Art

The landmark exhibition Fémininmasculin, Le Sexe de l'Art (Femininemasculine, The Sex of Art) presented at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, in 1995 attempted to address, through both exhibited works of art and companion catalogue, how twentieth-century art has traversed, transferred, and transformed the issue(s) of sexual difference. The 500 images on display appeared, however, to be divided between the traditional view of the differences between the sexes and an alternate axis that both experimented with and transgressed upon the established biological distinctions between and functions of both men and women. As the exhibition curators sought to clarify what they saw as a series of discrete distinctions between the overtly sexual and the implicitly erotic and the expanding academic boundaries of gender, they offered a new term, fémininmasculin, as a solution, especially in terms of art. For them, the issue was not feminine-masculine, sex in art, but rather femininemasculine, the sex of art.

Their point of art historical departure for this new term was the first work in the exhibition L'Origine du Monde (The Origin of the World, painted in 1866 by Gustave Courbet (1819–1877). Within his canvas, Courbet depicted only a lower female torso with legs spread open to draw the viewer's eye directly to the exposed genitalia as simultaneously the locus of sexual pleasure and symbolic of fertility and procreation. This new conception of art, then, provides a new way of seeing and interpreting art that presages what would become the twentieth-century preoccupation with discussions, examinations, and debates over the meaning of sex, sexuality, and—ultimately—gender.

Traditionally, art has been understood as performing certain functions, including the pedagogy of manners, social customs, cultural values, and behavior, in addition to beautifying human environs from the domestic to the public. The typical point of entry into seeing or interpreting a work of art is through representational, abstract, or symbolic renderings of the human body. Artists have conferred a variety of forms, shapes, postures, gestures, and costumes upon the human body to conform to the attitudes of different cultures, historical periods, and religious communities. These stylistic and culturally referenced differences allow researchers to see and critique the embedded inscriptions of gender, class, identity, and power in works of art. The reality that body types vary not simply from geographic region to geographic region but also within cultural categories and transmute according to prevailing economic, political, religious, and social attitudes is not lost upon artists, even those dedicated to the depiction of the ideal versus the real.

Analyses of the comparative expressions of mass, weight, and volume coordinate projections of natural versus ideal body types, symbolic patterns of the human body, and nutritional and medical factors that reveal information about sex and gender. One of the significant components in art has been in the social and cultural constructions of gender, that is, what distinguishes the categories of feminine and masculine in modes of behavior, demeanor, dress, and meaning. Biology determines sex, whereas society, from its privileged coordination of culture, economics, politics, and religion, conditions definitions of and attitudes toward gender.

Expressive of a diverse spectrum of cultural attitudes and religious values, artistic renderings of the human body, therefore depictions of sex and gender, has been instrumental in: fertility rites, magic ceremonies, cult objects and rituals, idolatry, natural medicine, social advancement, intellectual achievement, and sacred correspondence. However, an overview of the depiction of male and female forms reveals a dramatic contrast between Asian and European and North American attitudes toward the human, and perhaps thereby toward art, culture, and values. For example, Hindu artists traditionally render voluptuous goddesses and powerful gods engaged in joyful acts of sexual union in contrast to the chaste prayerful postures of asexual male and female saints of Christian art.

ART AS VISUAL COMMUNICATOR AND MIRROR OF SEX AND GENDER

Artistic images provide a venue for understanding cultural perceptions of gender, power, and sex. Universally, human beings convey identity and information through images. The basic human urge to create images is a fundamental form of the communication of ideas, precepts, and concepts. Such expression through and reflection in works of art is premised on the depiction of the human body or anthropomorphic figurations. The transformation of thinking in images into the concrete representation of seeing visions, dreaming dreams, imagining distant lands, recreating ancient the past, and living by memories defines the fundamental nature of art whether categorized individually as painting, sculpture, and, more recently, photography or collectively as fine arts and naive arts. Regardless of the medium art contributes to the shaping of identifiable cultures as the process of visualization translates abstract concepts into visible figures whose major messages, in turn, appeal to and influence viewers.

