ebook img

Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art PDF

180 Pages·2008·9.083 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art

Griselda Pollock Vision and Difference Feminism, femininity and the histories of art ex !!!:.ris ~ ,. ,~ DAVID ;¿¡ EDEL I A:_ .... ~ With a new introduction by the author London and New York ¡ .J. .. __ _ First published 1988 by Routledge First published in Routledge Classics 2003 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX'4 4RN 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Reprinted 2006, 2007, 2008 Routledge is an imprint ofthe Taylor a[ Francis Croup, an informa business © 1988 Griselda Pollock Introduction to Routledge Classics edition © 2003 Griselda Pollack For Tony, Benjamin and Hester Typeset in Joanna and 5caJa Sans by RefineCatch Ud, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall AII rights reserved. No part ofthis book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other mean s, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBNlO: 0-41S-308so-X ISBN13: 978-o-41S-308so-2 fA- ,°9 oS- fOL V t]v,~, ~, ~~ lt-GG CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix ACKNOWLEOGEMENTS XV INTRODUCTION TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EOITION xvii Feminist interventions in the histories of art: an introduction 2 Vision, voice and power: feminist art histories and Marxism 25 3 Modernity and the spaces offemininity 70 4 Woman as sign in Pre-Raphaelite literature: the representation of Elizabeth Siddall (written in collaboration with Deborah Cherry) 5 A photo-essay: signs of femininity 6 Woman as sign: psychoanalytic readings 7 Screening the seventies: sexuality and representation in feminist practice - a Brechtian perspective 212 ¡ 1 viii CONTENTS NOTES 269 BrSLlOGRAPHY 301 INDEX 3°9 I LLUSTRATIONS 3.1 Cover design of the catalogue for the exhibition Cubism and Abstraet Art, 1936, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 71 Gustave Caillebotte, Paris, a rainy day 1877; oil 3-2 on canvas; 212.2 x 276.2 cm.; the Art 1n stitute of Chicago (Charles H. and Mary F.S. Worcester Fund). 73 Edouard Manet, A bar at the Folies-Bergere 3-3 1882; oil on canvas; 96 x 130cm.; Courtauld Institute Gallery, Somerset House, London. 74 Berthe Morisot, In the dining room 1886; oil on 3-4 canvas; 61 x 50cm.; National Gallery of Art, Washington (Chester Dale Collection). 79 Berthe Morisot, The mother and sister ofthe artist 3·5 1869-70; oil on canvas; 101 x 81.8cm.; National Gallery of Art, Washington (Chester Dale 80 Collection). xi X IllUSTRATIONS ILLUSTRATlONS 3.6 Mary Cassatt, The tea 1880; oil on canvas; Collection, Courtesy ofthe Maryland Commission 64·8 x 92·7cm.; Museum ofFine Arts, Boston on Artistic Property of the Maryland State Archives, (M. Theresa B. Hopkins Fund). on loan to The Baltimore Museum of Art MSA SC 81 3·7 Mary Cassatt, Yaung girl at window 1883; oil on 4680-10-0010. . 90 canvas; 100·3 x 64·7cm.; Corcoran Gallery of Art 3.17 Mary Cassatt, Little girl in a blue armehalr 1878; Washington (Gallery Fund). ' oil on canvas; 89 x 130cm.; National Gallery of 82 3.8 Mary Cas.satt, Lydia seated at an embroidery fmme Art, Washington (collection ofMr and Mrs Paul e. 1881; 011 on canvas; 65.5 x 92cm.; Collection Mellon). of the Flint Institute of Arts, Gift of the Whiting 3.1 8 Constantin Guys, Afamily walking in the park, n.d., Foundation, 1967. 22.5 x 18.75cm.; Paris, private collection. 102 83 3·9 Mary Cassatt, Lydia eroeheting in the garden at 3-19 Constantin Guys, Twa caurtesans, n.d., 32.5 x 25cm.; Marly 1880; oil on canvas; 66 x 94cm.; Paris, private collection. 103 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 3.20 Edgar Degas, Dancers baekstage e. 1872; oil on Gift ofMrs Gardner Cassatt, 1965 canvas; 24 x 19cm.; National Gallery of Art, 83 3.10 Mary Cassatt, The bath 1892; oil on canvas; Washington (Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection). 106 99.2 x 66.1 cm.; The Art Institute ofChicago 3-21 Mary Cassatt, Women in a loge 1891-2; oil on (Robert A. Waller Fund). canvas; 80 x 64cm.; National Gallery of Art, 84 3·11 Berthe Morisot, On a summer's day 1880; oil on Washington (Chester Dale Collection). 