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The theme of this paper discusses the ideals and norms of the human body in western society—specifically speaking, the female body—in contrast and studying the works of art by the British contemporary artist, Jenny Saville. The human body plays an essential role in contemporary art; whether the art is expressing gender or societal issues, perceptions of body image, or challenging the viewer in all aspects of the body and communication. Jenny Saville depicts large women and distorted figures.
Throughout the centuries, notions about the female body have created and recreated the human form. This has resulted in many varieties of depictions of the female body and thoughts of what “beauty” is and how to represent the female body in different
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She attended the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland and received her BA in 1992. She had numerous exhibitions throughout her time at the Glasgow School of Art, and with the help of gallery owner and art collector, Charles Saatchi, many people became familiar with her work. It was during her six month visit to the United States, midway through her college career, which sparked her interest of the human body. She found her muses in the malls of Ohio, where she was pleased to see big women; they had the physicality that she was interested in; “big white flesh in shorts and t-shirts.” A few years later, she moved from Scotland to New York City where she spent long hours observing the work of Dr. Barry Weintraub, a plastic surgeon. She would take photographs while standing in on cosmetic surgeries and liposuctions, gaining a better understanding of the human body and the various manipulations that can be made. Here she improved her knowledge of the physical alterations of the body as well as obtaining an insight into the psychological factors behind these changes. Her work focuses on obese women, transgender people, and deformity; which she paints on canvases that are as big as 9 feet by 7, some even larger. These paintings compose of combinations of color arrangement of pale purples, blues, browns, pinks, and yellows of the flesh. With her technique of brushstrokes and use of color, her paintings draws …show more content…
That being said, Saville represents bodies rarely appreciated in today’s society. She believes what women think is beautiful can be different, that there is a beauty in individualism and through imperfections; if it’s part of your identity, it is beautiful, embrace it, reveal it, do not conceal these parts of the body. In Saville’s Propped, she portrays a large woman perched on a high stool, wearing nothing but a pair of white shoes. She is distorted and foreshortened. In the center of the painting are the woman’s crossed hands which set among her enormous pair of knees. The knees and the woman’s breasts are larger than her head, giving a sense that we as the viewer are looking up at the woman. A text is scratched into the paint in mirror writing which runs across and down the woman’s body. It reads “If we continue to speak in this sameness – speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other again..” This text is taken from a passage of Luce Irigaray. Saville’s “paintings reclaim the female body from centuries of male-produced art that have defined women’s bodies and women’s beauty. She explains, “We need a new language, a women’s language, so that we don’t have to take on maleness to be successful.” The woman depicted in the painting has a sense of attitude. The woman’s shoulders
"Skin blemishes made it impossible for me to really enjoy myself. I was always worrying about the way I looked" (Brumberg, p. 87). Woman all around the world share the same problem, they feel unhappy and self-conscious with the appearance of their bodies. In The Body Project by Joan Jacobs Brumberg, she successfully illustrates the way adolescents begin to change focus from inner to outer beauty in the early 19th and 20th centuries. Through use of personal diaries and historical research, Brumberg shows her readers the physical differences between girls then and now. Brumberg talks about an array of topics in her book – periods, acne, dieting, piercing, virginity, and sexuality. From their roots in the 1800’s through the Victorian era and into modern society the reader gets a glimpse of the way young women evaluate their bodies and turn them into body projects, and is still to this day sweeping the nation more than ever.
Prior to the 20th century, female artists were the minority members of the art world (Montfort). They lacked formal training and therefore were not taken seriously. If they did paint, it was generally assumed they had a relative who was a relatively well known male painter. Women usually worked with still lifes and miniatures which were the “lowest” in the hierarchy of genres, bible scenes, history, and mythological paintings being at the top (Montfort). To be able to paint the more respected genres, one had to have experience studying anatomy and drawing the male nude, both activities considered t...
