Fat women in sculpture and art
Beyond formalism: Feminist art history and female bodies
In 1984, the late Anne-Marie Kassay started her essay on the Dresden realist sculptor Christoph Voll with the words, "I think I'm too fat." ("Ich finde, ich bin zu dick.") (Kassay in Frauen Kunst Geschichte, 1984, 140) It was my first encounter with a feminist art-historical text and with what it means to write the personal as the political – or, in this case, the personal as the art-historical.
Kassay's words, written before the era of identity politics, social media indictments of fat-shaming and before the fully-fledged post-modern theorisations of the body, remain as remarkable today as they were then. Kassay used them to interrogate the nude figures of standing Eves by Christoph Voll, and her words that emphasise self-image ("I think I'm...") rather than a factual statement or an account of what others think get at the heart of a feminist project that attempts to reconcile a lived self with a scholarly project that privileges objectivity. I should add, a project that ostensibly privileges objectivity because, as generations of feminist scholars have taught us, there is nothing objective about the patriarchal project of masculinising creative (and scientific) endeavour.
Kassay goes on to describe Voll's œuvre in words that 'make strange' (ostranenie) mainstream art historical accounts. "Between 1919 and 1938, the sculptor Christoph Voll represented over one hundred women. Most of them are fat, some are thin." (Kassay 1984, 140) The criteria 'fat/thin' had not been used in art historical discourse as categories of evaluation before. They do not feature in Heinrich Wölfflin's 1915 Principles of Art History; with their overt link to 'real life' they have little in common with the formalist pairings of Wölfflin’s 'painterly/linear', 'optical/tactile' and so forth. Nor does Kassay’s statement employ the concepts used by critics contemporary with Voll: terms like tectonic, realist, direct carving.
Kassay continues: "For centuries, sculptors [she uses the masculine term 'Bildhauer'] have been producing women: seated, standing, reclining, clothed or naked, in wood, plaster, bronze, clay or stone." (Kassay 1984, 141) Kassay's sentence is reminiscent of Vassily Kandinsky's 'making strange' of academic art exhibitions. Kandinsky wrote in 1912 in his manifesto-like text Concerning the Spiritual in Art:
"Imagine a building divided into many rooms. … Every wall of every room is covered with pictures of various sizes ... They represent in colour bits of nature – animals in sunlight and shadow, drinking, standing in water, lying on the grass; ... human figures all sitting, standing, walking; often they are naked; many naked women, seen foreshortened from behind; apples and silver dishes ... People with these [guide-] books in their hands go from wall to wall, turning over pages, reading the [artists'] names. Then they go away, neither richer nor poorer than when they came, and are absorbed at once in their business, which has nothing to do with art.” (Vassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, orig. Über das Geistige in der Kunst, Munich: Piper, 1912; excerpt from the Introduction.)
Kandinsky's description is effective in its ostranenie and hilarious, in parts. It resonates with Kassay's sentences, and no doubt Kassay was familiar with Kandinsky's treatise. The human figures 'sitting, standing, walking' are echoed in Kassay's list of poses: 'seated, standing, reclining'. Kandinsky, like Kassay, highlights the presence of nude women and both purposely use the word 'naked' ('nackt') rather than the word 'nude' ('Akt'). That is, they choose the word used to describe people in the real world over the technical term used to describe art.
But the aim of these two writers, separated by profession, gender, aim and seven decades, is quite different. Kandinsky lists depicted women as objects among other objects ("many naked women, ..., apples and silver dishes") as part of a critique of contemporary exhibition practices which he was aiming to overturn. His reference to naked women exists only as an illustration of academic display. The women are part of his indictment of academic art as soul-less, materialist and removed from daily life. Kassay does the opposite: she inserts herself into the narrative. She is personally invested in these naked women figures. She does not at all 'go away, ... absorbed at once in [her] business, which has nothing to do with art.' Kassay makes her personal experience have everything do with art.
And in true feminist fashion, Kassay concludes: "I finally had to allow myself to have completely different questions." (Kassay 1984, 141; ‘ich mußte mir endlich zugestehen, ganz andere Fragen haben zu dürfen.’) It is these different questions that arise from personal life and political awareness that open up previously unacknowledged, side-lined and non-existent feminist areas of inquiry.
