30 November 2019

In this article Katy Siegel puts forward some interesting ideas on how the’ feminine sensibility’ has historically been dismissed and that the history of art can never been seen purely as a history of style as it is in fact always a social history. Of these two ideas I find the latter easy to accept but the former more difficult because I am not wholly convinced by what she describes as a ‘feminine sensibility’ defined as being concerned with decoration, pleasure, and the everyday along with gender and sexuality. I just do not agree that these qualities are necessarily feminine surely it is just another social construct that these particular qualities are associated with female artist’s work. These concerns recognised as ‘light’ and seen negatively in the 1950s Siegel argues were reclaimed or cultivated by feminist artists, such as Miriam Schapiro, Faith Wilding and Lynda Benglis in 1970s, this reclamation I would argue is something different. This is about seeing the qualities as negatively defined as feminine and claiming them or empowering them in the face of the negativity. 

 

More interesting is the idea Siegel puts forward that seemingly impersonal abstraction is in fact imbued with personal identity or personal feeling for everyone including men. This idea fits with some of the research I have been doing into Lee Krasner, where trauma and personal circumstance appear to be expressed in the work, she was doing in the 1950s, this will be further explored elsewhere in this journal. 

 

Gender and ambition and whether or not this has changed since the 1950s is another theme in the article. Siegel talks about this in relation to Amy Sillman’s essay in her book ‘The Heroine Paint:  After Frankenthaler’ where Amy Sillman talks about recognising in Frankenthaler a quality she herself struggles with, the ability to make huge and ambitious and risky gestures with confidence and authority - a lack of anxiety about the consequences and the details - that seems reserved for men in this culture. Putting confidence together with the ‘feminine’ is an amazing thing says Siegel. This is more recognisable surely for all female painters?

Gagosian Quarterly 14 July 2015