Modernism is a movement that occurred in the late 19th
century and lasted in popularity until the mid-20th century. Some modernist
myths that Chadwick mentions mostly pertains to women, in which she describes
that sexual energy that male artists put into their works. More specifically, the
male gaze that is usually channeled into the many paintings that men paint when
painting women in the nude, thus “presenting women as powerless and sexually subjugated”
(Chadwick 279). The quote is important because it introduces the modern agenda
of female art regarding the modernism movement. Artists Valadon and Modersohn-Becker
used the nude female form to steer the audience away from the myth of male
power but rather distinguish the women and portray the women. It makes sense because
when painting a woman, the focus should really be on the women instead of the
man. In pertaining to women’s art, modernism played a role in the making of art
indistinguishable between sex.
Another European artist that influenced modernism,
particularly Expressionism, is Kathe Kollwitz. She painted “attack,” The weaver’s
Revolt in 1895-97 that depicted realistic art of revolting weavers. This
painting instead focuses on the labor movement that women face in society. An
aspect of modernism is the connections between art and the current societal
issues. In this case, poverty and women become the main topic of the painting, which
is a large movement away from the male focused paintings. A common theme to her
paintings was demonstrating feminism in terms of struggle in a woman’s life,
which gives more emphasis on the social aspects that modernism eventually delves
into, an primary example being individual artistic freedom.
Important circumstances that aided these influences were
personal experiences linked with their ties with the art industry, mostly
regarding their gender and race. A defining moment for artist Marie Laurencin
was not only her painting “Group of artists” in 1908, but also her
contributions towards the institutionally unequal funding that were offered by
the art industry and femininity. Even though she takes part in cubism, “it was
her femininity that became the artistic yardstick against which her work was
measured” (Chadwick 296). In other words, her feats of her artwork were greatly
highlighted by the feminine qualities that she had and produced. The impact
that this has is that it exposes art as a duality between masculine and
feminine qualities. Thus, it can be said that art is really just non-biased
toward sexes because both qualities are integrated. Modernism tends to play on
this theme because the movement pushes agendas that are political and feminist
theory is a political movement. Though there is a little side note in the
context that by being measured by her femininity, it is possible that her work
is being degraded by others because it is feminine.
In the case of Kollwitz, her personal experiences of tragedy
and loss of her grandson shaped her ideals in her paintings. The agendas that
she pushed in her paintings were verified by her personal experiences, which
also emphasized the gruesome events that all people go through, not only just men
or just women. It provides a more humanizing approach to modernism that carries
on as social happenings in modernism.
Kathe Kollvitz (The Revolt of the Weavers) 1895-97
Postmodernism is an alternate approach to modernism. It was a
movement that picked up in the mid-20th century and became bigger
than modernism in the late 20th century. While modernism was trying
to form something new from past pieces, postmodernism uses modernism and
derives the art to implement it as a movement for political and sometimes
feminist theory agendas. Some notable artists that are included in the postmodernism
movement are Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Sherrie Levine. Each
of these artists pushed their agendas in some sort of way in correlation with a
modern approach of feminist theory and put more emphasis on societal norms and
social issues regarding females in the world, but through different means.
Barbara Kruger (Your gaze hits the side of my face) 1981
Cindy Sherman was a photographer born in 1954 and her
primary agenda was to push this inequality between gender in society. Females
were depicted only as stereotypes in movies that reflected how people during
that time thought about females. IN her works of Untitled film still series,
she photographs many self-portraits of herself to portray these tropes in order
to get at the absurdity of these common images of women. Her later works
depicted the same agenda but through different ways, including using prosthetic
limbs to “deform the body” and perform an act of objectification, which was a
pressing issue that she emphasized. The influence that Sherman had on the
postmodern movement is the emphasis of societal and political issues through
highlighting the daily norms that people lived and experienced.
Cindy Sherman “Untitled Film Still #84” 1970-1990
Sherrie Levine, born in 1947, photographed and repainted
works of Modernist art to demonstrate the ideas of originality and authorship.
Something that seemed insignificant to others was really just a statement about
the societal norms of both masculinity and femininity. The idea was that
through copying and repainting, she challenges the duality between male and
female authorship. Authorship in art is an important topic regarding
postmodernism because art was biased more favor toward men than women. Art that
was similar to each other, the men would get more credit than the female, even
though it is similar in production, but the female might have more unique
qualities than the man does. As Chadwick puts it, Levine’s agenda was an “act
of refusal: refusal of authorship, rejection of notions of self-expression, originality
or subjectivity” (Chadwick 384). The postmodernism aspect that she contributes
is that society has problems and main issues are in the societal norms.
Sherrie Levine (After Walker Evans) 1936
Works Cited:
The Guerrilla Girls' Beside Companion to the History of
Western Art. 1998.
Chadwick, Whitney. Women,
Art, and Society: Fourth Edition. Thames & Hudson, 2007.
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