Femininity
Art that shapes, performs or questions the looks, manners and roles a society expects of women.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Femininity are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Femininity is the set of looks, manners and roles a society assigns to women, and art has both produced those ideals and pulled them apart. Simone de Beauvoir argued in 1949 that one is not born but becomes a woman. Earlier images fixed types: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres gave his Grande Odalisque (1814) an impossibly long back, and around 1900 Alphonse Mucha's posters turned women into flowing hair and ornament.
From the 1970s artists examined how femininity is performed. Mary Beth Edelson pasted women artists' faces over the apostles in Leonardo's Last Supper for Some Living American Women Artists (1972), Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (1974–79) set places for thirty-nine women from history, and Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) cast the artist as film heroines who never existed. Shirin Aliabadi's Miss Hybrid photographs (2006) show young Tehran women with bleached hair and nose plasters, mixing global and local beauty codes.
Related artists
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Figure from the Back (Rückenfigur)
Figure Studies
Figures in Nature
Figures of the Art World
Flora
Focus on the Social Margins
Food
Gender
Glamour
Globalization
Grotesque
Group of Objects
Group of Portraits
Group Portrait
Haze
Hugs and Kisses
