Women, Art and Photography in the 20th Century

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
• Convenor: Dr Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra
• Assessment: a 1500-word research commentary (20%) and 3000-word research essay (80%)

Women have historically occupied a marginal role in what scholar Griselda Pollock has described as ‘the canonical legend of Western masculine… creativity’, often known, after E. H. Gombrich’s important book, as The Story of Art. In 1989, having noted that only 5% of the artists in the modern art sections of the Met Museum in New York were women but 85% of the nudes were female, the artist collective Guerrilla Girls produced a billboard pointedly asking whether women had to be naked to enter the museum. The question ignited a controversy that continues to this day.

• How to discuss gender in art history and how to account for the historical absence of women in major public and private art collections?
• Are the categories of female or women artists at all useful?
• Are there female issues and/or materials that feature prominently in art made by women?
• How to respond curatorially to power imbalances between genders?

In this module we address these and related questions by exploring the lives and work of a selection of notable women artists and photographers throughout the twentieth century. Taking a global focus, we’ll look at the transformation of Frida Kahlo into an international icon, explore the role of women artists in pop art and surrealism, and analyse the extent to which the notion of a ‘female gaze’ is suitable to understand women artists’ approach to the photographic medium.

Indicative syllabus

• 'Why have there not been any great women artists?’ Gender in twentieth-century art
• Frida Kahlo: the global icon
• Surrealist women: diaspora and solidarity in the lives and works of Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Kati Horna
• Ana Mendieta at the crossroads
• Jo Spence and Rosy Martin: psychic realism and phototherapy
• Maud Sulter and Joy Gregory: Black femininities
• Martha Rosler and Eleanor Antin: conceptual art and feminism
• Marina Abramovich and the/her body
• La Chola Poblete and the transgender debate

By the end of this module you will have:

• a significantly broader knowledge of twentieth-century Western and non-Western art and photography
• increased familiarity with some of the most influential women artists and their work
• a better understanding of theoretical approaches to the ways art attends to gender, patriarchy and the coloniality of power
• an awareness of the intersections between artistic practices and major political and social issues that shaped the second half of the twentieth century, and different waves of feminist artistic production
• an acute capacity for the close (visual) analysis of a variety of media, including painting, photography, installation, video and performance
• the knowledge to pursue comparative readings of the work of artists from a number of countries and geographical regions
• an awareness of the specific local and international contexts of these practices
• a critical understanding of changes in institutional and museum practices resulting from and mobilising the increased yet still contested visibility of women artists and photographers.