just read griselda pollock’s “modernity and the spaces of femininity” in which she talks about how modernist art history is based on masculinist myths. the bourgeoisie that emerged in the late 18th c was supposed to be universalistic and democratic. yet notice the gender partiality of “liberty, equality and fraternity”. she goes on to look at the work of women artists thru a different matrix based on the locations they painted (“domestic” wherein women were contained vs “public” reserved mostly for men), the spacial order within the paintings (pictorial space became compressed and was deemed experiential rather than a matter of mathematical perspective) and the social spaces that they occupied as women and therefore conveyed thru their work.
love this painting by mary cassatt (at the opera, 1879).
the female subject is actively looking, rather than inviting the gaze of male viewers by making a spectacle of herself (literally). she is in a public location (the opera), which was something that was just beginning to happen. since social spaces were policed by men watching women, cassatt makes the witty decision to have a man look at her subject – or is he looking at us? a mirror of us, the viewers, observing the woman in the painting? brilliant.