Yeonjoo Cho
In general, figurative painting is regarded as the oldest and the most historic medium throughout art history, from ancient wall painting in caves to contemporary art. However, the concept and context of figurative painting has not been uniform and it often has been changed according to the times. In particular, there were many conflicting opinions on figurative painting among feminist artists in 1970s when subversive and deconstructive art movement against Formalist Modernism were prevalent. While there were many feminist artists who rejected painting advisedly and pursed their feminism with a cross-conventional or an unconventional tool such as performance, video, craft, installation, there were others who asserted that figurative painting was the only appropriate style for feminist artists (Parker & Pollock, 1987: p.5). Though it is hard to deny that one of the most striking achievements of early feminist art was expanding the notion of art by exploring new materials, I want to point out that figurative painting also played a role as a tool that also fit into feminist strategies. Through this essay, I will introduce three different feminists’ ideas on figurative painting from 1970s to 1990s but also find out the answer on those questions: Why did feminist artists have different views on figurative painting? Notwithstanding controversy, how could figurative painting be an effective tool that delivered feminist ideas?
To answer those questions, first of all, I need to explain how the early movement of feminist art began and what its strategies were. Feminist art emerged along with other pluralistic art movements against Modernism. In the 1960s, diverse artistic expressions of political and social criticism were prompted by widespread agitations such as the anti-war movement and the Civil Right Movement in the US, and the student protest in Europe (Tekniner, 2006: p. 42). Since late 1960s, lots of artists and art critics have criticized the claim of Formalist Modernist that art has to ensure its integrity by excluding content and focusing on its physical aesthetic. They argued that art is not a mere self-contained and self-critical activity like Greenberg claimed, and artists have to call attention to content again and manifest a social and political context of artworks (Tekniner, 2006: pp. 41-42).
In the same vein, feminist artists and critics put emphasis on the content of women’s experiences, the social contexts of art works made by women artists, and the political status of women artists. In particular, they pointed out the fact that women artists had been completely marginalised and omitted from the history of Western art. Linda Nochlin’s provocative essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ (1971) revealed that most of the so-called genius great artists revered by the canon of Western art are white men. Also, it exposed that the reason for the absence of great women artists was not their innate artistic talents but caused by a social system—such as education, institution, social network, occupation, class, and obviously, gender (Nochlin, 1971). Likewise, In UK, feminist art critics Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock criticised the relationship between female artists and social structure had been different from that of male artists (Parker & Pollock, 1981).
However, the artistic practices and strategies to resist this structural sexism in the art world formed diverse aspects; There was no singular, unitary strategy (Parker & Pollock, 1987: p. 80). This was because feminist art’s resistance against Modernism included a rejection of the idea of a uniform or universal reason which formed the foundation of Modernist Formalism’s aesthetic. In 1970s, what defined feminist art was a political and social consciousness of the different position of women in society, this aimed to resist all forms of women’s oppression, rather than pursing a uniform format (Robinson, 1987: pp. 1-2). As Robinson said by referring to Lisa Tickner’s argument: feminism is a politics, not a methodology (1986, Art Historian Conference in Brighton), “To say that you are a feminist artist, or that you produce feminist art, is to say that your approach to art making is informed by your feminist politics.” Thus, there were numerous types of experimentation and discussions about media to manifest feminist ideas. In specific, feminist artists had a different point of view on figurative painting: first, there were feminist artists who avoided or rejected painting itself while exploring and embracing alternative media; second, some artists produced art works by combining figurative painting and alternative materials and lastly, there were others who held on to figurative painting.
First of all, some feminist artists often used alternative materials that were related to the female gender to create their work, or other media previously little used by men such as performance and video and they tactically avoided traditional media—painting. They wanted to find a new possibility by escaping from the tradition of painting which was already loaded with meanings, both in terms of the connotation of imagery and the social context of the actual practice. In specific, they thought figurative painting was burdened with a male dominant art history: for instance, regardless of its purpose or intent, painting which depicts a figure of naked woman can easily be understood as a voyeuristic representation of the female nude (Parker & Pollock, 1987: p. 5). Although there was a movement for the revival of figurative painting as a tactical opposition to Formalist Modernism in the early 1970s, some feminist artists deliberately refused this tendency for this reason. Rather, their strategy was intervening in existing male dominant art history with new tools which were not considered as traditional media for high art.
