Julia Fullerton-Batten does Edward Hopper

When I first saw this beautiful photo (top) from Julia Fullerton-Batten's website (remember this past post?), I was immediately reminded of iconic American painter Edward Hopper's rather sad and introspective paintings of lone women gazing out of windows. Like this one, for example (bottom): Eleven A.M. (1926). Though there is something creepily voyeuristic about this painting that I don't see as much in the photograph. The angle that the painter chose makes it seem as if she is being watched from behind - a classic example of the male gaze.

I love the shimmering surfaces in this photograph and the golden tones interspersed throughout. Plus the model's jacket, and her overall profile, is just lovely. This photo looks very fashion-y, don't you think? I'm not sure whether I like its slickness or not but overall it's a beautiful picture.

In Defense of the 18th Century

Oh I could just weep... here is one of the many reasons I should be in London right now.


Alan Riding writes of a new exhibition, The Triumph of Eros,

"The British have long conceded that the French invented the art of love. London, then, might offer the most receptive audience for “The Triumph of Eros: Art and Seduction in 18th-Century France,” a show that demonstrates through paintings, engravings and sculptures how the French turned loving into an amusing pasttime."

It's at the splendid venue of Somerset House...and it is displaying works from the Hermitage. The chance of ever seeing these pieces again outside of Russia are pretty slim.


This great review is courtesy of the NYTimes.
Love the title, by the way ("Art from Russia with Love (C'est Francais, Naturellement).")!

Most people these days aren't too enamored by 18th century French art, seeing it as too histrionic, too confectionary to contemplate. But what interests me about this time period are the deeper undercurrents running beneath the delightful (you might say saccharine) exteriors. It's now commonly acknowledged that cultural production (including the fine arts) is a construct which is reflective of the wider concerns of a society. This art isn't just about the excess and sexual perversions of 18th century aristocrats with too much time (and money) on their hands, it's symptomatic of a wider trend of libertinism and social enlightenment which would lead to the breaking down of boundaries, which in turn would lead to the collapse of the French social system in 1789.

You know, the Bastille, the Guillotine, the Reign of Terror, and all that.

Guerilla Girls, Take a Bow!

So this is where my inner art history geek comes out. An article has just been published in the New York Times by leading critic Holland Cotter on the subject of feminist art, which has finally, it seems, begun to infiltrate the big museums that have resisted women artists for so long.

Cotter writes that "such long-withheld recognition has been awaited with a mixture of resignation and impatient resentment. Everyone knows that our big museums are our most conservative cultural institutions. And feminism, routinely mocked by the public media for 35 years as indissolubly linked with radicalism and bad art, has been a hard sell."

As psyched as I am that women artists are becoming increasingly prominent in the art world, it becomes more and more apparent to me that putting together exhibitions, however well-intended, of solely women artists (such as Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris's watershed 1976 exhibition, Women Artists, 1550 to 1950 at LACMA) serves only to pushed them further into their own niche. You see this with outsider art as well. It becomes regarded as separate from the mainstream...still marked by Otherness. Is that really what Nochlin and Harris wanted?

Not that the mainstream is always right. I much appreciated Cotter's comment that one issue that was barely addressed "was the reality that the canonization of feminist art by museums would probably suppress everything that had made the art radical."

We have a long ways to go towards reforming the canon, but it's clear that something has to be done.

Still, this is definitely a big step forward and I commend Holland Cotter for his great article.

By the way, if you're curious about the Guerilla Girls who are/were one rocking set of ladies, check out their Wikipedia in the previous link and their website.