The symbolic language of the human figures and the ambiance rendered by the landscape, or background, and surrounding objects and attributes, provide a special mode of communication that transcends verbal literacy or formal education and training. Traditionally, even into the twenty-first century images have projected modes of understanding and interpreting gender, sex, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age in a socially appropriate construction of the self. Artistic images, then, question our notions of sex and gender and challenge our concepts of appropriate social behavior and relationships. What late-twentieth-century commentators have characterized as the multivalent character and personalized receptivity of images may have been at the heart of the professional and societal distrust of images—thereby an (over)emphasis on logocentrism in the Europe and North America, especially within the academic disciplines—since the Enlightenment (1600–1800).

Any examination of sex and gender in art, then, is predicated upon two universal notions: first, that the visual is primary historical evidence equitable to written documentation; and second, that the traditionally textually illiterate masses read images. Art is a critical vehicle for the formation, transformation, and dispersal of cultural and societal histories and their analyses. Images evoke authority and reality in the process elsewhere termed visual analogy. Images are internalized and identified as one's own by viewers and thereby have profound effects on individual members of a community. Art is critical to the process of socialization by which one enters into the societal and cultural order and signifies oneself as being male or female within that societal construct. Individual notions of gender, then, are affected by societal expectations premised on cultural definitions and redefinitions. Thus, even in art and for artists, sex is determined biologically, whereas gender is societal and cultural.

The contemporary twenty-first-century situation is made more complex by the pluralism of cultural constructions, societal expectations, religious attitudes, and the expanding power of images through technology and globalization. The historical reality is even more damaging in that many works of art—representative, perhaps, of countercultural or alternate religious attitudes—have been destroyed by war and political conflict. Misogyny and patriarchy, as understood in Europe and North America, have played a crucial role in the loss of art, especially images related to the power or authority of women and other marginalized groups. The permanent loss of art—either through the activity of religious iconoclasm or cultural war, or the passivity of natural disasters such as earthquakes or tsunami—account for an irretrievable diminution of both images of marginalized groups, such as women, and of countercultural attitudes. History may be written by the winners; however, cultural interpretations of societal propriety and excellence are clearly inscribed in art. For many contemporary feminist interpreters, the patriarchal basis of European and North American culture has resulted in the elimination, if not simple diminution, of any visual images of marginalized genders in motifs of power and authority.

Artistic images render visible, tangible, and thereby mimicable, societal perceptions of appropriate and inappropriate behavior for both men and women. The recognition that images are gendered—that is, projecting the proper attitudes, gestures, postures, and dress for what is culturally identified as masculine, feminine, androgynous, hermaphroditic, or homosexual—and that the prevalence of gendering through images is formative as well as reflective of cultural attitudes make it impossible to regard images simply as benign expressions or neutral objects. Prior to the scholarly changes in the late 1960s initiated by recognizing the marginalized, analyses and presentations of the power of images have been premised upon the predominant male-oriented hierarchical structure of artistic creativity, knowledge, and scholarship. Those critical studies of images of the marginalized—whether racial, ethnic, or sexual—did not exist prior to the early 1970s.

Earlier examinations of the human body and its meaning in art emphasized descriptions of works in the canon of European and North American art to the neglect, if not negation, of critical analyses of the body with all its racial, ethnic, sexual, cultural, or gendered variations. Critical to both a fair analysis of these earlier texts and of directions for future scholarship is the question of whether or not this interest or preoccupation with the identifying of sex and gender in and through art is a universal human concern or simply a European and North American preoccupation. For example, in most languages outside of English, there is minimal to no linguistic distinction between sex and gender; in addition, there is culturally no distinction between art, life, and religion let alone the modern concepts of sex and gender. However, feminist scholars since the late 1950s, affirmed by the landmark ruling of Judge Ruth Bader Ginzburg (b. 1933) on gender discrimination, have sought to examine the European and North American societal and cultural history of women through gendered lenses.

MODES OF ANALYSES OF SEX AND GENDER IN EUROPEAN AND NORTH AMERICAN ART

Typically, studies of sex and gender in the visual arts have taken one of two fundamental approaches in analyzing and interpreting images: iconographic or iconological. Iconography, or the reading of the signs and symbols, or iconology, the cultural history of the evolution of an image, can be incorporated within either a thematic or chronological frame. Central to both modes of analysis is a series of questions that delineate the communicative nature of art, which is both reflective and formative upon individuals and societies. For example, inquiry into the rationale and identification of the artist led to considerations of the process of artistic creativity and the nature of the aesthetic experience.

