Modernism - Umradha S

Umradha Shievkumar

Art & Women Fall 2017 

Blog Post 4 

Modernism is defined by http://www.tate.org.uk/ as “A rejection of history and conservative values (such as realistic depiction of subjects); innovation and experimentation with form (the shapes, colours and lines that make up the work) with a tendency to abstraction; and an emphasis on materials, techniques and processes. Modernism has also been driven by various social and political agendas. These were often utopian, and modernism was in general associated with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progress.” Some notable artists of this movement include Salvador Dali, Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol and Sonia Delaunay.

During modernism both the male and female artists emancipated themselves from art that connected the natural objects to their self. Women artists on the other hand, were still being defined by their sexuality, still being thought of as simply objects.  Georgia O’Keeffe, was a very notable artist during the time but her work was always defined by the vulgar and sexual connotations they carried. Concurring with Modernism’s indistinct approach toward women artists was the Surrealist movement, which gave women a definitive rank. The women of the Surrealist group, were still being left out of the world being dominated by the male art. Women instead took a different approach against those and chose to work with what they were familiar with the: the self.  This explains why many women have self-portraits as well as more real portraits depicting a regular woman. All these artists were involved in portraying visuals of a “subjective and metaphysical nature.” One very prominent artist in particular Frida Kahlo translated the physical pain she endured of her own body into her paintings. 

 The Broken Column, 1944, Frida Kahlo

Self Portrait with Monkey, 1938, Frida Kahlo

The idea of using the female body as entertainment was still alive and so many women of this era did their best to try and shift that idea. At the same time, women were also trying to use their art to gain equality with the men. As their works were under-appreciated or not thought of as significant as the male. According to www.nmwa.org “Women felt freer to work from nude models and to paint and sketch in public spaces. They also played key roles in the expansion of modernist sculpture and the tremendous growth of photography. Women played major roles in innovative artistic movements, such as abstraction, expressionism, and minimalism. But, as in the case of Abstract Expressionism, they were still often overshadowed by their male peers who typically received more critical and commercial attention. The Feminist Art Movement of the 1970s embraced diverse media and methods to transform the art world's status quo, challenge the unequal representation of women in galleries and museums, and reflect female experience in art. Women were also at the forefront of experimentation with performance art, electronic and digital media, and conceptual art.” Whitney Chadwick, in Women, Art and Society wrote “the category ‘woman artist’ remains an unstable one.” Meret Oppenheim, another notable visionary was one of the first women artists who created her own signature style. Her style can be described as modernism with a statement, an image that intrigues when the viewer sees it.  Meret  Oppenheim created Object(Le Déjeuner en fourrure), which incorporated Surrealism and styles from the Dada movement. No modern art movements had as many women as the Surrealism movement. 

 Object, 1936, Meret Oppenheim

 Meret Oppenheim 

             According to www.tate.org.uk/ “Postmodernism was a reaction against modernism. Modernism was generally based on idealism and a utopian vision of human life and society and a belief in progress. While modernism was based on idealism and reason, postmodernism was born of skepticism and a suspicion of reason. It challenged the notion that there are universal certainties or truths. Postmodern art drew on philosophy of the mid to late twentieth century, and advocated that individual experience and interpretation of our experience was more concrete than abstract principles. While the modernists championed clarity and simplicity; postmodernism embraced complex and often contradictory layers of meaning.” The Guerilla Girls were a very influential part of the movement as a lot of their works focused on bringing awareness to the unfair treatment of women. In the 1970s women artists began to make art in retort to the rising advances in feminist theory. They used their private experiences of being women to inform and raise awareness in their work. A prominent work that the Guerilla Girls are known for is a trilogy of pieces entitled “Do Women have to be Naked to get into the Met Museum?” This piece surveyed the works on display in the museum's nineteenth- and twentieth-century galleries, the Guerilla Girls equated “the number of female nudes versus the number of male nudes and counted the number of works by female artists versus the number by male artists. Their findings were startling: not even 5 percent of the artists represented in the modern galleries were women, while fully 85 percent of the nudes in those same galleries were female.” (www.nga.gov) Another exceptional movement during this time period was the Performance Art movement. According to www.tate.org.uk “Throughout the twentieth century performance was often seen as a non-traditional way of making art. Live-ness, physical movement and impermanence offered artists alternatives to the static permanence of painting and sculpture… the term has since been used to also describe film, video, photographic and installation-based artworks through which the actions of artists, performers or the audience are conveyed.” Marina Abramovic is still an exceptional performance artist of this time. She was given the opportunity to showcase her work at the MoMA in May of 2010. She is a Yugoslav performance artist whose work “explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind.” Throughout each of these movements women have been influential and prominent in every single sub-movement and have contributed to the vast development of each of them. 

Guerrilla Girls', Do Women Have to Get Naked to Get into the Met. Museum?, 1989

Works Cited

Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. Thames & Hudson, 2012

“Art Terms- Modernism.” Tate, 2017 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/modernism

“20^th Century.” National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2017 https://nmwa.org/explore/collection-highlights/20th-century#A

“The Gap Narrows In Fine Art: Modernism And Women Artists”  Alfred Martinez, 2009 Forum of Public Policy http://forumonpublicpolicy.com/archive07/martinez.pdf

“Art Terms- Performance Art ” Tate, 2017 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/performance-art 

“Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” National Gallery of Art, 2017 https://www.nga.gov/Collection/art-object-page.139856.html