A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women
Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind
Siri Hustvedt
First annotation on .
4 quotes
Chapter 1a
- In a letter to a friend, Henry James wrote, “In the arts feeling is always meaning.”Aug 31 2023 5:40PM
- According to Françoise Gilot, Picasso described Maar’s image as an inner vision. “For me she is the weeping woman. For years I’ve painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism, not through pleasure, either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me. It was the deep reality, not the superficial one.” During one of Maar’s early encounters with Picasso, he watched her play the knife game at a café, repeatedly stabbing the spaces between her splayed fingers. Inevitably she missed, cut herself, and bled. As the story goes, Picasso asked for the gloves she had removed and displayed them in a vitrine in his apartment. In 1936, he drew Maar as a beautiful harpy, her head on a bird’s body. Picasso’s biographers have cast their subject’s misogyny and sadism in various lights, but none of them doubts that his fear, cruelty, and ambivalence found their way onto his canvases. Perhaps this was most succinctly stated by Angela Carter: “Picasso liked cutting up women.” The tearful woman with her weapon-like fingernails clearly has multiple dream-like associations: war, grief, sadistic pleasure. They are all there in the weeping woman. Ideas become part of our perceptions, but we are not always conscious of them. The story of art is continually being revised by art movements, by money and collectors, by “definitive” museum shows, by new concerns, discoveries, and ideologies that alter the telling of the past. Every story yokes together disparate elements in time, and every story, by its very nature, leaps over a lot.Aug 31 2023 5:42PM
Chapter 2
- The boundaries of the self (or a form of the self) expand in ownership, and this may explain, at least in part, why art by men is more expensive than art by women. It is not only the fact that most collectors are men. There are many important women in the art world who run galleries, for example, and they also show mostly male artists. In New York City during the last ten years, around percent of all solo shows have been by men. When self-enhancement through art objects is at stake, a largely unconscious bias, not unlike the one hidden in the wine sippers, is at work when it comes to art made by a woman. The highest price paid for a work by a post–Second World War artist was for a Rothko canvas—$86.9 million, which is far more than the highest price paid for a woman (a Louise Bourgeois spider was sold for $10.7 million).Aug 31 2023 9:04PM
- The attributes associated with the two sexes are culturally determined, often registered in us subliminally rather than consciously, and they squeeze and denigrate women far more than men. Indeed, both Rothko and Bourgeois were highly sensitive, troubled, emotional, egotistical people whose characters mingled both classically feminine and masculine qualities. Of the two, Bourgeois was clearly the stronger and, according to the adjectival lists mentioned above, the more “masculine” personality. Rothko killed himself; Bourgeois fought on, working furiously (in all senses of the word) until she died at age ninety-eight. But even in terms of their work, it is hard to characterize either one as masculine or feminine.Aug 31 2023 9:05PM