1' Mary Cassatt Mother and Child, 1905

1
1. Mary CassattMother and Child, 1905

• This portrays a naked child being shown herself
  by her much-draped mother. Soon the little girl
  will have left her early unself-consciousness
  behind in her haste to assume the identity
  required by society. It is a charming and
  terrifying enactment of the socialization process.

2
2. Mary CassattGirl Arranging Her Hair, 1886

• The origin of this piece is instructive. Degas
  challenged Cassatt to make a beautiful painting
  from what he called an ugly subject, this
  adolescent (and lower-class) maid looking into
  the mirror as questiongly and insecurely as we
  all do. Cassatt saw and showed Degas (and us) the
  natural beauty of this everyday ritual.

3
3. Paula Modersohn-BeckerWorpswede Peasant Girl

• In this drawing of a homely peasant girl, her
  hair pulled back off the high forehead, shoulders
  slumped forward, Modersohn-Becker shows us a face
  and body type rarely, if ever. included in art by
  males. She is the wallflower type. The impact on
  women's self-image of centuries of idealized
  representations has been to falsify our own sense
  of our physical selves.

4
4. Paula Modersohn-BeckerNude Study

• We are reminded of that crucial period, a
  kind of turning point in women's lives when we
  become painfully self-conscious about our own
  bodies, aware of our vulnerability. We recognize
  this arm gesture, the pulling in - the way we
  felt sometimes in gym classes.

5
5. Gwen JohnGirl with Bare Shoulders, 1909

• Gwen John too is interested in picturing
  different body types than are traditionally found
  in the history of art with the dual portrait that
  she did of her friend, Fenella Lovell. She
  painted her in this first portrait clothed and in
  the next, as you will see, unclothed. Goya, the
  famous Spanish painter, had done two versions of
  his beautiful mode! - one nude for himself and
  one clothed for her husband, and Gwen John is
  saying to us, humorously really, that she could
  do the same.

6
6. Gwen JohnNude Girl, 1909

• In the nude version the model's expression
  seems to show an advance in openness and trust
  between the model and the artist. It is
  interesting that the faces have been important in
  most of these works - a real change in the
  convention of nude studies.

7
7. Paula Modersohn-BeckerSeated Nude, 1906

• Here you see the young girl in a kind of
  puberty rite. She is surrounded by such images of
  growth as flowers, fruits, bowls, and jewelry.
  Certainty the point here is not that she is nude
  - that is incidental - but clothes would be even
  more incidental.

8
8. Paula Modersohn-BeckerSelf-Portrait, 1906

• Modersohn-Becker then goes a step further,
  painting herself nude, with beads and flowers.
  This is the first such painting that we know of
  by a woman artist and it represents a tremendous
  advance in the willingness to disclose oneself as
  a woman. Women artists in the past have tended to
  paint themselves in glorious hats, with palette
  and brush, showing their status as artists.

9
9. Suzanne ValadonNude Self-Portrait

• Valadon also painted herself nude, and though
  her style and spirit are quite different from
  Modersohn-Becker's we have the same sense and
  great privilege of sharing an entirely honest
  moment with the artist

10
10. Frances GillespieSelf-Portrait

• With Fran Gillespie we feel even more that
  she has divested herself not only of clothing but
  of roles she is not coming to us as a woman
  artist or as anything other than herself. She
  does not make herself important here, but her
  face and gaze nonetheless compel our attention
  and make us acknowledge her as a person. The
  perspective seems altogether different than in
  most nude studies.

11
11. Charley TooropSelf-Portrait, 1944-45

• Charley Toorop does not undress to show us
  herself, yet the intense self-portraiture showing
  the marks life has left upon her is as vivid here
  as in any of the nudes we have looked at. We
  focus upon her with an intensity equal to her
  own. There is no vanity, and what is more, total
  honesty as to her frayed nerves.

12
12. Frida KahloThe Broken Column

• In this radically autobiographical work, Kahlo
  not only shows herself nude, but she shows how
  her body felt. When an adolescent, she had a
  terrible accident, and all her life after had to
  wear a surgical corset much like this one. She
  felt the kind of physical pain you feel when you
  look at this painting, but she still was able to
  make art out of it, even to make a pun out of it
  in the title.

