Revealing Women

...The level of technical execution among the sculptors in "Exposed" seems consistently higher than that of the painters...

...The more ambitious youths who could afford to cross the Channel would apprentice themselves in a Paris workshop...

...Mitchell is the Last of the Mohicans of Abstract Expressionism, having kept painting to a later date than all the other major players...

...And, indeed, this show is the fruit of that instruction, so far as it went...

...That assemblage of thirty-nine vulviform table settings was denounced and hosannahed, the standard to whose bright stripes partisan armies marched to their Kulturkampf...

...Mitchell's privileged existence and sheer good luck began with her parentage...

...The show offers a range of bronze and marble nudes of unexceptionable craftsmanship, though mostly of unexceptional vision...

...Each plate rests on its own placemat, and many of those are equal to plates they support, especially in the earlier centuries, when the cloths offer their own droll tributes to the arts of the loom and the needle...

...Her old culture-wars opponents and supporters adopted Chicago's own official tone of earnest preachment...

...And, without the old culture wars raging around it, the viewer can now see how superbly Chicago's teams of ceramicists and needlewomen realized her designs...

...The nation had, at least in the eighteenth century, capable portraitists and painters of landscapes, animals, and genre scenes...

...It may be the wisdom of hindsight to expect the Victorians to heed the examples of Degas and Renoir, but there were a host of French academic painters— Ingres, chief among them—who could have given them lessons...

...If you doubt that, check out the gallery next door...

...Artists who arrive on the scene in the midsummer of a movement, when all the work of springtime has been accomplished—artists like Raphael or Turner—have a chance, if they are quick learners, to begin their careers as old masters...

...For a show as au courant as "Exposed" is passe, one could not do better than Joan Mitchell's dynamite retrospective, which just left the Whitney to tour in Birmingham, Fort Worth, and Washington, D.C...

...Until recently, England lacked a vital tradition of painting the nude...

...Thomas M. Disch's latest book is The Castle of Perseverance: Job Opportunities in Contemporary Poetry (University of Michigan Press...

...To judge by the work's cumulative million-plus attendance figures, the answer seems to be yes...

...Her art is American as apple pie or the gunfight at the OK Corral...

...A second reason for non-indigenes to venture out to the Brooklyn Museum is the show that recently opened in the adjoining gallery...

...But drollery at that level of ambition is the stuff from which Divine Comedies are made— another long-term project notable for its sheer chutzpah...

...Like a Venus of Rubens, Circe straddles the line between high art and low titillation...

...But perhaps this much can be said of these paintings: If much of Matisse can be summed up in the borrowed title of one of his paintings, Luxe, Calme, et Volupte, Mitchell's might be characterized as Luxe, Violence, et Volupte...

...But the "Exposed" show reveals the technical problems English painters were up against in painting the nude: a dark-hued palette better suited to landscape, an awkwardness in capturing body language (a language that may differ in England as its weather and costumes differ), and a lack of practice in producing wares little in demand...

...Exposed" is fun, and big without being wearying, and strikes a reasonable balance between lubricious calendar art (such as Alma-Tadema's reclining nude with an exquisitely rendered ostrich feather preserving her modesty) and nudes at a level that Kenneth Clark might have approved (such as Watts's heroic bronze bust of Clytie, a woman metamorphosing into a sunflower, with her head twisted almost 180 degrees to keep the setting sun in view...

...Though Chicago wants us to read her designs as shorthand for the whole panoply of things womanly, the real question is whether her distinctive variations reward sustained and close attention...

...Her thirty-nine-woman pantheon is meant to begin to correct that age-old imbalance by giving equal time to worthy women, beginning with the nameless "Primordial Goddess" and concluding with Virginia Woolf and Georgia CKeeffe...

...Curiously, to see The Dinner Party these days is to realize what a mild and simple thing it really is—and always was...

...Painting for her exercised the whole body, a way of dancing with brushes...

...One must applaud Chicago's good intentions, observing at the same time the ways in which she has stacked the deck herself: Among the famous ladies who don't have a place at Chicago's table are Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Catherine the Great, Clara Schumann, and Nadia Boulanger (bumped by Ethel Smyth for the chair in Music), the two Georges (Sand and Eliot), Jane Austen, and Lady Murasaki...

...This might be the right occasion for finally reading Hawthorne's The Marble Faun or Du Maurier's Trilby, novels that echo and embody an aesthetic that has become all but inapprehensible to modern eyes and ears...

...If there were more Circes on hand in Brooklyn, the show might actually have excited the kind of "Ban This Insult to Womanhood...

...Early reviews of "Exposed: The Victorian Nude," the Canaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges...

...One of the least-remarked features of The Dinner Party is its sense of humor...

...foo-faraw that makes for good box office...

...Judy Chicago's compaintings and sculptures sent on tour by London's Tate Gallery, indicate that the exhibition has touched the same nerve as "Sensation," when that show opened in Brooklyn two years ago...

...Officially she is accounted "second generation," having joined the movement in its heyday in 1950, but she was then only twenty-four...

...Witness the facility won in Paris by the American Victorian recently showcased at the Metropolitan Museum, Thomas Eakins...

