It's Art - But is it Beautiful?

[steepholm]

I think so. And it's certainly hypnotic. But there's just a tincture of creepiness in there too, n'est-ce pas?

Comments

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

About halfway through, I thought "Will there be Picasso?" And there was! Even this Picasso!

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

More than a tincture, I'd say! Talk about the male gaze... And notice how few of the women have their lips parted? There's actually one self-portrait by a French woman around the time of the French Revolution and it's one of the first paintings to depict a woman smiling with her mouth open - but the mouth is shut for this. (Can't remember the name of the artist but we did a bit on her and that self-portrait in OU summer school for the Intro to the Arts course.)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

There is one arc where the lips part and teeth even show. It's very unnerving.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

I also noticed the consistency of small mouth and chin.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I couldn't get the overall effect, my head kept getting lightning flashes from all the paintings I recognized.

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that link - fascinating. Yes, I get the creepiness, often when the eyes stay still and everything morphs around them.

[hafren.livejournal.com]

Sad how the face changes so little - especially the proportions. Could be the same damn woman...

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I have seen the Eternal Feminine, and it smirks...

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I think a certain amount of sub-Berger can be talked about this, but the portraits aren't randomly selected: the artist has chosen a certain type of portrait with a certain type of sitter to make a point which must have occurred to most people who've ever been in an art gallery. Religious art apart from pictures of the Virgin -- a good source of older, crosser-looking women with faces in action rather than repose -- is underrepresented. The eyes are creepily static, but I'd be wary of ascribing that to the "male gaze" until I'd seen a control: a similar thing done with portraits of men, for example (not that a possessive gaze can't operate on men's bodies, but I don't think we can gender it so easily if that is the case). I suspect the eyes stay where they are because everybody's eyes are roughly the same place in their heads, so there are only a limited number of things you can do with eyes in a figural portrait (the artist has selected their Cubists and other moderns very carefully: a more radical Picasso, for example, would have upset things rather).