I love art and shopping, so naturally, I always spend time looking through museum stores. I have some classy items to be sure, along with some kitschy things, like my Van Gogh mug where one of the ears disappears when the cup is filled with hot liquid (a thoughtful gift from some students who know of my teenage obsession with the man). And sometimes I find things that absolutely outrage me. Such was the case with the last museum store I visited–the one at the Getty, where I recently saw the Jean-Léon Gérôme blockbuster exhibition (and I’ve got to post on that later because I’m madder than heck about the exhibition thesis, which tacitly justifies his misogynistic and racist works by celebrating the artist’s “quirky irreverence”–but I digress). Anyway, here is the souvenir du jour: a compact mirror with Gérôme’s Moorish Bath on the case. Unpack the semiotics of that little number, my friends . . . .

Conversation topic: What is your favorite museum souvenir and why?

One of my Paris rituals is to visit the Louvre on my final evening there and spend an hour with my much-beloved, machine-sized nineteenth-century paintings. I’m always surprised by certain details I hadn’t noticed before, such as the dark tonality of Girodet’s Burial of Atala or the flatness of certain passages in Ingres’ Grande Odalisque. This time, I was struck by the sheer beauty of David’s Intervention of the Sabine Women. The canvas has a freshness to it that makes it seem recently painted, all of the vignettes work cohesively, the bodies are magnificently articulated, and the facture is simply marvelous. I’ve always loved this work for its pro-woman possibilities, but this time, I was especially taken by all of the children in the painting. There are a number of babies and toddlers here, many of whom are looking out at the viewer with a moving plaintiveness or curiosity. While much significant work has been done on the women in this painting, little has been said about the children. I took a couple dozen photographs of all of the children I could find in the painting. Much has been done with children as subjects in art (and I’m particularly interested in how they are used as focalizers), but I also think something needs to be done with the whole matter of children as spectators. Contemporary accounts of the exhibition and reception of this painting remarked on the presence of women and children–mostly to express dismay that they were exposed to the indecent (read: male) nudity in the work. Other texts of the Revolutionary period attest to children’s involvement in the visual arts.

Conversation topic: What is your favorite work of art featuring a child and why?

A few days ago I went to the Musée d’Orsay to re-familiarize myself with the permanent collection and to see the boldly progressive exhibit “Crime et Châtiment.” The exhibit was excellent and due to current re-modeling the hanging of the museum’s regular holdings were fairly limited. As an avid admirer of many women artists during the later 19th century, especially women impressionists, I found myself sorely disappointed and even rashly infuriated upon discovering that throughout entire main floor there was only 1 painting by famed artist Berthe Morisot and 1 painting by the well-known Mary Cassatt. Indeed, while I was also happy to enjoy the room full of Corot’s that proceeded the monumental presentation of Rosa Bonheur’s Plowing in the Nivernais, I was surprised to find no other representation by this artist who was admittedly more widely admired and financially successful than any male peer of her time. In fact, my searches showed that at the Orsay museum women are only subjects (read: objects) displayed on their hallowed walls, yet are given no space to speak as author of these images. One must first plow through the rooms (yes rooms) of Monets, Manets, Courbets, Renoirs, and Gauguin’s Tahitian women in order to find a sliver of a real woman’s experience or a fully-clothed figure.

Anyone who has taken even the smallest introduction to feminist theory will know that the 1970s was a period of radical re-adjustment in the art world as scholars sought to add more names to the singular woman artist featured in their current textbooks and to recover important women that had been lost to history. This called for an entire re-examination on the way that we view women’s role in the artistic world.

Many people consider the “woman issue” to be a cause already completed, because we now live in a world where sexism obviously isn’t allowed to pervade our businesses, homes, and societies, let alone our museums housing national treasures that preserve timeless masterpieces that remain accepted and unchallenged by the critical eye.

Nevertheless, here I found myself at the limited showing of the Musée d’Orsay, which boasts one of the most extensive collections of the period, and claims to be the French authority on everything from Realism to Symbolism. I am shocked that such blatant ignorance of women in art is still prevalent at such a prestigious institution. Admittedly, there are greater holdings by many prominent women artists at other institutions in Paris (Berthe Morisot at the Musée Marmottan & Camille Claudel at the Musée Rodin), but I believe that this does not excuse the Orsay. As a museum whose new leadership professes to see into contemporary art history theory & technique, challenging the way things have always been done at this institution and initializing new bold exhibitions, I think that they could use an introduction to feminist interventions in the histories of art.

The purpose of this post is to bring to your attention that the “woman question” has not been answered or resolved, especially not in some of the most prestigious and frequented collections that are visited by millions each year.

I went to an incredibly powerful exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay yesterday: Crime et Châtiment. Of course, I knew I would love the show when I saw the publicity posters that featured Géricault’s painting of severed limbs. For those of you who have had the nineteenth-century class from me, you know that I’m kind of into that beautifully painted macabre scene.

