Visual Art has traditionally been one big boy’s club. Many critics, even today, overlook great women artists in favour of their less talented male counterparts. Outspoken artists such as the discredited Georg Baselitz dismiss all art created by women. Meanwhile, misogynistic figures from Manet to Koons have degraded their models in the process of their practices, and all for the love of money. Some of the examples in this Top 10 feature are shocking, only by virtue of the fact that they were created, exhibited and sold in the artist’s lifetime. How did they get away with it? Welcome to Artlyst’s Top 10 Sexist Artworks!
Image: Mel Ramos, Hav-An Havanna #9, 2002
10. Salvador Dali – Young Virgin Auto-Sodomised by the Horns of Her Own Chastity
Dalí painted many of his subjects as composed of rhinoceros horns. Here, the young virgin’s buttocks consist of two converging horns and two horns float beneath; as the horns simultaneously comprise and threaten to sodomise the callipygian figure, she is effectively (auto) sodomised by her own constitution. Dali was never particularly subtle, but this work is a truly gratuitous act of painterly misogyny.
9. Édouard Manet – Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
A great painting yet also controversial, the work shows two clothed men and a nude woman picnicking under the oaks and chestnut trees of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, and it shocked Parisian society. Even Emperor Napoleon III, who was hardly a paragon of decency, called it “indecent.” With its particular focus on the well-known artist’s model and painter Victorine Meurend. What’s more, she boldly stares back at you, as if you were intruding. Yet due to the painting’s imbalance, the work has called into question whether Manet was a feminist or a misogynist.
8. Gustave Courbet – The Origin of the World
Gustave Courbet’s painting ‘The Origin of the World’ hangs on the wall of the Musée Orsay in Paris, and is a graphic painting to say the least. It is a painting that portrays a woman’s thighs, torso, and, at the centre of attention, her unshaven genitals. The almost anatomical description of female sex organs is not attenuated by any historical or literary device. This painting was, no doubt, privately commissioned by a specialist collector and is by far one of the most graphic depictions of the female anatomy ever painted.
7. Picasso – Nude Woman with a Necklace
The artist was famous for driving his lovers to despair, ‘Women are machines for suffering,” Picasso told his mistress Françoise Gilot in 1943. Indeed, as they embarked on their nine-year affair, the 61-year-old artist warned the 21-year-old student: “For me, there are only two kinds of women, goddesses and doormats”. No one used and abused his women quite like the greatest artist of the 20th century, Picasso. At once objectifying and eviscerating his women in the service of his art, and in this case, further debases the figure by having her urinate.
6. Hans Bellmer – Dolls
The artist’s ‘Dolls’ series – once seen – is forever etched in the mind of the viewer. In 1934, the works appeared in the Surrealist journal Minotaur. Eighteen photographs Bellmer had taken of a life-size, female mannequin were grouped symmetrically under the title “Doll: Variations on the Montage of an Articulated Minor.” The works were perceived as surrealist ‘idealisations’ of the female form, and the dual realms of alterity, femininity, and childhood result in decidedly creepy works of art that predate the Chapman Brothers’ equally dubious mannequins by more than half a century.
5. Mel Ramos – Monterey Jackie
This loathsome artist paints naked, pneumatic women emerging from candy-bar wrappers and banana peels, riding oversize cigars like horses, Ramos’ art could hardly be deemed subtle, but is perhaps toying with the lubricious responses of his viewers, teasing the edge between acceptable and unacceptable taste… or perhaps prodding it with a large stick.
4. Jeff Koons – Made In Heaven
When Jeff Koons married porn star La Cicciolina, the world gasped. When the artist started making sexually explicit art, the art world fainted. These questionable works of art were a series from the controversial Pop artist known more formally as “Made in Heaven” portraying Mr Koons having various forms of sex with his soon-to-be (and later ex-) wife, politician Ilona Staller, aka Cicciolina. The work could be seen simply as bad art. The art world certainly thought so.
3. Allen Jones – Table
Allen Jones is widely known for his controversial sculptures, which upset a generation of feminists with their depiction of female figures. These Pop art pieces, made in the late Sixties and early Seventies, consist of fibreglass female models posed as pieces of furniture and were on display at the artist’s recent retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts. Table (1969), is a life-size, pornographically perfect woman on all fours; the figure wears knee-high boots with spike heels, black gloves, a black corset which displays her balloon-like breasts. To make her and other works like Chair (1969), Jones worked with a company that produced waxworks for Madame Tussauds.
2. Takashi Murakami – Hiropon
Murakami is known for blurring the line between high and low art. He coined the term superflat, which describes both the aesthetic characteristics of the Japanese artistic tradition and the nature of post-war Japanese culture and society. The artist’s work Hiropon is an anime-type character with monstrously huge lactating breasts that are spilling out of her bikini. The work is both sick and ridiculous, a sculpture that. This supersized fantasy figurine sold at an auction in 2002 for $427,500 and helped transform Murakami into a globally recognised art-world rock star.
1. Georg Baselitz
There may not be anything particularly sexist about Georg Baselitz’s paintings, but the artist more than makes up for that with his opinions. Recently, Baselitz spoke to the press to affirm his position on female painters, stating, “Women don’t paint very well,” he said. “It’s a fact.” And he knows this, of course, because of statistics. “The market doesn’t lie,” the artist stated, pointing out that women’s prices are nowhere near those of men. If we look at auction records, Baselitz is, to be exact, art history’s 932nd-most-important artist, yet, perhaps surprisingly to the misogynistic Baselitz, several women artists rank higher than he does. Knobhead!