comprise less than two percent ofthe population, influ-
enced the curators’ selection of forty-eight culturally diverse artists
from five continents. The curators believed that these artists exempli-
fied their theme of reproduction technologies, a term chosen to
include technologies ranging from knitting machines to X-rays,
though their choice was criticized for failing to elaborate the complex
history of white Australia’s relations with its indigenous peoples.
Textiles played a key role in the work of a number of artists in the
show, from the American-Indonesian collaborators Nia Fliam and her
partner Agus Ismoyo, who produced work informed by Hindu-
Javanese textiles, to Emily Kngwarreye (1910-96), one of Australia’s
best-known indigenous artists. Kngwarreye’s imposing silk batiks
displaying dynamic linear, gestural patterning were typical of the work 288
of the residents of the Utopia Aboriginal Land in central Australia.
After years of adhering to the collective and communal artistic prac-
tice of aboriginal culture, curators and critics have in recent years
acceded to market demand for individual attribution. The result has
been an explosion of interest in named artists such as Clifford Possum,
Michael Jagamara, and Kngwarreye, and a series of one-person
exhibitions that have acknowledged the evident distinctiveness and
authority of specific artists working within indigenous culture. The
residents of the Utopia community originally adopted a technique
from the Indian Ocean region that was not traditionally their own and
used it to produce stunning batik designs incorporating traditional
elements. In 1977 Kngwarreye and others formed the Utopia
Women’s Batik Group as a communal project. Two years later they
became the first aboriginal artists invited to exhibit in one of the
major international art exhibitions—the Third Biennale of Sydney—
and by the 1980s they were using acrylic paints on canvas and board,
and knowledge of their work had spread throughout Western Europe
and North America.
The Sydney biennial’s concentration of curatorial power perhaps
contributed to the local complaint that, “The exhibition that once
heralded new art in this country, the Biennale of Sydney, now runs
minor reworks of New York trends, and the event praised for presenting
new conjunctions of art is the Queensland Art Gallery’s Asia-Pacific
Triennial.” Whether or not such criticisms are true, there is a growing
perception that it is the Asia-Pacific Triennial, which is now linked to
the Asian Art Triennial in the Japanese city of Fukuoka, that is most

449
 288 (left) Emily Karne
Kngwarreye Utopia Panel 1996

289 (below) Denise Tiavouane

The Crying Taros 1996 (detail)

ageressively mobilizing regional interest in the art of the Pacific, as

well as the new art of China and Southeast Asia.A 1991 exhibition of
installation work by radical conceptual artists from China was intro-
duced in Japan in the exhibition “Exceptional Passage: Chinese
Avant-Garde Artists,’ sponsored by the Japan Foundation. It was fol-
lowed a year later by another large exhibition of installation work
called “New Art from Southeast Asia.” These collaborative exhibitions
defined “Asia” primarily as a geographical concept, a territory stretch-
ing from Pakistan 1n the west, the Philippines in the east, Indonesia in
the south and Mongolia in the north, but excluding Afghanistan, the
Middle East, and Oceania. This concept was gradually abandoned for
being too Japan-centric and was replaced by the looser term “Asia-
Pacific,” which has characterized the most recent triennials.

450
 The Asia-Pacific Triennial has emerged in recent years as one ofthe
more thoughtful international forums for dialogue about the pains
and pleasures (to paraphrase art critic Lucy Lippard) of an art world
subject to all the tensions of a market-driven global transformation.
Caroline Turner, the deputy director of the Queensland Art Gallery
and manager of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial (1996), described
the exhibition’s curatorial structure in an interview in Asian Art News.
She pointed to an integrated curatorial process that involved forty-
two curators from fifteen countries. To address what had been a
relatively small Pacific-Oceanic presence in the 1993 Triennial, a team
of Pacific selectors was put together and brought in Melanesian, Poly-
nesian, and indigenous Australian artists. Art from India was included
for the first time in 1996, as were Chinese artists from China, Hong
Kong, and Taiwan.
While much of the work was installation-based, the curators made
an effort to address issues of cultural difference directly. Turner pointed
out what she saw as two, perhaps intractable, problems facing this, and
other, international exhibitions taking place in areas with strong
indigenous cultural traditions. First, tensions between nationality, col-
lectivity, and identity may be unresolvable. Second, she pointed to the
extreme difficulty of defining the borders of contemporary art prac-
tice in a world in which market preoccupation with indigenous work
may affirm indigenous cultures at one moment, while reinforcing
their continuing marginalization at another. In the end,“Asia-Pacific”
remains an artificial construct as a region since geographic proximity
does not necessarily translate into common concerns. Incorporating
both the densely inhabited cities of East and Southeast Asia and the
atolls and islands of Polynesia produces a “region” defined by radical
difference. Nevertheless, the Asia-Pacific Triennials provide a unique
forum within which to consider contemporary artistic practices in
that part of the world.
Multiple juxtapositions of radically different views of culture were
most evident in the Pacific component of the 1996 APT, which
included a number of works installed outdoors around the Queens-
land Art Gallery. Among them was Kanak artist Denise Tiavouane’s
(b. 1962) Crying Taro Garden (1996), an actual planted garden combined
with an audio component that included the wailing of babies. Taro,
the staple crop of the Kanak people of New Caledonia, is a symbol of
women, as yams are a symbol of men, and Tiavouane chose it as a
feminist and cultural sign, incorporating into her garden aspects of
Oceanic life and women’s activities. Speaking more directly to issues

451
 of cultural hybridity and displacement,
The Campfire Group, a Bris-
bane-based aboriginal artists’ cooperative established in 1991, parked a
truck in front ofthe gallery. The truck, bearing a large “For Sale” sign,
displayed aboriginal works that ranged from souvenir items to major
works by some ofAustralia’s best-known indigenous artists. The place-
ment of the truck, nearby but outside the gallery, provided an ironic
commentary on marginalization and cultural commodification.
At the exhibition’s opening, a group of Papua New Guineans pro-
duced the performance Ples Namel (Our Place) in the gallery's garden.
They conveyed their message of cultural hybridity by using materials
that included cordyline leaves, soil, grass, masks, paint, feathers, and tree
oil in recognition of the fact that self-decoration is an integral part of
the culture of almost all peoples of Papua New Guinea’s Western
Highlands Province. Performer Anna Mel, wearing a grass skirt gar-
landed with shells and beads, stood behind an empty vertical picture
frame, while her husband Michael Mel invited members of the audi-
ence to confront their notions of the exotic by stepping through this
European sign to decorate her with finger paints.At the same time, he
provided a commentary on the way Polynesian identity has been con-
structed by others such as anthropologists and missionaries. The
performance, calling into question the cultural interface between
“self” and “other,” recalled Guillermo GOmez-Pena and Coco Fusco’s
246 1992 performance The Year of the White Bear, in which the two artists
exhibited themselves as recently discovered “Amerindians” 1n an
elaborate cage.
In another performance during the opening, Indonesian artist
Arahmaiani (b. 1961) transformed herself from a bride into a wild
figure brandishing toy guns and other implements of American
culture in an installation and performance piece titled Nation for Sale.
At the age of fourteen, Arahmaiani had left her religious, middle-class
family and lived on the streets of her native Bandung. Living like a
nomad, she confronted social injustices up close, especially those relat-
ing to cultural biases against women.As a result of this action, she was
stigmatized, and in 1983, while a student at the Bandung Institute of
Technology, she was arrested in the course of creating installation
work in the streets (because it was considered subversive) and was
forced to live under military house arrest.A growing concern with the
cultural imperialism of wealthy nations led Arahmaiani to produce
Nation for Sale, a performance about cultural displacement in which
she expressed her rage at seeing local languages and cultures sup-
pressed by an engineered mass culture.

452
290 Arahmaiani Handle
without care 1996

Like Arahmaiani, Korean artistYi Bul (Lee Bul), who was born in
1964 to parents who were political dissidents, has made a career of
exposing, challenging, and undermining religious, cultural, and politi-
cal ideologies that perpetuate the silencing of women and the
dominance of male authority. Beginning with works like Abortion
(1989), a performance that proved controversial because of its nudity
and exploration of cultural taboos,Yi Bul has deployed irony, contra-
diction, and ambivalence as she inserts herself into the cultural
conditions that she critiques. Her installation at the 1996 APT, Majestic 291
Splendor (1993), a display of fish adorned with sequins, attracted con-
siderable media attention there and later at the Kwangju Biennale in
South Korea 1n 1997, much of it directed toward what one newspaper
described as the work’s “repulsiveness.’” By the end of the ten-day
installation, all that remained were the cheap “man-made” baubles that
had adorned the fish, now reduced to a putrid mass of bones. Bul

453
 AP RE ED ARIA RRO RES SOS Zz

J I Yi Bul Maje stic Splendor 199 5

chose fish and sequins because of their feminine connotations in
Korean culture.The labor-intensive work involved 1n embellishing the
fish stemmed from childhood memories of her mother making
sequined bags and purses by hand. These signs of female fantasy and
vanity, however, also carried implications of class and gender, for in the
1970s making sequined objects for the export market emerged as a
kind of cottage industry in Korea. Thus the work’s feminist content
pointed toward both women’s oppression in a patriarchal society and
an unspoken cultural history of women in Korea.
A similar attentiveness to cultural identity, the environment, and our
relationship to nature is evident in the art of Australian Fiona Hall
(b. 1953), who studied in Sydney and Rochester, New York. Her work,
which includes photography, painting, and installations, is often
created with objects she has first made and then photographed. Her
installation at the Triennial, Give a Dog a Bone (1995—96), was a “por-
trait” of a civilization that consisted ofa“wall” of supermarket cartons
stacked and filled with carved soaps and found objects from everyday

292 Fiona Hall Give a Dog a Bone 1996

Gf)
 293 Mrinalini Mukherjee Yakshi
1934

life and a life-sized photograph of Hall’s father draped in a full-length

shawl made by Hall from strips of metal cut from Coca-Cola cans.
The 1996 APT also included New Delhi sculptor Mrinalini
Mukheyjee (b. 1949), who exhibited a series of monumental free-
standing woven and knotted hemp-and-sisal constructions that
suggested fantastic plants and addressed the line between art/craft,
high/low, masculine/feminine. Mukherjee’s earliest rope sculptures
date from the 1970s, and although they are contemporaneous with
postminimal fiber work by North Americans Eva Hesse, Jackie
Winsor, and others, they retain a more constructed aesthetic that
derives, at least in part, from Indian traditions.
The leading metaphor of
her work remains not form itself, but the organic life of plants. Tough,
hand-dyed hemp fibers are twisted and knotted around a rudimentary
metal armature in a way that suggests unfolding forms, inexorable
growth, and an intentional mingling of male and female shapes.
Aboriginal artist Destiny Deacon (b. 1957) has also built a practice
around the intersection of fine arts with mass culture, the gallery with
domestic space, the everyday and public with the private.A self-taught
artist, Deacon has chosen to work with affordable and reproducible

456
materials like Polaroids and color laser copies, drawing her imagery
from advertising and television and representing it with biting and
witty titles. In Brisbane, she reconstructed her Melbourne living room 294
(which also serves as her studio), calling attention to “blak” humor (a
term Deacon developed as a strategy to reclaim colonial language in
order to create a means of self-definition and expression for aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islands people) through a display of her collection of
racist kitsch.
A year later, in 1997, the largest and costliest event of its kind ever to
take place in the Asia-Pacific region opened. The Second Kwangju
Biennale, which included 500 artists from 60 nations, struck many
viewers as primarily a massive public relations effort to ratify South
Korea’s position on the international cultural map. Dependent on a
large number of European and North American art “advisers,” the
vague utopian multiculturalism of the Biennale’s theme, “Unmapping
the Earth,” failed to overcome the fact that at least half the artists in the
show were from Europe and North America despite a certain rhetoric
about non-Western artists and artistic practices.
Once again it was the 47th Venice Biennale (1997) that provided the
most focused look at a broad spectrum of female international art
stars. It featured Sam Taylor-Wood (UK; b. 1967) with her split-screen
video installation of a couple’s discussion in a crowded restaurant;
Rachel Whiteread’s (UK) ghostly castings; Mariko Mori’s (Japan; 295
b. 1967) 3-D video in which she projected herselfas a floating Japanese
princess-saint surrounded by gooey toy figures playing musical instru-
ments; and Pipilotti Rist’s (Switzerland; b. 1962) video featuring a
vivacious young woman prancing down a street and periodically
smashing the baton in her hand through a car window. Mor, born in
Tokyo, educated in London, and now living in New York, displayed an
early interest in exposing the image-making apparatus of the fashion
business. Her futuristic costumes were influenced by the work ofJean-
Paul Gaultier and other designers. More recently, as suggested by the
titles of her works—Love Hotel, Tea Ceremony, Red Light, Warrior, and
Play With Me—she has addressed issues of desire which coexist
uneasily within a technological realm of fantasy and reality.
Perhaps the most extensive and far-reaching representation of
women artists in international biennials occurred in 1999 with exhibi-
tions “in Brisbane, Fukuoka, Istanbul, and Venice. The Third
Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane and the Asian Art Triennial in
Fukuoka showcased contemporary developments in Asia, with the
Fukuoka exhibition taking place at the Asian Art Museum, Japan’s first

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contemporary museum to show Asian art exclusively. The Brisbane
show offered both a section called “Crossing Borders,’ designed to
represent global artistic collaborations and artists who live and work in
more than one country, and a “Virtual Triennial,’ which offered on-
line access to the exhibition and associated programs. In addition, four
region-based teams of curators represented East Asia (China, Japan,
Taiwan, South Korea), Southeast Asia (Indonesia, The Philippines,
Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam), South Asia (India, Pakistan,
Sri Lanka), and Pacific (Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea,
Niue, New Caledonia).
The 1999 Asia-Pacific Triennial departed from the model of many
previous international exhibitions in that its seventy-seven artists, rep-
resenting twenty countries, were selected by a team of twenty-five
international and thirty-nine Australian curators who chose to focus
on artistic practices tied to indigenous traditions and culture. In this
context, “crossing borders” was widely interpreted to refer to the
boundaries between craft, traditional practices, performances, textile,
video, and new technologies.
Place, memory, and identity figured strongly in many works.
Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen, one of the seven women included in the
large traveling “Inside Out” exhibition of contemporary Chinese art
in 1998—99, lives and works in Beijing, the city where she was born in
1963. Her work, which spans performance and installation, often
describes the dramatic changes taking place in China today. In a 1995
installation titled Woolen Sweaters, she divided a collection of second-
hand sweaters into two piles, one made up of women’s brightly
colored and patterned knits, the other, of men’s pale-colored sweaters.
Unravelling them, she began to, reknit the threads, blending the wools
in a metaphor of gender fusion. Another recent installation, this time at
the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, included clothes
from her childhood, which she packed and covered with concrete in a
dramatic symbolization of the lost past. Her interest in domestic
themes and women’s labor links her practice to what has been called
“Apartment Art,’ a move on the part of many Chinese artists in the
early 1990s to withdraw into more private practices and exhibitions in
response to the renewed distrust of avant-garde and non-traditional
art on the part of the political establishment and official culture.
Since the mid-1990s, Yin Xiuzhen’s work has centered around the
massive destruction and reconstruction of Beying. Through various
kinds of interventions, she seeks to personalize objects and make refer-
ence to the lives of people affected by sudden social, physical, and

294 (opposite top) Destiny Deacon My Living Room in Brunswick, 3056 1996

295 (opposite bottom) Mariko Mori Empty Dream 1995

296 Yin Xiuzhen Beijing 1999 1999

cultural change. Her installation Beijing 1999 interspersed ceramic roof

tiles rescued from demolition sites (a symbol of “Old Peking,’ the tiles
were used to cap the roofs of traditional Chinese single-story court-
yard houses, many of which have been bulldozed in recent years) with
photographs of ordinary people. Collecting fragments from demoli-
tion sites in Beying—including roof tiles, furniture, and other
objects—she creates large-scale installations that often focus on her
home and neighborhood.
Among the other artists in the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial in 1999
whose work took the form of installations were several women who
draw on materials associated with femininity and combine images
taken from multiple cultural sources. These included Shahzia Sikander,
who transferred a wall installation made of paintings on tissue paper
showing imagery from Hindu and Muslim sources from her New York
studio to the Queensland Art Gallery. There, animated by the move-
ments of passersby, they formed delicate veil-like fluttering layers.
Another example of cultural hybridity was evident in Dutch-
Indonesian artist Mella Jaarsma’s (b. 1960) four suits sewn into the
form of a jilbab (the Muslim veil that covers everything but the eyes
and hands). Made from frog and fish skins, kangaroo hides, and 850
chicken feet, the jilbab were worn by volunteers. The installation, orig-

460
inally based on the Dutch colonialists’ dismissive greeting to the
Indonesians, “Hi Inlander” (Hello, Native), an address that mocked
Jaarsma’s ancestors, resonated with other meanings as the jilbab-
wearing figures confronted what it feels like to inhabit another’s skin.
Jaarsma’s work also pointed to the extent to which, by 1999, the
horrors of the previous year’s riots in Jakarta had become integrated
into Indonesian art and literature (as well as contributing to a growing
exodus of artists from the country). During the period of rioting,
when many Chinese-Indonesians were attacked, tortured, raped, and
burned alive, Jaarsma used the frog-skin jilbabs to open a dialogue
between ethnic Chinese, who eat frogs, and Muslim Javanese, who
perceive the animal as impure. The theme of giving women a voice
also entered the work of Arahmaiani after she witnessed looted stores
and burning homes where the charred and wounded bodies of
Chinese-Indonesian women of all ages lay. Non Hendratmo, who had
staged an installation in Jakarta a few weeks after the tragedy, was

297 Mella Jaarsma Hi Inlander 1999

iy
298 Amanda Heng Narrating Bodies 1999 299 Kim Soo-Ja Cities on the Move—2727
kilometers, Bottari Truck 1997

only one of a number of Indonesian artists who had relocated to New

York within a year of the riots.
Amanda Heng’s (Singapore; b. 1951) photographic series Narrating
Bodies from 1998—99 (included in both the Brisbane exhibition and
the Seventh Havana Biennial in 2000) was part of a personal quest to
reconnect with her aging mother, trom whom she had become
estranged as a result of her choice of an unconventional artist’s life
within Singapore's traditional and patriarchal society. Her large color
photographs of herself and her mother, which she exhibited for the
most part close up and without context, served as a way of exploring
the mother-daughter relationship, female roles, and the price of forsak-
ing Mother Culture more generally.
Heng, born in Singapore, received her BFA trom Curtin University
of Technology in Perth, Australia, in 1990 and, two years later, organ-
ized a performance titled In Memory Of ... in an abandoned building
on the banks of the Singapore River. Commemorating the Tiananmen
Square uprising of June 1989 in Beijing, she set her work on fire,
462
burning the candles that made up the piece, while reciting in Chinese
the words of courage spoken by the female leader in Tiananmen
Square that had incited the uprising. She also collaborated with other
women artists who met regularly over a four-month period to discuss
issues of identity and their roles as artists. Heng, in summarizing the
complexity of establishing a position as a woman, often refers to a
Confucian saying that at home a woman must first obey her father,
and then her husband, and then her son.A recent installation, Missing,
grew out of her research into, and concern over, reports about the dis-
appearance of girl babies in Asian countries. In the piece, installed in
Canning, Singapore, in 1995, Heng displayed a haunting arrangement
of starched pieces of girls’ clothing collected from friends and neigh-
bors. The installation called forth a powerful critique of female
infanticide and the giving up of female children for adoption 1n some
Asian cultures.
Kim Soo-Ja, born in 1957 1n Taegu, South Korea, but now living in
New York, also addressed issues of identity through a feminist con-
sciousness in a display of domestic bundles and hangings made from
brightly colored Korean textiles and based on traditional bottari
(Korean wrapping cloth usually tied into a bundle for carrying various
household goods). The bundles, filled with clothing and objects of
everyday use, were tightly wrapped with hand-sewn traditional fabrics
associated with significant cultural rituals like marriage, funerals, and
ancestor worship and connected to wrapping as bandaging. Their
bulkiness also evoked connections to body and the traditional carry-
ing cloths associated with travel.“‘I regard the bottari as the body itself,”
Kim Soo-Ja has said.

300 Pinaree Sanpitak

The Egg 1997
 Phe work of the Thai artists Pinaree Sanpitak and Araya Rasdjarm
rearnsook also points to the difficulty of generalizing practices on the
basis of shared gender and/or culture. The arrival of urbanization and
modernization to Thailand in the 1970s did little to transform the
institutions of that traditional Asian patriarchal culture with its stereo
types of submissive femininity. Sanpitak, born in Bangkok in 1961,
received her fine arts degree from Tsukuba University in Japan.“'I real
ized long ago that you cannot change people suddenly, there’s no
point in being aggressive in attitude,’ she has said. “My art tries to
subtly nudge the viewer to receive and be more open-minded.” Her
work has engaged with self-exploration through bodily metaphors
arising from breast, egg, and womb shapes. In a 1997 exhibition called
“egos, breasts, bodies, I etcetera,’ she showed a series of works in
300 acrylic and charcoal on canvas that developed simplified, primitive
female forms based on breasts, wombs, torsos, and hollow vessels.
Rasdjarmrearnsook’s sculptural installations and language more
ageressively confront gender and social issues that include family loss,
female prostitution (itself a culturally taboo subject), insecurity,
and identity.

301 (above and opposite) Shirin Neshat Turbulent 1998

 Considerable overlap of artists was evident 1n the 1999 Brisbane and
Fukuoka exhibitions, and the latter’s curatorial practices also revealed a
concern about the rapid erosion of homogeneous communities and
indigenous culture.As a result, the exhibition brought together artists,
including a number of internationally recognized names, whose work
reflected current concerns with installation, technology, and perform-
ance, and was often mediated by irony, critique, or other avant-garde
strategies, and artists and artisans whose work remained tied to folk
and indigenous traditions. While some installations featured interpre-
tations of folk-style Pakistani truck decorations and indigenous
Bhutanese handicrafts, the work that mainly found its way into
Western reports was, as in the case of all the international shows, that
produced by artists working in familiar contemporary modes.
The awards ceremony at the 48th Venice Biennale in June 1999
confirmed the high visibility of women artists on the international
scene today. In addition to representing a quarter of all the artists,
women were singled out for many individual awards. The Golden
Lion for the best national participation was awarded to Italy’s “Virtual
Pavilion” of artists, all of whom were women: Monica Bonvicini,

405
 Bruna Esposito, Luisa Lambri, Paola Pivi,and Grazia Toder1. The pavil-
ion’s artists were selected by Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, who also
served as the Biennale’s overall director (individual nations select their
own national pavilion’s artists). Toderi (b. 1963) displayed a sequence of
animated videos that retold The Arabian Nights through stylish images
that blended elements of space travel and sports. Bonvicini'’s (b. 1965)
I Believe in the sign of the Things as in that of the Women (1999) consisted of
a wallboard cubicle, the interior of which was covered with lewd
sketches and historical citations that revealed gender bias in architec-
ture. Lambri’s (b. 1969) contribution was taken from her 1999
“Soli-Trac” series, its title a homage to a 1968 performance piece by
the Italian artist Gina Pane. In the Venice installation, Lambri recorded
modular elements and the immaculate deserted interiors of rationalist
architecture in images of longing and oppression.
International awards went to three installations, of which one was
301 the Iranian Shirin Neshat’s Turbulent (1998), a two-channel video
installation in which two projectors represent male and female experi-
ence in traditional Islamic culture. In one, a male singer performs
before an audience of white-shirted men who whistle and cheer
appreciatively as he sings a thirteenth-century poem set to music. As
he bows to the appreciative audience, a wailing, trilling, wordless song
emanates from the solitary black-shrouded figure projected on the
opposite wall. As the male singer stares at the woman, stunned, she
unleashes waves of primal screams and anguished wailing through her
whole body, breaking all the rules of female conduct. “It’s about how
women reach a certain kind of freedom ... how women become
incredibly rebellious and unpredictable in this society, whereas men
end up staying within the conformed way of living,’ says Neshat. Her
piece, part of a trilogy that also includes Rapture (1999) and Fervor
(2000), continued her project of untangling the ideology of Islam
through her artistic practice and addressing issues of gender, nature,
and culture in Islamic society. Yi Bul received an “honorable mention”
at Venice, as did the Finnish video artist E1ja-Liisa Ahtila for her Conso-
lation Service (1999), a compelling portrait of the dissolution of a
marriage and the possibility of forgiveness.
A reading of even a partial group of recent international exhibitions
from a gendered position, such as this, reveals their contribution to the
creation of multiple and diverse spaces through which women’s voices
are being heard today. Although much ofthis history has been hidden
under complex theoretical and political debates, it is one that will surely
contribute greatly to the future of our international visual culture.
466
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Art Gallery, 1974); Annemarie Weyl Carr, 1990); Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen,
“Women Artists in the Middle Ages,” 1098-1179:A Visionary Life (London, 1989); Renaissance women: Linda Nochlin,
Feminist
Art Journal (vol. 5, 1976), pp. 5-9; Barbara Lachman, The Journal of Hildegard of “Why Have There Been No Great Women
Judith Oliver, ““Gothic’ Women and Bingen (New York, 1993); Fiona Bowles and Artists?” in Hess and Baker, Art and Sexual
Merovingian Desert Mothers (Cults of Oliver Davies, eds, Hildegard of Bingen: An Politics; Joan Kelly-Gadol, “Did Women Have
Female Saints), Gesta (vol. 32, no. 2, 1993), Anthology (London, 1990). a Renaissance?” in Bridenthal and Koonz,
pp. 124-34; Lorraine N. Simmons, “The Becoming Visible; Judith C. Brown,
Abbey Church at Fontevraud in the Later Female mytics: Luce Irigaray, “Plato’s “A Women’s Place Was in the Home:
Twelfth Century: Anxiety, Authority and Hystera,’ Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Women’s Work in Renaissance Tuscany” in
Architecture in the Female Spiritual Life,” G. Gill (Ithaca, 1985), discusses the political M. Ferguson, M. Quilligan, and N. Vickers,
Gesta (vol. 30, nos 1 and 2, 1992), pp. 99-106; and psychoanalytic implications of mystical eds, Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse
Jeffrey Hamburger, “Art, Enclosure and the dialogue; see also Caroline Bynum, “*... And ofSexual Difference in Early Modern Europe
Cura Monialium: Prolegomena in the Guise of Woman His Humanity:’ Female Imagery in (Chicago and London, 1986), pp. 206-26;
a Postscript,” Gesta (vol. 30, nos 1 and 2), pp. the Religious Writing of the Later Middle David Herlihy and Christian Klapisch-
108-34; Penelope Johnson, Equal in Monastic Ages” in C. Bynum, S. Harrell and P. Zuber, Tiscans and Their Families (New
Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France Richman, eds, Gender and Religion: On the Haven and London, 1978); lan Maclean,

