WGSS 58.05 Women in Art
This course will explore the complex and varied roles of women in the arts: as artists, patrons, “muses,” and cultural critics. We will examine the structural conditions of art making in the academy and the studio, the market and the exhibition. We will investigate gendered notions of genius, creativity and originality, including the status of women artists as “exceptional.” Looking also at the female nude in Western art and feminist art in post-modernism, we will analyze the roles that femininity and masculinity play in modernism. With a focus mostly on the 18th-20th c., major figures include Artemisia Gentileschi and Judith Leyster, Mme de Pompadour, Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Frida Kahlo, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman, among others.