Elles at Centre Pompidou

My Art History class was at Centre Pompidou this week. Among other things, there's a new permanent exhibit there dedicated to women artists. One of the many women with work on display is Frida Kahlo. Very cool seeing one of her works in person. It's small, but extremely interesting—paint on canvas behind paint on glass.

Centre Pompidou sees the exhibit as controversial: "It's a risk," they say. "Excluding men and showing only women is a revolutionary gesture of affirmative action. But the museum is avant-garde. It's part of the Centre Pompidou culture to do things differently. And we like a lot of drama. This is going to be dramatic in a big way."

In fact, the women of France were kept from participating in art for generations, and particularly visual art. They were excluded from the Academy and the Salons and marginalized in a multitude of ways. Those who managed to emerge from beneath the sexism were rare indeed. Louise Vigée-Le Brun (1755-1842), who did the portrait of Marie Antoinette (and earlier, a young Lord Byron), was one of the few. Perhaps she succeeded because her great-uncle had been Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), one of the dominate artists of the 17th century and a favorite of Louis XIV.

Suzanne Valadon, a turn-of-the-century, Montmartre artist was the first woman painter admitted to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts. Rosa Bonheur, who like her contemporary Georges Sand, wore pants and smoked cigarettes (I wrote about her in a previous blog) was refused admittance a generation earlier.

Valadon was a contemporary of Gertrude Stein and that crowd. She was the daughter of a laundress. (I like to think it was Delacroix's laundress who some say he painted into Liberty Leading the People.) Like the sculptor Camille Claudel, she worked as a model for many of the famous male painters of her day, including Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec. And she had an affair with composer Erik Satie, whose portrait she painted in 1893.

Her The Blue Room (1923) parodies Manet's Olympia, which itself parodies Inge's Large Odalisque and Titian's Venus of Urbino. According to Art Historians, paintings like Venus of Urbino were created for male patrons (who in 1583, didn't have access to magazines, photos or films). One of the young men in my class asked why the Renaissance painters didn't include sexually titillating images for women. (I'm not sure if he's was being a smart mouth or if, at 19, he's really that ignorant about women's history.)

And speaking of women's history—I also visited Notre Dame cathedral with the Art History class that I'm not taking, the one studying the earliest of the early. Notre Dame: Our Lady. I just tried to draw the two square towers of Notre Dame into my sketch of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People. (They're in the background representing Paris.)

Art Historians think Delacroix might have chosen Notre Dame because Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame had just taken Paris by storm. Hugo wanted to see Notre Dame restored. It had been trashed during the Revolution and Amy pointed out some of the missing fingers and the heads that are replacements. (If the photo looks unfamiliar, it's because its a view from the back of the cathedral.)

Separation of church and state is taken very seriously in France. Historically, religion supported the monarchy and manipulated politics with a heavy hand. Christianity as an institution is a hierarchical, patriarchy that cannot tolerate democracy or any challenge to its earthly authority, which it claims is sanctioned by God. A hard thing to prove, a matter of belief—and which church does God support? Historically this kind of thinking has given rise to such horrors as the Inquisition, which certainly, among other things, persecuted women.

If I'm not careful, I will launch a rant here. Suffice to say I believe its time for the United States to think long and hard about why democracy requires a separation between church and state—lest we find ourselves returning to the medieval mentality that gave rise to the Inquisitions and made possible the burning of women like me for witchcraft.

On a lighter note: This picture was taken a couple weeks ago in the South of France. Toni posted it on her Facebook page. So. A pretty common pose: me trying to to figure out my very complicated camera.