Four Contemporary Women Artists

Alice Neel

Alice Neel (1900-1984) painted psychologically perceptive portraits of individuals whose lives, in some cases, she believed had been torn apart by the "rat race" of New York City. Ranging from religious fanatics and schizophrenics to famous artists, critics, and social elites, Neel captured the emotional state as well as the appearance of the person by blending representational elements of Realism with Expressionism in order to communicate the interior turmoil and outer affectation of those she painted. Neel's use of color evokes a similar sense of feeling evident in the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Edward Munch. The intense gaze of her sitters parallels that of Picasso's early self-portraits, and her elongation of the body refers to the late 19th and early 20th Century European expressionists, Oscar Kokoschka, Ludwig Kirchner and Otto Dix.

Neel's private life was quite difficult. As a child, she remembered feeling terrified and fascinated by the world and its people and while attending church, would cry at the sight of a crucifix. Always knowing she wanted to become a painter, she graduated from the Philadelphia School of Design for Women in 1925. However, the Great Depression soon followed, during which she experienced the death of her first child and suffered a nervous breakdown. Such trying circumstances enabled her to understand the pain of the human condition and guided her artistic ambition to communicate the interpersonal struggle of people from all walks of life.

Rather than painting with absolute precision, the artist exaggerated facial aspects and rendered hands to appear claw-like or cramped. To this degree certain features appear as monstrosities, including the teeth of one young man in the portrait entitled "Randall In Extremis" in 1962. Yellowed and pointed, they contribute to the viewer's impression of this man as a sniveling beast, showing the artist's insertion of metaphor through the painterly embellishment of features.

Some critics have said Neel used the idea of physiognomy, or the notion that a person's physical features are a manifestation of one's personality or character. This could be said for the portrait of Priscilla Johnson, a friend of Neel's sons, in which we see a very thin young woman who appears tense by the way she hunches her shoulders and folds her arm over her body. Stiff and upright, with her feet placed awkwardly in front of her, the woman's gaunt shoulders and long body frame look skeletal in contrast to the weight of her direct gaze. As the sitter wears fashionable clothing of the era in which she lived, one considers her social status and the pressure she may have experienced as a woman to maintain her appearance. It is impossible to know, but Neel's work compels us to speculate about what the potential meanings might be. Perhaps the artist is suggesting that this woman may seem physically weak, yet spiritually powerful as the eyes are thought to be the windows to the soul.

Neel claims to have been influenced by the work of Francisco Goya, the Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries whose etchings included dramatic and frightening scenes of monsters enfolded in dark shadows plaguing a man in his sleep. Goya did not share the Enlightenment's faith in the ultimate rationality and goodness of humanity. As a critic of the goals of industrialization and competitive urban life Neel also shared Goya's sense of skepticism of the motivations of individuals and society.

Though we can compare Neel to an artist such as Goya today because of her eventual success and inclusion in art history, it is important to note that women artists have suffered exclusion from this field. Neel, too, did not receive national recognition until the age of 74, when the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted her first major solo exhibition, which came as a result of the efforts of the women's liberation movement of the early 1970's to promote the achievements of women in all facets of life.

Discussion Ideas:

Activity:

Have your students look carefully at the "Priscilla Johnson" painting.

Questions to help your students understand the difference between a portrait that is representational in its imitation of the exact features of the sitter versus the expressive portrait in its representation of the artist's thoughts about a subject in the picture:

1. Look at the sitter's hands in "Priscilla Johnson". How are they painted-in a realistic way or elongated?
2. Look at the plant in the picture. Do you detect any similarities between the fingers and the shape of the plant leaves? Why do you think the artist chose to paint the plant as if it were creeping up or around the figure?
3. There are parts of the painting that appear unfinished. Do you think Neel did this on purpose? If so, why? Does the fact that there are unfinished patches of canvas cause us to concentrate on other facets of the painting? If so, how?

Questions to lead your students to the understanding that, just like the artist, the viewer also perceives things in a painting that may be a projection or reflection of their own feelings upon the work.

