The 19th and 20th Century which marked the beginnings of what would ultimately go on to be described as the modernist movement were a time where women artists began to explore new boundaries. Careful reflection themes such as "Sexuality, Class, Race, and Ethnicity" commenced as well as "Women's attempts to define what it meant to be a woman, to experience life from within a woman's body and to understand one's subjectivity as feminine." This represents a declarative reprioritization of traditional cultural norms, the same reprioritization that would come to characterize the modernist movement as this was a period where all established traditions scientific, religious, and cultural were under intense scrutiny and revaluation. This reinterpretation led many art critics and pundits to wonder what this revaluation would ultimately mean monetarily within a retrospective context as it relates specifically to human posterity. Guerilla Girls made note of a potential influx in the value of female artists work in the margin of their zine' asking "When racism and sexism are no longer fashionable, what will your art collection be worth?" A provocative notion that is all the more worth considering given the direction that society is heading as gender relations has become perhaps the pre-eminent issue featured at the focal point of the current cultural discourse. The Guerilla Girls publication makes note of this progress by citing the fact that "More women's art has been exhibited, reviewed, and collected than ever before." While also going on to identify the inequality that still pervades the art world on the basis of race and ethnicity in particular. This confluence of cultural circumstances certainly amounts to a complex quandary that combines seemingly infinite variables and possibilities. These were the difficult issues that the female artists of the twentieth century had to grapple with first and foremost of all and in doing so they redefined notions of aesthetic coherence, thematic relevance, and sociopolitical commentary. At the forefront were artists like Frida Kahlo who proved that the personal is in fact political as her work documented her own cultural lineage while also characterizing and defining her own individual rebellion. Her surrealistic imagery often drew fatalistic allusions to her strained relationship with spouse Diego Rivera while also anticipating her own untimely demise. Georgia O'Keefe another prominent female modernist drew starkly fatalistic allusions in her own work while also continually evoking the divinity and beauty of the female body. These depictions transcended what had previously been considered taboo subject matter, especially in the case of female artists. Additionally Hannah Hoch came to define another pivotal aspect of modernist and post-modernist art as she began to integrate various forms into what became known as photo collage, this progression is absolutely quintessential of modernist ideology and bears the roots of many of the postmodernist art that we see today. Lee Krasner's abstract expressionism made strides that even further broadened the boundaries of what was permissible and perceivable artistically. As her furiously vibrant renderings engage with ideas of the sublime as well as the inexpressible truths of psychological and emotional interiority. And finally Marina Abramovic made enormous strides in the realm of performance as a pioneer in the figurative and metaphoric expression of the human condition by way of physical interaction with her environment as well as other performers, most notably in the instance of her longtime collaborator Ulay who she worked with for well over a decade. Their collaboration was incredibly fruitful and explored themes of gender relations as well as the human capacity for belligerence, malevolence, and ultimately harmony and symbiosis. All of these strides and progressions ultimately resulted in postmodernism, an expression that once again reinterprets the established modernist aesthetic by emphasizing words and the literal as the primary means of expression. It also denotes the combination of high art and pop culture into one fluid and amorphic entity that contains all aesthetic sensibilities reintegrated into one continually evolving body of work. But moreover postmodern artistic theory shares more with modernism than it doesn't and so identification of the female modernist icons seems most imperative of all as the strides they made aesthetically and stylistically created the possibility for post modernism which is still seeminlgy in it's infancy.
By: Milan Robinson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY-cKs77Pfc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcaaVZrUC44
Works Cited:
Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. 4th ed. New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1990. Print.
The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print.
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