Pointes, hachoirs et marteaux

Abstract

Between the opening of the École des beaux-arts to women in the late 19th century and the attack by suffragette Mary Richardson at the dawn of World War I against Velázquez’s The Toilet of Venus, commonly known in English as the Rokeby Venus, there was an abundance of speeches on the subject of the violence of women. The practice of a physically demanding art such as sculpture and the revolt against the repression of the Suffragettes stimulated an iconography that made reference to Gentileschi’s depiction of the Old Testament story of Jael and Sisera. The representation of armed women came to symbolise the institutional recognition of women artists, either in a meliorative or depreciating way, depending on the attempt made to counter the symbolic “threat” that this this new recognition posed.

Keywords

• Camille Claudel
• Artemisia Gentileschi
• sculpture
• gender studies
• Suffragettes
• Jael