By Meghan O’Sullivan ’14
Li Guo’s ‘15 brown-bag lecture entitled “Death and Female Figures in Visual Art from the Late 19th to Early 20thCentury” actually began as a final project in her First Year Seminar class, “Living and Dying in America,” taught by Director of Religious Life and College Chaplain John Colatch.
Guo’s project focused on the portrayal of gender and death in artwork. Guo described how in earlier paintings women were noticeably absent from scenes relating to death. For example, the painting “The Death of Germanicus” depicts a poisoned Roman general dying in his bed surrounded by his soldiers. While his soldiers are a prominent presence, adorned with helmets and carrying spears, Germanicus’ wife and female relatives are huddled in a dark corner by his bedside. Their shadowy presence highlights their exclusion from this scene of death. Despite the common artistic motif of the “dance of death” (the idea that death comes to everyone), women were excluded from this universal cycle of life in artwork as seen by their limited appearances in paintings from the period as dying.
In the later 19th and early 20th centuries, as ideas of free dress and deaths associated with syphilis ran rampant, male artists began depicting women as alluring agents of death for men. Edvard Munch’s 1895 painting “Woman in Three Stages” portrays a woman’s death as the end of her fertility, depicting a young, virginal woman wearing a white dress and holding a bouquet of flowers on one side. In the middle a naked woman stands in a relaxed and open pose. On the right side a female figure stands in the shadow, with a gray face wearing dark clothing. A single man stands next to these women. This painting illustrates the way in which women of the nineteenth century were valued only by their potential to be wives and mothers, a burden not faced by the solitary, unchanging man in the corner of the painting, Guoargued.
Similarly, the painting “Judith II,” by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt in 1909, depicts an ashen-faced woman in revealing dress staring out the side of the painting as her fingers clutch at the hair of a man’s dismembered head. While this woman has a strong presence in the painting, her treatment of the man’s corpse employs a sinister tone.
After Guo had given the presentation of the same thesis in her FYS class, Colatch had suggested the idea of turning the project into a brown bag lecture. “I was pretty surprised—I didn’t think I could get that kind of chance as a freshman,”Guo said.
In looking at the campus calendar, it is easy to see that most students who present lectures open to the entire school are upperclassmen, often working in groups. Even more striking is that, while Guo had presented similar research projects during her high school career, this lecture was her first public speaking engagement in English (her primary language being Chinese, where she was born and raised).
Guo also described her concern over her research being insufficient, being that she had basically no background in gender studies or art history before this project. However, Colatch was full of praise for the presentation, describing its unique excellence and saying, “[it] knocked my socks off.” Attendees seemed similarly impressed with Guo’sperformance, which displayed a considerable grasp of the material.
The research proved to be challenging. “There aren’t a lot of sources on the topic,” Guo explained. “I just want to make people be aware of how women figures are presented in art by male artists during that time. I wish there could be someone on campus who would want to do more research on the topic—I would if I had the time!”