BY ALEXXA GOTTHARDT
“Do women have to be naked
to get into the Met Museum?” That’s the pointed question that the feminist art
collective Guerilla Girls printed on a poster in 1989 to expose the dearth of
female artists—compared to the bounty of naked female subjects—on the walls of
New York’s Metropolitan Museum.
“Less than 5% of the
artists in the Modern Art Section are women, but 85% of the nudes are female,”
read the poster’s potent subhead.
While gender imbalance
remains a deep-seated issue in museum collections across the globe, one New
York art historian is broaching the topic from a different angle: by
spotlighting the influential women who are represented across the Met’s lofty
corridors.
Professor Andrew Lear
specializes in gender and sexuality in art, and on a recent Friday night he
stands in the Met’s towering lobby holding a small sign that read simply:
“Nasty Women.”
“There are so many feisty,
tough women artists and subjects at the Metropolitan,” says Lear as a group
gathers around him. “So when a certain unappealing man used the phrase ‘nasty
woman’ on television last fall, I thought ‘God damnit, I’m going to organize a
tour showing that these women exist in art—and how powerful they were in life.”
Lear spent many years
working as a university art history professor, but more recently turned his
focus to organizing thematic tours at the Met. His first series, “Gay Secrets
of the Metropolitan,” explored motifs of homosexuality across the museum’s
collection. “Shady Ladies,” a guided excursion past sculptures and paintings of
courtesans, followed. And last year, as Americans began to organize in response
to soon-to-be-president Donald Trump’s derogatory comments towards women, Lear
introduced “Nasty Women.”
The new tour has been sold
out for months in advance since it launched. The evening I finagle a spot, he
preps our group for the three-hour journey through the Met with an enticing
teaser: “There’s a surprising amount of proto-feminism in many corners of
history. We’ll see that tonight.”
Lear begins the journey in
Ancient Egypt. I half expect him to lead us to a statue of Cleopatra, but as
will be the case many times throughout the tour, we land in front of an
unfamiliar figure: Hatshepsut, an “enormously powerful” pharaoh who ruled for
21 years, from 1478–1458 B.C. While she was officially only regent to her
stepson, he was deemed too young to rule and her reign is widely recognized as
one of the most successful of Ancient Egypt.
“She started trade
relations that led to the prosperity of the entire New Kingdom period; not to
mention she built the first mortuary temple in the legendary complex we now
call the Valley of the Kings,” says Lear, as he indicates a group of massive
granite and limestone statues depicting Hatshepsut. In some, she is represented
as a Sphinx, complete with a rippling lion’s body and royal beard. In others,
she is represented as the woman that she was, with breasts and a pharaoh’s
headdress. We pass likenesses of other history-shaping female rulers, too. Like
Hatshepsut, Julia Avita Mamaea ruled Ancient Rome as regent and retained
authority even after her son, Emperor Severus Alexander, took power. Mamaea set
up the principles of his rule, advised him on military campaigns, and was the
first woman in Ancient Rome to be named consors imperii, or the Emperor’s
“partner in rule.”
While Ancient Roman women
were often granted great power, especially in the Severan dynasty, Ancient
Greece operated quite differently, preferring a more oppressive approach. There
are staggeringly few women with any power or personality represented in Ancient
Greek art. They did, however, pay homage to mighty female goddesses like
Athena, who advised men, and scare figures like Medusa and the Amazons, who
were the Greeks’ most tenacious foe.
A stone statue of a wounded
Amazon commands one room of the Met’s Ancient Greek Hall. As Lear points out,
she is represented simultaneously with strength, female features, and rich
emotions. She is not shoehorned into a single role, as most women in Ancient
Greece were, but is represented as a complex figure.
All of the women Lear
highlights across his tour resisted or transcended the limitations that
traditional gender roles have enforced across centuries. And some of them
actively fought the gender inequalities of their times.
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard,
represented in an imposing self-portrait in the museum’s 18th-century French
galleries, actively campaigned for more women to be admitted into the French
Académie Royale, where she studied painting. When she attended on the dawn of
the French Revolution, only four women were allowed into the school at a given
time. Lear notes that this painting likely doubled as propaganda for her
crusade. It shows Labille-Guiard at her easel, accompanied by two female
students eager to absorb her expertise.
Mary Cassatt, Lady at the
Tea Table, 1883-85. Courtesy of the Met.
John Singer Sargent, Mr.
and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes, 1897. Bequest of Edith Minturn Phelps Stokes.
Courtesy of the Met.
As the tour comes to a
close, Lear leads us to two portraits where the female subjects are joined by
men. But in both, the women are foregrounded—and the deferential position of
their male partners emphasizes Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze’s and Edith Minturn
Stokes’s strength.
In Jacques Louis David’s
monumental portrait of Pierrette Paulze, she looks directly at the audience
while her husband gazes up at her entreatingly, as if waiting for guidance. He
is the famed chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, who is remembered for founding
modern chemistry and identifying elements like oxygen and hydrogen. Most
history books only attribute these scientific discoveries to Lavoisier, but
this piece underlines Pierrette Paulze’s considerable influence on her husband,
as she leans over his shoulder.
John Singer Sargent’s
painting of Minturn Stokes makes a similar point—the wife wears the pants.
Here, the New York philanthropist takes center stage while her husband stands behind
her, fading into the background with his face half-obscured.
Originally, Minturn
Stokes’s great dane was meant to take her side in the painting, “but the dog
was replaced by her husband at the last minute,” Lear says, delivering his
final line of the night, one chock-full of wildly intelligent, headstrong—and
yes, damn nasty—women.
