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

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

by John Finlay Part One

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

Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550–1568), despite identifying 13 women artists in Renaissance Italy, surmises that women risk overstepping the bounds of ‘femininity’ and giving the impression ‘to wrest from us [men] the palm of supremacy.’ One of the central problems thrown up Vasari, Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt’s writings is their delineation of the Renaissance acclaims the accomplishments of Italian society to the detriment of all others. Burckhardt insists that during the period ‘women stood on a footing of perfect equality with men … [And] the education given to women in the upper classes was essentially the same.’ But listen to Leon Batista Alberti (1404–1472) define a woman’s place in Italian Renaissance society in his treatise Il libri della famiglia (On Family, 1444): The smaller household affairs, I leave to my wife’s care … it would hardly win us respect if our wife busied herself among men in the marketplace, out in the public eye. It also seems somewhat demeaning to me to remain shut up in the house among women when I have many things to do among men, fellow citizens, and worthy and distinguished foreigners.

Despite all the talk about education, individualism and humanist principles, women had few intellectual, social or artistic opportunities during the period. Indeed, women of the Renaissance had far fewer legal entitlements, scarcer economic control and virtually no, if any, political sway compared to their medieval counterparts. In the famous portrait by Domenico Ghirlandaio 1

(1448–1494) of Giovanna Tornabuoni (née Albizzi, 1488), women’s femininity, wealth, lineage and dowries are carefully catalogued in the form of jewels, brooches, and emblems and crests embroidered on clothing. It’s a ‘stamp’ of ownership, authority and family allegiance on the part of the husband’s family. When we ask the question: ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance’, as Joan Kelly-Gadol does, the reply is a categorical No. If educational or artistic opportunities were made available to women, it was only to a small minority of privileged individuals. Humanist writings on the schooling of women promoted aristocratic learning so they might attain the Christian paradigms of motherhood, modesty and compliance, while laying down appreciably diverse morals for men.

It was not until the sixteenth century that a select number of women began to use Renaissance ideals of decorum and goodness to their own advantage when pursuing a professional career in art. Well-bred and well-educated women, many of whom were born into artist families and learned the skilled training that came with their background, included Sofonisba Anguissola (1532/5–1625). The daughter of Cremonese aristocrats, Anguissola was famous for her miniature portraits, which brought her acceptance socially, artistically and internationally. As the first Italian to become renowned, in 1559, Anguissola moved to Madrid to take up a position at the court of Phillip II. As painters, women became more numerous, usually undertaking portraiture and still life subjects, excluded as they were from studying the human body in life classes and artistic academies. Her work influenced Lavina Fontana (1552–1614), a more professionally trained and exceptionally gifted painter of portraits and large altarpieces for churches in Bologna, Rome and at the Escorial Palace in Spain. Anguissola and Fontana’s decision to dedicate themselves to art appears to have set a precedent, their work influencing and encouraging a number of important Bologna-based artists in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Naturally, the material conditions and social status of women artists was very different from men – as was true for all women. It’s a point the female artists were not afraid to make. For Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1654 or later), works of art became something of an act of defiance. In Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1615–17) and Judith and Her Maidservant (c. 1616–19), Gentileschi’s own private history seems to add the power of reckoning to its subject, the martyrdom of St. Catherine who is seen holding part of the shattered (Catherine) wheel on which the saint had been sentenced to be bound. Raped by a fellow artist Agostino Tassi (c.

1580–1644), Gentileschi was cruelly tortured during her trail; her career left in tatters by the ensuing public scandal. After fleeing Rome, Gentileschi quickly established an independent artistic career in Florence and, in 1616, became a member of the city’s ‘Accademia di Arte del Designo’, the first woman to do so. As Deborah N. Mancoff remarks in DANGER! Women Artists at Work (2012), Gentileschi’s ‘Judith has succeeded in an unthinkable act of grim justice, but she does not revel in her triumph. She has nothing to prove; in common with Gentileschi, her dignity marks her authentic heroism.’