1. What do think the sitter may be thinking or feeling?
2. Neel called herself a "collector of souls" and claimed to know "why people look the way they look". What she could have meant by these statements?
3. Can an artist's state of mind or mood affect what they see and how they depict an image?
4. Can the viewer ever know for certain what the artist was feeling at the time he or she created a work of art? If so, how? If not, can the viewer create meaning for him or herself?

Throughout the discussion, encourage your students to recognize the importance of the viewer's response to artwork. Help them to understand that looking is not an innocent or passive activity. Rather, looking can often lead to the construction of meaning or "reality" in our own lives.

Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger is a contemporary feminist artist who combines glossy stock advertising photography with bold, catchy slogans to produce shocking "photomontages", which mock and undermine the methods used by advertisers to sell products. Her early career as a graphic designer for the fashion magazine Mademoiselle directly influenced her artistic aesthetic.

Though Kruger was not a Pop artist, her work similarly embraces the 1960s' Pop Art practice of "appropriating" or taking images from popular culture, such as comic books and other commercial source material, as a way to combine the traditionally "low" art form of graphic design with the lofty ideals of "high" art. In terms of style and political message, Kruger's work also reminds us of the 1930s' political photomontages by the German artist, John Heartfield, who showed Hitler as a butcher preparing to carve up a rooster, which is a symbol of France, in his work Have No Fear-He's a Vegetarian.

Kruger displays a similar level of intensity in her critique of the power of the media industry to dominate our lives by telling us what to buy and whom to believe. As the feminist movement of the 1960s paved the way for women to question the patriarchy, or a society in which men control a disproportionately large share of power, Kruger emerged during the 1980s to further challenge certain "myths" or unreal ideas created by a patriarchal media industry about the identity of women. In contemporary art since the 1960s, we see many artists making photographs, sculpture, and other art objects about the unfair discrimination of women, African, Asian, Mexican, and Native Americans, as well as gays and lesbians. Kruger represents one of the many voices of "post-modern" artists who attempt to "deconstruct" or break down the various "myths" which prevent us from understanding the subjective or personal, experience of others.

In Talk Like Us the disturbing image of a presumably male face with an outstretched tongue serves as the background for a fire engine red box floating behind the white text-to which the title refers. The text functions as a kind of "sign", commanding the viewer to speak the same as an unknown entity or group. Perhaps Kruger wants us to consider what authority or whose voice the "us" represents beneath the polished surface. Kruger thus presents language and words themselves as potential images to be understood as art and therefore visual elements to be dissected as well. Notice, for instance, that Kruger's text demands, "Talk Like Us" as opposed to "Talk Like Them". By choosing to use the word "us" as opposed to "them," the artist draws our attention to the difference of the two meanings behind the words. As in sports, war, and other facets of society, the opposing team or country serves as the enemy or "other" to the winning side. The viewer wonders if it is possible that Kruger views this relationship of oppositions as an unnecessary construction. The phrases "Your Con Jobs, Your Power Trips, Your Sob Stories, Your Spins" also appear in smaller print above the order Talk Like Us. All of the former catch phrases blame an unknown "you" for carrying out different forms of manipulation and control. In this case, the victim of such lies seems to point the finger at an unknowable enemy.

Like Kruger, many contemporary artists such as Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince, and Lorna Simpson, recognize the importance of the use of words in our daily lives and strive to make art that asks us to consider the significance of both image and text, which may provide new understanding of how the two collide to shape our culture.

Discussion Ideas:

Introduce your students to Kruger's Talk Like Us prior to the discussion activity outlined below.

Activity:

Use an advertisement cut out from a magazine or television commercial to provide an example of how the voice in advertisements speaks directly to you, telling you to buy a product and relate Kruger's use of voice to such ads. Point out how the advertisement is designed, in terms of the placement of images with text in order to show how Kruger mocks this technique in her art.

Questions to help students compare/contrast an advertisement with Kruger's works, Talk Like Us and Think Like Us:

1. What kinds of pictures has the artist used?
2. How are the words placed on the picture?
3. Are they larger/smaller than the picture?
4. Which do you notice more-the words or the picture?

Questions to facilitate students' understanding of Kruger's purpose or idea behind the artwork:

1. In what ways is the Barbara Kruger piece like an advertisement or a work of graphic design?
2. In what way does Kruger make art out of advertising as graphic design?
3. Why does it matter who is speaking to us in the picture?