13
13. Frida KahloMy Nurse and I

• Again Frida does something radical and
  unexpected, interpreting this traditional scene
  as an allegory of her mixed parentage, her small
  white European body being nourished by massive
  Mother Mexico.

14
14. Frida KahloThe Two Fridas

• Again depicting this double parentage, the artist
  adds to the levels of the painting her feeling of
  being split in two when her husband, Diego
  Rivera, left her.

15
15. Amrita Sher-gilTwo Girls, 1939

• Another painter who shares and uses this double
  ethnicity, Sher-gil had a European father and an
  Indian mother. The work also reflects a frequent
  dream women have of joyous embrace between the
  dark sister and the fair sister.

16
16. Leonor FiniThe Doubles

• Are we double or half? Do we find our mirror
  opposites in one another's reflections? The
  recurrence of the double figures is intriguing,
  to say the least. For example, in this work the
  shadow self and the foreground self seem about to
  merge, to slip into focus, to become one in what
  would almost be an alchemical union between the
  silver and the gold into a perfect metal.

17
17. Mary Cassatt The Loge

• And here in a much less symbolic setting, two
  sisters at the theatre give a similar impression
  of being two sides of one another, the observed
  and the observer. The fan seems to divide the one
  Alice from the other in the Looking Glass.

18
18. Charley TooropTwo Sisters

• A very different sort of work visually, and yet
  again showing a close interrelationship between
  the elder and younger sister where they act out
  different sides of themselves - the dark and the
  fair again perhaps. Which will triumph and
  dominate the final identity?

19
19. Dorothea Tanning The Mirror

• A recurrent and very frightening dream is that we
  will one day look into the mirror and see no
  reflection. Who is the fairest of them all? No
  answer. This allegory of nonidentity comes from
  fear of desertion and death, from dependence upon
  an insufficiently integrated self.

20
20. Ernestine MillsMermaid Overwhelmed by
Octopus, c. 1910

• In this remarkable piece the mermaid is being
  swallowed up by a monster strangely akin to
  herself. What is terrifying is that she is not
  even struggling!

21
21. Leonor FiniThe Useless Dress

• The dress is worse than useless, as with the
  false modesty and passivity of a Virginia or an
  Ophelia, we let its weight pull us down. Many
  women's stories end right there, and poets have
  for centuries sung romantically of young maidens
  who have drowned themselves in despair, literally
  or symbolically.

22
22. Romaine BrooksThe Passage

• In this strange work, the sleeping beauty seems
  to be floating in a trance of passivity even
  with no clothes to pull her down she looks like
  one of those drowned maidens.

23
23. Dorothea GreenbaumThe Drowned Girl, 1950

• When anonymous, inert bodies are raised out of
  local rivers, they become the female equivalent
  of the Unknown Soldier, dead for love and honor
  Dorothea Greenbaum has carved the archetype in
  marble here.

24
24. Lenore Thomas StrausIllustration from her
autobiography, The Tender Stone

• These hands are much more actively involved in
  their fate, and we have a sense of a willing
  descent rather than a forced one. She is
  confident that her strength and natural
  ebullience will allow her return - the richer for
  this journey to the depths of the self.

25
25. Kathe Kollwitz... resting in the peace of
His hands

• Again a relinquishing in this tombstone which
  Kollwitz sculpted for herself and her family she
  seems to be sleeping but also being born again,
  held in the embrace of these hands.

26
26. Kathe Kollwitz Pieta, 1937

• This piece introduces so many themes important to
  women and begins a somewhat different section in
  this program. Again, it is the Mother and Child
  we see, but the former does not look pious or
  reconciled to giving up her son, though she holds
  his hand tenderly. She appears to be thinking
  instead about the question that women must ask
  "Is it worth the struggle of giving birth,
  nurturing and raising children, to have them
  sacrificed on the altar of meaningless wars?"

