Catalogue - Page 2 of 2 - Women, Gender, Sexuality, Art

Portrait of Mrs. James Bowdoin II (née Elizabeth Erving)

Robert Feke, Portrait of Mrs. James Bowdoin II (née Elizabeth Erving), 1748, 127.95 cm x 102.87 cm, oil on canvas, Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Robert Feke
1705 – 1752

Portrait of Mrs. James Bowdoin II (née Elizabeth Erving)
Dimensions: 127.95 cm x 102.87 cm
Medium: oil on canvas
Date Created: 1748

Robert Feke was a popular portrait artist amongst the emerging Colonial elite in New England in the mid 18th century. A self-trained oil painter, he was considered highly at the time for his ability to render colors and textiles with skill and vividness, of which this is a prime example. Feke’s extremely detailed clothing/textile renderings here contrast sharply with the spare rendering of the model’s facial detailing. The woman looks slightly stiff and awkward as a portrait sitter, with her unnatural hand/arm pose, extremely plain white complexion, and lack of individualistic features. Compared with the highly individualistic detailing on her gown, with its richly rendered lace, the sheen of its expensive silk, and its gorgeously vivid blue waterfalls of fabric, she seems merely the ideally blank canvas upon which a conspicuous amount of material treasure has been heaped. She seems less a woman and more a clothes hanger, one on which the colonial elite have hung displays of their wealth and power by virtue of the luxury textiles she is clothed in. She becomes, in other words, a representative human commodity, with all the implications of buying and selling, displaying and haggling, and packaging and shipping that come with commodities.

La Paresse (Laziness)

Félix Edouard Vallotton, La Paresse (Laziness), 1896, 25.08 cm x 32.54 cm, woodcut on cream wove paper, Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Félix Edouard Vallotton
1865 – 1925

La Paresse (Laziness)
Dimensions: 25.08 cm x 32.54 cm
Medium: color woodcut on paper
Date Created: 1896

Vallotton was a French/Swiss artist known for depicting the mingled cynicism and luxuriance of end-of-century (fin-de-siècle) Paris. He was personally and artistically close with the somewhat radical Les Nabis, a cultish group of young Parisian artists associated with the transition into abstraction and expressionism. La Paresse, a Japanese-inspired woodcut print, shows the idle, almost faceless body of a nude woman who seems to be presented to the viewer as if for their pleasure. Her supple, detail-less body lies in a timeless void and against angular, ornate bedding fabric that accentuates her curves and invites attention. The fabric she lays on looks to have more life and detail than she, and in its complexity highlights her largely nonexistent or simplified (and therefore non-threatening) identity and sexuality as a woman. To render the fabric, the artist mingles Japonisme, a Japanese-influenced but essentially Europeanized art form (characterized by flatness and strong slanting lines) along with a dash of the indulgent passivity of orientalism. The woman toys halfheartedly with an equally undefined and compliant cat (often a symbol of female sexuality) that is backdropped by the same decadent bedding fabric.The effect is a curiously objectifying mixture of Japanese and East-Asian aesthetics sifted through a voyeuristic lens and ready made for the male European gaze.

Courtesan with Two Attendants under Cherry Tree

Keisai Eisen
1790 – 1848

Courtesan with Two Attendants under Cherry Tree
Dimensions: 39.05 cm x 26.35 cm
Medium: color woodcut on paper
Date Created: 1790-1848

Keisai Eisen was born in the Edo period of Japan, characterized by isolationist foreign policies but a thriving economy and culture within the country’s borders. Eisen was a successful artist specializing in woodblock prints of beautiful women, known as bijinga. Eisen captures the rich detail and colors of the courtesan’s attire, as these images identified popular fashions and were circulated among the upper class. The adornment of elaborate drapery on this courtesan reaffirms her higher class status relative to common prostitutes of the time, known as yūjo. She is heavily decorated and attended by two figures, possibly en route to an entertaining gathering of upper-class society. This courtesan is displayed under a cherry tree, known for their intense but short-lived beauty. The cherry tree is also often used for decoration around the New Year to symbolize rebirth, which is perhaps another gendered-female social concept.

Tell Me What You’re Thinking

Mickalene Thomas
b. 1971

Tell Me What You’re Thinking
Dimensions: 100.97 cm x 125.73 cm
Medium: photograph, chromogenic print on paper
Date Created: 2016

Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary mixed-media artist whose work delivers empowered images of black women in richly decorated interior settings. Thomas takes from art historical representations of women–often in moments of leisure or relaxation–and posits them in an abstract space of technicolor textiles. In Tell Me What You’re Thinking, the model is reclined in a pose reminiscent of art historical paintings of odalisques. The variety of patterned fabrics break up the picture plane, obscuring our sense of depth and our ability to render and register a definable space. The studio-quality lighting and perfectly placed props of black culture, such as the album cover adorning a Diana Ross portrait, intentionally reveal the staged nature of the image and raise the notion of artifice, adornment, and the process of dressing up ourselves and our environment. Thomas manipulates the perception of the decoration and display of women throughout time and women of color in the modern era in doing so.

Kiki Smith, Sampler

Kiki Smith
b. 1954

Sampler
Dimensions: 61.12 cm x 45.56 cm
Medium: photo relief etching on paper
Date Created: 2007

Sampler is one of 206 photo relief etchings made by Kiki Smith inspired by the poems of Emily Dickinson. An etching accompanies every poem in the book of Dickinson’s poetry titled Sampler, holding two-fold meaning as containing a curated selection–or sample–of Dickinson’s poetry and alluding to the embroidered samplers sewn by women to demonstrate their domestic skills in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Smith employs the practice and imagery of the craft, using a needle and other sharp-pointed tools to scratch the lines in the emulsion of photographic negatives. This allows light to pass through the images when making the photopolymer plates for letterpress printing. Kiki honors the contributions made by women to art and literature and makes the private, primarily educational practice of embroidery visible for interpretative analysis.

Demons, Tlazoteotl ‘Eater of Filth’

Martine Gutierrez
b. 1989

Demons, Tlazoteotl ‘Eater of Filth,’ p92, 2018
Dimentions: 105.41 cm x 72.39 cm x 3.81 cm
Medium: C-print mounted on Sintra, hand-painted artist frame
Date Created: 2018

Martine Gutierrez is a Latinx and Indigenous transwoman who uses her work to comment on issues of identity as it relates to gender and heritage. Gutierrez’s Demons, Tlazoteotl ‘Eater of Filth,’ is as a page from her larger work “Indigenous Woman” which takes the form of a self-published fashion magazine focusing on such themes. In this photograph, we see a self-portrait of Gutierrez as Tlazoteotl the Aztec goddess of sin, filth, and purification. In her depiction of the goddess, Gutierrez highlights her own identity as an indigenous transwoman through the use of performative femininity embedded with Indigenous Latinx culture. This is seen primarily through her glamorous depictions of clothing, jewelry, and makeup which reference her indigenous ancestry. For example, her garment seems to use textiles woven into indigenous patterns while her use of gold jewelry might be seen as a reference to Mayan and Aztec culture as well as Spanish colonization. Finally, Gutierrez uses makeup to unconventionally depict Tlazoteotl who traditionally has a black mouth, representing the eater of filth, with gold lipstick. This could be read as a reference to her identity as a transwoman and a member of the LGTBQ+ community in that the change from black, in this case, associated with sin and filth, to gold which is associated with wealth, and power can be seen as a comment on growing acceptance and celebration of queer people and diversity as a whole.

Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Bowdoin College – Brunswick, ME