469
The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge, Household and lineage: F. W. Kent, Caterina dei Vigri: Alban Butler, Lives of
1980); Pamela Joseph Benson, The Invention of Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence the Saints (London, 1842). Iluminata Bembo
the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female (Princeton, 1977); Christine Klapisch-Zuber, is quoted in The Women Artists of Bologna,
Independence in the Literature and Thought of Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy p. 37; accounts of her miracles are in T.
Italy and England (University Park, Pa, 1992); (Chicago, 1985). Bergamini, Caterina La Santa; breve storia di
Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance Santa Caterina Vigri, 1413-1463 (Rovigo, 1970).
(Chicago and London, 1991); Elaine G. The profile portrait: the basic survey and
Rosenthal, “The Position of Women in catalogue is Jean Lipman, “The Florentine Printing in Bologna: A. Sorbelli, Storia
Renaissance Florence: neither Autonomy nor Profile Portrait in the Quattrocento,’ The Art della stampa in Bologna (Bologna, 1929);
Subjection,” in Peter Denley and Caroline Bulletin (vol. 18, no. 1, 1936), pp. §4-102. Sorbelli, Le marche typografiche bolognesi
Elam, eds, Florence and Italy: Renaissance Traditional views of Renaissance portraiture nel secolo XVI (Milan, 1923).
Studies in Honor of Nicolai Rubinstein (London, can be seen in John Pope-Hennessy, The
1988), pp. 369-81; Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Portrait in the Renaissance (Washington, 1966). Women and printing: Evelyn Lincoln,
Schiesari, Refiguring Woman. Perspectives on For a revisionist reading, see Patricia Simons, “Making a good impression: Diana
Gender and the Italian Renaissance (Ithaca and “Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Mantuana’s printing career,’ Renaissance
London, 1991); “Lesbian (In) Visibility in Profile in Renaissance Portraiture,’ History Quarterly (vol. 50, 1997), pp. 1101-47.
Italian Renaissance Culture: Diana and Other Workshop (25, Spring 1988), pp. 4-30, and
Cases of donna con donna,’ Journal of “A Profile of aRenaissance Woman in the Properzia de’ Rossi: Although de’ Rossi
Homosexuality (special double issue on “Gay National Gallery of Victoria,’ Art Bulletin was apparently the only Italian Renaissance
and Lesbian Studies in Art History,’ vol. 27, ofVictoria (vol. 28, 1987), pp. 34-52. The woman working in marble, the Spaniard Luisa
1994), pp. 81-121; Fredrika H.Jacobs, Alberti quotes are in Simons, “Women Roldan (1656-1704) was court sculptor to
Defining the Renaissance Virtuosa: Women Artists in Frames,” p. 12. Charles Il; Women and Art, pp. 8-9.
and the Language ofArt History and Criticism
(Cambridge and New York, 1997). Sofonisba Anguissola: J] Campi e la cultura Emilian painting: The Age of Correggio and
artistica cremonese del Cinquecento (exh. cat., the Carracci: Emilian Painting of the Sixteenth
Female patronage: Catherine King, Musco Civico, Cremona, 1985); Women and Seventeenth Centuries (exh. cat., National
“Medieval and Renaissance Matrons, Italian- Artists: 1550-1950, pp. 106-07; Ilya Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1986); see
style,” Zeitschrift
fiirKunstgeschichte (vol. $5, Perlingieri, Sofonisba Anguissola: The First also, A. W. A. Boschloo, Annibale Carracci in
1992), pp. 372-93; Catherine King, Renaissance Great Woman Artist of the Renaissance (New Bologna: Visible Reality in Art After the Council
Women Patrons, Wives and Widows in Italy York, 1992); Sylvia Ferino-Pagden and of Trent (The Hague, 1974).
c.1300—1550 (Manchester and New York, 1998). Maria Kusche, Sofonisba Anguissola: A
Renaissance Woman (exh. cat., The National Painting and the Counter Reformation:
Guilds: Edgecumbe Staley, The Guilds of Museum of Women in the Arts, Marc Fumaroli, L’Age de |’Eloquence:
Florence (London, 1906); similar structures of Washington, D.C., 1995); Sylvia Ferino- Rhétorique et ‘res litaria’ de la Renaissance au
male and female participation have been Pagden, ed., Sofonisba Anguissola (exh. cat., Seuil de l’Epoque Classique (Paris, 1980).
identified in Florentine confraternities: see Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 1995);
Ronald Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Sofonisba Anguissola e le sue sorelle (exh. cat., Lavinia Fontana: The Age of Correggio and
Renaissance Florence (New York, 1982). Cremona, 1994); Mary D. Garrard, “Here’s the Carracci, see especially Vera Pietrantonio’s
Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and discussion of the work, pp. 132-35. See also
Renaissance historiography: WN. Streuver, the Problem of the Woman Artist,” Our Hidden Heritage, pp. 31-34; Women Artists:
The Language of History in the Renaissance Renaissance Quarterly (vol. 47, Autumn 1550-1950, pp. 111-14;J.Bean and Felice
(Princeton, 1970); Bruni’s remarks are on p. 105; 1994), pp. 556-67; Fredrika Jacobs, Stampfle, eds, Drawings from New York
the Rucellai quote is in Michael BaXandall, “Women’s Capacity to Create: The Unusual Collections I: The Italian Renaissance (New
Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy Case of Sofonisba Anguissola,” Renaissance York, 1965), p. 81; R. Galli, Lavinia Fontana,
(Oxford and New York, 1972), p. 2. Quarterly (vol. 47, Autumn 1994), pittrice, 1552-1614 (Imola, 1940); Felsina
pp- 74-101. Pittrice, vol. 1, pp. 177-79; Eleanor Tufts, “Ms.
Alberti: Leon Battista Alberti, “I libri della Lavinia Fontana from Bologna: A Successful
famiglia” in his Opere volgari (Bari, 1960), Lucia Anguissola: her Portrait of Pietro Sixteenth-Century Portraitist,” Art News
as The Family in Renaissance Florence, trans. Maria is discussed in Women Artists: (vol. 73, 1974), pp. 60-64; Maria Teresa
Renée Neu Watkins (Columbia, S.C., 1969), 1550-1950, pp. 109-10; Flavio Caioli, Cantaro, Lavinia Fontana bolognese: “pittore
pp. 115-16; D. K. Hedrick, “The Ideology of “Antologia d’Artisti: per Lucia Anguissola,” singolare,” 1552-1614 (Milan, 1989).
Ornament: Alberti and the Erotics of Paragone (vol. 277, 1973), pp. 69-73.
Renaissance Urban Design,” Word and Image Elisabetta Sirani: the Otto Kurz quote is
(vol. 3, 1987), pp. 111-37. Titian: Elizabeth Cropper, “The Beauty in Bolognese Drawings in the Royal Library at
of Women: Problems in the Rhetoric of Windsor Castle (London, 1955), p. 7; A.
Perspective: the implications ofillusionism Renaissance Portraiture,” in Ferguson, Emiliani, “Giovan Andrea ed Elisabetta
are explored by Norman Bryson, Vision and Quilligan, and Vickers, Rewriting the Sirani” in Maestri della pittura del
Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven, Renaissance, pp. 175-90; Erwin Panofsky, seicento emiliano (exh. cat., Palazzo
1983); fifteenth-century measurements are Problems in Titian: Mostly Iconographic dell’Archiginnasio, Bologna, 1959), pp.
discussed in Painting and Experience in (New York, 1969). 140-45; A. Manaresi, Elisabetta Sirani
Fifteenth-Century Italy; Samuel Edgerton, (Bologna, 1898); Felsina Pittrice, vol. 2; Our
The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective Hidden Heritage, pp. 81-83; E. Edwards,
(New York, 1975); John White, The Birth 3 THE OTHER RENAISSANCE “Elisabetta Sirani,” Art in America (August,
and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (London, 1957). 1929), pp. 242-46. The source for Sirani’s
Women artists in Bologna: Laura Ragg, Portia is pointed out in Women Artists:
Embroidery: The Subversive Stitch, pp. The Women Artists of Bologna (London, 1907); 1550-1950; the theme is also discussed in
79-80. The Obstacle Race, pp. 208-26. Jan Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth

470
and Its Transformations (Oxford, 1982); Orazio Gentileschi: R. Spear, Caravaggio Roy Strong, The English Renaissance Miniature
Old Mistresses, p. 27, discusses the and His Followers (exh. cat., Cleveland (London, 1983), pp. 4-64; Strong, Gloriana:
sadomasochistic element. The Plutarch Museum of Art, 1971); R. Longhi, “Gentileschi The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London,
quote is from “Life of Marcus Brutus,” padre e figlia,’ L’Arte (vol. 19, 1916), pp. 1987), pp. 55-57; Erna Auerbach, Tidor
Lives, vol. 6, p. 194. 245-314; Alfred Moir, The Italian Followers of Artists (London, 1954), pp. 51-75; Simone
Caravaggio (Cambridge, Mass., 1967). Bergmans, “The Miniatures of Levina
Artists’ funerals: C. de Tolnay, Michelangelo, Teerlinc,’ Burlington Magazine (vol. 64,
vol. 4 (Princeton, 1954), p. 17; Sirani’s is Female Heroics and female January—June 1934), pp. 232-36. For the
described in The Women Artists of Bologna, subjugation: Yael Evan, “The Loggia dei cult of Elizabeth see Stephen Greenblatt,
pp. 229-36. Lanzi: A Showcase of Female Subjugation,” Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to
in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds, Shakespeare (Chicago and London, 1980);
Artemisia Gentileschi: R. Ward Bissell, The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art Frances Yates, Astrea: The Imperial Themes
“Artemisia Gentileschi: A New Documented History (New York, 1992), pp. 127-37; in the Sixteenth Century (London and
Chronology,’ Art Bulletin (vol. 50, 1968), Margaret D. Carroll, “The Erotics of Boston, 1975).
pp. 153-68; for the discussion of artists’ Absolutism: Rubens and the Mystification
personalities and further information on of Sexual Violence,” Ibid., pp. 140-59. Women and the Reformation: Roland
Tassi see Rudolf and Margaret Wittkower, Bainton, Women and the Reformation
Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct (Minneapolis, 1971); Wayne E. Franits,
ofArtists (New York, 1963), pp. 162ff, and 4 DOMESTIC GENRES AND Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in
Women Artists: 1550-1950, pp. 118-24; The WOMEN PAINTERS IN NORTHERN Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Cambridge
Obstacle Race has an entire chapter on EUROPE and New York, 1993); Martha Hollander,
Gentileschi; Our Hidden Heritage, pp. 58-69. “The Divided Household of Nicolaes Maes,”
A more recent publication is Mary Garrard, Key source books on the north: Ingvar Word and Image (vol. 10, April/June 1994), pp.
Artemisia Gentileschi: The Female Hero in Bergstrom, Dutch Still-Life Painting in the 138-55; Ilja M. Veldman, “Lessons for Ladies:
Italian Baroque Art (Princeton, 1989). Susanna Seventeenth Century (New York, 1956); Jakob A Selection of Sixteenth and Seventeenth-
and the Elders: Garrard, “Artemisia and Rosenberg, Seymour Slive, and E. H. Ter Century Dutch Prints,” Semiolus (vol. 16, no.
Susanna” in Broude and Garrard, Feminism Kuile, Dutch Art and Architecture, 1600 to 1800 2/3, 1986), pp. 113-27; Elise Lawton Smith,
and Art History, pp. 147-71. Judith Decapitating (Middlesex, 1966); Walther Bernt, The “Women and the Moral Argument of Lucas
Holofernes: the lost Rubens painting is Netherlandish Painters of the Seventeenth van Leyden’s Dance Around the Golden Calf,’
discussed by Frima Fox Hofrichter, Century (London, 1970); Svetlana Alpers, The Art History (vol. 15, September 1992),
“Artemisia Gentileschi’s Uffizi Judith and Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth pp. 296-315.
a Lost Rubens,” Rutgers Art Review (vol. 1, Century (Chicaco, 1983); Bob Haak, The
1980). pp. 9-15. Self-Portrait as the Allegory Golden Age: Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Dutch versus Italian Renaissance art:
of Painting: M. Levey, “Notes on the Royal Century (New York, 1984); Christopher Michelangelo is quoted by Alpers, “Art
Collection: II, Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Self- Brown, Images of aGolden Past (New York, History and Its Exclusions: The Example of
Portrait’ at Hampton Court,” Burlington 1984); Simon Schama, The Embarrassment Dutch Art” in Broude and Garrard, Feminism
Magazine (vol. 104, 1962), pp. 79-80; Mary ofRiches:An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in and Art History, p. 194. The Naomi Schor
Garrard, “Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self- the Golden Age (New York, 1987). Major quote is from Reading in Detail: Aesthetics
Portrait as the Allegory of Painting,” Art exhibition catalogues: E. de Jongh, Tot Lering and the Feminine (New York and London,
Bulletin (vol. 62, March 1980), pp. 97-112; en Vermak (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1976); 1987), p. 4.
Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The A. Blankert et al., Gods, Saints and Heroes:
Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt Anna Maria Schurman: Women and Art,
(Princeton, 1989); Elizabeth Cropper, “New (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., pp. 30-31; The Embarrassment of Riches,
Documents for Artemisia Gentileschi’s Life 1980); Peter Sutton, Masters of Seventeenth- pp. 410-12.
in Florence,’ The Burlington Magazine (vol. Century Dutch Genre Painting (Philadephia
135, November 1993), pp. 760-61; John T. Museum of Art, 1984). Marriage and domesticity: The
Spike, “Artemisia Gentileschi, Casa Embarrassment of Riches, ch. 6. For popular
Buonarroti, Florence,’ The Burlington Elisabeth Scepens: La Miniature flammande emblems see Jacob Cats, Alle de Werken
Magazine (vol. 133, October 1991), pp. au temps de la cour de Bourgogne (Paris and (Amsterdam, 1659). Cats’s Magdeplicht (The
732-33; Rodney Palmer, “The Gentler Sex Brussels, 1927); The Obstacle Race, p. 166. Duties of aMaiden) and van Beverwijck’s
and Violence: Artemisia Gentileschi at the commentary on the female sex are quoted
Casa Buonarroti,’ Apollo (vol. 134, October Caterina van Hemessen: Our Hidden and taken up in The Embarrassment of
1991), pp- 277-80; Nancy Stapen, “Who Are Heritage, pp. 51-53; Osten and Horst Vey, Riches, p. 400 and pp. 418—20 respectively;
the Women Old Masters?,’ Art News Painting and Sculpture in Germany and the Schama, “Wives and Wantons: Versions of
(March 1994), pp. 87-94. Netherlands: 1500-1600 (Harmondsworth, Womanhood in Seventeenth-Century
1969); Simone Bergmans, “Le probleme Dutch Art,” Oxford Art Journal (April 1980),
Judith: Yael Evan, “Mantegna’s Uffizi Judith: Jan van Hemessen, monogrammiste de pp. 5-13; Pieter van Thiel, “Poor Parents,
The Masculinization of the Female Hero,” Brunswick,” Revue belge d’archéologie et Rich Children and Family Saying Grace:
Kunsthistorisk Tidskrift (vol. 61, 1992), pp. d’histoire de l’art (vol. 24, Antwerp, 1955), pp. Two Related Aspects of the Iconography of
8—20; Mira Friedman, “The Metamorphosis 133-57; Bergmans, “Note complémentaire a Late Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century
of Judith,” Jewish Art (vol. 12, 1986-87), l’étude des De Hemessen, de van Amstel et Dutch Domestic Morality,” Semiolus:
pp. 225-46; Elena Cilette, “Patriarchal du monogrammiste de Brunswick,” Revue Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art
Ideology in the Renaissance Iconography of belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l'art (vol. 27, (vol. 17, 1987), pp. 90-149. The disorderly
Judith,’ in Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Antwerp, 1958), pp. 77-83. woman is the subject of Natalie Zemon
Schiesari, Refiguring Woman: Perspectives Davis’s important essay “Women on Top,”
on Gender and the Italian Renaissance Levina Teerlinc: Women Artists: 1550-1950, in Society and Culture in Early Modern
(Ithaca, 1991), pp. 35-70. pp. 102-04; Our Hidden Heritage, pp. 43-45; France (Stanford, 1975).

471
Cloth production in Leiden and of European Still-life Painting (Paris, 1959). Colonel M. H. Grant, Rachel Ruysch
Haarlem: Linda Stone, “From Cloth to Important exhibition catalogues include 1664-1750 (Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, 1956);
Clothing: Depictions of Textile Production Stilleben in Europa (Westfalisches R. Renraw, “The Art of Rachel Ruysch,”
and Textiles in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landesmuseum ftir Kunst und Connoisseur (London, 1933), pp. 397-99.
Art,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation Kulturgeschichte, Munster/Baden-Baden,
(University of California, Berkeley, 1980); the 1979) and E. de Jongh et al., Dutch Still-life
discussion of emblematic literature equating Painting (Auckland City Art Gallery, New 5 AMATEURS AND ACADEMICS:
weaving and copulation is on p. 139. Zealand, 1983); other women associated with A NEW IDEOLOGY OF FEMININITY
flower painting are Margarethe de Heer IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND
Susanna van Steenwijck-Gaspoel: Stone, (active in the 1650s), Margaretha van
“From Cloth to Clothing,” p . 69. Godewijk, and Eltje de Vlieger; for mention Key source books on the eighteenth
of others see The Obstacle Race, pp. 227-49, century: Edmond and Jules de Goncourt,
Judith Leyster: The Proposition is discussed and W. T. Stearns, The Influence of Leyden on The Woman of the Eighteenth Century, trans.J.
at length in Frima Fox Hofrichter, “Judith Botany in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth LeClerg and R. Roeder (London, 1928, first
Leyster’s Proposition: Between Virtue and Centuries (Leiden, 1961); the Boerhaave quote publ. 1862); Michael Levy, Rococo to Revolution
Vice” in Broude and Garrard, Feminism is in The Embarrassment of Riches, p. 236. (New York and Washington, 1966); Robert
and Art History, pp. 173-82; Frima Fox Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth-
Hofrichter, Judith Leyster: AWoman Painter Clara Peeters: Women Artists: 1550-1950, Century Art (Princeton, 1967); Derek Jarrett,
in Holland’s Golden Age (Doornspiyk, The p. 33, identifies Peeters’s game piece as the England in the Age of Hogarth (London,
Netherlands, 1989); P. Biesboer and J. Welu, first dated example of that type; and pp. 1974); Hugh Honour, Neo-Classicism
eds, Judith Leyster: ADutch Master and Her 131-33; Curt Benedict, “Osias Beert, un (Harmondsworth, 1977); Michael Freid,
World (New Haven and New York, 1993). peintre oublié de natures mortes,’ L’Amour de Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and
l’art (vol. 19, Paris, 1938), pp. 307-14; Marie- Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley and
Gertruid Roghman: The Embarrassment of Louise Hairs, “Osias Beert l’Ancien peintre Los Angeles, 1980); Thomas Crow, Painters
Riches, p. 417; Linda Stone-Ferrier, Dutch de fleurs,” Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris
Prints of Daily Life: Mirrors of Life or Masks de l’art (vol. 20, Antwerp, 1951), pp. 237-51. (New Haven, 1985); Albert Boime, Art in an
of Morals? (exh. cat., The Spencer Museum of Other women active in flower painting at the Age of Revolution: 1750-1800 (Chicago and
Art, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, time include Anna Janssens, Maria-Theresia, London, 1987); Jean Starobinski et al., Diderot
1983), pp. 9-60; Clifford Ackley, Printmaking Anna-Maria, and Francisca-Catharina, the et l’Art de Boucher a David (exh. cat., Hotel de
in the Age of Rembrandt (exh. cat., Boston three daughters of the painter Jan Philips van la Monnaie, Paris, 1985); Gill Perry and
Museum of Fine Arts, 1981), p. 166, points Thielen, and Frans Ykens’s niece, Catharina. Michael Rossington, eds, Femininity and
out their rarity outside of book illustration; Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and
Martha Moffitt Peacock, “Geertruydt Tulipomania: Wilfred Blunt, Tilipomania Culture (Manchester and New York, 1994);
Roghman and the Female Perspective in (Harmondsworth, 1950); N. W. Posthumus, Vivien Jones, ed., Women in the Eighteenth
17th-Century Dutch Genre Imagery,” “The Tulip Mania in Holland in the Years Century: Constructions ofFemininity (London
Woman's
Art Journal (vol. 14, Fall/Winter 1636 and 1637,” Journal of Economic History and New York, 1990).
1993-94), pp- 3-10. (vol. 1, Atlanta, 1929), pp. 435-65; Peter Coats,
Flowers in History (New York, 1970), pp. Académie Royale: Octave Fidiére, Les
Vermeer: Lawrence Gowing, Vermeer 195-209. Femmes Artistes a l’Académie Royale de
(London and New York, 1970); Edward Peinture et de Sculpture (Paris, 1885); James
Snow, A Study of Vermeer (Berkeley, 1979). Maria Merian: Women Artists: 1550-1950, Henry Rubin, Eighteenth-Century French Life-
pp. 153-55; The Art of Botanical Illustration, Drawing (exh. cat., Princeton University,
Lacemaking: Mrs. Bury Palliser, History pp. 127-29; Jan Gerrit van Gelder, Dutch 1977).
of Lace (London, 1910), pp. 258-60. Drawings and Prints (New York, 1959);
Gertrude Lendorff, Maria Sibylla Merian, Rosalba Carriera: Vittorio Malamani,
Erasmus of Rotterdam: Christian 1647-1717, ihr Leben und thr Werk (Basel, Rosalba Carriera (Bergamo, 1910); Gabrielle
Humanism and the Reformation. Selected 1955); Merian, Metamorphosis Insectorum Gatto, “Per la Cronologia di Rosalba
Writings of Erasmus (New York, 1987). Surinamensium (Amsterdam, 1705); Merian, Carriera,’ Arte Veneta (Venice, 1971); Women
Erucarum ortus alimentum et parodoxa and Art, pp. 20-22; Our Hidden Heritage, pp.
Botanical illustration: Wilfred Blunt, The metamorphosis, in qua origo, pabulum, 107—10; Bernardina Sani, Rosalba Carriera
Art of Botanical Illustration (London, 1950); transformatio, nec non tempus, locus et proprietater (Turin, 1989). Carriera’s remark about Louis
Blunt, Flower Books and Their Illustrators erucarum vermium, papilionum, phaelaenarum, XV is quoted in The Woman's Art Show,
(Cambridge, 1950); Agnes Arber, “From muscarum, aliorumque, hujusmodi exsanguinium 1550-1970, p. 14.
Medieval Herbalism to the Birth of Modern animalculorum exhibenter ... (Amsterdam,
Botany” in Edgar Underwood, ed., Science, 1717); “A Surinam Portfolio,” Natural History Pastel: Robert Graf, Das Pastell im 18.
Medicine and History: Essays on the evolution of (December 1962), pp. 28-41; the Goethe Jahrhundert: Zur Vergegenwartigung eines
scientific thought and medical practice written in quote is on p. 32. Mediums (Munich, 1982).
honor of Charles Singer (Oxford, 1953), pp.
317-306; the Brunfels and Cordus quotes Maria van Oosterwyck: Women Artists: Antoine Watteau: Watteau (exh. cat.,
are on pp. 322 and 326. 1550-1950, pp. 145-46; Homan Potterton, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.,
Dutch Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century 1984).
Still-life and flower painting in the Paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland
north: Edith Greindl, Les Peintres flamands de (Dublin, 1986), nos 125 and 126; The Golden The Crozat circle artists are discussed in
nature morte (Brussels, 1956); Marie-Louise Age, p. 454. Painters and Public Life, pp. 39-40.
Hairs, The Flemish Flower Painters in the
Seventeenth Century (Brussels, 1985); The Rachel Ruysch: Women Artists: 1550-1950, Sophie Chéron: Women and Art, p. 44;
Obstacle Race, ch. 12; Charles Sterling, History pp. 158-60; Our Hidden Heritage, pp. 99— 101; The Obstacle Race, pp. 72-74.

472
The saloniéres: Joan Landes, Women and the Catherine Read: Victoria Manners, Bourgeois Revolution of 1789: Artists,
Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution “Catherine Read: the ‘English Rosalba,” Mothers and Makers of(Art) History,’ in Gill
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1988); Vera Lee, The Reign Connoisseur (London, December 1931), Perry and Michael Rossington, eds, Femininity
of Women in Eighteenth-Century France pp- 376-86; Women and Art, p. 71. The Abbé and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century
Art and
(Cambridge, Mass., 1975); Ann Bermingham, Grant’s comment on Read and history paint- Culture (Manchester and New York, 1994),
“The Aesthetics of Ignorance: the ing 1s in Manners, “Catherine Read,” p. 380. pp. 184-203. Margaret Darrow, “French
Accomplished Woman in the Culture of Noblewomen and the New Domesticity,
Connoisseurship,’ Oxford Art Journal Académie de Saint-Luc: for a discussion 1750-1850,” Feminist Studies (vol. 5, Baltimore,
(vol. 16, 1993), pp. 3-20. of women in this academy see Women Artists: Spring 1979), pp. 41-65, suggests that in the
1550-1950, pp. 36-38; andJ. Guiffrey, late eighteenth century noblewomen by the
Marie Loir: Women Artists: 1550-1950, pp. “Histoire de l’Académie de Saint-Luc,’ score repudiated their traditional “careers” as
167-68; P. Lafond, “Alexis Loir-Marianne Archives de l’art francais (Paris, 1925). court ladies and saloniéres in favor of roles
Loir,’ Réunion des Soctétés des Beaux-Arts des as wives and mothers.
Départements (Paris, 1892). Angelica Kauffmann: Angelica Kauffmann
und ihre Zeitgenossen (exh. cat., Vorarlberger Anna Vallayer-Coster: M. Roland-Michel,
Fran¢ois Boucher: Francois Boucher, Landesmuseum, Bregenz, 1968); Women and Anne Vallayer- Coster: 1744-1818 (Paris, 1970);
1703-1770 (exh. cat., The Metropolitan Art, pp. 72-75; Our Hidden Heritage, pp. Roland-Michel, “A propos d’un tableau
Museum ofArt, New York, 1986); Eunice 117-21; Women Artists: 1550-1950, pp. 174-78; retrouvé de Vallayer-Coster,’ Bulletin de la
Lipton, “Women, Pleasure and Painting (e.g. Victoria Manners and G. C. Williamson, Société de I’Histoire de l’Art Frangais (1965),
Boucher),” Genders (vol. 7, Spring 1990), Angelica Kauffmann, R.A.: Her Life and Her pp. 185-90; Women Artists: 1550-1950, pp.
pp. 66-69. Works (London, 1924); Dorothy Moulton 179-84; Women and Art, p. 45.
Mayer, Angelica Kauffmann, R. A.: 1741-1807
The Enlightenment: Abby Kleinbaum, (Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, 1972); Adélaide Labille-Guiard: Anne Marie
“Women in the Age of Light” in Bridenthal Robert Rosenblum, “The Origin of Painting: Passez, Adélaide Labille-Guiard (Paris, 1973);
and Koonz, Becoming Visible, pp. 217-35; A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Roger Portalis, “Adélaide Labille-Guiard,”
David Williams, “The Politics of Feminism Classicism,” Art Bulletin (New York, Gazette des Beaux-Arts (Lausanne, 1901), pp.
in the French Enlightenment” in Peter December 1957), pp. 279-90; Pindar 352-67; Portalis, Adélaide Labille-Guiard
Hughes and David Williams, eds, The Varied is quoted in Adeline Hartcup, Angelica: The (Paris, 1902); Women Artists: 1550-1950, pp.
Pattern: Studies in the Eighteenth Century Portrait of an Eighteenth-Century Artist 185-87; Women and Art, pp. 45—48. Portrait of
(Toronto, 1971), pp. 338-48; Arthur (London, 1954), p. 133; Angela Rosenthal, Madame Adélaide: Jean Cailleux, “Portrait of
Wilson, “‘Treated Like Imbecile Children’ “Angelica Kauffmann Ma(s)king Claims,” Art Madame Adeélaide of France, Daughter of
(Diderot): The Enlightenment and the History (vol. 15, March 1992), pp. 38-55; Gill Louis XV,” Burlington Magazine (vol. 3,
Status of Women” in Paul Fritz and Richard Perry, ““The British Sappho’: Borrowed March 1969), supp. i-v1.
Morton, eds, Woman in the Eighteenth Identities and the Representation of Women
Century and Other Essays (Toronto and Artists in Late Eighteenth-Century British Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun: David Robb,
Sarasota, 1976), pp. 89-104; Samia Spencer, Art,” Oxford Art Journal (vol. 18, 1995s), pp. ed., Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun (exh. cat.,
ed., French Women and the Age of 44-55; Natalie Boymel Kampen, “The Muted Kimball Art Museum, Forth Worth, 1982);
Enlightenment (Bloomington, 1984); Erica Other: Gender and Morality in Augustan Women and Art, pp. 48-51; Women Artists:
Rand, “Diderot and Girl-Group Erotics,” Rome and Eighteenth-Century Europe,’ in 1550-1950, pp. 190-94; Our Hidden Heritage,
Eighteenth-Century Studies (vol. 25, Summer Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds, The pp. 127-32; Edgar Munhall, “Vigée Le Brun’s
1992), pp. 495-516; Baron d’Holbach is Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History Marie Antoinette: The Beauty of the Head
quoted in Susan Okin, Women in Western (New York, 1992), pp. 161-69; Wendy Wassyng That Rolled,” Art News (vol. 82, January
Political Thought (Princeton, 1979), Roworth, ed., Angelica Kauffmann: A Continental 1983), pp. 106-08; Brooks Adams, “Privileged
pp. 103-04. Artist in Georgian England (London, 1992). Portraits: Vigée Le Brun,” Art in America
(vol. 70, November 1982), pp. 75-80; Vigée-
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Joel Schwarz, Eighteenth-century aesthetic theories: Lebrun, Memoires, trans. L. Strachey (New
The Sexual Politics ofJean-Jacques Rousseau Louis Hautecoeur, “Le Sentimentalisme dans York, 1903); Paula Rea Radisich, “ Que peut
(Chicago, 1984); R. L. Archer, ed., Jean-Jacques la peinture francaise de Greuze a David,” definir les femmes?: Vigée-Lebrun’s Portraits of
Rousseau: His Educational Theories Selected from Gazette des Beaux-Arts (Lausanne, 1909), pp. an Artist,” Eighteenth-Century Studies (vol. 25,
Emile, Julie and Other Writings (Woodbury, 159-76 and pp. 269-86; Candace Clements, Summer 1992), pp. 441-67; Mary D. Sheriff,
N.Y., 1964); Women in Western Political “The Academy and the Other: Les Graces and “Woman? Hermaphrodite? History Painter?
Thought, pp. 99-196. His remark about Le Genie Gallant,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies On the Self-Imaging of Elisabeth Vigée-
women and genius is quoted in Carol (vol. 25, Summer 1992), pp. 469-94; see also Lebrun,” The Eighteenth Century (vol. 35, no.
Duncan, “Happy Mothers and Other New Painters and Public Life. Diderot’s attack on 1, 1994), pp. 3-25; Elisabeth Louise Vigée-
Ideas in Eighteenth-Century French Art” Boucher is quoted in Absorption and Lebrun, The Memoirs of Elisabeth Vigee Lebrun
in Broude and Garrard, Feminism and Art Theatricality, p. 40. (London, 1989); the poem is on p. 45. Portrait
History, p. 213; his comments on women and of Marie Antoinette with Her Children: the most
needlework are quoted in The Subversive The cult of happy mothers: the complete discussion is in Joseph Baillio,
Stitch, p. 124. pioneering article on this subject remains “Marie-Antoinette et ses enfants par Mme.
Carol Duncan’s “Happy Mothers and Vigée LeBrun,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts (vol.
The amateur tradition is discussed in The Other New Ideas,” pp. 202-19; D. G. 97, March 1981), pp. 34-41, and (vol. 97, May
Obstacle Race, pp. 280-91. Charlton, New Images ofthe Natural in France 1981), pp. §2—60; the criticism in Mémoires
(Cambridge, 1984), pp. 135-77; Mary Sheriff, Secrétes is quoted on p. 40. Jean Cailleux,
Mary Delaney: The Obstacle Race, p. 291. “Fragonard’s Erotic Mothers and the Politics “Royal Portraits of Madame Vigée-
of Reproduction,” in Lynn Hunt, ed., Eroticism LeBrun and Mme. Labille-Guiard,” Burlington
Anne Seymour Damer: Women and Art, and the Body Politics (Baltimore, 1991), Magazine (March 1969), pp. 1-6, discusses
pp. 76-77. pp. 14-40; Gen Day, “Women and the the two portraits exhibited in 1787.

