Women in the picture What culture does with female bodies

"Art and culture are not separate to our discussions about the politics of gender, race and representation; they are at its very heart," posits art historian McCormack (The Art of Looking Up) in this illuminating look at how women's bodies have been depicted in the arts. Examining work from Greek mythology and the Renaissance up to Instagram and Pinterest, she considers how archetypes in art have permeated the narrative around womanhood, which, she argues, until recently, has been largely controlled by men. She anchors her insightful study around four female stereotypes--Venus, Mothers, Maidens and Dead Damsels, and Monstrous Women--and lucidly explains the ways in which women's bodies have become symbols of male desire, sex, and violence, their subjugation culturally treated as "the unquestionable natural order of things." From Titian's The Rape of Europa (1560--1562), through works by Picasso and Warhol, and even to the Trump campaign's portrayal of Hillary Clinton as a modern Medusa, McCormack reveals how such imagery has come to influence today's sexual politics, gender roles, misogyny, and racial attitudes, and she also gives credit to the women artists (including 17th-century Italian painter Elisabbeta Sirani, and contemporaries Beyoncé and artist Kara Walker) who've challenged these perceptions by celebrating female sexuality, pleasure, and power. This eye-opening work will leave readers with plenty to ponder. (Nov.)

A feminist confronts the representations of women's bodies in the art world. London-based art historian McCormack, the founder and course director of the Women and Art study program at Sotheby's Institute of Art, focuses on the representation of women in art and the "roles that western culture has created for [women] as mothers, monsters and maidens" in pursuit of the "unattainably perfect Venus." The author begins with Diego Velázquez's famous 17th-century painting the Rokeby Venus (also known by other names), a woman "cast as little more than a rich man's plaything," and the scandal that erupted over its attempted 1914 destruction by a British suffragette. McCormack delves into how, over centuries--Botticelli, Titian, Picasso, Modigliani, Hottentot Venus, ads for the removal of female body hair, the anti-Venus paintings of Debra Cartwright--Venus "has been employed to make ideal versions of femininity seem normal and to teach us patriarchy's version of sex." This conception "satisfies a default male heterosexual gaze and leaves actual female desire without a language, without even a voice." The "routinely overlooked" mothering paintings of Berthe Morisot capture "seemingly straightforward domestic images freighted with psychodrama and existential uncertainty," challenging the classic Madonna and Child archetype. Art and advertising, writes the author, still struggle with depictions of breastfeeding and birthing as well as nonbinary and nonbiological mothers. The abduction, rape, sacrifice, and victimhood of the maiden, as in Titian's The Rape of Europa, McCormack ruefully notes, has been a common subject in images and stories since the Greeks, aestheticizing violence against women into easily digestible pop culture and art. It's time, she writes, "to see the separation between what we find intolerable in real life and what we lionise in monuments and works of art," and she introduces us to a new generation of female artists who are doing just that. A timely, succinct, aesthetic inquiry into debates about sexuality, objectification, and representation. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.