Unit 4 Exam, Development Book Megan Lowe New College, Swindon 1862
17. Female artist have been involved in the making of art over centuries but their individual achievements are now more widely recognised. Examples of such artists include Anna Lea Merritt, Gwen John, Dod Procter, Tamara de Lempicka and Gillian Wearing. You are asked to investigate this theme and produce one of the options below: Either a)
An illustrated essay, which explores the work of three different female artist.
Or a)
A design for an exhibition, which explores the theme in eight chosen works. Include a 3D model of the exhibition and plans for the display of the chosen works, together with an illustrated leaflet.
I have chosen to complete the question 17 in Section 4. I will create an illustrated essay based on three different female artists, in particular females that weren’t fully appreciated at the time and are now more widely recognised.
Working plan for the following weeks-
Look at a handful of female artists all through the history of art. • • • • • • • • • •
Artemisia Gentileschi Rosa Bonheur Berthe Morisot Tamara De Lempicka Frida Kahlo Barbara Kruger Marina Abramovic Kiki Smith Tracey Emin Judy Chicago
After this assess where my research has taken me and make my next plan.
Artemisia Gentileschi was born in Rome in 1593. She was born the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, who was a successful Baroque painter in Rome. Having an artist father would prove crucial in the career of Artemisia. Her farther had sent her to become an apprentice of Agostino Tassi, who could teach her properly. Tassi made sexual advances towards Artemisia, despite going through with the advances, Tassi refused to keep his promise of marriage. This case got taken to court as the first public rape case in Rome. Tassi eventually got acquitted mainly due to being a man, this caused great humiliation to Artemisia and gave her an unpleasant reputation. After the case, Artemisia was exiled to Florence where she married and eventually was the first female to be admitted to the Accademia del Deisegno. Despite the remarriage, Gentileschi never got over her rape ordeal and it becomes apparent in her paintings.
Judith beheading Holofernes, was painted in 1620. What we can see new in this painting is the realistic merciless interpretation of the story, which is not played down by the introduction of moralizing or religious tone. Judith acts with a determined, unemotional expression. The two women work with such strength and skill. They act as though they are butchering Holofernes. The colours are all rich and jewel like which was typical of the time.
Rosa Bonheur was born in 1822 in Bordeaux France. Her farther was a painter landscape and actively encouraged his tom boyish daughter to become an artist. Bonheur struggled to read and write, therefore her father taught her to depict the alphabet using sketches of small animals for every letter of the alphabet as a visual aid. Rosa’s father sent her to an all boys school, in order to educated the same as her brothers and then taught her himself in her last stages of education. This freedom of education and encouragement would shape Bonheur’s future. As a teenager Rosa dressed in comfortable, practical male attire and roamed the countryside making sketches and drawings. She also visited the Lourve and made copies of the works and studied the old masters.
In 1853, Bonheur painted The Horse Fair, it was of monumental dimensions measuring over 244cm by 507 cm. The Horse Fair shows a crowd of splendid black horses and mettlesome greys careering past the viewer. The stable boys try to control some of them by the bridle. Dramatic “constable like” clouds sit in the background, they reinforce the intense coloration and light effects to produce a tense atmosphere. Art dealer, Ernst Gambart bought the monumental work, along with its reproduction rights, for 40,000 francs. This helped extend Rosa’s reputation out of France. He had the Horse Fair duplicated as an engraving and after Queen Victoria had given it her blessing at a private viewing in Windsor Castle, in 1855, put his prize possession on show in London. He then auctioned the painting with the remarkable condition that it toured in en exhibition for three years! Bonheur was now financially settled and bought herself land in France in a country retreat including a Chateau. This was very unordinary for a woman of the time.
