Women, Art, and Societ by Whitney Chadwick

Author:Whitney Chadwick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

187 Irene Rice Pereira, Untitled, 1951

188 Lee Krasner, Noon, 1947

Krasner and other women Abstract Expressionists were well aware of the operations of sexual difference within artistic practice. During the 1940s and 1950s, they confronted the widely held view that women “couldn’t paint.” Teachers like Hofmann, following an example set earlier by Freud’s disciple, Havelock Ellis, believed that “only men had the wings for art.” The highest praise he offered his female students, including Krasner, was contained in the remark: “this painting is so good you’d never know it was done by a woman.”

The tensions between an ideology of sexual difference—one that assured jobs for returned servicemen, supported the shift of population to the suburbs, and provided “meaningful” work for women through homemaking—and vanguard art can be seen in painting and sculpture, by men as well as women. The sculptor David Smith, whose complicated relationship with the sculptor Dorothy Dehner (1901–1994) inflected the work of both during the 1940s, linked the body of woman to home in The Home of the Welder, a bronze of 1945–46 with the torso of a woman in bas-relief on one side, and a stylized mother and child in bas-relief on the other.[190] For Smith, the body of woman signified not only physical home, but also the mental and emotional source of male creative activity. For Dehner, the demands of marriage and art proved incompatible and she began to work professionally as a sculptor only after leaving Smith and her home in 1950.

Many women artists, encouraged by their teachers to divorce art practice from female experience and self-awareness in order to succeed professionally, found themselves painfully aware of the contradictions between artistic and personal identity. The nexus of body/home/art is central to the early work of Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), whose femme-maison paintings were exhibited in 1947.[189] Although Bourgeois pointed to the home as a place of conflict for the woman artist, critics read the paintings as affirming a “natural” identification between women and home. Her paintings of 1947 evolved out of earlier ones based on the grid, a structural form familiar to her from her early weaving and tapestry, and from her training in Cubist abstraction. Under the influence of Surrealism, she developed the personal, quasi-figurative imagery of these femme-maison paintings with their houses perched on top of women’s bodies in place of heads. In these disquieting works, domesticity, imaged through blank facades and small windows, defines women but denies them speaking voices. “Hers is a world of women,” wrote one critic. “Blithely they emerge from chimneys, or, terrified, they watch from their beds as curtains fly from a nightmare window. A whole family of females proves their domesticity by having houses for heads.”

The presence of a politics of gender in Bourgeois’s work has been recognized only in retrospect, in the light of more recent feminist-inspired investigations into the workings of socially assigned notions of difference and the gradual acknowledgment of Bourgeois’s contribution in creating a body of work remarkable for its personal, associative, autobiographical, and emotional content.

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