Body/Politics: Women as Subject and Object in the History of Art by John Finlay | Part Two

Body/Politics: Women as Subject and Object in the History of Art

by John Finlay Part Two

Still Life Class, New York, c.1885, photo: private collection

Artistic, cultural and physical preserves were, needless to say, inconsistently different for women in French society. As Pollock has argued, there is a huge dissimilarity socially, fiscally and personally between men and women in late nineteenth-century Paris. This too applies to ‘the gender-specific conditions’ of its painting. Paintings by Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) and Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) illustrate entirely dissimilar social territories to that of men. (Men freely frequented the Parisian boulevard with its countless bars, cafes, café-concerts, dancehalls and brothels.) Rather than an impression of Paris in the distance, Morisot’s View of Paris from the Trocadéro (1871–72) focuses on the separation of women and children from the domain of men – fencing, gardens and the river Seine cutoff faraway Paris. The social groups are isolated, not interacting, a reality that seems to be taken for granted by urban dwellers. Is this is a space of utopia, or a dystopic place of alienation?

In the 1860s and 70s, the search for modern subject matter generally focused on social environments altered by the impact of industrial and the swelling bourgeois class. The figures that populate the urban settings of Impressionist painters like Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Manet, Morisot and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) tend to be those unsettled by the aftershock of Haussmannization in Paris and caught up in social or economic change. In 1

Cassatt’s The Child’s Bath (1893), domestic spaces become a place of labour, particularly those concerning supervision of children. In similar instances, Cassatt’s paintings reveal facets of working-class life within a bourgeois setting. These additional bourgeois restrictions foisted upon women artists meant that they were frequently viewed as a threat to their male counterparts.

(See, for instance, Daumier’s The Blue Stockings of 1844.)

In avant-garde art and literature, two basic types inaugurated the representation of the period: the flâneur (male) and the demimonde (female). In one form or another, in seclusion or placed next to one another, these two corresponding individuals appear again and again throughout the period. When Degas’s Women on the Terrace (1877) was shown at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877, its theme of prostitution was easily identifiable.

Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) is suitably strange enough to raise questions. Why are we, the spectator, not part of the reflection? And who is the shady flâneur in the top hat proffering a coin to the barmaid? In the barmaid’s blank expression, does Manet record something of the solitude, dissatisfaction, alienation, ennui and possible danger in a large modern European city?

Impressionist artists were depicting the characters who were an inevitable feature of modern urban life, and they did so, it seems, without exciting in the spectator judgement, scorn or even pity.

As Carol Duncan identified in the Aesthetics of Power (1993), the avant-garde myth of individual freedom was founded on gender and social inequalities. In the work of modern artistic movements such as the Fauvists, Cubists, and the German Expressionists, the sexualising of creativity meant that a woman’s body was reduced to nothing more than flesh – ‘contorted according to the dictates of [male] erotic will.’ As Duncan rightly asserts: ‘Identifying women with nature, and imagining femininity in its instinctive, enigmatic, sexual, and destructive aspects places women artists … in an impossible double-bind in which femininity and art become selfcancelling.’ (See Pablo Picasso’s [1881–1973] famous Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907.)

Freudian theories relating to the body, sexuality, fetishism and the unconscious did much to influence modern movements like Surrealism. Unsurprisingly, few of Freud’s concepts have remained uncontested and have very vocal critics within feminism. In the Female Eunuch (1970), Germaine Greer stated: ‘Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.’ Yet Freudian ideas are both celebrated and sent up by Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) in Object: Luncheon in Fur (Le Déjeuner en fourrure). The shock of Luncheon in Fur lies in its subversion of polite domestic rituals and the repugnant nature of its highly disturbing materiality – a cup, saucer and spoon covered in fur from a Chinese gazelle. Here the presumption that the objet surréaliste will passively comply with male formalities, codes and uses, is transgressively annulled. Oppenheim was infamous for her objets Surréalistes, which subverted the world of male morality. (Also see, Ma gouvernante – My Nurse – Mein Kindermädchen, 1936). While women artists including Oppenheim, Lee Miller (1907–77) and Claude Cahun (1894–1954) and Dora Maar (1907–1997) did not overthrow the suppression of women identified in the work of male Surrealists, they nonetheless exploited the freedom offered by the idiom to articulate their own ideas. As such they did much to change the Surrealist movement.

The gender bias encountered by women artists of the 1950s and ’60s was feasibly no more than that suffered by cohorts of women prior. Amid the machismo of male Gesturalism and Pop art, women artists generally did not have prestigious positions, but they still had powerful artistic voices. The tactics of female artists were vastly different from their male colleagues, habitually pointing up and undermining Pop’s masculine showground of sexualized aggression and inherent male gazing. Martha Rosler’s (b. 1943) Vacuuming Pop Art (c. 1966–1972) though addressing the politics of the male gaze, simultaneously speaks of being swallowed by, or literally sucking up, the vacuity and meaning of male dominated Pop. In Rosalyn Drexler’s (b. 1926) Kiss Me Stupid (1964), masculinity can be interpreted as similarly domineering. Here the kissing couple appears locked in a passionate clinch; but his hand grasps the woman’s wrist very tightly, her

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countenance intimating either passion or hopelessness. The sculpture of Maria Sol Escobar, named Marisol (1930–2016), often investigates the relationship between sexuality and clichéd American consumerism. In Love (1962) a real coke bottle, rammed down the throat, frames woman as the passive or disinclined beneficiary of a hostile (male) consumerism and sexuality.

