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The canon of Western art history provides a selection of artists that have supposedly made an 'original' contribution to stylistic innovation within the visual arts. Although a process of selection cannot be avoided, this procedure has resulted in a Eurocentric and patriarchal art canon. For example, the Western art canon consists of certain white male artists who are given exclusive authority and are often referred to as the 'fathers of art'. As the status of a 'father of art' pertains to the highest level of achievement within artistic creativity, I argue that this excellence in creativity is based on a gender specific criteria. This issue refers to the patrilineage within Western art history and how this father-son model, in a general sense, excludes women artists from the canon. Further, the very few women included in the art canon are not given the equivalent status as a 'father of art'. I address this patriarchal bias through focussing on the father/daughter relationship as a way of challenging the patrilineage within Western art history’s patrilineage. Through this process of intervention, I position the daughter an assertive figure who directly confronts the fathers of Western art. Within this confrontation, I emphasise that the daughter has an assertive identity that is also beyond the father. On this premise my paper is based on the argument that the application of a father/daughter model, within a metaphorical and mythological sense, is useful in subverting the father figures within Western art history. That is, I construct myself as the metaphorical and mythological daughter of the Dada artist, Marcel Duchamp and the Fluxus artist, Joseph Beuys. As an assertive daughter, I insert myself into the patriarchal framework surrounding these two canonical figures in order to decentre and subvert their authority and phallocentric art practice. It is important to note that both Duchamp and Beuys are addressed as case studies (not as individual arguments) that illustrate the patriarchal constructs of the art canon. Within this premise, I draw upon the female artists Sherrie Levine and Jana Sterbak who directly subvert Western father figures as examples of assertive daughter identities. Within this exploration of the assertive daughter identity, I discuss feminist psychoanalysis (particularly the 'object relations' theorist Nancy Chodorow and the French feminist, Luce Irigaray) in order to offer metaphorical representations of the assertive daughter. These metaphors also assist in subverting the gender (male) specific criteria for creativity under the 'law of the father'.

This study is about the artist Monica Sjoo’s (1938-2005) painting God giving birth (1968) that was accused of being blasphemous and obscene in the early 1970s. God giving birth could have had much in common with Niki de Saint-Phalle’s She – a cathedral (1966), both works suggesting a mother goddess image. The main difference however can be found in the fact that Monica Sjoo’s painting had connection to the women’s movement in the 1970s. Monica Sjoo’s artwork responded to other feminist artwork of that period. Among several feminist artists during the period about 1968-1985, an iconography was in use that focused on vulvar imagery, experience of childbirth and goddess images. In particulary the mother goddess was embraced. The female body in art was re-sacred and invested with meaning connected with women’s cycles of birth-death and rebirth and the earth as a mother goddess.

Artemisia Gentileschi and Caravaggio's Looking Glass is an ironic allusion to both the concave mirror and the biconvex lens. It was these simple objects, in colloquial terms a shaving mirror and a magnifying glass, which Artemisia Gentileschi and her father Orazio, learned from Caravaggio how to use to enhance the natural phenomenon of the camera obscura effect. Painting from a projection meant that Artemisia could achieve an extreme form of realism and detail in her work. This knowledge, which was of necessity kept hidden, spooked the Inquisition and also gave artists, who knew how to manipulate the technology, an extreme competitive edge over their rivals. This dissertation challenges the naive assumptions that have been made about Artemisia's working practices, effectively ignoring the strong causal links between art and science in Seicento Italian painting. Introducing the use of optical aids by Artemisia opens up her story to a whole new generation of scholarship. / Art History / M.A. (Art history)

Artemisia Gentileschi and Caravaggio's Looking Glass is an ironic allusion to both the concave mirror and the biconvex lens. It was these simple objects, in colloquial terms a shaving mirror and a magnifying glass, which Artemisia Gentileschi and her father Orazio, learned from Caravaggio how to use to enhance the natural phenomenon of the camera obscura effect. Painting from a projection meant that Artemisia could achieve an extreme form of realism and detail in her work. This knowledge, which was of necessity kept hidden, spooked the Inquisition and also gave artists, who knew how to manipulate the technology, an extreme competitive edge over their rivals. This dissertation challenges the naive assumptions that have been made about Artemisia's working practices, effectively ignoring the strong causal links between art and science in Seicento Italian painting. Introducing the use of optical aids by Artemisia opens up her story to a whole new generation of scholarship. / Art History / M.A. (Art history)

The luminous, famous and enigmatic The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries are timelss objects at the center of heated scholarly discussion. There are six tapestries, created circa 1480-1500 (figures 1 – 6), and were commissioned by the le Viste family of Lyon, whose heraldic arms appear in each tapestry. This paper seeks to connect the tapestries conceptually to contemporary courtly, feminine ideals, the image of woman in late fifteenth-century Paris, and most importantly to Christine de Pizan's writings, particularly City of Ladies and The Treasury of the City of Ladies, both written in 1405. Through her texts, Christine de Pizan (1363 – 1434) created a noble, dignified image of women that may have influenced the way viewers were intended to perceive The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries. While recent scholarly studies have connected the tapestries to contemporary texts, there has not been a discussion regarding Christine de Pizan's influential writings, their surrounding discourse, or the image of a woman as the visual embodiment of the le Viste family in connection to the tapestries. Specific passages in Christine's texts resemble motifs, objects, and underlying messages in The Lady and the Unicorn. While Christine's works may not have been the direct inspiration for the tapestries, both are a part of the visual and textual make-up of the abstracted feminine ideals that were circulating in Paris and France at large in the fifteenth century. The Lady and the Unicorn may also have had a didactic purpose similar to Christine's Treasury of the City of Ladies, displaying for the le Viste daughters through a visual medium the attributes of the ideal maiden. Exploring the cultural context in which The Lady and the Unicorn was created, specifically as it relates to women in society, the upper class, expectations for young maidens, visual and written moral messages for women and their artistic manifestations provides a new understanding of these exceptional tapestries.