Further, the historical reality as to who was permitted to train as an artist was equally dependent upon sex and gender as upon artistic ability. For example, in Europe, even into the seventeenth century, only those women who were the wives or daughters of artists were able to enter into the studio as apprentices. The role of the patron and the collector in both the commissioning and the cultural valuation of art is transformed through history as the realms of gender, race, class, and economics evolve. So, for example, during those periods when women experienced political and economic power, that power was expressed through the subject matter in the art they created, commissioned, or collected. The cultural receptivity to works of art—the how and the why by which individual works are valued, and their influence on a society or a community—is related to the function of art as well as to artistic merit. Additional considerations would include the variations in cultural meaning when art shifts its center from the ecclesiastical or public domains to the domestic sphere as both media and motif are transformed accordingly.

The following examples of studies in sex and gender in European and North American art—first through thematic motifs and second by chronology—provide the methodological skeletons upon which more detailed interpretations and analyses can be structured. The thematic motif can be developed through a variety of patterns, such as the iconography of a specific event such as childbirth or an individual such as a specific monarch or general, whereas the chronological mode can be concentrated within one specific historical period or artistic style, such as the Renaissance (1350–1600), or survey the centuries. The crucial question, however, is whether or not the contemporary consideration of sex and gender was a distinct or discrete element in the creative design, aesthetic appreciation, and cultural evaluation of works of art throughout human history. For example, in his magisterial study, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, art historian Kenneth Clark (1990) distinguished the physical and symbolic differences between representations of both the naked from the nude and of men from women without direct referencing to sex and gender as overt categories. Rather, Clark's investigation was dependent upon the interdependence of art, culture, life, philosophy, and religion that created an identifiable cultural milieu that either embraced or decried the idea of the nude. His mode of analysis was a journey through a series of motifs that ranged from ideal individuals, that is, Apollo and Venus, to the embodiments of emotions, that is, energy, pathos, and ecstasy.

EXAMPLES OF MOTIFS OF SEX AND GENDER IN EUROPEAN AND NORTH AMERICAN ART

The Power and Authority of the Male Figure

Late twentieth-century feminist scholars have asserted that the male figure was normative in the Europe and North America for the cultural definition of power and authority. Thereby, a brief comparison between a male figure and a female figure can serve as one interpretive mode in the consideration of sex and gender in art. Referencing the High Renaissance sculpture of David by Michelangelo (1475–1564) as a fine example of the visualization of the classical principles of harmony and order through the male figure, the handsomeness of this masculine form becomes quickened by muscular tensions, especially in David's arms, legs, and torso, and the intimations of respiration in his diaphragm. This sculpted rendition of male energy and movement can be read as expressive of ideal form, kingship and guardianship, and the prevalent social and cultural order. A figure of extraordinary vitality, David visually attests to the so-called European principle of the authority of the male figure. Muscular structure, movement (whether internal or external), and the ability to connote emotion through facial expression, gesture, or pose, are among the sculptor's tools in transmitting both the idea and ideal of male authority.

By contrast, Donatello's (1386–1466) early Renaissance sculpture of Judith and Holofernes proffers an image of the female hero who, like David, signified democracy and the defense of the city to contemporary Florentines. The initial contrast between the nearly nude Holofernes and the seemingly overdressed Judith can be read as the Christian dialectic of vice and virtue or the Renaissance values of male potency and female humility. Clearly, the two bodies display overt signs of distinguishing the man (broad shoulders, powerful musculature) from woman (peaking breasts, smaller frame). This Judith is not the visualization of any canon of feminine beauty but, rather, a depiction of societal structures and of the female body more as symbol than organic composition. She is carefully positioned astride her drunken victim who rests between her legs.

