Women & Art

Sargent, John Singer. Madame X. 1884

Gender and art intersect in many ways throughout our history and continue to today. In the past few decades there has been a lot of attention paid to the way women are portrayed in art. Historically, women are painted for the male gaze. They were almost always young, nude, white women splayed out in a opulent setting. Then as the years progressed on, the standards changed as far as how women could be portrayed. The double standard exists between lower class and upper class women. This is shown best with Sargent's Portrait of Madame X, a full body portrait of an upper class socialite, Virginie Amélie Avegno. She is shown looking to the side with her chin raised, a kind of seductive while still powerful pose. She is also shown wearing a black evening gown which originally featured a strap slipping off her shoulder. There was so much outrage surrounding this that Sargent was forced to paint it out and put the strap higher on her shoulder. It still remains that way today, residing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Picasso, Pablo. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. 1907.

Then, 23 years later Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. This painting in context was really just a continuum of the provocative subject matter of prostitutes that came to the forefront of art in the mid-19th century. Though, this painting was a radical step from this, it helped catapult the modern art movement. Though today the painting holds a lot of controversy, it appears at first glance like a regular abstract painting of nudes. In reality they are prostitutes, which were commonly depicted at the time but still controversial. The part that upsets people even today is that they are painted as "savages" wearing tribal masks and hunched into strange positions. At the time, many prostitutes commonly carried venereal diseases like syphilis. Therefore this painting is read as a group of hungry, demon-like, even animal prostitutes luring the male viewer in. This was controversial then, but really hasn't been critiqued for its poor taste and message until modern day. Luckily the painting today and the way that gender is discussed and women are portrayed has changed drastically.

In the 1970s there was a cultural movement, the 2nd wave of feminism that worked to further women's rights. A specific focus of this was sexual liberation and representation. The art world at the time, and still today is a very male dominated sector and these women decided that it was worth trying to change that. I don't want to pretend that things didn't change because of their work, because they definitely did. Many female artists banded together and made names for themselves while also using their bodies as part of their work, to make a statement. Artist's like Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke, and Judy Chicago all worked to call for the respect or female artist while removing the male gaze.

Guerrilla Girls, Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum?. 1989.

After this, in the 1980s, when feminism fell into a low because of the booming economy among other factors, there were far fewer female artists joining the fight as progress mostly came to a standstill. Then the Guerrilla Girls arrived, and decided to call attention to the gender issues in the art world head-on. They created propaganda posters of sorts, calling attention to the lack of representation of not only female artists, but female artists of color. Their works such as, Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum? blatantly let viewers know how bad the sexism truly is in the art industry.

Current day, it is interesting to look at all the ways women are present in the art world and how gains have been made as far as women in art education positions and showing in galleries. Despite this, the high art world is still very male dominated, with exceptions like Jenny Saville and Yayoi Kusama. I have seen, in recent years as a response to this there is a mainly female group of online artists that create work and share ideas. There are also a lot of trangender artists in the online art community, who you would most likely not see represented at an art institution. This representation online is important for young female artists to be a part of and be confident in what they want to do.