"Until now, no one has been serious and passionate, and certainly no one has been argumentative, concerning attitudes toward women." Cynthia Gornick, "Women and Creativity" (1969)
In what way has the discipline of art history been affected by feminism and women's studies?
On one level the answer is obvious. We all know a great deal more about women artists of the past than we did even five years ago, thanks to the efforts of a growing number of scholars who are devoting their research skills to this area. Yet for the most part, this new knowledge remains hermetically sealed in its own world, not touching and often not touched by traditional methods and assumptions of the discipline. Women artists are discussed in courses on women artists, are written about in feminist journals, are grouped in single-sex exhibitions, and if I sound churlish about these activities, which surely have their positive effects, it is only with apprehension that we will all—feminist historians, artists and critics—remain trapped in a great cultural ghetto of our own devising if we do not now begin to force the issue of integration. It is indeed time to put women artists in the regular art history curriculum, and most important, in the standard survey textbooks, so they can be seen by the next generation of students as natural phenomena, and not exotic hothouse plants.
But there are other questions for art history raised by feminism. How has thinking changed? Should it not have changed? A generation of scholars in the early twentieth century were prompted by their response to the
We can, of course, press the Mannerist analogy far enough to see the danger of imposing modern consciousness on pre-modern cultures. The heavy emphasis upon Angst that accompanies much analytic writing on Mannerism in the 1920s is a prime example of such projection. Similarly, we would be foolish to look for feminist statements in the work of "lady" artists of the
There are two ways of looking at the history of attitudes toward women in art. One—the only one thus far explored—is to compensate for the lack of scholarly attention to women artists' achievements by writing as apologists. Gabrielle Munter was unjustly overshadowed by Kandinsky; Jeanne-Elisabeth Chaudet was sentimental, but so was Greuze, they all painted flowers and portraits because they didn't have access to the nude model, and so on. All of this is perfectly true, but is a lament from the ghetto, and it will not get us out because it is defensive. The other way is to approach the historic fact of discrimination against women from the other end—what has this politics of exclusion meant for male art? After all, despite the numerical hegemony of male artists, theirs is ultimately an art produced by only one of two sexes, and far from being universal, it is rampant with the prejudices, vanities, insecurities and fears that afflict mere men as well as mere women.
We have been sensitized for nearly ten years now to the fact that the image of each sex in art, and of their interaction, has been overwhelmingly a male perception, and as such, a grab-bag of aspirations, fantasies and neuroses, individual and collective. But if one looks, for instance, through the past five years of the Art Bulletin, it is virtually impossible to see that this understanding has affected the way scholars look at their subjects. One of the very few exceptions, Norma
Broude’s article in the March 1977 issue, which debunks the traditional view of Degas as misogynist, met with strong editorial resistance before it was accepted and was first dismissed as a "women's lib tract." Note: Norma Broude, Degas' 'Misogyny,' Art Bulletin (March, 1977), pp. 95-107. Such irrational reaction to logical revisions of thought stimulated by feminism ultimately bespeaks a bunker mentality, a stubborn, last-ditch effort to keep women and attitudes about them outside art history. And this in the discipline that deals with the human experience in its visual, most immediate manifestation.
Resistance by men to the idea of women's equality has produced mixed results in men's art. On the positive side, the sense of superiority is often the mainstay of an elitist perspective that makes art of some sorts possible. One could seriously argue that the Greek's superb confidence in himself as the measure of things was buoyed by his conviction that his wife was a far less perfect yardstick. The Parthenon is not just the triumphant result of that self-esteem, it does not even reflected a glimmer of bad conscience. On the other hand, the notion that females, and by extension that which is feminine in art, are inherently inferior has contaminated art historical thinking in curious ways.
Why is our art history, for example, full of virtuous reversals, in which a virile, heroic or austere style suddenly and dramatically replaces a feminine, lyrical or luxurious one— David over Fragonard, Caravaggio over Salviati, clean International Modern Gropius over wickedly ornamental Sullivan or Tiffany? Does it never go the other way? Who ever heard of a drastic hedonistic reaction to unbridled stoicism? The ornamental and feminine in art are seen as a kind of creeping sickness that gradually weakens the fabric of stern resolve until the virile essence has been fatally co-opted and must forcefully reassert itself. Hercules cleaning the Augean stables is heroic, his submission to Omphale shameful, and when he must choose between virtue and pleasure, we already know the contest is rigged. Yet in explaining all this, it is not enough to point to the Western philosophical bias to favor the moral over the pleasurable; we must also account for the equally deep-rooted attitude that identifies male with purposeful and female with corruptive. This kind of thinking has infected value judgments in art history in subtle ways, one fears, but to choose an unsubtle instance, such "feminine" styles as Maniera or
It is possible, though no one has done so, to view the art of early Mannerism as a reaction against not the style of the High Renaissance, but its high moral (read masculine) idealism. A couple of years ago, I began to look at Rosso Fiorentino's Moses Defending the Daughters of Jefro in a new way— as a comic parody of such paragons of virility in action as Michelangelo's Battle Cartoon, which was its point of departure. I do not know if Rosso intended it as parody, but the painting works as a commentary on the obsessive Renaissance adoration of the heroic male nude and the glory of battle, with its mock-heroic, tough little boy defenders and its kewpie-doll heroine. It is hilarious. Yet it is only possible to see the painting in this way if you take the heretical position that male heroism does not have an absolute value, but in an extreme form is subject to ridicule. No woman can walk around Florence today without some slight impulse to laugh at the material evidence of such an unabashedly phallocentric culture. Though fewer statues filled the squares in his day, Rosso quite conceivably had the same impulse.
Writers on early Mannerism, on the other hand, have not been able to postulate any conceivable reason for rejecting a heroic idealism other than a wish to explore its formalist potential. Friedlaender explains that Rosso's painting "is not formulated in terms of psychic depth, but is built on a purely aesthetic basis of form, color," et cetera, et cetera. Sydney Freedberg predictably discusses the work largely in formalist terms, and for him, the picture has not one but two contents, with Rosso relegating "mannered grace and subtly distilled sensuality...to the feminine and minor components of the picture, and exploiting the subject’s possibilities of violence instead." Note: Walter Friedlander, Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), p. 32 By identifying the "subject" with the male actors only, Freedberg mimics the very male solipsist attitude that Rosso appears to ridicule. Note: Sydney J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy, 1500 to 1600 (Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1971), p. 129. Most of all, it is strange that writers responsive to the expressive shift from the calm seriousness of Andrea del Sarto to the hyperintensity of Pontorme should draw a blank on Rosso's expressive tone. Strange, until one reflects that neither formalist manipulation nor heightened emotional intensity challenge any underlying social assumptions. Antiheroic parody, on the other hand, calls into question an entire set of values, revealing the Apollo-David-Hercules images that symbolize such values to be as extreme in one direction as fainting Victorian heroines are in another.
We have before us the prospect of an art history that takes sexual attitudes into account as subjective values and value judgments, rather than as absolute articles of faith. These values can be examined and assessed as part of the content of a work of art, factors often just as relevant to our understanding of it as other factors that we routinely take seriously—military history, theological doctrine or social mores. Also, we are now in a position to recognize and discredit scholarly writing in which sexual stereotypes are imposed on material to which they are irrelevant. To seize these opportunities afforded by feminist insight is an exciting prospect, but more than that, it is a professional responsibility that should now be shared by all art historians, male and female alike.
Mary D. Garrard is a Professor of Art History at the American University in Washington, D.C., where she teaches courses in Renaissance art, American art and Women's Studies. She was President of the Women’s Caucus for Art, 1974-1976.