(Channeling a certain sock frog) Why are there so many essays about prostitutes?
Ok, so I know that we call it the world's oldest profession for a reason, but were there really so many more prostitutes in the 1870's than now? To read feminist art criticism you'd think you couldn't walk the streets of Paris without, well, bumping into women who were also, ahem, walking the streets. It's ridiculous! Ok, so there were lots of women who were too busy keeping up appearances to actually enjoy living in a civic atmosphere, and there were also, certainly, people exchanging sex for money, but you are going to have a hard time convincing me that there were not the majority of women in between, much as there are now, and there always have been. Personally, I take a little offense to the conventional wisdom that all barmaids and waitresses of the 1880's were also on the game. How could starving artists afford so much sex they had to pay for, and also pay for their bar tabs and afford a studio? It just doesn't make good economic sense- why pay for sex, not to mention model's fees, when you could probably get away with dating someone who wasn't obsessed with her reputation? Why do we have to assume that there were not social contracts back in the day similar to now? Yes, ok, if you wanted to be married, and you wanted that lifestyle it was something you had to "protect," apparently. But why do scholars so often look down on, or just disregard, the mistresses and kept women? Women choosing not to get married, but to also have the standard of not being exclusively flesh for hire?
I find this idea perpetuated frequently, and it really annoys me (obviously). I mean, think about literature- You have female characters in Dickens, Austen, Hugo, etc. who may be taken advantage of, but are certainly not for sale. The middle class may not be a liberal as today, but there were women who could muddle through being single and not obsessed with their reputations, I'm sure. You can also look at the life of Colette, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colette) and see that some people were able to be quite openly bi-sexual and scandalous and able, oh my goodness! to contribute to the artistic dialog at the same time as making plenty of money!
It seems to be that writers such as Griselda Pollock (did her Daddy give her that name?) want there to have been a boys club that was somehow easier to win your stripes in if you were a man than if you were a woman. And, it's true, the Salon did accept a lot more men than women. But look around now at colleges and grad schools- you'll see that from the top down there is a shift in gender. There are generally a majority of male professors, followed by about equal numbers of men and women in the grad departments, and an overwhelming majority of women undergrads. What happens between those two times? Well, in my informal experience, I would say that the majority of male professors are, not surprisingly, married to women they went to undergrad with. The women are busy taking care of the kids and the house, generally holding down a job, and not making any art work until their kids hit college. Try telling these wives of professors that they aren't artists and you'll get your nose rearranged. It's hard now to have a family and an art career. Imagine how hard it was before birth control!
I find it hard to believe that the women who were the dancers or actresses in these paintings did not think of themselves as artists. Or that these women who modeled did not have an opinion of how they were drawn. Just because none of their thoughts or drawings ended up on display does not mean they didn't contribute to the dialog. They just didn't contribute the same way men did in this particular city in this particular era.
For example (and not harp on this too much) think of the visual effect of the relationship the actress Sarah Bernhardt and Alphone Mucha had, by all reports a non-sexual one. Actually, let's just take Sarah Bernhardt as an example for a second- Daughter of a Jewish courtesan, a courtesan occasionally herself, she went on to become the world's most famous actress. Apparently having a "bad" reputation didn't hold her back- she even mothered an illegitimate prince of Belgium and starred in the title role of Hamlet. I challenge Griselda to name an equally famous french stage actor with anywhere near the fantastic reputation.
Maybe women didn't care about painting quite as much, and found doing other projects more interesting or rewarding. I certainly do the majority of the time, and I'm a modern girl.
I resent that Paris was seen, is seen, as the center of the world at this time. What about the rest of France, where perhaps women were furthering the traditions of pottery, or the culinary arts, or spinning and dying, or weaving, as in Lyon? Who care's that there were a bunch of good ole boys in some city? That does not have to represent the entirety of male/female relations for an entire generation in an entire country.
But the presumably sexist paintings of Degas and the crew remain what people talk about. And they try to compare the relatively clumsy paintings of Cassat as if they were masterful. I do like her more than Renior, but just because all her characters seem to have their clothes on doesn't mean that her work isn't just as sexually charged as her male contemporaries. For example, if "girl in blue armchair" had been painted by a man (or "Psyche," perhaps) it would have been seen as fairly scandalous. The girl looks positively wanton, if you want to look at her that way. But most people don't. I can hazard a guess that a lot of people looking at Degas see a love of women, not an abuse of women.
I've lived with reproductions of Degas somewhere in my home most of my life. I find that the body images he created, those of women bathing, dressing, dancing, and most of all of women waiting to do something, say a lot about female musculature, and therefore strength and poise. I don't care how he got to make those images, or where that particular wash basin was located. What I care about is how beautiful the representations are. I care about the exciting use of color and line, and the amazing understanding of space and form.
Even in our "enlightened" times, women don't like to draw women. As a model, I know women hate to draw women because I watch them fidget for the first half hour. I hate to draw women, too. I don't feel comfortable with a model for a long time, because of how closely they resemble myself. For at least the first half hour I either want to feed them or tell them to go home. But I'm used to getting up on the modeling stand in front of 12 or more men, half of whom will inevitably draw my breasts first. But, really, if they are good drawers, they see me no more lifelike than a bowl of fruit. I suspect that these same men, if confronted with a male model, would more than likely head home. But both genders are more comfortable drawing women naked than men. Male models have to deal with problems of visual arousal, which keeps a lot of them from being able to relax and be good at their jobs. But also, as a woman, I don't freak out when people stare at me. My flight or fight instincts are not triggered by a man looking at me, or even a group of men looking at me. Most of the male models I know actually have to train themselves not to panic the first time they are up on the stand, even if they have their clothes on. To establish a relationship with a male model is harder for both parties, and I think that's probably one of the reasons that fewer men are featured naked after the Grecian era.
But why would I want to not understand the way an artist looks at a woman with desire? Desire is a legitimate way to look at another person. We are not all academics, we artists. Drawing dead bodies is one whole school of study, and I am uncomfortable looking at paintings, such as Francis Bacon's, that show people who look nearly dead. But I wonder why it is unacceptable for Degas to have an intimate relationship, possibly built on mutual respect, if not actual affection, for the naked ladies and young dancers that he drew. The biggest hurdle in this discussion I think, will be the acknowledgment that the relationships artists and models have are often a lot more complex than critics would find convenient, and do not always indicate an exclusively economic exchange.
