Wonder Woman: Feminist Icon, Feminist Failure, or Both?

If you’re old enough to remember the 1970s, Lynda Carter playing the title character in the TV show Wonder Woman (shown above) from 1975 to 1979 remains what you think of when you hear the name of the heroine Wonder Woman. Sadly, one of the oldest (and one of the first female) superheroes seems stuck in time for these past 35 years. In Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine, comic book historian Tim Hanley looks back at the 1940s origins of the Amazonian as well as how the character has evolved in response to changes in American society since the 1950s. While some claim Wonder Woman as a feminist icon, others label her a feminist failure. After reading Hanley’s “curioushistory,” you’ll find it harder to fall back on the easy labels and see that Wonder Woman’s a little bit of both. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Wonder Woman: Feminist Icon, Feminist Failure, or Both?"

Entering Mrs. N’s Palace

Louise Nevelson, Mrs. N’s Palace, 1964-77; Painted wood, mirror, 140 x 239 x 180 inches; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of the artist, 1985 (1985.41)

The Jewish Museum’s current exhibit The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend celebrates, as the guest curator Brooke Kamin Rapaport puts it in the introduction to the catalogue, Louise Nevelson’s “singular ability to endow formal abstraction with a life story—her own.” Rapaport sees Nevelson’s Mrs. N’s Palace (above) as “conceptually and retrospectively review[ing] the artist’s life of object making.” In this exhibit and catalogue, The Jewish Museum allows us to enter Louise Nevelson’s palace of self-revealing sculpture and learn more about this groundbreaking female, Jewish sculptor.

Louise Nevelson, Sky Cathedral Presence, 1951-64; Wood, paint, 122 1/4 x 200 x 23 7/8 inches; Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Gift of Judy and Kenneth Dayton, 1969

Louise Berliawsky Nevelson’s sculpture and her life are inseparable. Her “legendary sense of self,” as Rapaport calls it, compelled Nevelson to create almost entirely out of her own autobiography. As many of the photos in the catalogue prove, Nevelson even came to see her own appearance as another work of art to further her artistic persona. “Nevelson was a walking sculpture, though more flamboyant than any wood object she ever created,” Rapaport reports. (Look at photos of Nevelson and just try not to think of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.) In the 1970s, she rivaled even Andy Warhol as an outsized presence in the big-time art scene. As Michael Stanislawski points out in his essay in the catalogue, titled “Louise Nevelson’s Self-Fashioning: ‘The Author of Her Own Life,’” this persona was “high controlled and controlling,” to the point that even the artist began to believe her own version of “the truth.” Stanislawski sees at the heart of that self-fashioning Nevelson’s coming to believe “that from the earliest age she knew that she was not only exceptional, but an artist.”

Nevelson’s long road to artistic fame began in 1899 in the Ukraine. Her family immigrated to the United States and settled in New England. After marrying Charles Nevelson in 1920, Louise began to study art in New York, against her husband’s family’s wishes. When their marriage fell apart in 1931, Louise traveled to Munich to study Cubism with Hans Hoffman. “The Cubist movement was one of the greatest awarenesses that the human mind has ever come to,” she later said. Nevelson’s love of Cubist technique lasted throughout her entire career. In works such as Sky Cathedral Presence (above) we see the Cubist pursuit of simultaneously represented multiple planes of perspective at work. Nevelson took found pieces of wood, painted them uniformly black, and assembled them in unique patterns that bordered on the organic, arriving at magnificent wholes that transcended the disparate parts. By following this pattern of sculpture, Nevelson developed a signature style that allowed her to be both consistent and diverse.

