women.
women.
Kirsten Buick’s article is organized into four main sections: Lewis’s Freedwomen, Lewis’s Bondwomen, Lewis’s Indian Women, and Art and Self. Throughout the article, Buick’s tone remains scholarly and formal. Her voice remains neutral and without opinion. The first section of the article, Lewis’s Freedwomen, focuses on the sculptures Forever Free and Freedwoman on First Hearing of Her Liberty. Specifically she writes about the relationship between man and woman in the sculptures. Buick states that “criticism of Lewis’s Forever Free, for example, has often regarded the relative positions of the male and female as reinforcing gendered stereotypes of male ‘aggression’ and female ‘passivity’” (190). The second section, Lewis’s Bondwomen, focuses on single female figures in Lewis’s work. Buick states that Hagar in the Wilderness “represents the frustration of normalized gender roles within the body of one female figure” (196). The third section, Lewis’s Indian Women, discusses the contrast in Lewis’s portrayal of Indian men and women.…
Walking through LACMA there was a section that caught my eye and found it to be of interest to me. That section was the Greek, Roman, and Etruscan Art which was located on the Ahmanson Building, Level 3. There were various unique pieces such as vases, jewelry and sculptures. I chose the sculpture of Hope Athena to do my visual analysis because I found it to be beautiful. Athena was a Greek goddess of wisdom and war. The sculpture at LACMA is a Roman, 2nd century copy after a Greek original of the late 5th century BC School of Pheidias. The sculpture was made out of marble with neutral colors. In parts the color was dull with hues of ivory and golden brown. The shape of the body was rectangular with broad shoulders. The sculpture had her arms missing. Her head was round with hair coming down in vertical waves. She was wearing a warrior helmet from my view point I could not tell what the helmet had on it. The helmet gave her a powerful look. Her facial expression seemed reflective with facial features being symmetrical and smooth. The eye sockets were hollow and dark. Her nose was chipped and her upper and lower lips were thin. One of the focal points for me was how her robe or drapery had such detail throughout the sculpture. It wrapped around her body with great detail with vertical creases and folds giving the sculpture a realistic look. The vertical lines toward the bottom of robe had great detail and were distributed equally and her feet and toes…
The cultural Frame is the influence of society or cultural identity in artworks: race relations, gender concerns, religion & economics. This essay will cover and compare the representation of the female in the art works: fowling in the marshes and Birth of Venus. The fowling in the marshes is an art work created around 1350 BC 18th Dynasty. The size of the artwork is 98cm x 83cm and was painted by the Tomb-chapel of Nebamun. However, the birth of Venus is an art work created in 1486 by Sandro Botticelli it was created on a tempera canvas and the size is 172.5 x 278.5 cm.…
Artemisia Gentileshi, 1593-1654, was no ordinary girl for her times. Her father was a celebrated painter named Orazio Gentileshi, from whom she inherited her amazing talent for the arts. Most of Artemisia’s work was inspired by the endeavor of virtuous, martyrs, heroic and strong females from the mythology, classical literature and the bible. Being a victim herself of rape, her fondness of female dominance is remarkably present generally in her work.…
For many researches, and scientists, Paleolithic society was thought to have been an age of grit, savagery, and masculinity where women are practically wiped out of the history books only to be remembered by crude statutes carved out between 27,000 and 20,000 years ago called Venuses. Such little focus on the women of the Paleolithic era led scientists to misinterpret these Venus statutes as objects of sexual fetishes due to their exaggerated body features, as Angier points out, “Researchers have suggested that the figurines were fertility fetishes, or prehistoric erotica, or gynecology primers.” Angier and several other scientists believe that minor details such as intricate headdresses, string skirts, and belts were overlooked during the observation of the statues.…
Linda Nochlin’s essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists, pays critical attention to the way in which we look at art through a gender lens. The question is not whether women are capable of producing great art but rather why have they been kept in the shadows. Nochlins essay is a founding document of feminist art history that explores powerful relationship between gender and art and the history of dynamic tension. Edmonia Lewis is not only an example of a prolific female artist, but is a sculpture of African American and Native American decent. In Lewis’s sculptures we see stylistically neoclassic imagery with an important twist, she puts her own identity at the periphery. Lewis work encompasses themes of religion, freedom and slavery and while she sometimes depicts African, African American and Native American people in her sculptures, she more often neutralized her subjects race or ethnicity which made her art more acceptable to the social norms during the 19th century. In order to achieve professional fulfillment, women during this time had to deny their femininity but for Edmonia Lewis this extended even further into denying her culture, race and identity. Had Lewis not been a woman, had she not have been born from a Chippewa Indian mother nor an African father, would she have been celebrated more for her artistic genius?…
The author eloquently exuberates her pride as she states, “I and the other women this exceptional/ act with this exceptional heroic body” (Olds 1280). With this statement Olds takes the female body, a subject that has been overly abused by past poets who glorified a woman’s anatomy as a possession and a prize, and contorts the sometimes iconic symbol into a reality: a reality which feels pain, but also gives life. It is this element which I find my greatest personal connection to the poem, the fact that women are capable of putting their bodies through agony for the life of another. It is inspiring.…
