Anita Selzer

FOREWORD

In consideration of Anita Selzer’s thought-provoking book The Female Gaze in Art and Photography, which showcases the work of women artists around the world whose work explores the female gaze, as both a construct and a concept, I have been reflecting on my art history education. I remember my years on campus at the University of Queensland with great fondness for the time afforded to indulge myself in the history of the world as I like to think of the discipline. Because art history is so much more than a history of just art; it is social and political history, fashion history, cultural and geographical history, as well as a history of the arts more generally – dance, theatre, poetry, literature and so on. In that regard, it is truly multidisciplinary. I went on to complete a Master’s Degree in Post-War and Contemporary Art at Manchester University, expanding to that point in my education my narrow view of art history as I encountered artists in European collections I simply had not been taught about. Of course, no degree can ever be all comprehensive or inclusive. Or can it?

This is an important question as ‘western’ museums and galleries across the globe look to their international works to better address the wider diaspora and reconsider the art being made in Asia or Africa, for example. In short, art history has been very white. It is no longer thus, and institutions are rushing to play catch-up and better tell a more accurate history of world art. In Australia, we now see colonial art hung alongside the Indigenous artefacts of the same period so that we might better understand our complex story. And no longer do we relegate a Chinese artist to the Asian galleries. These taxonomic changes are incredibly important.

After some twenty-five years working in galleries and museums in the private and public sector, as a curator, consultant and an editor, I consider my experience in the arts to be considerably broad. I have called on my art history consistently throughout my career and, indeed, regularly reflected on the great lessons of my studies towards my degree. Mostly though, I realise I missed a very significant portion of art history back then. To put it simply, I missed the female art history. It was only when I began my professional career as a curator and writer that I was forced to reckon with that. My art historical knowledge was solid but, when it came to women artists, it is fair to say there was a gaping chasm. When I learned about Cindy Sherman during my studies it was through the lens of appropriation, her contribution to the great postmodern canon, and not in term of post-feminism. Same too for Sherrie Levine.

Since Anita asked me to write this, I have been wracking my brain and I cannot remember a discussion back when I was studying about the female gaze in relation to Sherman. Should I add my lecturer was male? In my undergraduate degree, I learned next to nothing about the great 1970s feminist artists and activists, from the Guerrilla Girls and Judy Chicago to Carolee Schneemann and Lynda Benglis. I had, to my shame, never encountered Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay from ARTnews 1971 (two years before I was born), ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ How did this happen? How did I learn about Jackson Pollock and not Lee Krasner? Richard Serra but not Ana Mendieta? The list goes on. Increasingly I am aware that my education was significantly lacking. Anita Selzer’s book is thus both timely and relevant because, despite the best efforts of art historians, writers and theorists, there is still so much work to be done. Her book comes at a time of global reckoning about the status of women in the art world, from their lack of representation in public collections to the unequal values accorded their work on the commercial market, both primary and secondary. I know this to be true.

I sit on the Board of the National Gallery of Australia and Chair the Collections Committee. I know that only 25 per cent of the collection is by women and, further to that, I know that the values accorded to works by female artists is frequently less than that of their male counterparts of equal reputation. It is not a fiction, which means we must correct the inequity.

In 2020 the gallery launched a campaign entitled Know My Name, with the goal to quite literally illuminate the careers of women who had been left out of, or even erased from, the canon and to celebrate those who had achieved recognition. It brought to light women artists I was unfamiliar with, as does Anita Selzer’s book. There are artists featured herein whose practice I know well, but several who are new to me, both in a historical and contemporary context, which is exactly the purpose of a book and scholarship such as this. To that end, Anita is to be commended. These are women who demand to be seen, re-seen even, as they command the gaze, flip it back and ask us to look twice and again. The Female Gaze in Art and Photography reminds us that the work is never done.

INTRODUCTION

This book was inspired by another, Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze by Charlotte Jansen. An arts and culture journalist, Jansen presented forty artists and photographers from around the globe who use the female gaze in their work. I was so impressed with this idea and the creativity of these wonderful women that it inspired me to build on and extend the work Jansen did.

The Female Gaze in Art and Photography showcases the work of other women artists and photographers from around the world also using a female gaze. But, as Asia Ewart notes, ‘There is no one female gaze as every woman comes from a different walk of life and has different experiences.’ While this diversity is reflected in their work, their commonality comes from a female way of feeling, looking and seeing.

