Women in the Picture: Women, Art and the Power of Looking

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In a strange way however, I still enjoyed this book. Whilst normally I might get frustrated with being confused about what is happening in a story, I decided to just run with it, and 'feel' what the message of the story was, rather than understand all the in's and out's. And what I was left with, was a poignant story that left me with a lot of questions. What is the 'story of my life' that I tell myself? How does this 'story' impact on my decisions and how I live my life? Is the 'story of my life', even accurate or true? Is accuracy or truth possible? And what secrets do we hide from ourselves or others, that dictate our ultimate outcome?

Book review of “Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with

And there are occasions where she does present contrary points of view like “The Dinner Party” by Judy Chicago (currently at the Brooklyn Museum). As a matter of fact, she has written an entire chapter on the “ Monstrous Women” depicted in art: the witches, the Medusas and the Liliths, the Sphinxes, the women who “defy the archetypes of ideal womanhood”. She said the male-dominated artistic system had always sought to defend itself by denigrating female artists. Equally damaging, she added, was how historians had played down the achievements of women until their voices were silenced and their creations overlooked and then hidden from view. Seventeenth-century works by Artemisia Gentileschi, Fede Galizia and Elisabetta Sirani give way to still lifes of fruit and flowers before the exhibition moves to portraits – including Élisabeth Louise Vigeé Le Brun’s Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante – and then to Orientalism, depictions of working women, images of maternity, sisterhood and, finally, to images of female emancipation.

In Hans Baldung Grien’s painting The Ages of Woman and Death, there is a juxtaposition of a youthful “Venus “ type figure and her older self ( which is depicted very unfavourably ), which the author interprets as promoting the idea of “that women, no matter how lovely on the outside, are all hags in Venus' clothing, just waiting to be unmasked by the march of time.” If we start to see the separation between what we find intolerable in real life and what we lionize in monuments and works of art, then perhaps we can further the way in which we talk about systemic sexual violence against women… leads us to a burning question of what we do with the artworks and public sculptures that contradict our proudly held liberal values in real life.

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All the characters in the book were either mind boggling boring or just plain strange. And I can’t say I liked the way the author wrote about women. Just felt so unauthentic. The story had a whisper of mystery here and there but it did not feel like it was resolved in any towards the end. I was horrified not because of the violence and gore, but because its subject matter: the villainizing of woman’s aging body and elderly woman’s sexual desire, which was at the core of the film. The more we consider this metaphor of the Virgin Mary, the more it starts to feel like sheer horror… Beneath the starched surface of Mary is a body that has been sealed shut from which only breast milk and tears escape.” And as she points out – what is it with all the dead and beautiful female bodies ever so present in art like “Ophelia” by John Everett Millais. Does this not send a message that women should be adorned and silent and demand nothing?If this was a work of fiction I would like it more, its provoking language that is littered with buzz words depicts wonderful, vivid scenes. This made it an enjoyable read, that is until I remembered this is a work of non-fiction. For my non-fiction reads I prefer to work things out for myself but this book, with its continual need to emphasise and spell things out, left me no room to do this. I want to re-emphasize that the author raises a number of very valid issues. When reading I could not help thinking of the Confederate monuments that glorify those who wanted to preserve slavery – and are now in the process, in some States in the U.S., of being removed. Medusa, who had been historically 'the protector of sex, death, divination, renewal and of dark moon mysteries', became nothing but a symbol of male victories in Benvenuto Cellini's bronze sculpture of Perseus with the Head of Medusa. Venus, maiden, wife, mother, monster—women have been bound so long by these restrictive roles, codified by patriarchal culture, that we scarcely see them.