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Pettinati-Longinotti
Betti Pettinati-Longinotti
Adviser, Tony Apesos
Group 1, Research Paper 3
October 20, 2010
My Uomini Famosi: Self- Analysis about choice of Subject, Medium and Style
As stated in my first research paper this semester, Claes Oldenburg’s manifesto, “I Am For
An Art”, a reading from Critical Theory I, has impacted my work by informing my direction
through out this semester. The process of writing a manifesto has assisted me in developing
concepts related to the strands of work, that I am exploring this semester for self-analysis and the
development of an artist statement (Fabozzi/Oldenburg 56). Within this paper, I would like to
focus on questions regarding my Art Heroes strand of work, also known as my Uomini Famosi:
Why Art Heroes connected to Uomini Famosi ? Why these ‘art heroes’ specifically?
Why glass and an impressionistic technique with murrini?
Differing from my prior investigation and references to Close and Esber, the
individuals whom I wish to study are less iconic within the popular world, therefore
initially less identifiable. Like the Uomini Famosi tradition of the Middle Ages, my
portraits are likely to raise these questions: Who are these people? Why are they being
portrayed and what are their contributions to the human race that substantiate their
portrayal?
Investigating Ayn Rand’s The Romantic Manifesto, she discusses a philosophy about
art within the contemporary world which resonates to my evolving artist statement. The
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dictionary definition Rand cites of “manifesto” is: a public declaration of intentions,
opinions, objectives or motives as one issued by a government, sovereign, or
organization. Rand clarifies her ‘manifesto’ is a statement of her informed philosophy,
and declaration of her personal objectives (Rand 7).
Adopting this thought frames my manifesto: An artist’s sense of life controls and
integrates her work, directing the innumerable choices she has to make, from the choice
of subject to the subtlest details of style. Two distinct, but interrelated, elements of a
work are the crucial means of projecting its sense of life: the subject and the style-
what an artist chooses to present and how she presents it. The subject of an artwork
expresses an artist’s view of her existence, while the style expresses a view of her
consciousness (Rand 50). Therefore my justification for choosing Art Heroes is to
project those artists that have fed my life as an artist and educator throughout my
career. My choice of using the medium of fused murrini impressionistically, expresses
my desire to form a hybrid technique for stained glass. I have used the term hybrid, to
explain the joining of two glass art techniques, which are centuries old, to create a new
art form. However, it should be noted that although the fused murrini was the primary
impetus for the thread of my Art Heroes, my Uomini Famosi, I have been exploring this
thread within other media, such as charcoal drawing and drawing/painting on glass with
vitreous paints.
My idea for working with my Art Heroes, as stated earlier this semester, developed
further to focus on my female art heroes out of a reaction to Critical Theory I and a
reading by art historian, Linda Nochlin. Women redefining themselves, their imagery,
and their place in history became a driving force of the emergence of feminist art theory
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in the 1960’s. Nochlin, in a groundbreaking 1969 essay,“Why Have Their Been No
Great Women Artists?” confronted the fact of women’s relative absence as producers of
art in the history of civilization. Nochlin was the first to raise the most significant
issues feminist art critics and scholars would address over the succeeding decades. That
history as a discipline has been biased, distorting and androcentric, and in the case of
art histories, deeply vested in the notion of creativity as the purview of the solitary,
sexual, male genius. That the demands of artmaking have been utterly incompatible
with the socially imposed demands of femininity, marriage, and motherhood and that
this incompatibility has been protected from within the establishment of art education
and patronage; and that woman’s overwhelming presence as object, rather than subject,
of art has masked her voice and reified it as mute sexuality and male ownership
(Johnson/ Oliver 12). It is because of this very point that I have begun with Faith
Ringgold for my first Art Hero portrait with murrini, as her life’s work has been
devoted to confronting these biases found in our history and culture to gender and race.
It is my intention through my works with my Uomini Famosi, to give another voice to their
voice, resounding their contributions. The next female Art Hero that I am celebrating is Käthe
Kollwitz (1867-1945). That is to say, I have completed a portrait of Kollwitz within a charcoal
drawing and painting on glass with vitreous paint, and in addition, hope to complete a murrini
portrait. Kollwitz whose countless studies and drawings were carried out as preparation for
prints, and she broke the mold for a woman artist of her time. For her, beauty was inseparable
from political and moral function. Her extraordinary achievement is relevant to a study of
women’s artistic capability (Greer 10).