107 canvas; 46 x 75 cm.; National Gallery, London. 3. Pierre Auguste Renoir, La lage 1874; oil on canvas; 85 22 3.12 Berthe Morisot, The harbour at Lorient 1869; oil on 80 x 53-5cm.; Courtauld Institute Gallery, Somerset canvas; 43 x 72 cm.; National Gallery of Art, House, London. 108 Washington (Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection). 85 3.23 Mary Cassatt, At thefranqais, a sketch 1877/78; oil on 3.13 Berthe Morrsot, On the terraee 1874; oil on canvas; 81 x 66cm.; © 2002 Museum ofFine Arts, canvas; 45 x 54cm.; Fuji Art Museum, Tokyo Boston (Hayden Collection). 110 86 3.14 Berthe Morisot, On the baleony (overlooking Paris 3.24 Berthe Morisot, Psyché 1876; oil on canvas; near the Trocadéro) 1872; watercolour; 20.6 64 x 54cm.; Lugano, Switzerland, Thyssen 116 x 17·5 cm.; The Art In stitute of Chicago (gift of M rs Bornemisza Collection. Charles Netscher). 3-25 Robert Doisneau, An oblique laok 1948; 87 3.15 Claude Monet, The garden oft he prineess 1867; photograph; Victoria and Albert Museum, 011 on canvas; 91.8 x 61.9 cm.; Allen Memorial Art London. 121 Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio (R.T. Miller Jr. 3.26 Berthe Morisot in her studio, photograph. 125 Fund,48.296). 88 3.27 Mary Cassatt, Woman bathing 189'; colour print 3.16 Mary Cassatt, Portmit ofMadamej., 1879/80; oil with drypoint and aquatint, fifth state; on canvas; 80.6 x 64-6 cm.; The Peabody Art 35.5 x 26.2cm.; Worcester Art Museum. 126 I .~.~ •.. xii ILLUSTRATIONS xiii ILLUSTRATIONS IIIustrations 5.1-5.9 are all by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The 6.2 Bocea bacciata 1859; oil on canvas; 33 x 30cm.; titles are taken from the catalogue raisonné edited by Virginia Mrs Suzette Zureher. 177 Surtees. The quotation marks emphasize the tentative nature of the attributions. Regina cordium 1860; black and red chalk study; 6·3 '9. x 18.7cm.; heirs of Kerrison Preston. 182 5.1 'Elizabeth Siddal(l)' 1860; pencil; 25 x 25 m.; Reg' ina cordium 1866; oi/ on canvas; 58.7 x c 48.7cm.; Glasgow Art Gal/ery and Museum. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; VS 477. 5.2 'Fanny CornJorth' 1862; penci/; 33 x 37cm.; 6 ·5 Venus verticordia 1864-8; oi/ onII canvas; 92.2 x 68.7cm.; Russel/-Cotes Art Ga ery, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; VS 288. Bournemouth. 5·3 'Elizabeth Siddal(l)' 6 February 1855; pen and ink; 12·5 x 11.75cm.; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; 6.6 Venus verticordia 1863; red chalk; 76.2 x 60.6 cm.; VS 472. Faringdon Col/ection Trustees, Buscot Park, Berkshire. 188 'Emma Brown' November 1860; pencil; 29 x 27cm.; Mrs Oliver Soskice; VS 274. 6 Sibylla palmífera 1866-70; oil on canvas; 5·5 'Elizabeth Siddal(l)' 1854; penci/; 11.8 x 11.25 m.; ·7 92.5 x 81.2cm.; Lady Lever Art Gal/ery, Port c Sunlight. '94 Victoria and Albert Museum, London; VS 499. 5·6 'jane Morris' October 1857; penci/; 48 x 33 cm.; 6.8 Lady Lilith 1868; oi/ on canvas; 93.7 x 80cm.; Delaware Art Museum (Bancroft Memorial Society of Antiquaries, Kelmscott Manor Oxfordshire; VS 363. ' Col/ection). '95 5·7 'Elizabeth Siddal(l)' 1854; watercolour; 18 x 6.9 Astarte Syriaca 1877; oil on canvas; 180 x 105cm.; Manchester City Art Gal/ery. 206 16cm.; John Street; VS 471. 5·8 'jane Morris' 1860; penci/ and ink; 21 x 18cm.; 6.10 Study for the head ofA starte Syriaca 1875; pastel on pale green paper, 53.7 x 44.3 cm.; Victoria and Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; VS 3 5. 6 5·9 'Emma Brown' 10 September 1856; pen and ink; Albert Museum, London. 207 7.1 Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt, Mary Kel/y, part of 12·5 x lOcm.; Birmingham Museums and Art Women and work: a document on the division oflabour Gallery, Birmingham; VS 273. 5·10 Advertisements for cosmetic products. in industry, instal/ation multi-media '975. 5·11 The faces of Greta Garbo and Mar/ene (a) instal/ation; (b) hourly paid women Dietrich. employees; (e) detail of the work processes of 165 women; (d) work diaries. . 