The Restoration of Venus : the Nude, Beauty and Modernist Misogyny Author Kane, Maureen Kay Published 2010 Thesis Type Thesis (Professional Doctorate) School Queensland College of Art DOI https://doi.org/10.25904/1912/3775 Copyright Statement The author owns the copyright in this thesis, unless stated otherwise. Downloaded from http://hdl.handle.net/10072/367838 Griffith Research Online https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au THE RESTORATION OF VENUS THE NUDE, BEAUTY AND MODERNIST MISOGYNY Exegesis Maureen Kay Kane BA (hons) Queensland College of Art Griffith University Exegesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Visual Arts March 2010 Abstract The title of this project is intended to convey the main thrust of my studio research, in which I articulate a series of female nudes in an Australian landscape. It is also, however, a response to Wendy Steiner’s book, The Exile of Venus: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art, which argues that, in many respects, the history of elite art in the twentieth century is one of resistance to the female subject as the symbol of beauty. Steiner traces this resistance to Kant’s theory of the sublime in art, whose effect was to identify feminine beauty with impurity, an identification taken to extremes by avant-garde modernists whose art, in the words of abstract expressionist Barnett Newman, sought “to destroy beauty.” The result was art that, in Steiner’s words, turned the female subject from paragon into “a monster, an animal, an exotic, a prostitute … in the name of purity and civilized values.” I argue that modernism’s quest for purity was actually a quest for truth which took art in two broad directions: a) toward increasing abstraction and minimalism that sought the unadorned pure forms that underpin all art, giving it value; and b) toward the deliberate portrayal of abject ugliness on the assumption that reality was, after all, not beautiful and that truthfulness therefore demanded that we represent it as it was. The first path is not (necessarily) inimical to beauty, but the rejection of beauty by the latter caused not just a rejection of the female form as symbol, but, as Steiner claims, a misogynistic denigration of woman that led to a century of pornography, shock and alienation in work that often provoked anger and outrage. Although I had commenced my nudes-in-the-landscape project some years before reading Steiner’s work, her analysis offered me an explanation for my own alienation from much of the modern art world, with what seemed to me its repeated and deliberate perversions. It also helped confirm and support my persistent interest, not only in pursuing traditional modes of art practice, but in creating works intended to be beautiful. If the twentieth century proved that art need not be beautiful to be art, it nevertheless did not succeed in expunging the human desire for and responsiveness to beauty, certainly not in the female form which became more blatantly deployed, often in debased form, in popular culture. The challenge for an artist now concerned with beauty and the female nude is to inquire how and whether the undeniable but problematic power of female beauty can any longer be used for artistic purposes. My research also inevitably raised the question of the place of theory in art. Against the theory-dominated practice of much modern art, I felt the need to defend an older idea (which I felt verified in my personal history) that theory may grow significantly out of the practice as much as the other way around. The five panels completed for this DVA project are my response to these challenges using the most traditional symbol of beauty, the female nude drawn from life. Indeed the paintings try to make an emphatic point by using multiple nudes integrated into a Queensland rainforest landscape and painted on such a scale as to envelop the viewer. This exegesis expounds this work by explaining first the artist and her artistic trajectory, with both her persistent and developing concerns, and second the means and methods she employed to try to achieve the strong but implicit structure of composition that must support any work that aspires to beauty. Statement of Originality This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the exegesis contains no material published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the exegesis itself. Signed:…………………………………. Kay Kane 2010 i CONTENTS List of Illustrations ii Acknowledgments iii Introduction 1 Section 1: The Paintings 7 Section 2: The Artist and Her Intentions 10 Section 3: Means and Methods 29 Conclusion 43 Bibliography 47 ii List of Illustrations Plates 1. Kay Kane, The Restoration of Venus 2. Kay