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Siri Hustvedt
A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women - Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind
English · Paperback / Softback
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Description
Informationen zum Autor Siri Hustvedt, a novelist and scholar, has a PhD in English literature and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. She is the author of a book of poems, seven novels, four collections of essays, and two works of nonfiction. She has published papers in various academic and scientific journals and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, the European Charles Veillon Essay Prize, an American Academy of the Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction for The Blazing World , which was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Klappentext "In a trilogy of works brought together in a single volume, Siri Hustvedt demonstrates the striking range and depth of her knowledge in both the humanities and the sciences, repeatedly upending received ideas and cultural truisms." --A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women WHAT artists say about their own work is compelling because it tells us something about what they believe they are doing. Their words speak to an orientation or an idea, but those orientations and ideas are never complete. Artists (of all kinds) are only partly aware of what they do. Much of what happens in making art is unconscious. But in these comments, Picasso, Beckmann, and de Kooning all connect their art to feeling—to love in the first two cases and to irritation in the third—and for each artist, women have somehow been implicated in the process. For Picasso, loving a woman is a metaphor for painting. His “we” is clearly masculine. Beckmann is giving advice to an imaginary “woman painter,” and de Kooning is trying to explain how his “women” were created by evoking the woman in himself, albeit in a defensive and worried way. All three claim that there is a fundamental feeling relation between their inner states and the reality of the canvas, and in one way or another, an idea of womanhood haunts their creativity. What am I seeing? In this exhibition, Women, which includes only paintings of women by the three artists, I am seeing images of one woman after another by artists who must be called Modernists and whose depictions of the human figure were no longer constrained by classical notions of resemblance and naturalism. For all three painters, “woman” seems to embrace much more than the definition in Webster’s: “an adult human female.” In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir argued that one is not born a woman but becomes a woman. It is certainly true that meanings of the word accumulate and change even over the course of a single lifetime. Since the 1950s, a distinction between sex and gender has emerged. The former is a marker of female and male biological bodies and the latter socially constructed ideas of femininity and masculinity that vary with time and culture, but even this division has become theoretically perplexing. We have no recourse to living bodies in art. I am looking into fictive spaces. Hearts are not pumping. Blood is not running. The markers of the human female in biology—breasts and genitalia that I see in these images (when I see them)—are representations. Pregnancy and birth do not figure explicitly in these pictures, but sometimes what is not there is powerful nevertheless. I am looking at inhabitants of the world of the imaginary, of play, and of fantasy made by painters who are now dead, but who were all making art in the twentieth century. Only the signs of the artist’s bodily gestures remain: the traces left by an arm that once moved violently or cautiously in space, a head and torso that leaned forward, then back, feet planted beside each other or at an angle, and eyes that took in what was there and what was not yet there on the canvas, and the feelings a...
Product details
Authors | Siri Hustvedt |
Publisher | Simon & Schuster USA |
Languages | English |
Product format | Paperback / Softback |
Released | 31.12.2017 |
EAN | 9781501141102 |
ISBN | 978-1-5011-4110-2 |
Dimensions | 139 mm x 213 mm x 40 mm |
Subjects |
Fiction
> Poetry, drama
Humanities, art, music > Art > General, dictionaries |
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