She matches the viewers gaze and strongly holds her palette and brushes, evoking the stance commonly associated with accomplished portrait artists, demonstrating that she is engaged in an intellectual pursuit. Mary Sheriff breaks down how Lebrun subverts gender norms. Judith Butler writes that the physiological body is separate from the social meanings of gender, that “gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo” which is constituted through repeated acts, a set of possibilities that are determined both historically (through a “shared social structure”) and individually. In this work Lebrun asserts herself as a history painter rather than a passive object for the male gaze, deliberately transgressing gender norms. Vigée-Lebrun intentionally subverted these hierarchies through a number of layers in her Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat, exhibited at the 1783 Salon (fig. As art is part of social production, they had to consider the interplay of ideologies, forms of production, social classes, family, and sexual practices. This is determined by the ways in which they negotiated their situations as a woman and as an artist at any given historical moment. In this way women have spoken from a different place within the history of culture. Therefore it is not enough to simply insert the work of female artists into the timeline of history, or to claim that they exemplify a shared sense of femininity – to say that women artists exemplify this constructed trait “teaches us nothing about what being, doing, or thinking as a woman at different historical moments and in different social conditions might be”. This fiction of an eternal hierarchy of men over women has fomented in society to become seemingly “natural” and “biologically” determined, one which the ideological basis of art history is founded upon. The ideology of the artist as a free, individual, and creative spirit is associated with the male persona, and thus the role of the artist is contradictory to the social definition of women from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries as passive, domestic, and maternal. Art history is a form of cultural male hegemony in that it reinforces dominant social relations. Owing to the request of Marie Antoinette she was admitted to the Académie Royale in 1783, and submitting the history painting Peace Bringing Back Abundance as her reception piece.įeminist Art Historian, Griselda Pollock writes that sexism and sexual division in society has always been a factor in the production of art, as well as plays a role in the social and governmental context and cannot be set aside.
Her success continued even after her exile following the revolution. As the official painter to Marie Antoinette, she found success among the aristocracy due to her picturesque and idealized style of portraiture. Elisabeth Louise Vigée Lebrun was a French artist working during the French Revolution who subverted gender norms and hierarchies in the male-dominated academy.
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