The underpainting of sexism

“Dead” is a good word not because it invokes an ending — this layer produces very striking effects — but because of the death-hold it has on all subsequent chromatic colors brushed above it. There is no escaping the undertones’ influence upon future colors: Red acquires a different shade over black than it does over white.

The influence of colors upon the visual world becomes discernible through persistent observation, which is a key skill taught to students at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. So it’s not surprising that Lou Sloan, a black painting instructor at the PAFA from 1962 to1997, well-versed in all aspects of painting, was keenly observant of the visual world and nuances that may have escaped others.

Fame vs. ability, and "love"

It was Lou’s opinion that despite the fame of 19th-century PAFA director Thomas Eakins, it was his wife, Susan MacDowell, who was the more talented painter. But as is often the case, the more talented artist is less recognized. Susan, who studied under Thomas at PAFA in the 1870s and then married him in 1884, put her own aspirations as an artist aside. Instead, Susan devoted her married life to Thomas’s career, not returning to her own painting until after his death. Given the time when she lived, this path into domesticity is to be expected.

And given Lou’s status as a black instructor in a white institution, he may have been sensitive to such issues.

But in 1988, 100 years after Susan’s time, and well after women’s right to live outside domesticity, a similar situation arises. William Beckman, the figurative painter and PAFA visiting artist, addressing a large audience of art students, speaks of his well-known painting of his wife. The painting required a year of eight-hour days to complete. Several women in the audience are outraged, demanding to know why Diana Moore, an artist, spent this amount of time posing instead of working on her own art. William answers, “Love.”

Seven years from that PAFA talk, I find myself sitting next to Diana at a dinner honoring artists exhibiting at the Arnot Art Museum. It is not William exhibiting, but Diana; now divorced. Perhaps inappropriately, I tell her of the PAFA talk, with the ex passing her off as his model and the women fighting for her right to exist as an artist. I intrude upon the private, knowing that sexism is never ultimately personal and oppression is always explicitly public.

A family affair

Familiar with potential inequalities between married artists — my husband is the sculptor Gary Weisman — I may be naïve in assuming we have been able to navigate these waters, with equal shares of successes and rejections, equal time spent in the studio, and so on.

But differences arise when not expected, often introduced by children’s perceptions.

As a film student, my son Jack made a beautiful film of Gary. In it, he follows Gary in the studio. The resulting film expresses respect through honoring what Gary creates.

It’s natural that Jack decides to film me for this year’s project, though logistics are somewhat complicated, given my involvement in prisons. Jack decides to focus on me through an essay I wrote for BSR: “Freedom of a moth.”

Obviously, I am different from my husband, but it becomes clear this will not be a film about me as an artist. Instead it becomes a film about our relationship — more excavation than honor, more intrusion than following, and the freedom or lack of freedom within the parental relationship.

Why me?

I struggle with the sexist implication, because these questions did not arise in Gary’s film. I wonder why my film requires dragging family therapy into my studio — it’s not as if these dynamics don’t exist between Gary and Jack.

The film continues through fights until I finally scream, “I’m not a prop for your (expletive) movie!” The student-audience viewing it cheers not so much in victory but in recognition.

Our film was doomed from the beginning; fighting, equipment failure, and bad wintry weather reminding me of Aeolus’s proclamation to Odysseus, “Your journey is cursed.” Cursed, because ours was a no-win situation in which powers larger than us dictated the direction of the film. Presenting a more realistic account of our relationship, and appearing not equal to Gary’s, it is sexist. Filmed equal to Gary’s, it is sexist. Either way, it is a film forced into the image of Gary’s film, never to exist on its own: a sexist myth as old as Adam’s rib. Not surprisingly, it became a film of imprisonment.

Impossible to imagine

If extricating ourselves from the flypaper of sexism is above Jack’s and my pay-grades, it is because sexism is above everyone’s pay-grade in a culture whose ground is power-based; it’s a power structure we cannot imagine living without.

Kant suggests we cannot envision non-space; we can only imagine empty space — imagining space, then emptying it. Likewise, we cannot envision relationships without power. We can only imagine non-power by first imagining power, then making correctives to that power. For women, this means buying their way out of domesticity. Defined by power, albeit equalizing power, oppression prevails by erupting elsewhere. Only an ontological sea change can overcome it.

Doomed, it’s a sad, perhaps unfinished film, but Jack manages in the way he somehow learned — using beauty not to minimize pain but to explore it. At the end of the film, a moth is seen flying in slow motion under chiaroscuro lighting. Wings are shed as the moth dies, in an image metaphoric not of a single relationship but the potential death-hold of a grounding cultural oppression upon which all intersubjectivity is haunted.

Top right: Susan MacDowell Eakins, Still Life (oil on canvas, 1870s)

Middle right: Thomas Eakins, Turning the Stake Boat (Biglin Brothers) (oil on canvas, 1872)

Bottom left: The author, in a still from Haunted by Silence (courtesy of director Jack Weisman)