THE GAZE

Before the phrase ‘the female gaze’ was articulated, ideas about ‘the gaze’, referring to the act of looking and seeing, were bandied about by various theorists. Among them were existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Sartre addressed the concept of ‘the gaze’ – le regard – in Being and Nothingness (1943), proposing a subjective power difference between the gazer and the gazed, the latter objectified by the former, as Kelly McCready points out. Simone de Beauvoir extended Sartre’s gaze theory to describe the seer or gazer in terms of gender, as Felicity Joseph explains: ‘he is the subject and she the object – the meaning of what it is to be a woman is given by men.’ In her groundbreaking book on gender, The Second Sex (1949), de Beauvoir elaborates: ‘Humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being ... she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Absolute – she is the Other.’

Influential art critic John Berger continued de Beauvoir’s gender thread and applied it to art in his BBC series and book Ways of Seeing. Berger suggested that women’s representation in western works of art had reflected their lower status, how they were viewed and seen in western culture as passive and subordinate, notably the ‘Other’. The female painted by men, depicted historically in European art – the nude particularly – was sexualised and objectified by them, then judged by the spectators and owners of the work who were also predominately male during that time. This male gaze has now been challenged by a female gaze, which offers other ways of representation and seeing.

THE FEMALE GAZE

British film critic Laura Mulvey coined and popularised the phrase ‘the male gaze’, noting how women in the visual arts are depicted from a masculine heterosexual viewpoint, presenting them as passive objects of male pleasure. In film, this is executed via a masculine camera lens, the creation of the characters and the spectators seeing the visual from a male perspective. It is largely about men looking and women being looked at. James Bond movies are a good example of the male gaze, where the female is intended to look beautiful for the pleasure of Bond. She has no real role to play other than to service him, more a sex object than subject. Bond films have primarily been made for the pleasure of male viewers by a male director, male writer and male producers.

Historically, in film, this male gaze has been valued as the normative dominant way of looking until it was recently challenged by creative women who apply a female gaze, another way of looking and seeing. Film director Joey Soloway discusses this female gaze in filmmaking, pointing out that the female gaze positions the woman as the subject by the person behind the camera. According to Soloway, the filmmaker uses the frame to evoke a feeling of being – the character, who is the subject, feeling what it’s like to be seen by the camera lens and by the spectator viewing the film. It is a three-way process that creates an intimacy focusing on emotion. It is about connecting on all levels through this female lens of looking.

The women artists and photographers in this book have applied this female gaze to their work using their camera lenses and paintbrushes to produce their images, evident in their processes to create them. In some of the works, the subject and creator are the same person, where they are looking and being seen. The female gaze values women in the process and production of their work. It uses a female perspective or/and female experience to emphasise the emotions of both the creator and subject, offering a more empathetic, intimate representation of women. And it respects women’s bodies without necessarily sexualising them as the male gaze has done.

The female gaze casts a wider net in how the female body is seen with its many possibilities of meaning, deconstructing an essentialist view of woman that has tended to dominate the male gaze. According to journalist Girinandini Singh, the female gaze is ‘the beginning of a new, more balanced form of depiction of femininity’ more than depiction of the feminine as an object of desire. It ‘focuses on agency and more so the internal and emotional landscape of depiction … the concept of the female gaze reclaims’ the female body, it demonstrates ‘vulnerability, inner narratives, power struggles at both the individual and broader’ societal level. ‘The feminine gaze … is nuanced, it is ever-changing in a quest of discovery of a deeper feminine one that balances power and sensuality, fragility and strength, [malleable] on one’s own terms.’

Photographer Emily Rose Larsen opines, ‘I postulate that the real power in the female gaze is women making art with the female viewer in mind. Art made, not to consider male ego or male desire.’ Charlotte Jansen tells Anika Meier in Widewalls, ‘The female gaze is not just about what the work speaks about, it’s the way it’s done. It’s the whole system, the whole structure of presenting and sharing images.’ And for some artists that means exhibiting their work on the internet, working for their own community, she adds. ‘They are not waiting for a magazine or a newspaper or a critic to contextualize it for them. That has never really happened before. We haven’t had the tools to be able to do that.’

There have been female artists and photographers using a female gaze long before the creatives of the 21st century in this book. Examples from different historical periods can be seen in the Renaissance, the baroque period in the 17th century, and the 19th and 20th centuries. Women from these times are regarded as significant in art history, and they have left an indelible mark on the visual arts and have their work showcased in public exhibitions. They are by no means the only talented women who have historically and currently used a female gaze in their artwork. There are others and to cite and discuss them is beyond the scope of this book.

My focus here is on four women of historical importance.

