TSS-Challenge Update

There have been several great posts related to my Art History Challenge this week, and I just had to share them with y'all! 

• Colette at A Buckeye Girl Reads read two books about women artists and watched a documentary about Georgia O'Keeffe!  Although she didn't like either of the books or the documentary very much, she did find two new artists she liked:  Lilian Martin Spencer and Rolanda Sharples.
• M from Alberti's Window read Vasari's Lives (officially titled Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects), all about the wacky artists he knew while living in Renaissance Italy.  M wrote a great post about the women artists Vasari mentioned, and a review of the book itself.

I also decided to join yet another challenge, the Take Another Chance Challenge created & hosted by Jenners at Find Your Next Book Here.  Even though I didn't finish it, I enjoyed the Take a Chance Challenge so much I can't resist adding this one to my 2010 challenges.  I'm going to go for the Gambling it All Level and try to complete all 12 challenges--because that's how I roll.

I think I'm about tapped out in the challenge department at the moment, however, so I don't expect to be signing up for any more for a few months--no matter how tempting. ;)

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Creepy Art

The Crying Spider by Odilon Redon

In honor of Hallowe'en, M from Alberti's Window has a great post up on her blog about Goya and his creepy paintings.  Although I tend to avoid anything Hallowe'en-related like the plague, I thought it would be fun to take a page out of M's book and write about a few of my favorite creepy artists.

Odilon Redon was a French Symbolist who, like many 19th-century artists, took inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe and Goya.  He wanted his paintings and lithographs to appear mysterious so as to inspire the unconscious mind.  One of my favorite works by him is Parcifal, because if you look at the painting one way, it appears to be a man; but if you look at it another, it looks like a woman.  Why, you might ask?  Because Parcifal was considered to be androgynous and the Symbolists were all about that.  And also because he first wanted to make a druidess, but she didn't turn out well; so to salvage the plate he just decided to change her into a guy. Art!

Butterfly Catcher by Remedios Varo

Another one of my favoritest artists of all time is Remedios Varo, a Surrealist who was (also) very inspired by Goya and Bosch.  And also Redon, funnily enough.  Varo's work is very clever, with a wry sense of humor, and is really more fantastical than scary--unless you consider being a woman trapped in a male-dominated society scary, in which case, yes, her paintings can be pretty creepy.

Severed Heads, Géricault

Finally, I lurrrrv Théodore Géricault because he was morbid as heck.  It all started with The Raft of the Medusa, a painting based on a true-life event that Géricault researched out the wazoo--talking to survivors, building a model of the raft, and so on.  At one point, he decided he needed to sketch dead bodies so his depiction of the tragedy would be "accurate."  After that, he had random body parts lying around his studio all the time!  He even (according to legend) would collect heads freshly severed from the guillotine.  In the above painting, one head is real and one is fake--the creepy part is that the one that's been collected from the guillotine looks more alive than the fake one.  In his later years, he also enjoyed sketching portraits of the insane.  Gotta love a guy like that!



Do you have a favorite creepy or disturbing work of art?

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The Male Gaze

Caillebotte-Le Pont de l'Europe

I was reading a post at Alberti's Window the other day, and it made me think about The Male Gaze. 

The male gaze is one of those terms that art historians throw around a lot, but never really define.  It's used in both Freudian and feminist contexts and generally connotes the sexual objectification of women in various media, including print, fine art, and film.

Cassatt, In the Loge

Rarely mentioned in art history (or anywhere else) is that "the male gaze" is not a modern invention of feminism; it's an actual idea and practice that emerged in the nineteenth century.  Most women in the twenty-first century take their right to be able to go out in public and look at things for granted; but nineteenth-century women were supposed to keep their gazes down and shielded as a display of proper respect and modesty.  And under no circumstances were you ever supposed to look at a man who wasn't related to you in public.  You hussy, you!  The only places where women could let their gazes wander freely were at art exhibitions like the Salon (ironically enough), or at the Opera.

The reason for this was because the gaze was very sexualized in the visual-hungry culture of the nineteenth century.  A man claimed something as his own by looking at it, and that included women.  The power to see, to walk freely through a city like Paris and observe in cafes and on streets, was considered a purely male perogative.  That's why Caillebotte's paintings of Paris are considered so masculine, and why paintings from female artists like Cassatt and Morisot are mostly of other women in a private setting.  Cassatt wouldn't have been allowed to visit the cafes that Manet and Degas did, even if she had tried to do so (which she actually did).  A woman's gaze--especially if she was of a middle- or higher-class--was very restricted.

Manet, Olympia

If you were of a lower-class and lower morals, however, it was another matter entirely.  That was part of the reason why people assumed Manet's Olympia was the lowest class of prostitue:  she dares to meet the viewer's gaze.

This why art historians make such a big deal out the male gaze, and gazes in general--it was a historical idea that truly affected artists and how they chose to represent the world.  And, despite the fact that women no longer have to restrict their gaze to just the home, we still live with the legacy of The Gaze in movies, television, and print.

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