The feminine in art

I have been thinking a lot recently about gender and art, mostly in relation to an upcoming solo exhibition I’m planning (see previous post). When something is on your mind, it seems to crop up more than would be expected, but perhaps you are just more attuned to picking up on things.  An example from the past couple of weeks that caught my attention…

-        A discussion on the BBC TV programme, The Big Painting Challenge (think Britain’s Got Talent for people with talent).  A male artist paints a watercolour of an urban scene.  Upon presentation to the panel for judging, the female critic decries the work as ‘weak, feminine, wishy-washy’ and urges the chap to return to a more ‘masculine, powerful’ style of painting (I can’t find the original clip so I’m paraphrasing a bit, but the essence is there)

These comments resonate with a longstanding debate about whether there is an inherently masculine or feminine style of art. Throughout art history, when women have made art, it has often been dismissed or pigeonholed as ‘feminine’ and judged separately from the ‘masculine’ sphere of real art.  In the 16^th-19^th century, women had limited access to professional studios, training and models, which led many to specialise in portraiture, still life, flower painting, watercolours, pastel and landscape, seen by the traditional art establishment as lesser genres to large scale religious painting or history scenes.  This made it easier to identify and marginalise the ‘feminine hand’. 

As one feminist critic put it, this was “…a stratagem by which the academic establishment could differentiate women’s and men’s spheres of activity.  This institutionally constructed segregation was then represented as proof of an innate inequality of talent.”† Once a work is described as feminine, all kinds of judgements about the skill, professionalism and innate ‘genius’ of the artist is called into question. 

Subsequently, feminist readings of art history sought to challenge the notion that there is an innate difference between male and female artists, only the differences that have been brought to bear by culture laid over our expectations of art.  This idea should have been firmly backed up by the diversity of art made by men and women in the 20^th century. However, it seems that in relation to the example above there still is an association of the female hand with weakness and inferiority to the male.

I can see where the panel judge was coming from – the painting lacked substance, was not a bold treatment of the subject matter and the chap had produced far better work in the medium. However, to associate these characteristics with the word feminine does no favours to female artists past or present.

†Griselda Pollock, ‘Vision and Difference’, p44