Art history professor Norma Broude
Art history professor Mary Garrard
Reproduced from Feminism and Art
History: Questioning the Litany and
used with permission of the authors.
Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and
the Elders, 1610. Unlike numerous
paintings depicting this Old Testament
parable in a more erotic fashion,
Gentileschi's Susanna, a potential rape
victim, "conveys through her awkward
pose and her nudity the full range of
feelings of anxiety, fear and shame
felt by a victimized woman faced w
ith a choice between rape and slanderous
public announcement." An expert on
Artemisia Gentileschi's art, Mary
Garrard joined Gloria Steinem to lead
a protest campaign against Artemisia,
a recent French film that wrongly
depicted the artist's rape as a romantic
experience.
Reproduced from The Expanding Discourse:
Feminism and Art History and used with permission of the authors.
Edgar Degas, Spartan Girls Challenging
Boys, ca. 1860/80. This painting moved
Norma Broude to reexamine Degas's
alleged misogyny. "Once interpreted as
an expression of a competitive and
unhealthy hostility between the sexes,"
she interprets the scene as "a natural confrontation among
equals" and a
portrayal of Spartan courtship rites.
Rewriting art herstory
By MIKHAILINA KARINA
One afternoon in 1973, Norma Broude delivered a lecture on the art of Edgar Degas to her students at Columbia University. As she rode the bus home, she kept thinking about the painting, Spartan Girls Challenging Boys, and how her lecture was based on what generations of art historians had written about Degas's hatred of women. Suddenly, Broude felt a lightbulb go over her head. "I realized that what I was taught to say was wrong," she says. "No, it's not what it's all about!" Instead, influenced by the emerging French feminism of the time, Degas had depicted a natural contest among equals.
In the early 1970s, when the women's movement in the United States was gaining momentum, Broude was not the only art historian trying to reexamine and redefine the role of women in the arts. When they met in 1974, Mary Garrard was one of the founders and second president of the Women's Caucus for the Arts, an offshoot of the College Art Association; Broude was the organizations's first affirmative action officer.
This Friday in New York City, the College Art Association Committee on Women will honor AU art history professors Broude and Garrard with a special recognition award for "pioneering feminist scholarship" and their early awareness of "the explosive implications of feminism for art history."
Feminism has raised "fundamental questions for art history as a humanistic discipline, questions that are now affecting its functions at all levels and that may ultimately lead to its redefinition," wrote Broude and Garrard in the introduction to their popular anthology of essays Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (Harper & Row, 1982). "In its broadest terms, we would define the impact of feminism on art history as an adjustment of historical perspective."
What's wrong with the old historical perspective? According to Broude and Garrard, up until the 1970s, art history has been presented through a prism of male artists and scholars whose world view has been, understandably, influenced by their gender and social position. However, Broude and Garrard argue, "this new historical vision has permitted for the first time a clear vision of the controlling part that sexual attitudes and assumptions have played both in the creation and naming of 'Art' and in the writing of art history.
"We can see how persistently and insidiously low esteem for women has figured in the formation of value judgements, consigning to perpetual second-class status all aspects of art associated with feminity: the crafts and the so-called minor arts, historical styles such as maniera or the Rococo, and even art itself in the larger social order," they write in Feminism and Art History.
Furthermore, studying art history through a feminist perspective places a greater emphasis on the artist's intent and the sociopolitical context. Art historians can now question whether art is a reliable reflection of male and female roles and relationships, or whether the images represent the dream worlds or vested interests of male artists and their benefactors.
For example, the lovely eighteenth-century French pastel paintings of happy mothers and industrious housewives is one instance of the role played by artists in promoting the Enlightenment campaign for parental responsibility and conjugal love. "It was an ideal that depended openly upon educating women from childhood on to be docile, submissive, and positively to want to organize their lives around the needs of their husbands and children-to educate women, in other words, to accept their 'nature,' as this was defined for them by the philosophers, educators, writers, and artists of the period," Broude and Garrard wrote.
Over the years, Feminism and Art History and the 1992 sequel The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, have become standard texts in art history and women's studies courses. However, Broude and Garrard insist that although they were the first to compile scholarly works into two volumes, they were not the first to raise feminist issues. "We created a continuous perspective," says Garrard. "I feel very happy to have played a catalytic role." They also emphasize the books' collaborative nature--they call it a quilting bee--both between themselves and with nearly 40 other art historians.
Looking back on almost three decades of feminist scholarship, they characterize the 1970s as a period of "explosion of feminism as a growth industry" with numerous women's galleries and collaboratives springing up around the country. Artists exposed objectification of the female body and women's roles in society, Broude adds.
Garrard says the 1980s was a period of backlash against feminism and "drying up" for women's galleries and decreasing professional opportunities. In the last decade, Broude says, women have had more opportunities, but the kind of work that gets exposure and recognition in galleries is not what she would call politically aware feminist art as it was in the 1970s.
Nevertheless, artists are now capitalizing on other issues originally raised by feminists: gendering, objectification, and homosexuality are being explored by artists of color and men. Broude says '90s art frequently restates '70s positions, which are open to interpretation and really muddy the waters. Thus, you can either see it as exposure of objectification, or, "if you happen to like looking at objectification of women, there is nothing in these images that will stop you from enjoying that."
A second generation of art history students is now reading Broude's and Garrard's works. Meanwhile, Garrard is about to publish a second book on Artemisia Gentileschi, an Italian Baroque artist. Broude is working on a book about Degas and gender, debunking myths calling him a misogynist. Broude is also the author of Impressionism: a Feminist Reading -The Gendering of Art, Science and Nature in the Nineteenth Century.
In addition to the two anthologies, Garrard and Broude also coedited The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (Harry N. Abrams, 1994).