SIGNIFICANT WOMAN CREATORS

First, I will address the Renaissance (14th to 16th centuries), when women were unable to receive a formal art training, were expected to marry and have children. Born into a noble family, Renaissance painter Sofonisba Anguissola (1532–625) was fortunate, though, in that her father ensured she trained under the tutelage of a local painter. Anguissola’s talent, led to her painting the royal portraits of King Philip II and his family at the Spanish court. She used a female gaze in Self-portrait with Bernadino Campi (1550) and The Chess Game (1555). In the former, Anguissola is the subject of thepainting, positioned foremost, occupying greater space than her teacher Bernadino Capri. While he is gazing directly at the viewer, she is dominant, in control with him ‘painting the embellishment of her jacket (a task often assigned to an apprentice),’ Katy Hessel writes in The Story of Art Without Men. She brings her female gaze as the painter and the self-assured subject.

In the latter, Anguissola and her sisters, Elena on the left and Minerva on the right, are the subjects. She shows the intellect of three siblings by having them engage in playing chess, understanding the game and its strategies at a time when chess was typically a male pursuit. Anguissola’s eyes shine confidently as the protagonist and active agent in steering the game, while her sisters and the older female onlooker are all gazing at one another or the chessboard. They are participating subjects in this painting. Anguissola confidently gazes at the viewer, and we engage, looking back at her. Again, the artist brings her female gaze as both the painter and subject of this work.

Italian baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–656) also used the female gaze in her painting. Her father, Orazio Gentileschi, was an artist, and Artemisia was ‘the first woman accepted into Florence’s prestigious Accademia delle Arti del Disegno,’ Hessel writes. At this time, most academies were not open to women, and in France, daughters or wives of members were able to attend them, but in minuscule numbers. Gentileschi was not free like her male peers to wander into churches or attend life class because of social custom and the restrictive roles placed on women, so she studied and copied biblical subjects from her father’s paintings – ‘subjects she tackled brilliantly,’

Hessel says. 'As an artist, Gentileschi used her female gaze to execute the task, depicting and representing the female subjects from a woman’s point of view. The biblical story of Susanna and the Elders (1610) is an example. Gentileschi painted this remarkable work when only seventeen. It is a painting of two men consorting to take advantage of Susanna sexually, with her recoiling on a bench. ‘Susanna is usually presented by male artists as unaware of the elders’ presence, or even welcoming them in a flirtatious fashion,’ as explained on everypicture.org website. However, in Gentileschi’s representation, the artist uses her female gaze to focus on Susanna’s response as the centre of the work. ‘Her Susanna presents us with an image rare in art, of a three-dimensional female character who is heroic. The expressive core of Artemisia’s painting is the heroine’s plight, not the perpetrators, anticipated pleasure, and this offers an entirely different set of concerns to many of her male counterparts.’

In Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (1612), based on a biblical story often referenced in art, of Judith (a Jewish woman who gains the trust of her enemy, Assyrian General Holofernes, and decapitates him), we see her female gaze at work again. Her narrative elevates Judith in the painting to the primary subject taking charge, being strong and determined, helped by her maid, placing a blade firmly through Holofernes’ neck. The artist is clearly the subject, the protagonist in the painting. Hessel says, ‘This work confirmed Gentileschi to be among the greatest artists of her day.’ Journalist Helen Lewis observes in The Atlantic that ‘Gentileschi is a psychological painter. Her 1610 portrait of Susanna is a study of power. The composition shows her vulnerability.’ Lewis quotes art historian Mary Garrard, who says, ‘For the first time in the history of art, it was sexual harassment from a woman’s point of view … It was earth-shattering in its significance.’

French Impressionist Painter Berthe Morisot (1841–95) is another notable female artist who used the female gaze during the 19th century, focusing on female subject matter. Morisot shared her intimate perspective of women’s daily lives and her world with her spectator, rather than seeing women as sexual objects. Her female gaze captures the familial and interior life of women during that period, for example, her painting Mother and Sister of the Artist (1869–70) of the two women sitting in their living room. Art historian Sabine Casparie notes how ‘Her mother is reading, and Edma [her sister] looks at her with a loving gaze.’ Seen from a female lens and a woman who was also a mother, this theme of motherhood continues to be seen in Morisot’s painting The Cradle (1872), with Edma watching over her baby asleep in the cradle. Casparie writes, ‘Her gaze shows the pleasures as well as the difficulties of being a mother.’

Casparie suggests that Morisot’s female gaze transports the spectatorto see through the painted subjects’ eyes, imagining what it would have been like to be them. She cites the example of Morisot’s In the Bois de Bologne (1870s), a breathtaking painting in hues of greens and blues, focusing on two female friends enjoying this well-frequented public park.