473
Marguérite Gérard: Women Artists: Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers London, 1995). The letter to the Board of
1550-1950, pp. 197-200; Women and Art, (Princeton, 1984); H. W. Janson and Robert Directors of the Pennsylvania Academy is in
pp. §1-52; Jeanne Doin, “Marguérite Gérard Rosenblum, Nineteenth-Century Art (New the Collection of the Archives of the
(1761-1837), Gazette des Beaux-Arts York, 1984); Kenneth Bendiner, An Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
(Lausanne, 1912), pp. 429-52. Introduction to Victorian Painting (New Haven Philadelphia
and London, 1985); Marcia Pointon, Naked
Women and the French Revolution: Authority: The Body in Western Painting The cult of True Womanhood: Carroll
Thomas Crow, “The Oath of the Horatii: 1830-1908 (Cambridge and New York, 1990); Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of
Painting and pre-Revolutionary Radicalism Stephen F. Eisenman, ed., Nineteenth-Century Love and Ritual,’ Disorderly Conduct, pp.
in France,’ Art History (vol. 1, December Art:A Critical History (London, 1994); Linda §3-76; Janet Woolf, “The Culture of Separate
1978), pp. 424-71; The Age of Revolution: Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Spheres: The Role of Culture in Nineteenth-
French Painting 1774-1830 (exh. cat., The Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (London Century Public and Private Lives,” in
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and New York, 1989); Marcia Pointon, Naked Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and
1975); Scott Lyle, “The Second Sex Authority: The Body in Western Painting, Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990),
(September, 1793), Journal of Modern History 1830-1908 (Cambridge and New York, 1990); pp- 12-33. For the Victorian enshrinement
(March 1955), pp. 14-26; Ruth Graham, Deborah Cherry, Beyond the Frame: Feminism of women in the home see Visions of Victorian
“Rousseau’s Sexism Revolutionized” in Fritz and Visual Culture, Britain 1850-1900 (London Womanhood, p. $0.
and Morton, Woman in the Eighteenth and New York, 2000).
Century, pp. 127-39; Elizabeth Raca, “The Women exhibitors in Great Britain,
Women’s Rights Movement in the French Women in the nineteenth century: 1840-1900: Painting Women; see also
Revolution,” Science and Society (Spring 1952), Charlotte Elizabeth Yeldham, Women Artists Canvassing. For the Society of Female Artists
pp- 151-74; Olwen Hufton, “Women in in Nineteenth-Century England and France and the Langham Place Circle see Painting
Revolution 1789-1796,” Past and Present (New York and London, 1984); Nancy F. Women, pp. 8-9. The quote about “woman’s
(November 1971), pp. 90-108; M. Gutwirth, Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s power” is in Visions of Victorian Womanhood,
The Tivilight of the Goddess, Women and Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New p. 50. The Englishwoman’s Review is quoted in
Representation in the French Revolutionary Era Haven and London, 1977); Carroll Smith- Painting Women, p. 10.
(New Brunswick, N.J., 1992); Erica Rand, Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of
“Depoliticizing Women: Female Agency, the Gender in Nineteenth-Century America (New Barbara Bodichon: The Woman's Art Show,
French Revolution, and the Art of Boucher York, 1985); Deborah Cherry, Painting p. 51; Woman and Art, p. 66; K. Perry, Barbara
and David,” Genders (vol. 7, Spring 1990), pp. Women: Victorian Women Artists (exh. cat., Leigh Smith Bodichon 1827-1891
47-68; Vivian Cameron, “Political Exposures: Rochdale Art Gallery, Lancashire, 1987, and (Cambridge, 1991).
Sexuality and Caricature in the French London and New York, 1993); Eleanor Tufts,
Revolution,” in Hunt, Eroticism and the Body ed., American Women Artists: 1830-1930 (exh. Edith and Jessica Hayllar: Christopher
Politic, pp. 90-107; Lynn Hunt, “The Many cat., The National Museum of Women in Wood, “The Artistic Family Hayllar,”
Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political the Arts, Washington, D.C., 1987); Elaine Connoisseur (April 1974, part 1; May 1974,
Pornography and the Problem ofthe Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, part 2); two other sisters, Mary and Kate,
Feminine in the French Revolution,” in Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New also painted.
Hunt, Eroticism and the Body Politic, pp. York, 1985); Representations: Special Issue on
108-30; the Chaumette quote is in Sheriff, Sexuality and the Social Body in the Nineteenth Clementina, Lady Hawarden: Graham
“Woman? Hermaphrodite? Histery Painter? Century (Berkeley, Spring 1986); Catherine Ovenden, ed., Clementina, Lady Hawarden
On the Self-Imaging of Elisabeth Gallogher and Thomas Laqueur, eds, (London and New York, 1974).
Vigée-Lebrun,” p. 7. Nineteenth-Century American Women Artists
(exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Hannah Culwick: Liz Stanley, ed., The
Mary Wollstonecraft’s important response Art, New York, 1976); Ellen Moers, Literary Diaries of Hannah Culwick: Victorian
to the ideology of the subordination of Women (New York, 1963); Pamela Gerrish Maidservant (London, 1984).
women developed by French writers is Nunn, ed., Canvassing: Recollections by Six
discussed by Cora Kaplan, “Wild Nights: Victorian Women Artists (London, 1986); Joan Rebecca Solomon: The Woman's Art
Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism” in Formations N. Burstein, Victorian Education and the Ideal of Show, p. 63; Pamela Gerrish Nunn,
of Pleasure (London, 1983), pp. 15-33. Womanhood (New Brunswick, 1984); Barbara “Rebecca Solomon,” in The Solomon Family
Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism of Painters (exh. cat., Geffrye Museum,
Women artists after the Revolution: and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century London, 1985).
the work ofindividual artists is catalogued (London, 1983); Susan Casteras, Visions of
in Women Artists: 1550-1950, pp. 24-30; Victorian Womanhood in English Art (London Emily Osborn: Women Artists: 1550-1950,
statistics about women’s Salon participation and Toronto, 1987); Lynda Nead, Myths of p- 228; The Woman’s Art Show, p. 60; James
are on p. 46; Gen Doy, Women and Visual Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Dafforne, “British Artists: Their Style
Culture in Nineteenth-Century France, Britain (Oxford, 1988); Deborah Cherry and and Character, No. LXXV—Emily Mary
1800-1852 (Leicester, 1998). Griselda Pollock, “Woman as Sign in Pre- Osborn,” Art Journal (vol. 26, London, 1864),
Raphaelite Literature: A Study of the pp- 261-63.
Representation of Elizabeth Siddall,” Art
6 SEX, CLASS, AND POWER IN History (vol. 7, June 1984), pp. 206-27; Prostitution: the comment in the
VICTORIAN ENGLAND Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Victorian Women Artists Westminster Review is quoted in Visions of
(London, 1987); Jan Marsh and Gerrish Victorian Womanhood, p. 131; representations
Key source books on the nineteenth Nunn, Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite of prostitution are the subject of Myths
century: Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Movement (London, 1989); Tamar Garb, Sisters of Sexuality.
Society (London, 1981); Peter Gay, The of the Brush (New Haven and London, 1994);
Education of the Senses: Victoria to Freud (New Janis Bergman-Carton, The Woman ofIdeas in The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and
York, 1984); T. J. Clark, The Painting ofModern French Art, 1830-1848 (New Haven and women: Elaine Shefer, “Deverell, Rossette,

474
Siddal, and the Bird in the Cage,’ The Art With the Beast: Animals, Pain and Humanity African-American Quilts: Gladys-Marie
Bulletin (vol. 67, September 1985), in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore, 1980). Fry, Stitched from the Soul: Slave Quilts from the
pp. 437-48; Laurel Bradley, “Elizabeth Elizabeth Blackwell and the comparisons Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1990); Eva
Siddal: Drawn Into the Pre-Raphaelite drawn between women and animals are Ungar Grudin, Stitching Memories: African-
Circle,’ Museum Studies (vol. 18, 1992), discussed in The Old Brown Dog; the American Story Quilts (Williamstown,
pp. 136—-45ff.; Elaine Shefer, Birds, Cages and Pansy quote is on p. 198. Mass., 1990).
Women in Victorian and Preraphaelite Art
(New York, 1990). Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler): Lilly Martin Spencer: Lilly Martin Spencer,
Women Artists: 1550-1950, pp. 249-50; Paul 1822-1902: The Joys of Sentiment, introduction
Rosa Bonheur: Our Hidden Heritage, Usherwood and Jenny Spencer-Smith, eds, by R. Bolton-Smith and W. H. Truettner
pp. 147-57; Women Artists: 1550-1950, Lady Butler, Battle Artist 1846-1933 (exh. cat. (exh. cat., National Collection of Fine Arts,
pp- 223— 25; Theodore Stanton, ed., National Army Museum, London, 1987); Washington, D. C., 1973); Spencer’s letter
Reminiscences of Rosa Bonheur (New York, Matthew Lalumia, “Lady Elizabeth to her mother is quoted in Women and Art,
1976; reprint of London 1910 edn); Dore Thompson Butler in the 1870s,” Woman's p. 105; Helen Lanza, “Lilly Martin Spencer:
Ashton and Denise Browne Hare, Rosa Art Journal (vol. 4, Spring/Summer 1983), Genre, Aesthetics, and the Gender in the
Bonheur:A Life and a Legend (New York, pp. 9-14; critical responses are quoted in Work of aNineteenth-Century American
1981); Rosa Bonheur, “Fragments of my Lady Butler, p. 36; Ruskin’s evaluation in Woman Artist,” Athanon (vol. 9, 1990), pp.
Autobiography,” Magazine ofArt (vol. 26, “Academy Notes, 1875” is in E. T. Cook 37-45; David Lubin, “Lilly Martin Spencer’s
1902), pp. 531-36; Anna Klumpke, Rosa and A. Wedderburn, eds, The Works ofJohn Domestic Genre Painting in Antebellum
Bonheur, sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris, 1908); Albert Ruskin, vol. 14 (London, 1904), pp. 308-09; America,” in his Picturing a Nation:Art and
Boime, “The Case of Rosa Bonheur: Why for a more general discussion of Ruskin and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America
Should a Woman Want to be More Like a women artists see Pamela Gerrish Nunn, (New Haven and London, 1994); the quote
Man?,” Art History (vol. 4, December 1981), “Ruskin’s Patronage of Women Artists,” about her work is on p. 162.
pp. 384-409; Rosalia Shriver, Rosa Bonheur Woman’s Art Journal (vol. 2, Fall 1981/ Winter
(Philadelphia, 1982); the Daily News quote is 1982), pp. 8-13; responses to Thompson’s Studying art abroad: May Alcott, Studying
reprinted in Ms. EF Lepelle De Bois-Gallais, nomination for Royal Academy membership Art Abroad (Boston, 1879); The Journal of
Memoir of Mademoiselle Rosa Bonheur, trans.J. are quoted in Lady Butler, p. 39. Anna Lea Marie Bashkirtseff, introduction by Roszika
Parry (New York, 1857, pp. 45-47; Whitney Merritt’s comments on Thompson are Parker and Griselda Pollock (new edn,
Chadwick, “The Fine Art of Gentling: quoted in The Woman’s Art Show, p. 58. London, 1985). Harriet Hosmer’s letter is
Horses, Women and Rosa Bonheur in quoted in Phoebe Hanaford, Women ofthe
Victorian England,” in The Body Imaged: Henrietta Ward: Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Century (Boston, 1877), p. 269; Mary Cassatt’s
The Human Form and Visual Culture Since the “The Case History of aWoman Artist: remark is quoted in Nancy Hale, Mary
Renaissance, eds Kathleen Adler and Marcia Henrietta Ward,” Art History (vol. 1, Cassatt: A Biography of the Great American
Pointon (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 89-107; September 1978), pp. 293-308. Painter (New York, 1975), p. 165; Griselda
James Saslow, “Disagreeably Hidden: Pollock, “American Women Artists of the
Construction and Constriction of the Nineteenth Century, Part 2, Female
Lesbian Body in Rosa Bonheur’s Horse Fair,” 7 TOWARD UTOPIA: MORAL Expatriots: Two Case Studies,” paper
in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and REFORM AND AMERICAN ART IN presented at the Women’s Studies
Art History, pp. 187-205. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Conference, University of Edinburgh, 1977;
Catherine Fehner, “Women at the Académie
Women and Empire: Nikkie Neddie and Eighteenth and early nineteenth- Julian in Paris,” The Burlington Magazine
Beth Baron, eds, Women in Middle Eastern century studies: Stephen Eisenman, ed., (vol. 136, November 1994), pp. 752-57.
History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender The Nineteenth Century: A Critical History
(New Haven, 1991); Antoinette Burton, (London and New York, 1994); Jan Fagin- The White Marmorean Flock: the term
Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Yelline, Women and Sisters: Antislavery was first used by Henry James in William
Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 Feminists in American Culture (New Haven Wetmore Story and His Friends From Letters,
(Chapel Hill, 1994); Billie Melman, Women’s and London, 1990). Diaries and Recollections (2 vols, New York,
Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1957; first publ. 1903); Margaret Farrand
1718-1918: Sexuality, Religion, and Work Eighteenth- and early nineteenth- Thorp, “The White Marmorean Flock,’ New
(Ann Arbor, 1992); the Nochlin quote is in century women artists, including Eunice England Quarterly (June 1959), pp. 147-69;
“The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America Pinney, are discussed in American Women William Gerdts, The White Marmorean Flock:
(vol. 71, May 1983),p. 125. Artists; see also Nineteenth-Century American Nineteenth-Century American Women
Woman Artists. For the relationship between Neoclassical Sculptors (exh. cat., Vassar College
Victorian Lady Travelers: Dorothy needlework and political organizing in Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, N. Y., 1972);
Middleton, Victorian Lady Travellers (London, America see Pat Ferrero, Elaine Hedges, and Wayne Craven, Sculpture in America (New
1965); Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: Julie Silber, Hearts and Hands: The Influence of York, 1968). Hosmer’s letter to Crow is
An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Women and Quilts on American Society (San quoted in Cornelia Carr, ed., Harriet Hosmer:
Colonialism (London and New York, 1991); Francisco, 1987); the Sarah Grimké quotes Letters and Memories (New York, 1912), p. 15.
Jane Robinson, Wayward Women:A Guide to are on p. 72. H. M., “Lady Artists in Europe,” Art Journal
Women Tiavellers (Oxford, 1990); Dea Birkett, (vol. 5, London, March 1866), p. 177.
Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers Native American Art: Edwin L. Wade, ed.,
(Oxford, 1989). The Arts of the North American Indian: Native Women’s networks of personal
Traditions in Evolution (New York, 1986); relationships are the subject of Carroll
Women and the antivivisection Jonathan Batkin, “Three Great Potters of Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of
movement: Coral Lansbury, The Old San Ildefonso and Their Legacy,’ American Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women
Brown Dog: Women, Workers and Vivisection Indian Art Magazine (vol. 16, Autumn 1991), in Nineteenth-Century America,’ in
(Madison, 1985); James Turner, Reckoning pp. 56-6ofF. Disorderly Conduct, pp. §3-76. Thomas

475
Crawford’s attack on Hosmer’s conduct 1s Lewis's description of Hagar is quoted in 1984), pp. 329-44; Norma Broude, “Degas’s
quoted in Jane Mayo Roos, “Another Look Bright Particular Star, p. 335. Kirsten P. Buick, ‘Misogyny’ in Broude and Garrard,
at Henry James and the ‘White Marmorean “The Ideal Works of Edmonia Lewis: Feminism and Art History, pp. 247-69; Griselda
Flock?” Women’s Art Journal (vol. 4, Invoking and Inverting Autobiography,” Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of
Spring/Summer 1983), p. 32. American Art (vol. 9, Summer 1995), pp. 5-19. Femininity,’ Vision and Difference, pp. 50-90;
Gill Perry, Women Artists and the Parisian
Harriet Hosmer: Joseph Leach, “Harriet Vinnie Ream Hoxie: Joan A. Lemp, Avant-Garde (Manchester and New York,
Hosmer: Feminist in Bronze and Marble,” “Vinnie Ream and Abraham Lincoln,” 1995); Ruth Iskin, “Selling, Seduction and
Feminist Art Journal (vol. 5, Summer 1976), Women’s Art Journal (vol. 6, Fall 1985/Winter Soliciting the Eye: Manet’s Bar at the Folies-
pp. 9-13; Alessandra Comini, “Who Ever 1986), pp. 24-29; see p. 27 for Hosmer’s Bergére;’ The Art Bulletin (vol. 77, March
Heard of aWoman Sculptor? Harriet Hosmer, response. Valerie Thompson, “Vinnie Ream: 1995), pp. 19-44; Marianne Delafond, Les
Elisabet Ney, and the Nineteenth-Century The Teen Who Sculpted Abe Lincoln,” Femmes Impressionistes: Mary Cassatt, Eva
Dialogue with the Three-Dimensional,” in Sculpture Review (vol. 41, 1992), pp. 32-33. Gonzales, Berthe Morisot (exh. cat., Musée
Tufts, American Women Artists: 1830-1930, pp. Marmottan, Paris, 1993).
17-25; Alicia Faxon, “Images of Women in
the Sculpture of Harriet Hosmer,” Woman's 8 SEPARATE BUT UNEQUAL: Mary Cassatt: Griselda Pollock, Mary
Art Journal (vol. 2, Spring/Summer 1981), WOMAN’S SPHERE AND THE NEW Cassatt (New York, 1980); Adelyn Breeskin,
pp. 25-29; Barbara S. Groseclos, “Harriet ART The Graphic Work of Mary Cassatt: A Catalogue
Hosmer’s Tomb to Judith Falconnet: Death Raisonné (New York, 1948); Breeskin, Mary
and the Maiden,” American Art Journal (Spring The Philadelphia Centennial Cassatt: A Catalogue Raisonné ofPaintings,
1980), pp. 78-79; Susan Waller, “The Artist, Exposition: Wanda M. Corn, “Women Watercolors and Drawings (Washington, D.C.,
the Writer, and the Queen: Hosmer, Jameson Building History,’ in American Women Artists: 1970); Nancy Hale, Mary Cassatt (New York,
and Zenobia,” Women’s
Art Journal (vol. 4, 1830-1930, pp. 26-34; Judith Paine, “The 1975); John D. Kysela, “Mary Cassatt’s
Spring/Summer 1983), pp. 22-27. For Women’s Pavilion of 1876,” Feminist Art Mystery Mural and the World’s Fair of 1893,”
Jameson on Zenobia, see Introduction above; Journal (Winter 1975-1976), pp. $12; Art Quarterly (vol. 19, 1966), pp. 129-45;
Dolly Sherwood, Harriet Hosmer, American Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s response is quoted F Sweet, Miss Mary Cassatt: Impressionist
from
Sculptor, 1830-1908 (Columbia, Mo., 1991). on p. 11. Sarah Burns, “The “Earnest, Untiring Pennsylvania (Norman, Ok., 1966); Susan
Worker’ and the Magician of the Brush: Fillin-Yeh, “Mary Cassatt’s Images of
Charlotte Cushman: Clara Erskine Gender Politics in the Criticism of Cecilia Women,” Art Journal (vol. 35, Summer 1976),
Clement, Charlotte Cushman (Boston, 1882); Beaux and John Singer Sargent,’ The Oxford pp. 359-63; Cassatt’s remarks about painting
Emma Stebbins, ed., Charlotte Cushman: Art Journal (vol. 15, no. 1, 1992), pp. 36-53. are quoted in Pollock, Mary Cassatt, p. 9.
Her Letters and Memories of Her Life (Boston,
1879); Joseph Leach, Bright Particular Star: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Berthe Morisot: Berthe Morisot: Impressionist
The Life and Times of Charlotte Cushman Arts: The Pennsylvania Academy and Its Women (exh. cat., The National Gallery of Art,
(New Haven, 1970). 1850-1920 (exh. cat., Pennsylvania Academy Washington, D.C., 1987), essays by Charles F.
of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1973), essay by Stuckey and William P. Scott; Kathleen Adler
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s remarks on Christine Jones Huber. and Tamar Garb, Berthe Morisot (Ithaca, N-Y.,
women authors are quoted in Martha 1987); Mme. Morisot and Edmé are quoted
Saxton, Louisa May Alcott: AModern Biography Susan MacDowell Eakins: Thomas Eakins, in Denis Rouart, ed., The Correspondence of
of Louisa May Alcott (Boston, 1979), p. 238; Susan MacDowell Eakins, Elizabeth MacDowell Berthe Morisot (New York, 1957), p. 35; M.L.
Hosmer’s response to The Marble Faun is Kenton (exh. cat., North Cross School, Bataille and G. Wildenstein, Berthe Morisot:
in Harriet Hosmer, p. 156. Roanoke, Virginia, 1977); Louise Lippincott, Catalogue des peintures, pastels et aquarelles
“Thomas Eakins in the Academy,” In This (Paris, 1961); Leila Kinney, “Genre: A Social
Anne Whitney: unless otherwise specified, Academy (Washington, D.C., 1976); Susan Contract?,” Art Journal (vol. 46, Winter 1987),
quotations by Anne Whitney are from her MacDowell Eakins: 1851-1938 (exh. cat., The pp. 267-77; Linda Nochlin, “Morisot’s Wet
unpublished letters, quoted by permission of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Nurse: The Construction of Work and
Wellesley College Library; Elizabeth Rogers Philadelphia, 1973), essays by Seymour Leisure in Impressionist Painting,’ Women,
Payne, Anne Whitney: Ninteenth-Century Adelman and Susan Casteras. Art, and Power, pp. 37-56; Renoir’s remarks
Sculptor and Liberal, unpublished manuscript, about professional women are in Renoir
Wellesley College Library; Payne, “Anne May Alcott: Caroline Ticknor, May Alcott: (exh. cat., The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
Whitney: Sculptures; Art and Social Justice,” A Memoir (Boston, 1927); Alcott’s description 1987), p. 15; Anne Higonnet, Berthe Morisot: A
Massachusetts Review (vol. 12, Spring 1971), of Cassatt is on p. 152; see also Sarah Elbert, Biography (New York, 1991); Anne Higonnet,
pp. 245-60; Payne, “Anne Whitney, A Hunger forHome: Louisa May Alcott and Berthe Morisot’s Images of Women (Cambridge
Sculptor,” Art Quarterly (vol. 25, Autumn Little Women (Philadelphia, 1984); Nina and New York, 1992).
1962), pp. 244-61; Lisa B. Reitzes, “The Auerbach, Communities ofWomen:An Idea
Political Voice of the Artist: Anne Whitney’s in Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1978). Eva Gonzales: Francois Mathey, Six
Roma and Harriet Martineau,’ American Art femmes peintres (Paris, 1931); Salons de la Vie
(vol. 8, Spring 1994), pp. 45-65. Women and Impressionism: Eunice Moderne: Catalogue des peintures et pastels de
Lipton, Looking Into Degas: Uneasy Images Eva Gonzales (Paris, 1885).
Edmonia Lewis: Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, of Women and Modern Life (Berkeley, Los
Sharing Traditions: Five Black Artists in Angeles, and London, 1986); Tamar Garb, The Arts and Crafts Movement: Anthea
Nineteenth-Century America (exh. cat., Women Impressionists (Oxford, 1986); Charles Callen, Women Artists of the Arts and Crafts
National Museum of American Art, Moffett et al., The New Painting: Impressionism Movement 1870-1914 (New York, 1979):
Washington, D.C., 1985); Jeffrey Blodgett, 1874-1886 (Oxford, 1986); John Rewald, The Isabelle Anscombe, A Woman’s Touch: Women
“John Mercer Langston and the Case of History of Impressionism (New York, 1973); in Design from 1860 to the Present (London,
Edmonia Lewis: Oberlin, 1862,” The Journal of Theresa Ann Gronberg, “Femmes de 1984); Anscombe and Charlotte Gere,
Negro History (vol. 53,July 1968), pp. 201=18; Brasserie,” Art History (vol. 7, September Arts and Crafts in Britain and America (New

