Betye Saar. African American woman artist who explored racial identity through many mediums

 

The Liberation of Aunt Jemima was born: an assemblage that repositions a derogatory figurine, a product of America’s deep-seated history of racism, as an armed warrior. It’s become both Saar’s most iconic piece and a symbol of black liberation and radical feminist art—one which legendary Civil Rights activist Angela Davis would later credit with launching the black women’s movement.

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-betye-saar-transformed-aunt-jemima-symbol-black-power

A cherished exploration of objects and the way we use them to provide context, connection, validation, meaning, and documentation within our personal and universal realities, marks all of Betye Saar's work. As an African-American woman, she was ahead of her time when she became part of a largely man's club of new assemblageartists in the 1960s. Since then, her work, mostly consisting of sculpturally-combined collages of found items, has come to represent a bridge spanning the past, present, and future; an arc that paves a glimpse of what it has meant for the artist to be black, female, spiritual, and part of a world ever-evolving through its technologies to find itself heavily informed by global influences. This kaleidoscopic investigation into contemporary identity resonates throughout her entire career, one in which her work is now duly enveloped by the same realm of historical artifacts that sparked her original foray into art. Over time, Saar's work has come to represent, via a symbolically rich visual language, a decades' long expedition through the environmental, cultural, political, racial, and economic concerns of her lifetime.

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/saar-betye/

Judy Chicago. Pioneering Feminist Artist

 

Small, feisty and dynamic, Judy Chicago was one of the pioneers of Feminist art in the 1970s, a movement that endeavored to reflect women's lives, call attention to women's roles as artists, and alter the conditions under which contemporary art was produced and received. In the process, Feminist art questioned the authority of the male-dominated Western canon and posed one of the most significant challenges to modernism, which was at the time wholly preoccupied with conditions of formalism as opposed to personal narrative and political activity. 

Seeking to redress women's traditional underrepresentation in the visual arts, Chicago focused on female subject matter, most famously in her work The Dinner Party (1979), which celebrates the achievements of women throughout history, scandalizing audiences with her frank use of vaginal imagery. In her work, Chicago employed the "feminine" arts long relegated to the lowest rungs of the artistic hierarchy, such as needlework and embroidery. Chicago articulated her feminist vision not only as an artist, but also as an educator and organizer, most notably, in co-founding of the Feminist Art Program at Cal State Fresno as well as the installation and performance space, Womanhouse.

Her gender politics, sometimes abrasive, forceful personality and focus on sexual imagery to represent women, as well as bringing to the fore the millions of women who have been written out of history are as controversial now as they were in 1979. There still seems to be little understanding of the complexities of the 70's and feminist art is STILL "written out" or seen as marginal or irrelevant. What's the famous quote - those who don't know history are domed to repeat it? Unfortunately, the younger generations of feminists are, by and large, ignorant of their own foremothers and waste a lot of time reinventing the wheel.

in a recent interview, she went on to say, “What I have been after from the beginning is a redefinition of the role of the artist, a reexamination of the relation of art and community, and a broadening of the definitions of who controls art and, in fact, an enlarged dialogue about art, with new and more diverse participants.” 

 

Because feminists had (and have) an interest in challenging elitist systems of value, the fact that the Dinner Party was visually inaccessible for most of the last two decades speaks volumes about the place of feminist art. The use of the female labia and the central iconography of the piece speak to the need to examine it as a serious work placed with its historical setting with ramifications beyond the 70’s. Berger’s theory on the gaze is as relevant then as now – the difference between the naked and the nude. The Dinner Party’s pudenda imagery is nothing if not naked, proudly and defiantly so, and all the more “shocking” because the piece was created by a body of (mostly) women, using the “womanly” crafts of pottery, china painting and embroidery. Portrayals of male and female genitalia abound in art but as part of a larger image; this was the first time that the part that had discretely veiled was so openly displayed without apology. 

I remember when I first saw it. The amount of women’s history presented there was overwhelming and I filled a notebook with names to research. Plate after plate of women’s names and achievements, most of whom had been written out of the history books, were handed to us on a plate, as it were. I did think at the time that not all the pieces were visually successful which is logical in a project of this size and complexity. But I also thought – then and now - Dear god, how many years must we talk about her "quality of work." the woman made history - did what no man has (and never could) done. But that's not enough! We must go back to the question if we "like" it or not. We have to discuss if it’s high brow enough or skilled enough (although in what way skilled? By whose standards?)

 

To those who criticize, I want to say, “Do you like every guy in art history?” There are whole genres of art out there that I do not care for, but I never attack, attack, attack and question it and rip it to shreds with a dismissive "it's lousy.” It doesn't matter whether we like Chicago or not. Her influence is immense.

 

Men are now claiming craft and communal art making and embroidery and all the rest of it. It's big in the art news. Just about every week we have a new man coming into town to talk about craft. Now these men have taken the (traditionally) women's art and make great speeches and made it all their own. No one is saying the quality of work is shit or that it's just fucking embroidery. When women made quilts, they were just quilts, but when men make quilts they get hung in the Museum of Modern Art. Funny huh?

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Painter of the 18th century rich and fashionable

 ANYBODY WHO WAS SOMEBODY KNOCKED AT HIS DOOR

Age 17. Examining himself. Like any teen-ager, really, except with tons of artistic talent! Joshua Reynolds, whose day is today.

Born on this day in 1723, in Plympton, Devon, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Painter of portraits. Here taking a good look at himself for his own portrait at age 24.

