Essay about History Subject

For this assignment, I want to talk about 19th century female artists and how under represented they were and continue to be today. Very few 19th century female artists can be found in the pages of history books and it is not because there were not many practicing female artist back then, it is due to the sexism that was carried from that time. I want to show how the depictions of women in art created by male artist in the 19th century also negatively impacts how women are treated in the modern wold. Additionally, the lack of female representation affects the way modern society judges art. I think there is a strong correlation between the sexism that did not allow women to study art in the 19th century and the lack of female artist representation that we see today. The fight for equality in the art world is far from over; therefore, it is crucial that we study how the past has influenced the present. I will be touching on the topics of gender roles in the 19th century, the male gaze, and the continuing fight to get more female artists represented in major art museums. Annotated Bibliography Myers, Nicole (2008). 

Women Artist in Nineteenth-Century France. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. The MET. This article explains the general limitations of women's artistic training in France through out most of the nineteenth century.Women were often excluded from essential trainings such as studying with live nude models, and also from participating in official competitions to win prestigious scholarships. It also talks about the social pressures women artist felt to choose between a career and marriage, unlike male artists.There is also a list of very successful female artist during this time that became great only because they remained unmarried. Those who did get married and continued to paint, their talents and success was accredited to the males in their lives like their fathers or husband. Women were not even able to be in public unaccompanied therefore, women artist were limited in social experiences and artistic inspiration. I want to use this article to show the sexist practices that limited women artist in the 19th century. I also want to show that there were many great female artists during this time but very few continue to be talked about. 2) Nochlin, Linda. (2015) Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? 

ARTnews. I want to use this essay because the author asks a similar question to what I am writing about. In this essay, Nochling argues that instead of bolstering the reputation of neglected and forgotten female artists, we should be analyzing the institution that held back women from producing art and being remembered in history in the first place. It was through reading second-wave feminist literature that she was inspired to look back the visual tropes in art history and question these practices through the lens of feminism. Why have some paintings been attributed to male artist when they were made by females from the 19th century? Why are male artists such as Michelangelo or Picasso typically described as “geniuses,” while women such as Berthe Morisot or Rosa Bonheur are not? She asks these questions in order to get to the root cause of why society thinks there aren’t any great women artist, when are plenty. 

I want to use this to support my argument that the way society judges art is deeply rooted on the lack of female representation. 3) Coppola, Allison. (2018) The Gendered Gaze: Analysis of Three Nineteenth-Century French Prints. Order No. 10826479 State University of New York at Binghamton In this essay, three paintings are analyzed to explore the idea of the male gaze. It talks about the male gaze being a concept created by a feminist theorist to talk about the phenomenon of women being viewed as objects for the consumption and pleasure of men, and consequently ensuring the objectification of women in society. This essay suggests that we replace “the notion of a singular male gaze with the notion of multiple potential gazes, multiple potential viewing positions for the spectator of the artworks, as proposed by artist working in France in the mid-nineteeth century.” What I want to take away from this essay is the idea that the male gaze used in these paintings negatively impacts the way society views women. It reenforces the idea that women are passive while men are active. I will also use it to argue that there are there ways to make art less objectifying. 

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