But ever since Gentileschi made it out of art-historical obscurity in the early 20th century, her work has never moved beyond Tassi’s shadow. Early reappraisals qualified her artistic abilities with references to her ‘lascivious’ and ‘precocious’ manner. The American art historian Linda Nochlin cited the case of Gentileschi in her epochal essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ (1971) to call for a ‘dispassionate, impersonal, sociological’ art history. Yet just three years later, fellow scholar Eleanor Tufts cast Gentileschi as a kind of sex-positive icon – one who, despite the trauma of her ‘introduction to the ways of love and desire’, had numerous affairs and ‘was, not surprisingly, a superb writer of love letters’. [...]
In the present moment, the confluence of commodified feminism and the #MeToo movement has produced a surge of interest in Gentileschi and in biographical interpretation of her work. With eyes on her images of violated or vengeful women, Gentileschi has become a Baroque #MeToo heroine who turned the horrors of her life into brutal painting, according to The Guardian. When one of Gentileschi’s depictions of Lucretia – a Roman noblewoman who stabbed herself in the heart after she was raped – went to auction in Paris in 2019, pre-sale publicity leaned heavily on its ‘autobiographical’ content. ‘The story of Artemisia is just like that story,’ said the auction-house specialist, ‘except that Artemisia decided on another outcome for her life.’ [...]
For Gentileschi, yet another double standard enters the picture: the readiness to separate life and art for an aggressor, against the eagerness to conflate life and art for a victim. Eric Gill; Roman Polanski; Pablo ‘each time I leave a woman, I should burn her’ Picasso. So much transcendence granted to the man-made artwork, lifted high above the abuse, however flagrant. When in 2017 Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft in East Sussex mounted an exhibition addressing Gill’s sexual abuse of his teenage daughters, the critic Rachel Cooke in The Observer wondered why this information was forced on visitors. By contrast, Gentileschi’s biography is frequently ‘forced upon’ both her work and its viewers – a process that allows sadistic relish to masquerade as gender-progressive concern, and objectifies the artist rather than recognising her immense ability.
read the article
In the present moment, the confluence of commodified feminism and the #MeToo movement has produced a surge of interest in Gentileschi and in biographical interpretation of her work. With eyes on her images of violated or vengeful women, Gentileschi has become a Baroque #MeToo heroine who turned the horrors of her life into brutal painting, according to The Guardian. When one of Gentileschi’s depictions of Lucretia – a Roman noblewoman who stabbed herself in the heart after she was raped – went to auction in Paris in 2019, pre-sale publicity leaned heavily on its ‘autobiographical’ content. ‘The story of Artemisia is just like that story,’ said the auction-house specialist, ‘except that Artemisia decided on another outcome for her life.’ [...]
For Gentileschi, yet another double standard enters the picture: the readiness to separate life and art for an aggressor, against the eagerness to conflate life and art for a victim. Eric Gill; Roman Polanski; Pablo ‘each time I leave a woman, I should burn her’ Picasso. So much transcendence granted to the man-made artwork, lifted high above the abuse, however flagrant. When in 2017 Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft in East Sussex mounted an exhibition addressing Gill’s sexual abuse of his teenage daughters, the critic Rachel Cooke in The Observer wondered why this information was forced on visitors. By contrast, Gentileschi’s biography is frequently ‘forced upon’ both her work and its viewers – a process that allows sadistic relish to masquerade as gender-progressive concern, and objectifies the artist rather than recognising her immense ability.
read the article
No comments:
Post a Comment