What is beauty? Seemingly a continually evolving and infinitely elusive ideal - mankind has been obsessed with the concept of beauty throughout the ages. Portraiture, as an essential channel of visual communication, has traditionally been the medium through which definitions of beauty are graphically expressed. Particularly in the Renaissance where portraiture often served celebratory or commemorative purposes, it was crucial that portraits were accepted as aesthetically pleasing reflections of the social ideals of the time. Hence by comparing and contrasting a range of different portraits of depicting men and women of the Renaissance such as Titian’s La Bella, Bronzino’s Eleonora de Medici, Sofonisba Anguissola’s Self Portrait, Vasari’s Alessandro de Medici, Bronzino’s Cosimo de Medici as Orpheus and Pedro Berruguete’s Portrait of Federico da Mentelfeltro, viewers can gain an understanding of the conceptual differences in definitions of masculine and feminine beauty during this period.
Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Cindy Sherman grew up in suburban Huntington Beach on Long Island, the youngest of five children and had a regular American childhood. She was very self-involved, found of costumes, and given to spending hours at the mirror, playing with makeup (Schjeldahl 7). Cindy Sherman attended the state University College at Buffalo, New York, where she first started to create art in the medium of painting. During her college years, she painted self-portraits and realistic copies of images that she saw in photographs and magazines. Yet, she became less, and less interested in painting and became increasingly interested in conceptual, minimal, performance, body art, and film alternatives (Sherman 5). Sherman’s very first introductory photography class in college was a complete failure for she had difficulties with the technological aspects of making a print. After her disastrous first attempt in photography, Sherman discovered Contemporary Art, which had a profound and lasting effect on the rest of her artistic career (Thames and Hudson 1). Sherman’s first assignment in her photography class was to photograph something which gave her a problem, thus, Sherman chose to photograph her self naked. While this was difficult, she learned that having an idea was the most important factor in creating her art, not so much the technique that she used.
Over the years many artist have viewed sensitive subjects within their work. Sex is one of the sensitive subjects that has been viewed in a positive and negative way. Before and during the 19th century, most paintings, sculptures, and art pieces focused on the features of a human's body. During this time, most artist believed that showing these features of a human could show the role a woman and man had in life. Sculptures in early times focused on the body of a man and showed distinctive features from head to toe. Most sculptures were representations of Greek Gods, which showed their strength and power throughout their body. Showing the sexual side of men in art, lead to showing the sexual features of a woman. The sexual features of a woman was shown throughout paintings and sculptures that mostly represented fertility. suppose to symbolize the sexual union between him and the woman. The idea of showing sex in art has been shaped and formed into various perspectives.
Women have spent a large amount of time throughout the 20th century fighting for liberation from a patriarchal form that told them that they must be quiet and loyal to their husbands and fathers. For the duration of this essay, I will be discussing how the “Modern Woman” image that appeared through the Art Deco style — that emulated ideas such as the femme fatale and masqueraded woman, and presented new styles to enhance women’s comfortability and freedom — is still prevalent and has grown in contemporary art and design since. Overall I will describing to you how fashion, sexuality, and the newly emerged ‘female gaze’, and how these tie in together — in both periods of time — to produce what can be described as powerful femininity.
Women have been facing crisis of body image since the dawn of man, for competition in breeding purposes, however women came under great scrutiny because of this. Often through history, they have been at the same level of livestock, treated poorly. Creating a rise in the early 1900’s to create the movement about pushing for the equality of women in the United States; it was after then when media first started adopting an ideal image of women in American culture, when marketing research found the use of images of ideal women in their campaigns made for higher sales.
...e multiplicity of meaning embedded in these works suggests the importance of the body as a liminal site, a site of inscription and meaning making, in both historical-contemporary and more recent feminist work. It is, of course, unlikely that Antin or Kraus draws directly upon any singular theory explicated in this essay. Both artists are, however, undeniably interested in the formations, constructions, and shifts of subjectivity. Both Carving: A Traditional Sculpture and Aliens and Anorexia address the body’s uncontained boundaries, exploding the dual Cartesian model of interior/exterior self. As feminist artists, both Antin and Kraus are also surely aware of the complexity of discourses around food, self, and the body. Through the artists may not be speaking “to” or “through” any particular theoretical model, they are contributing to these discourses all the same.
