For this study, I’ve decided to make simple lists to summarise the ideas that are brought up in relation to these photographs of artists. Obviously,I’m taking a slightly feminist view, so my thoughts often came back to gender roles,especially as ‘gender’ has been the over-arching theme of this week’s readings (notes/thoughts on those to follow).
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Click on the artist’s name to visit their site or their biography. All portraits are the work of Hans Namuth (1915-1990)
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Ad Reinhardt with his family (1958 )
– authority
-masculinity
-traditional roles (father, husband, bread-winner)
-control

Jean Tinguely and Nicky de Saint-Phalle
New York City, 1962
–
-Gaze(who/what is the focus on? who are we supposed to be looking at?)
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-Female form (of sculpture)
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-Gender roles (He’ll smoke and work, she’ll sit there, bored but pretty)

Elaine de Kooning and Willem de Kooning
East Hampton, New York 1953
-Again, ideas of focus and importance, though here it made more obvious that Willem de Kooning is the focus of the photograph due to his prominence in the foreground.
-However, it is the woman this time caught smoking, which seems somewhat unusual, though it may be considered elegant in certain cases,and rendered masculine in others (“women on fire eating meat!”, as certain male friends of mine insist on saying rather rowdily every so often)

Helen Frankenthaler
West Islip, New York 1964
–
-here the scene shows Frankenthaler being taught by a man (presumably another artist)
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-could be seen to hint at women’s lack of skill, but equally it is just a picture of her learning something new, or of a piece she worked on with another (it’s all too easy for us to read into things- we cannot tell whether the scene is staged or not, for example).
Barnett Newman
-Again,smoking (perhaps I’m a little more aware of this as someone living in the age of the ban (how would they cope?)), but this stereotype plays further- alone, male- were the decor different, it could almost be a bar.
-There is a sense of self assurance as the artists sits, back to the canvases, almost as if he were not phased by them (though he may yet be unaware of how important these pieces would become/were made to become (more on that in week 2))
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In general I feel these photos show a tendancy for women to be quite literally pictured as being a different kind of/of a lower class of artist in comparison to their male contemporaries. We see this through the subtle positioning of women in the image compared to the men (often behind, in the background), and the overall feelof the image- for example,whilst Newman seems clever, independent and confident due to his aloof position away from the camera- women in images are often not portrayed so powerfully.