Art Quarreling over Quality

By EDWARD M. GOMEZ PARIS

Mention feminism and art in the same breath, and some art critics begin to fume. "The feminist movement has not come up with a single talent heretofore unknown to us," insists Hilton Kramer, the founding editor of the New Criterion, a monthly arts review. "It tells us nothing about the qualities one should be studying in a work of art." But those are fighting words to the legions of artists, critics and scholars who have devoted the past 20 years to developing a feminist critique of art history. Their efforts have virtually set the agenda for academic discussion and have begun to overturn the standard textbook reading of visual art as an orderly march of styles from cave paintings to postmodernism.

Chipping away at the cultural canon, feminist artists beginning in the 1970s sought to rewrite art history to include overlooked female talents. Miriam Schapiro, Judy Chicago, Nancy Spero and other U.S. artists and historians, along with colleagues in Europe, began to exhume female artists of the past. They included medieval mystics and such Renaissance artists as Cremona-born Sofonisba Anguissola, who painted at the court of Philip II of Spain, and Artemisia Gentileschi of Rome, a painter's daughter who, like her father, was influenced by Caravaggio's eye-popping naturalism. To feminist admirers, the value of these women's paintings is self-evident. But some scholars complain that the sex of an artist has nothing to do with the quality of a work.

This issue of quality lies at the heart of the debate between supporters and foes of the feminist critique. What does it mean to say that a given painting or sculpture has the enduring quality of a masterpiece? Who defines this, and what biases does it reflect? Traditionally, quality has referred to the degree of excellence and accomplishment in a work of art, reflected in its form or ! content. The term is used to identify artists who demonstrate the highest technical skills and most mature or "serious" treatment of their subject matter. Works of the highest quality, or masterpieces, serve as yardsticks by which to measure all other works: the good, the bad or the mere passing fad. But feminists like art professor Whitney Chadwick of San Francisco State University insist that there simply is no "objective factor called quality that someone sophisticated and knowledgeable can immediately deduce."

Chadwick, author of the recent book Women, Art and Society, and like-minded scholars argue that a work of art reflects the culture, the times and also the sex of its creator. They contend that a mostly white male heterosexual establishment has shaped the form and content as well as the critical evaluation of Western art, giving scant attention to female artists whose work may reflect a sensibility different from theirs. "The old belief held that a work of art was the same, no matter when or where or who looked at it," says Linda Nochlin, a Yale University art professor and a leading feminist historian. "The 'new' art history considers the gender of both artist and observer." For whose pleasure, for example, have all the female nudes in Western art been painted or sculpted?

The subject is explosive, says Chadwick, because to question quality not only challenges cultural history but also "threatens the dealers, curators, critics and auctioneers who control the system that assigns value to artists' works." That may be so, says Kirk Varnedoe, director of the department of painting and sculpture at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, who does not completely accept or reject the feminist critique. But to dismiss the notion of quality, he says, also challenges the very purpose of art criticism and art appreciation. Says Varnedoe: "One is never relieved of the burden of making judgments about relative quality -- nor should one be."

While the scholars squabble, practicing artists such as Schapiro, Chicago and Spero have tried to create a new, women's art. Their work has incorporated techniques of traditional "women's work" -- quilting, embroidery, crafts -- or explored female sexuality. Inspired by Islamic and Near Eastern designs, Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff and others have produced large works resembling huge swatches of patterned fabric. Their tableaux infused geometric abstraction's smooth, minimalist surfaces with an explosion of zigzags and curlicues. Thus during the 1970s emerged the style called pattern and decoration.

Of course, not all female artists today are overtly feminist. Gender has not explicitly been an issue in the work of Susan Rothenberg or Jennifer Bartlett, two of the most successful contemporary painters. Nor does it dominate the work of media artist Jenny Holzer, who this year became the first woman to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale. Still, the force of feminism has helped improve the odds that a female artist's work will be exhibited and taken seriously. This year's most visible example was "The Decade Show," a three-museum summer exhibition in New York City that featured a multiracial roster of artists, including many women.

"Feminism seeded the democratization of art," says Schapiro. Traditionalists may snicker, but under its influence mainstream critical discourse has broadened to consider the social, historical and political contexts in which art is produced. Rediscovered female artists are not listed in every syllabus, but more and more students, art educators point out, are eager to learn about ignored talents. How to select which ones to study? Says Spero: "It's so subjective. It always comes down to that old chestnut, quality." Whether feminists like it or not, the viewer's quest for quality may be as fundamental, and inevitable, as the artist's urge to create.

With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York