Kane, Mouth of Noosa River 3. Kay Kane, Shaft of Light, Springbrook 4. Kay Kane, Minnippi Drawing 5. (a) Kay Kane, Nude Study (b) Kay Kane, Nude Study 6. (a) Kay Kane, Limited Palette (warm) Study (b) Kay Kane, Monochromatic (cool) Study 7. Kay Kane, Rock Formations 8. Kay Kane, Nude Climbing 9. Kay Kane, Reclining Nude 10. J. van Eyck, Arnolfini Marriage 11. Kay Kane, Male Nude 12. D. Velázquez, Venus at her Toilet 13. (a) Kay Kane, Five Panel Analysis (the glance) (b) Kay Kane, Five Panel Analysis (vectoral) 14. (a) Kay Kane, Mouth of Noosa River (negative shapes) (b) Kay Kane, Monochrome (explicit enclosure) (c) Kay Kane, Monochrome (implicit enclosure) 15. (a) Lloyd Rees, South Coast Road (b) Kay Kane, Rock Pools 16. Kay Kane, Rushing Water 17. Kay Kane, Virtue and Power 18. Kay Kane, Springbrook Mist 19. Kay Kane, Layering Progression 20. Kay Kane, Panel 2 (limited palette, warm) 21. Kay Kane, Panel 5 (limited palette, warm) iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my supervisors, past and present: Keith Bradbury, Mostyn Bramley-Moore, Christine Kirkegard and Russell Craig for their academic guidance, my husband, John Kane, and my children Matthew and Philippa, for their patience and support. iv What dazzles, in a Moment spends its spirit; What’s genuine, Posterity shall inherit. Goethe Man is hungry for beauty. There is a void. Oscar Wilde I don't think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that still remains. Anne Frank All negative art protests the lack of beauty in our lives. Agnes Martin 1 THE RESTORATION OF VENUS: THE NUDE, BEAUTY AND MODERNIST MISOGYNY The use of the female subject as a symbol of artistic beauty still might appear a retrograde repressive enterprise. Wendy Steiner Introduction Jasper Johns, when asked what influence he thought he might have on younger artists, replied, “To me, self-description is a calamity” (cited Vogel 2008). Such an attitude sounds at odds with much contemporary art practice, where artists’ statements of the significance and meaning of their own work often seem as important, if not more important, than the work itself. Yet many artists will understand Johns’ reticence. It is not, I think, the product of undue modesty but rather of the fear of falsifying the complex and rather mysterious processes of artistic production. Gayford and Wright in a book of writings about art state (1998, xvii): One of the most obvious aspects of art and one of the main points to emerge from any conversation with artists, is that we are dealing here with an intuitive, and finally mysterious activity. As George Braque noted, the most important part of a work of art is the little bit that can’t be explained. By trying to reduce what is essentially unsayable to handy formulas or trite categorizations, one risks being untrue to work whose meaning, if it has any, lies wholly within itself and nowhere else. The meaning of a negligible work is exhausted at a glance, and further explanation is superfluous; a great work may inspire a thousand enlightened commentaries without exhausting its meaning, again rendering explanation strictly superfluous. And yet artists inevitably talk about art practice and artworks, their own and those of others, and occasionally must be prepared to respond to the great ‘Why?’ of a puzzled public. The task for someone writing a DVA exegesis is to find a way of describing their own products and practice in a way that avoids either triteness or mystification. My intention is to address as directly as possible the goal that I have 2 been striving toward over several years of concentrated studio work. In the following pages I will try to do this by explaining both the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of my endeavour and, as importantly, the ‘how’. I have learnt from my own and other artists’ experience, as well as from much reading and teaching, that the what, the why and the how are neither as simple nor as independent of each other as may be naively assumed. It is often only in the actual doing of a work – in the relentless searching and refining that comprises the how – that one slowly discovers what one is really doing and why. I am inclined to think that it is only in this sustained process of discovery and organic growth that work of any depth is ever achieved. I will begin, then, with a brief outline of how I picture in general terms the relationship between artists, their aesthetic intentions and artistic methods (for want of a better label), and the meaning or significance of the works they produce. This will provide me with a kind of template for the exegesis that will explain its separate sections and allow me briefly to outline the significance of its title.