Feminist art history-A literature review
This paper aims at exploring the works of some famous feminist art historians such as Linda Nochlin, Norma Broude, Griselda Pollock, and Rozsika Parker, who focused their literature on the issue of women and art history from the 19th century through the 20th century.
Broude states that female feminist art history students are of the belief that they have to rewrite art (Broude & Garrard 1982, 183). However, Broude and Garrard challenges this assumption by inquiring the “what and how” female feminist art history students would go about achieving the task of rewriting art, and what led to this notion of rewriting the history of art and what they intend to achieve by rewriting the history of art (Broude & Garrard 1982, 183). The notion of rewriting art history can be obtained from the accounts of Pollock and Parker that there have been variance in the affiliation and which are a product of social structures (Pollock & Parker 2013, 3). Thus in order to expose these differences art history has to be revamped.
Feminist inquiry in art history began in 1971 with Linda Nochlin’s article “why have there been no great women artists” (Peterson & Mathew 1987, 325). To answer her question she stresses that, “art is not a free autonomous activity of a super endowed individual influenced by previous arts or social factors, but rather art is an integral element of structure and is determined by specific social institutions such as arts academics, patrons, patriarchal culture or the myth of the divine creator” (Peterson & Matthew 1987,325), which means that art is not for everyone who feel they are talented enough to hold a manipulate brush strokes. However...
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.... London: Chatto & Windus in collaboration with Channel Four Television Co., 1987.
Nochlin, Linda. Women, art, and power: and other essays. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
Parker, Rozsika, and Griselda Pollock. Old mistresses women, art and ideology. New ed. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013.
Peterson. G, Thalia, and ptricia Mathew .T. "Feminist Critique of Art History." Art Bulletin 69 (1987): 326-357.
Pollock, Griselda. Vision and difference: femininity, feminism, and histories of art. London: Routledge, 1988.
Raven, Arlene. Crossing over: feminism and art of social concern. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988.
Reckitt, Helena. Art and feminism. London: Phaidon, 2001.
Robinson, Hilary. Visibly female: feminism and art: an anthology. New York: Universe Books, 1988.
Robinson, Hilary. Feminism-art-theory: an anthology, 1968-2000. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.
In their works, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin show that freedom was not universal in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The three works, "The Yellow Wallpaper," "At the 'Cadian Ball," and "The Storm" expose the oppression of women by society. This works also illustrate that those women who were passive in the face of this oppression risk losing not only their identity, but their sanity as well.
Haney-Peritz, Janice. "Monumental feminism and literature's ancestral house: Another look at The Yellow Wallpaper". Women's Studies. 12:2 (1986): 113-128.
Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society 3rd ed. (NY: Thames & Hudson world of art, 2002), 153-160.
The formal education of women artists in the United States has taken quite a long journey. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the workings of a recognized education for these women finally appeared. Two of the most famous and elite schools of art that accepted, and still accept, women pupils are the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (the PAFA).
Haney-Peritz, Janice. "Monumental Feminism and Literature 's Ancestral House: Another Look At 'The Yellow Wallpaper '." Women 's Studies 12.2 (1986): 113. Academic Search Complete. Web. 24 Nov. 2014.
Haney-Peritz, Janice. “Monumental Feminism and Literature’s Ancestral House: Another Look at ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.” Women’s Studies. 12.2 (1986)113-128. EBSCOHost. Web. 10 Mar. 2011.
Feminism and political issues have always been centered on in the art world and artists like to take these ideas and stretch them beyond their true meanings. Female artists such as Hannah Höch, who thrived during the Dada movement in the 1920s in Germany and Barbara Kruger who was most successful during the 1980s to 1990s in the United States, both take these issues and present them in a way that forces the public to think about what they truly mean. Many of Kruger’s works close in on issues such as the female identity and in relation to politics she focuses on consumerism and power. Höch, like Kruger, also focuses on female identity but from the 1920s when feminism was a fairly new concept and like Kruger focuses on politics but focuses more on the issues of her time such as World War I. With the technique of photomontage, these two artists take outside images and put them together in a way that displays their true views on feminism and politics even though both are from different times and parts of the world.
...witty comical banter helps spread the understanding of the underlying themes behind the humor. It makes it easier for the artists to connect with the audience about feminism without an aggressive and hostile approach to the work. I believe viewers are more likely to communicate upon the works of the Guerrilla Girls with one another in society when they take on a more comedic approach. This investigation has examined the Guerrilla Girls through direct connection to the inequalities of compliance of power over women in the art world. Several themes were highlighted within society that reinstated these cultural norms of gender and sex within the institutions of art. With a variety of forms used by the Guerrilla Girls to redefine women's identity in history they were able to break down such barriers that stood in the way which denied the prosperity of female artists.
The article Artists Mythologies and Media Genius, Madness and Art History (1980) by Griselda Pollock is a forty page essay where Pollock (1980), argues and explains her views on the crucial question, "how art history works" (Pollock, 1980, p.57). She emphasizes that there should be changes to the practice of art history and uses Van Gogh as a major example in her study. Her thesis is to prove that the meaning behind artworks should not be restricted only to the artist who creates it, but also to realize what kind of economical, financial, social situation the artist may have been in to influence the subject that is used. (Pollock, 1980, pg. 57) She explains her views through this thesis and further develops this idea by engaging in scholarly debates with art historians and researcher, and objecting to how they claim there is a general state of how art is read. She structures her paragraphs in ways that allows her to present different kinds of evidences from a variety sources while using a formal yet persuasive tone of voice to get her point across to the reader.
Many modernist art movement moved away from traditional medium, topic and form in attempt to change the world through their art, including the influential feminist art movement who, through the efforts of individuals such as Judy Chicago and groups like the controversial guerilla girls, effectively altered the world and the way in which woman are viewed. The successfulness of the feminist art movement had on changing the world is reliant on individual opinion
Haney-Peritz, Janice. "Monumental Feminism and Literature's Ancestral House: Another Look at 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'" Women's Studies 12:2 (1986): 113-128.
In her essay, entitled “Women’s History,” American historian Joan W. Scott wrote, “it need hardly be said that feminists’ attempts to expose ‘male biases’ or ‘masculine ideology’ embedded in historical writing have often met with ridicule or rebuttal of as expressions of ‘ideology.’” Scott’s essay discusses the efforts of female historians to both integrate themselves into the history disciples and their struggle to add and assimilate female perspectives, influences, and undertakings into the overall story of history. She also talks about the obstacles and potentially biased criticism that female historians have received and faced upon establishing themselves as accredited members of the historical academic community. One of these historians is Natalie
This is a misconception because every great artist needs to be nurtured and trained. The fact that we don’t have a great Eskimo artist, as Nochlin points out, is not because there is no talent in the Eskimos, but because talent has not been cultivated. When institutions discriminated on the basis of sex, very talented women were excluded from the celebrated art schools. As such, to answer the question “why have there been no great women artists?” the blame lies squarely with societal institutions and the inequities that they promoted. Women artists were very talented but were not given the necessary support and encouragement that they needed in order to
Haney-Peritz, Janice. "Monumental Feminism and Literature's Ancestral House: Another Look at 'The Yellow Wallpaper'" Women's Studies. 12 (1986): 113-128.
Marder, Herbert. Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968.