Louise Nevelson, Dawn’s Wedding Chapel IV, from Dawn’s Wedding Feast, 1959-60; Painted wood, 109 x 87 x 13 ½ inches; Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York

To reflect her own struggle with her failed marriage and the larger feminist issues involved, Nevelson created pieces such as Dawn’s Wedding Chapel IV (above) from the larger piece Dawn’s Wedding Feast. Here, Nevelson delves into her own autobiography to tell not only her story but that of all women of her generation. However, as Rapaport stresses, “Rather than focusing on a role such as ‘woman artist’ [Nevelson] chose to focus on the work itself, where her selfhood could be best expressed.” Nevelson avoids all labels in her single-minded pursuit of individuality. Arthur C. Danto examines Nevelson’s use of color in the catalogue in his essay, “Black, White, Gold: Monochrome and Meaning in the Art of Louise Nevelson.” Danto sees the early use of black as “neutraliz[ing] the question of color, just as it neutralizes the question of the material… as a way to nullify color in pursuit of something more important.” Conversely, the use of white, as in works such Dawn’s Wedding Chapel IV, is not neutralizing but “declarative… proclaiming a new stage in her work and in her career.” White becomes Nevelson’s declaration of independence from traditional women’s roles and a celebration of a new dawn of hope and possibility as an artist. Later, Nevelson would experiment with works colored entirely gold, which Rapaport sees as “representing royalty and riches” in the period of Nevelson’s long-overdue recognition, but which Danto sees as “tak[ing] the idea of alchemy [i.e., neutralizing color to transcend materials] perhaps too literally.”

Louise Nevelson, Homage to 6,000,000 I, 1964; Painted wood, 91 3/8 x 225 5/8 x 11 13/16 in.; Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, Japan

Nevelson only won larger recognition as an artist in the 1950s and 1960s. She gained much of this larger recognition by her larger pieces of sculpture, which surrounded and overwhelmed the viewer. Many of these large pieces were set directly on the floor, placing the viewer on the same visual plane as the work. Nevelson’s “environments” forced others literally to enter her world. Although not herself a traditionally observant Jew, Nevelson entered the Jewish aspect of her world in Homage to 6,000,000 I (above), her memorial to the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Nevelson created works for Christian churches as well, later saying that “religion, if you feel it, belongs to the world. My sculpture in the Vatican, why not?” Related to these public religious works, Harriet Senie’s essay examines Nevelson’s involvement in the public art field, hailing her as “one of the first artists and the only woman to emerge as a central figure in the public art revival of the late 1960s” in the United States. Unfortunately, Nevelson’s outdoor sculptures, such as Atmosphere and Environment II (below), failed to win the same approval as her indoor works, perhaps due to the personal, rather than public, nature of her art. Nevelson’s enveloping environments feel dwarfed by the great outdoors. (I’m only seen a few of Nevelson’s Bicentennial public sculptures, including Bicentennial Dawn here in Philadelphia, and have often felt that they seemed small and out of place in the concrete jungle. Of course, I feel that way about most modern public art in Philadelphia.)

Louise Nevelson, Atmosphere and Environment II, 1966; Aluminum, black epoxy, enamel, 94 ½ x 50 x 26 in.; Rosalind Avnet Lazarus

In discussing the alchemical powers of Nevelson’s use of monochromatic color , Danto evokes Hegel’s term aufheben, which Danto says “has in fact three meanings—something is preserved, or something is negated, or something is transcended.” This trinity of preservation, negation, and transcendence permeates Nevelson’s sculpture. But, despite the neutralizing or transcending aspects of her work, the human presence unmistakably remains. As Nevelson herself once said, “The nature of creation is that you have to go inside and dig out. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it’s a painful, difficult search within.” In The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend, we glimpse the pain and the joy behind one woman’s works of art as well as the work of art that she made of her life itself.

[Many thanks to The Jewish Museum for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to the exhibit The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Construction a Legend as well as the images from the exhibit.]

Long Live Life

Today marks the 100th birthday of Frida Kahlo, one of the most original painters of the 20th century and perhaps the greatest female self-portraitist ever. Eight days before her death in 1954, Kahlo finished the painting above by writing the words Viva La Vida (or “Long Live Life” in English) on the center watermelon. Even in the midst of her pain, Kahlo could find some reserve of joy in life and express it through her art in full, abundant color.