Studying women artists over the centuries usually reveals their relationship to a
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contemporary male artist. In the history of art within Western civilization, however, you will
find then there is no female Leonardo, no female Titian, no female Poussin, but the reason for
that does not lie in the fact that women have wombs, that they can have babies, that their brains
are smaller, that they lack vigor, or that they are not sensual. The reason is simply that you
cannot make great artists out of egos that have been damaged, with wills that are defective, with
libidos that have been driven out of reach and energy diverted into neurotic channels. Western
art is in large measure neurotic, for the concept of personality which it demonstrates, is in many
ways anti-social, even psychotic, but the neurosis of the artist is of a very different kind from the
carefully cultured self-destructiveness of women. In the present time, we are seeing both art and
women are changing in ways that if we do not lose them, will bring us closer together (Greer
327).
A key reference for my female Art Heroes, my Uomino Famosi, is Judy Chicago’s The
Dinner Party (1975-79), which has long been thought of as the feminist art manifesto, par
excellence. The Dinner Party is one of the earliest and most ambitious discourses on the role of
women- and women artists- in history and in art. Establishing the fact of women’s historical
exclusion, it literally brings to light the forgotten names of significant women, and through the
use of metaphor, their forgotten achievements. The Dinner Party is a marker not only for the
history of art, but also for the history of feminist consciousness in the second half of the
twentieth century. Nevertheless, the characteristics of The Dinner Party as single-mindedly
feminist in implication has obscured multiple referential layers that usually make up the most
significant works of art. This includes references to other artworks, and especially, concepts
which aspire to spiritual significance. An interlace of Christian and Jewish religious ideas
comprise several of The Dinner Party’s sources, and the Jewish concept of tikkum olam- healing
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the world- ultimately emerges as the point and purpose of the work. This broadens the scope in
its feminist intent, and marks The Dinner Party as among the few works in modern times to
redress and redefine ‘religiosity’ in art (Johnson/Oliver 89).
This has serious implications to my work in glass, as the visual associations to stained
glass, icons of the saints/ the heroes of the church have a tradition imbedded still within church
art and architecture to today. What I am attempting to do hinges on a religious art aesthetic but
redefining within the secular world.
Stained glass was not a Gothic invention, but is almost always synonymous with Gothic
art and architecture. Stained glass generally differs from other two dimensional art forms
utilizing glass or paint within church architecture, as they do not conceal the wall space, they
replace them. These windows transmit rather than reflect light, transforming the natural light.
Abbot Suger in his key text on Gothic art and architecture, called this colored light as, lux nova
and with his contemporary, Hugh of Saint Victor, commented on the special mystical quality of
stained glass, and referred to these as the Holy Scriptures, since their brilliance lets the splendor
of the True Light pass into the church, enlightening those inside (Panofsky/ Suger 73-75).
As an artist/ designer of numerous ecclesiastical installations over the years, and mutually
invested as a believer, I gravitate to Suger’s manifesto on stained glass. Within the guise of the
contemporary art world, stained glass has been held within a precarious position. To this day the
pedagogy of stained glass primarily prevails within the larger studio with apprenticeship to the
varied processes that entail the completion of a window. Stained glass has not fit in well to the
studio glass movement initiated by one of my Art Heroes, Harvey Littleton in the 1960s. It
seems within today’s art culture at-large, for a medium that is supposed to be deemed so
heavenly, it’s held in some kind of limbo or purgatory.
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Bibliography
Fabozzi, Paul F. Artists, Critics, Context . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall,
2001. Print.
Fernie, Eric, ed. Art History and Its Methods. London: Phaedon Press Limited, 1995. Print.
Greer, Germaine. The Obstacle Race. 1979. New York: Farrar,Straus, Giroux,1979. Print.
Johnson, Deborah, and Wendy Oliver, eds. Women Making Art . New York:Peter Lang Publishing, 2001. Print.
Joost-Gaugier, Chritiane L. "A Rediscovered Series of Uomini Famosi from
Quattrocentro Venice." The Art Bulletin 58.2 June (1976): 184-105.College Art Association. Web. 26 June 2010.
Nochlin, Linda. "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" ARTnews. January 1971: 22-39.
Panofsky, Erwin . Abbot Suger. On the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its Art Treasures. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979, 73-75. Print.
Rand, Ayn. The Romantic Manifesto: Art and Sense of Life. Cleveland, Oh: The World Publishing Company, 1969. Print.
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