Moma Taking Historic Cultures and Turninng It Into Art
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Thomas Ruff, Reddish Panties, from the "Nudes" series, 2001
Vajayjay, vaj, meat wallet, muff monster, bearded clam, furback turtle—whatever you call information technology, the vagina has been the about obsessed-over torso part since apes began to walk upright. It'southward certainly been the most culturally and politically contested. It'south no surprise, and so, that for centuries (millennia, even) the subject has attracted all kinds of artists, and caused some of art history's biggest flaps. With that in mind, we offer this cursory history of the vagina in fine art, and all the hoo-ha surrounding it.
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Photograph: Randall White Aurignacian vulvar representation, circa 35,000 B.C., Vézère Valley, France
Life in the Pleistocene was relatively unproblematic: One'southward job was to eat and reproduce. Neither was easy back then, so Stone Age human being turned to the mystical properties of cave art to assistance ensure the hunts for both game and the opposite sex. This paradigm of a vulva, 1 of the primeval known examples of cave etching, is besides one of the oldest known examples of artwork, menstruum. There has been some argument among experts as to whether or not this circle with a slash through it is in fact a vagina. Perhaps—or maybe it'due south only a early stab at depicting an 'On' push. -
Photograph: H. Jensen The Venus of Hohle Fels, circa 37,000 B.C., Schelklingen, Germany
Much clearer every bit to what it represents, this buxom figure made of ivory hails from southern Germany and may take been associated with some sort of fertility ritual. The carver was apparently both an ass and breast man. -
Photograph: Damon Tighe Aphrodite in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin
Sometime during the fifth century B.C., the ancient Greeks came up with the ideal of the pube-free pudendum, and for the next millennia or then, depictions of depilated deltas became standard for classically inspired artists. Yet, the Greeks were believed to take vividly polychromed their marble sculpture with encaustic paints (pigments mixed with wax). It'due south possible that this Venus and others like information technology were rendered with a full bush-league—meaning that the Brazilian paradigm followed by Renaissance Old Masters may have been the effect of a big misunderstanding. -
Photograph: Uffizi Gallery Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538
Titian was amid the first of the Erstwhile Masters to button the envelope on the classically themed goddess of love. His Venus, with her combination of coyly covered maidenhead and come up-hither look, created a scandal when it was unveiled. The painting is believed to have been commissioned past Guidobaldo Ii della Rovere, Knuckles of Urbino, to celebrate his union four years before. -
Leonardo da Vinci, The Female Sexual Organs, circa 1510
The Renaissance represented a scientific besides as a cultural reawakening, and this anatomical dissection by Leonardo is mayhap the first attempt to render female ballocks in empirical terms—getting down, in other words, without getting muddy. -
Photograph: Museo del Prado Goya, La maja desnuda (The Naked Maja), circa 1797–1800
The dawn of the 19th century marked the end of the Old Principal period, and with information technology, the cease of the classical female nude. This image, possibly the first depiction of female pubic hair in Western art history, is i of a pair that Goya painted of this model. (The other, showing her clothed, is called La maja vestida, or The Clothed Maja). Nobody knows who the subject is, or why Goya chose to immortalize her. One guess is that she's María del Pilar Teresa Cayetana de Silva y Álvarez de Toledo, 13th Duchess of Alba, with whom Goya is rumored to take been romantically involved. Some other speculation is that she's Pepita Tudó, the young mistress of Prime Government minister Manuel de Godoy, Duke of Alcudia. -
Photograph: Musée d'Orsay Gustave Courbet, L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), 1866
Still revolutionary for its frank eroticism, this painting was created past Courbet for Khalil Bey, an Ottoman diplomat who had held posts in Athens and Petrograd, Russia, before moving to Paris. The subject is unknown, though she is idea to be Joanna Hiffernan, one of Courbet's favorite models at the time. Known as Jo, she was the mistress of James Whistler, an American expat painter and friend of Courbet. -
Photo: Private Collection Egon Schiele, Reclining Female person Nude with Violet Stockings, 1910
Vienna at the turn of the 20th century was a hotbed of sexual neuroses, so it makes sense that artists at the fourth dimension gravitated toward erotica. Schiele, a leading figure of the period and something of an Expressionistic bad male child, created dozens of studies of females in unashamedly sexual positions (see the following prototype likewise). Unable to afford proper artist's models, he persuaded prostitutes and teenage shop girls to pose for him. This ultimately proved to be a problem. Kids from the neighborhood often congregated at his studio, much to the consternation of the folks in boondocks, and in 1912, he was arrested on charges of seducing a small-scale. When law later raided his studio and confiscated nearly 100 sketches, he was farther charged with distributing immoral textile. After Schiele spent 21 days in prison, the rape allegation was dropped. He still was constitute guilty of displaying erotic pictures where children could see them, and had to serve an boosted three days in jail. -