Anyone who has seen the magnificent Salma Hayek film of Kahlo’s life is familiar with the details of her life. The child of a German father of Hungarian Jewish descent and a devout Catholic mother of Mexican-Spanish-Native American ancestry, Frida contracted polio at the age of six, beginning a life-long affair with agony that peaked at the age of 18, when she was involved in an accident between the bus she was riding on and a trolley car. Frida suffered a broken spine, collarbone, ribs, and pelvis; a fractured and dislocated foot; a dislocated shoulder; and the piercing of her abdomen and uterus by one of the bus’ iron handrails. In The Broken Column (above), Frida depicts with brutal honesty the depths of her agony. The thirty-five surgeries she underwent during her life did little to relieve her pain.

Even the love of her life, Diego Rivera, became a source of pain for Frida. Their dual portrait above shows them in happier times, before Rivera’s philandering became too much for their relationship to endure. Frida suffered multiple miscarriages during their marriage, due mainly to her injuries years before. Kahlo, too, had affairs during their marriage, with both men and women, most famously with the Russian Communist Leon Trotsky.

In Self Portrait With Cropped Hair (above), Kahlo assumes the clothes and hairstyle of a man, perhaps acknowledging her bisexuality. Kahlo definitely played with the concept of gender roles and identity in many of her portraits, which I’ve always seen as the strongest aspect of her oeuvre. Life in all its many facets, its heights and depths, was a laboratory on which her imagination continually experimented. Three days before her death, Kahlo writes in her diary, “I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope never to come back.” Rumors persist that she may have ended her own life (understandable in light of her pain), but nothing can end her presence in the world of art. We can only hope her end was joyful, just as we can only hope that she never truly leaves.

[I was very excited to see that the PMA has scheduled an exhibit of Kahlo’s work for February 2008 to celebrate this centennial. The accompanying catalogue will feature work by Hayden Herrera, whose biography of Kahlo remains the cornerstone of any research into Frida. The Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico plans to stage the greatest exhibit of Kahlo’s art ever assembled this year.]

Erased and Rewritten

Gail Levin sets out her goal in Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist before setting down her first words about Judy Chicago. By dedicating this biography “In memory of Josephine Nivison Hopper,” painter and wife of Edward Hopper, the subject of Levin’s fine earlier biography, “and all the other erased women artists,” Levin strikes at the heart of the story of Judy Chicago’s art and the general struggle for recognition of women in art—the issue of erasure and writing of art history.

Levin chooses the moment of the artist taking on that name “Judy Chicago” as her point of departure (and even uses the “boxing” photo of that exhibit as her cover; image above). “Judy Gerowitz hereby divests herself of all names imposed upon her through male dominance and freely chooses her own name JUDY CHICAGO,” the artist declared at the time, declaring her own independence from her birth name of Cohen and married name of Gerowitz to the name of her own choice, complete with toughened, pugilistic attitude to take on “the big boys” of art in the fight for her place in the pantheon.

Levin’s spends much time tracing the roots of Judy Cohen’s formative years in Chicago as a child art prodigy in a secular Jewish family with Communist beliefs. Chicago’s father suffered under the oppression of the 1950s “Red Scare” and lost his government job, which helped contribute to his early death at 43. Years later, when she developed ulcers from her hectic work pace, Chicago realized she was “eating my own stomach away in an effort to become my father and, in that way, keep him alive.”

