Abstract
In the visual arts, the idea of women’s art as something specific and identifiable has had an uneven reception. This chapter examines three “moments” of that reception in feminist art history. The first “moment” occurs in the early 1970s, when American artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro put forward the idea of a “feminine sensibility” in art. The second “moment” is the ground-breaking book of 1981, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology by British art historians, Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker. The third key “moment,” when a commitment to sexual difference featured in the visual arts, was an exhibition curated by Catherine de Zegher in 1996 titled Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art, in, of and from the Feminine, which reframed some of the concerns about women’s art that emerged in the 1970s. I consider criticisms of each “moment” and speculate about the current usefulness of thinking about women’s art in these ways. I argue that these “moments” can be best understood by applying a contemporary view of the ideas of French feminist Luce Irigaray. In particular, I draw on her ideas of sexual difference and the possibility of a feminine language.
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- 1.
The idea of a feminine sensibility in women’s art is most often associated with the American artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro. At a conference held at CalArts in January 1972, they are reported to have “put forth their ideas about a feminine sensibility. After much research they have concluded that women repeatedly work with certain forms and attitudes, orifices, central images, a vantage point from inside out.” Betsy Damon, Report from the West Coast Conference of Women Artists, Women and Art Summer/Fall 1972, cited by Ruth H. Bloch http://historyinthecity.wordpress.com/about/the-triple-origins-of-the-concept-of-womens-culture/feminist-art-movement/sensibility/ accessed October 10, 2014. See Patricia Mainardi’s discussion of this idea, Pat Mainardi, “A Feminine Sensibility,” Feminist Art Journal 1:1 (1972), reprinted in Hilary Robinson, ed. Feminism-Art-Theory 1968–2000 (Blackwell, 2001): 295–96. For a roundtable discussion of this idea see also Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin, Joan Snyder, “What is Female Imagery” (1975) in Lucy Lippard, From the Centre: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: Dutton, 1976), 80–89. There are many criticisms of this position, most notably that this thinking is essentialist. See for example, Mary Kelly, “No Essential Femininity: A Conversation Between Mary Kelly and Paul Smith,” Parachute 37, no. 26 (1982): 31–35.
- 2.
Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Pandora, 1981).
- 3.
Catherine de Zegher, ed., Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art, in, of and from the Feminine, Exhibition Catalogue (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art; Kortrijk: Kanaal Art Foundation; Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996).
- 4.
Luce Irigaray’s two key texts were published in French in 1974 and 1977: Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. C. Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).
- 5.
See the account of the term here: https://bloomsburyliterarystudies.typepad.com/continuum-literary-studie/2012/03/lecriture-feminine.html.
- 6.
Luce Irigaray cited in Naomi Schor, “This Essentialism Which is Not One,” Differences 1, no. 2 (1989): 48.
- 7.
Luce Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 205–18.
- 8.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 133.
- 9.
Chicago and Schapiro cited in Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (London: Routledge, 2012), 213.
- 10.
Anne Middleton Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 29–103.
- 11.
Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago, “Female Imagery,” Womanspace Journal 1 (1973): 11–14.
- 12.
Mira Schor, “Miriam Schapiro’s Road to Feminism,” Hyperallergic, March 15, 2016, https://hyperallergic.com/283426/miriam-schapiros-road-to-feminism/.
- 13.
Judy Chicago, “Back to Painting/Getting Married/The Women’s Movement,” in Art and Feminism, ed. Helena Reckitt (London: Phaidon, 2001), 210–11.
- 14.
Suzanne Santoro, “Towards New Expression,” (1974), in Feminism Art Theory: An Anthology 1968–2014, ed. Hilary Robinson (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 378.
- 15.
Suzanne Santoro, Towards New Expression (Milan: Rivolta Femminile, 1974).
- 16.
Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985).
- 17.
Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 148.
- 18.
Cindy Nemser, “Towards a Feminist Sensibility: Contemporary Trends in Contemporary Art,” Feminist Art Journal 5 (1976): 19–23.
- 19.
Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray, Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge 1989), 20.
- 20.
Luce Irigaray, “When our Lips Speak Together,” 212.
- 21.
Judy Chicago interview with Judith Dancoff, “A Feminist Art Program,” Art Journal 31, no. 1 (1971): 48.
- 22.
Cherry Smyth, “Bad Girls” Bad Girls, exhibition catalogue (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1993), 12.
- 23.
Parker and Pollock, Old Mistresses.
- 24.
Parker and Pollock, Old Mistresses, xviii.
- 25.
Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Art and Sexual Politics: Women’s Liberation, Women Artists, and Art History, ed. Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth C. Baker (New York: Collier, 1973), 1–54.
- 26.
Parker and Pollock, Old Mistresses, xix.
- 27.
Parker and Pollock.
- 28.
Parker and Pollock.
- 29.
Parker and Pollock.
- 30.
Catherine de Zegher, ed., Inside the Visible.
- 31.
Julia Kristeva cited in Catherine de Zegher, ed., Inside the Visible.
- 32.
Julia Kristeva, “Oscillation Between Power and Denial: An Interview with Xavière Gauthier,” trans. Marilyn A. August, in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), 165.
- 33.
Kristeva, French Feminisms, 165.
- 34.
The same quote from Kristeva that opens de Zegher’s exhibition catalogue is used to open an early essay on Italian women’s art. See Anne-Marie Sauzeau-Boetti, “Negative Capability as Practice in Women’s Art,” Studio International 191, no. 979 (1976): 24–29.
- 35.
De Zegher, Inside the Visible, 32.
- 36.
De Zegher, Inside the Visible.
- 37.
Julia Kristeva, “Is there a Feminine Genius?” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (2004): 497.
- 38.
Kristeva, “Is there a Feminine Genius?” 503.
- 39.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
- 40.
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2011), 20.
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Best, S. (2022). Is the Category of the “Woman Artist” Still Helpful?. In: Kouvaras, L., Grenfell, M., Williams, N. (eds) A Century of Composition by Women. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95557-1_10
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