The first room set the tone for the entire show. You walk into this narrow and long room with walls painted black and large canvases featuring the various aspects of crime and punishment disposed on either side. As you moved down this corridor of sorts, you realize that you are heading towards a large object that is draped in a black canopy and dramatically lit. The object is the emblem par excellence of 19th-century violence: the guillotine. The staging of this room, with the nave-like passage and altar of death, definitely draws on associations with sacred architecture and begs the question of how violence fits within the paradigm of worship.

Various kinds of crimes and punishments, as treated in modern European visual culture, are explored in this show. The exhibition, which is organized both thematically and chronologically, features a stunning array of works from “high” art and popular visual culture as well as objects related to acts of crime and punishment. While there were lots of well-known pieces in the show (Goya, Blake, Picasso) and a definite emphasis on the French fixation with this topic, I was happy to see lesser-known works too. I was stunned–but pleasantly so–to see the incorporation of so much material from popular culture–posters, book illustrations, images d’Epinal, etc.–and anthropological objects, such as death masks, phrenological instruments, and even a model of Bentham’s Panopticon. There were quotes from various literary figures on the walls (Hugo, Bréton, Dostoevsky) to add further texture to the show. It was an extremely avant-garde exhibition in terms of conception, content, and display, and if this exhibition is any indication of the vision of the Orsay’s new (and controversial) director, I’m going to be an ardent supporter. Quite frankly, I’ve never warmed to what I see as the sleek, safe, consumer-driven mentality that governed that institution and I’m glad to see the Orsay allow the complexities of nineteenth-century visual culture to bubble to the surface.

Not surprisingly, I was especially moved by the room devoted to the French Revolution, as well as with those images concerning women’s relationship to crime and punishment. Perhaps the most compelling work for me was Léon Bonnat’s Crucifixion. This painting should have been in that first room–or maybe its last–as a reminder to the world of the ultimate crime, deicide, and humankind’s potential for redemption.

For more info, click on these links:

Notice in rfi
Brief slide show

Conversation topic: What’s your favorite image of crime (or punishment) and why?

Here are links to some of the notices in the press:

Guardian obit
The New York Times obit
Germaine Greer’s (noted feminist art historian) tribute

Conversation topic: What do you think about the art of Bourgeois?

70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.

Conversation topic: Test your art history knowledge: How many of the paintings can you identify?

I know that  it has been forever since I posted. So you deserve more. I’m in Paris right now and am in a complete state of bliss, so I wanted to share. As usual, my eyes are either feasting on art (Louvre, Orsay, Carnavalet are musts) or bleary from looking at microfilms and transcribing texts from the BN. I love to hold those worn leather bound books–the smell of old books is one of my favorites!–and I treasure the freedom to focus on my research for hours on end.

The hands-down most thrilling experience of this trip was getting a 2 1/2 hour private tour of the nineteenth-century painting galleries at Versailles that are closed to the public. It was the first day of Kalisha Jacobson’s curatorial internship–and I’ll definitely have her guest blog about this–and part of the orientation was viewing the hundreds of sequestered masterpieces. The enormous keys of Louis XIV were used to open room after room, where wooden window shutters were opened to throw some light on the paintings. I gazed upon fabulous portraits of all the Bonapartes and Louis-Philippe and his entourage, massive military paintings, dozens of history paintings that I’d seen in only in tiny, black and white reproduction, and newly-discovered gems, all done from 1789-1848–the most magnificent period in the history of art, incidentally.

I’ll confess: I was so moved by the experience that I had to fight back tears on several occasions. And when the doors were thrown open and I saw Jacques-Louis David’s unfinished Oath of the Tennis Court [pictured above], I gasped and drew back. This was to be in line with his Horatii, Brutus, and Sabine paintings and yet, for political reasons, was never finished. As you can see, just a few heads were completed, and although we have oil sketches, this was the real deal and I’m telling you, it has a palpable aura. I just wanted to share this incredible moment with my art history friends who know what it is to connect passionately to this stuff.

Conversation topic (and this is a shout-out to those currently on study abroad): What artwork has “blown you away” of late?

I know, I know. One should blog more than once every six weeks or so. January was an insane month for me  (but this is fodder for another post).  However, I was able to squeeze in the reading of Sarah Thornton’s bestselling sociological study of the contemporary art scene, Seven Days in the Art World (2008).  My husband, who is especially keen on twentieth-century art, gave me the book for Christmas and I found it an engaging read. In a nutshell, it looks at various aspects of the contemporary art world and spends “a day” in the life of each arena.  Chapters are titled as follows: The Auction (Sotheby’s), The Crit (MFA studio class at Cal Arts), The Fair (Basel), The Prize (Turner), The Magazine (Artforum), The Studio Visit (Murakami), The Biannale (Venice).  I will confess to being more than a little annoyed at the lack of attention given to academics (as I recall, a discussion with a historian was briefly recounted in the chapter on “The Magazine”), but I am rather biased towards thinking that we have something to contribute to this realm:)  That said,  I think this book is a must-read for students who are interested in careers related to the contemporary art scene but have little sense of what these spaces and vocations actually look like and what it means to be a player in this realm.

I’d love to hear from those of you who have either read the book, who live or work in one of the above-mentioned places, or who would like to be a part of the contemporary art scene.

Conversation topic: If you could spend a day in the contemporary art world,  which one of these spaces would you visit and why?