Girls and Women in Art: Stifled Potential and Consumer Goods

      Angels and Tomboys, a collection of art objects currently on exhibition at the Newark Museum, showcases works that illustrate the roles and experiences of young girls in the 19th century.  From androgynous images such as Ammi Phillip's "Girl in a Pink Dress" (1832) that demonstrate the tendency to minimize gender in childhood portraits to paintings like Cecilia Beaux's "Dorothea in the Woods" (1897) that illustrate the transitioning of adolescence into adulthood, Angels and Tomboys reflects a cultural vision of feminine childhood, puberty, and movement into maturity.  Some works reveal a glimpse of girlhood untrammeled by societal expectations, when girls could fly kites and jump fences. Other images celebrate the innocence, purity, virginal qualities young women were expected to cultivate. Although included in the exhibit are pieces portraying young girls pictured in school and engaging in activities traditionally associated with their male counterparts, Angels and Tomboys features images that highlight pubescent moments preparing girls for the roles they will be expected to fulfill in years to come.  Uncomfortably dressed in corsetted gowns and frilly adornments, adolescent girls were taught that they were valued for their physical appeal and discomfort was worth it if it meant being attractive to the opposite sex.

Eastman Johnson, The Party Dress, 1872.

     Eastman Johnson's "The Party Dress" (1872) pictures a young woman being fitted for a dress or being assisted in tying up the complexities of her garment.  Two young women are central to the composition and the setting appears to be the intimate confines of their home.  One girl stares dreamily out of a window positioned before her while her companion tends to the finishing of her outerwear. The cumbersome layers of her long dress and jacket tightly bound to her torso represent the departure from the freedom she might of experienced during her childhood while being able to attend school or play wildly in fields.  Restricted by the rigidity of her garment and the social expectations associated with her gender, the young girl gazing out the window will leave behind the independence of her childhood and shortly enter into roles of wife and mother.

Hannah Hoch, Beautiful Girl, 1920.

     Issues of gender continued to be expressed in the visual arts following the 19th century.  Denied access to formal training in the fine arts for most of history and relegated to art forms considered lesser in value, women have had to struggle to exist in the art world as professionals and are far more likely to be sexualized objects of art.  Articulated brilliantly in the Guerilla Girls' piece "Do Women Have To Be Naked Get Into The Met Museum?" (1989) begs the observer to rethink the the hierarchies that exist in the professional world according to gender and question the persisting notions of women lacking agency, being easily manipulated, and solely existing for the sensual pleasure of men.  Gender and the female aesthetic was examined earlier by artists like Hannah Hoch, a German Dadaist who explored the post war culture of industrialization and consumerism with her photomontages.  A modernist departing from traditional modes of art production and experimenting with new modalities of developing visual art, Hannah Hoch addresses in her work the use of womens bodies and stereotypes borrowed from an emerging consumer culture constantly bombarded with advertising imagery. Not unlike Eastman Johnson's The Party Dress (1872) that captures the preparatory phase of a girl being groomed into the proper female role, Beautiful Girl (1920) examines the new role of women and their bodies in popular culture and a capitalist economy.
     Disallusioned by the war and critical of contemporary European culture, Hannah Hoch and the Dadaists borrowed aesthetics from cultures considered less refined in the pretentious view of traditional fine art schools, purposely put forms together that did not make sense, and hoped to prompt the observer to question current institutionalized hypocrisies and social absurdities.  Beautiful Girl (1920) is comprised of appropriated images juxtaposed to make an entirely different form.  BMW logos are repetitively placed throughout the composition and a popular woman's hairdo is positioned over a light bulb with the body of a bathing suit clad women.  An ominous figure with eerie cat-like eyes peers over the car emblems and the machine-woman hybrid.  A woman's body is pictured here with the BMW pattern because female bodies are at the same time used to sell goods and women are considered likely gullible consumers. Hannah Hoch positions these images in a way that instigates the notion that cars and womens bodies are objects similarly exploited in the pursuit of capital.  Machine-like in appearance, the woman's body is a part of a complex system of enticement used in advertising to convince individuals they must consume in order to attain contentment. 
     Eastman Johnson's The Party Dress (1872) projects an melancholy energy that many independent thinking young girls might have experienced in the 19th century when they were leaving the openness of childhood and entering the adult world that expected absolute conformity to gender roles. Hannah Hoch's Beautiful Girl (1920) studies a consumer culture that places women alongside objects to instigate desire in the consumer.  Both works explore ways women have been oppressed in European and American culture.  While The Party Dress (1872) suggests that a girl's potential and enjoyment of life is stifled when she grows into womanhood, Beautiful Girl (1920) reveals that advertising adopts the traditional manner of objectifying woman in visual arts.




Angles & Tomboys: Girlhood in 19th-Century American Art.”  Newark Museum. 49 Washington Street, Newark, NJ 07102. 23 Nov. 2012.

Eisenman, Stephen M. Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History. 4th ed. New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2011. Print.