Any sexual connotations to this composition of a man and a woman must be surrendered to the larger reading of her entire body posture—bent knees, arching body, upraised right arm, and lowered left arm as her hand clasps Holofernes's tendrils while a rider holds the reins. The energy and power signified in the flowing swirls of Judith's garments move in opposition to the arch of her body in the exact fashion that a rider's costume responds to the dynamism propelled by the horse's gait. Donatello's Judith, then, mirrors the well-established constructs of authority, power, and sovereignty of the ruler or general who astride his horse commands his army into battle. Thereby, this female hero garners her identity by her masculine posture, gestures, and symbols of power.

Maternity as the Power and Authority of the Female Figure

The universal category of maternity connotes the fertilization, conception, and gestation of a child in the female body and the commensurate acts of childbirth, lactation, and nurture to maturity. Whereas a man can act in a maternal fashion by nurturing, emotionally supporting, and gently guiding his child, partner, or friend, biology denies him the female power and authority of pregnancy and motherhood. A survey of artistic images of maternity transcends historical, cultural, and geographic boundaries, revealing its universality through pregnancy, giving birth, lactation, and scenes with a mother and her child.

Sex as biological thereby trumps gender; however, in so doing it confirms that artistic depictions of maternity simultaneously denote more than the iconographic convention of mother and child as found in the Egyptian images of Isis with Horus, medieval renderings of the Madonna and Child, or Mary Cassatt's (1824–1926) nineteenth-century variations of mothers cuddling, nursing, bathing, dressing, or educating their children. Rather, the limitless importance of female fertility, whether culturally or religiously aligned with that of the Earth, and its achievement in the survival of the species is ahistorical and generic. Thus, the reality behind Courbet's title, L'Origine du Monde (The Origin of the World), becomes apparent.

SURVEY OF EUROPEAN AND NORTH AMERICAN IMAGES OF SEX AND GENDER

This preliminary survey proffers a series of investigative principles for a chronological model to examine sex and gender in the visual arts. For purposes of clarity this present outline will emphasize the evolution of the female figure in European and North American art. Having their artistic (and religious) origins in fertility figures, women's images appeared as the fulfillment of socially recognized and sanctioned life stages: virgin, wife, mother, and widow. Further, women were depicted in relation to the major elements of the life cycle: birth, puberty, marriage, pregnancy, maternity, and death. Predominately, the female has been depicted as passive—that is, restricted to the domestic setting and engaged in the so-called feminine activities, such as needlework or cooking; by contrast, the male figure was actively engaged outside the realm of hearth and home. The primary visual distinction, then, will be found in the physicality of the male versus the female body, and the secondary visual difference will be in the activities such as familial nurture versus military leadership. These differences will be highlighted through the artistic presentations of the human body and its commensurate gestures, postures, dress, and companion signs and symbols.

Classical art characterizes the female form as a source of maturity, stability, and domesticity. Typically, the female figure was depicted as fully clothed with a thickened waist, small breasts, and wide hips. Those physical characteristics that twenty-first-century viewers would identify as expressive of female sexuality—a narrow waist and voluptuous breasts and hips—were not understood as sites of eros or femininity in the classical world. Evolving from the preclassical models, such as the famed Venus of Willendorf (c. 24,000–22,000 bce) that emphasized the presentation of the female abdomen, genitalia, and thighs as sites of fertility and female energy, classical Greek or Roman presentations of women favored the strength and authority exerted by the almost androgynous—to twenty-first-century viewers—presentations of goddesses such as Hera or Athena and empresses such as Julia or Octavia. Images of even the slender Aphrodite emphasize her abdomen and thighs more than her breasts and waist.

With the establishment of Christianity, depictions of the human body were transformed from the beauty and idealism favored by the classical artists to more symbolic representations in which the reality of the body, regardless of its sexual identification, was suppressed for an emphasis on the theological values of the narrative. Often characterized as asexual stick-like figures, the human body was the locus for symbolic meanings and interpretations, not for sexuality. Therefore, the flattened female body devoid of the classical artistic precepts of mass and volume was a conveyor of the appropriate or inappropriate roles of women in the early Christian world, that is, as humble, chaste, and obedient, as opposed to the seductive charms of Eve and her female descendants. Modes of dress—ranging from the androgynous Greek chit?n worn by both men and women, to the eventual Hellenistic interest in the skillful mastery of pleated and flowing drapery—disguised rather than emphasized the sex of the human body. Similarly, the hair—as veiled, uncovered and flowing, or elegantly coiffed—signified the sex and social status of the female figure.

