Representing sexuality in women artists' biographies: The cases of Suzanne Valadon and Victorine Meurent

Abstract

This paper aims to show how women artists have been excluded from art historical discourse, and have been inhibited from becoming artists. As committed and productive as a woman may be, she simply cannot signify as artist. In our culture, the artist in psycho‐sexual terms is always male, the model female. He makes, surveys, imagines; she poses, reposes, inspires. The symbolic apparatus is male mastery and power versus female passivity and resignation. Other ways to frame this binarism are: man is author(ity), woman is other; man desires, woman satisfies; man sees, woman is seen. He is active, she is passive; he is visible, she invisible. And so on. Certainly these are over‐simplifications, but they outline nonetheless an accurate construction of the artist as intrinsically and necessarily male. By focusing on two women artists, Suzanne Valadon and Victorine Meurent, we will see how male critics and historians have represented these artists first and foremost as women, and how this construction effectively erases them from the history of art and consciousness.