Women at the Whitney, 1910-30: Feminism/Sociology/Aesthetics

Wolff, Janet

doi:10.1353/mod.1999.0038

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…7. As I have said elsewhere, my decision not to persist with a possible exhibition of the 'Whitney women' was based at least partly on predicting the negative critical reception of their work (Wolff, 2003c). Of course the interesting question, in retrospect, is whether it was also my own assessment -and, if so, what (and whose) aesthetic criteria were in play.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Male realist painters were marginalized in the same way, though not always to the same extent. The interesting point here is that modernism and realism as practices were themselves gendered 'masculine' and 'feminine' (Wolff, 2003c). The pattern of exclusion of 'women's art' has a long history: see for example Parker (1984) and Garb (1989).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1 Did her early success, and subsequent disappearance from the scene, tell us anything at all about the quality of her work? 2 By coincidence (or at least for quite different reasons) I had come up against similar questions when I spent some time investigating the lives and work of women artists involved in the Whitney Museum's early years (Wolff, 2003c). On the one hand, it was easy enough to establish that the kind of painting these early 20th-century women artists had made had been marginalized by the hegemonic strategies of a dominant modernist aesthetic.…”

Section: Feminism's Kalliphobiamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Groundless beauty

Wolff

2006

Feminist Theory

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The ‘return to beauty’ raises a number of questions for feminism. This paper begins by suggesting that there is no real reason for a feminist distrust either of beauty or of the discourses of beauty. The more difficult question is how to comprehend the bases of aesthetic judgement more generally, given feminist and other critiques of aesthetics and art criticism. The paper proposes looking at the cognate ‘value’ fields of ethics and political philosophy, in order to develop an approach to aesthetics that recognizes aesthetic criteria as grounded in community. It has been argued that uncertainty is the necessary basis for morality and for political judgement after the demise of ideologies of universalism. For the same reasons, an ‘aesthetics of uncertainty’ can be developed which refuses both the new universalism of the ‘return to beauty’ and the temptation to abandon principled criteria of judgement.

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Feminism's Kalliphobiamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Groundless beauty

Wolff

2006

Feminist Theory

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“…This lead has influenced writing within a number of disciplines such as cultural geography, mentioned above. In addition, there has been extensive discussion of the audience within the museum studies literature, including discussions of the interpretations of objects (Pearce 1994), female audiences (Wolff 2004) and the relationships between objects, display, media and interpretation (Henning 2006).…”

Section: Critical Literatures Of Public Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Artful Cities

Hall

2007

Geography Compass

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This article explores the various roles that public art has played in the city and the ways in which cultural geographers and others, including critical social scientists and arts critics and advocates, have studied and written about it. It highlights the limitations of existing literatures on public art, discussing in particular their neglect of the study of the audience as a site at which meanings are made. It goes on to highlight ways in which the study of public art in the city might be advanced. In doing so, it considers recent examples of research into public art and the city that have challenged existing orthodoxies.

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“…My second example relates to a recent study I undertook on the realist artists of the Whitney Studio Club in the decades leading up to the founding of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1931. In the course of this research, I came to understand the marginalization of realism in post-war art history as itself a gendered practice, in which realism figures as 'feminine' against modernism's masculinity (Wolff, 1999). The relative invisibility of American figurative art of the early 20th century, particularly after the consolidation of the 'MoMA narrative' (the privileging of post-Cubist and abstract art associated with and maintained by the Museum of Modern Art in New York) after the Second World War, applied equally to work by men and by women.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Feminine in Modern Art

Wolff¹

2000

Theory, Culture & Society

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The concept of `the feminine' has generally been employed to denigrate the work of women artists. A central project of feminist art historians, therefore, has been to challenge the use of the term. This article argues instead that the term can be mobilized in a more productive way, to investigate the very constitution of discourses of gender and, in particular, the discursive production of modernism as itself `masculine'. Reading for `inscriptions in the feminine', as well as for tensions and contradictions in `the masculine', allows for a critical practice which is based on interrogation rather than correction, and which refuses the idea of modernism as monolithic. The article approaches these questions about modern art through a discussion of gender and modernity and, in particular, through an exploration of the prospects of such a critique available in some of the writings of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin.

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Women at the Whitney, 1910-30: Feminism/Sociology/Aesthetics

Cited by 7 publications

References 20 publications

Groundless beauty

Groundless beauty

Artful Cities

The Feminine in Modern Art

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