Women in the Picture: Women, Art and the Power of Looking

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The Woman in the Picture” is so multi-layered that it took me virtually the whole book to grasp the implications behind the title of this marvellous novel. The reader is swept along by the mystery straight away. English filmmaker Henry Whitaker is trying to locate the woman in a photograph he now possesses. The photograph of a girl and a letter from her to her fiancee who shot dead Henry’s father in WWI. His companion Captain Smith shoots dead the German and gives the dead German’s field glasses containing both the photograph and letter to Henry, still a child after WWI. Later, Malleus Maleficarum influenced the German artist Hans Baldung Grien, whose grotesque wood prints of withes became wildly popular . She said the male-dominated artistic system had always sought to defend itself by denigrating female artists. Equally damaging, she added, was how historians had played down the achievements of women until their voices were silenced and their creations overlooked and then hidden from view. In Hans Baldung Grien’s painting The Ages of Woman and Death, there is a juxtaposition of a youthful “Venus “ type figure and her older self ( which is depicted very unfavourably ), which the author interprets as promoting the idea of “that women, no matter how lovely on the outside, are all hags in Venus' clothing, just waiting to be unmasked by the march of time.”

From Venus to Medusa, How Art Codifies the Objectification of

When women are hidden, or robbed of their past, they are robbed of their identity,” said De la Villa. “The power of culture is very important. It just can’t be separated from the social conditions we enjoy, or which we suffer.” Whereas once the elderly woman represented the wisdom and experience of old age and provided valuable knowledge to her community, by the sixteenth century, she reeked of death and was disenfranchised from her property and ostracised from the community.” This is a highly opinionated book. It examines how the female body has been portrayed over the centuries using themes like Venus (the seductive look), Motherhood (puritanical and housekeeping), Maidens (but this was more on rape), and Monstrous women (those who stray out of the norm – witches). The walls of our galleries have a sacrosanct charge that absorbs any censure. Oil paint is a soothing medium that smooths out the brutality and double standards of these narratives and turns them into lessons in culture and civilization for the general public. But what other alternative histories lie buried in plain sight beneath the gilded frames, the imposing ceilings, the tasselled ropes and the protective glass surfaces that deflect proper scrutiny?"Lord Henry’s philosophies frequently criticize women and marriage, and the era of Dorian Gray’s London society, and indeed Oscar Wilde’s, becomes vivid to us in his dialogue. He says that women are a “decorative sex”, and that there are always only a few worth talking to. We see his marriage with Lady Victoria Wotton as a very separate affair, both parties leading distinct lives and meeting the other occasionally. When Victoria leaves him, Henry expresses sadness and misses her company. Though his description of sadness is far from a romantic declaration, it does seem that many of the women provide the male characters with essential and distracting company, and actually, it is the hostesses that at times enable the lifestyles of connection and fashion that men like Henry and Dorian boast of. Ladies like Lady Narborough and the Duchess are the connectors. Henry says of the Duchess Gladys that her clever tongue gets on his nerves, which is comically hypocritical. And she has the same disregard of her husband as the men have for women when she falls in love with Dorian. In this way, she is used to illuminate the actions and paradoxes of the men’s world. This is a very accessible and informative read, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in feminist art history.

Woman in the Picture by James Wilson | Goodreads Woman in the Picture by James Wilson | Goodreads

I couldn’t believe that it was the year 2022, and people were still vilifying aging in women and getting adulation for it.The “ Virgin Mary “ mother archetype that boxes mothers into the desexualized role of nurturing and sacrificing. Here, the historical events and facts mentioned, were eye opening and insightful. It's interesting how knowing about, say, the owner of a painting can change your mind about the art.

Book review of “Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with

Engaging from the outset, the classic and limited set of female archetypes are explored from saintly mother and femme fatale, to sensuous pin-up and monstrous witch. Medusa, who had been historically 'the protector of sex, death, divination, renewal and of dark moon mysteries', became nothing but a symbol of male victories in Benvenuto Cellini's bronze sculpture of Perseus with the Head of Medusa. In 1975 James received a Ford Foundation grant to research and write The Original Americans: US Indians, for the Minority Rights in London. Over the next twenty-five years he travelled widely in the US and Canada, working on – among other projects – a number of radio and TV documentaries, including the award-winning Savagery and the American Indian and The Two Worlds of the Innu, both for the BBC. His critically-acclaimed history of Native Americans, The Earth Shall Weep, was published by Picador in the UK in 1998, and by Grove/Atlantic in the US the following year. In 2000, it won a Myers Outstanding Book award. James continues to serve as a member of the executive committee of Survival, an international organization campaigning for the rights of indigenous peoples worldwide. For those interested there is the “National Museum of Women in the Arts” dedicated solely to female artists in Washington DC.

Seventeenth-century works by Artemisia Gentileschi, Fede Galizia and Elisabetta Sirani give way to still lifes of fruit and flowers before the exhibition moves to portraits – including Élisabeth Louise Vigeé Le Brun’s Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante – and then to Orientalism, depictions of working women, images of maternity, sisterhood and, finally, to images of female emancipation. Rarely seeing images about giving birth or experiencing sexual pleasure means that many women (still) are in the dark about their own bodies. And witnessing female 'monsters' as witches and Medusa (with great physical and intellectual power) being killed by men shaped societies on a larger scale that you might know. This is the better, and my favorite part of the book as it gives you new tools for observing art and helps you interpret and criticize art independently. How is it that their works were in storerooms until recently? Maestras is a feminist exhibition that seeks to emphatically correct the prejudices that have come about as a result of the patriarchy – prejudices that have meant that works by female artists have remained in museum storerooms during the 20th century.”

Women in the Picture by Catherine McCormack | Waterstones

I felt the author on less firm ground when discussing artistic interpretations of women which she referred to as the “male gaze”. She states: If we start to see the separation between what we find intolerable in real life and what we lionize in monuments and works of art, then perhaps we can further the way in which we talk about systemic sexual violence against women… leads us to a burning question of what we do with the artworks and public sculptures that contradict our proudly held liberal values in real life. This book will not stop the misogynists who long for the discriminatory values of yesteryear. But it might provide hope that people develop a more encompassing understanding of art.If we start to see the separation between what we find intolerable in real life and what we lionise in monuments and works of art, then perhaps we can further the way in which we talk about systemic sexual violence against women - by bridging the gender dynamics of power and violence that are hidden beneath the surface of of everyday life and its images more starkly into the light." The author comments on the significance of her work that “ This was perhaps the first time that the mask had slipped since the Virgin Mother's debut in images in the fifth century CE, after the Council of Ephesus had decided in 431 that Mary was the Mother of God.” The problem is that one form of sexual desire [male artists] has been chosen to represent sexual desire universally. And then whilst scouting for a film location Henry comes across Herman Street. Hermann Strasse was where he found the girl in the photograph: