Research Paper On Meret Oppenheim

A review of the world’s great artists conjures familiar images: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel; Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night; Pablo Picasso’s The Tragedy. There are many more, of course: Monet, Moya, Warhol, Rembrandt, Kandinsky. What is immediately noticeable, however, upon any brief study of art, is the significant absence of women as heralded artists—not only in our ancient pasts, but even today, amongst valiant efforts for gender equality.

Klimt was not a feminist; however, without the feminist movements of Vienna, he would not have been nearly as successful. He enjoyed the eroticization of women, and his work was rebellious in its portrayal of nude women. Even his work that did not actually depict nude women was still extremely sexual, and it was offensive due to its highly erotic and taboo nature. Klimt’s art astounded the Viennese population and became a scandal, making it more well-known.

This quote shows how a father at that time would wish to have no part of his daughter for committing such acts because he knows of the dishonorable reputation he will receive as a result.

This image of Lucretia is not that of some mythological or religious origin, say, of a venus, for example, part of whose appeal is the depiction of nudity without social repercussion. With respect to the time which bore this painting, it is not unlikely that this inclination to experiment with the female nude was in part sublimated by means of this historical subject matter, however, so say that Lucretia’s nudity is illustrated only on account of what would amount to the privilege of moral impunity is perhaps too simple an explanation. It seems much more reasonable to posit that Lucretia’s own nudity, especially in conjunction with her opulent, indeed, what is surely very expensive clothing (other depictions of Lucretia typically omit the inclusion of clothes altogether), is employed by Cleve to highlight Lucretia’s shame—amid her wealth and regal lifestyle, her clothes have been cleaved open, and she had been irrevocable hurt and humiliated. Whether intended by the artist, this awkward parting of Lucretia’s garments over her left shoulder and down through her abdomen adds greatly to the desolation and pity associated with her historical figure. Ultimately, this compositional decision serves to augment the paintings emotional

She does this by using such elevated, disgusted terminology- one can imagine her reading these terms with an intense voice of contempt- as “affair” (1), “the Brinvilliers woman”(5), and “Believing”(10) to convey a spirit of detachedness and divergence- marking the woman as a member of a distinctly separate social class than herself and her audience. Her incredulous, scornful tone toward the Brinvilliers woman indicates her treatment of the criminal as someone far below her and her audience.

In addition, I will examine the differences between male and female sexuality and how each tended to be perceived and treated by society. Then, I will look at prominent female artists and their personal experiences and beliefs on feminism and the female in their art focusing on how it tended to be received along how male artists responded to it. Mainly, I will be analyzing the clash of sexualized images in art, focusing on the differences not only between male made art versus female art, but the differences in the women’s art community, as well. What are the reasons and goals for women to use a “sexualized image” of women in their art versus

The dress forms that reside in Professor St. Peter’s study, used by Augusta, the St. Peters’ seamstress, are an analog for two traditional roles of women and each can be ascribed to the female characters of the text. Descriptions of the two forms reveal associations with two distinct and antiquated roles for women. The first form, called “the bust” by Augusta, appears “ample and billowy (as if you might lay your head upon its deep-breathing softness and rest safe forever)” (Cather 9). However, to touch it is “very disappointing to the tactile sense, yet somehow always fooling you again” (Cather 9). The first form is tied to motherhood, because of “the part for which it was named” (Cather 9), yet is not a sympathetic figure. “The bust” is fundamentally

In the short story, The Old Chevalier by Isak Dinsen, the male protagonist, Baron von Brackel reflects on his past sexual encounters with two women whose personalities are extremely different from one another. In many novels, short stories and comics authors would create two women as “polar opposites” for a man’s sexual and/or possessive gaze, which is evident in the text. In order to understand, why a man may be attracted to different character traits in women, I will examine The Baron’s attraction to Nathalie and The Mistress by looking at how literary works men portray women, what they find attractive and the fulfilment that men seek from a woman.

Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Ruined takes place at Mama Nadi’s brothel in the Congo where a civil war is being waged and coltan is the new gold being mined from the earth. Mama Nadi reluctantly takes Sophie and Salima into her establishment to work alongside Josephine as entertainment for miners and soldiers. Before coming to Mama Nadi’s, Sophie, Josephine, Salima all experienced rape. The word rape is so common in our society that it has lost its intensity and heinousness to a person who has not experienced it. Rape is a general term to describe what the women experienced but it does not give any hint to the struggle that comes after the event. For example, what it does to a person’s mind, the lasting scars on someone’s body, and how it can change a person’s personality. Many critics assume that rape is the tragedy in the play, but Nottage’s use of the word “ruined” emphasizes that the real tragedy is the consequences of those soldier’s actions on these women 's lives and how it affected their interactions with society.

