On the fourth floor of the Reina Sofía museum there are photographs that question the nude body of the woman, in this case Spanish but also of all women.
First, a large wall of photographs by Esther Ferrer taken in 1977 in Paris at the Lerin studio which are the capture of a performance “Intimo y personal”. It is a black and white series of the artist nude measuring various parts of her body with a tape measure marking each measured part with a point, a number or a musical note. The body of Esther photographed in an empty room, with a chair sometimes, violently lit, is extremely vulnerable. Intimate because she becomes aware of her body through the measurement she herself makes of it, exploration of her territory joining the feminist slogan of the 1970s: the freedom to dispose of one’s body.
She traverses her body.
There is no aestheticizing gaze and this absence of aesthetic concern is a rebellion, the affirmation of a free subject. She gives herself over to a measurement that seems absurd but which denounces the cult of the perfect body, that of the academic canon that comes from the Vitruvian man enclosed in a square and a circle with so-called perfect proportions. She attacks the canon of academic beauty, the representation of a female body that must be seductive, the one plastered on walls and ultra-mediatized.
A few meters from Esther Ferrer’s wall there is a large photograph, also in black and white, by Marina Vargas entitled “Romper el canon” from 2021. The canon from the Greek Kanon means “rule” or “standard” evoking an almost military regulation, an element with a religious connotation at the origin. It refers to the texts and objects that academic institutions establish as the best and it is the bearer of a transhistorical aesthetic value. Canons are defended with an almost theological zeal that indicates more than a historical coincidence between the ecclesiastical uses of the word concerning the authenticated texts of the bible and its function in cultural traditionalism.
It establishes what must be studied as a model. Marina Vargas moreover places herself in the position of a model in a very classical scene: in the drawing room of the Círculo de Bellas Artes she poses in front of male artists, nude, her left arm extended, her torso crossed by a mastectomy scar. Her body is outside the norm, damaged by surgery and chemotherapy.
She declares war on the canon of female beauty founded by male elites, her fist clenched, perhaps in reference to Delacroix’s painting “Liberty Leading the People”. She also inverts the role of the protagonists, the male artists are objects since she is the commissioner of the representation. She is no longer a simple model and takes power as an artist. She makes herself a heroine.
Esther Ferrer does not believe that art can change society but that it can stimulate thought, help to live. Marina Vargas transcending the fragility and vulnerability of the female body and making it visible in the collective space of the museum is in the same objective: that of making us active and renewing the gaze, making an individual experience universal, opening a different space of reading, founding a canon on a maternal genealogy.
The question of the male canon in art debated since 1971 with Linda Nochlin remains relevant and the subject of gender is predominant. Celebrating femininity and multiplying exhibitions of rediscovered women is to forget that they have been collected and known, that they were part of networks and the argument of discovery is marketable.
There has been a promotion of “feminism washing” for several years and a communication that makes these exhibitions bankable and tends to obscure genius in favor of gender. If in order to claim that the artist is a woman one must add the qualifier “woman” or the adjective “female” it is because the position of the artist is above all male: one does not get out of it. Listing women artists and using the rhetoric of forgetting is to pay homage to their gender more than to their genius. Is it not ultimately opportunistic?
Woman-artist already sounds better than artist-woman. In any case they are not a homogeneous category and if genius is a descent of the divine into man without God according to Arendt, one must prefer to the deification of the providential man the singularity of creativity as a definition of genius, the choice of creativity in one’s life.
Binarism is of course to be maintained in order to continue the fight of women.
References:
Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ARTnews 69, no. 9 (January 1971): 22–39, 67–71.
Pollock, Griselda. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. London: Routledge, 1999.
Claire Delhomme
Born in 1964, Claire Delhomme grew up with an insatiable curiosity for the world around her. From an early age, art and literature became for her places of refuge, playgrounds and sources of inspiration. This deep sensitivity to creation has never left her.
Based in Perpignan, she dedicates herself to cardiology, a field where scientific rigor meets a deep attention to the human dimension. Over the years, she has developed a recognized practice, guided by precision, attentiveness and a genuine passion for her profession.
Alongside her medical career, Claire cultivates a close relationship with contemporary art. An experienced collector, she enjoys visiting galleries, exhibitions, museums and art fairs, always in search of works capable of provoking emotion or reflection. An avid reader, she nourishes her imagination with novels, essays and poetry, convinced that words have the power to transform our perception of the world.
During the lockdown, she used this suspended time to devote herself to writing. From this period emerged three books, reflecting her need to explore, narrate and share. Writing thus became a new way of connecting her passions: observation, artistic sensitivity and an understanding of the human condition.
Today, Claire Delhomme continues her path between medicine, art and literature, remaining faithful to the creative energy that has driven her from the very beginning.