Throughout the exercise, guide your students to an understanding of the following:

Although fine art and graphic design are very different, they are also very similar. Graphic designers, just like fine artists, are constantly editing the designed picture to make it affect the viewer in the most powerful way in order to sell a product. Lead your students to recognize that Kruger uses graphic design elements to criticize the role the advertising industry plays in our lives. Cite the fact that commercials, brands, and advertisements are all around us in everyday life. (According to Anne Marie Seward Barry in her book Visual Intelligence many people see as many as 3,000 ads per day!)

Lorna Simpson

While Kruger stresses the overwhelming presence of advertisements and male cultural domination, the contemporary photographic artist, Lorna Simpson emerged in America during the 1980s and continues to make art that is a powerful critique of both racism and sexism as seen from a female African-American perspective. Because her work uses ideas as a kind of "material" from which to create, it is thought of as Conceptual Art, which took hold during the 1960s, however, began in the early 1900s with the art of Marcel Duchamp.

Simpson's influences can also be traced back to the feminist photographers of the 1970's, like Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman. Sherman created a series of mock, or fake, film stills in which she photographed herself dressed up as vain, daydreaming women, and other stereotypical female roles. This work explored how women are unfairly represented as passive objects to be looked at in film.

In addition to understanding that how one represents another in a photograph can shape our perceptions about that person, Simpson's work shows how the identity of a person can become the complete invention of someone else. Simpson's photos, like Cindy Sherman's also raise questions about how the identity of women, both black and white, is created through male representations of them in painting, film and advertising.

Traditionally, male artists, such as Botticelli, Ingres, and Renoir, painted the female to be looked upon as an object of beauty. Today, advertisers use the female body as a decorative object to sell products, such as cars, to potential male buyers. In film, a beautiful actress receives the attention of the male character. In Simpson's photographic work, however, the female is not presented as a beautiful object for the male gaze.

In her work, Same, we are struck by the stark color contrast of several photographs of the backs of African-American female heads, which are connected to each other by a long black braid. With the back of the heads facing the viewer and set against a white background, we are denied the opportunity to gaze upon the faces of these figures. The female "object" in these photographs actively looks beyond from within the photographic frame.

Similarly, Simpson's photographs capture the methods documentary photographers have used to show African Americans in a supposedly "objective" manner. Specifically, the artist "appropriates" or borrows a racist style of photographing slaves from the mid -19th- century photographer J.T.Zealy, whose series of daguerrotypes (photos produced on a silvered copper plate) depicted African Americans in fully frontal or side positions in the fashion of criminal poses. Treating them as photographic specimens, Zealy further tried to prove that, due to differences in African-American skull sizes, whites were inherently superior.

Beneath the photographs in Same there are black plaques with words engraved in them, which read, "they pronounced water the same way", "were disliked for the same reasons," "read w/ the same accent," "were not related," and other phrases. The phrases describing certain shared experiences seem to relate to the images of the black female.

In Same as well as in other works such as III, Simpson examines certain oppositions, such as presence and absence. These concepts surface in light of the invisibility of the African American female to the public as well as the African-American female artist to art history. Critic, Craig Owens has suggested that the insertion of photography into art by women during the 1970s-particularly by artists like Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine emerges as the necessary and logical transition from modernism to post-modernism in as much as the goal of the latter serves to counter the privileged white-male experience with an enlarged view of the world through women artists' eyes. Lorna Simpson, in turn, expands this view to include that of the African-American female artist.

Discussion Ideas:

Find a selection of news photos, magazine advertisements, or other media images with accompanying text and start a discussion about how individuals or things are depicted in the photographs.

Questions to lead your students to the understanding that the role of the photographer is important in influencing the viewer's perception of the subject in the picture:

1. What are the people in the photograph doing? Why do you think they are doing this?
2. How has the photographer chosen to photograph the subjects? From above, below, eye-level, close-up, far away, etc...? How does this change the way the viewer would otherwise perceive the person or thing in the picture?
3. How does the text relate to the image? Discuss why the person who designed the advertisement might have selected the particular text. Does the text change the meaning of the photograph? If the text were not present, would you interpret the picture differently?