As Linda Nochlin identifies during the 1960s, popular culture rendered women as ‘product-like; passive, sexual creatures.’ Women artists also found themselves relegated to the margins of the Pop idiom, their work habitually classified as un-Pop – not ‘Pop’ – enough in attitude and approach. Writing in 1966, Lucy Lippard was inclined to ‘admit only five hard core Pop artists in New York’ – all male – and simply because they employed ‘more or less hard-edge, commercial techniques and colours.’

Women’s Pop-related art nonetheless remained deeply combative and judicious – a profound alternative to male Pop art – its artists concerned to comment on social injustices and political upheaval, or to identify as women artists within a typically exploitive social milieu. In Evelyne Axell’s Axel-eration (1965), masculine clichés are literally flattened by a red high-heeled foot that puts the peddle to the metal and fires up the gas. Axell usurps the passé connection between male sexuality and the motorcar by placing the female protagonist firmly at the wheel and in control of her own pleasure and destiny. Axell’s painting would seem to reject any notion prompted by a 1970s and ’80s second-wave of feminist writing that saw women Pop artists as ‘collaborators’ in exploiting the female body as a purely sexualized object. New texts and exhibitions on the women of Pop are now beginning to challenge the status quo regarding this masculine aesthetic language, and demarcating women’s own subjectivity and identity within the Pop movement.

As Deborah Mancoff has also shown, there is an inherent jeopardy in producing artworks that tend to reject masculine ideas, assumptions and gender expectations. Exclusion in every possible form has been a real challenge for women artists throughout history, because they ‘have faced down limited options, public anger and professional scorn, as well as condemnation and censorship. Time and again, women artists have chosen audacious action over safe acceptance, courting danger through political expression, provocative subjects and giving voice to the voiceless.’ Women artists of the contemporary era have similarly re-defined established art histories and canons, Marina Abramovic (b.1946), Vanessa Beecroft (b.1969), Judy Chicago (b.1939), Renée Cox (b.1960), Tracey Emin (b.1963), Rachael Horn (b.1944), Shirin Neshat (b.1957), Catherine Opie (b.1961), Silvia Sleigh (1916–2010), Cindy Sherman (b.1954), Renée Stout (b.1958), Kara Walker (b.1969), Jenny Saville (b.1970), Rachel Whiteread (b.1963) and many others, helping to engender a new space for women in what was habitually a masculine account.

Few, however, have matched the sheer power and fearlessness of Maria Abramovic and the Guerrilla Girls (formed in 1985). In Seven Easy Pieces (1975), Imponderabilia (1977), Nightsea Crossing (1981 and 1987) and The Artist is Present (2010), Abramovic asserts her presence by coercing audiences to play a part in the artist’s ‘physical endurance in search of transcendence.’ As Connie Butler has observed of The Artist is Present: The sheer endurance and unsettling mix of generosity and narcissism that characterised her ability and desire to meet the gaze of every audience member willing to join her at the table in the centre of the Museum’s atrium for 736 hours over the course of three months … transformed the institution into both a spectacle and a laboratory for one of the most ambitious performance artists of our time.

The Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous artistic collective, employ similarly transgressive approaches to art. In 1989, they included a ‘weenie count’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, plastered on a billboard and titled ‘The Conscience of the Art World’. The poster included an image of Ingres’s Grande Odalisque kitted-out with a giant gorilla mask and accompanied by a highly inflammatory – yet statistically accurate – statement:

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Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 4% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 76% of the nudes are female.

As the Guerrilla Girls rightly maintain, the female form as object was omnipresent in art, but the female art subject was conspicuously absent from the history of art. For women artists working within parameters delineated by the masculine and with the assessment of the female form as passive, eroticized object to be visually consumed by men, the challenge was always one of navigating the terrain of the body, with its innate private and political repercussions.

John Finlay, 2020 John Finlay is a historian of French history, specialising in twentieth-century modern art. He studied Art History and Theory at Essex University and received an MA and PhD on Picasso from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1998. His book Picasso’s World was published by Carlton Books (London) and by Larousse (as Le Monde de Picasso, Paris) in 2011. He is also the author of Pop! The World of Pop Art (London, 2016) and co-author of Andy Warhol: The Mechanical Art (Madrid, 2017). He has contributed to international journals, publishing articles on Picasso and Giacometti for the Burlington Magazine. John is currently working on the collection of Picasso’s Vollard Suite (1930–37). His recent project for FABA concerns Picasso’s portraiture in the 1920s. Arcturus (London) will publish his new book, Art History, in July 2020. He is currently working on a new book entitled Cubism Forever: its characterisation and Continued Dissemination in the Work of Picasso. Finlay lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland. © John Finlay, 2020

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