Category: social justice

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A tale of two pretties

“Bluewald,” 1989, by Cady Nolan, is the top-selling work by a living woman artist. It sold for $9.8 million at auction in Spring 2015. If you think that's a lot, compare it to $58.4 million for a Jeff Koons.

“Bluewald,” 1989, by Cady Nolan, is the top-selling work by a living woman artist. It sold for $9.8 million at auction in Spring 2015. If you think that’s a lot, compare it to $58.4 million for a Jeff Koons.
Artists are generally politically liberal. So why are they more backward than the rest of society in compensating women?
I’ve written about gender inequality in prices achieved by male and female artists. Now a large study confirms that the gender gap is alive and well for those holding art degrees. Women in the arts earn 68¢ for every dollar earned by men. That’s far worse than in the broader economy, where women can expect to earn 79¢ for every male-earned dollar.
The study used data from the 2011 Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), which included almost 34,000 respondents, all of whom held degrees in the arts. Of this group, about half were not working directly in the arts sector. A quarter were creators themselves. Roughly speaking, it isn’t having an art degree that kills you economically; it’s having an art degree and being female that’s deadly.
Working for a non-profit organization is almost as much of a liability as being female, it turns out. That will earn you a $17K drop in salary if you’re male or a $7K drop if you’re female.
“Mirror Room (Pumpkin),” 1991, by Yayoi Kusama. She tops the list for living women in terms of the aggregate value of her work sold at auction: nearly $216 million at the end of 2015.

“Mirror Room (Pumpkin),” 1991, by Yayoi Kusama. She tops the list for living women artists in terms of the aggregate value of her work sold at auction: nearly $216 million at the end of 2015.
And if you’re thinking it would be better in other places than in the troglodytic United States, think again. A similar survey in the UK found similar results.
Artsy did an excellent analysis of the data, here, and it’s worth weeping over.
One reason women’s salaries lag in every industry is that women are far less likely to negotiate job offers than their male peers. I know two young women who took the wages they were offered at their current professional jobs. The first is a programmer; the second is a gallerist. In the case of the programmer, her employer—a heartless, multinational defense contractor—has since worked to reduce the gap, since her boss wants to retain her. In the case of the gallerist, the initial insult was compounded by violations of labor law such as asking her to train on her own time.
Spare me the liberal pieties about social justice, my art-industry friends, until you are willing to promote, support and compensate women equally with their male peers. What I really want for Christmas is to never read news like this again.
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The Empress Dowager Cixi

A tinted photograph of the Empress Dowager Cixi, Regent of the Qing Dynasty. Her portraits included a painting given to Teddy Roosevelt as well as extensive photographs. 
My friend K Dee recently put together a photostream of portraits of women to “help me remember, in case I ever start to forget, which sort of female image I find reflects a healthy civil society, and which I do not.” Today we’ll look at the story of a remarkable woman who prospered by being more toxic than her society.
The Empress Dowager Cixi was born in Beijing in 1835, an unimportant daughter of a mid-level bureaucrat. At 16, she was one of sixty girls in a cattle-call to choose consorts for the new Xianfeng  Emperor. Cixi made the cut.
 Concubines of the Xianfeng Emperor fishing at a pond, 19th century. The figure at left is probably Cixi; the one at right is the Empress Ci’an.
Despite the plethora of women in his harem, the Emperor had trouble producing an heir. In 1856, Cixi gave birth to his only surviving son, Zaichun. This propelled her up through the harem ranks so that by the time Zaichun reached his first birthday, she ranked second only to the Empress.
Unusually, Cixi could read and write. This granted her unprecedented access to the Emperor and an informal education in how to govern.
In September 1860, British and French troops attacked Beijing and burned the Emperor’s Old Summer Palace to the ground. The Emperor and his entourage fled Beijing. The Emperor turned to booze and drugs, became ill, and died.
Portrait of Empress Dowager Ci’an (co-regent with Cixi). Since Ci’an was an Empress and Cixi a lowly concubine, Ci’an had precedence, but this was a matter of formality, not fact. Her portrait corresponds with descriptions of her as good-natured and naive. 
An eight-member Regency ruled on behalf of his heir, who was then five years old. Balancing the Regents’ power were the former empress, the Dowager Empress Ci’an, and the former concubine, the Dowager Empress Cixi.
The Dowager Empress Ci’an was good-natured and naïve: the perfect tool for the former concubine. The situation was inherently unstable, and at the correct moment, Cixi staged a coup with the support of a coterie of princes. To demonstrate her compassion, Cixi executed only three of the eight Regents, eschewed torturing them, and refused to execute the ministers’ families.
Ruling from “behind the curtain,” Cixi issued an Imperial Edict on behalf of the young Emperor stating that the two Empresses Dowager were to be the sole decision makers “without interference.”  Her partner being malleable, Cixi had absolute control of the Chinese state by the mid-1860s.
Portrait of Empress Jiashun, Cixi’s daughter-in-law. It is speculated that Cixi poisoned her when she was pregnant with an heir to Cixi’s dead son.
In 1872, the Emperor turned 17 and was married to the Empress Jiashun. The relationship between Cixi and the new Empress was fraught. “I am a principal consort, having been carried through the front gate with pomp and circumstance, as mandated by our ancestors. Empress Dowager Cixi was a concubine, and entered our household through a side gate,” the new Empress said.
Foolish girl. Cixi ordered the couple to separate. The young Emperor—a man of weak intellect and weak character—began to act out his sexual desires in the brothels of Beijing. He contracted syphilis and died at the age of 19. His young pregnant Empress followed him into the grave a few months later, perhaps at Cixi’s hand. They left no heir. After considerable uproar, Cixi’s four-year-old nephew was tapped to become the next Emperor.