In “The Arts of Beauty: Women’s Cosmetics and Pope’s Ekphrasis,” Tita Chico contends that ekphrastic representations of women in The Rape of the Lock and Epistle to a Lady indicate Pope’s privileging poetic artistry over the art of cosmetics. In both poems, Pope exploits the humiliation of a “cosmetically constructed woman” in an effort to assert the supremacy of his own artistic authority (Chico 4). Chico uses other scholars―Laura Brown, Christa Knellwolf, and Felicity Naussbaum chief among them―to anchor the origins of her argument, but she immediately addresses their respective limitations. She gently criticizes other scholars for

When it came to women throughout the art movements of German Expressionism, Dadaism, and Surrealism, there was a rapid change in the artistic community, partly because of World War I. Using women as subjects became less about exploiting them and showing their faults through the eyes of the men painting them, like Henri Matisse did with his wife. When women were subjects in the art of these periods, it was much more about the celebration of them and their sexuality. In addition to women only being subjects, they were transformed into artists who were respected in their groups during these times. All of these seemingly progressive ideas went down the drain after WWI ended. In Expressionism, artists like Ernst Kirchner conveyed the new freedom of women, like in his Berlin Street Scene. After this freedom was more widely accepted, women joined in on and were actually welcomed into the movements. One such woman was Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Her collaboration with Morton Schamberg to create the piece God proved that she deserved to be respected in the Dada scene. After Dada, Surrealism came into the limelight. Salvador Dalí the most famous Surrealist and he had a lot to say about women in his art. In his painting The Great Masturbator, done in 1929, he made a statement about the disease he believed female sexuality was. This was a much more oppressive attitude when compared to the previous art movement, Dada. When World War One started in 1914, women had to take the place of

The concepts of storying and the fetish from Kevin Young’s The Grey Album have been essential continuous themes throughout the semester. The notion of storying a reality for one’s self as an act of self-love, value, and resistance versus the commodification of fetishized alien and non-normative aspects of the “other” is a distinction that is especially important to acknowledge and deconstruct in our current sociopolitical state. Ugliness as a deviance from the normative constructs of beauty can be used by those who exist in the state of ugliness and otherness and in turn use storying and biomythography to fabricate their own realm of beauty and being. The fetishizing and commodification of ugliness and otherness through exploitation is a ploy

With each letter in Les Liaisons dangereuses, Choderlos de Laclos advances a great many games of chess being played simultaneously. In each, the pieces—women of the eighteenth-century Parisian aristocracy—are tossed about mercilessly but with great precision on the part of the author. One is a pawn: a convent girl pulled out of a world of simplicity and offered as an entree to a public impossible to sate; another is a queen: a calculating monument to debauchery with fissures from a struggle with true love. By examining their similarities and differences, Laclos explores women’s constitutions in a world that promises ruin for even the most formidable among them. Presenting the reader glimpses of femininity from a young innocent’s daunting debut to a faithful woman’s conflicted quest for heavenly virtue to another’s ruthless pursuit of vengeance and earthly pleasures, he insinuates the harrowing journey undertaken by every girl as she is forced to make a name for herself as a woman amongst the tumult of a community that machinates at every turn her downfall at the hands of the opposite sex. In his careful presentation of the novel’s female characters, Laclos condemns this unrelenting subjugation of women by making clear that every woman’s fate in such a society is a definitive and resounding checkmate.

Meret Oppenheim worked with a number of touchy-feely, everyday items in her artwork that connected her with the Surrealism Movement. She uses these material items to convey

There is some disparity between the way critics and philosophers like Judith Butler view Cindy Sherman's work and the way that Cindy Sherman speaks of her photographs. It may be the disparity that exists between many modern artists, who often operate on an intuitive level, and the philosopher critics who comment upon them from a theoretical perspective or a pre-established framework. On one level, Cindy Sherman may only be playing "dress-up" (as she herself admits) in her famous History Portraits (1989-90) (Berne, 2003). On another level, however, her "dressing-up" may be indicative of a deeper problem in modern gender identity theory which is the problem of "becoming" woman (Butler, 1994) or, as Judith Butler sees it, the problem of performativity. In the History Portraits, Sherman may certainly be said to be "performing" and perhaps even attempting to "become" the male and female characters she represents in her work. Indeed, it is upon such a premise that philosopher critics and gender theorists find her work so engaging. This paper will examine Cindy Sherman and her History Portraits in relation to Judith Butler's gender theory, the portrayal of the self, and how gender identity has changed throughout the course of modern history. It will examine representations of womanhood from Romantic Idealism to Post-Modernism and will also