Interior Portraits: Women, Physiology and the Male Artist

Abstract

One of the most contentious and diElcult areas for feminist Art History is the representation of woman in high art forms, that is, in oil paintings exhibited within the public arena as opposed to advertisements and other popular art forms accessible to a mass audience. The nineteenth century has been a particular focus of attention. A number of reasons may be offered to account for this. Academic and pseudo-academic appraisal of the Victorian age has led, as Lyn Nead pointed out in an important article, to the 'phallocentric notion that representations by men of the female nude can function as the standard for exploring and defining Victorian sexuality'. Nead is especially critical of the work of Ronald Pearsall for the way in which it offers up to the reader a sequence of images unproblematically designated as erotic and purporting to tell us facts about the sexuality of the artists who produced them and hence, by automatic deduction, of the age in which they lived (Nead, 1983:227-36). The often prurient exposure of the 'other Victorians'l has encouraged the explanation of paintings as reflections of individual experiences and sexualities. Thus it has been too easy to present the period in terms of a polarity between virgin and whore with the representation of the prostitute on one side and the image of the 'respectable' woman on the other. Both are presented as reflecting meanings that are produced somewhere else, and the ideological interdependency of the models is unexplored. Equally unhelpful is the simple equation which posits a repressed male artist (Lord Leighton and Alma Tadema are popular targets) producing high-class pornography for a monolithic and hypocritical audience. Repression undoubtedly does play its part in the production of images of women in the nineteenth century and there were, undoubtedly, profound levels of hypocrisy at work but an argument that is predicated upon a universalist view of the artist (male) and of his sexuality will not help to establish the way in which these things function in cultural production of which images are an important part. The nineteenth century has also attracted attention because it is seen historically as the period in which women's struggle to acquire

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