WOMEN IN THE PICTURE

A feminist confronts the representations of women’s bodies in the art world.

London-based art historian McCormack, the founder and course director of the Women and Art study program at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, focuses on the representation of women in art and the “roles that western culture has created for [women] as mothers, monsters and maidens” in pursuit of the “unattainably perfect Venus.” The author begins with Diego Velázquez’s famous 17th-century painting the Rokeby Venus (also known by other names), a woman “cast as little more than a rich man’s plaything,” and the scandal that erupted over its attempted 1914 destruction by a British suffragette. McCormack delves into how, over centuries—Botticelli, Titian, Picasso, Modigliani, Hottentot Venus, ads for the removal of female body hair, the anti-Venus paintings of Debra Cartwright—Venus “has been employed to make ideal versions of femininity seem normal and to teach us patriarchy’s version of sex.” This conception “satisfies a default male heterosexual gaze and leaves actual female desire without a language, without even a voice.” The “routinely overlooked” mothering paintings of Berthe Morisot capture “seemingly straightforward domestic images freighted with psychodrama and existential uncertainty,” challenging the classic Madonna and Child archetype. Art and advertising, writes the author, still struggle with depictions of breastfeeding and birthing as well as nonbinary and nonbiological mothers. The abduction, rape, sacrifice, and victimhood of the maiden, as in Titian’s The Rape of Europa, McCormack ruefully notes, has been a common subject in images and stories since the Greeks, aestheticizing violence against women into easily digestible pop culture and art. It’s time, she writes, “to see the separation between what we find intolerable in real life and what we lionise in monuments and works of art,” and she introduces us to a new generation of female artists who are doing just that.

A timely, succinct, aesthetic inquiry into debates about sexuality, objectification, and representation.