Women As Art: A Tale Of Beauty, Hatred, And Woman's Collective Struggle For Human Dignity
Women As Art
A Tale Of Beauty, Hatred, And The Struggle For Human Dignity In A World Of Contradictions
Women are beautiful. Our form, our abilities, and our nature have always been a source of inspiration and wonder for artists of every description, and that has been true since humanity first picked up a pigment and left a legacy imprinted on the rocky walls of history.
In the world of art, women are powerful. We are goddesses and spirits, mythical beings from fairytales and scriptures - we are holy, we are dangerous. We are everything man desires and everything he fears, his source of life and his terror at the thought of death, of loss.
Outside of art, things have rarely been so elevated. Even as men painted our forms into the annals of history, real women were being kept out of those same narratives and prevented from existing with the same human dignity men expected as a matter of course. Like a painting hung upon a plain marble wall, women were made - forced - to live as one-dimensional beings, as concepts whose very existence was at best indulged and at worst made an object of suspicion.
Women occupy art as symbols, as repositories for the stories and ideas of men. All the while we have been made to pretend our true natures are simplified, as easily defined as that of the livestock in a man’s field.
This contradiction went without saying for thousands of years. Now, finally, we are beginning to find our voices. Women are leaping out of their assigned frames and have begun to claim their own narratives.
For once, women aren’t merely art - we are also people. But the legacy of all the times we (legally and socially) weren’t must be witnessed, examined, and learned from.
Pre-History And Its Erasure: When Women Had Voices, And Left Fingerprints On Our World
Forty-thousand years ago, someone picked up a piece of mammoth ivory and began to carve it. As it took shape beneath their calloused and life-worn brown hands, their inspiration took shape with it. That inspiration was the full-bodied shape of Woman; in the eyes of that long-gone artist, Woman was worth honoring in a powerful, eternal way.
The people of the paleolithic past were, by and large, nomadic. They carried little and were selective about the items they did keep on their person. Each one had to be significant enough to justify its place in their lives and the lives of their extended families.
The fact that figurines like the ivory Venus of Hohle Fels were counted among those vital items is significant in a way we can hardly comprehend in our sedentary, rooted modern age. Who took the time to carefully carve out the Venus of Willendorf, shaping her from a block of solid limestone and painting her body with rare, valuable red ochre?
What about Woman made her form so central to the artistic vision of diverse, far-reaching groups of ancient humans?
Of course, we can’t truly answer these questions in an objective sense. It is the fact of these objects’ existence that stands out from the otherwise silent years of their makers’ personal histories.
It is rare - exceedingly rare - to find complete, human-made artifacts from the Ice Age, but in the past century alone we have discovered over two hundred examples of these Venus Figurines. Most of them are made from materials not local to their discovery sites, which indicates their having been carried by hand for long, hard distances that had to be traversed on foot. Many bear the marks of ochre and other highly-sought, hard-to-find pigments.
These figures were valued. They were so important that people would, by expert account, intentionally select rare or challenging materials to craft them from.
The Venus of Willendorf (shown from behind) is one of the oldest examples of human art ever discovered.
On cave walls, the story of Woman as art continues in brilliant, ecstatic displays of skill and creative expression that rival our most masterful modern paintings. With limited pigments and their own two hands, prehistoric people were imprinting the story of Woman on the quiet halls of hidden caverns and sacred vaults, marking the female out as a figure synonymous with the human story itself.
In the sandstone caves of the Sahara, the feminine form floats and dances along the walls of the 10,000-year-old Cave of Swimmers. She mingles with men and spirits alike in the West Desert’s Cave of Beasts, and her handprints comprise up to seventy percent of those found in the rock shelters of Europe and Latin America.
Woman wasn’t just the inspiration for much of our surviving paleolithic art - she was often the literal hand that crafted it. Women are and have always been an integral part of how art itself came to be. Why, then, are so many of our assumptions about that collective past based on images of male-dominated societies and male artists?
The answer lies in a much more recent past: for the past few millennia, the disciplines of history, archeology, anthropology, and art itself have all been narrated and managed near-exclusively by men. The women who managed to “infiltrate” these disciplines were considered unique aberrations, and far apart from the norm. Men’s voices quite simply promoted an imagined history that was almost entirely populated by males.
Many things have changed since those faceless, distant paleolithic artists made their marks on the human record. For a long time their art went unknown and undiscovered, and even when it was found the assumptions scholars and observers made about it remained male-based and entirely fueled by a common, insidious notion known as “male bias.”
