About UMW’s ARTH 460: Women and Western Art
Professor M. Och
du Pont 319
654-2035; moch at umw.edu
Art History 460: Seminar, Women and Western Art
Fall 2007
“It is a great marvel that a woman can do so much.” Albrecht Dürer, 1520
“Meanwhile the notion that our portrait may have been painted by a woman, is, let us confess, an attractive idea. Its poetry is literary rather than plastic, its very evident charms and its cleverly concealed weaknesses, its ensemble made up from a thousand subtle artifices, all seem to reveal the feminine spirit.” Charles Sterling, 1951
Course Description:
This course fulfills both the Race and Gender, and the Speaking-Intensive requirements. We will examine the many and varied roles women have played in the visual arts in Western traditions, as well as the literature written by and about these women.
Art history is currently in a second generation of feminist studies. The first generation of scholars (Linda Nochlin, Anne Sutherland Harris, among others whose major work dates to the 1960s and early 1970s) saw as their task the recovery of women artists. In some respects, their work may be compared to that of the archaeologist who uncovers from the earth evidence of a hidden, even unknown, culture or civilization. Indeed, these scholars literally dug deep into archives, sifting through centuries of dust to discover names, works, lives, academies, and workshops of women artists of the past. Much of their “digging” was also into the derogatory comments made by the artists’ (and their own) contemporaries about works of art and style, comments such as, “the work displays a sentimental femininity, a womanly grace that is strained and resolute,” or “one has only to look at the work of a painter like Judith Leyster to detect the weakness of the feminine hand.” In spite of resistance and hostility from within The Academy (the museums and universities with which these scholars were affiliated) as well as the public, these scholars succeeded in “discovering” something akin to what Christopher Columbus discovered, that is, a world apart from the world with which everyone was familiar.
The analogy to Columbus may be taken a step further. The New World of Women Artists was occupied, or so The Academy concluded, by an inferior people, a lesser people, a people in need of guidance and direction. The evaluation of women artists by a hostile Academy, and the seeming unexamined acceptance of these evaluations, became the focus of a second generation of feminist scholars and artists. These individuals (including Norma Broude, Mary Garrard, Griselda Pollock, Lisa Tickner, and myself) are questioning attitudes within The Academy that have fostered the erasure of women from the history of art. The focus of this work is often on the status of women in society — legal, religious, political, familial, philosophical, sexual. Such an approach, it is believed, leads to a better understanding and interpretation of women’s responsibilities and opportunities, or lack of these, within a particular society.
As we create and contribute to a third generation of feminist scholarship, our tasks in this class will be many and varied. We will review the literature of these two generations of feminist scholars, as well as the scholarly contexts within which they produced their writings. We will examine the work of women artists, the commissions of women patrons, and the responses of contemporary female and male audiences to these works. Such close examination of a select body of work will allow us to analyze major questions in the field, for example: Is there such a thing as “women’s art”? How are meanings created? How is meaning altered? How and why are meanings placed on feminine forms? In addition, we will look at the most contemporary issues to examine the role of feminist political art as an art critiquing and creating society.
