The course studies women as producers of art and subjects in art in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. It offers an introduction to how meanings about women and gender are produced by visual images and how gender structures responses to art. We will investigate the professional opportunities available to women artists for training, exhibition, association, and selling during this period, and the types of work they consequently produced. Art of the period saw a shift from the male to the female nude as the dominant figure of ideal beauty, the invention of new mythologies around the figure of the woman, and the transformation of women into signs of fashion and modernity. The implications of these changes will be examined for women as well as for men involved with the arts. The format is seminar discussion. Some classes will be done in local museums. Modes of assessment include response papers to the readings, oral reports, and short papers. Recommended texts include Linda Nochlin, “Why have there been no great women artists?”; Mary Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art; Gen Doy, Women & Visual Culture in 19th Century France, 1800-1852; and coursepack.
