Looking Up to Women (sculpture photography, photomontage)

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Celebrating Women’s History Month with images that inspire reverence and awe. Plus the history of two giant sculptures: one built, the other abandoned.

For some people, Women’s History Month is filled with social and political significance, and who could deny it? But it also has a deeper meaning which can be brought out through images.

Images have the potential to reach us on a deeper level that’s beyond words, and such is my purpose here:

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The beauty of art is that both artist and beholder have tremendous freedom: The artist is free to explore his or her highest vision; the beholder is free to interpret what the artist wrought.

I hope that in viewing these images, you have an artistic, aesthetic, or spiritual experience of the highest order. But if you prefer to make sense of these images from a historical, social, or political perspective, we can do that too! We will have to come down from our lofty perch and wrestle with ideas…

Historically, women have been undervalued or looked down on. So when we see large sculptures of women that dominate the landscape and dwarf passersby, this rights an historic wrong.

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The social element relates to how we collectively view women (and therefore treat women). This is shaped by what we see every day. One segment of society may churn out images depicting women as sexual objects. In a free society we cannot necessarily control this, but for our part we can create images which ennoble women and encourage people to look up to women as role models.

What we see every day… I cannot emphasize this point too strongly. One subset of the women’s movement is concerned with civic art — placing more sculptures of women in public places. This is very good. Often these sculptures depict political figures from the women’s suffrage movement or civil rights movement.

Here, I have created images with no such associations, so what we get instead are the qualities of women, such as strength and nobility of character. The message is not overtly social or political, but the effect is. Simply by viewing these images, we are engaged literally in the process of looking up to women.

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Obviously, mere hugeness is not a virtue in itself. Critics could point to Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958) or The Temptation of Dr Antonio (1962). These films depict giantesses, but hardly evoke feminist themes. Still, what giant forms have in common, whether encountered in high art or low, is that they rely on the aesthetics of engagement. These women cannot be ignored!

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We can gain another perspective by looking through the lens of environmental psychology, a field concerned in part with making life better for people by relieving urban blight and a host of problems which affect public spaces. Such spaces are often cramped, overcrowded, dirty, impersonal, haphazard, poorly planned or excessively corporatized. But in the “Looking Up to Women” virtual exhibit, we often get light-filled, airy, windswept spaces which impart a feeling of freedom and vastness.

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The latter quality, vastness, is our gateway to understanding something deeper about these images. So much of human life is small, finite. When we contemplate vastness, our thoughts naturally turn to the spiritual. In Western theology, God is most often depicted as male and vastness perceived as a male quality. But especially in Hindu theology, the female aspect of God — that is, the Goddess — is omnipresent. If we are inspired by Hindu theology, then if we think of immensity, power, vastness and majesty, naturally we will think of Maheshwari, an aspect of the Divine Mother who embodies these qualities.

Of course, this interpretation is only for those who have some spiritual interest. Otherwise, we can fall back on social, political, psychological, and artistic factors to explain the images.

The beauty of art is that these different concepts are not mutually exclusive. If we have a depthful experience of art, these concepts can flow into each other and take us to a very special place.

Unlike the plane of ideas, where we often feel compelled to pit one thesis against another seemingly opposite, in art there is a sense of play, and seeming opposites can combine harmoniously. The various social, political, and psychological theories underlying these images don’t preclude the artist from depicting some women as simply beautiful.

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From an art history perspective, a significant theme running through the exhibit is that sculpture should not be subservient to architecture. Still, there is an underlying tension. Most of these sculptures are freestanding; some are even situated by or in the sea.

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However, a couple are attached to urban architecture. Where this occurs, the female figure is usually the crowning glory of the architecture; but in the case of A992 perhaps the woman does feel a bit trapped on the side of a building.

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By contrast, A865 explores the idea of a museum shaped like a woman — or more precisely, a museum designed so that the bust of a woman is its most prominent architectural feature.

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The woman is not a mere decorative element; she is the museum. Imagine if the National Museum of Women in the Arts were designed like that!

Now for a horrifying and shameful admission (which wouldn’t come as a total shock to art historians): Despite my earnest attempt to create images which empower women, I’ve drawn on styles from these 20th century male artists: Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, Salvador Dalí, Jacob Epstein, and Man Ray — a list which includes some womanizers and stark atheists; so for me there’s a delicious irony in adapting their styles to express ideals of feminism and spirituality.

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Once we explicitly recognize the Cubist influence, we can see how in many of these images the woman is struggling to break free from rectangular blocks and express her femininity. She usually succeeds.