Encourage your students to recognize that the photographer is always conscious of how he or she frames his or her subject in a certain light-be it negative, positive, or ostensibly neutral. In addition, lead them to comprehend that contemporary artists use words as images because words, like images, can signify multiple meanings and that words can change meanings as they are juxtaposed against different images. Explain to your students that the photographs we have seen in the past and those we view in the present have influenced and continue to influence our perceptions of the identity of other people-be they black or white, male or female.

Mary Ann Currier

The masterful still-lifes of native Louisvillian Mary Ann Currier invite us into sensuously beautiful and detailed compositions, which reveal the potential for objects to stimulate and inspire dialogue among contemporary viewers. Her influences range from the 17th-century naturalism of Rachel Ruysch to 19th-century trompe l'oeil-a form of illusionistic painting that attempts to "fool the eye" by representing an object as existing in three dimensions at the surface of the painting. Currier also draws from Impressionism and its emphasis on light and color to create form. Although Currier's work appears "superrealist" in its almost photographic accuracy, she diverges from working in a deliberately conceptual manner.

Born in 1927, Currier was part of the World War II generation of women artists who experienced an art community hostile to the emerging presence of women. However, given Currier's tenacity and exceptional talent for drawing-from portraiture to the figure-she secured a position as a commercial illustrator for Stewart's and Burdorf's of Louisville. She later entered the all-male faculty at the Louisville School of Art, where she taught portraiture and other classes for twenty years while continuing to find time to nurture her own art career.

Currier works mainly with oil pastels, which enable her to render images more quickly than by painting with oils. The control she exercises through the use of this medium contributes to her tight, yet gestural compositions. In certain still lifes, the artist juxtaposes a stark white teacup on a muted background with a bright, succulent looking group of strawberries, drawing attention to the vibrancy of natural forms. The majority of her work centers around small object groupings placed upon a flat ground, operating much like a stage, which she illuminates using both natural and artificial lights.

In contrast to the modernist emphasis on the flatness of the picture plane, Currier crafts an illusion of three-dimensional space through direct observation of the material world. In her work, "Cookies", a satin-white napkin pulls the viewer's eye into the picture plane from the bottom right hand corner. As the napkin arcs to the left, it creates a sweeping "z" movement from a plate with golden cookies on top to a cup and saucer, pitcher, and lastly, to a sugar bowl. The whiteness of the dishes is balanced by the lustrous, waxy green of plant leaves, serving as the backdrop to the work. The gilded, circular edges of the plate, cup, and saucer echo the orb shape of the cookies. The artist's consideration of these compositional elements illustrates her attention to formal detail.

In other works, such as in the Postcard series, we see the artist's inclusion of paintings of postcards with reproductions of famous artists' works, including Pop artist, Andy Warhol's famous silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe. Although her work is not explicitly feminist in nature, Currier recognizes herself as one in a line of many women artists who made their mark on art history. The artist pays homage to famous women artists like Frida Kahlo, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Olga Costa, and others and has copied the works of many artists for placement in her own still-life compositions. Celebratory and exploratory, Currier's process leads the viewer to a wondering and pondering of objects in the past and their relationship to the present.

Discussion Ideas:

Discuss with your students the significance of still-life painting. Encourage them to understand the still life as the artists' glorification of sight itself in representing different objects-both natural and human-made. The still life also serves as a time capsule of the contemporary world in which we live, depending upon the objects selected for our composition.

Question:

1. The still life was once referred to in French as nature-morte or "dead nature". Why do you think this was?
2. The objects in a still life may be chosen for their purely visual value, or the artist may paint them for their symbolic meaning. If you were to paint one of these today, what kinds of objects would you use and would they hold any symbolic meaning for you?
3. How would you arrange the objects on a table-far apart from one another or close? Why?

Lead your students to an understanding of the artist's role in framing the still-life painting. Though the artist may depict things in an objective manner, the selection of certain fruits, toys, dishes, and iconography tells a story about the culture from which these objects came. The viewer may also glean information about the motivations of the artist from his or her selection of forms.

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