27
27. Charley Toorop Working Woman, 1942-43

• Though this picture of a woman looking out over
  the ruins of Europe after World War II is not a
  traditional pieta, we see the same questioning in
  her eyes and feeling of loss in her empty hands.

28
28. Ruzhena ZatkovaThe Monster of War, 1914

• This piece uses an entirely different medium to
  convey the mechanical inhumanity, and the
  inevitability of modern war.
  

29
29. Kathe Kollwitz Nie Wieder Kriege

• This lithograph, one of Kollwitz's most effective
  posters, calling for Never Again War, was used in
  Vietnam demonstrations. Kollwitz, in one of her
  last conversations with her granddaughter, gave
  this profession of faith "But one day, a new
  ideal will arise, and there will be an end to all
  wars. I die convinced of this. It will need much
  hard work, but it will be achieved."

30
30. Hannah Hoch Cut with the Kitchen
Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural
Epoch, 1919

• This is a quite explicit response to Fascism.
  Hoch uses collage and newsprint as Picasso does
  in Guernica - to show how the media serves up
  disasterevery morning with our breakfast.

31
31. Louise Nevelson Homage to 6,000,000,1964

• Nevelson tells of her depression during World War
  II when her son Myron was on a U-boat, gone for
  six months at a time. "I went inside, inside
  myself," and began working with black boxes. This
  impressive carved piece is a later development of
  that form. As you walk toward the work, it evokes
  a sense of reverence appropriate to such a
  monument. It is a very great work and, like
  Vieira da Silva's Disaster (1942), not shown
  here, it salvages something at least from the
  darkness.

32
32. MarisolThe Generals

• Marisol, in a more simplified way than Hoch, also
  makes a statement against war with her sculpture
  of the two generals riding stiffly on their hobby
  horse, implying that war is just men playing with
  their -deadly - toys.

33
33. Lilly Martin Spencer War Spirit at Home,
1866 The Newark Museum

• From another phase of American history, these
  charming babes get into the spirit all right.
  They are celebrating victory more than peace, the
  excitement of war and of winning, and this all
  learned right at home. Create a patriotic fervor
  early so that the children will know to enlist,
  to jump on the band-wagon. The government, after
  all, needs the cooperation of the family unit to
  carry on its wars.

34
34. May StevensBig Daddy Draped

• "A relative of mine," she answers drily, when
  asked where she found the prototype for her Big
  Daddy series. Indeed this work brings the war
  home in quite a different spirit than in
  Spencer's comparatively innocent patriotism.
  There has certainly been an increase in the
  satirical spirit at home in the past 100 years.
  Stevens explains scrupulously, however "I come
  from Middle America and I think I understand it.
  It is not a simple matter of hating those who
  don't understand and are backward in their
  concepts and damaging to people. I have always
  felt there was a kind of health in working with
  this theme."

35
35. Louise BourgeoisEcho, 1969

• For Stevens the penis is personified, so to
  speak, or replaced by the bulldog in the lap of
  Big Daddy Bourgeois uses the ironic
  juxtaposition of her sculpture with the bodiless
  busts of the fathers of our country.

36
36. Faith RInggoldThe Flag is Bleeding

• As always, Ringgold's conception is so strong it
  makes words superfluous. However, it certainly
  imbues the flag with new meaning to see the
  "we-shall-overcome" linked arms imprisoned behind
  its bars.

37
37. Yvonne CatchingsWar

• This collage sums up many of the foregoing
  images the flag, newsprint, and the
  juxtaposition of soldiers at gun crouch and Dr.
  Spock's baby-care book. The basic contradiction
  between bringing up children so carefully just to
  send them off to war has yet to be resolved.

38
38. Kathe KollwitzTwins, 1935

• Which brings us back inevitably to the always
  relevant Kathe Kollwitz. In this powerful
  sculpture, the mother embraces the children not
  only to show affection, but also to protect them
  she does not want to let them go. Kollwitz tells
  of a dream she had of a baby she could go on
  always holding in her arms
• "It would be one year old and then only two, and
  I would not have to give it away." This mother
  has two infants, and you might almost say one is
  for a "spare." And indeed Kollwitz did give up
  one of her two sons to the war spirit. She never
  got over that loss, quoting Goethe's dictum that
  children are seed corn for the planting and must
  not be ground.

