Speaking of women artists, Frida Kahlo would have been 100 today. This is a good day to do brief survey of some of my favorite women artists, few and far between as they are. I was thinking about this on July 4th, actually, as I was sitting on a stoop on the Lower East Side eating Gelato with Gretl and talking about Judy Chicago and The Dinner Party. The lack of documented women artists is one of the reasons many of us have such a hard time claiming our own work, which is an issue for me at moment too. Not being an art historian or an art critic, I don't have much that's pithy to say about the artists I've admired, and I don't know much about their lives, for the most part, but their work and their existence has paved the way for other women, including me, to do something we love. And it's instructive that the hardships women artists have to overcome are so different from the ones male artists face. Very often, one of the hardships for women is male artists and critics.
First, a little nod to Frida, on her centennial. The Tate Modern hosted an exhibit of Kahlo's work in 2005 and the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City is hosting one now. Kahlo painted far more "transgressive" images (female sexual organs, representations of less than perfect women's bodies) than Georgia O'Keefe's suggestive flowers (I used to own a poster of this particular work, back when I was feeling very aggressive about my feminism, but O'Keefe's not one of my favorite artists). Her self portraits are her best known works, easily recognizable from the fierce, Brooke Shields eyebrows (or unibrow, in Kahlo's case). I love Kahlo's colors, and the richness of her paintings, as well as their vernacular style. Like many other women artists, in Kahlo's case, she was directly overshadowed by the man in her life, Diego Rivera. I love that she had the courage to paint what she did, that she had the courage to paint at all in the time and place that she did.
Another painter I admire for her fierceness and courage (and talent) is Artemisia But that's something I admire about all the early modern women artists, and those who came before them. Gentileschi, whose birthday, oddly enough is two days later and 314 years earlier than Kahlo's: July 8th, 1593. Like Kahlo, she had a difficult life, surviving a rape and a trial which was a "blame the victim" fiasco. Her rapist, originally hired byher father to tutor her in painting, got (surprise!) a year in jail. No wonder she painted pictures like Judith beheading Holofernes, which makes even Caravaggio's realism look genteel in comparison. She gave her interpretations of the typical Biblical and mythological subjects of the day a decidedly female and protofeminist POV and spin.
Then there's Mary Cassatt, who no one thinks of as a rebel but who was, just by traveling abroad alone and daring to be a painter. That's most evident, I think, in her early paintings, before she started painting mothers and children. One of my favorites of hers is one you don't see often, called On a Balcony During a Carnival, with two women flirting with a man that has just a wonderful and unfettered sense of joie de vivre that has nothing domestic about it at all.
These are probably the three women just about everyone knows, along with Georgia O'Keefe and more contemporary artists like Louise Nevelson and Louise Bourgeois, and the ones I know of from my Bloomsbury fixation, Vanessa Bell and Dora Carrington. But there are hundreds more, most of them unsung, many more anonymous and lost to history, like the women who sewed the Bayeaux Tapestry (animated here for your viewing pleasure)
And this is where Judy Chicago comes in. There's always been a (thoroughly absurd and sexist) split between "fine" arts and "crafts," many of which are traditionally done by women: embroidery (see above), weaving, china painting, pottery, etc. We've all been socialized to see these as somehow inferior arts, in part because so many of them have to do with that lowly job, housekeeping, and we all know how valueless that is (except when it's not done). I was 19 when The Dinner Party was first displayed in 1979, just waking up to feminism and beginning to question the male-centric pablum I'd been fed in school. I remember the stink about it (Vulvae! in public! And not a phallus in sight.) which did make me wonder why it was okay to glorify schlongs in art but not those wet, messy, drippy, hidden organs I was endowed with. A radical notion then, and still relevant, even after Karen Finley's infamous yams and the NEA Four. That led to a lot of other questions on my part too, so The Dinner Party was a cornerstone in my feminist development. And I'm glad it's been permanently installed (enshrined?) at the Brooklyn Museum now, where I plan to go see it in person for the first time.
Gretl mentioned, while we were sitting on the stoop, that the women who actually made the runners and plates for The Dinner Party aren't credited either, which isn't entirely true. Chicago made sure that the exhibits all gave credit to the women who collaborated with her on it; it's only the current installation that doesn't do so (except on the website). And that in itself was a radical notion, that artists who needed other people's skills to bring their vision to life, should credit the people they work with. That's still a radical notion. Almost as radical as women making art.
Happy birthday, Frida. And thanks.
Comments