Battle of the Centaurs and the Lapiths by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1852)
In celebration of International Women’s Day, I took a Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) tour on the subject of women artists. In all, 55 are represented. But it wasn’t surprising to learn that of the 2,500 works currently on view, only about 100 are by women. Of those, the vast majority are from the 20th century. Before that, there are few, like a 16th century portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola. She had the rare fortune to be the daughter of a true Renaissance man who valued education, even of women.
Jumping a few centuries into the mid-1800s, we encounter French realist and cross-dressing lesbian, Rosa Bonheur. Her story is noteworthy for its long-term, successive committed relationships with two women. All are buried together. A century later, we see the deeply closeted lesbian Agnes Martin’s reductive and calmingly spiritual abstract expressionism.
Among the others are notable feminists, there’s Wisconsin’s Georgia O’Keeffe, of course, who epitomizes that radical consciousness. She once famously refused to participate in a retrospective exhibit of “woman artists” because she felt the concept to be a repressive male construct.
But in ironic juxtaposition, opening just in time for Women’s History Month, is the special exhibit “Bouguereau & America.” It provides inadvertent context for the polemics of the “male gaze,” that patriarchal objectification of women. Divided into five sections, the exhibit presents William-Adolphe Bouguereau, considered the late 19th century’s finest Paris Academy artist. The first section displays massive canvases with mythological scenes of muscular men and buxom women like Orestes murdering his mother or the Battle of the Centaurs and the Lapiths, an allegory of civility conquering barbarism. They’re benign enough but didn’t sell particularly well. Portraits followed as Bouguereau painted for income and found clients.
The next rooms, however, present disturbing documents of Gilded Age patriarchy. One focuses on seemingly innocuous paintings of beggar girls. While Bouguereau’s American clientele apparently delighted in the genre, there’s nothing particularly sympathetic about its themes. They’re actually rather salacious. Perhaps it’s the bare feet, a sexual symbol that goes back to ancient Greece, the source of Bouguereau’s inspiration. Here, the fixation on the fetishized proletariat, especially in the context of women’s history, conjures exploitation rather than social consciousness. One canvas celebrates lost virginity symbolized by a doe-eyed girl at a well with a broken pitcher. A water pump’s protruding spout reiterates the sexual innuendo. It hangs next to a painting of a fair pre-pubescent subject weaving a crown of fresh daisies placed strategically in her lap.
There’s a room of religious art. Almost exclusively versions of the Madonna and Child, they have a superficial piety about them. Finally, entering the last room, Sensuous Subjects (read Titillating Guy Stuff), we find female nudes in the guise of beguiling creatures of mythology. Their perfect bodies indulge male power and control, on the one hand romantically falling to Cupid’s darts, on the other, submissively capitulating to pure sexual desire.
A Satyr with his stable of Nymphs, like so many trophy mistresses, underscores a prurient appeal to the rich American male. The image eventually turned up on a cigar box (read whatever subliminal messaging that might entail). A #MeToo poster if there ever was one, a handsome Faun presses against a giggling drunken nymph he’s plied with wine, her hand brushes upon a staff adorned with a particularly comely pine cone finial. Speaking of phallic symbolism, in Dawn, a female figure fondles a shapely lily.
The take-away: we’ve come a long way since Bouguereau’s demeaning gender hierarchy. Oh, wait… never mind.
