Gender In Art

Gender in Art: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was a gradual shift from an emphasis on gender to an emphasis on class. This change in visual art during the period of Louis XIV (1638–1715) coincided with the emergence of a middle class in France. Increasing public appreciation was afforded women artists such as Rosalba Carriera (1675–1757), who was elected as a member of the male-dominated Académie Royale in 1720. Other significant female artists were Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755–1842), who was commissioned to portray Queen Marie Antoinette and later on became a member of the French academy, as well as Angelica Kauffmann (1741–1807), one of the founding members of the British Royal Academy.

Because of these restrictions, female artists had fewer experiences to draw from than their male colleagues. Griselda Pollock’s landmark essay “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” discusses the way that contemporary gender roles impacted the subject matter depicted by the female versus male Impressionist artists. As Pollock points out, social restrictions prevented female Impressionist artists like Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt from being able to attend the new nighttime entertainment spots that occupied their male colleagues, like the café-concert or the cabaret. In the nineteenth-century mindset, only women with loose morals would converse with men so informally and without a chaperone in these settings. According to Pollock, because of these constrictions on their mobility, female Impressionist artists therefore tended to focus on the lives and experiences of women— most often the experience of

Take Monet's Gardens at Giverny series of paintings. The artist spend years working on these paintings, of which Waterlilies was one such image. Van Gogh was also an artist who appreciated the outdoors when it came to his art, with his paintings of sunflowers and the outdoors.


Gender Ratio Facts in Modern Art

• 51% of visual artists today are women.

Only 28% of museum solo exhibitions spotlighted women in eight selected museums throughout the 2000s.

Only 27 women are represented in current edition of H.W. Janson’s survey, History of Art—up from zero in the 1980s.

• From 16–19th centuries, women were barred from studying the nude model, which formed the basis for academic training and representation.

Women lag behind men in directorships held at museums with budgets over $15 million, holding 24% of art museum director positions and earning 71¢ for every dollar earned by male directors.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 is more than three times the previous auction record for a work by a female artist, which was the $11.9 million paid for Joan Mitchell’s Untitled (1960) at Christie’s earlier in 2014. It doesn’t, however, come close to the world auction record, held, naturally, by a male artist: $179.4 million with Picasso’s Les Femmes