Judith Leyster’s (1606/9–1660) Man Offering Money to a Young Woman (1631) likewise deviates from the traditional tendency to see women as embarrassed victims or alacritous accomplices. In Leyster’s hands, the woman being proffered coins remains attentive and steadfast in her task.

The emphasis is on physical labour under strained candlelight, often accompanied by the additional burden of looking after children rather than freedom, reverie or male Calvinist moralizing. Alternatively, the genre subjects of her contemporary, Johannes Vermeer (1632– 1675), were tailored to the partialities and whims of privileged male buyers in a society enchanted by female pulchritude, driven by Dutch amatory literature and testified by Vermeer’s The Lace Maker (1669–1670). In a relatively egalitarian Dutch seventeenth-century culture, a still-life image such as Carel Fabritius’ (1622 –1654) The Goldfinch (1654) might also affirm social or religious paragons regarding domestic fidelity, modest homeliness and the virtue of a woman at home. To be loyal in seventeenth-century Dutch society was to be the queen of domestic sovereignty. A popular wedding song of the period, ‘The Little Holland Goldfinch’, warbled that ‘a houseguardian’s [huis-voogd] realm … is like a kingdom, … her children their happy subjects.’

2

By the mid-eighteenth century, women of the day were still excluded from studying the live model, which formed a key part of male academic artistic training. This led to the traditional practice of using antique sculpture in place of the naked form. As illustrated by a later nineteenth-century photograph of Thomas Eakins’ life-class at the Pennsylvania Academy around 1855, a cow, rather than a nude male, provided the model for the women students.

Women artists were always hamstrung by limited access to life classes. As Linda Nochlin argued in her seminal essay: ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ (Art News, 1971), this is ‘an interesting commentary on rules of propriety: i.e., it is all right for a (“low,” of course) woman to reveal herself naked-as-an-object for a group of men, but forbidden to a woman to participate in the active study and recording of naked-man-as-an-object, or even of a fellow woman.’ Even Angelica Kauffmann (1741–1807), who was elected to the esteemed Academy of Saint Luke in Rome in 1775 and among the founding members (alongside Mary Moser, 1744–1819) of the British Royal Academy in 1786, is relegated to a portrait on the wall to the right and at the back in Johann Zoffany’s male group portrait, which celebrates The Academicians of the Royal Academy (1771–1772), then an entirely male preserve. Such was Kauffman’s standing in 1779, however, that she was tasked with creating one of the four oval paintings to decorate the ceiling for the Royal Academy’s lecture room, where cohorts of students would be taught. In fact, Kauffman identified herself primarily as a history painter, the genre at the heart of (male) teaching at the Royal Academy. Kauffman’s designs (all allegorical self-portraits) represent her personal understanding and mastery of the rudiments of painting: colour design, composition and genius or invention. Colour (1778-1780), in unfastened attire and right breast exposed to symbolise her artistic liberty, holds a paintbrush up to the air to both fashion a rainbow in the blue and cloudy skies, or to mix its optical prism on her artist’s board.

Popular etiquette books actually reinforced the image of the ‘lady artist’ in the midnineteenth century. Mrs Ellis’ highly popular The Family Monitor and Domestic Guide (1844) cautioned against ladies striving to achieve excellence in any particular area of study: ‘It must not be supposed that the writer is one who would advocate, as essential to woman, any very extraordinary degree of intellectual attainment, especially if confined to one particular branch of study …’ ‘Drawing is’, Mrs. Ellis (née Sarah Stickney, 1799–1872) explains, ‘of all other occupations, the one most calculated to keep the mind from brooding upon self, and to maintain that general cheerfulness which is a part of social and domestic duty …’ Nochlin argues that ‘such an outlook helps guard man from unwanted competition in his “serious” professional activities and assures him of “wellrounded” assistance on the home front …’ We see this implied ‘dabbling’ in Octavius Oakley’s (1800-1867) watercolour, A Student of Beauty (1861), where the amateur watercolourist practices art for enjoyment rather than as a professional (male) occupation.