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If these women are representations of some spiritual ideal, this need not trouble us; for as New York-based art critic and author Eleanor Heartney points out in a 2020 article, “Spirituality Has Long Been Erased From Art History. Here’s Why It’s Having a Resurgence Today”:

Where once it was, in the words of Rosalind Krauss, “embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence,” today it could not be more au courant.
…
In her 2014 book, The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art, Charlene Spretnak expands on the ideas in Maurice Tuchman’s “The Spiritual in Art” exhibition, taking it beyond abstraction to suggest the spiritual underpinnings of a wide swath of modern and contemporary artists. Her book, based on painstaking research into the motivations of artists from 1800 to the present, proposes a radical revision of our understanding of the history of modernism. Spretnak argues that spirituality is at the heart of the established canon and that mystical and occult ideas run through the works of artists as diverse as Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, Beckman, Miró, Dove, and Klee.

– Eleanor Heartney

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Murals, Sculptures, and Selfies

Murals are another type of large form civic art. Like muralists, I find myself wishing that the virtual spaces I’ve imagined could be cultural icons which would attract visitors, give them respite from urban blight, and inspire liberal use of selfie sticks. In a documentary on public murals in Nebraska (not to be confused with public morals in Nebraska), some local artists say:

These comments encapsulate the diverse turns which public art can take, often dictated by the community. One community is cool with a semi-abstract design featuring Lakota spiritual symbols; another wants middle American kitsch! There have been many changes in recent decades concerning the planning and installation of public art, and the increasing emphasis on working closely with communities. One excellent resource on the subject is Eleanor Heartney’s detailed survey here.

So much of what artists say about murals is also true of sculptures — sometimes literally, but sometimes in altered form. If murals can help us remember a past culture, sculptures can help us create a new culture — one which honors women. If murals engage us in a storied past, sculptures can engage us in a storied future. Take Invisible Cities, a 1975 Nebula Award-winning novel by Italo Calvino. He pens a poetic travelogue of cities that never existed and never will; but we want them to exist because they engage us in ways our own cities don’t.

Advocates for community art say that murals tell the story of their city, drawing positive attention to it, inviting tourism and business investment. In that sense, art serves an instrumental function, with success often measured in number of selfies taken. My sculptures tell the story of an imaginary city, one whose history has yet to be written. Success is measured, perhaps, by the depth of emotion generated. If you see these abstract representations of the Goddess, are swept away by them, and suddenly feel that the city is small and unimportant by comparison, then my work is done.

As a thought experiment, imagine that civic life begins with the sculpture in A964. Then a city is built around it, according to what it inspires, portends, or signifies. In this thought experiment, the tables have been turned: The sculpture is of the essence; it is the city which has become an instrumentality. If it fails to live up to the ideals of the sculpture, perhaps it will be torn down and a new city erected in its place!

Living in a cramped apartment in the city, I’m driven to create virtual spaces which I myself would love to dive into, breaking the fourth wall which is the computer screen. To the extent that these sculptures are non-denominational spiritual icons, it is perhaps important that the viewer have private audience with them — not be jostled by picnickers. But in the real world, I would expect people to congregate around them, take refuge in their shade, have lunch and communally enjoy them. Like the biggest Buddha east of the Mississippi, or the tallest butter sculpture of Paul Bunyan, these giant sculptures should attract virtual tour groups.

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I confess that whenever I view A187, I’m seized by an urge to jump into the picture and run up those little steps that go through the sculpture, as I imagine countless schoolchildren doing, no matter how the headmistress may admonish them not to. It’s fun! (As best I can determine, the two pedestrians are arguing about laundry. He says soap flakes are best, while she wants to use a concentrated liquid detergent.)

I don’t know if my imagined spaces will ever go viral on social media, but in “Public Sculptures That Indulge Your Photo Habits,” art history teacher Kate Palmer Albers chronicles the emergence of large-scale installations which seem specifically designed to trigger the selfie response:

Whether or not one sees these installations in person, they are nevertheless impossible to miss as their viewer-made representations have oozed across social media platforms, permeating the consciousness of virtual art world viewers.

Even if you like the art itself, it’s easy to become cynical about viewer response to these kinds of large-scale installations, when the primary shared characteristic is to produce a reflexive gesture among their viewers to 1) reach for a camera, 2) determine the best hashtag, and 3) add a unique view to the vast collective, and publicly produced, archive.