Judy Chicago kept her father’s beliefs alive throughout her life, not only in her feminist stuggles, but also in other fights for rights. She joined the NAACP in the 1950s and was politically active enough to earn the distinction of an FBI file as early as 1958. Her early trips to New York and exposure to the crushing poverty of the Lower East Side impressed on Chicago the need to give voice to the voiceless. Chicago’s 1990s Holocaust Project linked the evils of the Holocaust to other social wrongs: the parallels between Nazi slave camps and the history of slavery in America, the assembly line processing of the concentration camps and modern food plant animal processing, and the denial of the Jews’ plight and the modern denial of the dangers of nuclear weapons. Levin’s presentation of this universal aspect of Chicago’s activism, in contrast to the prevailing view of Chicago as “just” a feminist agitator, may be the most valuable part of this biography.

The centerpiece of Levin’s biography and Chicago’s art is, of course, The Dinner Party (image above) . Levin traces the development of The Dinner Party from its earliest conceptions all the way through its full realization as an integrated work of painting, text, ceramics, and embroidery, elevating women’s “domestic” arts to a status with the other fine arts. The critical firestorm generated in the wake of The Dinner Party, from the newspapers columns to even the halls of Congress, ends happily with the work finding a permanent home at The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at The Brooklyn Museum. Just as happily, for the larger purpose of inscribing a feminist history onto art history as a whole, was the inclusion of The Dinner Party into the 7th edition of Janson’s History of Art, the first edition to include women on its editorial team.

“The assertion of womanhood is a challenge to all those values that allow war, dehumanization, rape, and art that lacks relationship with reality to continue,” Chicago says. Judy Chicago’s call is a call to reality—a reality that embraces all aspects of humanity, including the female perspective. As a teacher, Chicago sees her task as the “undoing of role conditioning, which comes unraveled in the same pattern it was knitted by social pressure.” Gail Levin’s biography teaches by exerting this same “social pressure” and unraveling untruths about Judy Chicago and feminist art to help knit a new social fabric interweaving all strands of life.

Haunted by Painting

I just recently watched A Soul Haunted by Painting (Chinese title: Hua hun), starring Gong Li as Pan Yuliang, the first “Western,” female, Chinese painter. Pan Yuliang's Self Portrait from 1945 is above.

After the death of her parents, an uncle sold Pan Yuliang into a brothel at the age of 14. While working at the brothel as a prostitute, Pan Yuliang met a customs official in 1916 who helped her escape and later married her. Her husband encouraged her painting and she soon traveled to study art in Shanghai. In the 1920s, Pan Yuliang studied art in Paris and Rome, earning awards and scholarships for further study. In 1929, she returned to China to teach art and was honored as the first Chinese woman artist to paint in a Western style, taking the Post-Impressionist techniques she discovered in Europe and modeling them to her native Chinese approach.

Unfortunately, Pan Yuliang soon ran into trouble with the government authorities over her use of nude models. Her Mum and Woman’s Body appears above. (More portraits of women bathers and other nudes by Pan Yuliang appear here.) Pan Yuliang soon returned to France, where she remained until her death in 1977. If she had remained in China during the Cultural Revolution, her works would have undoubtedly been destroyed as decadent and “Western.” Despite this political turmoil and artistic exile, Pan Yuliang always wished that her works would return to China after her death, which they did in 1985. A large collection of her work now hangs at the China National Art Gallery in Beijing and at the Anhui Provincial Museum in Hefei.

A Soul Haunted by Painting remains mostly true to Pan Yuliang’s life story, emphasizing certain aspects for dramatic effect, of course. Gong Li, China’s finest actress of the last 20 years, portrays the beauty and passion of Pan Yuliang’s life perfectly. The English subtitles can be rough at times (think bad fortune cookies), but Gong Li’s ability to play the same character from a teen to old age transcends language.

I can’t help but draw parallels between Pan Yuliang’s struggles against a moralistic society and those of Thomas Eakins, mainly because of their shared belief in portraying the nude body. But even Eakins’ struggles pale in comparison to the mountain of difficulties before Pan Yuliang: the death of her parents, her early life as a prostitute, the constant burden of being a woman in an ancient, patriarchic society, all culminating in the stigma of championing the depiction of the human body. Pan Yuliang’s life and art earn her a place in the pantheon of great female artists right there next to Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Woman of the World

More than just a painter of mothers and children, Mary Cassatt made inroads into the male-dominated world of art as few women had done before her. Cassatt celebrates her 163rd birthday today.

