Gender Issues in Art History and Production

G container Issues in Art History and ProductionDescribe How Issues of Gender Are historic to the Production of Art and the Writing of Art History womens lib has disposed new and important insights into the production of machinationistic production and the study of graphics record. It has not only(prenominal) helped us to discover the work of neglected women machinationists but has excessively given us a new approach to the study of subterfuge as a whole. Feminists built upon the earlier insights of Marxism. Traditional trick history holds that works of finesse ar the creations of individual genius that they atomic number 18 forms of self- observation but Marx argued that art is a product satisfying a demand, accompaniment the ideology of the ruling sieve. Part of that ideology included the subjection of women, who tended to be depicted in a subordinate role. These are the kind of arguments that Rozsika Parker and Griselda pollock put forward in their book Old Mis tresses Art is uncomplete pure nor neutral. It is, as we pull in shown, an ideological practice, secured within power structures (Parker 157). major power structures are not just those of sexism, they are also those of racism and class distinction and thus feminism is closely bound up with the sociable history of art. With respect to sex distinctions, it seems clear that femininity and masculinity are to some extent favorable constructs. They are behaviour traits learned in childhood to satisfy the demands of society.Feminists have shown that the individual artistic genius is not a universal phenomenon but preferably a feature of westbound art since the Renaissance. In other parts of the world, and in Medieval Europe, artists were a good deal anonymous chicaneworkers. In the Middle Ages, both men and women worked at producing gorgeous marks for the Church illuminated manuscripts, carvings, embroideries. at that place was no distinction between art and craft, which was a distinction that arose during the Renaissance. The twentieth-century saw a partial end to this rather artificial division between art and craft. We have not yet seen the death of painting, but it is now rivalled in importance by other media. This rise in the status of the crafts has tended to utility women artists, since women have al commissions been closely involved with craftwork. The development of swindle art in the twentieth-century owes something to womens kip downledge of the abstract patterns on textiles and embroidery. Sonia Delaunay and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, for example, were both mode designers as well as painters (Chadwick 271).The split between art and craft which arose during the Renaissance was furthitherd by the new interest in the biographies of individual artists, as distinct from anonymous craftworkers. Vasari wrote a series of Lives of the Artists. The artist, unlike the craftworker, was expected to know ab surface the rules of perspective and about history an d the classics, which provided subjects for paintings. This kind of knowledge was unremarkably denied to women, who had a restricted access to education, and this helps to explain why on that point were fewer fe manly artists in the Renaissance although artists daughters sometimes learned to paint, and there are examples of aristocratic lady artists, such as the painter Sofonisba Anguissola and the sculptor Properzia de Rossi. A myth developed that the true artist must be a temperamental genius, a rebel, a bohemian as exemplified in the career of a painter like Caravaggio and this meant that womens work was not taken seriously, because a bohemian conductstyle would have been deemed inappropriate for a woman (Parker 99). Thus, because of restricted opportunities and the prejudices of society, it came about that no women were deemed to belong to the ranks of the great artists. not strikely, womens liberationists debunk the myth of the great artist, although it is also true tha t feminist art history itself in time relies heavily on the biographies of individual women artists and seeks to lay out that their work has been undervalued. Germaine Greer makes the important point that overemphasis on great artists detracts our attention from the myriad of so-called minor talents The seven wonders of the world are not the only things worth looking at (Greer 150). Indeed, artistic taste is something very personal, and the veranda visitor may find that she or he prefers the work of a minor painter to that of a out-of-the-way(prenominal) to a greater extent famous name. commodious artists are usually seen as innovators Caravaggios use of dramatic glint and shadow, for example while minor artists are thought of as their followers. There are some(prenominal) examples of women as innovators Sofonisba Anguissola helped to develop the new form of the municipal conversation piece genus Rosalba Carriera popularised the new medium of pastel Angelica Kauffman help ed to preface the Neo-Classical style to England Helen Frankenthaler developed a new staining technique for producing abstract paintings. It may be true, how ever so, that until recently womens work has tended to be hidebound rather than innovatory, and Germaine Greer provides a possible reason for thisThe fact that so many gifted women strangled themselves in archconservatism is not some sort of secondary winding sexual characteristic working its way out, as if women are with indispensability born with corsets on the mind. It comes of the very insecurity that these women felt upon