476
York, 1978); The Subversive Stitch; Candace of Feminist Cultural Studies (vol. 4, no. 5, Fall Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York, 1971);
Wheeler is quoted in A Woman’s Touch, p. 36; 1992), pp. 38-65. Margit Rowell and Angelica Rudenstine, eds,
J. Burkhauser, ed., Glasgow Girls: Women in Art Art of the Avant-Garde in Russia: Selections from
and Design, 1880-1920 (Edinburgh, 1990); Vanessa Bell: Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell the George Costakis Collection (exh. cat.,
Janice Helland, “The Critics and the Arts (New Haven and London, 1983); Vanessa Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New
and Crafts: The Instance of Margaret Bell: AMemorial Exhibition of Paintings (exh. York, 1981); Leonard Folgarait, “Art—State—
Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh,’ cat., Arts Council Gallery, London, 1964), Class: Avant-Garde Art Production and the
Art History (vol. 17, June 1994), pp. 209-27. introduction by Ronald Pickvance. Russian Revolution,” Arts Magazine (vol. 60,
December 1985), pp. 69-75; M.N.
Art pottery: Paul Evans, Art Pottery of the Omega Workshops: Isabelle Anscombe, Yablonskaya, Women Artists of Russia’s
United States:An Encyclopedia of Producers and Omega and After: Bloomsbury and the Decorative New Age (London, 1991); Briony Fer, “What’s
Their Marks (New York, 1974). Arts (London, 1981); Simon Watney, “The In a Line? Gender and Modernity,’ Oxford
Connoisseur as Gourmet: The Aesthetics of Art Journal (vol. 13, no. 1, 1990), pp. 77-88.
World’s Columbian Exposition: Jeanne Roger Fry and Clive Bell” in Formations of
Madeline Weimann, The Fair Women: Pleasure (London, 1983), pp. 66-83; Virginia Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp: Arp:
The Story of the Woman’s Building, World’s Woolf’s response to Omega dressmaking is 1886-1966 (exh. cat., Minneapolis Institute of
Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893 quoted in Spalding, Vanessa Bell, p. 142. Lisa Arts, 1986), curated by Jane Hancock and
(Chicago, 1981); Carolyn Kinder Carr and Tickner, “Men’s Work? Masculinity and Stephanie Poley; Arp is quoted in Arp: On
Sally Webster, “Mary Cassatt and Mary Modernism,” in Differences (vol. 4, Fall 1992), My Way, Poetry and Essays 1912-1947 (New
Fairchild MacMonnies: The Search for Their pp. I-37. York, 1948), p. 40; Sophie Taeuber-Arp (exh.
1893 Murals,” American Art (vol. 8, Winter cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New
1994), pp. 52-69. Sonia Delaunay: Women and Art, pp. York, 1981), essay by Caroline Lanchner;
169-71; Sonia Delaunay: A Retrospective (exh. the Taeuber-Arp quote is on p. 9; Sophie
cat., Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, Taeuber-Arp (exh. cat., Musée National
9 MODERNISM, ABSTRACTION, 1980), essays by Sherry A. Buckberrough, d’Art Moderne, Paris, 1964).
AND THE NEW WOMAN, 1910-25 contains extensive bib.; the Delteil poem is
quoted here; R. Delaunay’s comment is on Hannah Hoch: Women Artists: 1550-1950,
Baudelaire: “The Painter of Modern Life” p- 21; Cendrars’s response to Delaunay’s pp. 307-09; Hannah Hoch: Collagen aus den
(1863), reprinted in Francis Frascina and dress designs is on p. 38; Crevel’s description Jahren 1916-1971 (exh. cat., Akademie der
Charles Harrison, eds, Modern Art and of the Delaunay apartment is on p. $6; Kunste, Berlin, 1971); Hannah Hoch, collages,
Modernism: A Critical Anthology (New York, Clare Rendell, “Sonia Delaunay and the peintures, aquarelles, gouaches, dessins (exh. cat.,
1982), p. 23; Exter is quoted in I. Yasinskaya, Expanding Definition of Art,’ Woman’s Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, and
Revolutionary Textile Design: Russia in the 1920s Art Journal (vol. 4, Spring/Summer 1983), Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 1976); Hannah Hoch:
and 1930s, introduction by John Bowlt Pp. 35-38. Fotomontagen, Gemdlde, Aquarelle (exh. cat.,
(New York, 1983). Kunsthalle, Tubingen, 1980), essays by Peter
Futurist costume: Pontus Hulten, ed., Krieger, Suzanne Pagé and Hanne Bergius;
Wassily Kandinsky: Peg Weiss, Kandinsky Futurism and Futurisms (London, 1987); Dawn Ades, Photomontage (London and New
in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years Enrico Crispolti, Ilfuturismo e la moda: York, rev. and enlarged edn 1986); Sally Stein,
(Princeton, 1979) contains much valuable Balla e gli altri (Venice, 1987), discusses The “The Composite Photographic Image and
information about Kandinsky and Jugendstil; Antineutral Dress; the Balla quote is on p. 11; the Composition of Consumer Ideology,”
see especially ch. 10 on the relationship Futurism and antifeminism are discussed in Art Journal (vol. 41, Spring 1981), pp. 39-45;
between ornament and abstraction; Fanette Roche-Pezard, L’Aventure Futuriste Maud Lavin, Cut With the Kitchen Knife: The
Kandinsky’s remarks are quoted on p. 107. (1908-1916) (Paris, 1983), pp. 141-45. Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch (New
Haven and London, 1993).
Reform Dress: Ken Montague, “The The Russian avant-garde: Women Artists:
Aesthetics of Hygiene: Aesthetic Dress, 1550-1950, p. 62; Women and Art, pp. 162— 69; Consumerism and women: Stuart Ewen,
Modernity, and the Body as Sign,” Journal Stephanie Barron and Maurice Tuchman, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and
of Design History (vol. 7, no. 2, 1994), The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930: New the Social Roots of Consumer Culture
pp. 91-112. Perspectives (exh. cat., Los Angeles County (New York, 1976).
Museum of Art, 1980); Christina Lodder,
Gabriele Miinter: Women Artists: 1550-1950, Russian Constructivism (New Haven and The New Woman: Renate Bridenthal,
pp. 281-82; Women and Art, pp. 160-62; London, 1983); Popova’s “painterly Atina Grossman, and Marion Kaplan, eds,
Shulamith Behr, Women Expressionists (New architectonics” is discussed on p. 45; When Biology Became Destiny: Women in
York, 1988); Anne Mochon, Gabriele Miinter: Productivism is discussed on pp. 75-76; the Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York, 1984);
Between Munich and Murnau (Cambridge Stepanova quote is on p. 147; Kiinstlerinnen Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery
and Princeton, 1980); Edouard Roditi, der russischen Avantgarde (Women Artists of the of the Suffrage Campaign 1907-14 (Chicago,
“Interview With Gabriele Minter,” Arts Russian Avant-Garde): 1910-1930 (exh. cat., 1988); Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams:
(vol. 34, January 1960), pp. 36-41;J.Eichner, Galerie Gmurzynska Cologne, 1979); Camilla Fashion and Modernity (London, 1985);
Kandinsky und Gabriele Minter von Ursprungen Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863-1922 Kenneth W. Wheeler and Virginia Lee
modernen Kunst (Munich, 1957); L. Erlanger, (revised and enlarged edn, London and New Lussier, Women, the Arts, and the 1920s in Paris
“Gabriele Miinter: A Lesser Life?,;’ Feminist York, 1986); Susan P. Compton, “Alexandra and New York (New Brunswick, N.J., and
Art Journal (Winter 1974-75), pp. 11-13; Exter and the Dynamic Stage,” Art in America London, 1982); Ellen Wiley Todd, The
Gabriele Munter, 1877-1962: Retrospektiv (exh. (vol. 62, September/October 1974), pp. “New Woman” Revised: Painting and Gender
cat., Lenbachhaus, Munich, 1992); Irit 100-02; Alison Hilton, “When the Politics on Fourteenth Street (Berkeley and Los
Rogoff, “Tiny Anguishes: Reflections on Renaissance Came to Russia,’ Art News (vol. Angeles, 1993); Marsha Meskimmon, The Art
Nagging, Scholastic Embarrassment, and 70, December 1971), pp. 34-39, 56-62; of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self-Portraiture in
Feminist Art History,” in Differences: A_Journal Russian Avant-Garde: 1908—1922 (exh. cat., the Twentieth Century (New York, 1996).

477
10 MODERNIST Paula Modersohn-Becker: Women Artists: Gwen John: Women Artists: 1550-1950, pp.
REPRESENTATION: THE PEMALE 1550-1950, pp. 273-80; Our Hidden Heritage, 271-72; Our Hidden Heritage, pp. 199-204;
BODY pp. 188-97; Paula Modersohn-Becker: zum Cecily Langdale, Gwen John (London, 1987);
hundertsten Geburtstag (exh. cat., Kunsthalle, John McEwen, “A Room of Her Own,” Art
Key source books on feminism and Bremen, 1976); Ellen C. Oppler, “Paula in America (vol. 74, June 1986), pp. 111-14;
Modernism: Vision and Difference; Women, Modersohn-Becker: Some Facts and Augustus John, “Gwendolen John,” Burlington
Art and Power; Juliet Mitchell, Women: The Legends,” Art Journal (vol. 35, Summer 1976), Magazine (vol. 81, October 1942), pp. 236-38;
Longest Revolution (New York, 1966, rev. pp. 364-69; Gustav Pauli, Paula Modersohn- Gwen John: A Retrospective Exhibition (Davis
edn, 1988); Fred Orton and Griselda Becker (Leipzig, 1919, rev. edn, 1934); Otto and Long Company, New York, 1975),
Pollock, ““Avant-Gardes and Partisans Stelzer, Paula Modersohn-Becker (Berlin, 1958); introduction by Cecily Langdale; Langdale
Reviewed,” Art History (vol. 3, September Paula Modersohn-Becker: Zeichnungen, Pastelle, and David Jenkins, Gwen John: An Interior Life
1981), pp. 305-27; Marsha Meskimmon, We Bildentwiirfe (exh. cat., Kunstverein in (New York, 1986); Mary Taubman, Gwen
Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Hamburg, 1976); Martha Davidson, “Paula John (London, 1985). The identification of
Limits of German Modernism (Berkeley and Modersohn-Becker: Struggle Between Life Rodin’s sexuality with his creativity is a
Los Angeles, 1999); Katy Deepwell, ed., and Art,” Feminist
Art Journal (Winter leitmotifin the Rodin literature; for example,
Women Artists and Modernism (Manchester 1973-74), pp. 1-5; Alfred Werner, “Paula Bernard Champigneulle, Rodin (New York
and New York, 1998); Theresa Leininger- Modersohn-Becker: A Short, Creative Life,” and Toronto, 1967); the quote is on p. 151.
Miller, New Negro Artists in Paris: African- American Artist (vol. 37, June 1973), pp. 16-23; Alison Thomas, Portraits ofWomen: Gwen
American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Giinter Busch and Liselotte von Reinken, eds, John and Her Forgotten Contemporaries
Light, 1922-1934 (New Brunswick, New Paula Modersohn-Becker: The Letters and Journals (Cambridge, 1994).
Jersey, and London, 2000). (New York, 1983); the quote about Frau
Meyer is on p. 120; a useful discussion of the Camille Claudel: Camille Claudel (exh. cat.,
Sexualizing creativity: the Renoir quotes feminist implications of Modersohn-Becker’s The National Museum of Women in the
are in John House, “Renoir’s World” in yaintings
8 of women is in Tickner, “Pankhurst, Arts, Washington, D.C., 1987), essay by
Renoir (exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, Modersohn-Becker and the Obstacle Race,” Reine-Marie Paris; Paris, Camille Claudel:
1985), p. 16. Picasso’s quote is in John pp. 24-39; Gillian Perry, Paula Modersohn- The Life of Camille Claudel, Rodin’s Muse and
Golding, “The Real Picasso,” New York Review Becker: Her Life and Work (New York and Mistress, trans. L. Tuck (New York, 1988);
of Books (vol. 35, July 21), 1988), p. 22. Carol London, 1979); the “Volkish” movement is Reine-Marie Paris, L’Oeuvre de Camille
Duncan, “Domination and Virility in discussed by Michael Jacobs, The Good and Claudel: Catalogue Raisonné (Paris, 1990);
Vanguard Painting,” reprinted in Broude and Simple Life: Artist Colonies in Europe and Camille Claudel (exh. cat., Musée Rodin,
Garrard, Feminism and Art History, pp. America (Oxford, 1985). Paris, 1991).
293-314; the quote is on p. 311; see also
Alessandra Comini, “Gender or Genius? The Woman and nature: the literature is Marie Laurencin: Women Artists: 1550-1950,
Women Artists of German Expressionism,” extensive; for example, Sherry Ortner, “Is pp. 295-96; Roger Allard, Marie Laurencin
ibid., pp. 271-92. Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” in (Paris, 1921); Guillaume Apollinaire,
Rosaldo and Lamphere, Women, Culture and Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews,
Suzanne Valadon: Women Artists: 1550-1950, Society, pp. 67-87. Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich, 1902-1918 (New York, 1972); Jean-Emile
pp. 259-61; Our Hidden Heritage, pp. 169-72; and Susan Griffin have been influential Laboureur, “Les estampes de Marie
Jeanine Warnod, Suzanne Valadon (New York, proponents of an essentialist or cultural Laurencin,” L’Art d’aujourd’hui (vol. 1,
1981); the Dorival quote is on p. 88; Nesto feminist position; for a more recent critique Autumn/Winter 1924), pp. 17-21; Renée
Jacometti, Suzanne Valadon (Geneva, 1947); of innate gender differences see the Sandell, “Marie Laurencin: Cubist Muse
Bernard Dorival, Suzanne Valadon (exh. cat., references under Anne Fausto-Sterling, and or More?,” Woman’s Art Journal (vol. 1,
Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, 1967); Sherry Ortner and Harriet Whitehead in the Spring/Summer 1980), pp. 23-27; the
Paul Petrides, L’Oeuvre complet de Suzanne Preface above; Marcia Pointon, “Interior Apollinaire quotes are on p. 24. Marie
Valadon (Paris, 1971); Rosemary Betterton, Portraits: Women Physiology and the Male Laurencin: Cent Oeuvres des collections du musée
“How Do Women Look? The Female Nude Artist,’ Feminist Review (no. 22, Spring 1986), Marie Laurencin au Japon (exh. cat., Fondation
in the Work of Suzanne Valadon” in Looking pp. 5-22, points out that the correlation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny, 1994); Elisabeth
On, pp. 217-34; Patricia Mathews, between woman and nature is fundamental Couturier, “Marie Laurencin: Memoires
“Returning the Gaze: Diverse in nineteenth-century thinking. Scheffler is d'une Jeune Fille Rangée,” Beaux Arts
Representations of the Nude in the Art of quoted in Women Expressionists, p. 8. Magazine (no. 118, December 1993),
Suzanne Valadon,” The Art Bulletin (vol. 73, pp. 96-101; Julia Fagan-King, “United on
September 1991), pp. 415-30. Kathe Kollwitz: Women Artists: 1550-1950, the Threshold of the Twentieth-Century
pp. 263-65; Nochlin’s remarks about Kollwitz Mystical Ideal: Marie Laurencin’s Integral
Feminist literature on spectatorship: key are quoted in Tickner, “Pankhurst, Involvement with Guillaume Apollinaire and
articles, including Laura Mulvey’s influential Modersohn-Becker and the Obstacle Race,” the Inmates of the Bateau Lavoir,” Art History
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” are p. 34; Hans Kollwitz, ed., Diaries and Letters of (vol. 11, March 1988), pp. 88-114; Douglas
reprinted in Looking On. Kathe Kollwitz (Chicago, 1955); A. von der K.S. Hyland and Heather McPherson,
Becke, Kathe Kollwitz: Handzeichnungen and Marie Laurencin: Artist and Muse (exh. cat.,
The cult of fecundity: Wendy Slatkin, graphische Seltenheiten, eine Austellung zum 100. Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham,
“Maternity and Sexuality in the 1890s,” Geburtstag (Munich, 1967); Martha Kearns, 1989).
Woman’s Art Journal (vol. 1, Spring/Summer Kathe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist (New York,
1980), pp. 13-19; the Zola quote is on p. 15. 1976); Otto Nagel, Kathe Kollwitz (New York, Romaine Brooks: Women Artists: 1550—
For Gauguin’s representations of Tahitian 1963); Howard Devree, “Kathe Kollwitz,” 1950, pp. 268-70; Women and Art, pp. 189-91;
women see Josephine Withers,“Perspectives Magazine ofArt (vol. 32, September 1939), pp. Adelyn D. Breeskin, Romaine Brooks
on the Art of Gauguin: For Women, It’s 512-17; Elizabeth Prelinger, Kathe Kollwitz, (Washington, D.C., 1986); Meryl Secrest,
Sexual Colonialism,” The Washington Post with essays by Alessandra Comini and Between Me and Life:A Biography of Romaine
(July 3, 1988). Hildegard Backert (Washington, D.C., 1992). Brooks (New York, 1974); for the women

478
modernists in Paris in the early twentieth Barbara Hepworth: Barbara Hepworth, Expressionism: The Critical Developments (exh.
century see Shari Benstock, Women of the A Pictorial Autobiography (New York, 1970); A. cat., Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo,
Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 (Austin, 1986); M. Hammacher, The Sculpture of Barbara 1987); Irving Sandler, The Triumph ofAmerican
Brooks’s portraits are discussed on pp. Hepworth (New York, 1986); the Stokes Painting (New York, 1970); Schapiro’s and
304-06; the remark about Brooks’s portrayal comments are on p. 68. Krasner’s comments on the Club and the
of women is on p. 305. Bridget Elliott and Cedar Bar are discussed in Originals, p. 275;
Jo-Ann Wallace, “Fleurs du Mal or Second- Women and Surrealism: Whitney Lee Hall, Elaine and Bill: Portrait of aMarriage:
Hand Roses?: Natalie Barney, Romaine Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist The Lives of Wilhelm and Elaine de Kooning
Brooks and the “Originality of the Avant- Movement (London and Boston, 1985); more (New York, 1993); Michael Leja, Reframing
Garde’,” Feminist Review (Spring, 1992), pp. recent sources include Mary Ann Caws, Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting
6-30; Sonia Ruehl, “Inverts and Experts: “Ladies Shot and Painted: Female in the 1940s (New Haven and London, 1993).
Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Identity,” in Embodiment in Surrrealist Art” in Norma
Feminism, Culture, and Politics, pp. 15-36; the Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds, The Lee Krasner: Lee Krasner: A Retrospective
Brooks quote is in No Pleasant Memories, p. Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New
258; Susan Gubar, “Blessings in Disguise: (New York, 1992), pp. 381-96; Erika Billeter York, 1983), essay by Barbara Rose; the quote
Cross-Dressing as Re-Dressing for Female and Jose Pierre, La Femme et le Surréalisme about Krasner’s hybrid images is on p. 114;
Modernists,” The Massachusetts Review (exh. cat., Musée du Cantonal, Lausanne, Ellen G. Landau, “Lee Krasner’s Past
(Autumn 1981), pp. 477-508; the quote 1987); Janet Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys: Continuous,” Art News (vol. 83, no. 2,
is on p. 488; Whitney Chadwick, Amazons in The Art and Life of Remedios Varo (New York, February 1984), pp. 68-76; Krasner and
the Drawing Room: The Art of Romaine Brooks, 1988); Carrington’s writings have been re- Pollock: AWorking Relationship (exh. cat.,
with an essay by Joe Lucchesi (Berkeley, Los issued, The House of Fear and The Seventh Gray Art Gallery, New York, 1981), essay by
Angeles, and London, 2000). Horse (London, 1989); Raquel Tibol, Frida Barbara Rose; Anne Wagner, “Lee Krasner as
Kahlo:An Open Life, trans. E. Randall L. K.,” Representations (vol. 25, Winter 1989),
Florine Stettheimer: Women Artists: 1550— (Albuquerque, 1993); Martha Zamora, Frida pp. 42-57; the comments about women and
1950, pp. 266-67; Parker Tyler, Florine Kahlo: The Brush ofAnguish, trans. M. Smith writing, including the Gauthier quote, are
Stettheimer: A Life in Art (New York, 1963); (San Francisco, 1990); M. A. Caws, R. cited in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de
Linda Nochlin, “Florine Stettheimer: Kuenzli, and G. Raaberg, eds, Surrealism and Courtivron, New French Feminisms:An
Rococo Subversive” in Women, Art, and Women (Cambridge and London, 1991); Anthology (New York, 1981), p. 162; Cixous’s
Power, pp. 109-35; Pamela Wye, “Florine Orianna Baddeley, “‘Her Dress Hangs Here’: remarks are on p. 251. Hofmann’s response
Stettheimer: Eccentric Power, Invisible De-frocking the Kahlo Cult,” The Oxford Art to women’s painting is quoted in Originals,
Tradition,’ M/E/A/N/I/N/G (vol. 3, Journal (vol. 14, no 1, 1991), pp. 10-17; Janice p. 108. Anne M. Wagner, “Lee Krasner as
May 1988), pp. 3-12. Helland, “Culture, Politics, and Identity in L.K.,’ in Norma Broude and Mary D.
the Paintings of Frida Kahlo,’ in The Garrard, eds, The Expanding Discourse:
Georgia O’Keeffe: Women Artists: 1550— Expanding Discourse, pp. 397-408; Whitney Feminism and Art History (New York, 1992),
1950, pp. 300-06; Georgia O’ Keeffe (exh. cat., Chadwick, ed., Mirror Images: Women, Pp. 425-36.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Surrealism and Self-Representation (Cambridge,
York, 1988); Georgia O’ Keeffe (exh. cat., The Massachusetts, and London, 1998). Dorothy Dehner: Dorothy Dehner and David
Whitney Museum of American Art, New Smith: Their Decades of Search and Fulfillment
York, 1970), cat. by Lloyd Goodrich and (exh: cat., The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli
Doris Bry; Katherine Hoffman, An Enduring Ir GENDER, RACE, AND Art Museum, Rutgers University, New
Spirit:The Art of Georgia O’ Keeffe (London, MODERNISM AFTER THE Brunswick, N.J., 1984), essay by Joan Marter.
1984); Laurie Lisle, Portrait of an Artist (New SECOND WORLD WAR
York, 1980); the quotes are reprinted in Lisle, Louise Bourgeois: Louise Bourgeois (exh.
pp. 119-55; Charles Eldredge, Georgia O’Keeffe: The Great Depression: K. A. Marling cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New
American and Modern (New Haven, 1993); and H. Harrison, 7 American Women: The York, 1983), essay by Deborah Wye; the
Anita Pollitzer, A Woman on Paper: Georgia Depression Decade (exh. cat., Vassar College quotation about her paintings is on p. 17; the
O'Keeffe, The Letters and Memoirs of a Legendary Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 1976); critic’s response to her late 1960s sculpture is
Friendship (New York, 1988); Anna Chave, Caroline Bird, The Invisible Scar (New York, on p. 27. Ann Gibson, “Louise Bourgeois’s
“© Keeffe and the Masculine Gaze,” Art in 1966); Cindy Nemser, Art Talk (New York, Retroactive Politics of Gender,’ The Art
America (vol. 78, January 1990), pp. 114—-25ff.; 1975) contains valuable interviews Journal (vol. 53, no. 4, Winter 1994),
Charles C. Eldredge, Georgia O’ Keeffe (New with artists. pp. 44-47; Louise Bourgeois: Sculptures,
York, 1991); Susan Fillin-eh, “Dandies, Environments, Dessins 1938-1995 (exh. cat.,
Marginality and Modernism: Georgia Irene Rice Pereira: Our Hidden Heritage, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris,
O'Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp and Other pp. 233-38; Judith K. Van Wagner, “I. Rice Paris, 1995); Julie Nicoletta, “Louise
Cross-dressers,’ Oxford Art Journal (Fall 1995). Pereira: Vision Superceding Syle,’ Woman's Bourgeois’s Femme Maisons: Confronting
Art Journal (vol. 1, no. 1, Spring/Summer Lacan,” Woman’s Art Journal (vol. 13, no. 2,
Emily Carr: Paula Blanchard, The Life 1980), pp. 33-38; Karen A. Bearor, Irene Rice Fall/ Winter, 1993), pp. 21-26; Louise
of Emily Carr (Seattle, 1987); Emily Carr, Pereira: Her Painting and Philosophy Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory, Works
Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr (Austen, 1993). 1982-1993 (exh. cat., The Brooklyn
(Toronto, 1946); Maria Tippett, Emily Carr:A Museum, New York, 1993).
Biography (Oxford, 1979); Edythe Scheider, Abstract Expressionism: Abstract
Emily Carr: The Untold Story (Seattle, 1978); Expressionism: The Formative Years (exh. cat., Joan Mitchell: Joan Mitchell (exh. cat.,
Doris Shadbolt, Emily Carr (Vancouver, Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell
1975); Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr University, Ithaca, N.Y., 1978), essays by University, Ithaca, N.Y.), essay by Judith
(Vancouver, 1988); Robert Fulford, “The Robert Carlton Hobbs and Gail Levin; Bernstock; John Ashbery, “An Expressionist
Trouble With Emily Carr,’ Canadian Art (vol. Ann Gibson, “The Rhetoric of Abstract in Paris,” Art News (vol. 64, April 196s),
10, Winter 1993), pp. 32-39. Expressionism” in Michael Auping, Abstract pp- 44¢f.

479
Grace Hartigan: Ann Schoenfeld, “Grace Feminism and Art History (New York, 1992), Years of Painting, Sculpture and Performance
Hartigan in the Early 1950s: Some Sources, pp. 475-86; Hayes Benjamin Tritobia, The (exh. cat. The Studio Museum in Harlem,
Influences, and the Avant-Garde,” Arts Life and Art of Lois Mailou Jones (Rohnert New York, 1984); for an account of the black
Magazine (vol. 59, no. 11, September 19835), Park, California, 1994); Melanie Ann Herzog, art politics of the 1960s see Mary Schmidt
pp. 84-88; Hartigan: Thirty Years of Painting, Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico Campbell, ed., Tradition and Conflict: Images of
1950-1980 (exh. cat, Fort Wayne Museum of (Seattle and London, 2000). a Turbulent Decade, 1963—1973 (exh. cat., The
Art, Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1981). Robert S. Studio Museum in Harlem, New York,
Mattison, Grace Hartigan: A Painter's World Bridget Riley: Bryan Robertson, “Bridget 1985); Faith Ringgold: A 25 Year Survey
(New York, 1990); the Hartigan quote Riley: Color as Image,” Art in America (Hempstead, N.Y., 1990); Dan Cameron, ed.,
is in Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract (vol. 63, March/April 1975), pp. 69-71; her Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgold’s French
Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in response to feminism is in Art and Sexual Collection and other Story Quilts (Berkeley
the 1940s (New Haven and London, Politics, pp. 82-83; Bridget Riley (exh. cat., and New York, 1997).
1993), p. 2606. The Hayward Gallery, London, 1992); Bridget
Riley: Dialogues on Art, with Neil Macgregor, Betye Saar: Cindy Nemser, “Conversation
Elaine de Kooning: Lawrence Campbell, E.H. Gombrich, Michael Craig-Martin, with Betye Saar,’ Feminist
Art Journal (vol. 4,
“Elaine De Kooning: Portraits in a New Andrew Graham-Dixon and Bryan Winter 1975-76), pp. 19-24; Betye Saar (exh.
York Scene,” Art News (vol. 62, April 1963), Robertson (London, 1995). cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
pp. 38-39; “Ten Portraitists—Interviews/ Angeles, 1984).
Statements,” Art in America (vol. 63, Agnes Martin: The quotation is in Wendy
January—February 1975), pp. 35-36; Rose Beckett, Contemporary Women Artists (New Art of the 1970s: Corinne Robins, The
Slivka, “Elaine De Kooning: The Bacchus York, 1988), p. 58. Pluralist Eva; American Art, 1968-1981 (New
Paintings,” Arts Magazine (vol. 57, October York, 1984); Wendy Beckett, Contemporary
1982), pp. 66-69. Marisol: Grace Glueck, “It’s Not Pop, It’s Women Artists (New York, 1988); Europe in the
Not Op—It’s Marisol,” New York Times Seventies: Aspects of Recent Art (exh. cat., The
Helen Frankenthaler: Helen Frankenthaler: Magazine (March 7, 1965), pp. 34-35; Art Institute of Chicago, 1977); Edward
Paintings (exh. cat., Corcoran Gallery of Lawrence Campbell, “Marisol’s Magic Lucie-Smith, Art in the Seventies (Ithaca,
Art, Washington, D.C., 1975); Carl Belz, Mixtures,” Art News (vol. 63, March 1964), N.Y., 1980).
Frankenthaler: the 1950s (exh. cat., Rose Art pp- 38-41; Roberta Bernstein, “Marisol’s Self-
Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Portraits: The Dream and the Dreamer,’ Arts Feminism and art in the 1970s: Arlene
Ma., 1981); the critical designation of her Magazine (vol. 59, March 1985), pp. 86-88. Raven, Cassandra Langer, and Joanna Frueh,
work as “feminine” is by B. Friedman, see FeministArt Criticism:AnAnthology (Ann Arbor,
Originals, p. 217. Niki de Saint Phalle: Fantastic Vision: Works 1988); Lucy Lippard, From the Center: Feminist
by Niki de Saint Phalle (exh. cat., Nassau Essays on Women’s
Art (New York, 1976); The
Ethel Schwabacher: Ethel Schwabacher; County Museum ofArt, Roslyn, N.Y., 1988); New Culture: Women Artists of the Seventies (exh.
A Retrospective Exhibition (exh. cat., Jane Niki de Saint Phalle: Retrospective Exhibition cat., Turman Gallery, Indiana State University,
Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers (exh. cat., Musée National d’Art Moderne, Terre Haute, 1984); Framing Feminism. The
University, New Brunswick, N.J., 1987), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1980). Whitney Museum officials are quoted by
essays by Greta Berman and Mona Hadler. Grace Glueck, The New York Times, December
American art of the 1960s: Sidra Stich, 12, 1970; Peg Zegler Brand, ed., Beauty
Louise Nevelson: Laurie Wilson, Louise Made in USA (exh. cat., The University Art Matters (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2000);
Nevelson: Iconography and Sources (Outstanding Museum, Berkeley, 1987); Ann Gibson, Diane Neumaier, ed., Framings: New American
Dissertations in the Fine Arts, series 5, New “Color and Difference in Abstract Painting: Feminist Photographies (New York, 1995).
York, 1981); “Nevelson on Nevelson,” Art The Ultimate Case of Monochrome,”
News (vol. 71, November 1972), pp. 67-73; Genders (no. 13, Spring 1992), pp. 123-52; Alice Neel: Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New
critical response to Nevelson’s first exhibition Briony Fer, “What's In a Line? Gender and York, 1983); Linda Nochlin, “Some Women
is quoted in Women and Art, p. 201; the Modernity,” Oxford Art Journal (vol. 13, no. 1, Realists: Painters of the Figure,” Arts
Kramer quote is in Originals, p. 141; Laurie 1990), pp. 77-88; Anna Chave, “Minimalism Magazine (vol. 48, May 1974), pp. 29-33.
Lisle, Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life (New and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine
York, 1990). (vol. 64, no. 4, December 1989), pp. 44-63. Isabel Bishop: Women Artists: 1550-1950,
pp. 325-26; Karl Lunde, Isabel Bishop (New
Artists of colour: Karen Higa, The View Eva Hesse: Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York, 1975); Sheldon Reich, Isabel Bishop
From Within: Japanese Art From the Internment York, 1976); Eva Hesse: A Memorial Exhibition Retrospective (University of Arizona Museum
Camps, 1942-1945 (exh. cat., The Japanese (exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim of Art, Tucson, 1974).
National Museum and the UCLA Wight Museum, New York, 1973); the quote is in
Gallery, Los Angeles, 1992); Mine Okubo, Lippard, Eva Hesse, p. 24; Bill Barrette, Eva The first feminist art programs: Judy
Citizen 13660 (New York, 1946); Betty Hesse: Sculpture: Catalogue Raisonné (New Chicago, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a
LaDuke, “African/American Sculptor York, 1989); Eva Hesse:A Retrospective (exh. Woman Artist (New York, 1977); Womanhouse
Elizabeth Catlett: A Mighty Fist for Social cat., Yale University Art Gallery, New (exh. cat., Los Angeles, 1973); Paula Harper,
Change,” in Women Artists: Multicultural Haven, 1992); Anne M. Wagner, “Another “The First Feminist Art Program: A View
Visions (New Jersey, 1992), pp. 127-44; Dena Hesse,” October (no. 69, Summer 1994), from the 1980s,” Signs: Journal of Women in
Merriam, “All History’s Children: The Art of pp. 49-84. Culture and Society (vol. 10, no. 4, Summer
Elizabeth Catlett,” Sculpture Review (vol. 42, 1985), pp. 762-81; Amelia Jones, ed., Sexual
no. 3, 1993), pp. 6-11; Freida High W. Faith Ringgold: Faith Ringgold: Change: Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist
Testagiorgis, “Afrofemcentrism and its Painted Story Quilts (exh. cat., Bernice Art History (exh. cat., Armand Hammer
Fruition in the Art of Elizabeth Catlett and Steinbaum Gallery, New York, 1987), essays Museum ofArt and Cultural Center, Los
Faith Ringgold,” in Norma Broude and Mary by Moira Roth and Thalia Gouma-Peterson; Angeles, 1995); Judy Chicago, Women and Art:
D. Garrard, eds, The Expanding Discourse: Michele Wallace, ed., Faith Ringgold: Tiventy Contested Territory (New York, 1999).

