Feminist approaches to art history
Susanna at her Bath by Francesco Hayez
Dr Amy Mechowski
In this lecture we will explore the work of the 19th-century Italian artist Francesco Hayez – especially the role that paintings of the female nude played in his career and how his exploration of the subject culminated in Susanna at her Bath. This painting will be the focus of our case study to consider how feminist theories and critical texts have shaped the history of art since the 1970s as well as how society, culture, and different power structures affect the way we view works of art at various moments in time. Do women see or ‘look’ differently to men? How can we compare the way paintings were understood when they were created to how we understand them today in the context of a gendered ‘gaze’? And, finally, how did well-known stories such as ‘Susanna and the Elders’ enable artists to mobilise images of the female nude before dramatic changes took place in 19th-century French art, which changed the way we view ‘the nude’ forever?
 |
| Francesco Hayez, Susanna at her Bath, 1850. National Gallery, London |
 |
| Professor Nochlin enthralled students in her art history classes. |
Linda Nochlin-Weinberg (New York, 30 januari 1931 - 29 oktober 2017)
In 1971 verschijnt Nochlin's baanbrekende essay Why Have There Been No Great Woman Artists? in het tijdschrift Art News. De tekst wordt gezien als één van de grondvesten van de feministische kunstgeschiedenis. De Britse toonaangevende krant The Guardian noemt de tekst na verschijnen “Ondeugend, provocerend en iconoclastisch”.
Nochlin neemt in het essay de machtige instellingen van de kunstwereld onder de loep, met een focus op hoe zij een impact hebben op vrouwen. Geen enkel onderwerp gaat ze hierbij uit de weg: van het in vraag stellen van de historische beperking dat je als vrouw in de kunstwereld verwacht wordt om de rol van model of muze in te vullen tot het idee dat enkel mannen onder de noemer “genie” zouden kunnen vallen. Ook het nogal beperkte beeld van de vrouwelijke seksualiteit laat Nochlin niet onaangeroerd. Zowel institutionele beperkingen als sociale conventies neemt de auteur onder de loep. De kunstfilosofische vraag “Wat is kunst?” laat ze evenmin ongeroerd.
 |
| The Guerrilla Girls Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum?, 1989 © Tate Gallery |
In 1989, the Public Art Fund in New York commissioned the Guerrilla Girls, a collective of feminist artists who maintain their anonymity by wearing gorilla masks in public, to design a billboard. They visited The Met to compare the number of women artists represented in the modern art galleries with the number of naked female bodies featured in the artworks on display. They included the statistics in a poster that asked, "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?" The Public Art Fund ultimately rejected it as a billboard, citing reasons of lack of clarity, so the Guerrilla Girls found an alternate public venue for their design: New York City’s buses. The poster has achieved iconic status for its bold, eye-catching graphic design, which includes a reproduction of the female nude figure from French artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's painting Grande Odalisque (1814, in the collection of Musée du Louvre, Paris) donning a gorilla mask. It also made an impact with its message, which spoke to the lack of gender diversity at the Museum and the art world writ large in the 1980s. The Guerrilla Girls reissued the poster in 2005 and 2012, attesting to its continued resonance.
Susanna-Ausstellung im Wallraf-Richartz-Museum Köln
In the first exhibition ever devoted to the biblical figure of Susanna in art, the Wallraf addresses a narrative and pictorial tradition which could hardly be more topical against the backdrop of the MeToo movement. With SUSANNA- images of a Woman from the Middle Ages to Me Too, the Cologne Museum demonstrates that the abuse of power and sexual violence has been the subject of painting for centuries: the biblical story of the assault on Susanna by two judges has had a profound influence on art since the Middle Ages. This special exhibition illustrates this with superb works by masters such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Anthony van Dyck, Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet and Lovis Corinth, as well as remarkable pieces by contemporary female artists like Kathleen Gilje, Zoe Leonard and Heike Gallmeier. In a fascinating way SUSANNA traces the diverse interpretations of the biblical narrative, the stylistic preferences, the changing demand in the art market, as well as the rivalry and artistic discourse ignited by the subject of Susanna. The exhibition, which contains over ninety exhibits and includes loans from prestigious international museums and private collections, runs from 28 October 2022 until 26 February 2023 exclusively in Cologne.
Vergewaltigung durch Sehen: “Susanna” in Köln
