Among the many counts in which women have been proven inferior to men in
human development is the oft-heard charge that there are no great women
artists. Where one or two are proudly exhibited in evidence, they are
either pooh-poohed as not very great, or held to be the trifling
exceptions which do but prove the rule.
Defenders of women generally make the mistake of over-estimating their
performances, instead of accepting, and explaining, the visible facts.
What are the facts as to the relation of men and women to art? And
what, in especial, has been the effect upon art of a solely masculine
expression?
When we look for the beginnings of art, we find ourselves in a period of
crude decoration of the person and of personal belongings. Tattooing,
for instance, is an early form of decorative art, still in practice
among certain classes, even in advanced people. Most boys, if they are
in contact with this early art, admire it, and wish to adorn themselves
therewith; some do so--to later mortification. Early personal
decoration consisted largely in direct mutilation of the body, and the
hanging upon it, or fastening to it, of decorative objects. This we see
among savages still, in its gross and primitive forms monopolized by
men, then shared by women, and, in our time, left almost wholly to them.
In personal decoration today, women are still near the savage. The
"artists" developed in this field of art are the tonsorial, the
sartorial, and all those specialized adorners of the body commonly known
as "beauty doctors."
Here, as in other cases, the greatest artists are men. The greatest
milliners, the greatest dressmakers and tailors, the greatest
hairdressers, and the masters and designers in all our decorative
toilettes and accessories, are men. Women, in this as in so many other
lines, consume rather than produce. They carry the major part of
personal decoration today; but the decorator is the man. In the
decoration of objects, woman, as the originator of primitive industry,
originated also the primitive arts; and in the pottery, basketry,
leatherwork, needlework, weaving, with all beadwork, dyeing and
embroideries of ancient peoples we see the work of the woman decorator.
Much of this is strong and beautiful, but its time is long past. The
art which is part of industry, natural, simple, spontaneous, making
beauty in every object of use, adding pleasure to labor and to life, is
not Art with a large A, the Art which requires Artists, among whom are
so few women of note.
Art as a profession, and the Artist as a professional, came later; and
by that time women had left the freedom and power of the matriarchate
and become slaves in varying degree. The women who were idle pets in
harems, or the women who worked hard as servants, were alike cut off
from the joy of making things. Where constructive work remained to
them, art remained, in its early decorative form. Men, in the
proprietary family, restricting the natural industry of women to
personal service, cut off their art with their industry, and by so much
impoverished the world.
There is no more conspicuously pathetic proof of the aborted development
of women than this commonplace--their lack of a civilized art sense.
Not only in the childish and savage display upon their bodies, but in
the pitiful products they hang upon the walls of the home, is seen the
arrest in normal growth.
After ages of culture, in which men have developed Architecture,
Sculpture, Painting, Music and the Drama, we find women in their
primitive environment making flowers of wax, and hair, and worsted;
doing mottoes of perforated cardboard, making crazy quilts and mats and
"tidies"--as if they lived in a long past age, or belonged to a lower
race.
This, as part of the general injury to women dating from the beginning
of our androcentric culture, reacts heavily upon the world at large.
Men, specializing, giving their lives to the continuous pursuit of one
line of service, have lifted our standard in aesthetic culture, as they
have in other matters; but by refusing the same growth to women, they
have not only weakened and reduced the output, but ruined the market as
it were, hopelessly and permanently kept down the level of taste.
Among the many sides of this great question, some so terrible, some so
pathetic, some so utterly absurd, this particular phase of life is
especially easy to study and understand, and has its own elements of
amusement. Men, holding women at the level of domestic service, going
on themselves to lonely heights of achievement, have found their efforts
hampered and their attainments rendered barren and unsatisfactory by the
amazing indifference of the world at large. As the world at large
consists half of women, and wholly of their children, it would seem
patent to the meanest understanding that the women must be allowed to
rise in order to lift the world. But such has not been the
method--heretofore.
We have spoken so far in this chapter of the effect of men on art
through their interference with the art of women. There are other sides
to the question. Let us consider once more the essential
characteristics of maleness, and see how they have affected art, keeping
always in mind the triune distinction between masculine, feminine and
human. Perhaps we shall best see this difference by considering what
the development of art might have been on purely human terms.
The human creature, as such, naturally delights in construction, and
adds decoration to construction as naturally. The cook, making little
regular patterns around the edge of the pie, does so from a purely human
instinct, the innate eye-pleasure in regularity, symmetry, repetition,
and alternation. Had this natural social instinct grown unchecked in
us, it would have manifested itself in a certain proportion of
specialists--artists of all sorts--and an accompanying development of
appreciation on the part of the rest of us. Such is the case in
primitive art; the maker of beauty is upheld and rewarded by a popular
appreciation of her work--or his.
