Post #3

During our class trip to the Newark Museum we viewed the exhibit Angels and Tomboys which focused on girlhood during the 19^th century. Usually women were painted in the nude as objects for men to look at. However the paintings in this exhibition go against this idea and show women the way that they were. One specific painting that stuck out to me was John Singer Sargent’s Katherine Chase Pratt.

 

The portrait is of a woman, Katherine Chase Pratt, sitting in a chair looking off into the distance. She is not looking at the viewer at all and seems to have a sad or defeated look on her face. This piece was created during the late 1800’s and at this time women were not treated as equals to men (which may be why Katherine has a distraught look on her face). Sargent worked in a realist style. He painted Katherine Chase Pratt in her daily life sitting in a chair. His brushstrokes are heavy and there is less attention paid to small details such as the folds of Katherine’s dress or the petals of the flowers in the background. 

 

About fifty years later Frida Kahlo painted the picture The Two Fridas. It is a self-portrait where two Fridas are sitting next to each other holding hands in what seems to be a barren wasteland. Both of their hearts are exposed and connected by a vein, which has been cut at the end by a pair of scissors that the Frida on the left is holding. The painting was done in a modernist or more specifically a surrealist style. Surrealism was based on putting aside one’s conscious mind and letting the unconscious mind take over. Kahlo painted herself this way for the viewer to take a look into her own psyche.

Even though these two paintings were done in completely different styles at completely different times they are both dealing with the inner thoughts and feelings of the women in them. John Singer Sargent painted Katherine Chase Pratt looking away from the viewer and with and upset look on her face to portray her inner feelings in a subtle way. He was an outsider painting his subject as he saw her and not as the subject saw herself. Frida Kahlo painted herself in a less subtle and more symbolic way. She was not painted as she literally looked at the time but as she was feeling at the time. Kahlo’s style of modernism completely rejected Sargent’s style of realism yet both painters still focused on the feelings of their subject.

For more information on Katherine Chase Pratt's life click here

For more Information on Frida Kahlo click here

Sources

Hunter, Sam. Modern Art. Third ed. New York: Prentice Hall, 2004. Print.