Belle Smith.
Sonafabisa Anguissola - self portrait at the Clavicord 1561. Skilled - image includes both youth and age. Accomplished multi-talented.
16th and 17th century focus. National Gallery art - tradition of European painting. Embroidery would give a different narrative (Oh good!)
Women were present at this time, despite obstacles. Needed chaperone. Renaissance - art became more intellectual - thereby making art more respectable. Women artists were trained by fathers. (Skills were effectively traded instead of dowry when married off). Women did portraiture, and small scale religious paintings mostly. No figure/nude training, therefore no narrative myth. Unusual for women to set up studio. Some banner painting.
SA was Court artist in Madrid with Philip II. On payroll. But, can't refuse commissions. Gave protection of court circle and courtly atmosphere - good for status. Learn from patron's art collection. Dame de Chambre (lady in waiting) to Isabella, Philip's wife. Chose Queen's dress fabrics. Paints women and children mostly. Philip pays her dowry to Sicilian - married 4 years then widowed. Visits Cremona on way back from Sicily, marries captain of boat. Paints all the way. Dies in her 90s. Van Dyck visits her and overlaps time wise.
Catherine van Hemmessen 1548.
Religious and portraits. Painting men. Unmarried woman painting in a studio. Issues of propriety? Chaperone? Close scrutiny of men by a woman?
Marries in 1553 - musician - off to Spain.
Plautilla Nelli. 1554. Pentecost Nunnery. Encouraged to earn via art. Centrally positions women. Women (Mary and 2 Dominican nuns) in centre - places men at the side. Unlike most religious images. Large scale. Nuns could do this? - They were not stuck at home with children, working at the home scale - nunnery provided women assistants to support on larger works in bigger rooms.
Women don't do murals - public arena/churches - ladders, scale, unseemly - people might look up your skirt!
Properzia de Rossi 1520. Joseph and Potiphar's wife.
Bologna. Uni admits women. Accepts pioneering women. Sculpture - very rare. Strong women. Michelangelo used male model when depicting women, so his women looked strong.
Lavinia Fontana. 1599. Self portrait. Minature. Opulent, sumptuous. Books. Latin inscriptions, nude models on desk, body parts and casts. Shows tools of her trade. Worked on copper.
Women tend to paint Mary and female saints. Her career was managed by her husband - a lesser artist, who gave up his career to manage her career. Male artists can be stroppy and eccentric - but not women. Women judge as not having intellectual heft for allegorical images. Women can be copyists or engravers, but not original, imaginatory or investors.
Artemesia Gentileschi. National Gallery has just acquired AG as St Catherine 11615-17. Born Rome. Large scale religious, allegory painting. Trained by father. In her day renowned. Biography (rape and torture) overshadows her work. Paints female heroines and icons.
Judith and Holofernes. Judith, the virtuous Jewish widow. Meets the enemy, gets him drunk, seduces and chops off his head. Violent story. Less titilation.
Loose hair represents loose women. Idea of what a woman artist should be, gets fixed in 18th century. Narrow and unwanted attention.
Amy Tobin, University of Cambridge/Kettles Yard. What women paint - 1963 to date.
Women's lib 1968. Women always painted. But women erased from discourse. Feminist politics. Compared self to men. How excluded? Cambridge gallery settings, museum settings, tutors, critics, curators. Systemic discrimination. Shared oppression - not self to blame but political understanding and gender politics.
Women artists are not just painters. Substantial - weighted by tradition and led by men.
Patriarchal values. Pollock argued historically substantiated gender difference. Focus on artist as male. Depends upon exclusion of women, unless in supporting role. Historically role of women - model or sex partner.
Women perform or disavow gender. Lee Crasner, Agnes Martin - they distanced themselves a women artists. Women artists compromised their identity as artist. Feminism reclaims work of women - critiquing issue of "woman artist" - your work is not as good as men.
- Try referring to 'male artist' as well as 'female artist'.
- Interrogate values of women artists
- Rejection of painting
- Rewriting history
- Reclaim the body
- Rethink abstraction.
Ukraine Rosenbach 1983. Reputation of great masters Raphael and Loughner. Mythic and Christina images - puts self in, to be judged against mores of history. Real cannot meet the ideal, therefore unrealistic and harmful to real women. 1970s high art and pop culture being challenged. Different expectations of men and women from images and legal reform for change. Attack icon of Madonna that you attack yourself.
Carolee Schneeman. Broke canon. Interested in exploring creative freedom. Eye Body - 3D transformative acts. Performance - Up to and Including her Limits. Reclaims Cezanne for feminist intent. Does not disavow but considers how work can be reframed/positioned.
Jackson Pollock drip technique. Gendered modern image - wife Lee Krasner perches on edge. CS - Tethered Drawing. Pushes against Pollock - what is it to be creative. Considers sensuous, sexuality, art and how to make it. Impulse - can I be both image and image maker. Interestingly, Tethered, and other 1970s drawings, now gets censored on Instagram.
Melissa Gordon, 2016. Copycat Pollock and Janet Sobel. Dummy studio from sizes she's worked in. Photos, not abstract drawing. Janet Sobel was first to use drip technique. Pollock found it resolved a problem in his art - he did credit her.
Ordinary in relation to cooking, caring and sustaining self as artist. Inspired gesture, or hours of practice and changing/adapting. Kitchen counter represents it.
The problem of painting - expanded practice ie drops and by-products - move away from emotion and gesture.
Images of women are a political problem. Self portrait - always objectified and sexualised - women painters don't push at it. Find contemporary self portrait artists.
History Painting
Sylvia Sleight - AIR group 1977-8. Women who founded the AIR group revisioned historic group portrait - defined purpose - more than wife, mother, woman, sister.
Louise Fishman, Angry Gertrude. Abstraction - feminine or women based practice. Via language, and bold brushmarks. More ordered than drop. Less accomplished than formal fine art.
Woman as Angry. Artist mother and Gertrude (stein). Avoids artist (ie husband) surname.
Faith Ringgold. Broad global art knowledge. We meet the master #12 "prejudice".
African/americal protest. White women did not give black women space to be heard. Remakes Olympia.
Dana Schutz. Open Casket 2016. Parker Bright's protest. Her position changed on motherhood. Know the murdered boy's mother. Open letter for it to be removed and destroyed at the Whitney Bienniel. Whose right to portray? As a white woman? Damaging - market value - of a black man's death?
Lubaina Himid. Naming the Money. 2004. Representing history carefully. What stories we are told. 10 x 10 figures. Roles and vocations of different people. Walk a path through the staging. Through part of history. Immigration - what's lost when people travel - white version of own identity. Slavery and slave trade. Historic and contemporary costume.
Reclaim the Body
Joan Sewell 1974. Intimacy - autonomy. Comes from artist perspective as love. Post coital vision in landscape format.
Maria Lassnig. Body conscious painting - self portrait with stick.
Claudette Johnson. 2017. Pinned. Gouchae and pastel. substantial but under-described. Reclining figure.
Betty Tempkins Apologia 2018. Metoo#. Woman attacking/accusing a man. Avatar Ronelle apologisd for attacking a male student. Complexity of sexual violence. More than rape or unwanted advances. Manipulation of powerful/powerless.
Abstraction
Chicago, Kozloff, Pindell. Women paint what they want.
Mira Schar - Slit of Paint 1994. Sexual pleasure. Grammar is a system for understanding - so is art. Over determined by patriarchal culture.
Julie Mehretu. Landscape/history painting via abstraction.
Vaginal Gene Davis - Drag artist. Heroicism. Owens lesson - a different kind of painting. About community not heroes.
Great lectures. Exhausted now.
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