Whereas the societal reality of women as wives, daughters, and courtesans was part of the classical Mediterranean world, it was the early Christian world, especially in the fourth century, that clearly represented the dichotomy of woman as virgin or whore, that is, the good Christian woman following the model of the Virgin Mary or the temptress who was Eve. Church leaders, following the lead of Jerome (347–420), defined appropriate modes of dress even unto hairstyles, cosmetics, and jewelry for the proper Christian woman. The visual distinction here was premised upon the female body as a site of shame or humility that was the locus of wanton sexuality or chaste motherhood.

The transition into the medieval modes of rendering the human body manifested the social and cultural shifts initiated in the fourth century and early Christian art toward a theocentric universe in which God was the origin, locus, and ultimate goal of all creation. The human was merely, as characterized by Augustine (354–430), a player with a clearly defined role in a larger drama of Christian history. Women continued to be interpreted culturally and artistically within the dialectic of the virgin and the whore, and as such, their bodies were artistically rendered as either asexual (almost unto androgyny) or sexually likened to a beast, usually the snake. So, for example, consider the disembodied characteristics of the Madonna as she was carved into cathedral capitols and tympani as opposed to the reptilian characterizations of Eve, as found in the famous image by French sculptor Gislebertus (active 1125–1135) at Autun Cathedral.

As the Middle Ages (476–1350) expanded both in chronological time and geographic regions, a commensurate series of stylistic shifts occurred in the rendering of the human body. As if an accompaniment of the medieval interest in the theology of God's transcendence, cathedral architecture evolved with an emphasis on height—a reaching to the heavens, if you will—and was paralleled in the elongation and thereby slenderizing of the earlier Romanesque figurations of matronly women into the Gothic elegance of shaped postures, which emphasized a more feminine line and softness to the female body. Elongated torsos gently directed the viewer's eye to the swell of the female belly as a sign of fecundity, female sexuality, and male authority. Diminished breasts were bound or hidden by the thick layers of clothing that featured a high waist, tightly fitted sleeves, and voluminous, pleated skirts.

The cultural and social revolution identified as the Renaissance brought new energy and principles of the human body into art. As the transfer into an anthropomorphic, or human-centered, world, the Renaissance has been characterized as being open 360 degrees to all attitudes, ideas, and teachings of the classical world and the more modern sciences, including Aristotelian philosophy, mathematics, and medicine. The commensurate interest in the human led to a retrieval of the classical principles of the body as the site of beauty, balance, and harmony and to the artistic redefining of the body according to the precepts of modern medical knowledge, especially anatomical studies. As a result the female body was refashioned within the purview of the classical nude but with a clear touch of the erotic. Nonetheless, it remained rare to find depictions of women in positions of power and authority, as the fundamental image of woman remained as imperfectly male.

Baroque art, whether created by northern European artists who followed the teachings of the Reformers or southern European artists who stood steadfast with Rome, expanded the dichotomy of the imagery of woman as either alluring temptress or asexual saint. The discovery and refinement of the moveable type printing press allowed for the mass production of prints and engravings, making these modes of artistic imagery easily and financially accessible. The northern European development of the so-called moralizing prints called special attention to the feminine images of vices and virtues. Feminine virtue was characterized by asexual, almost disembodied, presentations of the female figure, with minimal breasts, thickened waists, and other physical attributes almost indistinguishable from what twenty-first-century viewers would categorize as masculine. These women were heavily draped from head to foot and identified by their performance of good deeds or acts of female obedience. Alternatively, feminine vices were orchestrated by either partially or totally naked women whose large, sagging breasts were paralleled by visual emphases on their genitalia as they pursued their often unnatural activities, such as decapitating drunken or sleeping men, riding broomsticks in the sky, or consorting with pigs, horses, or other wild beasts. Southern European artists attempted to expand their iconography of saintly Christian women by reemphasizing the singularity of Mary's virginity and obedience through the visual evolution of new motifs, such as the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of the Virgin.