228-29 7.2 Mitra Tabrizian, part of On Governmentallty '983; IIIustrations 6.1-6.10 are all works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. a phototext work on advertising in 17 panels.. 236-37 6.1 7-3 Yve Lomax, 4 panels from Open rings and partlOl Monna Vanna 1866; oil on canvas; 86.6 x 85 cm.; Tate, London. lines, a photographic work in 15 panel s each 173 57.5 x 80cm., '983-4 xiv rLLUSTRATrONS Marie Yates, The only woman 1985; 12 panels. (a) Rage, 4 panels; (b) Pain, 2 details' (e) Gaze 6~nels. " 7·5 Mary Kelly, part of Interim, Part 1: 'Corpus' 19 4-2~6-49 8 30 panels, 90 x 120em, laminated photopositiv 9 , sereenprlnt and aerylie on perspex. (a) three pa e'l from 'M é' . h ne s . enae, Wlt materials from the artist's archive for Interim; (b) Supplieation (No 1)' (e) Appel (No. 2); (d) Extase (No. 3). " ACKNOWLEDG EM ENTS Thde author and publisher are grateful to all those ind"d I an organlzations listed above who h IVI ua s ave granted perm' . to repro d uee pietures. Every effort h b Isslon . . as een made to bt' permlsslon to use copyright material but 'f D o arn request has not been reeeived th .1 or any reason a eontaet the publisher. e copYright holder should It is normal to take this space to thank colleagues and friends who have helped in the making of a book. There have been so many contributions to the development and excitement of femi nist art history that the list of names would and should be long. 1 hope those whose example and practices have helped me will find themselves acknowledged in due place throughout the texto It is also comInon for authors to leave untillast their families, as if the domestic backup is less valuable than the intellectual input of academic colleagues and friends. This is not so. The people who have given generously of their time, patience and support to make this book possible are my children and their father. The book is dedicated to them with deepest thanks. 1 have not yet found the balance between the passions of motherhood and the thrills of feminist scholarship. It is my children and their father who live out the painful effects of the struggle which feminism has brought to uso It is they above all and by name who must be acknowledged as my ca-producers, Tony Bryant, Benjamin Pollock Bryant and Hester Pollock Bryant. I NTRODUCTION TO ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION Vision and Diflerence was my fifth feminist book thinking about and analysing culture for inscriptions 'in, of and from the femi nine'.l Its title is typical of rny project. It conjoins two issues: looking, seeing and representing visuaHy with the problematic of difference. It does not mentian gender at aH. The subtitle: Feminism, lemininity and histories 01 art, links three terms. One stands for a political movement that is al so an inteHectual revolution. The second uses a psychoanalytical term for a psycho-linguistic position within the structuring of sexual difference. 'Femininity' dces not invoke any empirically experienced notion cf women. It refers to a position within language and in a psycha-sexual formation that the term Woman signifies. As a position, there fore, and not an identity, a fictian produced within that forma tion, femininity may be something of which its defining Other, masculinity, speaks, drean1s, fantasizes. Ir signals at the same time that which subjects living and thinking from that position labelled 'women' have to cantend as an imposed or created posi tioning. It is also a structure and realm cf experience women xviii rNTRODUCTrON TO ROUTlEDGE CLASSICS EDITION xix INTRODUCTION TO ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION subjects need to explore since it may not be known to us, given can continue. undisturbed by the questions feminism poses: its con/iguration through certain patterns of discourse and the questions of gender as a continuing axis of power and psycho-sexual formation under a phal!ic Law. domination, and of sexual difference as the ambivalent seene of The pluralization of the histories 01 art is especial!y