Mirror, Mirror on the Brick Phone: Feminist interventions in beauty standards, part 1 - the twentieth century
- Bryleigh Pierce
- Nov 3
- 13 min read
In art history, and Western society in general, external beauty is equated with moral, social, economic and political success, with the qualifying features for what is considered beautiful being determined by, and for, the male gaze. Given that art’s spectator is presumed to always be a man, his idyllic gaze is pandered to in artworks that, to be considered art, must always agree with his definition of beauty. It is for this reason that in portraits of men, beauty is drawn from their success, their autonomous bodies appear powerful and strong, sometimes even threatening, and it is their success that is truly on display. Women, however, are deemed successful because of their beauty, with her passivity and sexual availability displayed through strategic positioning intended to flatter the spectator’s sense of ownership and control over both her body and the image it is seen in.1 Unlike men, whose bodies project embellishments of past success glorified for the benefit of his ego over other male spectators, portraits of women display one of the two potential uses the spectator identifies for her body – motherhood or sex.
According to Greek mythology, the artist Zeuxis famously painted a portrait of the goddess Venus and used as his model every woman in his village, choosing “all remarkable and elegant beauties of form from several of the most handsome maidens and translat[ing] them into his work”. Centuries later, Renaissance-man Leon Battista Alberti evoked this myth in his formula for the representation of the ideal human figure, stating “So we too chose many bodies, considered to be the most beautiful by those who know, and took from each and all their dimensiones, which we then compared one with another, and leaving out of account the extremes on both sides, we took the mean figures validated by the majority of exempeda [ruled measurements]”.2
While today’s standards for beauty are written by a technological gaze, that which captures an algorithm fuelled by likes, follows and shares, historically, beauty standards have been set by men who commissioned and displayed artworks of beautiful, usually naked women for their pleasure, and who, like Zeuxis and Alberti, constructed an ideal image from the fragmented parts of the young women they sought to own, thereby setting the standard for beauty as youthful, which could be identified by thinness (as small as possible with enlarged, perfectly rounded breasts), firmness (no sagging, deflated or aging skin) and smoothness (a hairless body and even skin tone). Such standards were determined by men and disseminated through art for centuries, firmly cementing the definition of woman and the position of the feminine body to such idealised standards. It wasn’t until the rise of feminist art and theory in the mid-twentieth century that women were able to begin challenging the way their bodies had been presented and dismantling the stories they had been used to tell.
Efforts to reclaim the female body took great strides in the 1970s and were made in many forms by many artists who had grown tired of the realities of the feminine body being determined by a masculine point of view. Creating her first vulval works in the late 1960s, Hannah Wilke (1940-93) was one of the earliest artists to explicitly deploy imagery of female genitalia as a feminist intervention. Her S.O.S Starification Object Series (1974-82) was born from the artist’s interrogation of the constructs of beauty, sexuality and femininity as prescribed by men, along with the entangled roles of victim and aggressor in the construction of beauty standards through erotic images of women’s bodies. Having been struck by the similarities between the genital forms of men and women, Wilke knew that concepts of gender and sexuality, masculinity and femininity, were not set in stone but could be learned through visual imagery. “I have been concerned with the creation of a formal imagery that is specifically female,” she said, “a new language that fuses mind and body into erotic objects that are nameable and at the same time quite abstract. Its content has always related to my own body and feelings, reflecting pleasure as well as pain, the ambiguity and complexity of emotions.”3
Asking viewers to chew a piece of gum, Wilke took the gum from spectators’ mouths and shaped it into tiny vulva-like forms before sticking them onto her naked torso. As her body became scarred with these anatomical wads of gum, her reference to the demands men have placed on women’s bodies became clearer. Always interested in how such transient moments can outlive the performance, Wilke then made what she called ‘performalist self-portraits’, whereby she recreates the movements and poses of models in fashion magazines and advertising campaigns for editorial-style photographs that utilise the tension caused by disrupting the spectators’ hopes of deriving pleasure from an image of her nude breasts with the unsightly gashes of gum lumped across her torso.4 With clothing being slowly removed, fingers gripping her hair or a suggestive gape in her mouth, Wilke calls attention to the objectification of feminine bodies and voyeurism such materials have enabled, along with the role poses played in constructing stereotypes of femininity, standards of beauty and narratives of distress being an indication of seduction by being derived from those pictured in artworks which were, as we have seen, intended to please the male spectator and remind him of his power and control over the naked body splayed out before him. The use of chewing gum furthers her challenge to the objectification of female bodies by symbolising women’s second-class status and their “disposability”, being chewed up and spit back out into the trash when no longer wanted or needed.5
The grotesque mounds of flesh that inhabit Jenny Saville’s (1970-) canvases are a total embodiment of the unidealised nudes and disorderly bodies that preoccupy many contemporary artists interested in the figure. Beginning her career in the early 1990s, the precarious position of the feminine body at this time is seen in her use of the traditional materials of her master artist forbearers alongside her embrace of the imperfections of flesh, with all its social implications and taboos, that they shunned away. In her 1992 painting Propped, made when she was just 22 years old, Saville was already deconstructing the narratives of women, as depicted by the likes of Alberti to cement the position of women in a social hierarchy, and urging for the creation of a new, more robust language for exploring the relationship between the body and the world it exists in. Only once this language is developed can women be freed from the imprisonment of idealised beauty standards and social expectations, and, for Saville, the first step in its construction was acknowledging that ‘woman’ exists in many states.
