Friday 6 February 2015

Research Point: Photography and Feminism 2

Hannah Hoch

Dada was an avant-garde, artistic movement, that was anti-art, anti-bourgeois, and aligned itself politically with the radical left. The movement began around 1915 and quickly spread to European cities such as Berlin, as well as New York. As with Marcel Duchamp a few years earlier, the movement attempted to swipe away the conventional thinking on art and it's origins were based in Cubism, and German Expressionism.

Collage was a form of art that became highly developed under the Dadaists. Hannah Hoch's work is well known for her critiques of the German Weimar republic, gender roles - including marriage, and the representation of women in advertising and larger society.

Hoch struggled to have her work recognised by the Dadaist themselves. In later critiques and reviews she began to slip from view as biographers downplayed her importance. It was not until later decades when Feminist historians re-discovered her work that Hoch's place was rightly restored to the movement.

It is difficult to fully analyse Hoch's work online. Her collages are packed with complicated imagery that really needs to be seen full size to be appreciated. Also, some of her political messages are now hard to interpret without an understanding of the political motivation and players of the time.

Her views on female representation are much easier to read as many of these themes are universal and still relevant today. Hoch's collage incorporate images from fashion and advertising. Women's bodies are often re-imagined. Limbs are stretched or out of scale and eyes are enlarged or misaligned. This work reminds me of Cindy Sherman's 'Sex Pictures' series to an extent. Hoch was bisexual and it is clear that she thought a lot about defined gender roles for women and how those roles suppressed her as an individual.


Tamara de Lempicka

Synonymous with the Art Deco style this Polish artist's paintings were loosely based around the technique of Synthetic Cubism. This is a variation on Cubism using a colour palette that was much more acceptable to a majority audience. Lempicka also painted mainly society portraits, and her work was much in demand right through the decades of the 1920s & 30s. In her paintings, Lempicka portrayed women as strong figures (much like herself) that were part of the new machine age and able to take what they wanted from life. The images featured modern technology and used strong, bold colours, to depict automobiles and cityscapes as angular backdrops to her subjects.

After moving to America in 1939 her style fell out of favour and she became much more widely known for her private life and demand for portrait commissions dwindled. It wasn't until the 1970s when the Art Deco style began to make a resurgence in popular consciousness that her work became widely known again. This is typical of many women artist's as they struggle not only to make their artistic voices heard but also sustain them over time. Many art historians seemed to quite happily let these women's histories slide into oblivion. Luckily Feminist re-discovery in the latter decades of the twentieth century has restored them to their rightful places.


Frida Kahlo

Born in Mexico, Frida Kahlo's work embodies self portraits, her enthusiasm for her native culture, and critiques against the cultural imperialism of America. The self portraits embody the pain, both physical and psychological, that she endured throughout her lifetime. A serious traffic accident as a teenager affected her for the rest of her life and Kahlo was frequently bedridden or in hospital. Her paintings reflect not only the physical damage done to her body but the issues around her sexuality also. Mexico is depicted as a natural world of plants and earth and sky; this is often juxtaposed against the hard and mechanical machine age of Modernist America.

Kahlo's paintings have a Surrealist element - although the artist herself is known to have been disdainful of this label for her own work. Kahlo preferred to state that her work portrayed reality - her inner pain was real. I can appreciate where she is coming from here. The Surrealist paintings of Dali seem far removed from what Kahlo was attempting to communicate in her work.

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