As the cultural world turned toward the eighteenth-century evolution to the rococo (1700–1760) and later the Enlightenment, depictions of women in the now dominant modes of secular art were highlighted by a softening of the female form and a sentimentalizing of attitudes toward women, especially as mothers and muses. Artists now rendered delicate feminine forms, either in states of frothy dress or partial undress, characterized by rosy skin tones, pale blond hair coiffed with ringlets and gentle curls, and light, airy garments that highlighted the softened curves of the female form from gently peaking breasts to wispy waists. The reintroduction of the stronger, more stable, matronly forms presaged the expanding social and cultural roles of women during the French and American revolutions.

The nineteenth century was a time of multiple artistic and social revolutions, prophesying the pluralism of the modern art styles of the twentieth century. The rapid succession of art styles—from romanticism to impressionism or from realism to symbolism and abstraction—signified both the speed of steam that powered the industrial revolution and the rapid expansion of economic, political, and religious ideas throughout the expanding geographic reach of the Europe and North America. Such a diversity of artistic styles resulted in a commensurate variety of interpretations of the female figure ranging from the idealized beauty of the romantics to the stunners of the pre-Raphaelites, to the sexuality of the symbolists. Thereby, the female form could be interpreted as a conveyor of societal attitudes and mores more than as a presentation of the individuality of women.

Multiple attitudes toward female beauty, thereby to the visualizing of sex and gender, paralleled the stylistic variations. Without doubt, the artistic imaging of women was influenced by the invention and development of photography, especially as it moved from a technical recording of events or individual portraiture to a recognized art form in the early twentieth century. Almost simultaneous with the advent of photography as it moved from portraiture of women vis-à-vis traditional high-art portraits to artistic interpretations of the female form in the hands of such distinguished photographers as Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) to Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) was a transformation in the understanding of the female body in terms of health and medicine. So the wispy waists and overflowing bosom and hips manifested by the whalebone corset gave way first to the American girl and bloomer girl of the late nineteenth century; then to the slender, waif-like flappers of the 1920s emphasized in the designs of Coco Chanel (1883–1971); then to the stability and strength of Rosie the Riveter during World War II (1939–1945); and later to the voluptuous feminine forms of the 1950s highlighted by both the clothes of Christian Dior (1905–1957) and the celebrity of movie stars such as Jane Russell (b. 1921) and Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962).

Modern art, it is often argued, is about the shock of the new as characterized by art critic Robert Hughes (b. 1938). One of the fundamental elements of that shock of the new has been the multiple configurations and refigurations of the human body in terms of abstraction and postmodernism. Those bodily elements, most often large or engorged breasts and highlighted female genitalia, were abstracted from the realistic portrayals of the female body and came to characterize both the sex and gender of woman in twentieth-century art, from the sculptures of Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) to the canvases of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Willem De Kooning (1904–1997). The latter half of the twentieth century was characterized by the raised voices of the marginalized, especially feminist scholars, authors, and artists, who called for the recognition of the female presence in the arts as artist, muse, and subject.

DIRECTIONS FOR THE FUTURE STUDY OF SEX AND GENDER IN ART

Gendered images are more than a mode of sexual identification or socialization into a community; they are a symbolic communication through gestures, postures, dress, attributes, and activities of the common experiences of being human. A comparative or cross-cultural study of sex and gender in art, such as the motif of divine messengers or warriors, reveals the gendered interpretations of being male and female in any given cultural or historical epoch and serves to sharpen perceptions of the historicizing of sex and gender. This is especially significant for European and North American viewers who learn that the scholarly presuppositions in the categorizations and structures of their cultures are not necessarily valid universally or, perhaps, that traditional their concepts of both sex and gender, and the power of images, must be reconsidered.

The diversity of characteristics and roles in which men and women are represented in non-European and non-North American art points to the racial, ethnic, and nutritional diversity of both globalization and the marginalized that is otherwise lost to the art of elite monotheistic and patriarchal cultures of Europe and North America. This is not to propose that non-European and non-North American cultures are not patriarchal in religious, cultural, or social structures but, rather, proposes that sex and gender may be imaged and experienced differently. The potential exploration of these differences opens new avenues for investigation and revised formulations for the iconology of sex and gender in art within the expanding parameters of globalization.

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                                 Diane Apostolos-Cappadona