With her bruised and veined body, that is at once relaxed above the shoulders and full of anxiety as her hands dig into her fleshy thighs, Saville inserts herself into the tradition of the female nude, subverting and distorting this insistently male tradition to fashion an entirely new artistic convention. Etched into the paint is what, at first, appears to be nonsensical lettering, but in the mirrored image of this painting one comes to understands that Saville is invoking the words of French philosopher Luce Irigaray to stress the need for a new language through which women may be freed from objectification and expectations: “If we continue to speak in this sameness – speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other. Again, words will pass through our bodies, above our heads – disappear, make us disappear”.6 When first installed at her graduation exhibition from the Glasgow School of Art, a mirror was placed opposite the canvas reflecting the image back to itself and extending the work of the canvas and into the empty space between it and its reflection. Giving the viewer the ability to read the text, the mirror at once absorbed them into the artwork’s physical space and forced them to turn their backs to the subject and the message she urges.
While Saville’s petition to create a new language through which the feminine experience may be understood subverts the standards of traditional portraiture underpinned by idealised beauty, engagement with the expectation of firmness is seen in a much more literal sense in the work of Anne Noggle (1922-2005) who, in Reminiscence: Portrait with My Sister (1980), shows herself alongside her sister as the pair stretch the skin on their faces, for an instant facelift or to reminisce on the beauty they had before their faces began to sag and lose the volume associated with youth and required for beauty.
One need only look at the dramatic proportions clothing has moulded women into throughout history to know that thinness has not always been the standard and that such moulding was done in an effort to enlarge specific body parts, particularly those required for childbearing, so as to meet expectations not only of an idealised beauty, but also notions of femininity. In fact, the Western idealisation of thinness was a byproduct of the Enlightenment’s obsession with classical ideals, reimagined into flappers in the 1920s, mods in the 1960s and, later, heroin chic in the 1990s. But, by the 1970s, thinness had been solidified as an expectation for women of all ages and at all stages of their life.
