The Female Nude in Public Art: Constructing Women's Sexual Identity in the Visual Arts

Abstract

In the winter and spring of 1922, a battle raged in the New York popular press centering around a sculpture and an artist almost forgotten today-the Triumph of Civic Virtue by Frederick William MacMonnies. Civic Virtue was a huge sculptural ensemble, due to be put in place that summer at one of Manhattan's more prominent sites, the plaza in front of City Hall. Yet when art historians today recall the sculpture and the controversy that it provoked, both are seen as of marginal import: the sculpture as an example of a sadly outmoded style, and the debate as one more instance of an artist vilified by a prudish, philistine public.1 But however trivial MacMonnies' Civic Virtue now seems from an aesthetic viewpoint, the controversy that it generated is of real potential interest for women's studies scholars. To my knowledge this debate is one of the first times when a group of women created a genuinely feminist protest around the image of womanhood that public art so importantly produces. In doing so, they began to ask crucial questions about the use visual culture makes of women's bodies-questions that are still the focus of public debate today. The furor sparked by Civic Virtue was not the first press debate MacMonnies' sculptures had engendered. At several moments in his career, press and public asked angry questions about the artist's portrayal of women. In fact, seen as a whole, MacMonnies' art and the discourse that encircled it provide interesting historical evidence of shifting attitudes about the way in which visual culture can and should embody women's sexual identity. This article, by examining several of MacMonnies' sculptures and the contemporary critical response to them, seeks to identify some of the means by which the visual arts constructed women's identity during the period 1890-1925. Many of the rationales by which mainstream society in the modern era explain culture's use and abuse of women's bodies were proposed and honed during those decades, and art critical debates around MacMonnies' work were an important part of the process.