Photograph: Museum of Modernistic Art New York Egon Schiele, Girl with Black Hair (Mädchen mit schwarzem Haar), 1911
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Gustav Klimt, Reclining Semi-Nude Facing Correct, 1914
Roughly a generation older than Schiele, Klimt, another major effigy of the Vienna scene, was no slouch when it came to provocative depictions of women, though his shift to overtly sexual imagery came relatively late in his career. -
Photograph: Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe—Body, 1921
Americans are often considered puritanical, but that certainly wasn't example amidst the founding members of this country'south avant-garde. Take Alfred Stieglitz. This image is one of some 350 he took of Georgia O'Keeffe betwixt 1918 and 1925 as a "composite portrait." Merely a portion of these photographs were starkly sexual (he as well took photos of O'Keeffe's face and hands), but Torso testifies to Stieglitz's erotic obsession with O'Keeffe, which began around 1917, while he was even so married to his wife, Emily. Stieglitz'southward first nude studies of O'Keeffe were taken at his home, even when Emily was there. As one might look, this somewhen led to a "information technology's her or me" confrontation. Stieglitz divorced Emily in 1924, marrying O'Keeffe that same year. They remained married until Stieglitz's death, though the fact that he dallied with other women was perhaps one reason that O'Keeffe moved to New Mexico to live by herself and work on her art. -
Photograph: Metropolitan Museum of Art Georgia O'Keeffe, Black Iris, 1926
This floral study has been interpreted as a literal lady-flower from almost the solar day it was painted, though O'Keeffe herself adamantly rejected such Freudian associations. And it's true that sometimes a flower is but a flower—but c'monday! -
Photograph: Private Collection Christian Schad, Two Girls, 1928
Schad was part of the German Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Realism") motility in the decadent Berlin of the interwar years. His work was notable for its most pornographic treatment of subjects similar those depicted in Two Girls, and also for his clinical, most academic approach to painting them. Although the women here are by and large thought to exist lesbians, they are both are staring at something or someone outside of the film frame. Who that might be is suggested by the man's wristwatch band laid on the pillow well-nigh the top right corner of the composition. -
Photograph: Private Collection Otto Dix, Nude Girl With Gloves, 1932
Dix was also associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit, and while he did limn the occasional lewd subject, sex in his piece of work was inevitably intertwined with death. Y'all get a sense of that in this painting'south lugubrious overtones, with its skeletally sparse model set up against a funereal black groundwork. The painting is besides a homage to work of the swell German language Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder. -
Photograph: Menil Collection René Magritte, Le Viol (The Rape), 1934
Every bit its name implies, Surrealism was intent on upending conventional notions of reality, and the social club that was built on it. Artists associated with Surrealism turned to the world of dreams and the hidden for their inspiration, and sex played no pocket-size part—then did the classical ideal of the female person figure. In this image, Magritte transforms the features of a woman's face into a naked female torso, with the breasts, navel and vagina substituting for the optics, nose and mouth. If e'er there were an icon for the objectification of women, this was it. Yet, the title indicates that far from being blind to the painting'southward implications, Magritte was essentially deconstructing them—or at the very least, acknowledging that dazzler, in the Western tradition, was dependent on treating women every bit an object of the male gaze. -
Photograph: Museum of Modernistic Art New York Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936
Likewise known as Fur-lined Tea Loving cup, this work is 1 of Surrealism's greatest hits. Its origin lies in a conversation betwixt Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar at a café in Paris. The story goes that Picasso, complimenting Oppenheim's fur-trimmed bracelet, noted that merely well-nigh anything could be covered with fur, to which Oppenheim replied, "Even this loving cup and saucer." Shortly after, when Surrealism's supremo, André Breton, asked Oppenheim to exhibit in the starting time Surrealist exhibition dedicated to sculpture, she went out and bought a cup, saucer and spoon and practical pieces of pelt to them. The work's sexual connotations are unmistakable, but unfortunately for Oppenheim, Object's instant success meant that she was never able to superlative information technology. -
Photograph: Museum of Modernistic Art New York Hans Bellmer, Plate from La Poupée, 1936