...But as the political agenda has faded, what remains is the work itself...

...It was the life of an empress, and she painted on an imperial scale...

...She went to the best schools, married Barney Rosset (soon to be publisher of Grove Press), and moved to France, where she commandeered the love of Canada's leading abstract expressionist, Jean-Paul Riopelle, a man who could share her passion for painting without exceeding her talent...

...It gives them an enormous initial advantage, though it can make for monotonous retrospectives...

...It's gorgeous enough that any resemblance of its crockery to women's sexual organs is as little cause for taking umbrage as phallic metaphoric power is reason for deploring the Eiffel Tower or Churchill's cigars...

...But up close, The Dinner Party is a steady succession of little jokes and sly allusions as the artist and her atelier do their riffs on the history of Western Art (as the omission of Lady Murasaki might suggest, the women of the East are kept in purdah still...

...Elizabeth Blackwell...

...If museums are the cathedrals of our secular age, then Mitchell's canvases are complete only when they silhouette a slow procession of well-dressed museum visitors...

...Mitchell's teenage accomplishments as a champion tennis player, figure skater, and diver are as relevant to the career she was to pursue as whatever formal training she received in the art of draftsmanship...

...Her mother, the daughter of a noted Chicago structural engineer, was co-editor of Poetry magazine, her father a society doctor...

...Her paintings are big, filling the museum's galleries, floor to ceiling, wall to wall...

...Mitchell inherited the tools of her art fully evolved, with none of the angst or uncertainty that colored the work of Abstract Expressionism's originating genuises...

...The museum's gift shop should offer replicas of the individual pieces...

...Are there giants who might hang them over their gigantic sofas...

...From whatever medley of these causes, the artists of England failed at the challenge of the nude, and those who failed worst were often those who tried hardest...

...After years of wandering the desert, the work has at last found a permanent home in the Brooklyn Museum, where it now appears in conjunction with a Judy Chicago retrospective from Washington's National Museum of Women in the Arts...

...There is an exquisite bronze figurine of Circe, standing bolt upright, arms and fingers extended before her as she zaps men into beasts...

...This time the critics are upset that mid-century Victorians don't measure up to the standard set by "Courbet, Degas, and Renoir" (the complaint of Jerry Saltz in the Village Voice...

...After a year or two making drawings or plaster casts of classic statuary and haunting the right boites, they might acquire a certain savoir faire...

...Most of the work on view straddles these extremes, since it is a rare painter who can divest the nude of all erotic interest (although Gwen Johns comes close in her clinical Nude Girl of 1909...

...Rossetti and Burne-Jones in their different ways aspired to be Italian, but both failed in ways that no French or Italian artist of their time would have...

...I'd also be tempted by the quatrefoil array of colored goop (like the squeezings of tubes of paint) that honors Dr...

...As to the formal character of the paintings, there is little that can be said, except for those airy bromides which non-objective art elicits from critics straining to have an original thought about the color blue of a certain size and intensity laid across a ground of speckled white...

...Chicago has a reluctance to include women whose fame derives from their association with famous men, whether by way of marriage, motherhood, or murder (although the biblical Judith does find a place...

...Hilton Kramer in the Observer was no less dismissive, excoriating in particular William Etty's meretricious plicitous winks require a different decoder, but she winds up with the same moral to her story: Sex is real and sex is earnest, and the grave is not its goal...

...To properly appreciate Mitchell's mural-like canvases one should see them as one sees Chartres's windows, blazing with light, the immense backdrop of imposing ceremonies...

...by Thomas M. Disch If you're old enough to have voted for Bella Abzug or Ronald Reagan, then you may remember the great to-do surrounding the unveiling, in 1979, of Judy Chicago's cause celebre, The Dinner Party...

...There is a further drollery in the work's sheer overweening ambition, which is nothing less than to replicate the entire project of World Art, to reappropriate it, so to speak, from the hands of usurping men...

...Kramer is right that Etty's work is a turbid botch that fails to provoke even a prurient interest, but the show contains a fair number of paintings that do succeed at that basic task—and do so with a veneer of high-mindedness that is echt Victorian...

...No other action painter, not even Pollock, seems so energetically and exuberantly athletic...

...The dissolution of the monasteries and the iconoclasm of the Civil War period helped create a civic environment in which the human figure was devalued...

...One has to wonder for whom such paintings are painted...

...As it is, "Exposed" offers an instructive view of works that are usually tucked away in museum basements or exiled to faraway vaults...

...Chicago has consistently asserted that The Dinner Party is not just a work of art but a political act, a kind of one-woman parade for the cause of all Womankind, especially those female geniuses who have been denied their place at the table where money, immortal fame, and other such perks are handed out...

...Mitchell was a wonderful painter when she was twenty-six, and pretty much the same wonderful painter at thirty-six, forty-six, fifty-six, and sixty-six—until mortality caught up with her and she died in 1992 in Paris, the city she'd adopted forty years earlier...

...I would get a whole set of the faux majolica platters made for Isabella d'Este...

...Exposed" is a peep-show of the Victorian mind in much the way that Peter Gay's books on that subject are, and its lesson is much the same: The Victorians were human and liked sex, just like us...