Hosmer's life and work have been liable to much insightful critique in late decades, with a few writers endeavoring to represent her remarkable global prestige as a female sculptor. While Power for the most part was perceived by art enthusiasts, craftsmen of history and by workmanship devotees, women artists like Hosmer were left in the shadows. The exposition coaxes out a perplexing web of mid-nineteenth-century worries that expect cutting edge distractions, including self-designing, gender roles, tourism, the ascent of VIP culture, and the craftsman's complicity with and fights against the contemporary press. All taken together, it looks to entangle and improve our comprehension of Hosmer and her key engagement with sculpture making , prompting…
The Etruscans offered a more liberal approach to women through their extreme dedication to kinship and through the rights and leisure that Etruscan women freely enjoyed. On the other hand, the Greeks offered a more conservative sentiment on women due to the limited rights and leisure that they enjoyed, along with the mandatory stay-at-home status that they possessed. Both representations of these women are noted in the artwork that their societies produced. However, as time passed, both societies withered away, but their culture remained alive through the art that they left behind. This artwork allows one to understand the antiquated attitude toward women, so that one can learn from…
At the El Paso Museum of Art I saw many beautiful and wonderful paintings and sculptures but the “The Portrait” was the sculpture that caught my attention the most. “The Portrait” was sculpted by Frances Bagley an American artist born on April 7, 1946 in Fayetteville, Tennessee. Frances Bagley lives and works in Dallas, Texas. “The Portrait” was created in 1997 and it is made out of stainless steel and marble. I believe that “The Portrait” is an interesting piece of art because it resembles exactly what the title says. It is a portrait of a the artist or a portrait of woman. The sculpture has shape and contour which is the shape of a woman like in a night gown. The sculpture has mass. It also has texture because in the stainless steel you can see that is shine and smooth and the marble is not finish so you can see that is rough. It has color because even if the marble is rough it has different colors. It has proportion and scale in the part of the body from top to bottom as well it does have the proper scale to simulate a woman sitting down. “The Portrait” has design, unity, and aesthetic because the whole piece is appealing to eye since it resembles the shape of a woman with the different pieces of rough marble place inside of the stainless structure and even if the materials does not have a glamorous touch the sculpture does captivate the viewers attention because of its has beauty. But most important the portrait has content and iconography because the piece is portraying a woman that is always beautiful even in her simplest form and it also resembles the meaning that a woman has in society as a strong person because it gives life to their children and as the foundation of the family. In my opinion The Portray has the meaning of what a woman is. She is hard as stainless steel because she knows that she always have to be there as an inspiration for her family or her children. She…
They still perceive the conspicuous commitment of womanhood in sentiment and love. They think that the statue of knidos was a bad example in the society just because standing nude, it refers somewhat seductive posture. Nevertheless, the Greek combination of humanism, realism and optimism couldn’t legitimize attempting to bind the pith of womanhood to the regular demonstration of childbearing. The woman at last made her mark. She made an illustration of magnificence as being more immaculate than nature. She was human, she was genuine and she was superior to could be…
In an age where younger generations of girls are taught that they are beautiful by just being themselves, there are subtle hints all around us that may express the opposite. Yes, beauty can come in all shapes and sizes but there can always be more to fix about ourselves; to become, or appear, more perfect. This concept of women having to conform to what is considered the feminine ideal is nothing new. The idea that women are valued based on the perception of others, specifically men, as portrayed in Ovid’s Pygmalion and Hesiod’s Works and Days, has been the central idea, or issue, in many contemporary works of art precisely because this idea still seems relevant in modern society.…
Throughout history female figures have played an important role as subject matter. The female figure is very subjective, as peered through the different lenses of varying cultures. The status and functions of women in these cultures are the primary factors that influence how they are portrayed in art of a certain culture. However, the female figure itself through its natural and inherent iconography represents fertility and the importance of women in society. This natural iconography creates certain parallels in content between all works that use the female figure as subject matter. This varying subjectivity of a female’s status based on an artist’s culture will create differences in content and themes; however some aspects remain similar to most art with a female subject. Parallels, content inconsistencies, and how culture affects these, is visible in the Shango Shrine Figure, Athena Parthenos, and Venus of Willendorf.…
Women were not equals in the Age of Reason. Their education was deemed of little importance. They were to accept their role as “pleaser”. In marital roles they had limited property rights and physical abuse was not against the law. Women were considered intellectual and physical inferiors, who were in need of both direction and protection from their male counterparts. In paintings, females were often depicted as soft and helpless, as shown in Jacques-Louis Davids ' painting “Oath of the Horatii.” In this particular painting the women are pictured sitting, wearing muted shades of pink, with heads facing the ground. The men stand strong, wearing bright shades of red, with their heads tilted upwards. This painting is in part a reflection on the view of women in this era.…
Nochlin argues the importance of asking the question, “Why have there been no great women artists?” by offering many of it’s implications. She suggests that by simply asking this question we realize how conditioned we’ve been to accept the white Western male viewpoint as the dominant and, perhaps, even the only accepted viewpoint because it’s the only one we’ve ever known. She continues on to explain how many institutional limitations rather than individual limitations, such as female artists not having access to nude models in a period of time where it was necessary for artists to achieve greatness, and the historical role and expectations of women in society, have prohibited women from being accomplished artists.…