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Women as Artists Instructor: Gayle ClemansREADING: Excerpts from Griselda Pollock, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity," in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, London, 1988. Available on line with some supplementary images: With all of your extra readings, please print them out and actively read them. Mark them up, circle and underline words, and make notes in the margins. Bring the assigned reading to class, along with your written responses to the questions below, and be prepared to participate in a discussion. Your written responses serve two purposes:? They show me that you’ve done the reading and were engaged in the material. ? They are YOUR notes and should be useful to YOU as prompts for discussion. (Therefore, you can use bullet points, phrases, quotes – whatever is useful to you. They do not need to be typed. They do not need to total more than a page.)QUESTIONS:Pollock’s essay was instrumental in opening up new territory for modernist art history. More recent scholarship has shed light on the spaces of 19th century Paris as, perhaps, more fluid and open than Pollock suggests. However, her essay remains used by many scholars as a touchstone for how to think about:the relationship of gender and modernitythe relationship of spaces and genderhow an artist experiences his/her space and how those experiences affect his/her work.the relationship between public/private spaces and spaces within a paintinghow art history is constructedAfter reading the article, please jot down a few thoughts about a-e above. Please also answer the following, more specific, questions:On pages 53/54, Pollock refers to scholarship by TJ Clark and Manet’s painting, “The Bar at the Folies Bergère. She asks, “Could Berthe Morisot have gone to such a location to canvass the subject? Would it enter her head as a site of modernity as she experienced it? Could she as a woman experience modernity as Clark defines it at all?” How would you answer these questions?Pollock identifies a “matrix of space” as the basis for her essay. What are the various “dimensions” of this matrix? What does Pollock suggest about the relationship between locations represented (as subject matter) and “spatial order within paintings”? On p 64, Pollock outlines the “mastering eye/I.” What does this mean? How does this relate to Cassatt’s artistic choices? Ultimately, what does Pollock mean by “The spaces of femininity”?On p 66 Pollock poses the question, “How does this (the spaces of femininity) relate to modernity and modernism? How does she answer that question?What does the figure of the fl?neur have to do with it all? How can ideas about space and the gaze be seen – or countered by – depictions of women in paintings by Renoir, Cassatt, or Morisot? (We’ll look at some images in class, just have a general idea of how we can “read” these paintings.) Pollock says, “The spaces of femininity still regulate women's lives.” Do you agree? If so, how/where might this be seen? If we broaden that statement to say, “Spaces – and our negotiations within those spaces - are gendered,” what examples might you think of? ................
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