– Kate Palmer Albers

The implied critique is that some artists might design installations as “clickbait” rather than going for the highest artistic vision (which might not have the same popular appeal). Or they could be under pressure to produce “safe” art that will easily survive the funding and community approval process. Not all communities are looking to sponsor an avant-garde masterpiece, parachuted in by some eclectic genius. They may prefer a mural sporting American flags, vintage cars, old-time locomotives, retro product ads, or cows grazing idyllically!

A primitive, semi-abstract stone sculpture of a woman. No one wants to take a selfie?

“Junkyard Annie with Her Muse.” Where’s that selfie stick? Everybody gather ’round. Try and get the family dog in too!

“Empowered” – an outdoor sculpture inspired by Salvador Dalí. Surely the Public Art Committee will vote unanimously to approve such an expressive work!

Jacqueline Roque (1927-1986)

For me, there’s something very poignant about those images which invoke Jacqueline Roque, as a few of them do.

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Trying to put this into words, I find that all prose formulations seem trite and run smack into the issue that contraries which can be harmonized in art tend to fight like cats in a sack when expressed on the lower plane of ideas. Was she weak? Was she strong?

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If we see her likeness, interpolated through modern sculpture styles, towering over the skyscrapers of New York’s financial district, what does that say? If we know that she committed suicide in 1986, thirteen years after Picasso’s death, this imparts an elegiac quality to some of the images. I view her almost as a mythological subject. At times, she fuses with the Goddess ideal.

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Writing for the Picasso Museum Barcelona, Lola Simó Bergua quotes journalist and art critic Hélène Parmelin from the latter’s 1966 book Picasso dit…:

Jacqueline has to an unimaginable degree the gift of becoming painting. She has within her that power on which a painter is nourished. She is the fountain-head. She is made for it, and she submits, and dedicates herself to it and dies in harness, living all the time and never posing. She secretes within her this multiplicity of herself. She peoples Notre-Dame-de-Vie with her hundred thousand possibilities. She unfolds to infinity. She invades everything, becomes everybody. She takes the place of all the models of all the painters on all the canvases. All the portraits are like her, even if they are not like each other. All the heads are hers and there are a thousand different ones. All the eyes are black, all the breasts are rounded; it is raining Jacquelines all through the house, and whichever way you turn she is looking at you. Sometimes it is almost a portrait, sometimes not at all. She is that enormous nude or that delicate one, that epitome of woman or that long exposition of femininity. She is sitting, lying, standing, everywhere. She is dreaming, thinking, playing. During these twelve years of Picasso’s life, painting and love have mated and mingled.

– Hélène Parmelin

“Picassp dit…” by Hélène Parmelin (1966): book cover

This passage — which reads more like a prose poem than art criticism — helps explain my fascination with Jacqueline Roque as a potential subject for artistic exploration.

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While Picasso painted her hundreds of times, he appears to have made relatively few sculptures, mostly small maquettes, very abstract. Some of these were later realized in large form by Carl Nesjar, who was Picasso’s chosen fabricator.

Two Sculptures: One Built, The Other Abandoned

“Head of a Woman” by Pablo Picasso (1962) – realized by Carl Nesjar (1971) for the Princeton Art Museum. https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/31339

A 1971 New York Times article discusses this and other outdoor sculptures at Princeton:

There seems to be a community of spirit between the students and the art in much the same way that there is a living rapport between people and outdoor art in Europe. The students sit on some of the sculptures, lean against others and just generally appreciate and live with them. Some students, however, feel that they are an eyesore and too modern in taste.

Much of the success of the sculpture depends on how it relates to the environment. The natural forms of Moore, Lipchitz and Lachaise respond especially well to the lush environment and architecture of the campus. The monumental Tony Smith looks good in front of a large hedge and the scale of the Picasso does not jar with the proportions of the art building, near which it stands.
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It is only within recent weeks that the selection committee was able to take the Calder out of storage and install it. Campus uneasiness over the death of two workmen who were killed last year while putting up the sculpture caused the committee to retire it temporarily.

There have also been complaints that the Nevelson is placed too close to the street in violation of borough laws. The committee can at least be satisfied that the students have not yet begun to mark up the sculptures with graffiti or paint them in more wayward moments.

In 1971, the University of South Florida also began the process of commissioning a large Picasso fabrication based on a small maquette: “At ten stories tall, or 102 ft, the sculpture would have been Picasso’s largest single work as well as one of the world’s tallest concrete sculptures.” However, the project bogged down in funding issues. Twenty years later there was some attempt to revive it, but in addition to funding and rights issues, there was now concern voiced that coming so many years after Picasso’s death, the project “might not be something that would end up garnering an awful lot of respect.”