That bias can be summed up as, “of course all the artists, religious leaders, inventors, and creatives were men.” We can debate endlessly about why, exactly, that worldview emerged and has persisted so stubbornly in modern academia, but that isn’t the purpose of this piece.
I am not here today for a debate over history, but instead I am inviting us all to stand as witnesses to that history. We must ask ourselves difficult questions, such as:
● Why have so few female artists been recognized for their work within the majority of human cultures and histories?
● Are there inherent contradictions in the way women have been used as art vs. their real-life, lived experiences beyond it?
● If women can inspire male artists to create masterpieces, why did so many of those same men express disdain, skepticism, or even vile hatred towards the fairer sex in their personal and political lives? How could they be so hypocritical?
At times there will be few - if any - rational answers to these questions. Woman’s place in the depictions made of her is at times distant, subtle, or open-ended. The way Woman is shown in art often deeply contradicts the way those same artists viewed her, and her depictions are often a mockery of how women were treated by their own deeply patriarchal societies.
The legacy of Women As Art is full of contradictions. We may never untangle most of them. That does not absolve us of our responsibility to reflect, to observe, and to wonder at the story of beauty, hatred, and dignity that exists in our art museums and gallery halls here and now.
A growing number of experts believe many of the fine cave art examples we’ve discovered were painted - at least in part - by women.
Of Saints And Sin - Women As Religious Symbols In Art And Culture
As a socio-historical scholar, I am often astounded by the inherent contradictions of the past and its participants. Women as goddesses; women as slaves. Women as nature; women as unnatural. We are at once reflected in shades of glittering gold and violent red - we were worshipped at altars even as we were abused in our homes.
In many ways, things have changed a great deal. But when you look back as a historian, you cannot help but view things from a different lens, a wider angle.
Certain historical contradictions stand out. In ancient Mesopotamia, the upper echelons of the divine pantheon were ruled by Ishtar, the goddess of beauty, love, and war. She was in many ways a deity composed of contradictions, at once violent and lovely, admired and feared.
Ishtar is usually depicted with full breasts, powerful wings, and a regal face. She is beautiful even as she sports the monstrous talons of a beast and enacts the sacred principles of vengeance and bloodshed against mankind. In short, she was a powerful goddess, and even the proudest kings were expected to worship at her feet.
Ishtar was the goddess of war, love, beauty, and prophecy.
As they bowed in obeisance before images of the divinely feminine, those same kings enacted some of the harshest and most brutally anti-female laws on Earth. Women in ancient Mesopotamia were often given less autonomy than livestock - they were possessions, capital to be traded in and used for the purposes of their male keepers.
In the famous “Code of Hammurabi,” horrific examples of this brutality have been immortalized in elegant black stone:
If a man killed a woman by striking her, he was not punished - his daughter was executed. If a man could not pay a debt in coin, he could simply sell his wife and her children into slavery and move on. Women who had been raped were usually forced to marry their rapists.
Art and real life were often severely at odds in centuries past. Mesopotamia was not unique for its shocking examples of women as property vs. their simultaneous role as keepers of divine law. Egypt, ancient Indian empires such as that of the Kuru dynasty, and the Roman Empire all held contrasting artistic and legal depictions of women.
Lest we think our modern institutions superior to those of the past - what gender is the symbol of Justice depicted as? Did she not stand guard over the very courts that denied her the right to vote, to live as a human being (rather than as property or an infantilized second-class citizen), and to seek recourse for her own physical and economic humiliation?
If Justice is a woman, then so is Irony. They have kept each other company for millennia and have witnessed more contradictions than we can possibly name. As Mesopotamia and Babylon faded into Rome and Persia, and as those empires fell to reveal a new Medieval age, little changed when it came to the lives of women and their depiction as concepts rather than autonomous human beings.
A Madonna Or A Whore: The Missing Luxury Of Middle Ground For Women Of The Past
We all know the story of how, in the 15th century A.D., a man nailed a list to a Church door and began what we now call the Protestant Reformation. And what did that reform mean for society? What rights and new ways of life did it propose?
For women, the answer is “very little.” Martin Luther, that rebel priest so lauded for his enlightened spirit, had much to say about women as a whole. “The words and works of God are quite clear,” he stated with utmost confidence, “that women were made to either be wives or prostitutes.”