In the late nineteenth century, rules of propriety, ‘chaste’ modesty and ‘indecency’ meant that the ‘acceptable’ Salon nude represented women as either stock-in trade characters, passive stereotypes or as an exotic/‘primitivized’ ‘Other’. In the Second Empire, the satisfactory female ‘nude’ was a nineteenth-century confection – soft pornography in disguise – with sham ‘Venuses’ designed ‘to appeal the passions of bankers and Stockbrokers’, as the French painter Jean François Millet (1814-1875) put it. In the European mind, romantic representations of the Orient as an exotic milieu likewise captured the imaginations of countless nineteenth-century French and British artists. It’s what Edward Said famously termed ‘Orientalism’, ‘one of [Europe’s] deepest and most recurring images of the Other.’ New knowledge of the Orient and its artifacts did little to stem the tide of Arabian Nights-style fantasies from artists such as JeanLéon Gérôme (1824–1904), Eugene Delacroix (1798–1863) and, in particular, Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres (1780–1867). Perhaps most famous for his nude odalisques in West Asian settings, Ingres exhibited La Grande Odalisque (1814) at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris.

Odalisque is French for ‘harem women’, the forbidden yet desired territory of many a male Western fantasy.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Slave Market (1866), which was created after reading Gerard de Nerval’s fictional Voyage en Orient (1851), has as well been an iconic marker of Orientalism since the publication of Said’s text and Linda Nochlin’s assessment of the picture in her correspondingly 3

seminal essay, ‘The Imaginary Orient’ (1983). Nochlin articulates the view that The Slave Market presents the imperialist, racist and Orientalist perspective of male, European power; other art historians contend that the work can be interpreted as an ‘abolitionist painting’. It is hard to dispute Nochlin’s argument that such imagery perpetuates the Western canon’s depiction of the Orient as a place of ‘picturesque timelessness’, while also offering a moralizing and racist commentary on the ‘savage’ nature of contemporary Islamic society. We need only compare the European Orientalist fantasy with the work of the Turkish intellectual and pioneering painter Osman Hamdi-Bay (1842–1910). His subjects recall the strong influence of his European teachers Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger (1824–1888), but alternatively depict sophisticated images of his female family members, as in the likes of Two Musician Girls (1880) – both by contemplating and negating Western stereotypes and assumptions regarding the Orient, and by intentionally eradicating the Orientalist gaze. As Zeynep Çelik has forcefully argued, Hamdi’s prestige as a scholar means that many view his work as dissent and highly censorious of European Orientalism.

Likewise in Manet’s Olympia (1863), the inclusion of a black-skinned handmaid (a standard trope in European art) equated the naked model with an exotic harem and explicitly Orientalist male fantasies – Africans during the period were stereotypically perceived as bestial, ‘primitive’ and highly sexualised. In Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of Madeleine (formerly Portrait of a Negress, 1800), the young woman might have recalled, for certain audiences, the slave markets in French colonies, where potential buyers assessed the bodies of black slaves. And when Portrait of Madeleine was first shown at a state-sponsored exhibition at Louvre in 1800, the critic for a traditionalist newspaper disparaged the work as a noirceur or ‘black stain’. Such colonial racist arrogances typically connected blackness with inferiority, the skin of ‘Ethiopians’ – as African peoples were repeatedly labelled – viewed as a particularly troublesome painterly challenge. ‘Did’, as Griselda Pollock asks, the young African or African-Caribbean descendent (recently brought from the Antilles to France by Benoist’s sailor brother-in-law) ‘see any difference between the slaver at the market, who showed her … naked to a buyer?’ Madeleine’s exposed right breast in combination with the tricolour design of her dress, is another cruel irony; for it symbolises artistic and political liberty in France. She was probably born a slave in the colony and eventually ‘freed’ by the official decree, which abolished slavery in the French colonies in 1794. However admirable, the motives of abolitionists were often filled with racist sentiments equating slaves with defenceless animals and ‘… with little more intelligence … than sheep being driven to the shambles.’ (See The Salve Trade [1840] by François Biard.) While Europeans made noises of righteous indignation, the trade in slaves remained legal in many countries until 1888. In the United States, slavery was (and still is) a fiery issue.

John Finlay, 2020 To be continued in part two…

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 4