Berthe Morisot was born in Bourges in 1841. She was the third child of a government officials four children. The family were well travelled and moved posts several times and in 1852 the family settled in the very influential Paris. There, Berthe along with her sistes Yves and Edma, started to study art and took up drawing lessons. Joseph Guichard was the man they got, it would prove vital that Berthe studied under the influence of a man. They began to copy the great masters in the Lourve. Camille Corot had lent the girls some of his pieces so they could copy his style (this again was very influential on Morisots style) In 1867 Berthe met Edouard Manet. She soon formed part of the circle which became the impressionists and included Manet, Pissaro, Degas, Cezanne, Sisley, Monet and Renoir. The artistic relationship carried on for several years and Manet even painted Berthe. Although this painting was heavily criticised, Manet and Berthe remained friends. Berthe soon turned to painting a new subject matter; everyday scenes and portraiture. In 1874 she had nine paintings in the first Impressionist exhibition and after that she had work in every impressionist exhibition until 1886. She married Eugene Manet, Edouards brother.
In the first impressionist exhibition, Morisot displayed an oil painting called Reading. This shows a woman sat in grassy fields completely isolated and sat reading. The picture was admired for the lightness in the handling of the colours, other than that it was savaged by critics. Her former teacher, Joseph Guichard even said she should apologise to Correggio for trying to do something in oil that only could be done in watercolours.
By the end of the 1970s Berthe had created her own niche creating oil paintings of great transparency and refinement. Her first solo exhibiton was in 1892 and a huge success. Berthe Morisot died of pneumonia in Paris on 2 March 1895.
Tamara De Lempicka was born Tamara Maria Gorska in Warsaw in 1898. Shortly after the Russian revolution, her and her husband emigrated to Paris. Paris again was the most influential art capitals of the world. There she continued to create art. Studying with teachers such as Maurice Denis at the Academie Ranson and the studio of the cubist artist Andre Lothe. In the 20’s and 30’s Lempicka was one of the most sought after after working at the time. She completed portraits and nudes in her own new unique style. Her paintings display neo-classical descriptive colours with the jagged solid feel of the cubists. When we see her paintings now they symbolise the sex and seduction of the 20’s and 30’s. They show women in the typical style of the 20’s sporting short hair, discreet make-up with bright red lips. De Lempicka was the perfect example of the art deco style that over took Paris in 1925.
Tamara presented herself just like the women she painted. She did paint herself in 1925, she showed herself sat at the wheel of a Bugatti wearing a leather jacket, a scarf casually draped around her neck. These were both high fashion at the time. She is also wearing a racing helmet and scarlett red lips. This was typical of the high class, high fashion women of the time. She spent her final years in the town of Cuernavaca in Mexico, where she died in 1980.
Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1973-77. This instillation examines the theme of motherhood and four years of Mary Kelly’s relationship with her son. When it was first viewed in 1876, the worked received heavy criticism because Documentation I incorporated stained nappy liners. Each of the six part series concentrates on a formative moment in her son’s mastery of language and her own sense of loss, moving between the voices of the mother and child. It considers the processes by which, in the early years of motherhood, an unstable femininity is provisionally secured. There are six sections to this work that consists of 165 parts of work that uses multiple representational modes, such as; literary, scientific, physcoanalytic, linguistic and archaeological to chronicle her relationship with her son. In the instillation it includes documents such as feeding charts, statistical tables and analysis of speech. Mary Kelly also used objects and found objects, such as; clay imprints made by the childs hand, writing slates (which reflect Rosetta stones) folded vest, nappy liners and specimens of plants that the child had collected. These are mounted in a frame, some in perspex. We can see the way in which both mother and child changes through this instillation. The mothers response is documented by writings and diaries, although the result is not autobiographical. This is a totally unique and challenging approach to the theme of mother and child. There is no images of either mother or child in the exhibition-this means that rather than having any conventional notions of visual beauty and rapid gratification, the work requires careful reading, close examination and a deep understanding.
Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974-79, is a monumental work of art. It is a triangular table that employs numerous media, including ceramics, china-painting and an array of needle and fiber techniques. The theory behind the work is too honour the history of women in Western Civilization. An immense open table is covered with fine white cloths, is set with thirty-nine place settings, thirteen on a side, it was originally intended for there to only be thirteen places. Each of the place settings commemorate a goddess, historical figure or important woman in history. Each place has a placemat with the women’s name and artworks relating to her life, with a napkin, utensils, a glass or goblet and a plate. The painted porcelain plates feature an image based on a butterfly, as symbolic of a vaginal central core (the triangle table also symbolises femininity and often female genitalia) Place settings include; the Egyptian Goddess Ishtar, Queen Hatshepsut, Sappho, Artemisia Gentileschi, Georgia O’Keeffe, Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf.The table sit on a monumental porcelain floor comprised of 2304 hand-cast, gilded and lustered titles on which are inscribed the names of 999 other important women.