480
Women and Performance: Moira Roth, 1978); Bill Jones, “Painting the Haunted Faith Ringgold: Thalia Gouma-Peterson,
ed., The Amazing Decade: Women and Pool,” Art in America (vol. 82, no. 10, October “Faith Ringgold’s Narrative Quilts,” Arts
Performance Art in America, 1970-1980 (Los 1994), pp. 120-23ff. Magazine (vol. 60, January 1987), pp. 64-69;
Angeles, 1983); Eleanor Antin, Being Antinova Faith Ringgold: A Tiventy-Five Year Survey
(Los Angeles, 1983); Kim Levin, Angel of Lynda Benglis: “Interview; Lynda Benglis,” (exh. cat., Fine Arts Museum of
Mercy (exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Ocular: The Directory of Information and Long Island, 1993).
Art, La Jolla, Ca., 1977); RoseLee Goldberg, Opportunities for the Visual Arts (Summer
Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present Quarter, New York, 1979), pp. 30-43. Harmony Hammond: “Feminist Abstract
(London and New York, 1979, rev. and Art: A Political Viewpoint,” Heresies:A
enlarged as Performance Art: From Futurism to Miriam Schapiro: Miriam Schapiro: Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (no. 1,
the Present, 1988); the Berger quote is in Ways Femmages 1971-1985 (exh. cat., Brentwood 1977); reprinted in Wrappings: Essays on
of Seeing (London, 1972), p. 46; Amelia Jones, Gallery, St. Louis, Miss., 1985); Thalia Feminism,
Art, and the Martial Arts (New
Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis Gouma-Peterson, ed., Miriam Schapiro:A York, 1983), pp. 19-28; Harmony
and London, 1998). Retrospective, 1953-1980 (exh. cat., The Hammond, “Lesbian Artists,” Wrappings
College of Wooster, Ohio, 1980). (op. cit.), p. 40; Harmony Hammond, Lesbian
Female imagery: for a critique of feminist Art in America: AContemporary History
imagery see Judith Barry and Sandy Jackie Winsor: Jackie Winsor (exh. cat., The (New York, 2000).
Flitterman-Lewis, “Textual Strategies: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1979);
Politics of Art-Making,” reprinted in Feminist Lucy Lippard, “Jackie Winsor,” reprinted in Fiber art: American Fiber Art: A New
Art Criticism, pp. 87-97;Joan Semmel and April From the Center, p. 202. Definition (exh. cat., University of Houston,
Kingsley, “Sexual Imagery in Women’s Art,” 1980), essays by Lawrence Alloway and Jane
Woman’s Art Journal (vol.1, Spring/Summer Earthworks: Ted Castle, “Nancy Holt, Vander Lee; Mildred Constantine and Jack
1980, pp. 1-6; Lucy Lippard, “Quite Contrary: Siteseer,” Art in America (vol. 70, March Lenor Larsen, Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric
Body, Nature, Ritual in Women’s Art,” 1982), pp. 84-91; see also Lucy Lippard, (New York, 1972); Katherine Howe-Echt,
Chrysalis (no. 2, 1977), pp- 3 1-47; Lisa Tickner, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of “Questions of Style: Contemporary Trends
“The Body Politic: Female Sexuality and Prehistory (New York, 1983); in the Fiber Arts,” Fiberarts (March/April
Women Artists Since 1970,” Art History (vol.1, The Pluralist Era. 1980), pp. 38-43.
June 1978), pp. 236-51; Lippard, “The Pains
and Pleasures of Rebirth: European and Women and “‘New Image” painting: Magdalena Abakanowicz: Mary Jane
American Women’s Body Art,’ reprinted in “Pat Steir: Seeing Through the Eyes of Jacob, Magdalena Abakanowicz (exh. cat.,
From the Center,
pp. 121-39; Lawrence Alloway, Others,’
Art News (vol. 84, November 1985), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,
“Women’s Art in the 70s,” reprinted in Judy pp. 81-88; Tony Godfrey, The New Image 1982); Abakanowicz Retrospective (exh. cat.,
Loeb, ed., Feminist Collage: Educating Women in (Oxford, 1986); Phyllis Freeman, ed., Galerie Alice Pauli, Lausanne, 1979).
the Visual Arts (New York and London, 1979); New Art (New York, 1984).
Susan Griffin, Women and Nature:The Roaring Pattern and Decoration: The Pluralist Era,
Inside Her (New York, 1978); Lippard’s list Hanne Darboven: Johannes Cladders and pp. 131-54; Janet Kardon, The Decorative
of female characteristics is in “Prefaces to Hanne Darboven, eds., Hanne Darboven (exh. Impulse (exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary
Catalogues of Women’s Exhibitions (three cat., Venice Biennale, 1982); Margarethe Art, University of Pennsylvania, Pa., 1979);
parts),”in From the Center, p. 49. Jochimsen, Hanne Darboven: Wende “80” John Perrault, “Issues in Pattern Painting,”
(Bonn, 1982). Artforum (vol. 16, no. 3, November 1977),
Female spirituality: Gloria Feman pp. 32-36; Amy Goldin, “Patterns, Grids
Orenstein, “The Reemergence of the Jennifer Bartlett: Marge Goldwater, and Painting,’ Artforum (vol. 13, no. 11,
Archetype of the Great Goddess in Art,’ Roberta Smith, and Calvin Tomkins, September 1975), pp. 50-54; Jeff Perrone,
Heresies, special issue devoted to the Great Jennifer Bartlett (New York, 19835). “Approaching the Decorative,” Artforum
Goddess (New York, 1982); Carol P. Christ, (vol. 15, December 1976), pp. 26-30; Norma
“Why Women Need the Goddess: Pat Steir: Pat Steir (exh. cat., The Tate Broude, “Miriam Schapiro and ‘Femmage’:
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Political Reflections,” Heresies (vol. 2, no. 1, Decoration and Abstraction in Twentieth-
Spring 1978), pp. 8-13; Seven Cycles: Public Century Art” in Broude and Garrard,
Rituals. Mary Beth Edelson (New York, 12 FEMINIST ART IN NORTH Feminism and Art History, pp. 314-29; Judith
1980), introduction by Lucy Lippard; Ana AMERICA AND GREAT BRITAIN Bettelheim, “Pattern Painting: The New
Mendieta: A Retrospective (exh. cat., The Decorative, A California Perspective,” Images
New Museum of Contempoary Art, Feminism and art in the 1970s: Norma and Issues (Los Angeles, March/April 1983),
New York, 1987). Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds, The Power pp. 323-36; Patricia Stewart, “High
of Feminist
Art (London and New York, Decoration in Low Relief,” Art in America
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(exh. cat., Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, Abstraction in the 1970s (exh. cat., The Rose
1988); Ordinary Extraordinary, ASummation Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Body art: I am indebted to Maureen
1977-1984 (exh. cat., Boston University Art Massachusetts, 1996). Branley, MA candidate at San Francisco State
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Kuspit et al. Female imagery: John Berger’s quote Hannah Wilke quote is in Rose Hartman,
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Feminist Art Journal (vol. 5, Summer 1976), pp. p. 13; Arlene Raven, “Feminist Content in Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth:
5-8; Joan Snyder: Seven Years of Work (exh. cat., Current Female Art,’ Sister (no. 5, European and American Women’s Body
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481
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“Pygmalion Reversed,” Artforum (November pp. 35-36; Lauren Rabinovitz, “Issues of McDonald, Erotic Ambiguities: The Female
1975), p- 37; Lucy Lippard, “Transformation Feminist Aesthetics: Judy Chicago and Joyce Nude in Art (London and New York, 2001).
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Nature, Ritual in Women’s Art,” Chrysalis 2 “Engaging Embroidery” (a review of The the Gender Gap?” Art News (vol. 86, Summer
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History; a Critical Study of Nancy Spero’s Wagner, Hillwood Art Gallery, Long Island Art History,’ The Art Bulletin (vol. 69,
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pp. 430-34. 13 NEW DIRECTIONS: A PARTIAL Mary Kelly is quoted in Rosemary Betterton,
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Differences: Photographs of Mexican Women Artists (Phoenix, 1994). Summer 1985), p. 12, for the quote also; Joan
Women,” Afterimage (April 1991), pp. 11-13; Copjec, “In Lieu of Essence: An Exposition,
Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” Adrian Piper: Judith Wilson, “In Memory a Photographic Work by Silvia Kolbowski,”
Screen 24 (no. 6, Winter 1983), pp. 18-36; The of the News and of Our Selves,” Third Text Block (vol. 7, 1982), pp. 27-31.
Decade Show: Framework of Identity in the 1980s (no. 16/17, Autumn/Winter 1991), pp. 39-64.
(exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Mary Kelly: Mary Kelly, Post Partum
Hispanic Art/New Museum of Carrie Mae Weems: Carrie Mae Weems Document (London, 1985); Margaret Iverson,
Contemporary Art/Studio Museum in (exh. cat., The National Museum of Women “The Bride Stripped Bare by her Own
Harlem, New York, 1990); Abigail Solomon- in the Arts, Washington, D.C., 1993). Desire: Reading Mary Kelly’s Post Partum
Godeau, Mistaken Identities (exh. cat., Document,’ Discourse (vol. 4, Winter
University Art Museum, University of Gender and difference: Difference: On 1981-82, Berkeley), pp. 75-88; “No Essential
California, Santa Barbara, 1992); Mira Schor, Representation and Sexuality (exh. cat., The Femininity: A Conversation Between Mary

483
Kelly and Paul Smith,” Parachute (no, 2, Faith Ringgold: Faith Ringgold, La (Spring 2000), pp. 3-20; Global Conceptualism:
Montreal, Spring 1982), pp. 31-35; Mary Collection Frangaise (New York, 1992); Moira Points ofOrigin, 19508-19808 (exh. cat.,
Kelly, Interim (exh. cat., The Fruitmarket Roth, “A Trojan Horse,” in Faith Ringgold:A Queens Museum of Art, New York, 1999);
Gallery, Edinburgh, 1986). ‘Tiventy-Five Year Survey (op. cit.); Faith Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World (exh.
Ringgold, We Flew Over the Bridge: The cat., The National Museum of Women in
Feminism and psychoanalysis: Juliet Memoirs ofFaith Ringgold (New York, 1995). the Arts, Washington, D.C., 1994); George
Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon
(Harmondsworth, 1974); Jacqueline Rose, Rachel Rosenthal: “Bonnie Marranca, A Bird, Barry Curtis, and Tim Putnam, eds,
Sexuality in the Field ofVision (London, 1986); Cosmography of Herself: The Autobiology Traveller's ‘Tales: Narratives of Home and
Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” of Rachel Rosenthal,” Kenyon Review (Spring Displacement (London, 1994); Donna Landry
reprinted in Victor Burgin, James Donald 1993), p- $9; Moira Roth, “The Passion of and Gerald MacLean, eds, The Spivak Reader
and Cora Kaplan, eds, Formations of Fantasy Rachel Rosenthal,” Parachute (vol. 73, (New York and London, 1996); n.parodoxa;
(London and New York, 1986), pp. 35-44; January—March 1994), pp. 22-28. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith, and Helen
Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman: Woman Tiffen, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies
in Freud’s Writings, trans. Catherine Porter The Guerrilla Girls: Josephine Withers, (New York and London, 1998); Carol
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1985); Janet Sayers, Sexual “The Guerrilla Girls,’ Feminist Studies (vol. Becker, “The Romance of Nomadism: A
Contradictions: Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and 14, Summer 1988), pp. 285-300; Confessions Series of Reflection,” The Art Journal
Feminism (London and New York, 1986); of the Guerrilla Girls (New York, 1995). (vol. 8, Summer 1999), pp. 12-29.
Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism
and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982); Mitchell Public and activist Art: Suzanne Lacy, ed., *“Magiciens de la Terre”: Magiciens de la
and Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art Terre (exh. cat., Musée National d’Art
Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne (London, 1982). (Seattle, 1994); Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris,
by the Guerrilla Girls (New York, 1995); and La Grande Halle, La Villette, 1989).
Alexis Hunter: C. Osborne, “Alexis Culture in Action, essays by Mary Jane Jacob,
Hunter,” Artscribe (no. 45, February—April Michael Brenson, Eva M. Olson (Seattle, 1995); Biennale of Sydney: M. A. Greenstein,
1984), pp. 48-50; A.Johnson, “Alexis Joyce Kozloff: Visionary Ornament (exh. cat., “Global Art Showcases or Curatorial
Hunter,” Art New Zealand (no. 24, Winter Boston University Art Gallery, Boston, 1986). Circus,” The Art News Magazine of India (vol.
1982), pp. 46-47;J.Fisher, “Alexis Hunter,” 5, 2000), pp. 18-21; Benjamin Genocchio,
Artforum (vol. 21, March 1983), pp. 81-82. Museum practice: Caro! Duncan, The Aesthetics “Every Day: The Biennale of Sydney 1998),
of Power (Cambridge and New York, 1993); Ralf Third Text 45 (Winter 1998/1999), pp. 81-84.
Thérése Oulton: Sarah Kent, “An Biel, “Sophie Calle: The Art of Observation,
Interview with Thérése Oulton,” Flash Art Documents of an Anthropological Search for Havana Biennial: Djon Mundine, “La
(no. 127, April 1986), pp. 40-44; Wendy Traces,” Artefactum (vol. 10, no. 49, November Quinta Bienal de la Habana,” ART AsiaPacific
Beckett, Contemporary Women Artists. 1993), pp. 16—2off. (vol. 2, no. 2, 1995), pp. 38-39; Llilian Llanes,
“La Bienal de la Habana,” Third Text 20 (Fall
Rachel Whiteread: Nancy Princenthal, “All Against deconstruction: Gisela Breitling, 1992), pp. 13-22; Luis Camnitzer, “The Third
That Is Solid,’ Art in America (vol. 83, no. 7, “Speech, Silence and the Discourse of Art” Biennial of Havana,” Third Text 10 (Spring
July 1995), pp. 52-37. in Ecker, Feminist Aesthetics, pp. 162-74; 1990), pp. 79-93; Luis Camnitzer, “The Fifth
Jacqueline Morreau and Catherine Elwes, Biennial of Havana,” Third Text 28/29
Rosemarie Trockel: Jutta Koether, Women’s Images of Men (London, 1985). (Fall/Winter 1994), pp. 147-54; Jay Murphy,
“Interview with Rosemary Trockel,’ Flash “The Young and Restless in Habana,” Third
Art (no. 134, May 1987), pp. 40-42; Dan Text 20 (Fall 1992), pp. 115-32;Jay Murphy,
Cameron, “In the Realm of the tfyper- 14 WORLDS TOGETHER, “The Young and Restless in Havana
Abstract,” Arts Magazine (vol. 61, November WORLDS APART Revisited,” Third Text 28/29 (Fall/Winter
1986), pp. 36-40; S. Stich, ed., Rosemarie 1994), pp- 155-64; Guy Brett, “Venice, Paris,
Trockel (Munich, 1991). General sources: | wish to thank the Kassel, Sao Paulo and Habana,” Third Text 20
students in the Senior Art History at Mills (Fall 1992), pp. 13-22.
Janet Woolf, “Reinstating Corporeality: College in Fall 2000—Heather Alvis,
Feminism and Body Politics,” in Feminine Suzanne Carey, Raana Heck, Maryellen African and Caribbean Artists: Veerle
Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture Herringer, Nissa Jackman, Amy McKee, Poupeye, Caribbean Art (London and New
(Berkeley, 1990), pp. 120-41; Hannah Adrienne Rodriguez, Terry Sarver, Kristine York, 1998); The Constructed Photograph
Wilke, poster of 1977 reading “Marxism and Vejar—tor their energy, enthusiasm, and hard (Maria Magdalena Campos Pons) (exh. cat.,
Art/Beware of Fascist Feminism,’ in work on this project. Special thanks go to Addison Gallery of Contemporary Art,
Thomas H. Kochheiser, ed., Hannah Wilke: A Mary Ann Milford-Lutzker and Moira Roth Andover, Mass., 1997); Marta Maria Pérez
Retrospective, with an essay by Joanna Frueh for their unwavering support and Bravo (exh. cat., Galeria Ramis Barquet,
(Columbia, Missouri, 1989), p. 46. For more encouragement, and to Judith Bettelheim Mexico City, 1996). The Homi Bhabha
on body art see Jeff Rian, “What’s All This and Paula Birnbaum for reading and quote can be found on p.1 of his The
Body Art?” Flash Art (vol. 26, no. 168, commenting on the text. Cynthia Napoli- Location of Culture (London and New
January/February 1993), pp. 50-53; for the Abella and Nanor Kaplanian, MA students at York, 1994).
so-called “Bad Girls” exhibitions see Bad San Francisco State University, contributed
Girls (exh. cat., The Institute for valuable information on Mona Hatoum and Venice Biennale: Marcia E. Vetrocq,
Contemporary Art, London, 1994); the Doris Salcedo. General works on issues of “The Birthday Biennale: Coming Home to
Helen Chadwick quote is on p. 7. globalism and contemporary art include Europe,” Art in America (vol. 83, September
Leela Ghandi, Postcolonial Theory:A Critical 1995), pp. 72-89; Marcia E. Vetrocq, “The
Dorothy Cross: Powerhouse (exh. cat., Introduction (New York, 1998); Rasheed Venice Biennale Reformed, Renewed,
Institute of Contemporary Art, University Araeen, “Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Redeemed,” Art in America (vol. 87,
of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1991). Theory and Identity Politics,” Third Text 50 September 1999), pp. 82-93; David Clarke,

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“Foreign Bodies: Chinese Art at the 1995 East Asia (China, Japan, Taiwan, South Sculpture,’ ART AsiaPacific (vol. 3, no. 4,
Venice Biennale,” ARTAsiaPacific (vol. 3, no. Korea): Kim Sun-jung, “Baubles, Bangles 1996), pp. 85-89; Kamala Kapoor, “Missives
1, 1996), pp. 32-34; Stella Santacatterina, and Beads: Interviews with Four Korean from the Streets: Nalini Malani,’ ART
“The Identity of the Same: The Venice Women Artists,’ ART AsiaPacific (vol. 3, no. 3, AsiaPacific (vol. 2, no. 1, 1995), pp. 41-51;
Biennale,’ Third Text 31 (Summer 1995), 1996), pp. §8-67; Kathleen FE Magnan, Reena Jana, “Shahzia Sikander: Celebration
pp. 104-07; Hou Hanru, “Bi-Biennali: The “Cyber Chic: The Artist as Model: Mariko of Femaleness,” Flash Art (vol. 31,
Venice Biennale and the Biennale de Lyon,” Mori,” ARTAsiaPacific (vol. 3, no. 2, 1996), March/April 1998), pp. 98-101; Patricia
Third Text 24 (Fall 1993), pp. 93-101; Marcia pp. 66-67; Nicole Combs, “Struggle for the Johnson, “Shahzia Sikander: Reinventing the
E. Vetrocg, “Identity Crisis,’ Art in America New,” Asian Art News (vol. 9, May/June Miniature,” Art News (vol. 87, February
(vol. 81, September 1993), pp. 100-08; Marcia 1999), pp- 56-61; James B. Lee, “Yi Bul: The 1998), pp. 86-88; Reena Jana, “Cultural
E. Vetrocq, “Vexed in Venice,” Art in America Aesthetics of Cultural Complicity and Weaving,” Asian Art News (vol. 7,
(vol. 78, October 1990), pp. 152-61. Subversion,” ARTAsiaPacific (vol. 2, no. 2, March/April 1997), pp. 86-87; Dana Friis-
1995), pp- 52-59; Susan Dewar, “In the Eye Hansen: “Full Blown: The Expansive Vision
Yayoi Kusama: Collette Chattopadhyay, of the Beholder: The Art of Wang Jin and of Miniaturist Shahzia Sikander,’ ART
“On Her Own Terms,” Asian Art News (vol. Feng Jiali,’ ART AsiaPacific (no. 15, 1997), pp. AsiaPacific (no. 16, 1997), pp- 46-49; Jorella
8, May/June 1998), pp. 60-61; Love Forever: 66-73; Susan Dewar, “Imagining Reality: Andrews, “Telling Tales: Five Contemporary
Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968 and In Full Bloom: Contemporary Chinese Photography,’ ART Women Artists from India,” Third Text 43
Yayoi Kusama, Years in Japan, 2 vols (exh. cat., AsiaPacific (vol. 3, no. 2, 1997), pp. 55-59; (Summer 1998), pp. 81-89.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 1999). Hilary Binks, “Sterotyping Under Attack,”
Asian Art News (vol. 9, March/April 1999), Asia-Pacific Triennial: Asia-Pacific Triennial
Louise Bourgeois: Charlotte Kotik, Terrie pp. 60-65; Xu Hong, “The Awakening of of Contemporary Art (exh. cat., Queensland
Sultan, Christian Lee, Louise Bourgeois:
The Women’s Consciousness,” ART AsiaPacific Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1993); The Second Asia-
Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993 (exh. cat., (vol. 2, no. 2, 1995), pp. 44-51; Melissa Chiu, Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (exh. cat.,
The Brooklyn Museum (in conjunction with “Thread, Concrete and Ice: Women’s Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1996); The
Harry N. Abrams), Brooklyn, New York, Installation Art in China,’ ARTAsiaPacific Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
1994); the quote is on p. 25. (no. 20, 1998), pp. 50-57; Lisa Bloom, (exh. cat., Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane,
“Gender, Nationalism and Internationalism 1999); Asian Art News, special number
Doris Salcedo: Charles Mereweather, in Japanese Contemporary Art: Some Recent devoted to the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial
“Naming Violence in the Work of Doris Writings and Work, n.paradoxa (vol. 6, July (vol. 17, January/February 1997); Roger
Salcedo,” Third Text 24 (Autumn 1993), pp. 2000), pp. 35-42. Taylor, “A Dynamic of Cultures,” Asian Art
27-45; Rhea Anastasia, “Doris Salcedo: A News (vol. 9, November/December 1999),
Tour of the Border of Unlands;’ Art Nexus Southeast Asia (Indonesia, the pp. 48-53; Julie Ewington, “Pigs Might Fly:
(August-September 1998), p. 104. Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Traditions/Tensions and the Asia-Pacific
Singapore, Vietnam): Alice G. Guillermo, Triennial of Contemporary Art,’ ART
Mona Hatoum: Mona Hatoum: The Entire “Art From Fiber,’ Asian Art News (vol. 10, AsiaPacific (vol. 15, 1997), pp. 21-24.
World is a Foreign Land (London, 2000); May/June 2000), pp. 63-67; Ana P. Labrador,
Eleanor Heartney, “In the Realm of the “Beyond the Fringe: Making it as a Filipina Pacific Region (Australia, New Zealand,
Senses,” Art in America (vol. 86, April 1998), Contemporary Artist,’ ART AsiaPacific Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia and
pp. 42-47; Angela Dimitrakaki, “Mona (vol. 2, no.2, 1995), pp. 84-97; Maggie Pai, Nuie): Wally Caruana, Aboriginal Art
Hatoum: A Shock of a Different Kind,” “Challenges to Change,” Asian Art News (London and New York, 1993); Utopia:
Third Text 43 (Summer 1998), pp. 92-95. (vol. 8, July/August 1998); Maggie Pai, Ancient Cultures, New Forms (exh. cat., Art
“Making Visible The Invisible; Asian Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 1999);
Johannesburg Biennale: Thomas News (vol. 8, March/April 1998), pp. 60-66; Nicholas Thomas, “A Compelling Vision,”
McEvilley, “Report From Johannesburg,” Robert Preece, “Doin’ It For Themselves,” Asian Art News (vol. 8, May/June 1998), pp.
Art in America (vol. 83, September 1995), Asian Art News (vol. 7, November/December 48-51; Henrietta Fourmille, “Copyrites:
Pp. 45-49; Bernd Scherer, “Interview with 1997), pp. 64-79; Natalie King, “Performing Reproducing Aboriginal Art,’ ART
Lorna Ferguson,’ Third Text 31 (Summer Bodies: Singaporean Artist Amanda Heng,’ AsiaPacific (vol. 3, no. 4, 1996), pp. 34-38.
1995). pp- 83-88; Candice Breitz, “The First ART AsiaPacific (vol. 3, no. 2, 1996), pp.
Johannesburg Biennale: Work in Progress,” 81-85; Astri Wright, “Bali Report: The Kwangju Biennale: James B. Lee, “Beyond
Third Text 31 (Summer 1995), pp. 89-94; the Seniwati Gallery of Women’s Art,’ ART the Borders: The Inaugural Kwangju
Rasdjarmreonsook quote is on p. 92; Jen AsiaPacific (vol. 2, 10.2, 1995), pp. 32-35; Astri Biennale,’ ART AsiaPacific (vol. 3, no. 2,
Budney, “Who's It For? The 2nd Wright, “Undermining the Order of the 1996), pp. 22-24; Helena Kontova, Satoru
Johannesburg Biennale,’ Third Text 4z Javanese Universe: Kartika Affandi-Korberl’s Nagoya, Chan-Kyoug Park, “Kwangju
(Spring 1998), pp. 88-94. Self-Portraits;’ ART AsiaPacific (vol. 1, June Biennale: Unmapping the World,” Flash Art
1994), pp- 62-72. (vol. 31, January/February 1998), pp. 70-74.
Sao Paulo Bienal: Eric Otto Wear,
“Uncertainties at the S40 Paulo Bienal,’ South Asia (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka): Shirin Neshat: Leslie Camhi, “Lifting the
Asian Ant News (vol. 7, March/April 1997), Victoria Lynn, “Dung Heap: Sensuality and Veil,” Art News (vol. 99, February 2000), pp.
pp. 92-93; Lisette Lagnado, “On How the Violence in the Art of Sheela Gowda,’ ART 148-151; Shirin Neshat, Women of Allah;
24th Sao Paulo Biennial Took On ~ AsiaPacific (vol. 3, no. 4, 1996), pp. 78-83; photographies, films, vidéos (exh. cat., Maison
Cannibalism,” Third Text 46 (Spring 1999), pp. Kamala Kapoor, “Songspace: The Art of Européene de Ja Photographie 4 Paris,
$3-88; Cristina Freire, “The 23rd Sao Paulo Nilima Sheikh,’ ART AsiaPacific (vol. 3, no. 2, Paris, 1998).
International Biennial: Dematerialisation and 1996), pp. 91-94; Gayatri Sinha, “India Songs:
Contextualisation,’ Third Text 38 (Spring Indian Women Artists,’ ART AsiaPacific (vol.
1997). pp- 95-98; Edward Leffingwell, “The 2, no. 2, 1995), pp. 98-107; Deepak Ananth,
Bienal Adrift,” Art in America (vol. 31, March “The Knots are Many, but the Thread is
1992). pp. 83-88. One: Mrinalini Mukherjee’s Hemp

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List of Illustrations

Measurements are given in centimetres, followed by inches, height before width, unless otherwise stated

