Gender Role In Modern Art

Gender plays a key role in modern painting. The content of the paintings was usually reflective of the gender roles in that particular location and time period. In addition, female artists were rare and most were not taken seriously so there is a lack of insight into gender roles from the female perspective since not everyone gained the respect of artists a la the versatility and skill of Mary Cassatt. Thus, analysis of gender, with very few exceptions, is limited to the way that females were portrayed in modern painting and the symbolism thereof. Each style of art that has been covered during lecture has given the students of Professor Kester’s VIS 22 classroom an insight into some of the ways in which gender has been addressed in modern

This style was very interesting because humans were allowed to embrace their emotions. As such, men were allowed to be weak and vulnerable, and women were allowed to be strong and assertive. However, this freedom of emotional expression came at a cost. It laid the groundwork for the shift toward neo-classical art because the frivolity and self-aggrandizing nature of Rococo was categorized as a effeminate weakness. The painting “Queen Marie Antoinette and Her Children” by Louise Elizabeth Vigee Lebrun is a good example of gender in the Rococo movement. It shows the queen with her children. Interestingly enough, the artist who created this painting was a woman and a very talented one, too. To the wealthy, paintings like these were representative of their daily life. Closer to the revolution, however, these painting came to represent the needless display of wealth and over-indulgence of the nobility as a weak and effeminate quality. Moreover, it did not include class differences with respect to gender roles as only the nobility were the subjects of these paintings due to their patronage of

The Oath of the Horatii Between the Hands of Their Father by Jacques Louis David is exemplary of the way in which gender was addressed leading up to and during the French Revolution. In accordance with the neoclassical style of painting, the men are stoic, self-sacrificing and muscular. This directly contrasts with the weak, collapsing women. This painting was based on a story in which the men sacrificed themselves for the state, and the women “selfishly” did not want to lose their loved ones to the quarrel. This makes the women seem irrational and selfish for valuing the lives of their loved ones over the unity provided by living in a particular, shared geographical area, but that view is overly simplistic representation of human nature. The complete denial of emotion and dismissiveness toward it is more telling of male inadequacies than of female “irrationality and selfishness”. During the neoclassical movement, paintings like these provided a valuable insight into the role of gender in the public sphere. Women were excluded from the public sphere and from duties as citizens because they were believed to not possess the stoic self-sacrifice in order to make tough decisions for the betterment of the state. This attitude was present in the Rococo era but the reasoning was different that neoclassical ideology. This