Eleanor Antin (1935-) evoked images of a sculptor chipping away at a block of marble in her seminal photographic work Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972). Much like the sculptor who discards excess material to reveal the beautiful body within, Antin photographed herself naked from four angles every morning for thirty-seven days as she lost weight, assuming the role of both carver and carvee, artist and object, as she worked towards the illusory perfection of a thin body. Organising her photographs into the conceptual artists’ beloved grid, Antin shows the struggle of women being forced to adopt the norms and expectations of a male dominated world while also transcending the boundaries of both conceptual and sculptural art, challenging them both by turning their formal qualities against themselves. “I was laughing at the boys” she said, “I call them the boys – the conceptualists”.7 Such an oscillation between conceptualism and sculpture was by no mistake, however, and can also be seen as an institutional critique of the staunch traditionalism of the Whitney Museum, who famously rejected the work for their 1970-71 Annual exhibition on account of not fitting the exhibition brief. Recalling the rejection, Antin said “One year [the Whitney Annual] was sculpture and [the next] was painting, which I thought was so old-fashioned. I thought about what I should give them that was a traditional sculpture: a woman going on a diet – very traditional. They sent it back and said, ‘It’s very nice, Eleanor, but it’s not sculpture: it’s conceptual art.’ I assumed it was both”.8
In The Eight Temptations (1972), an accompanying photographic work from the same year, Antin documents the torturous practise of starvation, through which many women have withered away under the pressure to be thin, lest they be considered ‘ugly’ and suffer the social, political and economic consequences of being undesirable. In each of the eight photographs, Antin refuses food that has been placed in front of her – an egg, a banana, nuts, all are refused with exaggerated gestures reflecting the absurdity of diet culture with the work’s continuous relevance showing the ever-present nature of such culture. The message was only made stronger when Antin reenacted her Carving project in Carving: 45 Years Later (2017), and admitted she had already lost 11 pounds before she felt ready to be photographed: “Even though this was about losing the weight, I couldn’t”, she said, “I was embarrassed”.9
Depicting these habits before the eating disorders they can be associated with were taken seriously, Antin was well ahead of her time with her images being familiar to the women who view them but absurd to the male spectator who cares not for how his desires are met and, quite possibly, has failed to consider the impact of such desires. Weakened physically and mentally by tight corsets, heavy petticoats or lack of nutrition, a vulnerable woman is much easier to manipulate and control and it is for this reason that maintaining control over women’s beauty standards is the ultimate weapon of patriarchal societies.
A deeply complex phycological phenomenon that makes little sense to those who have never experienced it, the constant push and pull between knowing the ramifications but being unable to overcome the psychological need to be the ‘correct’ kind of thin was an underlying aspect of much twentieth century feminist art concerned with the feminine body. ‘Correct’, because while being thin is a requirement of the male gaze, strategic posing and lighting to emphasise the parts of the female body that provide the most sexual arousal, tells us that so too is large breasts and backside, and that being too thin is equally as disturbing for the spectator to see as the gluttonous bodies of Saville’s canvases because they both disobey the demands of the male spectator to always, at all costs, be what he considers beautiful.
For feminist artists in the twentieth century, reclaiming the manner in which their bodies were depicted was not limited to contesting notions of beauty, but also challenging the narratives their bodies were used to tell. Historically, when women developed their knowledge enough to pose a credible threat to patriarchal authority and when their skills survived their social sell-by date, their old and wrinkled bodies became the identifier of evil. No longer youthful, nor firm, nor smooth, nor thin, she is no longer desirable to the male gaze, and therefore no longer tolerated in the society it governs, so descends into wickedness at the tragedy of losing her youth and beauty and jealousy of those women yet to lose theirs. Thus, the malicious nature of the old crone was visualised and weaponised to make clear not only the expectation of beauty, but the fate of those who dare exist beyond its expiration, and to make a soldier of one woman in the war against all women.
As art historian and scholar Frances Borzello notes, women photographers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned their gaze and lens on themselves with a curiosity that transcended their physicality and reached for their inner reality.10 This is especially seen in the self-portraits of photographer Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976). Beginning in 1906 with her lying nude in a picturesque field, when the series begins Cunningham depicts herself as conforming to beauty and femininity expectations, with her three sons and grandchildren featured in many and her interest in art indicated as amateur. As she grows older, however, Cunningham uses her photographs to show her refusal to give way to the assumption that she will simply disappear once her childbearing duty is fulfilled. Instead, they grow increasingly introspective as she depicts herself next to her camera, the instrument of her agency, or as a shadow, present but obscured across the landscape. The most powerful of these, taken in 1961 when Cunningham was about to enter her 80s, she appears as a shadow looming over the display of women’s girdles in a shop window.
Designed to smooth the hips and mould the wearer into the ideal hourglass shape, the girdle is one of many garments worn by women in order to meet the requirements of the male gaze. With the brand ‘Youthcraft’ splattered above the girdles and next to the young, thin model on a poster in the background, a promise is made that for the price of 48 or 51 Danish Krone, any young woman can craft themselves into the idealised thin, smooth and firm form. Emerging in direct contrast to this is the shadowy figure of Cunningham, whose overcoat obscures her body entirely, save for one wrinkled hand that extends out of the sleeve and onto the camera’s shutter button. With her wrinkled hand, tussled and wiry hair and eyeglasses, she makes no attempt to hide the expiration of her beauty, and, while she knows it is expected she remain silent in the shadows where her bitterness brews at the sight of a beautiful, youthful model, as photographer and maker of the image, Cunningham declares her ongoing existence alongside, rather than opposed to, that of her young counterpart and does so through the gaze of her camera lens that she is in full control of.