In 2018, there were announcements that art historian Kamila Oles and landscape archaeologist Lukasz Banaszek would finally realize the sculpture in virtual reality form, aided by archival research, three-dimensional scans, and digital blueprints of USF’s campus; but it’s unclear how far the project got. The web archive of this 2018 hyperallergic.com article by Claire Voon is the most informative. It includes a number of interesting graphics, and suggests that the earlier 1971 project was “rejected” over concerns about Picasso’s politics, and his Cubist style.

Scan of the first page of a 1978 op-ed by Eckerd College professor Burr Brundage, questioning the “rejection” of the “Bust of a Woman” project at USF. The accompanying illustration (artist unknown) seems to accentuate Picasso’s association with the Communist Party.

What remains most memorable from the original project is this photomontage of a sculpture that was never built:

“Bust of a Woman” by Pablo Picasso (1961) – realized by Carl Nesjar as a photomontage (1971) for the University of South Florida. Courtesy USF Special Collection Library

Naturally, I feel a sense of kinship here. Given the myriad difficulties associated with actually realizing giant sculptures, my experiments may have to remain “music of the mind.”

A dream you dream alone is only a dream.
A dream you dream together is reality.

– Yoko Ono

Still, if you’re reading this and are seized by the inspiration to build something more practical, here are four of my sculpture designs which could be realized, being of reasonable size:

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Closing Thoughts

“Looking Up to Women” expresses my deeply held views about art — at least some of them. I also create images in other styles:

“Stories of the Street”

“Older and Wiser”

“Why I Sing The Blues”

In the Postmodern period, it’s possible to create art in styles ranging from aestheticism to activism and everything in between. There are political artists who see little value in aestheticism, and aesthetic artists who are wary of having their art measured against a political yardstick. There are also plenty of people who just want to do what they do without having to define it in a way which might limit their creativity and their audience. I am one of these.

If there’s any confusion as to where “Looking Up to Women” falls along the spectrum, I would say that it’s motivated primarily by aesthetics, but with images chosen in hope of having some social and political impact. For this reason, I rejected images which I like as art, but which the general public might find too foreboding:

Giant head in a modernist style influenced by Picasso and Mitoraj

Traditional Impressionist portrait cleaving to styles of Renoir and Monet

The giant head might be considered “ugly art,” but I’m personally quite fond of it. I can do ugly art and get into that aesthetic; but by nature I tend to strive for beauty (as in the Impressionist work) based on my studies of meditation and philosophy of art with Sri Chinmoy. He himself was an amazing natural media artist whose own views were shaped in part by Rabindranath Tagore.

I just want to take a moment to thank readers for visiting my blog and viewing my images.

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Photomontage inspired by the collaborations between Pablo Picasso and Carl Nesjar

Michael Howard

The views expressed are my own, and do not represent any other person or organization.

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LINKS

Was Picasso Spiritual? Part 2
https://ethicsandspirituality.wordpress.com/2014/11/11/was-picasso-spiritual-part-2/

And Woman Created Picasso
https://ethicsandspirituality.wordpress.com/2023/04/10/and-woman-created-picasso/

Jacqueline Roque & Picasso
https://mattsmorgue.blogspot.com/2007/12/jacqueline-roque-picasso.html

A Joyful Representation of Jacqueline Roque
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHvkIosngtg

Pablo Picasso: Different perspectives on the cubist’s life and art
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pablo-picasso-different-perspectives-on-the-cubists-life-and-art/

Jacob Epstein Heroic Torso Exhibited at Coventry Cathedral
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX71YLN8RrU

Socially Engaged Practice
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/socially-engaged-practice

The Future as Aesthetic Experience
https://eujournalfuturesresearch.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40309-022-00204-8

The Transformative Art of Sri Chinmoy
https://www.srichinmoy-reflections.com/transformative-art

Inside the Forgotten Rabindranath Tagore Painting Gallery
https://simplykalaa.com/rabindranath-tagore-painting/

AI Aware: These days I often use AI as a tool to learn, explore, and ideally create images that might express something valuable, human, and soulful to somebody somewhere. I try to use AI ethically. The issues surrounding AI art are rarely simple binaries. I am a non-combatant in the conflict between some artists and some proponents of AI. I have tremendous respect for the artists whose work I try to learn from.

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