The Empress Dowager Ci’an died suddenly in 1881; rumors swirled that Cixi had poisoned Ci’an. Now the sole Regent, Cixi maintained her iron grip on power even after the new Emperor reached his majority and began to reign as the Guangxu Emperor.

As he grew into his role, the Guangxu Emperor began flexing his muscles, initiating a series of modernizing reforms. These particularly displeased Cixi because they would have checked her power. Once more, the Empress Dowager Cixi took over. The Emperor was never formally removed from the throne, but he was a powerless puppet from then on.
The Guangxu Emperor died suddenly on November 14, 1908. The Empress Dowager installed a new child emperor on the throne and promptly keeled over herself. Turns out that the Guangxu Emperor was poisoned; modern forensic testing shows he had arsenic levels 2000 times greater than normal. It appears that, knowing she was dying, the Empress Dowager’s last act was to prevent him from ever taking power in China.

In 1912, the child emperor Puyi abdicated, ending over 2000 years of imperial China and beginning a long period of instability that would result in the Chinese Civil War.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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When the going got tough…

This Dardanelle, Arkansas, Post Office WPA Mural is not much different from the one in my home town, except that the crop is cotton.
The logical successors to the Ashcan school were the Federal Art Project painters. This was the visual arts part of the New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression. At no other time in American history has government made such an effort to support the arts in all forms. While autocrats sometimes employed art to create an ethos for their state, democracies do not, in general, use art and artists like this.
Whereas this WPA Office Mural from Arlington, Massachusetts is distinctly northern in character, and refers back to our original settlement stories.
Since non-representational artists—still considered the avante garde—were not making much of a living in the Thirties, you can imagine what a boon government support was for them. But most of the WPA art was representational, and most of it was local. We remember the WPA for the murals in our post offices, libraries, schools and hospitals, not because it supported the likes of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock before they became famous.
Could this be from anywhere else but America’s heartland, celebrating corn as it does? In this case, Mount Ayr, Iowa.
Yesterday I wrote that art is primarily a reflection of the aspirations and values of the society that created it. The WPA art is an example of art as a change agent. In the midst of the Great Depression, America needed to be reminded of her exceptionalism. In government buildings across the country, painters did just that.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Does art reflect society or society reflect art?

McSorley’s Bar, 1912, by John Sloan. McSorley’s is the oldest Irish tavern in New York City. It only admitted women after being forced to do so in 1970. I got into my last-ever bar fight there, with an undergrad from NYU who imagined I’d slighted his girlfriend. “I can take him,” I insisted to my husband. “Who expects a roundhouse from a blue-haired church lady?”
Yesterday a reader asked, “Does art reflect society or society reflect art?” It seems to me that art is primarily a reflection of the aspirations and values of the society that created it. That is not to downplay the importance of social justice in art, and it doesn’t mean that artists can’t change people’s minds. Think of the tremendous courage it took for Émile Zola to publish J’accuse, and the influence it has down to this day. But even that was responsive to a reality: the injustice of institutional anti-Semitism.
By the turn of the 19th century, America had recovered a bit from its earlier unbridled optimism. This could be seen in its literature, with writers like Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, and Frank Norris describing the dark side of the American experience. The painterly equivalent was called the Ashcan School.
Steaming Streets, 1908, by George Bellows. The Ashcan painters did not gloss over the filth and danger of our cities.
The Ashcan painters opposed both American Impressionism and the highly polished work of painters like John Singer Sargent. They were darker, rougher, and harsher. They were not just interested in light and air; they also wanted to paint the grime, the frozen manure and the poverty that were also part of our urban reality.
From the standpoint of trendiness, their moment was short-lived. The Cubists, Fauvists and Expressionists took over the avant garde high ground with the Armory Show of 1913, and suddenly the Ashcan painters were lumped in with all those boring old realists from the 19th century.
Eviction (Lower East Side), 1904, by Everett Shinn (gouache). Shinn had watched the eviction of an old musician from his apartment, which inspired this picture of misery and despair.    

That should not minimize their artistic and social importance. Painters like Robert Henri, George Bellows, George Luks, John Sloan, and William Glackens cast a long shadow. They were the first painters to admit that America was not Elysium, and the flaws they painted have only gotten more noticeable with time. 
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!