Miscellaneous illustrations 64 Engraving with Louis XIV as pater famil- ANGUISSOLA Sofonisba 27 Portrait of
ias, late seventeenth century. Bibliotheque Queen Anne ofAustria c, 1570. Oil on canvas
10 “Thamar” from Boccaccio’s De Claris Nationale, Paris 84 X 67 (33 X 26%). Museo Nacional del
Mulieribus 1355—59. Bibliotheque Nationale, Prado, Madrid. 28 Boy Bitten by a Crayfish
Paris. MS fr.12420, f.101Vv 71 ~The Damerian Apollo 1789. Anonymous before 1559. Black chalk 31.5 K 34 (12%
engraving. British Museum, Department of 134). Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.
11 Christine de Pisan in her study, miniature Prints and Drawings 29 Self-Portrait 1561. Oil on canvas 88.9 X
from The Works ofChristine de Pisan, early 81.3 (35 X 32). Earl Spencer, Althorp,
fifteenth century. British Library, London. 86 Amazone, Frangaises Devenues Libres c. Northampton. 39 Bernardino Campi
Harley 4431, f.4 1791. Colored print. Bibliotheque Nationale, Painting Sofonisba Anguissola late 1550s. Oil on
Paris canvas 111 X 109.5 (43%X 434). Pinacoteca
12 Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS Bod. Nazionale, Siena
764 f.41V 87 “Lady Students at the National Gallery,”
Illustrated London News November 21, 1885 APPLEBROOG Ida 264 Don’t Call Me
13 Ailfgyva and the Cleric, from The Bayeux Mama 1987. Oil on canvas 111.8 K 40.6
Tapestry c. 1086. Centre Guillaume ror Black Beauty frontispiece, 1877 (44 X 16). Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine
le Conquerant, Bayeux Arts, New York. Photo Jennifer Kotter
103. Marianne North at her easel,
14 Illustration from The Beatus Apocalypse Grahamstown, South Africa. Photograph by ARAHMAIANI 290 Handle without care.
of Gerona 975. Gerona Cathedral ‘Treasury. Aldhan and Aldhan. Photo courtesy Royal Performance, 11 minutes, September 27 and
Photo Mas Botanic Gardens, Kew. Presented in 1892 28,1996. The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial
of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art
15 Hildegard of Bingen Scivias 1142-52. 107. Needlework case with abolitionist Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, 1996
Formerly Wiesbaden Hessische slogan,c.1830-50. Pale Chinese silk cover
Landesbibliothek. Destroyed during the 10.79 X 8.89 (4%X 34). Courtesy, Essex ARP Jean 156 Paper Cut with Paper Cutter
Second World War. Institute, Salem, Mass. 1918. Various papers on cardboard 79 X 60
(314 X 23%). Fondation Arp, Clamart
16 Office ofthe dead pas de page, Saints 108 “Underground Railroad,”c. 1870-90.
Mary the Egyptian and Mary Magdalene, American quilt, pieced cotton 184 X 221 AYCOCK Alice 218 Maze 1972. Wood
psalter-hours, Liége diocese c. 1300-10. (72 X 87). Richard and Suellen Meyer. Photo 945 (372) diam. Gibney Farm, New Kingston,
Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. MS Pat Ferrero Pennsylvania. Courtesy the artist
76 G 17, fol. 187v
110 }©6Women Rig(hts) quilt, 1850s. Appliquéd BACA Judy 234 The Great Wall of Los
17. Gospel Book of the Abbess Hitda showing cottons 177.5 X 176.5 (70 X 69%). Dr. and Mrs. Angeles, begun 1976 (detail). Mural. Los
the Abbess offering her Gospel Book to the John Livingston. Photo Pat Ferrero Angeles
cloister’s patron, St Walburga, c. 1020.
Darmstadt 11I_ Navajo Chief’s Blanket, Third Phase BARTLETT Jennifer 216 Rhapsody
1870s. Warp-handspun white wool, weft- 1975-76 (detail). Baked enamel and silk
18 German psalter from Augsburg, c. 1200. handspun white wool, black wool and indigo screen, whole work 213 X 4686 (7 X 153% ft).
Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore blue; respun flannel cloth red; warp and weft Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
salvage cords: 2-cord 3-strand wool handspun
19 The Syon Cope, late thirteerth/early indigo blue; remains of sewed tassel in two BELL Vanessa 142 Cracow 1913. Jacquard
fourteenth century. Embroidery with silk, corners 185 X 138 (72%X 54%). California woven fabric. By Courtesy of the Trustees of
silver gilt thread and silver thread on linen Academy ofSciences, San Francisco. the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
147.5 X 295 (58 X 116). By Courtesy ofthe Elkus Collection 143 The Tub 1917. Oil on canvas 180.3 X
Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, 166.4 (71 X 65%). The Tate Gallery, London
London 141 Firescreen designed by Duncan Grant
and embroidered by Lady Ottoline Morrell, BENEDETTI Giovanni 33 “S.Caterina
20 Herrad of Landesberg Hortus Deliciarum 1912 de Vigri,” Libro devoto 1502
fol. 3231, after 1170
145 Winifred Gill and Nina Hamnett mod- BENGLIS Lynda 213 For Carl Andre 1970.
21 Hildegard of
Bingen Savias 1142-52. fol.Ir. eling dresses at the Omega Workshops, c. 1913 Pigmented polyurethane foam 143 X 135.5 X
118 (564X $34 X 46%). Collection of The
22. Hildegard of Bingen Scivias 1142-52. f5. 161 Cubist dress from Vogue October 1925 Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort
Worth, Texas. Museum purchase, The
23 Bourgot and le Noir Book ofHours ABAKANOWICZ Magdalena 224 Backs BenjaminJ.Tillar Memorial Trust. C Lynda
c. 1353. British Library, London. Yates 1976-82. Burlap and resin. Group of 8o figures Benglis/DACS, London/VAGA, New
Thompson 27, fol. 86b life-size and larger. Courtesy Marlborough York 1996
Gallery
50 First Great Seal ofElizabeth I, 1559, BISHOP Isabel 190 Dante and Virgil in
probably after a design by Levina Teerlinc. ABRAMOVIC Marina 251 The Inner Sky Union Square 1932. Oil on canvas 68.6 X 133
Wax, 12.5 (5) diam. for Departure 1991. Courtesy Sean Kelly, (27 X $2). Delaware Art Museum,
New York Wilmington
53 Illustration from Johann van Beverwijck
Van de Wtnementheyt des Vrouwelicken Geslachts AGAR Eileen 184 Ploumanach 1936. BLUNDEN Anna 92 The Seamstress 1854.
1643 Photograph Oil on canvas 47 X 38 (18.5 X 15). Private
collection. Photo Christopher Wood Gallery
60 Illustration from Jan Commelin Horti ANGUISSOLA Lucia 32 _— Portrait ofPietro
Medici Amstelodamensis Rariorum Plantarum Maria, Doctor of Cremona c. 1560. Oil on canvas BONHEUR Rosa 96 The Horse Fair 1855.
Descriptio et Icones 1697-1701 96.2 X 76.2 (374 30). Museo del Prado, Madrid Oil on canvas 244.5 X 506.7 (96%X 1994). The

486
Metropolitan Museum ofArt, Gift of CARR Emily 180 Landscape with Tice canvas 129.2 X 95.8 (50%X 37%). The
Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1887. 99 Plowing in 1917-19. Oil on canvas §4 X 43.2 (214% 17). Frick Collection, New York
the Nivernais 1848. Oil on canvas 136 X 260 Collection of Glenbow Museum Calgary,
(52.8 X 102.4). Musée d’ Orsay, Paris. Photo Alberta DEACON Destiny 294 My Living Room
Réunion des musées nationaux. 100 VWést in Brunswick, 3056 1996. Installation comprising
Highland Bull engraved after Rosa Bonheur. CARRIERA Rosalba 65 Antoine Watteau mixed media, found objects, photography.
From Thompson, Cattle Management 1866 1721. Pastel 55 X 43 (21%X 16%). Museo Dimensions variable. Installation at the Second
Civico di Treviso Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art,
BONTECOU Lee 202 Untitled 1960. Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia,
Metal and canvas 110.5 X 131.1 X 30.5 CARRINGTON Leonora 168 Self- 1996. © DACS 2002
(43%X §1%X 12). Albright-Knox Art Portrait 1938. Oil on canvas 65 X 81.2 (25%4X
Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Gift of 32). Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York DEHNER Dorothy 193 Scaffold 1983.
Seymour H. Knox, 1961 CARS Laurent 80 The Good Mother after Fabricated Cor-ten steel, 243.8 (96) h.
Greuze 1765. Etching. The Metropolitan Twining Gallery, New York
BOURGEOIS Louise 194 Femme-Maison Museum ofArt. The Elisha Whittelsey
c. 1946-47. Ink on paper 23.2 X 9.2 (9KX 3%). Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959 DELANEY Mary 69 Flower collage,
Robert Miller Gallery, New York. 1774-88. Mixed media 334 X 228 (1314X
205 Fillette 1968. Latex $9.7 (23%) long. CASONI Felice 37 Lavinia Fontana 1611. 89%). British Museum, Department of
Robert Miller Gallery, New York. Portrait medal 6.2 (2/4) diameter. Biblioteca Prints and Drawings
265 Arch of Hysteria 1993. Bronze, polished Comunale di Imola
patina 76.2 X 101.6 X §8.4 (30 X 40 X 23). DELAUNAY Sonia 146 Couverture 1911.
Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New CASSATT Mary 124 Mother and Child Appliqué tog X 81 (43 X 31%). Musée National
York. Photo Allan Finkelman c. 1905. Oil on canvas 92.1 X 73.7 (36%X 29). d’Art Moderne, Paris. 147 Simultaneous
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Contrasts 1912. Oil on canvas 45.5 X $5 (18 X
BOYCE Sonia 240 Missionary Position Chester Dale Collection. 127 A Cup of 21%). Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris.
No. 2, from Lay Back, Keep Quiet and Think Tea c. 1880. Oil on canvas 64.5 X 92.5 (25%4X 152 Costume for Cléopdtre with
About What Made Britain so Great 1985. 36%). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Maria Chernichova in the title-role, 1918.
Watercolor, pastel and conté crayon on paper Hopkins Fund. 130 Woman in Black at the 154 Appliquéd coat design, 1920s.
123.8 X 183 (48.7 X 72). The Tate Gallery, Opera 1880. Oil on canvas 80 X 64.8 (314 Watercolor 32 X 23 (124% 9). Bibliotheque
London 25%). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Nationale, Paris. 159 Page from Sonia
The Hayden Collection Delaunay, ses peintures, ses objets, ses tissus
BRACQUEMOND Marie 126 Tea-Time simultanes 1925. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
1880. Oil on canvas 81.5 X 61.5 (32 X 24%). CHADWICK Helen 267 Glossolalia 1993.
Musée du Petit Palais, Paris Patinated bronze, fur, oak 200 X 200 X 120 DEVERELL Walter 98 A Pet 1852-53.
(including pedestal) (78% 78%X 47%). Oil on canvas 83.8 X §7.1 (33 X 22%). The Tate
BRAUCHITSCH Margaretha von Courtesy Zelda Cheatle Gallery, London. Gallery, London
138 Embroidered cushion, 1901-02 Photo Edward Woodman
DUPARC Francoise 68 Woman Knitting
BROOKS Romaine 174 White Azaleas or CHARPENTIER Constance Marie (attrib- late eighteenth century. Oil on canvas 77.8 X
Black Net 1910. Oil on canvas I§1.1 X 271.7 uted to) 7 Portrait ofMademoiselle Charlotte 63.5 (30%X 25). Musée des Beaux-Arts,
(59%X 107). National Museum of American du Val d’ Ognes c. 1801. Oil on canvas 161.3 X Marseille
Art, Washington, D.C. Photo Art Resource, 128.6 (63% 50%). The Metropolitan Museum
New York. 175 The Amazon (Natalie of Art, Bequest ofIsaac D. Fletcher, 1917. Mr. EAKINS Susan MacDowell 122 Portrait
Barney) 1920. Oil on canvas 86.5 X 65.5 (34 X and Mrs. Isaac D. Fletcher Collection ofThomas Eakins 1899. Oil on canvas
25%). Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photo Bulloz. 127 X 101.6 (50 X 40). Philadelphia Museum
176 —Self-Portrait 1923. Oil on canvas 117.5 X CHICAGO Judy. 220 “Virginia Woolf,” of Art, Gift of Charles Bregler
68.5 (46%X 26%). National Gallery ofArt, The Resurrection Triptych 1973. Sprayed acrylic
Washington, D.C. on Canvas 152.4 X 1§2.4 (60 X 60). Courtesy EXTER Alexandra 150 Composition 1914.
the artist. 229 The Dinner Party 1974-79. Oil on canvas 91 X 72 (35%X 28%). Costakis
BROWNSCOMBE
Jenny 120 The New 1463 X 1463 X 1463 (576 X $76 X 576) Multi- Collection. 158 Costume design fora
Scholar 1878. Oil on canvas 46.3 X 61 media installation. Courtesy the artist. woman for La Fille d’Hélios 1922. Gouache
(18%X 24). Thomas Gilcrease Institute of 49.5 X 64.1 (194X 25%). Theater Collection,
American History and Art, Tulsa, OK. CLAUDEL Camille 171% LaValse 1895. The New York Public Library at Lincoln
Bronze 43.2 X 23 X 34.3 (17 X9 X 134). Musée Center. Gift of Simon Lissim, Dobbs Ferry
BUL Yi 291 Majestic Splendor 1995. Rodin, Paris. © DACS 1996
Installation, SudwestLB Forum, Stuttgart. FAULKNER Kate 131 Wallpaper design
Steel-and-glass vitrine, fish, sequins 100 X 100 CROSS Dorothy 263 Spurs 1993. Boots, for Morris and Company, after 1885. By
X 100 (39% X 39% X 39%). All photos courtesy cow teats and string. Private Collection, Courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria
the artist and pkm projects, Seoul. Photo London. Courtesy Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and Albert Museum, London
Kim Woo-il
DAMER Anne Seymour 70 The Countess FINI Leonor 183 Sphinx Regina 1946.
BURR Margaretta (Mrs. Hickford Burr) of Derby c. 1789. Marble 59.7 (23%) high. The Oil on canvas 60 X 81 (23%X 32).
102 Interior of aHareem, Cairo. Lithograph National Portrait Gallery, London Private collection
plate no. IV, from Sketches from the Holy Lands
1846. © The Board ofTrustees of the Victoria DARBOVEN Hanne 219 24 Gesdnge-B FLACK Audrey 212 Leonardo's Lady 1974.
and Albert Museum, London Form 19708. Ink on paper mounted in frames Oil over synthetic polymer paint on canvas
with glass, 48 panels of 125.5 * 30 188 X 203.2 (74 X 80). The Museum of
CALLE Sophie 272 Ghosts 1991. (49%X 11%), arranged 2 by 24, and 72 Modern Art, New York. Purchased with the
Installation view ofthe exhibition Dislocations, panels of 42.5 X 78.9 (16%X 31), arranged aid of Funds from the National Endowment
showing detail of CALLE: Ghosts. The 12 by 6. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam for the Arts and an anonymous donor
Museum of Modern Art, New York. October
16, 1991—January 7, 1992. Photograph © 1996 DAVID Jacques-Louis 85 =The Oath of FOLEY Margaret 116 William Cullen
The Museum of Modern Art, New York the Horatii 1785. Oil on canvas 330 X 425 Bryant 1867. Marble reliefinmedallion 47.6
(129%X 167%). Musée du Louvre, Paris. (18%) diameter. Mead Art Museum, Amherst
CALVERLY Lady 72 Embroidered Photo Giraudon College
screen, 1727. Six panels, each 176.5 X 53 (69.5
x 21). Wallington Hall, Northumberland. DAVIN-MIRVAULT Césarine FONTANA Lavinia 36 — Birth ofthe Virgin
Photo National Trust 6 Portrait ofAntonio Bruni 1804. Oil on 1580s. Chiesa della Trinita, Bologna. Photo

487
Alinari. 41 Consecration to the Virgin 1599. HALL Fiona 292 Give a Dog a Bone 1990. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New
Oil on canvas 280 X 186 (1104 X 74%). Musée Photograph, carved and moulded soap, card- York. Photo Attilio Maranzano
des Beaux-Arts, Marseille board cartons, coca-cola cans, shopping bag,
perfume bottle. Dimensions variable. HOSMER Harriet 113 Zenobia in Chains
FRANCESCHINI Marcantonio 34 Collection the artist. Installation at the Second 1859. Marble 124.5 (49) high. Wadsworth
S. Caterina Vigri seventeenth century. Cooper- Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Atheneum, Hartford. Gift of Mrs. Josephine
Hewitt Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, M.J.Dodge. 115 Beatrice Cenci 1857.
National Museum of Design, New York 1996. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley 9 Marble 43.8 X 104.7X 43.1 (174 414X 17).
Gallery, Sydney. St. Louis Mercantile Library
FRANKENTHALER Helen
198 Mountains and Sea 1952. Oil on canvas HARTIGAN Grace 197 Persian Jacket HOXIE Vinnie Ream 119 Abraham
220 X 297.8 (86%X 117%). Collection the artist 19§2. Oil on canvas 146 X 121.9 (§74X 48). Lincoln 1871. Marble 210.8 (83) high.
on extended loan to the National Gallery of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Architect of the Capitol, United States
Art, Washington, D.C. Gift of George Poindexter Capitol Art Collection

FUSCO Coco and GOMEZ-PENA HATOUM Mona_ 260 _ Recollection 1995. HUNTER Alexis 259 Considering Theory
Guillermo 246 Tivo Undiscovered Installation at the Institute of Contemporary 1982. Acrylic on paper 66 X 76.2 (26 X 30).
Amerindians Visit Madrid as performed at Art, Boston. Photo Suara Welitoff. Collection of Mr. S. Grimberg, Dallas, Texas
Walker Art Center 1992 during the exhibition 278 Over my dead body 1988. Billboard, ink
Viewpoints: Guillermo Gomez-Peria and Coco on paper, 200 X 300 (78Y, X 118%). Courtesy ITURBIDE Graciela 275 Magnolia,
Fusco: The Year of the White Bear September Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London. Photo Juchitan, Oaxaca, Mexico 1987. Gelatin silver
13—November 15, 1992. Courtesy Walker Art Edward Woodman print 50.8 X 40.6 (20 X 16). Photo San
Center, Minneapolis. Photo Glenn Halvorson Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
HAWARDEN Clementina, Lady Accessions Committee Fund. 89.171. Photo
GENTILESCHI] Artemisia 43 Judith 91 Photograph of amodel, 1860s. By Ben Blackwell
Decapitating Holofernes c.1618.Oil on canvas Courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria
160 X 162 (70% 67%) Uffizi Gallery, Florence. and Albert Museum, London JAARSMA Mella 297 Hi Inlander (Hello,
Photo Scala. 44 Self-Portrait as the Allegory Native) 1999 (detail). Treated skins: kangaroo
ofPainting 1630s. Oil on canvas 96.5 X 73.7 HAYDEN Sophie 134 Woman’s Building 244 X97 (96% X 387); frog 140 X 84 (55/4 X
(38 X 29). Reproduced by Gracious Permission at the World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893. 33%); fish 150X 100 ($9 X 39%); chicken 152 X
of Her Majesty The Queen. 46 Susanna Photograph. The Art Institute of Chicago. 95 (59% X 37%). Installation at the Third Asia-
and the Elders 1610. Oil on canvas 170 X 121 Ryerson Archives Special Collection Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art,
(67 X 47%). Schonborn Collection, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia,
Pommersfelden. Photo Marburg. 48 Judith HAYLLAR Edith 89 Feeding the Swans 1999. Purchased 2000. Queensland Art
with Her Maidservant c. 1618. Oil on canvas 116 1889. Oil on canvas 91.5 X 71 (36 X 28). Gallery Foundation. Collection: Queensland
X 93 (45%X 36%). Pitti Palace, Florence. Photo Private collection. Photo Courtesy Art Gallery.© DACS 2002
Alinari Sotheby’s, London
JOHN Gwen 165 A Corner of the Artist’s
GENTILESCHI Orazio 47 Judith with HEMESSEN Caterina van 49 Portrait Room, Paris 1907—09. Oil on canvas 31.7 X 26.7
Her Maidservant c. 1610-12. Oil on canvas ofaMan c. 1550. Oil on oak 36.2 X 29.2 (12%X 10%). Sheffield City Art Galleries.
133.4 X 156.8 (524 61%). Wadsworth (14%X 114). National Gallery, London 170 Young Woman Holding a Black Cat
Atheneum, Hartford. Ella Gallup Sumner c. 1914-15. Oil on canvas 45.7 X 29.5
and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection HENG Amanda 298 Narrating Bodies 1999. (18 X 11%). The Tate Gallery, London
Photo installation and performance 600 (wall
GERARD Marguérite 82 Portrait of the length), X 350 (wall width ) X 300 (floor space) JOHNSON Frances Benjamin 135 Self-
Architect Ledoux and his Family c. 2787-90. (236%, X 137%, X 118/%,). Courtesy the artist Portrait c. 1896. Photograph. The Library of
Oil on wood 30.5 X 24.1 (12 X 9/4). The Congress, Washington, D.C.
Baltimore Museum ofArt, The May Frick HEPWORTH Barbara 182 Tivo Forms
Jacobs Collection 1934. Grey alabaster, 16.5 (6%) h., base 43.2 X KAHLO Frida 167 The Broken Column
17.8 X 3.2 (17 X 7 X 14%). Private collection 1944. Oil on masonite 40X 31 (15% 12%).
GHIRLANDAIO Domenico 26 Giovanna Collection of Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.
Tornabuoni née Albizzi 1488. Oil on poplar HESSE Eva 206 Hang Up 1966. Acrylic Photo Dr. Salomon Grimberg
77 X 49 (30%X 19%). Thyssen-Bornemisza on cloth over wood and steel 182.9 X 213.4 X
Foundation, Lugano 198.1 (72 X 84 X 80). The Art Institute of KANDINSKY Wassily 139 Dress design
Chicago. Gift of Arthur Keating and Mr. and for Gabriele Miinter, c. 1904. Pencil.
GIRON Monica 277 Ajuar para un con- Mrs. Edward Morris by exchange, 1988. Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
quistador (Trousseau for a Conqueror) 1994. 207. Accession II 1967. Galvanized steel and
Detail ofinstallation, knitted merino wool plastic extrusion 78.1 X 78.1 X 78.1 KAUFFMANN Angelica 73 Zeuxis
and buttons. Courtesy the artist (30%X 30%X 30%). Private collection Selecting Models for His Picture of Helen of Troy c.
1764. Oil on canvas 81.6 X 112.1 (32%X 444).
GONCHAROVA Natalia 148 Rayonist HILLER Susan 254 An Entertainment The Annmary Brown Memorial, Brown
Garden: Park c. 1912-13. Oil on canvas 1991. Four interlocking video projections University, Providence,R.I. 74 Design in
140.7 X 87.3 (55%X 34%). Art Gallery of with sound; duration 26 minutes. The Tate the ceiling ofthe central hall of the Royal
Ontario, Toronto. Gift of Sam and Ayala Gallery, London Academy, London, 1778. Oil on canvas
Zacks, 1970 132 X 149.8 (52 X $9). The Royal Academy of
HOCH Hannah 153 DADA-Dance Arts,London. 76 Vase after a design by
GONZALES Eva 125 Pink Morning 1874. 1919-21. Collage 32 X 23 (12%X 9). Photo Angelica Kauffmann c. 1820. By Courtesy of
Pastel go X 72 (35%X 28%). Musée du Louvre, courtesy Galleria Schwarz, Milan the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert
Cabinet des Dessins. Photo Réunion des Museum, London
musées nationaux HOLZER Jenny 237 — Selection of
Truisms
1982. Spectacolor board, Times Square, New KELLY Mary 257 Post Partum Document,
GOWDA Sheela 281 Untitled 1993. Cow York. Sponsored by the Public Art Fund Inc. Documentation VI 1978—79 (detail). Slate and
dung, pigment, jute and paper on board, Courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New resin 18 units 35.6X 27.9 (14X 11). Arts
137.2 X 137.2 ($4 X $4). Courtesy Gallery York. Photo Lisa Kahane Council Collection,London. 258 Corpus
Chemould 1985 (supplication section). Laminated photo
HORN Rebecca 252 The Tirtle Sighing positive and screen print on plexiglass
GUERRILLA GIRLS 271 Poster, c. 1987. Tiee (detail) 1994. Copper, steel, motors, steel 53-3 X 88.9 (48 X 36). Courtesy Postmasters
Offset lithograph 43.2 X 56 (17 X 22). wire, audio 420 X 810 X 930 (168 X 324 X 372). Gallery, New York