As the mother Mary - an unwed woman - suckled Martin Luther’s own savior and Lord upon the walls of cathedrals, he declared that the female was by nature deficient. He spoke with all the arrogance of his “humble belief in the Almighty God.”
No one at the time seemed to note anything unusual or hypocritical about this. Few made mention of his misogyny in later eras, either. Mary looked down from her walls and statues, her paintings and her heavenly throne - but her voice, alas, did not reach us here on Earth. Even if it had, the blusterings of Church men very likely would have drowned it out.
Depictions of St. Augustine often show him in holy rapture, the flaming heart of man in his hand as he strives to discipline his passions, biases, and human nature. Apparently such attempts at seeking enlightenment resulted in his firmly stated belief - of course supported by his conception of Divine Reason - that “any woman who does not give birth to as many children as she is capable [of] is guilty of murder.”
This was said at a time when the maternal mortality rate was incredibly high. Each time a woman gave birth, her chances of dying increased. Depictions of childbirth in Medieval art often include symbols of death and women looking heavenward as they endure excruciating pain in order to fulfill their “duty to God.”
Childbirth was extremely dangerous for most of human history.
Art from the Medieval period and the ensuing Renaissance-era depict women in a dizzying array of roles, a phenomenon especially prevalent in those examples that held religious significance. She is Eve, the temptress, and she is Mary, the Holy Mother. She is Jezebel and Justice, Salome the murderess and Susanna the helpless victim - everywhere you looked, Woman was being used to symbolize something.
In real life, she was being used in other ways. For most of history Woman was a tool - a dispenser of the needs and desires of man, at once their fulfillment and their temptation to do evil. Whenever Man had a problem, Woman somehow became both the solution and the cause. He often resented her for both.
A man could paint the most elevated depictions of Woman as a saint, honoring her assumed virtue and closeness to purity, then go out and rape his wife, beat his daughters, and murder a prostitute with few (if any) legal consequences. He could admire the nude form of woman in statues and galleries, then go to University and write about the inherent deformity and hideous inferiority of the “fairer sex” at length and with a huge network of supporting scholars behind him.
Again, few made note of the irony - or, one might venture to say, the sinful hypocrisy - of these facts. Perhaps it is our duty to do so now, though a belated witness can do little to stop crimes which have already occurred. We cannot right the wrongs of the past, but we can question them, observe them, and learn from them.
The story of Women As Art is hardly finished, however. Irony and Art continued to be sisters-in-arms as time marched inexorably onward, and now our duty as witnesses moves closer to home.
Women, War, And Work: The Irony Of Homecoming After World War II
While men marched and died on foreign battlefields, American and other Allied women assembled themselves in factories and on farms. On walls and billboards, in magazines and newspapers, figures like Rosie Riveter and the determined, almost ferocious faces of battlefield nurses adorned daily life.
As women filled the needs of wartime, there finally seemed to be a marriage of Woman As Art and Woman as real - she was both a hero and heroic, lauded in art and celebrated outside of it.
And then, of course, the war ended.
Rosie Riveter became, in art and life, Hannah Homemaker. A new kind of art solidified the betrayal - as consumerism became a defining feature of the West, Woman became both a commodity and an economic tool used with abandon by the artists who made their living from glossy advertisements in magazines and on television screens.
Again, Woman As Art began to look less and less like Woman As A Real Person. Happy, smiling women baking cakes and wearing perfectly tailored dresses over their perfectly maintained figures filled the artistic renderings of the 50s and 60s. The silent rage, unhappiness, and legal helplessness of actual women was nowhere to be found in these images.
Mental illness among homemakers was so prevalent at this time, doctors began to refer to their prevalent depression and “hysteria” as “The Housewife’s Syndrome.” In art, women were (as several prominent voices put it) “the happiest creatures on Earth.”
Now more than ever before, Woman was expected to measure up to the unreality of her depictions in art. If she did not, she was considered an aberration. A statistical anomaly that made all-male doctors scratch their heads in perplexed puzzlement as they stared at their charts and studies - all of which were based on studies of men.
Working-class women, whose communities could not afford to indulge the Happy Housewife fantasy, were rarely depicted in the West but were characterized heavily in the communist and socialist nations of the East.
The hardworking woman was strong yet pretty, and was expected to work herself half to death on “the job” before killing the other half of her humanity by taking up the housekeeping and childcare role as soon as she arrived home. She was depicted as doing so with a smile.