One of the more outré figures of modernistic art, Bellmer, a German artist who lived in Berlin, adult his work independently of the Surrealists that were based in Paris, though he would eventually join their ranks. Equally a child, he and his brother hid out from their tyrannical father in "a hugger-mugger garden decorated with toys and souvenirs, and visited past young girls who joined in sexual games." Sounds similar a recipe for an erotically obsessed artistic genius! Bellmer was largely self-taught, having initially studied applied science, per the demands of his father. His creeptastic dolls, or poupées, were cobbled together complete with pudenda out of wood, plaster, broom handles, metal rods and ball joints. They were initially meant as a protestation against the Nazi'south ascension to power (Dad was an agog Nazi, naturally)—the result of Bellmer's renunciation of doing annihilation "useful" for the new regime. The poupées were inspired by memories of his hugger-mugger garden and his sexual encounters in that location. Bellmer took photos of his creations, publishing them in a book that came to the attending of André Breton, who invited him to showroom with the Surrealists. -
Photograph: Philadelphia Museum of Art Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés: 1. La chute d'eau, two. Le gaz d'éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas), 1946–1966
The inventor of the Readymade's terminal work was anything but prepare-fabricated: He labored over the piece in hush-hush for 20 years after supposedly giving upwards art to play chess. Created in his New York studio, the piece was moved to Philadelphia Museum of Art after Duchamp'southward expiry in 1968, where information technology has resided ever since. Essentially a hidden room whose interior tin can only be viewed through the peephole of a locked wooden door, Étant donnés contains a sort of weird wax-museum-similar scene: a naked adult female splayed spread-eagle in the alpine grass by a stream running from a distant waterfall, property a gas lamp in her upraised hand. Over the decades, its significant has been debated, though it'southward more often than not agreed that the effigy in the foreground, an armature covered in parchment, was based on ane of Duchamp'due south one-time lovers. Enigmatic to this solar day, Étant donnés serves as a perverse paean to the relationship between voyeurism and art. -
Tom Wesselmann, Bathtub Collage #3, 1963
Pop artists equally a whole mined Madison Avenue and Hollywood for their work, merely no '60s Pop creative person exploited their sexual undertones as obviously as Tom Wesselmann did with his "Great American Nudes." Bathtub Collage is a peculiar hybrid, an assemblage of bodily objects from a bathroom (laundry hamper, towel, shower pall, etc.) framing a cheery painting of a naked woman drying herself off. She'south notable for her lack of facial features, contrasted with the obvious effort put into depicting her pubic hair. The whole piece seems to wind up skewing to that one minor surface area of the composition, suggesting that in the battle for the viewer's attending, the prosaic is ever outmatched by the profane. -
Gerhard Richter, Pupil, 1967
Richter'south encounter with the piece of work of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein in the early 1960s led to the development of the blurring technique that has become his signature, his method for crystallizing the emptiness inherent in the imagery produced by mass civilization in all of its forms. This includes pornography, of class, and in this painting, Richter negates the erotic accuse of its source photo, using his brush to obscure porn's power to reveal or strip its subject field bare. Something of the same thing happens with his choice of championship, Pupil, the neutral tone of which pulls the figure of the young girl out of the realm of the salacious and into the earth of the ordinary. -
Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely, Hon-en Katedral, 1966
With the rising of feminism in the 1960s and '70s, the vagina'south representation in fine art took a turn, as women artists began to make references to it in their work. This wasn't something new, exactly (come across Georgia O'Keeffe), but it was different in that the vagina became a political symbol instead of a indicate of sexual fixation. This English title of this installation mounted at Stockholm's Moderna Museet is She: A Cathedral, and its creators, Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely, were both associated with Nouveau Réalisme, the French accept on Pop Fine art. With its crowd waiting in line like churchgoers on a Sunday, the work proposed a kind of sacred infinite for the nascent sexual revolution. -
Valie Export, Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic), 1968
In 1968, Austrian performance creative person Valie Export (neé Waltraud Lehner) entered a picture theater in Munich, Germany, wearing crotchless pants. She walked around the audition with her exposed genitals at heart level, a gesture meant to question the passive part of women in the movies, but also in keeping with her other performances that projected the private nature of sex into the public sphere. The photo here, and the image that follows, were taken a year later on in Vienna, with the improver of the toy gun beingness held by the artist to make information technology resemble the posters produced past radical groups at the time. -
Valie Export, Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic), 1968
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William N. Copley, Scottish Ms, 1974
Copley, the adopted scion of a wealthy Los Angeles publishing magnate and i of West Coast's primeval dealers in modern art, was likewise a painter. In this image, he takes a natural language-in-cheek shot at feminism. -
Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, 1975
In her most famous slice, Schneemann, a pioneer of feminist performance art, stood naked on a table, painted her body with mud, and slowly pulled a newspaper whorl out of her vagina as she started to read from it. -
Hannah Wilke, Corcoran Art Gallery, 1976
Another first-generation feminist artist, Wilke fashioned kneaded erasers into vaginal forms, using them in diverse pieces, including this collage where they seem to take over the venerable Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. -
Photograph: © Donald Goddard Hannah Wilke, So Help Me Hannah: What Does This Represent / What Practise You Correspond (Reinhardt), 1978–1984
In this operation self-portrait, Wilke makes a reference to a famous line taken from one of Ad Reinhardt'southward "art-history comics," in which a viewer points at an abstract painting and proclaims laughingly, "Ha ha, what does this represent?" while the painting shoots back, "What do you stand for?" The question and response is repurposed here, perhaps to accost Wilke'due south nakedness. -
Photograph: Brooklyn Museum Judy Chicago, The Dinner Political party, 1979
Chicago's installation has go the bellwether representation of the vagina in art: A symbolic breaking of bread amidst famous female person figures from history, each represented by a dinner plate containing a vaginal form intended as a likeness. -
Judy Chicago, Emily Dickinson Plate from The Dinner Party, 1979
This detail imagines the famed American writer and poet as a series of lacy labial folds. -
Marina Abramovic, Luminosity, 1997
In this durational operation, Abramovic sabbatum naked on a wall-mounted wheel seat for hours, creating a kind of crucifixion scene. The work was restaged using other performers during her MoMA retrospective. -
Vanessa Beecroft, vb45.007.dr, 2001
The British artist is known for her performances in which phalanxes of naked women stand silently still in a kind of Nuremberg Rally of nookie. -
Marina Abramovic, recreation of Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic), 2005
Abramovic, who believes that performance-art pieces can and should be remounted like theatrical plays, restaged Valie Export's 1968 work as part of her 2005 Guggenheim show, "Five Easy Pieces." -
Eve Fowler, Untitled, 2005
Merely as feminism has given fashion to postfeminism, the vagina's representation in art has go more complicated with both male and female artists using its loaded history for various purposes. Fowler's photographs, for example, portray androgynous sitters, including lesbians and transgender subjects. In this image, she evokes Valie Export's Activeness Pants: Genital Panic equally a mark of queer identity. -
John Currin, Tolbrook, 2006
Unabashed celebrations of contemporary decadence, Currin'southward paintings practically dare you to be shocked by their unflattering portrayals of female person subjects, equally if feminist critique had been hijacked by the male person gaze. Here, a woman staring wistfully at her vagina with a porcelain dinner setting around her feet suggests zippo so much a ship-upwards of the traditionally held view of the delicate female person constitution. -
Thomas Ruff, nudes on 15, 2006
This paradigm is 1 of a series the High german photographer has done over years, in which he appropriates porn images downloaded from the web. -
Betty Tompkins, Cunt Painting #xi, 2008
Tompkins also uses porn every bit a source for her paintings, and she'southward done then for 40 years. The bluntness of her approach didn't quite fit with the feminist milieu of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which is why her piece of work has merely recently gained a following. -
Photograph: Courtesy David Zwirner Gallery Lisa Yuskavage, Triptych (detail), 2011
Yuskavage, similar John Currin, upends representational conventions to somewhat ambiguous ends, though as a adult female painter known for cheesecakey pneumatic nymphs worthy of Penthouse magazine, her intentions are presumed to be critically ironic. -
Photograph: Rosalie Knox Kembra Pfahler, Wall of Vagina, 2011
Pfahler, a musician and artist all-time known for fronting cult glam-punk ring the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, performs every bit a goth version of the Femlin cartoon grapheme created dorsum in the 1950s past creative person Leroy Nieman for Playboy. For the piece (the title of which echoes the famous Phil Spector "wall of sound"), Pfahler was aided by the Girls of Karen Black (GOKB), a group of döppelgangers forming a stack of bodies with Pfahler herself at the top. Using a turkey baster, another GOKB then squirted the resulting pile with thick white cream. -
Photo: Private Collection Mickalene Thomas, Origin of the Universe 2, 2012
Our survey ends nearly where it began, with this gimmicky homage to Courbet by African-American creative person Mickalene Thomas.
A brief history of the vagina in art (slide show)
Forget Eve Ensler and Naomi Wolf: When it comes to the vagina as a discipline, art was there first. We snatch some examples from history to survey the persistence of pussy in art through the ages.
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Source: https://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/a-brief-history-of-the-vagina-in-art-slide-show
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