488
<NGWARREYE Emily Karne Photo Art Resource, New York. MERRITT AnnaLea 105 War 1883.
88 Utopia Panel 1996. Detail ofinstallation. 117_~—- Forever Free 1867. Marble. Howard Oil on canvas 102.9 X 139.7 (40% $5).
yynthetic polymer paint on canvas 263.5 X University, James A. Porter Gallery of Bury Art Gallery
4.5 (103¥, X 337%), one of 18 panels. Afro-American Art, Washington, D.C.
commissioned 1996 by the Queensland Art MESSAGER Annette 261 Histoire des
sallery with funds from the Andrew Thyne LEYSTER Judith 3 The Happy Couple Robes 1990. Dresses and mixed media in glass-
Xeid Charitable Trust through and with the 1630. Oil on canvas 68 X $5 (26%X 21%). fronted wooden boxes. Collection the artist.
ssistance of the Queensland Art Gallery Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo Réunion des Photo courtesy Arnolfini, Bristol. © ADAGP,
‘oundation. Collection: Queensland Art musées nationaux. 4 The Jolly Toper 1629. Paris and DACS, London 1996
sallery.© DACS 2002 Oil on canvas 89 X 85 (35 X 33.5).
Ryksmuseum-Stichting, Amsterdam. MITCHELL Joan 196 Cross Section of a
<OLBOWSKI Silvia 255 The Model 54 The Proposition 1631. Oil on canvas Bridge 1951. Oil on canvas 202.6 X 304.2
leasure Series 1984.7 black-and-white and 30.9 X 24.2 (11%X 9%). Mauritshuis, The (79%X 119%). Robert Miller Gallery,
ye color photograph, overall dimensions Hague. 56 AWoman Sewing by Candlelight New York
3.5 X 8g (21 X 35). Postmasters Gallery, 1633. Oil on panel 28 (11) diameter. National
New York Gallery of Ireland. 59 Yellow-Red of Leiden MODERSOHN-BECKER Paula
c. 1635. Watercolor on vellum 40 X 29.5 162 Mother and Child Lying Nude 1907.
<OLLWITZ Kathe 169 “Attack,” The (15%X 11%). Frans Hals Museum, Harlem Oil on canvas 82 X 124.7 (32%X 49%). Freie
Neavers’ Revolt 1895-97. Etching 23.7 X 29.5 Hansestadt Bremen. 163 Self-Portrait with
9.3 X 11.6). Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden LIN Maya 270 Vietnam Veterans Memorial Amber Necklace 1906. Oil on canvas 62.2 X 48.2
1975. Photo Wendy Watriss (244 19). Freie Hansestadt Bremen
<OZLOFF Joyce 227 Hidden Chambers
975. Acrylic on canvas 198.1 X 304.8 LOIR Marie 66 Portrait of Gabrielle-Emilie MOFFATT Tracey 285 Pantyhose Arrest,
78 X 120). Courtesy Barbara Gladstone le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Chdtelet 1973, from “Scarred for Life II” series 1999.
sallery, New York 1745-49. Oil on canvas 101 X 80 (39%X 31%). Offset lithograph go.2 X 69.9 (35% X 27%).
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
<RASNER Lee 192 Noon 1947. Oil and Paul Morris Gallery, New York
yn linen 61.3 X 76.2 (24%X 30). Courtesy MACHIDA Margo 268 — Self-Portrait as Yukio
Robert Miller Gallery, New York. Mishima 1986. Four panels, acrylic on canvas MORGAN Evelyn Pickering de
(99 Cat Image 1957. Oil on cotton duck 152.4 X 183 (60 X 72). Courtesy the artist 95 Medea 1889. Oil on canvas 149.8 X 88.9
19.4 X 147.6 (394X 58%). Courtesy Robert (59 X 35). Williamson Art Gallery and
Miller Gallery, New York MALANI Nalini 283 Body as Site 1996 Museum, Birkenhead, Wirral
(detail). Installation view, “Mutant I-VI”
<RUGER Barbara 236 Untitled (Your (from “B” series). Three wall drawings, three MORI Mariko 295 Empty Dream 199s.
Gaze Hits the Side of My Face) 1981. works on milk carton paper, fabric dye, sound, Crystal print, wood, pewter 200.7 X 599.4 X
-*hotograph 139.7 X 104.1 ($5 X 41). ultraviolet lights, 300 X 1080 X 1080 (118%, X 7.6 (79 X 236 X 3). Courtesy Deitch Projects,
Mary Boone Gallery, New York 425% X 425%). Installation at the Second New York
Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art,
<USAMA Yayoi 279 Aggregation— Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, MORISOT Berthe 123 Mother and Sister
Rowboat 1963. Detail ofinstallation in “NUL 1996. Photo Andrew Campbell of the Artist 1870. Oil on canvas 101 X 81.8
(965, April 15—June 8, 1965. Assemblage, (39%X 32%). National Gallery of Art,
‘owboat with oars, covered by plaster castings MAN RAY 177. Coco Chanel 1935. Washington, D.C. Chester Dale Collection.
n white cotton, a pair oflady’s shoes 60 X 265 Photograph 129 Psyche 1876. Oil on canvas 65 X 54
< 130 (23% X 104% X 514). Stedelijk Museum, (25%X 21%). Thyssen-Bornemisza
Amsterdam MARISOL 203 _— Self-Portrait 1961-62. Collection, Lugano
Wood, plaster, marker, paint, graphite, human
_-ABILLE-GUIARD Adélaide 5 Portrait of teeth, gold and plastic 110.5 X 115 X 192.1 MORONI Giovanni 30 Portrait of aMan
Dublin-Tornelle c. 1799. Oil on canvas 72.4 X (434X 45%X 75%). Museum of Contemporary (The Tailor) c. 1570. Oil on canvas 97.8 X 74.9
57.2 (28%X 22%). The Harvard University Art Art, Chicago. Promised gift of Joseph and (38%X 29%). The National Gallery, London
Museums, Cambridge. Bequest Grenville L. Jory Shapiro
Winthrop. 79 Portrait ofMarie-Gabrielle MORROW Albert 136 The NewWoman
Capet 1798. Oil on canvas 78.5 X 62.5 MARTIN Agnes 200 Untitled #9 1990. 1897. Mixed media poster. Private collection
30% X 24%). Private collection. 81 Portrait Acrylic and graphite on canvas 182.9 X 182.9
ofMadame Mitoire and Her Children 1783. (72 X 72). Whitney Museum of American Art, LAS MUJERES MURALISTAS
Dil on canvas 90.3 X 71 (35%X 28). New York. Gift of the American Art 228 Mural 1974 (detail). Industrial paint
Private collection. 84 Portrait of Foundation 92.60. Photo courtesy Pace on concrete 6.09 X 23.2 m (20 X 76 ft). San
Madame Adelaide 1787. Oil on canvas Wildenstein, New York Francisco. Photo Pamela Rodriquez
271 X 194 (106%X 76%). Musée de Versailles.
Photo Réunion des musées nationaux MASACCIO 25 The Trinity 1425. Fresco. MUKHERJEE Mrinalini 293 Yakshi
Sta Maria Novella, Florence. Photo Alinari 1984. Hemp 225 X 130 X 66 (887% X $1 X 26).
LACY Suzanne and LABOWITZ Leslie Courtesy the artist
235 In Mourning and in Rage 1977. McLAUGHLIN Mary 128 Losanti
Performance. Photo Susan R. Mogul porcelain,c.1890. 12.1 (4%) h. National MUNTER Gabriele 140 Portrait of
Museum of American History, Division of Marianne von Werefkin 1909. Oil on board 78.7
LAURENCIN Marie 172 Group ofArtists Ceramics and Glass, Smithsonian Institution, X $4.5 (31 X 21%). Stadtische Galerie im
1908. Oil on canvas 64.8 X 81 (254 31%). The Washington, D.C. Lenbachhaus, Munich. 144 Boating 1910.
Baltimore Museum ofArt, The Cone Oil on canvas 125 X 73.3 (49%X 28%).
Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and MENDIETA Ana_ 233_— ‘Untitled (Silueta Milwaukee Art Museum Collection, Gift of
Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland Series) c. 1977. Earth, clay, water (earth-body- Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley
work). Courtesy the Carlo Lamagna Gallery,
LEVINE Sherrie 239 After Walker Evans New York NEEL Alice 231 Pregnant Maria 1964.
(1936). Photograph. Courtesy Mary Boone Oil on canvas 81.3 X 119.4 (32 X 47). Robert
Gallery, New York. MERIAN Maria 61 African Martagan Miller Gallery, New York
1680. 43.1 X 32.8 (17 X 12%). British Museum,
LEWIS Edmonia 8 Old Indian Arrow- Department of Prints and Drawings. NEVELSON Louise 195 Totem IT 1959.
maker and His Daughter 1872. Carved marble 63 Illustration, plate 47 from Metamorphosis White painted wood 280.7 X 34.3 X 35.6
$4.6 X 34.6 X 34 (214X 13%X 134). National Insectorum Surinamensium 1705.Colored (110%X 134 14). The Pace Gallery,
Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. engraving New York

489
NESHAT Shirin 301 ~~Tisrbulent 1998. POWERS Harriet 109 Pictorial Quilt Comunittee for the Acquisition of Afro-
Video still. © 1998 Shirin Neshat. Installed at c. 1895-98. Pieced, appliquéd and printed American Art)
Serpentine Gallery, London, July cotton embroidered with plain and metallic
28—September 3, 2000. Courtesy Barbara yarns 175 X 267 (69 X 105). Courtesy, Museum SAGE Kay 186 In the Third Sleep 1944.
Gladstone Gallery, New York of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Maxim Oil on canvas 100X 146 (39%* $7). The Art
Karolik.© 1995 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Institute of Chicago, Watson F. Blair Purchase
NICHOLS Maria Longworth (Storer) Prize, Goodman Fund
133 Vase, 1897. Rookwood pottery 17.7 (7) RAE Fiona 262 Untitled (green with stripes)
high. Cincinnati Art Museum. Gift of 1996. Oil and pencil on canvas 213.4 X 213.4 SAINT PHALLE Nikide 204 Nanac.
Dr. H. Schroer (84 X 84). Courtesy Waddington Galleries 1965. Mixed media 127 X 91.4 X 78.7
Ltd., London (50 X 36 X 31). Albright-Knox Art Gallery,
NIRO Shelley 241 — Portrait of the Artist Buffalo, New York. Gift of Seymour H.
Sitting with a Killer Surrounded by French RAMOS Sandra 276 Migraciones II 1994. Knox, 1978
Curves 1991. Hand-tinted black-and-white Mixed media (painted suitcase) 50 X 64 X 34
photograph. Canadian Museum of (19% X 257, X 13%). Courtesy the artist SALCEDO Doris 280 Untitled 1990.
Civilization, Hull, Quebec Installation at Galeria Garces-Velasquex,
RASDJARMREARNSOOK Araya Bogota, Colombia. Courtesy Alexander and
O’KEEFFE Georgia 178 The American 284 Prostitute’s Room 1995. Installation, Bonin, New York
Radiator Building 1927. Oil on canvas cloth, glass, blood, oil. Dimensions variable.
121.9 X 76.2 (48 X 30). The Alfred Stieglitz Photo Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook SANPITAK Pinaree 300 The Egg 1997.
Collection for Fisk University, New York. Charcoal, acrylic, pastel on canvas (200 X 210,
179 Black Hollyhock, Blue Larkspur 1930. READ Catherine 67 Lady Anne Lee 78/, X 82%) from “eggs, breasts, bodies, I,
Oil on canvas 76.2 X 101.6 (30 X 40). Embroidering 1764. Pastel 73.7 X $8.4 (29 X 23). etcetera” show at the Art Center, Centers of
Private collection Private collection. Photo Courtesy Courtauld the Academic Resources, Chulalongkorn
Institute of Art University, Bangkok. Collection the artist.
OPIE Catherine 243 Bo 1994. Photograph Aroon Permpoonsopol
Chromogenic print 152.4 X 76.2 (60 X 30). REGO Paula 250 The Family 1988.
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles Acrylic on canvas-backed paper 33 X 33 SCHAPIRO Miriam 225 American
(84 X 84). Saatchi Collection, London Memories 1977-80. Acrylic and fabric on
ORMANI Maria 24 Breviarium cum canvas 183 X 183 (72 X 72). Collection the
Calendario 1453. Cod.1923, fol.8or. RICHIER Germaine 181 The Batman artist. 226 Anatomy ofaKimono (detail)
Osterreichisches Nationalbibliothek, Vienna 1956. Bronze 86.4 (34) h. Wadsworth 1976. Whole work 2 X 17.3 m (6’8 X 56’10).
Atheneum, Hartford. Gift of Mrs. Frederick Collection Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich.
OSBORN Emily Mary 88 — Barbara Leigh W. Hilles Photo courtesy the artist
Smith Bodichon before 1891. Oil on canvas 118
X 96 (46%X 37%). The Mistress and Fellows, RILEY Bridget 201 Winter Palace 1981. SCHURMAN Anna Maria 51 Self-
Girton College, Cambridge. 94 Nameless Oil on linen 212.1 X 183.5 (834X 72%). Portrait 1633. Engraving 20.2 X 15.2 (8 X 6).
and Friendless 1857. Oil on canvas 86.4 X 111.8 Courtesy the artist Rijksmuseum-Stichting, Amsterdam
(34 X 44). Private collection
RINGGOLD Faith 208 Die 1967. Acrylic SCOTT Jill 273 Machinedreams 1990
PEETERS Clara 58 — Still-life 1611. Oil on on canvas 182.9 X 365.8 (72 X 144). Courtesy (detail—one of four images from “The
canvas §1 X 71 (20 X 28). Museo del Prado, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, New York. History of Women and Technology”).
Madrid 269 The Wedding: Lover's Quilt No. 1 1986. Computer-generated image, inkjet sprayed
Acrylic on canvas, tie-dyed, painted, pieced on canvas behind plexiglass 100 X 80
PEREIRA Irene Rice 191 Untitled 1951. fabric 196.5 X 147.5 (774 $8). Collection (39% X 314). Courtesy the artist
Oil on board 101.6 X 61 (40 X 24) The Marilyn Lanfear. Photo Bernice Steinbaum
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New Gallery, New York SCULTORI Diana 35 Christ and the
York. Gift of Mr.Jerome B. Lurie Woman Taken in Adultery 1575. Engraving
ROBUSTI Marietta 2 Portrait of an 42.4 X §8.5 (16%X 23). Private collection.
PEREZ BRAVO Marta Maria Old Man with Boy c. 1585. Oil on canvas Photo courtesy Christie’s, London
274 Proteccion 1990. Gelatin silver prints, 103 X 83.5 (40%X 32%). Kunsthistorisches
edition of 15 50.8 X 40.6 (20 X 16). Courtesy Museum, Vienna SHEIKH Nilima 282 “Songspace”
Galeria Ramis Barquet, New York installation 1995 (detail). Five canvas scrolls
ROSSI Properzia de’ 9 Joseph and painted on both sides in casein tempera, each
PEYTON Elizabeth 286 Lady Diana Potiphar’s Wife c. 1520. Marble bas-relief 304.8 X 152.4 (120 X 160). One canvas
reading Romance Novels 1997. Oil on board 28 54.5 X $9 (214%4X 234). Museo di San Petronio, backdrop painted in acrylic 342.9 X 569
X 35.5 (11 X 14). © The artist, courtesy Sadie Bologna. Photo Alinari (135 X 224). Courtesy the artist
Coles HQ, London
RUYSCH Rachel 57 Flowerpiece after SHERMAN Cindy 238 Untitled 1979.
PINNEY Eunice 106 The Cotters, Saturday 1700. Oil on canvas 75.6 X 60.6 (29%X 23%). Film still. Courtesy Metro Pictures, New York
Night c. 1815. Watercolor 30.8 X 37.1 (124X The Toledo Museum ofArt, Toledo, Ohio.
14%). National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey. SIKANDER Shahzia 287 = The Scroll
D.C. The Edgar William and Bernice 62 Flowers in a Vase after 1700. Oil on canvas 1991-92. Vegetable color, dry pigment, water-
Chrysler Garbisch Collection 57 X 43.5 (224X 174). The National color, tea on hand-prepared wasli paper, 33.3
Gallery, London X 162.2 (13% X 63%). Courtesy Deitch
PIPER Adrian 247 Vanilla Nightmares No. Projects, New York
2 1986. Charcoal drawing on New York SAAR Alison 245 Love Potion No.9 1988.
Times pages $6 X 69.8 (22 X 27%). Photo Mixed media. View ofinstallation from the SIRANI Elisabetta 38 The Holy Family
courtesy John Weber Gallery, New York exhibition “New Visions: James Little, with a Kneeling Monastic Saint c. 1660. Black
Whitfield Lovell, Alison Saar,” 1988. The chalk, pen and brown ink, brown wash on
POPOVA Liubov 151 Painterly Queens Museum, Flushing, New York paper 26.3 X 18.8 (10% 7%). Private collection.
Architectonics 1918. Watercolor and gouache Photo courtesy Christie’s, London.
29.3 X 23.5 (11%X 94%). Yale University Art SAAR Betye 210 The Liberation ofAunt 40 Portrait ofAnna Maria Ranuzzi as Charity
Gallery, Gift from estate of Katherine S. Jemima 1972. Mixed media 29.8 X 20.2 X 6.8 1665. Oil on canvas. Bologna, Collezioni
Dreier. 160 Design for flannelette print (11%X 8 X 2%). University Art Museum, d’Arte e di Storia della Cassa di Risparmio.
and a coat and skirt using these, c. 1924. University ofCalifornia, Berkeley. Purchased 42 Portia Wounding Her Thigh 1664. Oil
Pencil and inks 72.5 X 34 (28% 13%). with the aid of funds from the National on canvas IOI X 139.1 (39%X $4%).
Private collection Endowment for the Arts (selected by The Private collection

490
SJOO Monica 232 God Giving Birth 1969. STEVENS May 209 Big Daddy, Paper Doll VELARDE Pablita 189 Animal Dance
Oil on hardboard 183 X 122 (72 X 48). 1968. Acrylic on canvas 198.1 X 426.7 (78 X Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico 1939-45.
Courtesy the artist 168). The Brooklyn Museum. 223 Rosa Casein. Permanent Collection of Bandelier
from Prison from the series “Ordinary/ National Monument, National Park Service,
SLEIGH Sylvia 230 =The Turkish Bath Extraordinary” 1977-80. Mixed media 76.2 X New Mexico
1973. Oil on canvas 193 X 259 (76 X 102). 114.3 (30 X 45). Rudolf Baranik Collection
Courtesy the artist VERMEER Johannes 55 The Lacemaker
STUART Michelle 215 Niagara II 1976. c. 1665-68. Oil on canvas 24 X 21 (9% 8/).
SMITH Jaune Quick-to-See 242 Site: Rock indentations, red Queenston shale, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo Réunion des
Canyon de Chelly 1980s. Oil on canvas graphite, muslin mounted, rag paper musées nationaux
142.2 X 106.7 (56 X 42). Courtesy Bernice 396.2 X 1$7.5 (156 X 62). Collection Walker
Steinbaum Gallery, New York Art Center, Minneapolis. Photo Courtesy VIGEE-LEBRUN Elisabeth-Louise
Fawbush Gallery, New York 75, Portrait of Marie Antoinette with Her
SMITH Kiki 266 Untitled 1986. Twelve Children 1787. Oil on canvas 275 X 215
glass jars 49.5 X 25.4 X 25.4 (19%X 10 X 10) TAEUBER-ARP Sophie 157 Vertical (108%X 84%). Musée de Versailles.
each installation dimensions variable, version Horizontal Composition c. 1916-18. Wool 78 Hubert Robert 1788. Oil on canvas
2. Courtesy Pace Wildenstein, New York. embroidery 50X 38.5 (19%X 15%). 105 X 85 (414X 33). Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Photo Ellen Page Wilson Private collection Photo Réunion des musées nationaux.
83 Portrait of the Artist with Her Daughter
SNYDER Joan 211 Heart-On 1975. Oil, TANNING Dorothea 187 Palaestra 1789. Oil on canvas 105 X 84 (41% X 33).
acrylic, paper, fabric, cheesecloth, papier- 1947. Oil on canvas 61.5 X 44 (244%X 17%). Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo Réunion
maché, mattress batting and thread on canvas Private collection des musées nationaux
182.9 X 243.8 (72 X 96). The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and THOMPSON Elizabeth (Lady Butler) WALKER Alice 90 Wounded Feelings
Mrs. Donald Rugoff, 1981 97 Calling the Roll After an Engagement, 1861. Oil on canvas 100.3 X 73.6 (394X 294%).
Crimea 1874. Oil on canvas 91.5 X 183 The Forbes Magazine Collection, New York
SOLOMON Rebecca 93 The Governess (36 X 72). Reproduced by Gracious
1854. Oil on canvas 66 X 86.4 (26 X 34). Permission of Her Majesty the Queen WARD Henrietta 104 Queen Mary
Private collection Quitted Stirling Castle on the Morning of
TIAVOUANE Denise 289 The Crying Wednesday, April 23 ... 1863. Present where-
SOO-JA Kim 299 Cities on the Move—2727 Taros 1996 (detail). Installation comprising abouts unknown. Engraved in The Art
kilometers, Bottari Truck 1997. One-ton truck, taro plants, bamboo, wooden sticks, sign, audio Journal 1864
used clothes and bedcovers, eleven-day per- components 3000 X 100 (1181% X 39%).
formance across Korea. Courtesy the artist Installation at the Second Asia-Pacific WHEELER Candace 132 Printed silk,
Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland c. 1885. Designed for Cheney Bros. The
SPENCER Lilly Martin 112 We Both Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, 1996 Metropolitan Museum ofArt, Gift of Mrs.
Must Fade 1869. Oil on canvas 181.9 X 136.5 Boudinot Keith, 1928
(71%X 53%). National Museum of American TINTORETTO 45 Susanna and the
Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, Elders 1555—56. Oil on canvas 146.4 X 193.7 WHITEREAD Rachel 253 House 1993.
D.C. Museum Purchase (s7%*X 76%). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Commissioned by Artangel. Courtesy Karsten
Vienna Schubert, London. Photo Sue Ormerod
SPERO Nancy 221,222 Codex Artaud
1970-71 (details). Gouache and typewriter TITIAN 31 La Bellac.1536.Oil on WHITNEY Anne 118 Charles Sumner
collage on paper. Courtesy the artist canvas 89 X 75 (35 X 29%). Pitti Palace, 1900. Plaster cast oforiginal in Harvard
Florence. Photo Alinari Square, Cambridge, Mass. 73.5 (29) high.
STEBBINS Emma 114 _ Industry 1860. Photo Watertown Free Public Library
Marble 71.1 X 27 X 27.9 (28 X 10%X 11). TOYEN 185 __ Illustration from The Rifle-
Collection of the Heckscher Museum, Range 1940. Pen and ink on paper 28 X 42.5 WILSON Millie 244 Merkins, from The
Huntington, New York. Gift of Phillip (11 X 16%) Museum of Lesbian Dreams 1990-92. Synthetic
M. Lydig II wigs on wooden shelves, dimensions variable.
TROCKEL Rosemarie 248 Cogito, Ergo Photo courtesy the artist
STEENWIJCK-GASPOEL Susanna van Sum 1988. Wool on canvas 210 X 160
52 The Lakenhal 1642. Oil on canvas (82% x63). Courtesy Galerie Monika WINSOR Jackie 214 Bound Grid
97 X 119 (38.2 X 46.9). Museum de Spriith, Cologne. 249 Untitled 1983. 1971— 72. Wood and hemp 213.4 X 213.4 X
Lakenhal, Leiden Ink and gouache 29.5 X 21 (11% 8%). 20.3 (84 X 84 X 8) Fonds National d’ Art
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Contemporain, Paris. Photo Paula Cooper
STEIR Pat 217 The Breughel Series Gift of Walter Bareiss Gallery, New York
(A Vanitas of
Styles) 1981-83 (detail). Oil on
canvas 64 panels each 72.5 X 57 (28% 22%). UDALTSOVA Nadezhda 149 At the Piano XIUZHEN Yin 296 _ Beijing, 1999 1999.
Kunstmuseum, Berne. Courtesy the artist 1914. Oil on canvas 106.7 X 88.9 (42 X 35). Installation, wood, roof tiles and black-and-
Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of the white photographs. Timber structure, 160 X
STEPANOVA Varvara 155 Designs for Société Anonyme 600 X 400 (63 X 236Y, X 157%), 200 tiles each
Sports Clothing from LEF No. 2, 1923 22 X 25 (8% X 9%). Installation at the Third
VALADON Suzanne 164 Grandmother Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art,
STEPHENS Alice Barber 121 The Female and Young Girl Stepping into the Bath c. 1908. Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia,
Life Class 1879. Oil on cardboard 30.5 X 35.6 Black chalk 29 x 39 (11% 15%). Private 1999. Courtesy the artist
(12 X 14). The Pennsylvania Academy ofFine collection. 166 The Blue Room 1923.
Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of the Artist. Oil on canvas 90 X 116 (35%X 45%). YATES Marie 256 The Missing Woman
137. The Woman in Business 1897. Oil on Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris 1982-84 (detail). Photograph. Courtesy
canvas 63.5 X 45.8 (25 X 18). Brandywine the artist
River Museum. Acquisition made possible VALLAYER-COSTER Anna 77 _— Still-life
by Beverly and Ray Sacks 1767. Oil on canvas 70.5 X 89.5 (274X 35%). ZOFFANY Johann 1 The Academicians
The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio. ofthe Royal Academy 1771-72 (detail). Oil on
STETTHEIMER Florine 173 Cathedrals Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey canvas 120.6 X 151 (47% $9%). Reproduced
ofArt 1942 (unfinished). Oil on canvas by Gracious Permission of Her Majesty
153 X 127.6 (60%X 50%). The Metropolitan VARO Remedios 188 Celestial the Queen
Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Ettie Pablum 1958. Oil on masonite 92 X 62 (36 X
Stettheimer, 1953 24%). Private collection

491
Index

Italic numerals refer to plate numbers

Abakanowicz, Magdalena 363; 224 Becker, Julie 443 Cahn, Miriam 353
Abdala, Yaquelin 429, 431 Beeck, Jan van der (Torrentius) 131 Cairo, Francesco del 113
Abramovic, Marina 366, 397,423; 251 Bell, Clive 257 Calle, Sophie 421, 444; 272
Abstract Expressionism 316, 317, 319, 322, Bell, Vanessa 256, 258, 260; 142, 143 Calverly, Lady 152; 72
326, 328, 330, 331, 340, 354, 369 Bellini family 17,18 Cambiaso, Luca 86
Abstraction 252-78 Bencovich, Federico 22 Camden Town group 292
Académie de Saint-Luc 162, 164 Benedetti, Giovanni 33 Campfire Group 452
Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture Benglis, Lynda 346, 348, 369; 213 Campos-Pons, Maria Magdalena 427, 428
138, 140, 143, 144, 161, 164, 165, 168, Benjamin, Frances 251; 135 Capella, Francesco 22
173,174 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 15$1 Caravaggio 96, 100, 105, 106, 112
Accademia del Disegno 109 Bernstein, Theresa 305 Caravaggisti (Utrecht) 22,126
Accademia del Nudo 37 Beuys, Joseph 355 Cardoso, Maria 429
Acconci, Vito 367, 369 Beverwijck, Johann van 123-24; 53 Carmellion, Alice 115
Action Painting 320 Bhabha, Homi 434-35 Carr, Emily 279, 307; 180
Adam, Robert 153,156 Bicci, Neri De 75 Carracci 93,94, 96,153
Aelst, Willem van 136, 138 Bienal de Sao Paulo 424, 442, 444 Carriera, Rosalba 139, 141-44;65
Agar, Eileen 312; 184 Biennale of Sydney 425-26, 448-49 Carrington, Leonora 311, 314, 345; 168
Aguilar, Laura 434, 436 Bining, Simon 115 Cars, Laurent 80
Ahtila, Eija-Liisa 466 Bird Bishop, Lucy 202 Casoni, Felice Antonio 96;37
Alberti, Leon Battista 17,71, 72,74, 76 Bishop, Isabel 316, 318, 319, 345; 190 Cassatt, Mary 41,214,215, 230,231,
Alcott, May 206, 214, 229, 230, 231 Blaue Reiter group 292 232,234, 235,240, 241,249; 124,
Alexander,
Jane 437 Bloch, Lucienne 318 127, 130
Alicia, Juana 392 Block, René 425 Castello, Valerio 113
Allegra, Sister (miniaturist) 90 Bloom, Barbara 425 Castiglione, Baldassare 36,83
Allori, Alessandro 32 Blunden, Anna 188;92 Castillo, Ménica 429
Ampzing, Samuel 22 Blunt, Lady Anne 201 Caterina dei Vigri (St Catherine of Bologna)
Anastaise (miniaturist) 36 Bodichon, Barbara 179, 180, 202 88-90;
33, 34
Anderson, Laurie 362 Boltanski, Christian 432 Catlett, Elizabeth 317, 318,341
Anderson, Sophie 177 Bonheur, Rosa 41,177, 189, 192-96, 217, 230, Cats, Jacob 120, 123
Andre, Carl 339 236, 249, 301; 96, 99, 100 Cézanne, Paul 240, 287
Anguissola, Lucia 85;32 Bontecou, Lee 335; 202 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung 392
Anguissola, Sofonisba 10, 32, 34, 38, 67,77, Bonvicini, Monica 465-66 Chadwick, Helen 411, 414; 267
78—86, 87, 92,94, 113, 114; 27, 28, 29, 39 Boquet, Anne-Rosalie 164 Chagall, Marc 268
Antin, Eleanor 362,410 Borchard Dassel, Herminia 205 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon 163-64,
Antoni, Janine 434 Bossche, Agnes van den 114 168
Applebroog, Ida 405, 406; 264 Botticelli, Sandro 75 Charlton, Valerie 355
Arahmaiani 452, 4533290 Boucher, Francois 145, 163 Charpentier, Constance Marie 25, 26, 28;7
Archipenko 268 Bourgeois, Louise 324, 340, 345,348, 408, Chase-Riboud, Barbara 344
Aristarete 32 423, 434, 442; 194, 205, 265 Chaudet, Jeanne-Elisabeth 174
Arp, Jean 270, 271-72, 308, 309; 156 Bourgot (illuminator) 23 Chéron, Sophie 143
Art Nouveau 253 Boyce, Joanna 177,184 Chicago, Judy 348, 356-57, 358, 376, 379, 403.
Arts and Crafts Movement 243-47, 253, Boyce, Sonia 387, 388; 240 448; 220, 229
256,257 Brabazon, Hercules 179 Chuang, Hsin 448
Asian Art Triennial 449-50, 457, 465 Brach, Paul 326 Citron, Minna 318
Asia-Pacific Triennial 448, 449-65 Brackett, Edward 28 Clair, Jean 437
Associated Artists 245 Bracquemond, Marie 235,238,249; 126 Claricia (illuminator) 54
Atherton, Gertrude 217 Brancusi, Constantin 308 Chris Ey) 23a
Auric, Georges 272 Braque, Georges 292,295 Claudel, Camille 294-95;171
Auzou, Pauline 174 Brauchitsch, Margaretha von 253; 138 Clemente, Francesco 379
Aycock, Alice 349, 350, 352; 218 Breughel, Jan 131, 132 Coe,Sue 405,415
Ayres, Gillian 405 Bridges, Fidelia 229 Coello, Claudio 78,82
Brody, Sherry 358 Cogniet, Léon 21
Baca, Judy 374; 234 Brooks, Romaine 297-301, 3023174, Colsell, Ann 355
Bach, Elvira 396-97 175,176 Commelin, Jan 133; 60
Backer, Catherina 138 Brown, Ford Madox 184, 189 Conceptual art 338, 362
Baer,Jo 331 Brownscombe, Jenny 228; 120 Confraternity of Saint Luke 69
Balla, Giacomo 262-63 Briicke group 292 Constructivism 264, 274, 331
Barbizon painters 289 Bruguera, Tania 428-29, 444 Cooke, Lynne 448
Barlow, Hannah 243 Brunelleschi, Filippo 71 Cope, Charles 180, 181
Barnes, Cornelia 305 Bry, Johann Theodor de 134, 136 Corot, Camille 179, 238
Baroque 112 Bul, Yi (Lee) 453-55, 466; 291 Correggio 86,90,92, 153,240
Barrie, Ray 400 Burden, Chris 367 Cosway, Maria 249
Bartlett, Jennifer 353, 354, 378; 216 Burgin, Victor 300 Courbet, Gustave 194, 238,289, 422
Bataille, Georges 422 Burluik, David 268 Crane, Walter 243
Bayeux Tapestry 47, 48-49; 13 Burne-Jones, Edward 243 Crawford, Thomas 217
Beard, James 213 Burne-Jones, Georgiana 244 Cross, Dorothy 411, 434; 263
Bearden, Romare 341 Burr, Margaretta 201; 102 Cubism 252, 264, 265, 268, 269, 280, 296
Beaux, Cecilia 230,249 Butler, Lady, see Thompson, Elizabeth Cubofuturism 264
Beaux-Arts style 248 Byss, Maria Helena 138 Culwick, Hannah 184