The article “Aesthetics of Disgust” by Michelle Meager examines Jenny Saville and the deeper meaning behind her work. Instead of capturing the beautifully perfect proportioned female body, Saville’s work shows them as “distorted, fleshy and disquieting”. These images were better known as visuals of disgust. The article, Mercer examines the different meanings of disgust by reviewing the studies of well-known psychologists. Reviewers of her work responded with shock and confusion. They believed that her paintings were a depiction of the negativity and hatred she felt about the female body. Reviewers even questioned if she hated women’s bodies in general. However, throughout all of the negative comments, some women were pleased that she recognized
These cultural strictures come in a number of forms. First, the artist attacks intellectual conformity, choosing art over all other means of self-expression even though it is not widespread in his or her society. Though it is not explicitly stated - and is perhaps even subconscious - the artist chooses art over either academe or high society. The artist questions society's customs, making this choice explicit in their daily actions. The artist rejects ostentatious displays of wealth and the cultural emphasis on money, replacing it with a frugal simplicity more conducive to authentic experience. Finally, the artist calls into question the cultural construct most important to any understanding of human interaction - the binary conception of gender.
The most attractive woman are found in books, posters, on tv, and on advertisement boards to send out the message of what an ideal woman should look like. No matter how much times goes by, there will always be that ideal woman that every man wants. Thus, we make sculptures and images to represent the kind of woman we want and what every woman should look like. Over the ages, there have been different sculptures formed of the perfect woman, such as overweight and short then transitioning to tall and thin. This paper will discuss one of the most ideal woman sculptures are the “Venus of Willendorf” and over the time the ideal woman transitioned to “Peplos Kore.” Also, it will be about these two sculptures have an significant turning point in social
Images that eroticism is implied tend to represent the availability of the women’s bodies, in the implication that they are objects of eroticism (Sturken and Cartwright 2009: 116), consequently affecting the way society views women such as illustrated in Figure
Aristotle once claimed that, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” Artists, such as Louise-Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun and Mary Cassatt, captured not only the way things physically appeared on the outside, but also the emotions that were transpiring on the inside. A part no always visible to the viewer. While both artists, Le Brun and Cassatt, worked within the perimeters of their artistic cultures --the 18th century in which female artists were excluded and the 19th century, in which women were artistically limited-- they were able to capture the loving relationship between mother and child, but in works such as Marie Antoinette and Her Children and Mother Nursing her Child 1898,
The picture is a scale in which the female side is higher than the male side. Women have always been since as less than a man, an outlook that can be traced all the way back to the bible. According to the bible, Eve was created from Adams rib, which was supposed to be construed as his loving her because she was made of his flesh has been corrupted that women are less than a man. Even the United States, the pioneer of freedom and rights, still pays a woman less than a man. A women’s opinion is still doubted or in some cases not even listened to especially when they hold positions of power. In third world countries, if a woman is attacked or raped it is her fault, just because she is a woman. Infanticide, the killing of female babies, is still predominant in areas all over the world. Mothers rid themselves of girl children so that they don’t have to worry about dishonor or providing a dowry. This killing of females is also represented in the art. This artwork should remain on Tejon Street as a reminder as how far we have come as women and how we have much work ahead of us in order to get true
There is a long history of gender roles in society. The expectations of gender roles continually shift; however, there is not a time when women and men share the same equalities simultaneously. The idea of how men and women should act is instilled in us at a young age. I think it starts really young with girls and boys being told what they can be and when they see what they are expected to be, they abandon parts of them which society deems as undesirable. We don’t acknowledge how much pressure we put on men and women to conform to the ideas of gender roles but it is apparent in our media and in the history of our art. One of the most influential things about figurative art is that it has the ability to capture society’s concepts of how men and women are expected to be during that time period. One thing for certain about gender equality is that it has historically and predominantly been a women’s movement. This sculpture, entitled Portrait Bust of a Woman with a Scroll, stood out to me in particular. It is is made of pentelic marble and dates back to the early 5th century. The sculpture shows a woman with a restless face, clothed in a mantle and head piece while holding a scroll. This sculpture reflects the women’s intelligence and capabilities being overshadowed by her gender and