The Great Housewives of Art
This article on a German exhibition of and on Amrita Sher-Gil (by the way, thanks to KG, whose name appears in my blog way too much, I'll finally be getting my hands on Yashodara Dalmia's biography of her real soon) made me ponder, once again, what it means to be female and a painter. As happy as I am that Sher-Gil seems, according to this article, set to take her place as the final angle of the trinity that also includes Kahlo and O'Keefe, I am bothered by the article's undertone, which to me carries a subtle but pervasive throwback to standards of judging female painters which one hopes are becoming obsolete. But that's not the writer's fault -- celebrity status and female painters seem only to go hand in hand where elements of scandal, sexuality and famous male partners are also present. Until recently, painters who are women were rarely, if ever, taken seriously unless they also had something lascivious on offer, and even today, shades of such discrimination remain evident.
Here's an article I wrote awhile back for a unisex lifestyle and entertainment magazine on the whole phenomenon.
THE GREAT HOUSEWIVES OF ART
Why, in this post-feminist, post-Kahlo day and age, is the phrase "famous female painter" still an oxymoron? SHARANYA MANIVANNAN wonders whether a paintbrush can be used to attack the patriarchy.
In 1985, the Guerrilla Girls, the art world's most idiosyncratic insurgent group, took arms (or, more accurately, propaganda posters, pickets, anonymous identities and some gorilla masks) against what they saw as male-dominated curators' and pay-rollers' gender-oriented discrimination. The facts, once the novelty of their appearances died down, were truly grim. Women were underrepresented at exhibitions, by an average discrepancy of 90%: 10% or less. North American art schools graduated almost equal numbers of men and women, but most of the women were either dropping dead right after college, or falling through the cracks.
The question today is no longer "Where are the Women?" but "Where are the Famous Women?" Because regardless of how much affirmative action has dragged women's paintings out of the barrios of insignificance and into museums, there remain to this day very few female painters we recognize as memorable. As Genius.
If subject matter is of importance, then alongside Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot who painted domestic scenes, were the likes of Chardin, Renoir and Monet, just as any variety of non-domestic, "macho" scenes have been tackled by a plethora of women artists. If being within the right circles is of importance, then Remedios Varo airbrushed Paris crimson with the likes of André Breton, Max Ernst and Joan Mirò, but remains the least known major Surrealist. If emerging out of hardship is important, then whoa mama, would the list burst out of the margins - except for that sometimes the hardship in question, like Minnie Evans', isn't nearly as glamourous as the kind we'd prefer to see.
As with any other arena of human civilization as it has evolved today, a significant history of suppression has daunted women in art. When Artemisia Gentileschi, the first post-Renaissance woman to venture into religious and historical themes, moved from being mentored by her father to being taught by another man, she could not have expected to be raped by the tutor furious and jealous of her adeptness, though we'd see it now as a typical outcome of the time. This there is no denying. Yet, more interestingly still is how despite feminist reclamation/revisionist work, of the women who have attained some degree of eminence, posthumously or otherwise, there is a pattern of fame-by-association to husbands or lovers of notable renown.
Pop quiz: name the five most famous women painters you can think of. Time's up, and chances are if you're lucky, you could think only of five women painters, let alone famous ones. Then, try that exercise for male painters - you ran out of fingers, didn't you? Now, go back to your list of women painters, and pick out how many of them were married, related to, or involved with, a male mentor. Notice anything?
Frida Kahlo lived a uniquely inspiring life, and was certainly a pioneer of contemporary women's art. But why was she hailed as such? Her confessional, deeply narcissistic paintings, striking as they are, were in the votive tradition, which warranted little attention when already so commonplace in worship. The difference lay, with little argument, in that fact that she was married to Mexico's most celebrated muralist and most insufferable womanizer. And if that wasn't enough, her life lay littered with miscarriages, operations, that bus accident, and notches on her own bedpost for everyone from Leon Trotsky to Josephine Baker. Everybody loves a weeping woman, especially if she "drinks tequila like a real mariachi" (according to a previous Mrs. Rivera), and shares the shot-glasses with a true-blue revolutionary.
Romaine Brooks - who painted surreal self-portraits, exhibited at all the major European and North American artistic hubs, exaggerated her masculinity through attire, and even lived in a separate house that was hyphenated from her lifelong-but-by-no-means-monogamous (female) lover's by a common area - all things Kahlo would do a few decades later, barely rings a bell. The only thing missing is, naturally, the famous husband.