Had this condition remained, we should find a general level of artistic
expression and appreciation far higher than we see now. Take the one
field of textile art, for instance: that wide and fluent medium of
expression, the making of varied fabrics, the fashioning of garments and
the decoration of them--all this is human work and human pleasure. It
should have led us to a condition where every human being was a pleasure
to the eye, appropriately and beautifully clothed.
Our real condition in this field is too patent to need emphasis; the
stiff, black ugliness of our men's attire; the irritating variegated
folly of our women's; the way in which we spoil the beauty and shame the
dignity of childhood by modes of dress.
In normal human growth, our houses would be a pleasure to the eye; our
furniture and utensils, all our social products, would blossom into
beauty as naturally as they still do in those low stages of social
evolution where our major errors have not yet borne full fruit.
Applied art in all its forms is a human function, common to every one to
some degree, either in production or appreciation, or both. "Pure art,"
as an ideal, is also human; and the single-hearted devotion of the true
artist to this ideal is one of the highest forms of the social
sacrifice. Of all the thousand ways by which humanity is specialized
for inter-service, none is more exquisite than this; the evolution of
the social Eye, or Ear, or Voice, the development of those whose work is
wholly for others, and to whom the appreciation of others is as the
bread of life. This we should have in a properly developed community;
the pleasure of applied art in the making and using of everything we
have; and then the high joy of the Great Artist, and the noble work
thereof, spread far and wide.
What do we find?
Applied art at a very low level; small joy either for the maker or the
user. Pure art, a fine-spun specialty, a process carried on by an elect
few who openly despise the unappreciative many. Art has become an
occult profession requiring a long special education even to enjoy, and
evolving a jargon of criticism which becomes more esoteric yearly.
Let us now see what part in this undesirable outcome is due to our
Androcentric Culture.
As soon as the male of our species assumed the exclusive right to
perform all social functions, he necessarily brought to that performance
the advantages--and disadvantages--of maleness, of those dominant
characteristics, desire, combat, self-expression.
Desire has overweighted art in many visible forms; it is prominent in
painting and music, almost monopolizes fiction, and has pitifully
degraded dancing.
Combat is not so easily expressed in art, where even competition is on a
high plane; but the last element is the main evil, self-expression.
This impulse is inherently and ineradicably masculine. It rests on that
most basic of distinctions between the sexes, the centripetal and
centrifugal forces of the universe. In the very nature of the
sperm-cell and the germ-cell we find this difference: the one attracts,
gathers, draws in; the other repels, scatters, pushes out. That
projective impulse is seen in the male nature everywhere; the constant
urge toward expression, to all boasting and display. This spirit, like
all things masculine, is perfectly right and admirable in its place.
It is the duty of the male, as a male, to vary; bursting forth in a
thousand changing modifications--the female, selecting, may so
incorporate beneficial changes in the race. It is his duty to thus
express himself--an essentially masculine duty; but masculinity is one
thing, and art is another. Neither the masculine nor the feminine has
any place in art--Art is Human.
It is not in any faintest degree allied to the personal processes of
reproduction; but is a social process, a most distinctive social
process, quite above the plane of sex. The true artist transcends his
sex, or her sex. If this is not the case, the art suffers.
Dancing is an early, and a beautiful art; direct expression of emotion
through the body; beginning in subhuman type, among male birds, as the
bower-bird of New Guinea, and the dancing crane, who swing and caper
before their mates. Among early peoples we find it a common form of
social expression in tribal dances of all sorts, religious, military,
and other. Later it becomes a more explicit form of celebration, as
among the Greeks; in whose exquisite personal culture dancing and music
held high place.
But under the progressive effects of purely masculine dominance we find
the broader human elements of dancing left out, and the sex-element more
and more emphasized. As practiced by men alone dancing has become a
mere display of physical agility, a form of exhibition common to all
males. As practiced by men and women together we have our social
dances, so lacking in all the varied beauty of posture and expression,
so steadily becoming a pleasant form of dalliance.
As practiced by women alone we have one of the clearest proofs of the
degrading effect of masculine dominance:--the dancing girl. In the
frank sensualism of the Orient, this personage is admired and enjoyed on
her merits. We, more sophisticated in this matter, joke shamefacedly
about "the bald-headed row," and occasionally burst forth in shrill
scandal over some dinner party where ladies clad in a veil and a
bracelet dance on the table. Nowhere else in the whole range of life on
earth, is this degradation found--the female capering and prancing
before the male. It is absolutely and essentially his function, not
hers. That we, as a race, present this pitiful spectacle, a natural art
wrested to unnatural ends, a noble art degraded to ignoble ends, has one
clear cause.