Performance became a crucial medium for feminist artists such as Tina Keane who—although she practised as a painter—explained the reason why she became involved in performance in 1974 was it was easily accessible to women; it only needed few resources like props and something to say; it did not need extensive training in specific skills and prescribed materials. It was also more open and enabled an active relationship between artist and audience, which could allow a more collective and social experience (Parker & Pollock, 1987: pp. 39-40). Due to those reasons, performance art stood out as an alternative media for feminist artist in 1970s with a rapid development.
In addition, choosing daily objects as art materials was another remarkable feature among feminist artists. In particular, they used trivial objects, which directly manifested women’s experience and life—such as cosmetics, tampons, linens, and baby clothes. A highly publicized exhibition, entitled ‘Woman’s house’ in 1972 was one of the most important early achievements involving refurbishing a house in Los Angeles with such non-traditional objects. Also, Mary Kelly’s ‘Post-Partum Document’ is another example that utilized daily documentation related to her own experience of childcare as a tool. Through these new materials, the artists shared a goal to express women’s experience in a more direct way. The common strategy of both tendencies was shaping a new aesthetic sensibility that questioned the status quo by radically adopting new media and materials, rather than by sticking with painting.
On the other hand, there were another group of artists who chose nonconventional or cross-conventional materials and applied those to figurative painting since the early 1970s. In many cases, they started their early career as a painter and kept their status, accepting new media and different approaches as feminist artists. Although they tried to find out a new tactic to reveal the oppression of woman by embracing new materials, they did not disregard figurative painting or imagery itself. For instance, Miriam Schapiro, an American feminist artist, who organized the Woman’s House project along with Judy Chicago, incorporated elements of craft (that were often regarded as low art) with feminine imagery. She created her own method of combine painting, ‘femmage’ that applied traditional women’s techniques—sewing, piecing, hooking, cutting, appliqué to achieve her art. Though she made abstract paintings in 1950s, she embraced the decorative style as a positive quality and combined it with imagery to show her identity as a woman artist after a collaborative project with other women artists in 1972 (Peterson, 1997). This was an attempt to resist against an artistic hierarchy that had dismissed decorative craft as an inferior art, often with associations of femininity (Peterson, 1997: p. 22). However, at the same time, her ornate works also grounded with implication to tradition of figurative painting to create new hybrids which could not be marginalized in western fine art history. In Specific, Delacroix and me (Figure 1) manifests Schapiro’s intent to define her work in a tradition of figurative painting, regardless of the explicit decorative style with lots of patterns and flower embroideries. Also, I’m Dancin’ As Fast As I Can (Figure 2) shows certain representations of figures and a well-balanced combination of fragments of vibrant fabrics and colourful acrylic paints, which is based on her ‘femmage’ technique.
In the same manner, Faith Ringgold—who also participated Woman’s House project—used a similar strategy to reveal her female identity by combining canvas and quilting fabric and appropriating well-known figurative paintings considered as masterpieces in Western art history. In one of her well-known works, for instance, Picnic at Giverny (Figure 4), she deliberately attached a fabric border to acrylic painting in order to show her inclination to oppose to the hierarchy of genre between craft and fine art. However, by mentioning Giverny—which reminds us Monet—as a title and implying Manet’s (1862) Luncheon on the grass with a naked little Pablo Picasso, she showed her marginalised identity as a Black woman artist and alluded the mainstream of Western art tradition sarcastically and humorously (Graulich & Witzling; 1994). Both artists, Miriam Schapiro and Faith Ringglod kept a position as a painter with experimentations of a new artistic language by embracing political and social contexts of alternative materials related to craft.
