At the beginning of the 20th century, many artworks featuring American women tended to fall into two categories: reverential or decorative. The reverential involved the painting of grandmothers, mothers, wives, daughters or noble spinsters, while the decorative works were done primarily by male artists and depicted women as interchangeably lovely as floral still lifes. This particular featured woman was young, desirable but not excessively sensual, and at that seemingly chaste time she likely would not have posed nude in a painting meant for public exhibition or purchase.
If nudity was involved, it tended to be linked with mythology or classicism and maintained a kind of marble-white ideal purity. Outdoor nudity, like misty woodland or water scenes, was preferable to the more suggestive indoor nudity. Earthier portraits of women were for private or mature audiences, or relegated to the field of photography in the erotic French postcard form.
Robert Reid’s Impressionist Beauties
Massachusetts-born artist Robert Reid was one of the quintessential American beauty idealizers and member of the group of American Impressionists known as The Ten. Reid’s 1893 Bathing in a Stream is enchantingly dappled, with a female subject so nymph-like that she seems close to sexless. Reid’s 1915 Girl with Chinese Vase shows another charmingly attractive woman wearing a dress as decorative as her surroundings. Her eyes are downcast and her face is winsome; she appears calm and demure and nothing like any of the same era’s fervent suffragettes clamoring for equality and the right to vote.
Guy Pène du Bois and the 1920s
The Ashcan School painters brought a bit more realism and character to the American female in art, and with the arrival of the 1920s, portraits of the flapper or "modern woman" came into being. Guy Pène du Bois was an American artist of French heritage who found inspiration in the liberated lady of the time, particularly those living abroad in Paris. Many of his women, however, tend toward facelessness or androgyny, as if being liberated has diminished their true sense of self. Still, Pène du Bois’ 1924 portrait of fellow painter Isabel Bishop, then one of his pupils at the Art Students League, is sleekly intriguing and offers more of an independent, intelligent allure.
Regionalist Females
The American Regionalists found fame by rejecting more European, avant-garde movements like Cubism and Surrealism and glorifying the spirit of their native heartland. Grant Wood’s solemn farm woman graced his 1930 American Gothic, while his D.A.R. dowagers sipped tea and his Portrait of Nan showed a fashionable girl remaining rural by cradling a baby chick in her hand.
On the other side of spectrum, Thomas Hart Benton, another Regionalist kingpin, put the American female nude right out on the canvas. His circa 1938 Persephone applied the quaint artistic tradition of justifying nudity through mythology, but Benton’s naked female looked more like a pin-up model than a diaphanous waif. Benton seemed to be celebrating American burlesque and cheesecake with his nude stretched out in the midst of vegetable bounty, and though Persephone was criticized for being both reactionary and brash, the work was still gawked at just like the man in the painting leers at the goddess while she sleeps.
Women, De Kooning and Warhol
Turning to everything that the Regionalists hated, Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning took the intensity of perception and created a personalized style of artwork. De Kooning was born in the Netherlands but immigrated to the United States as a stowaway, and he was later married to American artist Elaine Fried de Kooning.
In the 1950s, De Kooning produced a series of women-focused paintings which mirrored America’s post-war angst, Freudian inner turmoil and secret curiosity about Alfred Kinsey’s sex studies. De Kooning’s women are fascinating yet horrible, fragmentedly compelling like Picasso’s Cubist females. The women seem to exist mostly as the objects of the artist’s catharsis, with the classic interplay between phallic brush and paint and the receptive canvas.
Finally, in the 1960s, Pop Artist Andy Warhol took two of America’s most famous women and turned them into colorized icons. Warhol’s Marilyn showed us a victim of her own vulnerability and appeal, while his 1963 blue and black-toned tragic Jackie presented America’s beloved young widowed First Lady following President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The world may have known Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy beforehand, but Warhol’s prints elevated their lives and images from newspaper and magazine pages to serious serial art.
Sources
- Guy Pène du Bois: Painter of Life -- Betsy Fahlman (Quantuck Lane Press, 2004)
- Renegade Regionalists -- James M. Dennis (University of Wisconsin Press, 1998)
- Woman, I: Willem de Kooning -- Museum of Modern Art