As time passed, men continued to occupy the role of “artist” far more often than women did. They could go out into the world and pursue their passions in ways women would be severely punished for. Woman’s suffocation was man’s freedom, but you’d never get that impression from the bright pop-art and attractive advertisements that declared her perfectly happy with this arrangement.
Posters during wartime and the subsequent years often depicted women working hard and smiling all the while.
What was better, to choose between the Saintly Wife versus the Evil Temptress, or to have that choice modified to be a matter of The Happy (And Self-Sacrificial) Housewife versus The Hysterical Ingrate? More importantly, should we be asking that question of men, or should Woman herself be the only voice proving insight into this particular issue?
Art is not meant to be reality. And yet - there is always an and yet to be added when it comes to Women As Art - that has never stopped us from being compared to the depictions crafted of us. Historically we are merely receptacles for the symbols, concepts, and renderings of men, and for a long time nobody seemed to see anything wrong with that.
Of course, here we are. To find out where here is may not be as simple as you’d expect.
Sex And Sisterhood: “Women As Art” Versus “Women As People” Is A Battle We’re Still Fighting Today
I am twenty-four years old at the time of this article’s writing. When my mother was young, women could be refused their own bank accounts, lines of credit, and investment opportunities without legal recourse. In many states, husbands could still rape their wives without legal consequence.
The men who made and kept the laws - the men who passed by the female figure of a blindfolded and straight-backed Justice each day as they went to work - simply declared that such assaults were not rape. Opportunity simply meant different things for men and women, they said, and that declaration was the only one that was available in a court of law.
Things have changed. Soon the portrait of a female Vice-President will hang proudly alongside her all-male predecessors. Women are art, and women are artists, and women are people, too - usually. Even in the West, with our professions of modernity, we seem to have a habit of falling back into old habits.
Women As Art remains a subject of glaring irony in some areas of our social and political lives. It depends on how - and what - we choose to label “art.” Pornography is art, if one considers sexual performance to be artistic. Advertisements are still art by most experts’ definition. Comics, books, memes, and architecture are art - and the way women are depicted in all of these realms is still as poignant as it is one-dimensional.
Woman is Art - Woman is Sex. Woman is Art - Woman is The Caretaker, the Liar, the Victim, the Vice. Go on internet forums like Reddit or Twitter, Instagram or Tik Tok, and Woman is many things. Her body is a performance and a symbol, and her existence is, still, even now, largely a part of the unfolding story of Man.
Woman is Art and Scapegoat, both Degraded and Powerful, the Tyrant and the Temptress and the Teeth-Baring Harpy. She is everything that can be assigned to her and nothing less than - nothing more than - the holding pen for everything our societies deem her capable of, worthy of, or deserving of carrying.
Men can see Woman as (their) Empowerment - Sex - while they satisfy their desires, and then they can declare in one-thousand words that she is the Whore, the Oppressor, and the Problem. They will find supporters and choruses of agreement on their networks of choice.
She is still the Solution, too, as well as the thing in the way of the Solution. In art we are both beautiful and enslaved to Beauty. We are Politics and we are Posturers, Boundary-Breakers and Bitches and Sisters and Sluts.
Are we art, or are we people? Is Woman a symbol, or is she a human being? Even when we are asked these questions, it is often men’s voices that overwhelm our answers. 40,000 years ago, things could have been very different or much the same. Looking back at history means looking back through a hundred thousand frames, almost all of them crafted at the height of men’s eyes, to the specifications of men’s beliefs, wants, and demands.
If we are to understand Women As Art at the same time we acknowledge Women as People, we must first acknowledge that for most of human history, women were more conceptualized than they were considered.
We must view the marriage of hypocrisy and artistic expression for what it is; the physical, often damning evidence of our collective female suffering. We must declare to all that our identities were stolen from us in order to be hung on walls and used in temples. Women As Art is, like so much of our history, a story of both irony and omission. To be literally objectified in both art and life is to be stolen away from your own narrative over and over again.
Woman is Art, and she is also me, you, and all of our sisters. She is the person standing next to you and living in houses like yours, dreaming like you do, occupying her own unique reality just as her brothers, fathers, and sons do. Woman is Art - and she is so much more than art.
It is beyond time we reclaim the gilded frames in which we have been told to live. It is time to paint a new picture. It is time to sculpt a new era. So, pick up your brushes and pick up your chisels: we have work to do.
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