Born in what is today Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1844, Cassatt studied at the PAFA before growing tired of the old boys network there and traveling to Europe. After studying the works of the old masters in her travels to the capitals of Europe, Cassatt studied with Camille Pissarro, who first introduced her to Impressionism. She soon discovered the works of Edgar Degas, who supported Cassatt’s art and greatly influenced her approach to pastels. (Degas’ painting Mary Cassatt at the Louvre is above.) Cassatt may also owe some of her obsessive approach to the subject of mothers and children to Degas’ similar obsession with dancers and the theater.

I’d like, however, to show aspects of Cassatt beyond the great mother-child images. Like many of the Impressionists, Cassatt was influenced by Japanese art in the Japonisme craze of the late 19th century. Cassatt’s Boating Party (seen above) shows this Japanese influence in the cropped figure of the rower at the right. In addition, this work takes the familiar motif of mother and child and adds psychological depth with the almost sinister figure of the rower, whose dark presence in the foreground seems to threaten the other two figures. Such psychological depth helps dismiss characterizations of Cassatt as a “pretty” painter. Cassatt’s wide-ranging interests, including women’s suffrage in the United States and late-in-life travels to exotic Egypt, testify to her seriousness as an artist as well.

After seeing last year Cassatt’s Little Girl in a Blue Armchair at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit Americans in Paris: 1860-1900, I had even greater respect for her as an artist. Viewing the brushstrokes up close and then stepping back to put it all back into focus, the designs on the blue chairs are nothing short of amazing. Even the composition that goes into the dog at left cannot be done justice in reproduction. The pose of the little girl, with its almost eroticized undertones, raises this work beyond the deceivingly comfortable sphere of her mother and child works.

Like John Singer Sargent, Cassatt is an American who always seems more European than anything else. Fortunately, they both belong to the whole world today.

Fighting White-Male-Ameri-Euro-Centrism

The Tate Museum in London, England, admits it has a underwhelming number of women artists in its collection, something that pretty much every art museum in the world could own up to as well. A critic in the Guardian helpfully provides a "memo" to get a Georgia O'Keeffe already, but the problem surrounding the representation of women in art is not necessarily content as much as it is the mindset of the art world.

As the Guerrilla Girls, everyone's favorite ape-masked, feminist art activists (pictured above), will tell you, not only are women artists underrepresented but the female form is grossly overrepresented in most museum collections, often in violent depictions by male artists. Women have toiled under a muse complex (and the accompanying madonna-whore psychodrama) for centuries, and it's reflected in the content of art museums and art history.

The Anonymous Female Artist (aka, Militant Art Bitch) tells a story of a Los Angeles artist fed up with the current fetish for work by artists under 30 as well as the expectation of "eccentric, bizarre, stupid, fluffy crap from artists, especially women artists." That artist fulfilled a fantasy by hiring an under 30 actor to act the part of the artist behind her work. There's an element of ageism in that story as well as sexism, but it's all part of the greater problem that the Tate story has brought to the forefront.

I herewith resolve to try to be less White-Male-Ameri-Euro-centric on this blog, knowing that I will fail by most standards of feminism, simply from the range of my own reading. I have the great Georgia O'Keeffe biography Full Bloom by Hunter Drohojowska-Philip sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read. I'll try to remember the lessons of Whitney Chadwick's excellent single-volume history of women and art, Women, Art, and Society, which opened my eyes years back. Unfortunately, the reality is that my finite brain can only hold so much, so any failure to document the great work done by women artists is simply the result of my narrow, yet hopefully widening, horizons.

UPDATE: John Perreault in his Artopia blog calls for a Women's Art Strike to fight the injustice!