Femininity And Modernism As Treated By Two Key Scholarly Texts

(Find a concept of Modernism as treated by two key scholarly texts. Compare the texts’ treatment of this subject and consider their arguments within the overall context of debates about Modernism)
Word Count: 2251

Compare two scholarly texts’ treatment of Femininity and Modernism, and consider their arguments within the overall context of debates about Modernism.

Femininity in Modernism has been a subject of ongoing debate for decades. Not only was art seen as a primarily male profession with women being perceived as a subject to paint, art history has predominantly been written by men for men. One of the mains issue is that the canon dictated the way women were represented as artist. Another issue is that the history of art ‘has produced

Modernity is defined as the product of the city, but women have a different relation to the city than men. Baudelaire describes the modern artists as a ‘man of the world’ who is most at home in the crowd. However there is no female equivalent to this. Women were depicted only within certain settings, for example in domestic space, in suburban parks, and in spaces of working class women’s labour within a bourgeois home , they were ‘allied with the private world of hearth and home and men with the public world of business, culture and politics’ . They are also depicted with children highlighting the fact that they are seen by society as the ‘mother’. They are confined within these spaces and are marked by boundaries. They often depicted as being removed from city life and in the

For example View of Paris from the Trocadero (1872) by Berthe Morisot represents women’s removal from urban areas by the city of Paris in the background and the two women being physically separated from it by a fence. Moreover the women are looking after a child highlighting their maternal status in society. Other examples of women being confined are paintings depicting the theatre. During outings to the theatre men were able to roam freely and converse with people whereas women were expected to stay in their seats and wait for the men to return. Mary Cassatt’s painting Two Young Ladies in a Loge (1882) shows two young women, possibly their first time at the theatre, who are waiting in a box. Both the women are averting their eyes while one of them partially hides her face behind a fan. This illustrates how women were restrained by society. However the way in which women are depicted depends on their relationship with both the city and the artist. Bourgeoisie women and ‘fallen’ women are both painted by male artists, whereas female artists such as Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot only portray bourgeoisie women in domestic settings . This represents the limitation of bourgeoisie female artists of Modernism as they were socially separated from the city, whereas men could