This is a feminist piece affirming the participation of women in history and demanding respect for womens productions. Over 100 women worked on the project and all put in what they could using their specialised subjects. It is primarily used to address the neglect of many figures in female creativity and history. The Dinner Party is a provocative collision between the high art of museums and the private domestic space of women’s craft. The Dinner Party is now displayed in the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A Sackler Centre for Feminist Art.
Tracey Emin (born in 1963) is an English artist. She is part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs (Young British Artists) In 1999 Emin held her own solo exhibiton in the United States at Lehman Maupin Gallery, entitled “Every Part of Me’s Bleeding.” Later that year she was a Turner Prize nominee and exhibited My Bed. Emin is a panellist speaker and has lectured at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In December 2011 she was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy; with Fiona Rae, she is one of the first two female professors since the Academy was founded in 1768.
Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 was created by Tracey Emin in 1997. It is a small blue tent with 102 names appliqued on the inside. These are the names of all the people Emin had slept with. It does not just include sexual partners but also family, friends, her twin brother Paul and her two aborted foetuses. This helps us question ourselves and what intimate experiences we carry through life. Although it is not a conventional portrait it still displays ideas about Emin’s character and identity and explores ideas about the self. Here the relationship between physical likeness and character and identity is abandoned.
Tracey Emin, My Bed, 1998, this installation shows a mattress, bed linen, pillows and found objects. Tracey Emin claims that this bed was where she stayed for four days in the summer of 1998, where she was miserable and suicidal and remained drunk for days. This was a part of a project to make the artists life fit for public consumption and show that being an artist isn’t glamorous and there is a constant pressure. The work have been viewed as both “wholly egotistical” and “disarmingly frank and revealing.” The transgressive quality of the work was not so much to do with its content but its claim to be ‘art’. Amoung the found objects there are several used condoms and blood-stained underwear. Some presentations of My Bed had a hangman’s noose suspended above the bed this gave it a further macabre and bleak association.
Emin has also created performance pieces too such as; In a mix of super-8 and video, she explores a might-have-been in her past life. It was called Why I Never Became a Dancer, 1995 and explored her life as a girl in Margate and countless sexual encounters. She dreams of becoming a dancer and getting out of Margate where she was born and raised. She takes part in a dancing competition. She breaks off her showpiece when a chorus of men and former boyfriend jeer her as a “slut”. This breaks her dreams and answers the question as too “Why she never became a dancer.” She has, more recently, re-written the script with a positive outcome. In this recent adaptation, the adult Tracey comes on stage and blithely dances to a 1970s disco hit. This is not unusual for Emin as she often makes her past life a public talking point in provocative fashion. Her art is so in-your-face that viewers may feel directly addressed and respond just as directly. When you view Emin’s work, you can’t help but be confronted with things that us as humans would rather not publicly face.
Marina Abramović is a performance artist, originally born in Serbia and now living and working in Amercia. She is a performance artist and often performs live. Balkan Baroque was created in 1997. It was a four day performance (in Venice) with an accompanying video installation showing the artist and and her parents. Abramović features in the performance wearing a white dress sitting on a pile of bloody animal bones. She starts to wash the blood off and scrubs the bones, this causes the white dress to become stained with blood. Her expression moved from concentration, to anxiety, to sorrow and she sang songs from her childhood. The performance became repetitive with actions and songs-this reinforces the meaning of the performance. Her physical presence allowed the use of facial expressions, bodily gestures and the timbre of the voice to react naturally and there was no acting involved. Abramović was born in Belgrade and the performace is a lament for the sufferings of recent wars in the Balkans. This is often viewed as a general anti-war statement.
