Laurie and Debbie (together again for a short time) say:
Our blogrolls and email boxes are buzzing with this YouTube video, 500 years of women in Western art:
People seem to love it. You can describe both of us as underwhelmed.
The film-maker did a great job at two things: his (presumably “his,” the nickname is “eggman”) morphing from face to face is brilliantly done, and his ability to pick similar faces and similar sizes and positions to make the morphing work is superb.
But there’s one catch. By picking the faces that work most seamlessly together, he has neatly excised a huge variety of women painted by the same painters or schools that he selected, and left us with the impression that for the first three hundred and fifty years every woman in Western art was not only white, thin, and young, but had a long nose, dark eyes, and a demure downward gaze. In his last hundred and fifty years, only three-quarters of women fit that description.
We disagree. While the long-nosed demure beauty is easy to find in the history of art, fifteen minutes with Google Images will tell you that she’s never been alone there. Let’s start more or less where eggman started.
Believe us, there are tens of thousands more where these five came from. The vast majority of women in Western art are, in fact, white; on every other axis, however, the variation is amazing.
Here’s a challenge for eggman: do it again with some real variety.
women, feminism, art, Western art, diversity, Women in Art, body image, portraits, art history, Body Impolitic