Transcript ACL1001: Reading Contemporary Fiction

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 Holofernes
www.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

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
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 Marriage
www.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