Martha Rosler created Semiotics of the Kitchen in 1975. This was a black and white video with sound that lasted 6:09 minutes. In this performance Rosler takes on the role of an apron-clad housewife and parodies the television cooking demonstrations popularised by Julia Child in the 1960s. Standing in a kitchen, surrounded by a refrigerator, table and stove she moves through the alphabet from A to Z, assigning a letter to the various tools found in this domestic space. Her gestures sharply punctate her rage and frustration of oppressive women’s roles. For U, V, W, X, Y and Z, the utensils are dispensed with and she mimics the shape of the letters with her arms. The Z is signed as the Mark of Zorro- this is a cinematic reference. The video ends with shrug of the shoulders; this is as to defuse what has gone before. Rosler has said of this work, “I was concerned with something like the notion of ‘language speaking the subject,’ and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity.
Aneta Grzeszykowska is a polish artist who often worked with her husband. In 2007 she produced “knock-off” Cindy Sherman untitled film slides. She exhibited them at Art 38 Basel. The difference between the originals are that Aneta herself features in her own slides and that they are in colour-opposed to black and white that Sherman uses. In order to reproduce the exact style she used herself as a model and put a modern turn on them, she wanted to emphasis the time shift and show that times change. Colour photographs can be ambiguous between being natural and having a sense of artificiality. It appears that Cindy Sherman’s originals photos were taken whilst in motion, this helps create the sense of spontaneity, however, where Grzeszykowska was reproducing the image she had to be posed and she appears more staged and portrays less movement. The artist herself, believes her own work to be “ugly” however she does say that in art there is “no good, or bad art works, it is unfair to say that, art however stems from a concept and becomes what it is.” Grzeszykowska says that she has not copied Cindy Sherman but she has used the same idea to portray her own issues. Although Cindy Sherman isn’t physically in the photos, there is obviously clear reference to her and her characteristics.
Cindy Sherman is considered by many to be the most important and influential artist in contemporary art. She is a multi-talented artist who uses different mediums to create her art. She is a photographer, film director and she is best known for her conceptual portraits. Throughout her career she has dealt with provocative subject matters and much of her work is controversial. In 1995 she became the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She created a series called “Untitled Film Stills” in 19771980. It consists of 69 black and white photographs. Sherman poses in the photos herself in different settings such as; streets, yards, pools, beaches and interiors. It was said that none of the films are individually named so they can remain ambiguous. All the photographs are 8 ½ by 11 inches. All of the props used belonged to the artist or was borrowed from a friend, for example, in still 11 there is a dog pillow, which belonged to a close friend of Sherman.
Hannah HÜch was born in 1978 and was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period. During this period she became one of the originators of photomontage. Many of her political works from the Dada period equated women’s liberation with social and political revolution. In particular her photomontages often critically addressed the Weimar New Woman collating images from modern magazines. Her works from 1926-1936 often depicted same sex couples, and women were once again a central theme in her work were once again a central theme within her work. HÜch also made strong statements on racial discrimination.
You are not yourself is a monochromatic photo montage made by Barbara Kruger in 1982. It depicts a shattered reflection of a woman crying in a smashed mirror that she holds in her left hand. Super-imposed on the picture are the words “YOU ARE NOT YOURSELF” in bold white letters. When you look at the image this is probably the first thing you see. The sentence breaks up the image from the illusionistic feelings it gives. The way the image is put together creates a jarring, less fluent appearance. This could suggest that Kruger had set out to shock. The bold white letters, along with the smashed mirror and shattered reflection depicts anger and aggression, this is symbolic of Krugers hatred towards feminine stereotypes as she attempts to expose and shatter how we see the women before us. The woman appears to be crying due to the reflection she looks at in front of her being different to how she sees herself. This would have been influenced by the stereotypes broadcasted in the media in the time. Using the text ‘YOU ARE NOT YOURSELF’ is symbolising that the stereotypes being displayed is not who you want to become and that we all need to be ourselves and be true to ourselves. Kruger was heavily influenced by Hannah Hock as she also tried to break through female stereotypes.
!Women Art Revolution explores the “secret history� of feminist art, through conversations, observations, archival footage, and works of visionary artists, historians, curators and critics. The film details major developments in feminist art through the 1970s and explores how the tenacity and courage of these pioneering artists resulted in what is now widely regarded as the most significant art movement of the last 20th century. The film features many of the great contemporary women artists such as; Judy Chicago, Marina Abramović, Yoko Ono, Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger.