~Women of the Modernism vs. Postmodernism Era~

Modernism refers to the global art movement that sought a new perspective of experience and values of modern, industrial life in society. Revolution was on everyone’s mind during this era, especially artists. The Guerrilla Girls exclaim, “In Western art, movements and “isms” appeared, one after another: impressionism, postimpressionism, fauvism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, dada-ism, surrealism, expressionism, abstract expressionism, etc (The Guerrilla Girls 59). Hence, all these techniques together gave rise to the term “Modernism,” which left a significant impact on the art world. With Industrialization came advances in manufacturing, transportation, and technology. During the modern movement, women artists strayed away from traditional values and conventional methods of painting and adopted new techniques by investigating different forms such as colors, lines, shapes, and more. With that being said, a female artist began “to live her life and make art on her own terms” as the Guerrilla Girls exclaimed (The Guerrilla Girls 59). With more freedom, but still heavy discrimination, women artists embraced their own space and began creating works that illustrated their immense creativity and reflected their visions!

Recognition in the art world has never been easy for women to attain. However, Modernism allowed women to have a “voice” within society which steered them in the right direction. Women achieved rights that were never given to them before. However, it was still not the same equality and privileges that men possessed. The Guerrilla Girls stated, “Women don’t want to be granted equality: they want to win it, which is not the same thing at all" (The Guerrilla Girls 59). Therefore, women took approaches and implemented new techniques to validate their knowledge and skill as an artist!

An influential artist that illustrated a new technique, abstraction in modern art was Alexandra Exter. Abstraction was known as “a new visual language for the twentieth century” (Chadwick 253). Along with other artists, Exter’s work was tied to Cubism. Cubism was a technique that incorporated different views of objects or figures together in the same image. By doing so, the painting appeared fragmented and abstracted. In figure 1 below titled, “Composition,” Exter utilizes symbols that speak to recognizable things. The image contains sharp geometric angles and does not depict a typical representation of space anymore. Exter advocated the principals of “disharmony dissymmetry, and deconstruction” (Chadwick 268). Hence, this artist’s collages produced effects of expansive space through the use of flat, crude colors.

Figure 1: Alexandra Exter, Composition, 1914. This image is an experimentation of reassembling objects in an abstracted form a multitude of viewpoints.

Another crucial female artist whose works heavily influenced the modern arts was Sonia Terk Delaunay. Delaunay had an interest in the dynamics of surface design. In other words, she worked with textiles and embroidery. This enabled her to use color freely in her works. She was a Russian artist who married Robert Delaunay, a Cubist painter. Delaunay valued her husband’s career first and never put herself before him. Therefore, her husband received all of the credit for the works that they collaborated on together. She did not mind that her husband was labeled as the genius of their artwork. Delaunay was “always innovating, thinking of new ways their ideas could be applied to the world at large” (The Guerrilla Girls 61). Her work with textiles and embroidery allowed her to break down forms and emphasize surface structure (Chadwick 261). In her piece, “Simultaneous Contrasts” that is displayed below (figure 2), a plethora of colors are used to portray abstract forms of the movement of color. Both Sonia and Robert Delaunay were largely accepted by “Dadaists” because they “lived their art in every aspect of their lives” (Chadwick 270). Therefore, they wanted to break free from the natural techniques of painting by applying the language of abstraction as widely as possible with other Dada collaborators (Chadwick 271). 

Figure 2: Sonia Delaunay, Simultaneous Contrasts, 1912. Sonia Delaunay uses both complementary colors and contrasts of clashing colors, such as red and blue in this artwork. 

           Speaking of the Dadaists, Hannah Höch was a famous Dadaist during this era. Höch challenged gender roles and presentation as well as sexuality! Dada was “an art movement that challenged every convention (except male supremacy) and scandalized bourgeois society” (The Guerrilla Girls 66). In figure 3, “DADA-Dance,” she conveys a political statement as well as an art statement. Chadwick describes, “Höch's DADA-Dance juxtaposes machine parts with a female dancer and a model who is elegantly dressed and posed but whose head has been replaced by that of a black. Violent distortions of scale and a rejection of conventionalized femininity undermined the commodification of the idealized female body and its relationship to mass-produced goods” (Chadwick 270). Hence, this artwork is challenging the view of the history of the idealized female body. Many of Höch’s other works were critiques regarding women’s roles in society. This piece resonates well with the ideology that women were becoming freer. In other words, Höch uses the strategy of combining unrelated images to make something that will startle the audience and make them feel uncomfortable. These techniques were adopted by many Dadaist and Surrealist artists of her era. Höch also utilizes images and texts from mass media to challenge the status of women in the social world. Hence, many of this talented artist’s work influenced the idea of the “New Woman” era!  

Figure 3: Hannah Höch, DADA-Dance, 1919-1921. This artwork illustrates both a political and an art statement. 

Surrealism was an additional development in the modernist movement. This technique focused on unleashing images and thoughts from the unconscious, which led to women exploring their creativity, sexuality, and desires. Claude Cahun was one of the first female artists to use herself as her own model depicting gender-bending stereotypes. Figure 4 displays her self-portrait that epitomizes her attitude and style with her bold look into the camera. Her outfit doesn’t look feminine nor masculine. The Guerrilla Girls exclaim, “Claude’s pictures were a relief from this sometimes monotonous aspect of art history. Instead of presenting herself as a passive object ready to be consumed by a heterosexual male gaze, she defiantly presents herself as both object and subject of her own sexual fascinations” (The Guerrilla Girls 63). Cahun was extremely controversial during her time because she was a lesbian. Hence, Claude’s statement about homosexuality was surreal to male surrealists “who marginalized the real woman around them in favor of the idealized ones in their minds” (The Guerrilla Girls 63).

Figure 4: Claude Cahun, Self Portrait, 1928. In this image, Cahun strongly stares into the camera and expresses her unique attitude and style. 

            Postmodernism arose after World War II in juxtaposition with Modernism. Both of these movements highlighted the social and cultural environment of the 19^th and the 20^th century. Chadwick characterized Postmodernism as “the breaking down of the unified (though hardly monolithic) traditions of exposing assumptions underlying many of the beliefs that defined vanguard art, engaged in a dialectic with Modernism” (Chadwick 380). Therefore, Postmodernist artists implemented the use of conceptual art, installation art, performance art, photography, and technology, in the realm of art. Postmodernism denied the application of logical thinking and was based on subjectivity. However, in both of these movements, Feminism persisted. The Postmodernism style also differed because it was full of ideologies, skepticism, sarcasm, and irony. Just like during Modernism, more women became artists, but they were still overshadowed by male artists!

            Barbara Kruger was a pivotal artist in the Postmodernism Movement. Kruger conveys a message to her viewers in a unique way. She uses “severely cropped photographs of women, and their short accompanying texts to subvert the meanings of both image and text to destabilize the positioning of the woman as an object” (Chadwick 382). In figure 5, “Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face),” the woman has a stern expression on her face and is not making eye contact with the viewers. She gazes in the other direction to convey that women will no longer accept being an object for others to look at, but rather be considered a subject. Through her unique positioning of powerful text in this and her other works, Kruger “emphasizes the ways in which language manipulates and undermines the assumption of masculine control over language and viewing, by refusing to complete the cycle of meaning, and by shifting pronouns in order to expose the positioning of woman as ‘other'” (Chadwick 382). Therefore, feminism in the arts during Postmodernism was committed to open conversations about sexism, consumerism, and almost any other social or political issue!

           

Figure 5: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face), 1981. This image comments on women’s position as objects in the minds and views of male figures and rejects the “male gaze.”

             Cindy Sherman was another influential Postmodernism artist that used photography to reveal “the instability of gender and challenge the idea that there might be an innate, unmediated female sexuality (Chadwick 383). The photograph below (figure 6) represented the definition of an “ideal” woman in Western society. In other words, the woman in the photo is beautiful, blond, fit, and focuses on her appearance while she ponders on her male figure in her life who isn’t there to guide her. These “images” of femininity “enabled her to act out the psychoanalytic notion of femininity as a masquerade–that is, as a representation of the masculine desire to fix the woman in a stable and stabilizing identity” (Chadwick 383). Hence, she heightens the conventional representation of the female body to justify that society is obsessed with the objectification of women! 

Figure 6: Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1979. The artist poses as an object to validate that men in society love to gaze at women. 

Works Cited

Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. Langara College, 2016.

Makufka, B. (1970, January 1). Hannah Höch - Feminist Artist. Retrieved from http://philandfem.blogspot.com/2010/04/hannah-hoch-feminist-artist.html.

Tate. (n.d.). Cubism – Art Term. Retrieved from https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/cubism.

The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. Penguin, 1998.