6 août 2011 - 7/ Italian, French, Low Countries Women Artists who depicted Aphrodite/Venus (I)

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An investigation into this subject would necessitate an interdisciplinary team, analysing not only the iconography and iconology of the artworks, but also the socio-cultural background of the artists and their customers or patrons, and the market-related aspects. Why did they create art with this motif? Did they create an original composition or were they inspired by work of their male-colleagues in the same period?
These questions are much beyond my qualification and I do not know if the subject was ever treated. I consulted 'Manifestations of Venus', the excellent monograph by 9 women contributors (1).
Niki de SAINT-PHALLE: Vénus de Milo (1962)
Only one picture depicting Venus by a woman artist is shown in this book: Niki de SAINT-PHALLE's 'Venus de Milo' shot in a New York theatrical performance in 1962, and none of the other women artists, listed below, are discussed. The closest to my subject comes Shulamith Behr in Chapter 7 'Veiling Venus: gender and painterly abstraction in early German modernism' where she writes <(....), moreover, raises the problem of gendered authorship in depicting the eroticised female nude - paradigmatically the figure of Venus within an academic tradition. However, this chapter follows a less familiar path... > (p.128). She then discusses the work and psychology of Marianne WEREFKIN, an expatriate Russian artist who was part of the KANDINSKY's New Artists' Association of Munich in the early 20th century.

My contribution is simply the list of women artists extracted from my Topical Catalogues Iconography of Aphrodite / Venus from the Middle Ages to Modern Times. The list reveals, as could be expected, a very low percentage of women artists with respect to the total number of artists who created Venus-artworks, as defined in the catalogues: 1,5% among the Italian artists and 1% among the artists of the Low Countries. However, the percentage is significantly higher among French artists: 3,5% (2). The time distribution of the percentages of French women artists is interesting: from 5% in the first half of the 20th century to almost 25% in the second half.
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