Reynolds was born at Plympton in Devon, the son of a headmaster who never had 10 cents to rub together. His self-portrait of 1747 or thereabouts, which shows the future Sir Joshua as a rather worried and - for all the elegance of his blue silk waistcoat - a still somewhat countrified young man. Shading his eyes from a strong overhead light, he stares far into the distance, as if time and not space were the subject of the painting. How would time treat him?

In time, very well. 

He became a  fellow of Balliol College, Oxford: a more educated background than that of most painters. He was apprenticed in 1740 to the fashionable London portraitist Thomas Hudson, who also trained Wright of Derby. He spent 1749-52 abroad, mainly in Italy, and set up practice in London shortly after his return.

He soon established himself as the leading portrait painter, though he was never popular with George III. He was a key figure in the intellectual life of London, and a friend of Dr Johnson. When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, Reynolds was elected its first President. Although believing that history painting was the noblest work of the painter, he had little opportunity to practise it, and his greatest works are his portraits. Anybody who was somebody knocked on his door for a portrait. 

Caption from the museum This picture, presented to the National Gallery in 1847, and subsequently transferred to Tate in 1951, has for many years been among Reynolds's best known works. In the nineteenth century it was deeply admired and frequently copied, National Gallery records revealing that between its acquisition and the end of the century no fewer than 323 full-scale copies in oil were made. The picture was not a commissioned portrait but a character study, or 'fancy picture', as the genre was known in the eighteenth century. The present title was not invented by Reynolds, but derives from an engraving of 1794, the second impression of which was inscribed 'The Age of Innocence'. Traditionally, it is has been thought that the picture was painted in 1788. However, it is very probably identifiable with a work exhibited by Reynolds at the Royal Academy in 1785, and entitled simply 'a little girl'. On 8 April 1785 The Morning Herald, previewing Reynolds's proposed exhibits for the forthcoming Royal Academy exhibition, noted: 'An Infant Girl, disposed on a grass plat in an easy attitude. The companion to it is a girl fondling a bird. These subjects are fancy studies of Sir Joshua's and do him honour'.

Keeping their hands busy with ladylike occupations, the Ladies Waldegrave in 1780. Also celebrating Big Hair.

This portrait shows Captain Robert Orme (1725-90) at the age of 31, during the war against the French for supremacy in the North American colonies. The portrait was not commissioned by the sitter or his relatives, and was never owned by him, but was painted on speculation by Reynolds with the hope of selling it or displaying it to gain more work.  

Anne, Countess of Albermarle. 

Charming and happy girls with their dogs. 

Master Bunbury in 1780, looking sad and lonely because No dog! And then, Francis George Hare in 1788, dogless. The tragedy of boys without dogs 

He did not care if in their everyday life some of his sitters were rather too free with their favors. (If his portrait of Mrs. Abington in Congreve's ''Love for Love'' makes her look irresistibly naughty, we can be sure that Reynolds knew just what he was doing.) Never one to pass judgment, he was as much at home with the highbred nymphomaniac and the homosexual dilettante halfway out of the closet as he was with the man of war, the empire builder, the architect, the maker of the pioneer English dictionary, the antiquarian and the professor of moral philosophy

It was Joshua Reynolds who gave us an enduring idea of what an exceptional Englishman or Englishwoman might be expected to look like.

Of course, he was not without flaws.  From a NY Times article on his work, ''indiscriminate use of concoctions made of varnish, Venice turpentine, wax, eggs and other miscellaneous ingredients had dire consequences for the structural adhesion of various layers of paint to one another and, in combination, to the support.''

Nor did it escape notice that, although Reynolds became president of a potentially great academy, he had never had the kind of rigorous academic training that was taken for granted elsewhere in Europe. He was never much of a draftsman, his anatomy was shaky, and his command of linear perspective no less so.

All this he concealed as best he could. Though the most metropolitan of men, he dreaded to tackle a London interior. 

Gainsborough may have been a greater painter but he claimed, ". ''I can from a sincere heart say. that I have always admired and sincerely loved Sir Joshua Reynolds.''  So there is no shame for us who love him as well 

ANYBODY WHO WAS SOMEBODY KNOCKED AT HIS DOOR

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Reynolds

Käthe Kollwitz. She looked to change the world through her art.

I am in the world to change the world, Kathie Kollwitz 

 Fiercely committed to portraying the plights of workers and peasants, Käthe Kollwitz rendered the grief and harrowing experiences of both historical and contemporary wars in the first decades of the 20th century. Bucking usual artistic trends, Kollwitz adopted printmaking as her primary medium, and drawing from her own socialist and anti-war sentiments, she harnessed the graphic and expressive powers of the medium to present to the public an unvarnished look at the root causes and long-lasting effects of war. While her interest in printmaking and sometimes her subject matter coincided with the Expressionist painters in Germany, she remained independent from them, charting her own path in the burgeoning world of modern art. 

In following the example of Goya's print series, The Disasters of War, Kollwitz's depictions of rebellion, poverty, and loss refuse the melodrama of war and sacrifice and instead concentrate on specific personal experiences that can be understood by many. In addition to her powerful visual legacy that still reverberates among graphic protest artists, her role as a recognized, leading female artist of the time ensures her place in the annals of 20th-century modern art.

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/kollwitz-kathe/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kathe-Kollwitz

What to do in July

 

Ennius

@red_loeb

·

Jun 27

July is the time for harvesting the wheat. #Medievalcalendar BnF MS Latin 1156B; Horae ad usum romanum; 15th century; f.7r 

it's harvest time as the sun moves into the sign of Leo. #MedievalCalendar BL Add 62925; the 'Rutland Psalter'; c.1260 CE; England, S. E.; f.4r

@BLMedieval