Last but not least, there were feminist artists who tried to find the possibilities of the figurative tradition in the 1970s. They focused on potentials of figurative paintings that allowed them to deliver certain contents directly related to their own point of view and life experiences. Moreover, in order to disrupt the dominance of modernist painting and to subvert the belief that art must be pure and universal, they thought the use of figuration is needed (Carson & Pajaczkowska, 2000: p. 39). Unlike other feminist who explored new artistic practices with nonconventional media, they believed that a form of figurative painting that was sympathetic to women could be an effective tool to fight against dominant paintings which degrade or exploit the image of women. For example, American painter, Marjorie Kramer defined feminist painting as a painting which does not exploit but reaches out to people, especially women, with a communicated truth (Kramer, 1971). She claimed that “Feminism doesn’t share a quality with Abstract art and the images in a feminist painting have to be socially legible, that is, recognizable. Figurative” (Kramer, 1971). In addition, Monica Sjoo rejected a concept of abstract art and emphasized the necessity to return to figurative painting, claiming that “abstract art is a means of communication in our hands to sit around playing games with surface reality” (Sjoo, 1972: p. 4). These artists focused on figurative painting with various methods, such as representation of female body, manifestation of women’s experience, and implication of narratives.
Monica Sjoo, a precursor of feminist painting, showed her infamous painting, God giving birth (Figure 5)’ in 1973 exhibition ‘Womanpower’ at London’s Swiss Cottage Library. This painting explicitly depicted a non-white goddess giving birth with nudity to celebrate women’s creativity and potential power. And this figuration of goddess effectively reclaimed the concept of female nude that was usually regarded as an object of sexual desire from male artists and audiences. For feminist painters, showing women-centred, positive image was a tactic to challenge sexually, idealized or stereotyped representations of women. And this tendency was also continued through following exhibitions such as ‘Women’s images of women’ (1977) and ‘Woman-magic’ (1978) (Carson & Pajaczkowska, 2000: p. 39).
However, since the 1980s, feminist painters have expressed more complex and multifaceted ideas and ambivalent emotions about the gendered body, women’s sexuality, childbirth and motherhood (Carson & Pajaczkowska, 2000: p. 42). Unlike early pioneers of feminist art, younger artists like Eileen Cooper and Amanda Faulkner implied their identity and their own distinctive experiences through less straightforward images, colours, compositions and more painterly expression: they did not tactically choose a positive or negative image of women. Over a period of time, there was recognition of other woman painters who were comparatively isolated but had continuously pursued issues of womens’ experiences and narratives such as Paula Rego and Evelyn Williams. The common aspects of these figurative painters are: accepting and expressing their experiences of difference as a crucial theme to their work, not as a separate, uneasy fact which they have to get rid of; embracing conventional figuration as their artistic language while choosing a themes which were not considered as important issues; rather than using explicit imagery or propaganda, they alluded to certain narratives related to the female figure (Carson & Pajaczkowska, 2000: p. 44). These multi-layered feminist figurative paintings, produced by these artists have inspired younger generations, forming the new aesthetic from women’s points of view, which was misunderstood and neglected in Western Art history.
Conclusion
Thus, considering all those diverse explorations on media and different strategies, it is clear that those three groups of artists recognized the importance and potential influence of figurative painting even though they chose different strategies to pursue their feminist ideas. In comparison with the radical feminist artists who aimed to criticize the hierarchical system of art world itself and to formulate a new arena for women by using alternative media, feminist figurative painters intended to expose their existences and raise their own voices in the existing system of art world. As a result, both efforts were equally important and it is hard to say there is only one strategy which is effective for the feminist project. As I mentioned earlier, feminist art cannot be defined by unitary criteria, but, it shares the common goal of “influencing cultural attitudes and transforming stereotypes” as Susan Lacy declared. Figurative painting as a feminist medium provided a diversity to intervene or change overly dominant masculine values by adopting the most conventional and authoritative media, figurative painting itself and reclaiming its power for women. That was the most powerful strategic impact that figurative painting had. Thus, based on this aspect, figurative painting played an important role and made a great achievement by representing images made from a women’s point of view. Although the political effectiveness of figurative painting was ignored among some feminist artists and critics, the impact of figurative painting to feminist project should not be devalued any more.
Bibliography
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“How Did Feminist Art Begin? A Brief History of Women Rejecting Patriarchy in the Art World” Available from: https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/book_report/how-did-feminist-art-begin-a-brief-history-of-women-rejecting-patriarchy-in-the-art-world-55016 [Accessed: 01-03-2018] “Feminist Art Movement Overview and Analysis”
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