signi/icant meaning, fantasy and desire. since it opens out the /ield of historieal interpretation beyond 1 have been told on more than one occasion that my work is a selectlve tradition, The Story of Art, a canonieal version 'history' now. That is, the debates have moved on to other ques masquerading as the only h.istory of arto Whose stories are told in tions such as internationalism, postcoloniality and post-gender whose interests? Whose stories will we need to find? How ~an studies of sexuality and queerness. The possibility and necessity we read differently? of opening other investigations around cultural difference and In the end, all our histories wil! be just that: stories we tel! globalization in our study and analysis of cultures is unquestion ourselves, narratives of retrospeetive self-affirmation, fietions of able. 1 would, however, argue that this is so precisely because of and for resistanee that are, nonetheless, answerable to a sense of what we have learnt by the historic feminist interruption: that the real processes of lived and suffered histories. Thus to enter knowledge is shaped in relations of power and invested with eritically into the problenlatic of narrative, representation, his interests, political, ideological and psychological. Feminism was tory and the politics of meaning, we shal! need self-awareness of never alone in making this claim; but it made the challenge who we are when we 'tel! a story', what its effects will be what central to its politico-intel!ectual project. is excluded and how contingent it wil! be, however dilig~nt we Jt was Rozsika Parker' s and my opening salvo, Old Misttesses: are m our scholarship and research. Situated knowledge, recog Women, Art and ldeology, in 1981, that /irst tracked what we could nlzlng our soclally overdetermined positions. do es not create a now caH, pace Fredric ]ameson, 'the political unconscious'2 of art free-for-all of limitless relativismo That is the slur the canonists history as a discursive formation institutionalized in museum wish to cast upon the ethical scholar, the political!y self-aware and academy in the twentieth century. We argued that despite thmker, arUst or writer who engages with study at the highest art's deceptive marginality in real material and political terms, 'evels of responsibility but honestly offers her/his interpret the privileged discourses of and on art served symbolic purposes atl~ns a: readm8s, as a sltuated work of attempted understanding that disseminated, beyond their own privileged sphere, concepts WhICh, m that awareness, is both con/idently creative and mod of Eurocentrism and masculine suprell1aey. The eore narratives estly critical of inevitable limitations. that encode Western phallocentrism' s political unconscious What has happened between 1988 when Vision and Diffeten" /irst serve not ll1erely to structure the study of the histories of art, but appeared and its re-issue as a 'Classic' in 2003' At times I feel as to establish a story of art as The Story of Art, the canonicallegend if the waters of' art history as usual' are closing back ove~ the site of Western masculine Christian creativity which becon1es syn of what I nalned in Vision and DifIerence 'feminist interventions in onymous with art, pure and simple. Against this formal creation art' s histories'. It is as if there is a will to cast feIl1inist work in of a version of the past that serves to consolidate gender as an and on, the histories of art back into the momentarily ruffled axis of power on the one hand and, on the other, as a mark of surface of the 11lstory of the late twentieth century as an intel exclusion and devaluation, it is not useful to aim merely te lectual curiosity, no longer relevant to current practices. These correct the oversights and ignorance that led art history to xxi xx INTRODUCTION TO ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION INTRODUCTION TO ROUTlEDGE ClASS1CS EDITION ignore the art of almost all women who have participated in women have won, to a still limited degree, general access ra creative cultural activity. Such