Even those who enjoyed some degree of success prior to marriage, such as Lois Mailou-Jones (who married the celebrated Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel) found their careers benefited, never symbiotically, from a desirable partnership. Conversely, if the man wasn't supportive, then chances of success become limited. Lee Krasner's career lay sputtering until Jackson Pollock made his way to glorious self-destruction. Paula Modersohn-Becker, a forerunner of Expressionism, was married to Otto Modersohn, a successful landscapist; when she finally escaped his controlling demeanour, she died a fittingly female end in childbirth, leaving feminist revisionism to excavate her reputation. Others ended up as footnotes in the biographies of their more celebrated spouses and lovers, unremembered muses.
(Ironically, thanks today to feminist revisionist art history, some Mrs. Legends are more famous than their husbands were or are.)
Or is it more than just the man? Georgia O'Keeffe, like Kahlo, was married to an older and more established man, Alfred Stieglitz, whose gallery it was that first propelled her into stardom. What these two painters have in common, other than their debts to their husbands' statures and the fact that they were rumoured to be onetime lovers, is the role of sexuality in their lives and work. Neither was monogamous nor completely heterosexual, and their most recognizable work was blatantly sexual - from Kahlo's images of grown women's heads emerging from bloodied vaginas to O'Keefe's erotically-charged flower/genitalia paintings.
All that being said, feminist revisionist history itself is dubious. It canonizes, ostensibly, with less regard for creative merit than for personal lives, associations, and the suddenly-celebrated stigma of being female. Obscure second-rate hobbyists are dug out alongside truly passionate pursuants, and a definite penchant is shown for suffering. We like, for some perverse though explicable reason, to see women as victims. Amrita Sher-Gil, for example, died in 1941 at just age 28 and may have managed to avoid the Mrs. Legend stigma, but part of her legacy contains not just scandal but sanctimonious cautionary suggestions – she was rumoured to be bisexual and to entertain up to three lovers a day, but died in mysterious circumstances, possibly a botched abortion.
Today, even in what's considered as the most liberal, post-feminist domains, women remain token minorities - at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, 85% of the nudes are of women, but only 5% of the exhibits are by women artists. Aside from marrying up the pecking order, the easiest way for a woman to be noticed in art is to either pose naked or live as though she always is.
Perhaps something needs to be said for all those stuffy old curators keeping us girl painters in gorilla masks and on the arms of Svengalis. Perhaps its isn't because female counterparts to the extensive canon of male masters have had their works lost or otherwise obscured - perhaps it is simply that they have never existed, or rather, there have not been conditions within which their existence is possible. Feminist revisionism in western art (eastern art, which dates back further, was characterised for centuries by anonymous contributions) is essentially a supplier of perfunctory nods. Because the question still remains: never mind the numbers, never mind the political correctness, where are on Goddess' green earth are the truly legendary painters -- painters who happen to be women who happen to be geniuses?
But that doesn't mean we don't need to reexamine our definitions of genius. Is genius cutting off your ear to present to a prostitute and never allowing your mistresses to have orgasms, as Picasso was said to? Is it abandoning one's family and impulsively moving to Tahiti, as Gauguin did? Fact is that we often associate greatness with eccentricity, possibly the only point on which most if not all subjective artistic tastes concur, which effectively shuts the door on every potential Ms. Dali who was too busy being a girl, or birthing a Dali, or being his mistress, to be eccentric enough to achieve "greatness"; no wonder Grandma Moses didn't even start painting until age 78!
It's interesting to note, though, that when there has been a backlash, it's been inventive in terms of medium. On-site installations and multimedia figure prominently, as with Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (places set for iconic females to eat out of vagina-like symbols a la the Biblical Last Supper) and Menstrual Bathroom installations, Ana Mendieta's Silueta series (sacrifice, crime and the woman's body), and others including current artists like Arahmaiani, Moema Furtado and Tracey Emin. The problem is that, pressurised to capture immediate reaction, these platforms, while sometimes powerful, can sometimes be overly polemic and separatist, with shock value taking precedence (again, the emphasis on sexuality).
But let it never be said that women aren't painting. Women are going through paintbrushes today like they used to go through knitting needles, buying linseed oil like they once bought laundry detergent. And not just because they're borrowing from or buying for their man. Anjolie Ela Menon may be asked about her grandchildren in interviews, but barely anyone makes space to ask after her (civil servant) husband. Leonora Carrington may have had her share of artistic dalliances, but few know who Chiqui Weisz (her photographer husband) is. We don't even know if Yolanda Lopez is married. It's just a matter of time before the percentages even out.
Of course, whether the continued paucity of male nudes is an ingenious way of attacking the hierarchy without borrowing its weapons, or simply a question of aesthetic disgust, is another subject altogether...
(An edited version first appeared in V Mag, English edition, May 2005 issue. Is forthcoming, also, in this year's issue of my college publication, of which I am editor-in-chief. The montage is by my college mag's art director, the fantastic and very sexy Irys Ching).
posted by sharanya @ 6:23 PM
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