Myths of "Sensibility"

By ROBERT HUGHES

According to one legend, the art of painting was invented by a Greek potter's daughter, who traced the shadow of her swain's profile by candlelight on a cave wall. In the centuries since then, the opposite view of sexual roles in art has prevailed--namely, that the heights of creation are inaccessible to women, whose misfortune it is to possess something called a "feminine sensibility." This is largely a fantasy, akin to the one found in literature (see BOOKS). But every woman artist at work today still has to contend with it.

For all we know, the Pyramids might have been designed by women, and the Bayeux tapestry almost certainly was; but ever since art history began to be systematically written, its heroes have all been men. From Praxiteles through Michelangelo to Cezanne and Matisse, the sex of Western genius never varies. Where were the great women artists? Silence. "The fact of the matter is," argued Art Historian Linda Nochlin in a brilliant essay for Art News, "that there have been no supremely great women artists, although there have been many interesting and good ones; nor have there been any great Lithuanian jazz pianists, nor Eskimo tennis players, no matter how much we might wish there had been."

No chauvinist conspiracy of art historians was needed to keep major women artists from emerging, for the social conditions of art practice since the Renaissance have ensured that they had very little chance. Women were excluded from the artists' guilds of the 15th and 16th centuries, and later from the academies. Until the end of the 19th century, they were forbidden to draw from the nude in art schools, a crippling prohibition since the human figure remained the basis of "high art."

Branded. It is barely an exaggeration to say that by 1900 women had no visual culture they could call their own. Only two art activities were left to them. Well brought-up girls could do small watercolors, which were considered signs of "accomplishment," like a precarious tinkling on the pianoforte. Poorer girls, on the other hand, could make craft objects like pots or quilts. But such craftwork was also by reigning definition not high art. Since women's talent had been deprived of a social context in which it could make art, there was no problem in branding it as minor by nature.

Hence the myth of feminine sensibility. It is not so much an idea as a rendezvous for a flock of adjectives: sweet, refined, minor, sensitive, nuanced, emotional, lyrical, pastel, and so on. The opposite list would be the favorite lexicon of praise for most New York painting since 1950, the attributes of the macho masterpiece: harsh, brusque, major, obsessive, direct, intellectual, tragic, primary. The result of the stereotype is an ingrained reluctance to take women artists as seriously as men.

It took 40 years' work in comparative obscurity before Alice Neel--now 64--won some recent recognition as one of the few artists capable of preserving the expressionist portrait as a live form (as in The Family, 1971). If an artist like Georgia O'Keeffe, Helen Frankenthaler or Louise Nevelson manages, by prolonged and single-minded concentration on work, to annul the prejudice against women, it is assumed that she has "transcended the limits" of her sexual class. Thus Nevelson's austere and formidable constructions like Black Crescent, in the very act of "escaping" the stereotype, may confirm it for others. As Art Critic Barbara Rose points out in a recent book on Helen Frankenthaler, her work was routinely patronized for its "feminine" qualities: "Judged by the norms ... of the prevailing de Kooning style that Frankenthaler rejected, her art was seen as reckless, thin, uncontrolled, uncomposed, lacking in impact, and too sweet in color." Today, it is possible to see her best work as a triumph of sensuous integration: that iron sweetness, that blooming and expansive surge of color, is unequaled among living American artists.

Femininity, to some nostrils, is a kind of scent that gets left on the work of art by skin contact. Sometimes it is a matter of technique: if Canadian-born Joyce Wieland executes a series of tenderly ironic icons of her native landscape, like Spring Tree, 1971, and does them by quilting, sewing and stuffing various cloths, it will inevitably be related to the small world of the sewing box; whereas if Claes Oldenburg sews and stuffs, it must be for other reasons.

Fatuous. The truth seems to be that there is no way, iconographic, stylistic or other, to tell the sex of an artist by looking at her or his work. Who was more "feminine" in paint handling, Renoir or Sonia Delaunay? In terms of the stereotype, the answer would have to be Renoir. It is easy, once one has seen the name of Joan Snyder affixed to her recent painting Smashed Strokes Hope, 1972, to attribute a feminine sensibility to those glowing, flecked, dispersed blotches and runs of green, gold and crimson. But when this painting is set alongside other recent abstracts by (male) New York artists, the distinction is fatuous: Snyder's work concedes nothing to them in strength, decisiveness and pictorial intelligence. So, too, with Patricia Steir's Blue, and the work of a dozen other young women artists: Nancy Graves, Lynda Benglis, Rosemarie Castoro, Dorothea Rockburne, and so on.

The first dialogue of art is always with other art. Hence the desire of most women who make art to be known as artists first and only incidentally as women. "To be put in any category not defined by one's work," states Portraitist Elaine de Kooning, "is to be falsified." Eva [Hesse, the brilliantly gifted German-born sculptor who died two years ago of a brain tumor at the age of 34, is a case in point: her work belonged, and contributed on exactly level terms, to the kind of antiformalist direction in American sculpture that Robert Morris' felt pieces and Carl Andre's floor sculpture also represented.

At the same time, one can see in the art of some women sensations and emotions which are very much part of the darker side of their experience: Nancy Grossman's leather-bound heads, for instance, are veritable nightmares of repression. "The work is me, my experience," says Grossman. "Everyone is a sadomasochist. The difference between me and other artists is that I admit it." So her masks, like Mary, 1971, are both armor and prison; the face and the implied personality behind it are abolished by the protective skin.

The debate over what is (and what is not) a female experience as distinct from feminine sensibility will no doubt go on for years, especially among the more politically committed women artists; and no doubt it will produce its abundant quota of bad, programmatic ideological illustration. No matter. The important thing is that the assumed imbalance of talent in the visual arts has begun to alter, and that Virginia Woolf s sadly true remark, " 'Anonymous' was a woman," may not describe the future.

Robert Hughes

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.