From Venus to Medusa, How Does Art Code the Objectification of Women?


THE WOMAN IN THE PICTURE
What Does Culture Do with Women’s Bodies?
by Catherine McCormack

In “Women in Painting,” writer, scholar, and art curator Catherine McCormack confronts the inexhaustible issue of women as objects of interest in Western visual art and elsewhere. She is not the first: the self-image of woman has long been a nurturing of critics such as John Berger (“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”), Sigmund Freud (cf. “castration complex”) and film theorist. Laura Mulvey wrote in 1975 that “in a world regulated by sexual instability, the pleasure of looking is split between active/male and passive/female.”

McCormack continues these lines of interrogation by considering the various familiar, limited shapes that the female figure has had to take on the canvas: the dead, floating Ophelias; eternal holy Madonnas; robbed leisure women; persecuted spouses; flirty fairies and angry gods – all fetishized and tragic. Yes, McCormack says, women are sometimes peers; but it is mostly looked at, at least in the canon.

This is the author’s second book after 2019’s “The Art of Looking Up,” an exploration of classical ceiling art, from the azul tiles of the Imam Mosque of Iran to the Medici frescoes in Italy. Its more controversial sequel is as poignant and provocative about motherhood as the two-part exhibition “Motherhood and Motherhood” curated at the Richard Saltoun Gallery in London in 2019 and 2020.

“Women in Painting” opens with a rather pedestrian encounter from the author’s own experience. During a visit to the National Gallery in London, McCormack, whose baby is bouncing on his hip, is approached by a male stranger and told him, “I wouldn’t have looked too closely at the symbolism of that.” He looks at “The Tale of Griselda,” a 15th-century triptych whose central focus is “a long-haired woman surrounded by a herd of men in tights and an animal zoo.” Men talk a lot in the picture.” McCormack cannot find shelter in the corner, escaping the stranger’s “boring ‘talk to the man’”; Here, he sees another Renaissance painting hanging: “a woman lying on the floor with her throat pierced, blood oozing from her carotid artery, and a deep cut on her forearm. his wrists were already clenched in a severe mortis; Her high round breasts and slightly curved stomach were revealed horribly.

Such archetypal figures that mark the collective consciousness organize the chapters of the book. Venus, as befits the first, is particularly immersive, the range of poses covering the celestial world (“Venus coelitis conceived as a pure and extraterrestrial female body that stirs thoughts about divine love and the beauty of the soul”) and earthly (“Venus vulgaria was earth-bound Venus associated with fertility, sex, reproduction, and the beauty of the living world”). The episode “Girls and Dead Girls” asks us to question our own responses to Titian’s painting “The Rape of Europe”. Do we share Europa’s desperation? Writer. Or are we accelerating in the excitement of conquering it? A star episode called “Monster Women” asks, “whether Medusa was a Black African god originally from Libya…a question classical scholars would like to shrug and ax.”

However, McCormack’s analysis gets stuck in pop culture. It describes public disagreements over female pubic hair, from celebrities to Cosmopolitan polls (“Social expectations about the female body, hairless pubic areas – expectations encoded by the smoothness of Venus imagery”); Menstrual policy on Instagram in 2015 that censored poet Rupi Kaur for posting a photo of her lying in bed, her sheets and pajamas stained with menstrual blood; and the 2014 Paper Magazine cover, a glass “perched on the anatomically impossible (photoshopped) butt” of Kim Kardashian. A reinterpretation of these issues is generally read as an attempt to be “up-to-date”, which feels redundant given the topicality of the work.

“Woman in the Picture” brings a sensitive and questioning critique to the motifs, predetermined poses and mannerisms of the female figure in art. If feminism aspires to make itself obsolete, McCormack’s project now longs for a future as it criticizes such stances – skinned victims, seducers, and genderless “mamas”. It is for now.



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