a short-sighted, if always neces education. There are now a sufficient number of critically self sary. objective swings the issue of gender ayer onto the artists conscious women academics for whom the question of sexual who are women having to make their case far re-incorporation difference is a major academic project. In a radically changed after dedarations by scholars such as H. W. Janson, the author of situation, the woman question is being posed in the name of the most widely used textbook in art history, that no woman has women by highly educated professional women forming an ever made any innovation in art sufficient to justify inclusion in a international intellectual community. one-volume survey of world art.3 Token women are merely Not a mere moment in a social movement for equal pay or offered far re-introduction into a canon, whose own construc better employment opportunities, our moment of feminist tion by exdusion on the grounds of the sex of the artist renders theory is a work that has only just begun with a first generation that canon already a gendered and gendering discourse and thus of women professors in a quantity sufficient to progress an intel will always position artists who are women as marked, othered, as lectual revolution through a volume of writings that have women artists. How essential is fernininity? 1 once asked. The emerged in every academic field, from genetics to art history, and answer: it is structural to the maintenance of a certain Eurocentric through the training of generations of women scholars who are masculinist conception of art and artist. Femininity is invoked as allowed to be scholars of women. These women scholars can the deficient, bnt always named and marked other, that which confront the full implications of sexual difference as a complex then allows art to be understood as inherently what men make, structuration of subjectivity and social relations in perpetual play without having to spell out that blatantly false narcissism. with other determining and over-determining relations of Many people misrecognize feminism as a merely historical power and formations of subjectivity, notably, in the modern phenomenon, limited to a certain time and place. The work of period, of 'race' and dass. feminist theory is a radical questioning, a way of thinking and Feminist thought has never meant limiting women tD the not just a short-lived partisan advocacy. There have been study of women's issues. Thus feminist work in and on art his moments of feminist challenges to patriarchal and phallocentric tDry is not just about the restitution of women artists tD official thought and formations throughout history, for example in the histories (although given the almost complete annihllation of late medieval period, during the Protestant Reformation and in theír histories by Art History (the discipline) we have a really the revolutionary period of the late eighteenth century. Politic exciting job to do there as my first book Old Mistresses (1981) ally and militantly, feminism raok on the modern bourgeois demonstrated). It must mean broadening the entire field of state at the end of the nineteenth century and continued to battle intellectual endeavour to acknowledge the significance of sexual i not only for political emancipation throughout the twentieth and other differences amidst the play of many social, economic, century but for a deeper sense of the modernization of sexual 1 ideological, semiotic and psychological factors one might con difference. After a quiescent period following the reaction ! sider. Feminist thought confronts the entire field of the histories against women's movements by fascism from the 1930s to the of artistic and cultural practices with questions about difference, 1950s, feminist theory after 1960 became a major intellectual formulating new theories and methods of analysis with wltich force because, for the first time in the hisrary of the West, more to rewrite Western phallocentric monoculture in a way that \ l I I I

See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.