Feminist Art History

What I found most interesting about Patricia Mathews "The Politics of Feminist Art History," is that Feminism is not just an ideology, viewpoint, or methodology under which art and politics are reviewed, but a combination of all three. It is this combination that makes Feminism "active." In her introduction to Feminist politics, Mathews outlines several Feminist art-historical interests including "1) recuperating the experience of women and women artists; 2) practices that critique and deconstruct authority, institutions and ideologies and/or examine resistances to them; 3) strategies concerned to rethink the cultural and psychological spaces traditionally assigned to women." (95).

With Feminism it is not enough to evaluate the formal characteristics of an artwork (as has been the case with all of the theories we have looked at this far) because the meaning will be "incomplete." Instead, both the artists, their class and politics, the politics of the time in which the artist is producing work, and the class/politics of the subject or model need to be evaluated and taken into account in order to derive meaning or narrative. Mathews uses the female nudes of Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) as an example of a Feminist critique.

The female nude genre of which Valadon depicts is much different than those of the "conventional portrayal of women as objectified bodies on display." (101) Mathews uses Judith Butler's examples of gender being both a "masquerade" and performance when looking at the ease and casualness of Valadon's models. They are real and natural, with drooping breasts and sagging skin, which makes for interesting critiques from male critics who believe that the female nude represented through art should be idealized and sensual; simply aesthetic. Critics focused on the aesthetics, unpleasing to most. They tended to concentrate on the physical, rather than the woman being painted. To most, the female nude was an object in which to fantasize about.

Mathews also brings up the relationship these models have with Valadon as an artist compared to a relationship nude, female models have with a male artist. Mathews writes, "They are present as subjects. . .Their gender masks have slipped or entirely fallen away." (102) The type of relationship models have with the artist, or lack there of, depends on how they will be portrayed. Male artists tend to objectify female nudes, playing up female sexuality and projecting their own fantasies upon the work. Valadon portrays her nudes as women, real and of the world around them. Mathews notes the distant gaze in many of the eyes of Valadon's nudes, suggesting their withdrawal from the gaze of the viewer. "They possess subjectivity, and their subjectivity is not on display." (102)