by Jon Lackman | 10 May 2007 | Books, Modern
In the most recent Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne (n. 98), Véronique Goudinoux reviews Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art by Charles Harrison: “Can we agree that the question of sexual difference has played a role in the development of modern art since Manet, and if so, what role? … This work covers more than a century, from Manet and Renoir to Gerhard Richter and Art & Language. The author’s thesis is powerful: at the end of the 19th century … the matter of how women look [how they look at others and how they are looked at] … was a transformative force in painting … One century later, at the end of the 20th century, it was the sexes’ differing powers and interests that the most convincing painting turned to … The strength of his approach is that it doesn’t reduce this fact of sexual difference to an iconographic or socio-historical question, but treats it [at the level of] the very surface of painting.” Goudinoux concludes: “Let’s say it straight out: we in France lack books of this kind, entrenched as they are in a debate that we’re just beginning to engage.”
