Painting Over Gender

Painting Over Gender

Painting Over Gender is a book series that featured the history and work of three female painters from different centuries. It was essential that each book jacket incorporated elements of the painter’s work while articulating how social perception of gender and sexuality influenced them. To create a cohesive visual narrative of the series, each book had a photomontage scene created from the painter’s work. The painter’s gender was significant to their place in art history which became a repeating element in the series represented as the symbol of female on the back cover.

The design for the book series was inspired photomontages by the Dada artist Hannah Hoch, who chose the medium of photomontage to express her criticism of the male response to a rise in feminism in Germany during the early nineteenth century. The first two book covers both featured a human figure comprised of fragments from paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi and Angelica Kauffman. However, Rosa Bonheur’s subject matter was predominantly animals. The quote “The fact is, in the way of males, I like only the bulls that I paint,” directed the decision to cover up the faces of the male figures in the photomontage with the heads of animals. The female symbol on the back cover of The Life & Work of Rosa Bonheur is broken to illustrate how Bonheur pursued a drastically different lifestyle from the gender norms of the nineteenth century.

Art historian, Maud Lavin has researched and wrote about female artists and how gender roles influence their work through visual and historical analysis. The choice of deconstruction and reinterpretation of the paintings served as a visual articulation of the authors’ intended thesis. The title of the series, Painting Over Gender further served the claim that the skill and work of each artist surpassed the limitations set for their gender by a patriarchal society.