Feminist Art

 

What have artists brought to feminist struggles?

 

 

an article, which has become cult, in which she then takes up the ingenuous question of a gallery owner friend, and answers it by shedding light on the conditions of the impediment of female artists. Nearly fifty years later, three American academics (Lucinda Gosling, Hilary Robinson and Amy Tobin) unite to highlight the essential role of artists in feminist struggles. Or how, through the image, a whole fight is shaped. We take a look back, in five questions, on the writing of this (very) beautiful book, which evokes both education and exhibition conditions as well as the political impact of female art.

 

“Bethe Morison has succeeded, thanks to her rich and bourgeois environment, in using her artistic education to forge a career. "

 

The first artist 

Lucinda Gosling: Bethe Motorist is interesting because she was at the center of the first truly disruptive artistic movement - the Impressionists - and painted in an extremely savant-grade style for the time; however, his subjects are often borrowed from the domestic sphere, with members of his family, fashionable interiors, etc.

I like this dichotomy and the fact that she made her own choices. Women painters of previous generations generally owed their success to their clients, but Bethe Motorist succeeded, thanks to her wealthy and bourgeois environment, in using her artistic education to forge a career, choose her subjects and exhibit her paintings alongside painters. men. Her work is the reflection of a feminine universe, certainly privileged but often constrained, and rendered with breathtaking talent.

 

What role did feminist imagery play in the struggle for the vote for women?

 

Lucinda Gosling:The art and the suffragette movement were intimately linked; even today, we associate the latter with certain powerful images. Many activistswere artists, which is not surprising considering the obstacles they could also encounter in the art world. They used their drawing skills to create one of the world's first "visual identities" ... And it is interesting to compare the art of the suffragettes, which was always of great quality, with that of the anti-right campaign. vote of women, often rudimentary and vulgar. From banners designed by Mary Lowness to murals by Sylvia Pankhurst, suffragette art presents a strong, intelligent and worthy vision of the women's movement, with many allegorical figures symbolizing the struggle for equality. What's also interesting is that suffragists celebrated their femininity instead of covering it up, for example by dressing fashionably, or giving mothers and older women as prominent a place as working women. and educated.