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

Gender and Sexuality: Painting

Hello Bloggers. I am writing a personal post for the Gender and Sexuality: Arts section to talk a little more specifically with my topic, painting. Now as I mentioned before, artists have played around with the idea of introducing sexuality and gender into paintings for generations. The type of art that I will be specifically looking at is the art that depicts the human body's sex: male, female, transgender, etc. I hope that I can find some interesting art pieces to share with you all that artists have shared with us. I really want to give you guys a chance to observe paintings that point out sexuality and gender in an obvious way. My hopes is that people start to think about what the artists saw when creating their pieces, how did they view sexuality and gender themselves through art, and how did they portray these terms. In my opinion, paintings like this show us a lot of interesting things on how people viewed sex from back then to times like these. The idea of sexuality has certainly grown along with the definition and some artists boldly took the opportunity to record these changes, something I have had an appreciation for ever since I got into art. Through my experience so far, I have seen paintings depict woman as delicate, feminine, fragile, and soft while the men hard, dominant, and bold. While these labels can be accurate in some cases, one of my hopes is to find pieces that really explore homosexuality, cross-gender, and non-stereotype captured pictures of people throughout the world. I feel like we don't really focus on paintings like these and more on the paintings that depict heterosexual men and women. The paintings that I have seen really try to approach this type of branch in sexuality and gender has been painted by the oldest of artists like this Euaion painter from ancient Greece (example of their work is the picture posted). I would like to find some more modern painters that have taken on these terms into their pieces. Hopefully you all can developed some appreciation if you haven't already for art like this and come to accept more pieces similar to these. I certainly have overtime. After all, as Pietro Aretino stated, "why should I be ashamed to describe what nature was not ashamed to create"?
-Justine Samaha


The artist of the painting is unkonw since the timing was such a while back (circa 460-450 BC). It is done by using a technique called red-figure style where the background is filed in with black pigment and helps outline the figure and details. The painting itself is a tondo (circular painting) and it depicts a young male playing an aulos at a banquet. An Aulos is a muscial "flute" that was sexual in it's origins in that it gave the player the ability to do anythign it wanted to the person listening. In this photo, homosexuality is expressed through the young male that  is playing the aulo to another male in the hopes of making the male succumb to his whim. Homosexuality was openly expresed in such an innocent and sometimes discrete way (for the male listening appears to be in pain whereas he is actually woed by his male player) and I hope to discover more art pieces that showed such preferences dating all the way back then like this.

 

Hey fellow bloggers! We are Justine Samaha and Charlie Staley and we will be focusing gender/sexuality and art. We both have had a lot of experience coming into this field so it should be fun to expand on it a little bit and become more open minded with what we find. Charlie will be posting about gender and sexuality in photography. It fascinating because not one person may have the exact same views as another. For example when Charlie was in Spain visiting The Rein of Sofia in Madrid he saw this photograph by an unknown artist. He can't find a copy of this photo. This was an abstract photo, at first glance it looked like a view of Paris in the winter, one could see a ruff view of Le madam of Paris also known as the Eiffel Tower, Then he saw a strait couple, a lesbian couple and gay couple kissing. Then he realized that this was a collage of photographs to make 1 giant photo. This collage was huge, probably about 10 by 15. When he stood back at this photo it was a giant LGBT logo and Love was in the foreground. he found this image to be very motivational and empowering, even me being a strait male he was glad that this artist did this. Charlie plan to post images and a brief synopsis for each photo, stay updated and you will see my views on the images and I would appreciate feedback.


My posts will be talking about gender and sexuality and incorporating these two terms into the art of painting. From my learning, art has been a huge playing card in the visualization of gender and sexuality for centuries. From the depiction of what sex and gender is to the striking paintings of how people view these two terms, art has taken sexuality and gender into its own form of expression. Sexuality and gender was introduced into the art society around the 1920’s shortly after film production began. Of course, sexuality and gender was displayed in art pieces by many artists before this time from the Victorian era. Sexuality and gender took a bigger step into the obvious world when photography and film was introduced though.  It was put into a more realistically visual outlook for people that didn’t really pay attention to it before while in paints and sculptures and this drew some concerns. Sexuality and Gender in such an obvious way became heavily protested against. It went to the point where art dealing with gender and sex of any kind became prohibited against some viewers. However, as the years went on, people began to feel more comfortable with the idea of dealing with such an abrasive point of view on sexuality and gender. Many even looked the idea of expressing these two terms through such a way as a learning experience through the eyes of others.

As art developed, it became more and more part of our lives, encouraging people to acknowledge it more daily as well. Once art in this matter began to first cshow itself to the world, ertain art forms were confined in ways that they limited visual ideas. Paintings of such things were usually of men only, films of sexual acts or gender were restricted to men’s eyes and photographs of sexuality were scarce. But these restrictions lessened and lessened as well. People began to bolding paint women in such promiscuous forms, women could see the films that expressed sexuality and gender roles so explicitly and photographs became the stand stills of breath taking moments that poured of sexuality in our lives. Then the question of gender really began to take play in art. What was gender? What did people see when they thought of the term? How does it feel? Art boldly took a turn to begin showing what gender meant to people. Taking on ideas of people being straight, gay, lesbian, transgender, bi, etc was another big step in the art society. This is what draws me to the topic of art; the boldness of people's ideas being blatantly placed onto a canvas. I've always thought that art was interesting, being an artist myself. But I have never really taken the time to look at art through the perspective of sexuality and gender. In my posts, I will be discussing art pieces that I find respresent these terms well that I think people will think interesting over the time of my research.

It will be fun working with each other because again, Charlie and I have some personal experience with art and it will be interesting to see how by the end of the term our opinions of the matter might change. Any feedback is welcome of course and we look forward to exploring. Happy blogging!

-Justine Samaha and Charlie Staley