492
Dada 270, 272, 273,274, 276, 331 Fontana, Lavinia 32, 33, 37, 38, 86, 87, 90, 92, Hammond, Harmony 13, 362, 366, 388
Damer, Anne Seymour 151; 70 93-96;36,37, 41 Hamnett, Nina 258; 145
Damon, Betsy 366, 371 Fontana, Prospero 33 Hard Edge abstraction 405
Dance, Nathaniel 143 Fontana, Veronica 90 Harlem Renaissance, The 316,318
Darboven, Hanne 353-54; 219 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré 168 Harrison, Margaret 355, 356, 417,418
Daubigny, Charles-Frangois 179 Franceschini, Marcantonio 90; 34 Hartigan, Grace 326, 328; 197
Daumier, Honoré 234, 289 Frankenthaler, Helen 303, 326, 328, 330, Hartley, Marsden 306, 307
David, Jacques-Louis 17,24, 25, 26,157, 169, 331; 198 Hatoum, Mona 408, 410, 424, 432; 260, 278
171,174; 85 Fraser, Andrea 421 Haudebourt-Lescot, Antoinette 174
Davin-Mirvault, Césarine 25;6 Frazer, Sally 355 Hausmann, Raoul 270
Davis, Stuart 319 Freeman, Florence 215, 222,229 Havana Biennial 424, 426-32, 462
Deacon, Destiny 456-57; 294 Friedman, Tom 443 Haverman, Margaretha 138
Decker, Cornelis 123 Fry, Roger 256, 265 Hawarden, Lady Clementina 183; 91
Decorative-Primitivism 265 Fuertes, Rosana 431 Hayden, Sophia 248; 134
Deepwell, Katy 425 Fusco, Coco 392, 393, 445, 452; 246 Hayllar, Edith and Jessica 177, 180,
Degas, Edgar 231, 232, 234, 238, 286, 388 Futurism 262, 268, 269 182-83; 89
Dehner, Dorothy 323-24; 193 Healy, Anne 362
Delacroix, Eugéne 199 Galizia, Fede 38 Heem, Jan Davidsz de 137
Delaney, Mary 151; 69 Galle I, Cornelius 112 Heizer, Michael 350, 351
Delaunay, Robert 260, 261, 269, 271, 300 Gambacorta, Clare 74 Hemessen, Caterina van 114,116; 49
Delaunay, Sonia 260-62, 269-70, Garciandia, Flavio 428 Hendratmo, Non 461
272-75, 277, 306; 146, 147, 152, Gardner, Elizabeth C. 229 Heng, Amanda 461-62; 298
154,159 Garrido, Ines 429 Hepworth, Barbara 308-09, 330; 182
Della Robbia, Luca 18,71 Garzoni, Giovanna 37 Herford, Laura 179
DeMaria, Walter 350,351 Gauguin, Paul 286, 287, 289, 290 Herrad of Landsberg 55-57, 62; 20
Demuth, Charles 303, 307 Gaultier, Jean-Paul 457 Herrero, Alicia 429
Desubleo, Michele 100 Gentileschi, Artemisia 10, 16,92,96, 105-13; Hershman, Lynn 362
Deverell, Walter 192;98 43, 44, 46, 48 Hesse, Eva 339, 340, 348, 379, 456; 206, 207
Diaghilev, Serge 264, 269-70 Gentileschi, Orazio 16, 100, 105, 106, Hick, George Elgar 181
Diemud (Cloister of Wessobrun) 54 112; 47 Hicks, Emily 329
Dighton, Robert 301 Geometric Abstraction 319, 364 Hicks, Sheila 363
Donatello 72 Gérard, Marguérite 168,174; 82 Hildegard of Bingen 55, 58-61, 62; 15,
Douglas, Stan 444 Gerdme, Jean-Léon 199, 200 21,22
Dove, Arthur 303 Gheyn, Jacques de 131 Hiller, Susan 356, 377, 400, 408; 254
Drinker, Catherine A. 230 Ghiberti, Lorenzo 71,72, 104 Hilliard, Nicholas 115
Dunbar, Lady 202 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 75; 26 Himid, Lubaina 386, 388
Dunn, Peter 418 Ghisi, Diana 249 Hoch, Hannah 270; 153
Duparc, Francoise 148; 68 Gibson, John 218,221 Hodges, Jim 443
Diirer, Albrecht 31,78, 114,287 Gill, Winifred 258; 145 Hofmann, Hans 322, 324, 331
Girardet, Karl 21 Hogarth, William 195
Eakins, Susan MacDowell 230; 122 Giron, Monica 431;277 Holbein, Hans the Younger 115
Earl, Maud 189 Giroust-Roslin, Marie 162 Holman Hunt, William 189, 199
Eckhout, Albert van der 133 Glissant, Edward 427-28 Holt, Nancy 350, 352,417
Edelson, Mary Beth 362,371 Goldin, Nan 396, 415 Holzer, Jenny 379, 382, 385, 434; 237
Egerton, Lady Francis 200 Golding, Andy 388 Hong, Li 447
Egg, Augustus 189 Gomez-Pena, Guillermo 392, 393, 4523246 Honoré, Maitre 64
Eisenman, Nicole 415 Goncharova, Natalia 263, 264-65, 268, 273, Honthorst, Gerard van 23
Elliot, Maud Howe 247 417; 148 Hood, Thomas 188
E] Lissitsky 268 Gonzales, Eva 235,238; 125 Horn, Rebecca 423, 425; 252
Ensor, James 292 Goodridge, Sarah 205 Hornebout, Susan, and family 31, 115
Enwezor, Okwui 444 Gorky, Arshile 326, 328 Hosmer, Harriet -28—29, 206, 214, 215—16,
Ernst, Max 309 Gothic art 56,175 P7220. 221,227,230; 1195 105
Escobedo, Helen 429 Gowda, Sheila 437-39;
281 Howitt, Anna Mary 189
Esposito, Bruna 466 Graff, Johann Andreas 134 Hoxie, Vinnie Ream 215, 217, 226-27,
Essen, Hans van 131 Graham, John 319 249; 119
Export, Valie 366 Granberry, Virginia and Henrietta 229 Huberland, Kathy 358
Expressionism 280, 292 Grant, Duncan 256, 258; 141 Hughes, Holly 415
Exter, Alexandra 252,263, 265, 268, 269, 274; Graves, Nancy 349-50 Hunt, Kay 356
150,158 Greatorex, Eliza 229 Hunter, Alexis 405; 259
Grebber, Frans Pietersz de 22
Falstein, Jessie 366 Green, Renee 434, 436 Impressionism 232,299
Fasnacht, Heidi 398 Greene, Balcomb 319 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Domunique 199, 200
Faulkner, Kate and Lucy 244; 131 Greenwood, Marion 318 Ismoyo, Agus 449
Fauves 264,280 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste 162-63, 166; 80 Iturbide, Graciela 429-31; 275
Fell, Alison 355 Groot, Cornelius Hofstede de 22, 2: Izquierdo, Maria 313
Female Labor Reform Association 207 Group of Seven 307
Ferrara, Jackie 345,417 Gruner, Sylvia 429 Jaarsma, Mella 424, 460-61; 297
Fine, Maxine 366 Guercino 113 Jacobus, Pauline 246
Fini, Leonor 279, 311—12; 183 Guerrilla Girls 385,418,421;
271 Jagamara, Michael 449
Finley, Karen 414 Jaudon, Valerie 356
Firenze, Francesca da 68 Haacke, Hans 400 Jawlensky, Alexei von 255
Fish, Janet 348 Hall, Anne 205 Jeanron, Philippe 21
Fishman, Louise 366 Hall, Fiona 455-56; 292 Jetalova, Magdalena 398
Flack, Audrey 348; 212 Hall, Stuart 427 Jeuffrain, Pierre and Gerard 26
Fleury, Sylvie 434 Hals, Frans 22,24, 126 Jia, Feng 447
Fliam, Nia 449 Hambling, Maggi 353 Johannesburg Biennale 434, 437-41, 444-46
Fluxus Group 339 Hamilton, Ann 417 John, Augustus 292
Foley, Margaret 215,222, 223;116 Hamilton, Gavin 7,153 John, Gwen 279, 292-94; 165, 170

493
Johns, Jasper 335 Lipton, Eunice 231 Mondrian, Piet 258
Johnson, Adelaide McFayden 249 Liss,Johann 112 Monet, Claude 232, 234,289
Johnson, Frances Benjamin 135 Loir, Marie 144;66 Mongez, Angélique 174
Johnson, Henrietta 205 Lomax, Yves 400, 401 Moninckx, Johan and Maria 133
Jonas, Joan 345-46, 362 Longhi, Barbara 32 Moore, Henry 308
Jones, Allen 377 Longhi, Luca 32 Moore, Liz 355
Jones, Lois Mailou 317, 318 Lopez, Yolanda 392, 417 Morgan, Evelyn Pickering de 204; 95
Jugendstil 253 Lorimier, Henriette 174 Mori, Giovanni Battista 82;30
Julien, Isaac 444 Louis, Morris 330 Mori, Mariko 424, 457; 295
Lyss, Jan 22 Morisot, Berthe 232, 234, 235, 238,240-41,
Kahlo, Frida 279, 313, 314, 315, 345, 242, 300; 123, 129
417, 429, 440; 167 MacCarthy, Sarah 377 Moroni, Giovanni Battista 78, 82; 30
Kandinsky, Wassily 253, 254-56, 258, Machida, Margo 417; 268 Morrell, Lady Ottoline 257,258; 114
268; 139 Maciunas, George 339 Morris, Robert 335, 339, 340
Kapoor, Geeta 437 Maderno, Stefano 220 Morris, William 243,244
Kaprow, Alan 339 Maggiotto, Domenico 22 Morrow, Albert 251; 136
Kauffmann, Angelica 7, 21, 139, 148, 152-60, “Magiciens de la Terre” 423, 444, 445 Morton, Ree 346
161, 172, 249; 73, 74, 76 Mahlangu, Esther 423, 445 Moser, Mary 7,2!
Kelly, Ellsworth 303 Malani, Nalini 437, 440; 283 Mosquera, Gerardo 444
Kelly, Mary 356, 377, 385, 400, 403-05, 408; Malevich, Kasimir 263, 265, 269, 384 Mujeres Muralistas, Las 374; 228
257, 258 Manet, Edouard 231, 232, 235,242, Mukherjee, Mrinalini 456; 293
King, Mary Ann 306 279, 300 Munch, Edvard 291
Kiss and Tell 385 Manfredi, Bartolomeo 113 Miinter, Gabriele 255—56; 140, 144
Klee, Paul 271 Mangold, Sylvia 348 Murray, Elizabeth 253,354
Klinger, Max 290 Manning, Adeline 222 Murray Cooksley, Margaret 202
Klumpke, Anna 230, 249 Man Ray 277; 177 Mutrie, Anna and Martha 178
Kngwarreye, Emily Karne 449; 288 Mantegna, Andrea 112
Knight, Laura 7 Mantuana, Diana 87 N., Pushpamala 437
Kolbowski, Silvia 400, 401; 255 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 268 Nam, Yun Suk 446-47
Kollock, Mary 229 Marisol, Escobar 335, 337, 340; 203 Nash, Paul 308
Kollwitz, Kathe 279, 286, 290-92; 169 Marrell, Jacob 134 Nattier, Jean Mare 144
Kooning, Elaine de 325, 326, 328 Marta, Luigi 21 Neel, Alice 316, 318, 345, 370-71; 231
Kooning, Willem de 326, 328, 330, 337 Martha (parchmenter) 64 Nelli, Luca 32
Kozloff, Joyce 364, 365,417, 418; 227 Martin, Agnes 331, 332, 379; 200 Nelson, Don 366
Krasner,
Lee 318, 319—23, 325, 326; 328, 345; Martin, Jean-Hubert 423, 445 Neoclassicism 7,25, 30,153,157, 161,171,
192,199 Martinez, Daniel 436 215,216, 225
Kruger, Barbara 382, 385, 400, 408, 423; 236 Martinez, Maria 212 Neoexpressionism 378
Kubota, Shigeko 330, 425 Masaccio 72325 Neoplatonism 84
Kusama, Yayoi 433-34; 279 Massot, Pierre de 272 Neoprimitivism 264
Kwangju Biennale 453, 457 Massy, Gertrude 189 Neshat, Shirin 424, 466; 301
Maswanganye, Esther 437 Netscher, Caspar 127
Labille-Guiard, Adélaide 139, 160, 161, Matisse, Henri 260, 279, 292 Nevelson, Louise 316, 318, 330-31,
162, 164-65, 167, 168, 171, 173, 1743 Maurer, Rudolph 290 3453195
5, 79, 81, 84 Mautloa,
Pat 444 Nevins, Blanche 229
Labowitz, Leslie 375; 235 Mayer, Constance 174 New English Art Club 293
Lackowicz, Rachel 398,410 Mayer, Rosemary 362 Newman, Barnett 303
Lacy, Suzanne 362, 375, 418; 235 Maynors, Katherine 115 Nichols, Maria Longworth 246; 133
Lama, Giulia 22 Mazuchelli, Elizabeth Sarah 200 Nicholson, Ben 308
Lambertsz, Hendrik 126 McLaughlin, Mary Louise 243,246; 128 Niro, Shelley 389; 241
Lambri, Luisa 466 McMonnies, Mary 249 Nivison, Josephine Verstille 305
Lander, Louisa 206, 215,220 Medici, Marie de 130,249 Noir, Jean le 64
Landseer, Sir Edwin 189 Mel, Anna 452 Noland, Kenneth 330
Landseer, Thomas 194 Mel, Michael 452 North, Marianne 201, 202; 103
Lanes, Llilian 426-27 Mendieta,
Ana 373,428, 444; 233 Nouveaux Réalistes 337
Langham Place Circle 179 Mengs, Raphael 153
Larionov, Mikhail 263, 264—65, 268, 272 Merian, Maria 133-37; 61, 63 Obrist, Hermann 253
Laurencin, Marie 295, 296, 306, 310;172 Merritt, Anna Lea 229, 249; 105 O’Grady, Lorraine 362, 392-93
Lavier, Bertrand 445 Messager, Annette 410; 261 O'Keeffe, Georgia 279, 320-27, 328, 358;
Lawrence, Jacob 342 Metsu, Gabriel 124 178, 179
Leapman, Edwina 353 Metz, Gertrued 138 Okulo, Mine 317
Lee, Doris 318 Metzinger,
Jean 265, 268 Oliver, Sheila 353
Leeson, Lorraine 418 Michelangelo 12, 31,66, 78,79, 104, 118, 119 Olivier, Fernande 296
Le Fauconnier 268 Mignon, Abraham 134 Olympia 32
Léger, Fernand 273 Millais, John Everett 180 Omega Workshops 256,257, 258—60
Leonard, Zoe 421 Miller, Lee 312 Ono, Yoko 339, 362,410
Leonardo 66,79,82 Millet, Jean-Francois 194, 289 Oosterwyck, Maria van 131, 137-38
Levine, Sherrie 384, 400, 408; 239 Millett, Kate 366 Op art 334
Lewis, Edmonia 17, 28—30, 215, 220, 222, Min, Yong Soon 392 Opie, Catherine 396; 243
224-26, 249; 8, 117 Minimalism 337, 338, 339, 362 Oppenheim, Dennis 350, 351
Lewis, Wyndham 256 Mirandola, Lucretia Quistelli della 32 Oppenheim, Meret 315, 345,408
LeWitt,
Sol 339 Miss, Mary 345, 349, 350, 352,417 Ormani, Maria 68; 24
Leyster, Judith 10, 17,22, 23-24, 28, 124— Mitchell, Joan 325, 326, 330; 196 Orta, Lucy 444-45
26, 132, 13333, 4, 54, 56, 59 Modernism 286, 300, 302, 338, 380, 386, 415 Osborn, Emily Mary 180, 185; 88,94
Lidrbauch, Christine 410 Modersohn-Becker, Paula 279, 282, 286-87, Osorio, Pepon 444
Lin, Maya 418; 270 289, 290; 162, 163 Oudinot, A.F 238
Linnaeus, Charles 136 Modigliani, Amedeo 292 Oulton, Thérése 405; 232
Lippard, Lucy 451 Moffatt, Tracey 424, 442; 285 Outterbridge,John 444
Lippi, Filippo 317 Molenaér, Jan Miense 22—23,24 Overbeck sisters 246

494
 Pagliano, Eleuterio 21 Rococo style 25, 38, 39, 141-43, 145, 205 Social Realism 319
Paik, Nam June 339 Rodchenko, Alexander 268, 269, 274, 292 Society for Applied Art in Munich 253
Pane, Gina 366, 367-68, 410, 466 Rodin, Auguste 289, 294 Society of Female Artists 178, 199, 201, 202
Parmigianino 90,92 Roghman, Geertruid 126-27, 249 Sole, Giovan Giosefa dal 110
Pasinelli, Lorenzo 100 Ronner, Henrietta 249 Solomon, Rebecca 177, 185;93
Passe, Crispijn van de 130 Rookwood Pottery 246 Sonnier, Keith 339
Pastor, Jennifer 443 Rosenthal, Rachel 362 Soo-Ja, Kim 463; 299
Pattern and Decoration Movement 364, 365 Rosler, Martha 404 Spencer, Lilly Martin 206, 212, 213-14; 112
Peale women ofPhiladephia 205 Rossellino 17,18 Spero, Nancy 359,405,
406, 423; 221, 222
Peeters, Clara 131-32; 58 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 189 Spivak, Gayatri 435
Pellegrini, Gian Antonio 141,142 Rossetti, Lucy Madox Brown 203 Sprinkle, Annie 415
Pereira, Irene Rice 319; 191 Rossi, Properzia de’ 32, 33, 87,92—93,96;9 Squarcione, Francesco 75
Pérez Bravo, Marta Maria 427, 428; 274 Rothenberg, Susan 353, 378 Standish, William 197
Petrini, Antonio 22 Rothko, Mark 326, 330 Starbak, Jana 408, 410
Peyton, Elizabeth 443; 286 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 39, 40, 146-48, 168, Stebbins, Emma 215,220; 114
Picasso, Pablo 260, 279, 292, 295, 388 174,213 Steenwijck-Gaspoel, Susanna van 122; 52
Piero della Francesca 73,75 Royal Academy 7, 178, 198, 199, 202 Steir, Pat 353,354; 217
Pindell, Howardena 349 Royal Female School of Art 179 Stepanova, Varvara 269, 274-75; 155
Pinney, Eunice 205; 106 Rozanova, Olga 168, 269 Stephens, Alice Barber 230; 121, 137
Piper, Adrian 339, 349, 362, 369, 386, 393; 247 Rubens, Peter Paul 112 Sterne, Hedda 326
Pisan, Christine de 35—36,67;11 Ruskin, John 40, 41, 189, 229 Stettheimer, Florine 279, 295, 296-97; 173
Pivi, Paola 466 Ruysch, Rachel 131, 137;57, 62 Stevens, May 341, 342, 359, 301; 209, 223
Plantin, Christophe 130 Ryland, William 156 Stieglitz, Alfred 302, 303, 306
Plautilla, Suor 32 Still, Clyfford 303, 326
Pisanello 75 Saar, Allison 392-93; 245 Story, William Wetmore 217
Pissarro, Camille 232,234 Saar, Betye 341, 342, 344, 386, 444; 210 Stuart, Jane 205
Pollaiuolo, Antonio 17, 18,75 Sage, Kay 311, 313;186 Stuart, Michelle 350, 351; 215
Pollock, Jackson 232, 234, 238, 320, 322, 326, Saint Phalle, Niki de 335, 337, 340; 204 Suprematism 264, 268
328, 330, 354, 389 Salcedo, Doris 424, 432, 434, 435, 436; 280 Surrealism 279, 296, 309, 310-11, 315, 324
Pondick, Rona 410, 445 Salle, David 378 Sussman, Elisabeth 448
Pool, Juriaen 138 Sanchez, Alfonso 78 SVOMAS (Free State Art School) 268
Pop art 331,337,338 Sanders,
Jan 114 Swanenburg, Isaac Claesz van 121
Popova, Liubov 263, 265, 268—69, 274, 275; Sando, Sandra de 367 Swynnerton, Annie Louise 7
151,160 Sanpitak, Pinaree 464; 300 Symbolism 286
Possum, Clifford 449 Saraceni, Carlo 113 Syon Cope 63-64; 19
Post-Impressionism 252,256, 260 Sartain, Emily 228, 316 Szeemann, Harald 466
Postmodernism 382, 385 Scepens, Elisabeth 114
Postpainterly Abstraction 331, 338 Schapiro, Miriam 326, 331, 348, 356-57, 358, Tabrizian, Mitra 388
Potter, Paulus 194 364, 417, 418; 225, 226 Taeuber-Arp, Sophie 270, 271-72; 157
Power, Hiram 221 Schimert, Kathleen 443 Tala, Botala 436
Powers, Harriet 210; 109 Schimmel, Paul 442 Tanguy, Yves 313
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 189 Schnabel, Julian 378 Tanning, Dorothea 311, 315,345; 187
Process art 335,338 Schneemann, Carolee 362, 369,410 Tatlin, Vladimir 262,265,274, 384
Productivism 269 Schon, Eva Maria 396 Tawney, Leonore 363
Puvis de Chavannes 283,289,292 Schurman, Anna Maria 120, 124,129, 136;51 Taylor-Wood,Sam 445, 457
Schwabacher, Ethel 330 Teerlinc, Levina 114, 115—16;50
Queen Isabella Society 248 Scott, Jill 425-26;
273 Tell, Marika 371
Scott, Joyce 397 Tenison, Lady Louise 200
Rae, Fiona 405, 406; 262 Scultori, Diana 90; 35 TerBorch, Gerard 124
Raimondi, Marcantonio de 92 Segonzac, André Dunoyer de 265 Terbrugghen, Hendrick 22
Ramos, Sandra 428—29; 276 Sellers, Anna 230 Thompson, Elizabeth 41, 177, 196-99, 203,
Rando, Flavia 367 Senior (illuminator) 46 204, 249397
Ranier, Yvonne 362 Serra, Richard 339 Tiavouane, Denise 451; 289
Raphael 34,66,90 Servieres, Mme. 174 Tiepolo 22
Rasdjarmrearnsook, Araya 441, 464; 284 Shahn, Ben 342 Timarete 32
Raunders, Raymond 341 Shaw, Annie C. 229 Tinguely, Jean 337
Raven, Arlene 366 Sheerer, Mary 246 Tintoretto 18, 19,21, 108, 109;45
Rayonism 264,265 Sheikh, Nilima 437, 439-40; 282 Titian 32,77, 78, 82, 84, 86; 31
Read, Catherine 148, 156; 67 Sher-Gil, Amrita 437, 440 Toderi, Grazia 466
Redgrave, Richard 180 Sherman, Cindy 378, 379, 383, 385; 238 Torre, Flaminio 100
Reform Dress Movement 254,258 Sikander, Shahzia 424, 445—46, 460; 287 Torres, Rigoberto 436
Rego, Paula 353, 397;250 Simpson, Lorna 393 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 283
Reichek, Elaine 397 Sintram (illuminator) 395 Tour, Quentin de la 164
Rembrandt 24,78, 120, 287 Siopsis, Penny 444 Towne Darrah, Sophia Ann 229
Renaissance 17, 43, 36-38, 66-113, 116, 117 Sirani, Elisabetta 32, 38,87, 90,92, 96, 100-02, Toyen 312-13, 185
Reni, Guido 93, 100, 105, 106, 109, 113,220 113,249;
38, 40, 42 Trakis, George 352
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 279, 232,234,283 Sisley, Alfred 232 Treu, Katherina 138
Reyes, Magaly 429 Sjoo, Monica 355,371,373;
232 Trockel, Rosemarie 396-97, 425; 248, 249
Reynolds, Sir Joshua 119, 153,156 ° Skinner, Beverly 371 Troy, Jean Frangois de 144
Richier, Germaine 308, 330; 181 Sleigh, Sylvia 370; 230 Tucker, Marcia 349
Riley, Bridget 332; 201 Smiter, Ann 115 Turner, Caroline 451
Ringgold, Faith 341-42, 344, 362, 386, 415; Smith, David 323-24 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 229
208, 269 Smith, Jaune Quick-to-See 388-89; 242
Rist, Pipilotti 457 Smith, Jennie 210 Uccello, Antonia 68
Robert, Hubert 161,172 Smith, Kiki 408—o9, 434; 266 Uccello, Paolo 68,72
Robineau, Adelaide 246 Smithson, Robert 339, 350, 351 Udaltsova, Nadezhda 265; 149
Robusti, Marietta 17, 18-21, 22,28;2 Smythe, Rosalyn 355 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman 362, 418
Rockburne, Dorothea 345, 346, 353 Snyder, Joan 346, 348; 211 Ultvedt, Per Olof 337

495
Union des Femmes Artistes 235 Wagner, Zacharias 133 Williams, Sue 434
Utopia Women’s Batik Group 449 Walker, Alice 183;90 Wilson, Millie 396, 410; 244
Wall, Jeff 400 Wilson, Richard 153
Valadon, Suzanne 279, 282-83, 285-86, 292; Ward, Henrietta 177, 182, 203; 104 Winsor, Jackie 349, 363, 456; 214 3
164, 166 Warhol, Andy 337 Winter, Alice Beach 305
Vallain, Nanine 174 WASABAL 344 Women’s Arts Union 290
Vallayer-Coster, Anna 139, 161, 162, Washburn, Caroline 249, 367 Women’s Liberation Art Group 355,373
163-64; 77 Watson, Caroline 249 Women’s Liberation Movement 344, 345,
Vallet, Pierre 130 Watteau, Antoine 141, 143,354 340, 354, 386, 405
Van Dongen, Kees 280 Waugh, Ida 229 Women’s Rights Movement 210-11
Van Dyck, Anthony 7 Weber, Idelle 348 Woolf, Janet 406
Van Eyck, Margaretha 114 Weems, Carrie Mae 393,404, 444 Worpswede painters 276~77
Varo, Remedios 311, 315; 188 Weidnitz, Hans 130
Varotari, Chiara 37 Wells, Augusta 184 Xiuwen, Cul 447
Velarde, Pablita 317; 189 Werefkin, Marianne 255 Xiuzhen, Yin 459-60; 296
Venda Group 437 Wertmuller, Adolphe-Ulrich 169
Venice Biennale 408, 423-24, 432-36, 437, West, Benjamin 7, 153,156 Yaomin, Yuan 447
457, 465-66 Wheeler, Candace 245; 132 Yates, Marie 377, 400, 401, 403; 256
Vermeer,
Jan 119, 126, 127, 129; 55 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill 292, 300, 301
Vernet, Joseph 161 Whiteread, Rachel 396, 398, 457; 253 Zappi, Gian Paolo 92
Veronese, Paolo 18, 21 Whitney, Anne 28, 206, 214, 220, 222-24, 226, Zeisler, Claire 363
Verzotti, Giorgio 436 229, 249, 277; 118 Zoffany, Johann 7,8,18,21;1
Vesnin, Alexander 269 Wiener Werkstatte 254,256 Zorach, Marguerite 303
Vigée-Lebrun, Elisabeth-Louise 139, 144, Wijck, Thomas 123 Zucker, Barbara 349 ‘
160-61, 162, 164, 165-66, 168-73;
75, 78, 83 Wilding, Alison 398 Zuniga, Francisco 318
Vincent, Frangois Elie 164 Wilding, Faith 362 Zurbaran, Francisco de 22,82
Vrelant, Guillaume 114 Wilke, Hannah 362, 367, 369, 408
Vuillard, Edouard 292 Williams, Ward 393, 396

496
£11.95

world of art Women, Art, and Society

Whitney Chadwick

western art
modern and
“Impressive and ambitious” — Art History
contemporary art : :
“Packed with information, controversy, argument and very good art”
— Times Educational Supplement

This acclaimed study challenges the assumption that great

women artists are exceptions to the rule who “transcended”
their sex to produce major works of art. While acknowledging
the many women whose contributions to visual culture since
the Middle Ages have often been neglected, Chadwick’s survey
amounts to much more than an alternative canon of women
artists: it re-examines the works themselves and the ways in
which they have been perceived as marginal, often in direct
reference to gender. In her discussion of feminism and its
influence on such a reappraisal, the author also addresses
the closely related issues of ethnicity, class, and sexuality.
This expanded edition is brought up to date in the light
of the most recent developments in contemporary art. A
new chapter considers globalization in the visual arts and
the complex issues it raises, focusing on the many major
international exhibitions since 1990 that have become an
important arena for women artists from around the world.

Third edition

On the cover:
Alice Neel, Marxist Girl
(Irene Paslikas), 1972
© Estate of Alice Neel
Courtesy Robert Miller
Gallery, New York

Printed in Singapore

rut Thairies & Hudson world of art ISBN

0-500-20354-7