I keep gazing at a print of Picasso's "Girl Before A Mirror" (1932) that hangs on my wall, trying to divine what it is saying. This woman seems to be grappling with her femininity as she reaches her hand into the mirror almost through the image of herself. In the region of her abdomen, Picasso paints circular figures that resemble a womb. The woman's face resembles a mask split in half, half yellow, half purple. Her image in the mirror shows only half of a mask with red around the eyes. From the mirror image's eyes hangs a small semi-circle of red, possibly a tear.
While the intensity of color here rivals Matisse's showiest work, I am drawn to "Girl" by Picasso's depth of perception. Rather than telling you about the girl's experiences before a mirror, Picasso lets the viewer watch the girl connect to herself in the mirror. He writes an open-ended sentence. This painting rejects the idea of art as escapism and instead offers this picture as an invitation into the mind of the woman or perhaps even the idea of womanhood.
I also hang Matisse prints on my walls. While Picasso's works make me seek to understand the objects, I become absorbed by Matisse's use of color--his reds and yellows warm the entire room. I display his still lifes, though, not his nudes. Looking at Matisse's works, I continually feel a range of positive emotions. His colors evoke a sense of calm and happiness.
But works by both Matisse and Picasso can simultaneously offend and inspire me. As Matisse and Picasso opened the doors to modern art, they brought with them an inheritance of disempowering female imagery. On my two trips to this exhibit, I found myself standing in an awkward place. To begin to understand what has happened in twentieth century art, I must study and understand these masters, but their depictions upset my vision of the world and a woman's role in it.
While Matisse and Picasso put me in an uncomfortable position, the curators working in 2003 surprise me with their implicit acceptance of the idea of women as art subjects. Why didn't they address this issue in their catalog or audio guide? The place of Matisse and Picasso in art history is secure, so why not start questioning some of the other forces at work in their paintings?
While exposing new ideas about Matisse and Picasso and their important contributions to each other's art and the idea of the modern in art, the exhibit also showed that modern art does not by necessity incorporate modern feminist ideals. As the suffragette movement gained momentum in the early 1900s in the United States and similar feminist movements arose in Europe, these artists continue to use primitive images of sexualized women. Changes in iconography seem to happen much slower than political change. To this day, contemporary art struggles with the inherent conflict between women as art object and women as artist.
The Guerilla Girls, an anonymous group of female artists who protest the marginalization of women in the art world, organized themselves after the MoMA's 1984 exhibition, "An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture" had only 13 female artists out of 169 contemporary artists exhibited. Since then, the women have crashed major art exhibitions wearing gorilla masks to highlight how female artists are ignored in the mainstream art world. Their provocative posters put art in the wider perspective: "Do women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art?" one of their posters asks. "Less than five percent of artists in the Modern Arts section are women, but 85 percent of the nudes are female." These posters and protests serve an important purpose. The highest forms of art that stand in the Metropolitan Museum of Art should be celebrated, and also questioned. By questioning the patriarchal ideals around which Western art developed, women can begin to find a space from which they stand as art viewers and creators.
The Guerilla Girls' protests kept flashing through my head as I left the exhibit. Maybe we need to shake up the modern art world and remind it that women are not just objects. We can appreciate the beauty of forms and color, but there is also beauty in remembering that women paint, stand, and argue.
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Mirror, mirror on the painting on the wall