Similarly, in her Liminal Portraits series, Melanie Manchot (1966-) reclaims ownership of how the female body is portrayed by making her subject, her mother, an active participant in the way her body is presented to the lens in an analysis of the complexities between acceptance or denial of one’s body once it no longer performs or conforms to expected standards of perfection. Ensuring she won’t be mistaken for the biter old crone who misses what is lost, as is risked by Noggle in her image and its title, Manchot positions her mother within a broader landscape with the photograph testifying to the ongoing existence of the middle-aged woman much in the same manner as Cunningham.
Contemporary accessibility of cosmetic procedures has exacerbated pressure to meet the impossible ideals dictated by the male spectator of art and society, but this escalation was predicted in the 1990s when the French artist Orlan (1947-) became the first artist to take plastic surgery as her medium and notoriously underwent nine operations to transform herself into the ideal beauty. The Reincarnation of Sainte-ORLAN (1990) is the inevitable conclusion of the demand that women be young, thin, smooth and firm, and the habit of rejecting women who, for whatever reason, fail to meet this demand. Asking for the chin of Botticelli’s Venus and the mouth of Boucher’s Europa, she creates space for conversation about the impact art has on the beauty standards of wider society and, using a local anaesthetic to stay awake during the surgeries, which were filmed, she highlights the violent absurdity of these standards.
Not simply refusing to meet a standard of beauty determined by, and for, the male spectator, many twentieth century women strived to renegotiate the terms of their existence in a world where their success was determined by their ability to meet such standards. Taking control of their own bodies and their own images, they positioned themselves far beyond the limitations that had been placed upon them for centuries, depicting themselves and the realities of their existence in a manner unappealing to the spectator and, in doing so, began the slow process of constructing a new language whereby the myriad possibilities of the feminine experience could be accurately translated into imagery.
1. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972).
2. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), p.70.
3. Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective, ed. Thomas H. Kochheiser (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), quoted in Frances Borzello, The Naked Nude (London: Thames & Hudson, 2022), 80.
4. Museum of Modern Art, “Hannah Wilke S.O.S. - Starification Object Series”, MoMA, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/102432
5. Prinston University Art Museum, “S.O.S. Starification Object Series, 1974”, PUAM, https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/art/collections/objects/61147
6. Luce Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together”, trans. Carolyn Burke, in Signs 6, no. 1, (Autumn 1980): 69.
7. Alice Butler, “Eleanor Antin on Art, Ageing and Grief”, Diane Rosenstein Gallery, 29 May 2019. https://www.frieze.com/article/eleanor-antin-art-ageing-and-grief
8. Butler, “Eleanor Antin on Art, Ageing and Grief”.
9. ibid.
10. Frances Borzello, Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self-Portraits (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998, 2016, 2018), 158.
Image credits:
Figure 1: Henri Matisse, Blue Nude (1907). Oil on canvas, 92.1 x 140.3 cm. Baltimore Museum of Art, U.S.A.
Figure 2: Hannah Wilke, S.O.S. - Starification Object Series (1974-82). Gelatin silver prints with chewing gum sculptures, 101.6 x 148.6 x 5.7 cm. Museum of Modern Art, U.S.A.
Figure 3: Jenny Saville, Propped (1992). Oil on canvas, 213.4 x 182.9 cm. Private collection.
Figure 4: Anne Noggle, Reminiscence: Portrait with My Sister (1980). Bromide fibre print, 33.8 x 48.1 cm. National Portrait Gallery, U.K.
Figure 5: Eleanor Antin, CARVING - A Traditional Sculpture (1972) (detail). 148 gelatin silver prints, 17.7 x 12.7 cm (each photograph). Art Institute of Chicago, U.S.A.
Figure 6: Eleanor Antin, The Eight Temptations (1972). Eight chromogenic prints, 17.8 x 12.7 cm (each photograph). Art Institute of Chicago, U.S.A.
Figure 7: Imogen Cunningham, Self-Portrait, Denmark, 1961 (1961). Silver gelatin print. Imogen Cunningham Estate.
Figure 8: Melanie Manchot, Liminal Portraits 1999-2000: With Mountains II. C-print.