39
39. Frida KahIo My MiscarriageWar is
not the only death bearer, of course,and
miscarriage is another frightful experience of
loss known to many women but not often spoken
of or shared. Frida Kahlo, with her customary
courage painted her lost fetus indeed dealing
with the experience jolted her deeply into her
art and for a long time it was the content of
her work.
40
40. Kathe Kollwltz Knocking at the Doctor's
Office

• Kollwitz's husband was a doctor in the industrial
  area of Berlin, and she often saw women like this
  one knocking at his door. She wanted to sculpt
  them and wrote in her journal "The immobility,
  restraint.introspection. The arms and hands
  dangling heavily, the head lowered, all attention
  directed inward. And the whole thing in heavy,
  heavy stone. Title Pregnancy."

41
41. Alice NeelPregnant Woman, 1970,

• Women artists do not use pregnancy just as a
  symbol of fertility, as in Van Eyck's Arnolfini.
  For them, it is an actual physical condition,
  arousing a variety of responses, as we shall see.
  Alice Neel here leaves nothing to the imagination
  or at least to the idealization. The woman is
  pregnant. The focus is all on her body, not her
  face, and certainly not on the face of the man
  seen only peripherally.

42
42. MarisolThe Famity

• The glittering iconography of this Holy Family is
  so unreal as to throw us off balance. When the
  Christ Child's aura and straw bed has to be
  helped out by a little neon, watch out!

43
43. Suzanne JacksonThere's Something Between Us

• Isn't there something between Marisol's bit of
  gaudy mockery and Alice Neel's almost possessed
  young woman lying on the sofa ? There's Something
  Between Us by the appealing Suzanne Jackson, is a
  tender, ruefully punning acknowledgement of the
  couple's attachment while also admitting that the
  coming baby can get in the way. Even these few
  works make us think about pregnancy in many
  different ways, and we will see that the images
  of motherhood do not receive stock treatment
  either.

44
44. Paula Modersohn-BeckerMother and Child, 1907

• In this unpretentious painting the utilitarian
  and intimate interrelationship between these two
  bodies is seen for what it often is, more sensual
  than sentimental.

45
45. Claudine StellaPastoral No. 16, 17th c.
engraving

• One of the first diaper-changing scenes portrayed
  in art, as far as we know, and the general
  acceptance of this action around the communal
  hearth, where the fire warms the baby's rump, is
  pleasant to see.

46
46. Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun Mme. Vigee-Lebrun and
her Daughter, 1789

• By contrast to that homey scene, there is this
  posed embrace of the artist and her daughter,
  whom she probably saw for a half-hour a day at
  most - one reason they can both look, and even
  be, so sweet. This campaign for the "beauty of
  motherhood" was encouraged in the eighteenth
  century for a complicated set of economic and
  social reasons, and we are still dealing with its
  aftereffects.

47
47. Isabel Bishop Waiting

• There is so much waiting in the lives of women
  and children that it is not surprising to see it
  emerging as a predominant image in the literature
  and art by women. In this wonderfully executed
  vignette, we are brought to feet their closeness,
  their patience with one another, their endurance.

48
48. Suzanne Valadon The Abandoned Doll

• We have here a most common scene in life but an
  unusual one in art - the mother is explaining to
  her daughter the changes taking place in her
  body. The daughter looks into the mirror to see
  if these effects are going to show - already her
  breasts are developing, and then the title image,
  her doll, is thrown down in the right-hand corner
  of the painting. How wonderful that Valadon saw
  this natural and yet emblematic event as
  appropriate subject matter for art. Nothing in
  women's lives need be taboo sending them off to
  a menstruation hut and sending the boys off to
  the gym when the film is shown in junior high are
  equally unnecessary.

49
49. Audrey FlackChanel, 1974

• "Lately, I have dealt with imagery which is
  specific to women... lipstick tubes, jewels,
  makeup, rouge eye shadow, rings, flowers." These
  are powerful and fascinating tools to put in the
  hands of someone who has just thrown down her
  doll.