entering into contender with men who seemed to have made all the running so far (Greer 131).There were also barriers to prevent women from competing with men in the first place. For example, women were usually excluded from art academies in the eighteenth and 19th centuries, and denied the chance to copy the nude, which was the alkali of the most prestigious art form, that of history painting. W omens social lives were also restricted. Griselda Pollock points out that Baudelaires flaneur who wanders the streets of Paris is a priapic figure a woman would not have been able to seethe freely in this way (Pollock 70-72). This limited the subjects available for women to paint, and helps to explain why the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot thin outd on domestic interiors. In differentiate to visit the Paris horse market for her painting The Horse Fair, Rosa Bonheur had to disguise herself as a man (Parker 37).Womens restricted opportunities meant that they tended to concentrate on lesser genres like portraiture and still-life. But the idea that there is a hierarchy in painting is now completely discredited, because there is obviously no link between the subject of a come across and its aesthetic quality. The flower paintings of seventeenth century Holland many of which are by women include some of the most beautiful works of art ever made. The academic hierarchy of gen res broke down in the later nineteenth century, as Parker and Pollock explainWhen venturesome artists rejected academic theories and hierarchies, they took up the hitherto less prestigious fields of portraiture, landscape and still-life. Women could and did take amply part in avant-garde movements based in these, for them, familiar areas of art (Parker 35).Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, for example, were important in the new movement of Impressionism.The subject of gender and the visual arts also includes the ways in which gender roles are depicted. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, the male nude was probably much important than the effeminate nude as a subject for art. unrivalled only needs to think of Greek sculpture and Michelangelo. But the female nude was also important, and these female nudes tend to depict women in a humiliating way, as objects of male fantasy. Carol Duncan argues that even the distorted nudes of avant-garde Modernism such as Picassos Les De moiselles dAvignon continue this way of portraying women into the twentieth century (Duncan 47-52). She is certainly correct to point out that it is strange that modern art, which is often said to move way from representation, still contains a surprisingly large number of female nudes. John Berger has present that the nudes in old master paintings often bear a surprising resemblance to the nudes in modern publicize images and porn magazines (Berger 55). Berger points out that the nude is essentially dehumanising because a naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude (Berger 54). It seems that Kenneth Clark, a traditionalist of the old school, would agree with Berger to some extent, since Clark writes of Manets Olympia that to place on a naked body a head with so a great deal individual character is to jeopardize the whole premise of the nude (Clark 225). This rather dehumanising quality of the nude is, however, a quality that Clark admires, because he sees th e nude as a vehicle for expressing a sense of ideal form, divorced from life to some degree whereas Berger and the feminists are interested in showing how art reflects and constructs the attitudes and injustices of society. Paula Modersohn-Beckers famous nude Self-Portrait of herself was an important and original contribution because of the individuality she gave to her features, subverting the whole tradition of the nude.Feminist artists seek to actively change society, and unmatched of their achievements has been to draw attention to the stereotyped gender roles which appear in art, advertising and the media. Barbara Krugers famous print entitled Your Gaze Hits the Side of My casing draws attention to the fact that the male gaze can be a means of expressing dominance or hostility, a form of harassment. Cindy Sherman photographed herself in poses derived from stereotypical advertising and media images of women. Sylvia sledge painted a series of pictures showing male nudes in th e kind of poses usually given to women, to demonstrate their absurdity. (The above examples from Kruger, Sherman and Sleigh are taken from Chadwick, chapter 13).Yet womens art is concerned with often more than issues of gender and sexism. It may, indeed, be a mistake to consider womens art as separate from mens because it risks placing womens art in a separate category, a kind of ghetto area. Works of art themselves have no gender. In this Postmodern era we should now do more to stress the individual contributions of individual women artists, who are much more than just representatives of their gender.Works CitedBerger, John. Ways of Seeing. London Penguin, 1972.Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art and Society. London Thames Hudson, 1996.Clark, Kenneth. The Nude. stark naked York Doubleday, 1959.Duncan, Carol. The MOMAs Hot Mamas. Art Journal Summer 198947-52.Greer, Germaine. The Obstacle execute The Fortunes of Women Painters and their Work. New York Farrar Strauss, 1979.Parker, Rozsi ka and Griselda Pollock. Old Mistresses Women, Art and Ideology. London Pandora Press, 1981.Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. London Routledge, 1988.