ACL1001: Reading Contemporary Fiction

Lecture 9: The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

Art - the expression or application of creative skill and imagination, especially through a visual medium such as painting or sculpture

Aesthetics - a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, especially in art

(oxfordreference online, 2007)

Women and Art History

Female artists in 16th century e.g Artemisia Gentileschi

Often their fathers were painters Female painters at this time painted biblical

scenes, still lifes, and portraits Their names are not well known; they were

overshadowed by male artists

Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holoferneswww.artemisia-gentileschi.com

Women Artists Today

Linda Nochlin (ARTNews, 2007)

‘The problem is to make collectors, museums, and curators who aren’t really up on things see that there are many great women artists. There are collectors and curators who – out of habit, laziness, or even misogyny – simply don’t bother with women. But that’s happening less and less frequently as women begin to occupy the most prominent places in the art world as creative artists’ (pp. 114-115).

Atwood’s Influences

Margaret Atwood acknowledges the influence of the following artists in the beginning of Cat’s Eye

Joyce Wieland, Jack Chambers, Charles Pachter, Gail Geltner, Dennis Burton, Louis de Niverville, William Kurelek

She also acknowledge the Isaacs Gallery as an influence.

Joyce Wieland 1931-1998

First woman to have solo exhibition at the Isaacs Gallery, Toronto

Her exhibition was met with criticism from her male contemporaries

Initial works were abstract geometric shapes. Later she used quilts, constructions, embroidery, cartoons etc. Was preoccupied by disasters, death and loss

1987 – first living female Canadian artist to have a retrospective at the Art Gallery of Toronto (www.cybermuse.gallery.ca)

Louis de Niverville (1933-)

Worked in Toronto 1957-1963 Famous for art works that explored childhood

memories Lives and works in Vancouver

(www.thecanadianencycopaedia.com)

Representations of the Woman as Artist

The woman is assertive, unconventional and physically assured whereas the male is sensitive and passive

The woman must choose between her womanhood and her work

The woman’s novel contains a sexually conventional foil for the protagonist

The woman lacks a muse, whereas the man’s is Woman;

The woman’s novel is inevitably radical(Huf, 1983)

The Artist in Cat’s Eye

Elaine’s career as an artist sheds light on the position of female artists in Canada.

Art Gallery of Toronto refuses to do Elaine’s retrospective: ‘Their bias is towards dead, foreign men’ p. 16

Many of the Canadian artists who influenced Atwood were students at the Ontario College of Art in the 1960s and were based in Toronto.

Sub-Versions, a woman-run gallery, is holding the retrospective.

Linda Nochlin: ‘Women tend to run alternative spaces or small museum galleries and the like’ (ARTNews, 2007, p. 116).

Women and the Toronto Art Scene – 1960s

Mr Hrbvik – art teacher; shows the young female artists ‘the ropes’ – artistically and sexually.

‘You are an unfinished woman’, he adds in a lower voice, ‘but here you will be finished’ p. 273

Art and Archeology – University of Toronto: all the lecturers are men, all the students are women

‘lady painters’

Art and Marriage

Jon does not support Elaine’s art – thinks it is ‘irrelevant’

Art regarded as a hobby for married women e.g Cordelia’s mother

Feminism provides a space for Elaine’s art – female artists in the exhibition referred to as ‘the girls’ by Jon; male journalist makes derogatory remark about ‘bra-burning’.

Ben supports Elaine’s art financially; doesn’t interfere with it; is not competitive.

Narrative

Elaine Risley’s retrospective initiates some retrospection: people, relationships, places, objects

Novel is concerned with death, loss, aging, memory, and sight.

Two narrative personas: the young Elaine and the older Elaine.

Connections between trauma and art: many of Elaine’s paintings are representations of people from her past e.g the collection of paintings of Mrs Smeath

Motifs

Cat’s Eye – sight; the gaze

Mirrors – reflections of the self

Costumes – disguises, conformity

Landscape and People

Elaine sees the landscape and people in terms of shapes and colours.

Present home: Vancouver is contrasted with her former home: Toronto

Speaking of Vancouver:

‘I can’t take it seriously. I suppose these things are as real and as oppressive, to the people who grew up there as this place is to me’ (p. 15)

Vancouver

Toronto

Science and Art

Influenced by her father’s drawings of biological specimens

Decides to become an artist whilst sitting her biology exam.

Studies painting techniques used in the Renaissance e.g Egg tempera

Influenced by Leonardo da Vinci – artist and architect

Stephen’s theories of physics influence her thoughts about art

Egg Tempera

‘What I want instead is pictures that seem to exist of their own accord. I want objects that breathe out light: a luminous flatness’ p. 326

‘The first object of the painter is to make a flat plane appear as a body in relief and projecting from that plane’ (Leonardo da Vinci, www.ibiblio.org)

Egg Tempera – used by Leonardo da Vinci to achieve the style of painting described above.

Mona Lisa

Van Eyck, The Arnolfini Marriagewww.lawrence.edu.au

Elaine’s Art

Paints memories e.g household objects; sofas; virgin mary

Objects are a source of anxiety but Elaine doesn’t know why

During retrospective, Elaine feels empathy for Mrs Smeath: ‘An eye for an eye leads only to more blindness’ p. 405

Feminist Readings

Interview with Journalist regarding the retrospective

Elaine wants to burn her paintings

‘Because I can no longer control these paintings, or tell them what to mean. Whatever energy they have came out of me. I’m what’s left over’ p. 409