50
50. Florine StettheimerBeauty Contest

• Pressure will soon be exerted upon the girl to
  start becoming a woman, which can mean competing
  with other women for the best prizes in the great
  on-going beauty contest, where the contestants
  are always being replaced while the judges remain
  the same old men. The private mysterious changes
  taking place in the body of Valadon's young girl
  become a kind of commercial art form. Stettheimer
  catches here the basic American ballyhoo behind
  it all, the ironies inherent in these events.

51
51. Florine Stettheimer The Cathedrals of Fifth
Avenue, 1931

• She sees the basic cash nexus behind many a
  marriage made not in heaven but by Tiffany's, in
  this icon of the fashionable wedding. Note the
  on the grille of the Rolls Royce at the right.

52
52. ColetteVictimized by a Fable, Stitchery

• After the ceremony is over, the preparations
  often turn out to have been inadequate or
  irrelevant, and here we see Eve, in aftershock
  perhaps, left holding the apple.

53
53. Suzanne ValadonAdam and Eve

• This same fable is again being interpreted by a
  woman artist. Although Eve is taking the apple,
  Adam looks guilty within the meaning of the act.
  The reverse modesty here is perhaps a predictable
  out come of the reversal of perspective. No myth
  is safe! The knights beneath the fig leaf, or
  other armor are a various lot.

54
54. Leonor Fini Chtonian Deity Espying the
Slumber of a Young Man

• Here, a gilded youth with his drapery allowing
  just a bit of pubic hair to show, in approved
  erotic fashion.

55
55. Beth van HoesenNo. 24 for The Nude
Man. EtchingMuch less exotic than the previous
sex objects, this comfortable model is from a
series of thirty etchings of male nudes the
artist has done. Again the perspectives and
proportions are telling.
56
56. Lilly Martin Spencer The Young Husband First
Marketing,1856

• Here is an early example of the husband trying to
  help with domestic duties and it was probably the
  artist's own husband who posed here. Notice the
  mocking gentleman in the background who is not
  giving his brother the support he should be!

57
57. Susan Brenner
Molly and SteveA quite
similar beard and face from a very different
time, but also a portrayal of the domestic
species of male far removed from any romantic
fantasies.
58
58. Joyce WielandYoung Woman's Blues

• We can all recognize this imagery even if we do
  not understand the construction, because Joyce
  Wieland understands so much about the special
  quality of women's lives.

59
59. Remedios Varo Mimesis

• And this lady has sat still for so long, she has
  become part of the upholstery - almost an
  occupational hazard for some women. (Chairs
  appear with suspicious frequency in women's art,
  we have noticed.) The cat stares balefully at her
  from the hole in the floor, and whatever is that
  chair up to over in the corner? When the
  furniture is more alive than you are, watch out!

60
60. Sandra OrgelLinen Closet, from Womanhouse

• And here you see, it got her - an image from the
  Womanhouse collective project, where each room
  was created by an artist to show some aspect of
  women's lives.

61
61. Marsha (bailey) Piece for Irvine, 1972

• This controversial piece - a self-portrait
  combining several powerful symbols was
  important to the artist as a kind of overt and
  explicit acting out of the crudest possible
  interpretation of some of the patterns we can
  find in ourselves and in the society in which we
  live.

62
62. Marsha (bailey) Catharsis, 1974

• Two years later she arranged a performance piece
  where she herself ritually burned the image. Here
  is one slide from that evening. Now her work has
  moved on to quite different concerns/but the
  conscious recognition of the power of myth is
  part of the process of progress for many women
  artists.

63
63. Lee BontecouUnfilled

• The sense of vulnerability, of being a target and
  needing armor have been felt in Bontecou's
  heavily fortified canvas, welded and stitched
  into a kind of chastity belt. Actually, it takes
  a woman artist to think of installing zippers!
  Paradoxical images, based at least somewhat on
  the primitive folk art motif of the teethed
  vagina and the psychological archetype of the
  devouring mother, the teeth mother.