Although it is not an art historically sanctified category, fatness has also crept into men art historians' evaluations of art, for example, Peter Paul Rubens’ 17th-C. paintings and the prehistoric figurine known as the Venus of Willendorf. More generally, the biologist calls the Venus of Willendorf ‘overweight’ (Eckdahl, Obesity: The Venus of Willendorf, 2019). In the 1950s, art historian Kenneth Clark vilified non-normative female bodies in his widely-read book The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Of Rembrandt van Rijn's 1631 etching known as Woman Seated on a Mound (British Museum; also Rijksmuseum Amsterdam), Clark wrote: 'Rembrandt has gone out of his way to find the most deplorable body imaginable and emphasize its least attractive features. Few young women in Amsterdam, and the face of the Woman Seated on a Mound suggests that she was still under thirty, can have had so huge and shapeless a stomach. We can hardly bring our eyes to dwell on her...' (Clark, 339).
We might say that Clark’s text was penned a long time ago but that is no excuse. There is no pretence at objectivity in the visceral disgust evident in words such as 'deplorable' and 'we can hardly bring our eyes to dwell on her'. The use of 'we' solicits solidarity with the readership, and that readership is imagined to share the author's disgust, thereby justifying and normalising it. The readership is also imagined to be unlike the woman with the 'deplorable body', not to have such a body, and, tacitly, to be male. Men are permitted to have 'power paunches', even to be required to have them for status. As Clark himself avers: 'Rembrandt's male models are as miserably thin as his women are embarrassingly fat.' (Clark, 341) So the reader envisaged here is non-thin but acceptably portly man while any woman who does not conform to a normative shape is ruled out as part of the 'we', and even asked to feel disgust towards herself.
Clark collapses the image in the etching with fantasized real bodies in historical Amsterdam: 'Few young women in Amsterdam .. can have had so huge and shapeless a stomach.' Historical method and scholarly principles of proof are here absolutely abandoned as the academic gives in to grotesque speculation. It is significant that Clark dwells on the youth of the depicted woman; it is the combination of youth (which is expected to furnish a normative desirability for straight men) and body deviance (which is linked to, permitted and expected of old age, of hags and crones) that repulses the art historian.
This sort of thing still happens today. The fantasmatic presence of young women's normative bodies continues to defy reality. Anybody who has ever stood in a women's communal changing room or simply been present in a space where women exist in bathing suits will have had ample opportunity to observe the diversity of real body-shapes in the real world. Clark is representative, symptomatic; we may be grateful to him for having outlined his stance so explicitly.
Sculpture historian Herbert Read, writing of the Venus of Willendorf in 1964, avers that the female figure 'may seem grotesque' by 'our' standard of beauty but, he claims without reference or statistical proof, similar human proportions ‘occur among pygmies and other African tribes today' (Read, The Art of Sculpture, 1964, 28). The unreflecting colonial and racist mindset that produces a conflation of present-day Africans with prehistoric artefacts remains shocking when encountered in the pages of a putatively formalist, modernist and scholarly account of sculpture.
I don't want to fall into Kenneth Clark and Herbert Read’s trap of equating reality with representation. In sculptural terms, thin-ness is scaffolding, convexity and cylinders; fatness is concavity and spheres. A sculptor may be taken with convexity (Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Alberto Giacometti, Germaine Richier) or with concavity (Aristide Maillol, Henri Laurens, Louise Stomps). German critics of the 1920s admired the rotundity of Maillol's figures. E.[rnst] C.[ollin], 1928 'Simply closed, rotund, his figures stand there.’ (Cited in Arie Hartog, Christoph Voll, 2007, 189 n.19). In 1927, Alfred Kuhn wrote of Christoph Voll's wooden sculpture: 'There is a fat woman. She is round, bulky, with immense cubic feeling, weighing heavily, one can't help thinking of stone.' (Kuhn in Cicerone 1927, 706). These critics used the notion of ‘fatness’ as part of a formalist sculpture vocabulary.
Nobody took up Kassay's non-formalist musings on the fatness of sculptures. She cites cultural history, a history that links her 1980s self to women’s preoccupations in the 1920s. Kassay quotes Colette's article 'Vollschlank oder dünn' (‘Full figure or thin’, in the popular women’s magazine, Die Dame). Kassay’s words continue to resonate today, and have informed my thinking about convex sculptures of female figures. I may write about those in another post.