Architecture, in its own nature, is least affected by that same cause.
The human needs secured by it, are so human, so unescapably human, that
we find less trace of excessive masculinity than in other arts. It
meets our social demands, it expresses in lasting form our social
feeling, up to the highest; and it has been injured not so much by an
excess of masculinity as by a lack of femininity.
The most universal architectural expression is in the home; the home is
essentially a place for the woman and the child; yet the needs of woman
and child are not expressed in our domestic architecture. The home is
built on lines of ancient precedent, mainly as an industrial form; the
kitchen is its working centre rather than the nursery.
Each man wishes his home to preserve and seclude his woman, his little
harem of one; and in it she is to labor for his comfort or to manifest
his ability to maintain her in idleness. The house is the physical
expression of the limitations of women; and as such it fills the world
with a small drab ugliness. A dwelling house is rarely a beautiful
object. In order to be such, it should truly express simple and natural
relations; or grow in larger beauty as our lives develop.
The deadlock for architectural progress, the low level of our general
taste, the everlasting predominance of the commonplace in buildings, is
the natural result of the proprietary family and its expression in this
form.
In sculpture we have a noble art forcing itself into some service
through many limitations. Its check, as far as it comes under this line
of study, has been indicated in our last chapter; the degradation of the
human body, the vicious standards of sex-consciousness enforced under
the name of modesty, the covered ugliness, which we do not recognize,
all this is a deadly injury to free high work in sculpture.
With a nobly equal womanhood, stalwart and athletic; with the high
standards of beauty and of decorum which we can never have without free
womanhood; we should show a different product in this great art.
An interesting note in passing is this: when we seek to express socially
our noblest, ideas, Truth; Justice; Liberty; we use the woman's body as
the highest human type. But in doing this, the artist, true to humanity
and not biassed by sex, gives us a strong, grand figure, beautiful
indeed, but never _decorated_. Fancy Liberty in ruffles and frills,
with rings in her ears--or nose.
Music is injured by a one-sided handling, partly in the excess of the
one dominant masculine passion, partly by the general presence of
egoism; that tendency to self-expression instead of social expression,
which so disfigures our art; and this is true also of poetry.
Miles and miles of poetry consist of the ceaseless outcry of the male
for the female, which is by no means so overwhelming as a feature of
human life as he imagines it; and other miles express his other
feelings, with that ingenuous lack of reticence which is at its base
essentially masculine. Having a pain, the poet must needs pour it
forth, that his woe be shared and sympathized with.
As more and more women writers flock into the field there is room for
fine historic study of the difference in sex feeling, and the gradual
emergence of the human note.
Literature, and in especial the art of fiction, is so large a field for
this study that it will have a chapter to itself; this one but touching
on these various forms; and indicating lines of observation.
That best known form of art which to my mind needs no qualifying
description--painting--is also a wide field; and cannot be done full
justice to within these limits. The effect upon it of too much
masculinity is not so much in choice of subject as in method and spirit.
The artist sees beauty of form and color where the ordinary observer
does not; and paints the old and ugly with as much enthusiasm as the
young and beautiful--sometimes. If there is in some an over-emphasis of
feminine attractions it is counterbalanced in others by a far broader
line of work.
But the main evils of a too masculine art lie in the emphasis laid on
self-expression. The artist, passionately conscious of how he feels,
strives to make other people aware of these sensations. This is now so
generally accepted by critics, so seriously advanced by painters, that
what is called "the art world" accepts it as established.
If a man paints the sea, it is not to make you see and feel as a sight
of that same ocean would, but to make you see and feel how he,
personally, was affected by it; a matter surely of the narrowest
importance. The ultra-masculine artist, extremely sensitive,
necessarily, and full of the natural urge to expression of the sex, uses
the medium of art as ingenuously as the partridge-cock uses his wings in
drumming on the log; or the bull moose stamps and bellows; not narrowly
as a mate call, but as a form of expression of his personal sensations.
The higher the artist the more human he is, the broader his vision, the
more he sees for humanity, and expresses for humanity, and the less
personal, the less ultra-masculine, is his expression.
Read next: CHAPTER V - MASCULINE LITERATURE.
Read previous: CHAPTER III - HEALTH AND BEAUTY.
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