64
64. Judy Chicago Female Rejection Drawing, from
the Rejection Quintet 1974

• The peeling back of defenses carefully built up.
  "I did the Rejection Quintet, and there I was,
  out. Internally, I was out, OUT!... I wasn't
  afraid anymore. Now what was I going to do? Now I
  could make art." How to deal with rejection is
  important for any artist and feminist art
  education is working out some techniques. The
  visual image in this piece draws you in to read
  the story.

65
65. Mary BarnesMummy

• Mary Barnes struggled with her own set of fears
  in one of R. D. Laing's "blow-out" centers, as
  she described in Two Accounts of a Journey
  through Madness. She, after much work, got out of
  the mummified shroud just beginning to open here
  the spring orchard and the sunrise are hopeful
  signs.

66
66. May WilsonWestern

• May Wilson worked for a while with these wrapped
  dolls, but she too has moved on past these images
  of stultification, emerged from these bandages
  whole.

67
67. Remedios VaroLight Emerging

• Again this piercing through the walls, the
  layers. What do all these images have in common?
  Do they seem hopeful to you? Horrifying?

68
68. Marsha (bailey)Flight from Within

• These images of beginning to open, to flower, to
  spread our wings are at least as frequent as the
  tight, restricted, girdled, impacted images.
  Notice that this work is by the same artist who
  earlier did the crucifixion.

69
69. Magdalena AbakanowiczAbakan 27, 1967

• This woven piece includes much of this same
  imagery. With no overt message or apparent
  struggle, it celebrates folds, flaps, fur, and
  slender openings with infinite potential.

70
70. Barbara ShawcroftEnvironment

• And here is the artist herself comfortably
  sitting within one of her womblike environments

71
71. Barbara Hepworth
Standing Form

• Hepworth's proudly pierced forms seem like giant
  musical instruments.

72
72. Hildegard von Bingen Cosmos, from her book
Scivias,1125

• Wonderfully analogous to the Hepworth, this
  vision of the cosmos includes tongues of flame,
  complexity and order, an egg-shaped form with a
  beautiful center.

73
73. Remedios VaroStar Pap

• Prom a tidy outpost, this woman handles the
  little matter of the waning and waxing of the
  moon. feeding the captive baby moon ground-up
  stardust as pablum.

74
74. Remedios Varo Exploration of the Fountains
of the Orinoco

• Well-equipped for her venture, in a cup-shaped
  vehicle over which she has perfect control, this
  woman is almost at the source.

75
75. Leonor Fini The Ideal Life

• A powerful self-portrait celebrating the ideal
  life which, according to the artist, is the
  company of a few friends and her many cats.

76
76. Joan DanzigerMagic Sam

• Wonderful creatures like Magic Sam keep Joan
  Danziger company. Often they are equipped with
  musical instruments.

77
77. Niki de Saint Phalle hon (she)

• Those of you who know Niki de Saint Phalle's
  playful black Venus figures will not be surprised
  to see the concept extended in scope to the
  recumbent (and thus nonthreatening despite her
  bulk) hon. All Stockholm strolled up through her,
  pushing their baby carriages, having fun, finding
  somewhere near the heart a Coca Cola machine -
  some say it dispensed milk. The building of the
  piece was an enormous collaborative effort,
  documented in the catalogue it looks as if the
  workers enjoyed it too.

78
78. ClitartistsShe is Light

• A celebration of the new sense of wholeness, the
  power of the circle, and the fun of working
  together after all these years of seoaration.

79
79. Mary Beth Edelson Great Goddess
Series, 1975"Reaching across the centuries we
take the hand of our ancient sisters," she says.
Exploring here possible matriarchies, past and
future, as well as the power of the self to move
upward while keeping one's feet on the ground.
80
8O. Germaine Richier
Hurricane, 1948-49

• This figure has obviously done just that! Here we
  are again with the nude figure, where we all
  begin and end, and again notice the dignity and
  detail in her face. She is of an indeterminate
  age, but she certainly is not the usual nude
  model age. She seems to know who she is and where
  she is going she accepts that her center of
  gravity and of grace is herself.