<i>Visceral</i> culture: blushing and the legibility of whiteness in eighteenth‐century British portraiture

Rosenthal, Angela

doi:10.1111/j.0141-6790.2004.444_5_5.x

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…The experience of white privilege allows for whites to interact with images that represent their race and life experience on a frequent basis (McIntosh ). The unacknowledged norm of whiteness becomes a standard by which all other forms of art are judged (Rosenthal ). Several curators reflected on interactions with visitors that made this outgroup status clear.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Curating Inequality: The Link between Cultural Reproduction and Race in the Visual Arts

Blackwood¹,

Purcell²

2014

Sociological Inquiry

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Although the U.S. population is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, research indicates that minority participation in the arts continues to decline. This article addresses the racial disparity of public art museum attendance by examining the role of the art museum curator and the process by which concepts of race are reproduced within the space of the public art museum. Utilizing Bourdieu's theories of cultural reproduction, social space, and symbolic power as a preliminary framework of inquiry, we examine the concept of whiteness as privileged social construct. Through face-to-face indepth interviews with museum curators, we investigate the means by which the dominant cultural narrative of whiteness is maintained through the preferences, decisions, and social interactions of curators. We draw upon critical white studies, a part of critical race theory, to underline the manner in which whiteness presents itself as a position of dominance. Our findings show that whiteness is maintained through the process of exclusion by presenting the white cultural narrative as both ordinary and invisible.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Curating Inequality: The Link between Cultural Reproduction and Race in the Visual Arts

Blackwood¹,

Purcell²

2014

Sociological Inquiry

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“…In these paintings women's skin is depicted as particularly pale, sensitive and transparent, an emphasis on whiteness that, as Rosenthal further argues, has to be understood within the emerging framework of racial discourses in the eighteenth century. 20 A similar development can be observed in French art theory where the term 'skin colour' for what has been painted with 'flesh tones' emerged only in the second half of the eighteenth century, and thus simultaneously with racial anthropology; both discourses became 'colour conscious', as signalled by the superiority accorded white skin as the universal ideal and standard of beauty. In French medical and moral-anthropological discourse, a privileging of the white and sensitive female skin is equally evident.…”

Section: T H E O R I E S a N D H I S T O R I E S O F S K I Nmentioning

confidence: 57%

Bodily and Pictorial Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1790–1860

Fend¹

2005

Art History

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This essay argues for the shared quality of skin and painting as signifying surfaces. When representing the surface of the body the artist engages with questions about the borders of the body and relations between the interior and the exterior. Portraits by Jacques‐Louis David and Jean‐Auguste‐Dominique Ingres are considered in relation to several discursive fields: medical definitions of skin from the Enlightenment, nineteenth‐century artistic anatomy and art theory. While David's rendering of skin is understood in terms of Xavier Bichat's definition of skin as a ‘limite sensitive’, the hermetically sealed and opaque skin of Ingres's figures negates contemporary notions of skin as a communicative membrane. Scientific knowledge notwithstanding, these very different approaches to the representation of skin may be seen as reflecting upon different ways to produce meaning as well as different conceptions of the body. Mechthild Fend is a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where she is working on a project on the history and representation of skin in late eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century France. Her recent books deal with the representation of masculinity: Männlichkeit im Blick. Visuelle Inszenierungen in der Kunst seit der Frühen Neuzeit (co‐edited with Marianne Koos, Cologne, 2004), and Grenzen der Männlichkeit. Der Androgyn in der französischen Kunst und Kunsttheorie Zwischen Aufkl.arung und Restauration (Berlin, 2003).

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“…Fend discusses how the whiteness of the women in Ingres' portraits is ‘obviously a sign of racial and social distinction’, while demonstrating that the discourses of French art theory and racial anthropology became ‘colour conscious’ simultaneously, ‘as signalled by the superiority accorded white skin as the universal ideal and standard of beauty’ 57. Rosenthal goes further to argue that ‘white(ness) as a visually racial category emerged as an explicit value in the eighteenth century … [and] whiteness became preeminently visual through a particular physiological capability perceived as a feminine “virtue”: fair women's capacity to blush’ 58. Though ‘The White Disease’ is not portraying in any definite way a blushing woman, there are similarities with the descriptions of Rosenthal and Fend in the way Dumas uses colour to emphasise whiteness—the face in the portrait is flushed pink across the nose, cheeks and forehead, the eyes are bright blue, and the background is dark and solid compared with the more transparent tones in the face.…”

Section: Using Titles To Classifymentioning

confidence: 99%

Classifying the body in Marlene Dumas'The Image as Burden

Gordon

2017

Med Humanities

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Medical photography, and in particular dermatological imagery, is often assumed to provide an objective, and functional, representation of disease and that it can act as a diagnostic aid. By contrast, artistic conceptions of the images of the body tend to focus on interpretative heterogeneity and ambiguity, aiming to create or explore meaning rather than enact a particular function. In her 2015 retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern, South African artist Marlene Dumas questions these disciplinary divides by using medical imagery (among other photographic sources) as the basis for her portraits. Her portrait 'The White Disease' draws on an unidentified photograph taken from a medical journal, but obscures the original image to such a degree that any representation of a particular disease is highly questionable. The title creates a new classification, which reflects on disease and on the racial politics of South Africa during apartheid. Though, on the one hand, these techniques are seemingly disparate from the methods of medical understanding, features such as reliance on classification, and attempts at dispelling ambiguity, bring Dumas' work closer to the history of dermatological portraits than would usually be perceived to be the case. In considering the continuities and disparities between conceptualisations of skin in dermatology and Dumas' art, this paper questions assumptions of photographic objectivity to suggest that there is greater complexity and interpretative scope in medical dermatological images than might initially be assumed.

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Visceral culture: blushing and the legibility of whiteness in eighteenth‐century British portraiture

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Curating Inequality: The Link between Cultural Reproduction and Race in the Visual Arts

Curating Inequality: The Link between Cultural Reproduction and Race in the Visual Arts

Bodily and Pictorial Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1790–1860

Classifying the body in Marlene Dumas'The Image as Burden

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