2015/01/02 by Susan L. Siegfried · 4 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical Art and Culture Studies #Decadence, Literature, and Society #Fashion and Cultural Textiles #Painting #Memoir #Ideal (ethics) #Studio #Period (music) #Context (archaeology) #Art #Art history #Visual culture #Visual arts #Aesthetics #History #Philosophy #Epistemology #Archaeology
paper · doi:10.1080/00043079.2014.943619
published in The Art Bulletin 97(1), 77-99 (College Art Association)
openalex publication_date 2015/01/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In her little-known painting A Study of a Woman after Nature (1802), Marie-Denise Villers exploited a conjuncture between masculine-inflected ideals of Neoclassical art and feminine-inflected ideas of fashionability in the post-Revolutionary period in France by making a feature of female dress while emulating the standards of history painting. The artist's confident synthesis of idioms is examined in the context of Albertine Clément-Hémery's memoir of a women's art studio. Walter Benjamin's notion of gestus is enlisted as a means of understanding how the quite different image cultures invoked in this work communicated social ideas.