Battle Between the Sexes.

"...Gender stereotypes in art are just another form of identity theft..."

- Bob Duggan

Hey Guys! So last time I left of with the hope that I would be able to find some more modern painters that approach the topic of sexuality and/or gender and unfortunately I have not really found a piece that really captures my attentiton. So I decided to look at the more older paintings that might capture me. I stumbled across something interesting in my research and while the piece itself may not represent gender or sexuality in any case, the idea and situation behind the painting is definitely soemthing to think about.

The picture above is an art piece done by Jacques-Louis David during 1801 called Young Women Drawing.  A lot of people find this drawing to be one of his most interesting pieces until a recent discovery has everyone questioning whether or no this is actually one of his pieces of work at all. Experts believed that this piece is really the work of a woman named Marie-Denise Villers. A funny thing about this situation though is the duality of credibility that went along with the question of who was responsible for this piece of work. Apparently, when the artist that was repsonsible for this painting was titled David, many people showed interest and value in the artwork. But once Villers was named the actual artist, the art piece was not given a lot of thought. This brought into question for many people, including fellow journalist Bob Duggan, whether male painters (or artists in general) get more credit for the "stolen" artowrk that they create than the real female artists themselves.

An interesting result in this questions was the experiemnt that the Deleware Art Museum came up with, where people did a poll of whether art pieces belonged to female or male artists. A good question that came up was whether or not discrimination was amonst ourselves when looking at art that specicifically had a masculine feel to it. The whole point of this experiment was to prove that we cannot truly "see" gender within art and instead we immediately jump to conclusions and stereotypes based on opinions and experiences regarding who does what kind of art. On May 19th, the results were posted on the voting done by the male and female visitors. The ending results came back as about 50% of the art pieces guessed correctly on the gender of the creator. It was thought that the guesses above 70% indicated that the artists style was heavily representing their own gender traditions, guesses that were somewhere between 60% and 40% were the art pieces that artists tried to go out there with and take a chance, while the pieces that were guessed correctly that were under 40% correct showed completely opposite traditions for the gender style in art (Dobrzynski, 2011).

I looked further into this to see if there might be another cause for such results. Was there a specific reason that people were mistakenly guessing men's work for females and females for men? I found a journal article written by Wanda Corn that discussed such a controversy between female and male painters and I have to agree with her conclusions. An artist that Corn focuses on in her journal article is a well known mural painter Pieree Puvis de Chavannes. Corn states that Puvis is a well respected artist that is appreciated by men for his protrayel of the every day life of men vs. women: men being represented as the strong, skillful, thinkers and women being the fragile, small, do-nothing but care for children type of people.

Women (and myslef in this case) disagreed with this depiction. The painters that used Puvis as a reference for thie inspiration ( two women named Mary MacMonnies and Mary Cassart) showed this difference in idea through their own paintings, showing women the strong and working type while reducing men to the sit-at-homes. Corn used these two women as examples because their works of art showed that women as a sex could do their own (Corn, 2009). But it is not just the idea alone that makes the art work different between Puvis and MacMonnies and Cassart. It is the handling of the brush, they wayt he figures are shown on the canvas, and the overall feel to it. Puvis has a peaceful yet masculine feel to his paintings, something you can undoubtlyfully recognize as male. Cassart and MacMonnies are sure in their brush strokes as well but you can tell by their pieces that a female hand created it. I am curious if the same sort of principle is being applied while testing the visitors at the Deleware Art Museum. Did some art pieces have a certain stroke to them, a certain idea, a specific feel to it that made it seem more female than male? Or vice versa? Is this the reason why the random test subjects mistook some female artistry for male artistry instead: female artists are approching a new way of art with a more masculine/dominant feel that people are so used to men having?

The last question though brings up some more interesting topics of discussion. How does an art piece have a male or female "feel" to it? Like I mentioned before, the idea behind the art piece plays a big part in the overall image of the art work. Gudrun Helgadottir points out a good example when she talks about pronogrpahy art. While the art topics don't have anything in common (with Puvis' piece being about the peaceful country side and Helgadotirr discussing pronogrpahy through art) I think the same principle certainly applies here. Puvis' created a piece that men could mostly connect to. Hegadotirr taks about how pornogrpahy through art is certainly created for men as well (at least it is assumed so). What modernist people cannot get over now is that other artists (women specifically) are starting to develope the idea of taking men's ideas and fascinations and transforming it through a woman's touch when a canvas is applied. Maybe this is another reason why people mistake women work for men's and men's for women's: they are too stuck in the idea that women paint about certain things and men about others (Helgadotirr, 1991).

Personally, I thought that the mueseums attempt at proving whether or not people nowadays display discrimination towards was certainly worth looking more into. I think I've thought of the same question occasioanlly when looking at different pieces but have not really extensively approached the idea any further. I'm not too sure if this really represents the opinion of people when it comes to gender in art. Maybe some more tests could be done witht he same idea behind it. It bothers me that not a lot of people voted in the first place. I'm not really sure what I was expecting though for the results. I think maybe about the same thing that the results showed: a mixture of thoughts on who's work is who's. But whether or not these results really prove anything, I think it's something interesting to look into. Does society allow gender stereotypes and traditional ideas cloud their ideas on change when it comes down to something not being part of the norm? Do we give too much credit to a certain gender when it comes down to art work?  Who knows.


Sources:
Duggan, Bob. "Identity Theft: Seeing or Not Seeing Gender in Art." Big Think. N.p., 09 Mar. 2011. Web. 06 Mar. 2013.

Dobrzynski, Judith H. "In The Battle Of The Sexes, Results Show We're Often Wrong." Real Clear Arts: Search Results. N.p., 09 Mar. 2011. Web. 06 Mar. 2013.

Corn, Wanda M. "Gender." The Smithsonian Institution. 23:1., Spring 2009. (Pg. 25-26). Web. 18 Mar. 2013.

Helgadotirr, Gundrun. "Gender Issues in the Art Education." National Art Education Association. 32:4., Summer 1991. (pg. 248-249). Web. 18 Mar. 2013.

-Justine Samaha