Museum Visit

Today my boyfriend and I went to the Saint Louis Art Museum in order to observe how women are represented through various mediums. The first room we walked into contained mainly religious images and I noticed immediately that women were either painted as saints (the Virgin Mary's image was in great abundance) or painted as maternal figures. In the first picture, I am standing next to a woman breastfeeding her two children, which was a common theme in the religious artwork. The next section we entered was much more abstract and the last two pictures both came from this particular section of the museum. Much of the women in this section were mostly portrayed as nude and some even in a suggestive stance with sexual connotations. The middle painting caught my eye because it contains many naked women seemingly waiting to serve the male figure (who is also nude) in the picture. The painting is entitled "The Fire" 1945, and the plague under the work states, "In this unsettling scene, a group of women advance toward a reclining and androgynous figure in the center of the composition."
I thought this was very pertinent to our class for I feel as though the painting contains patriarchal values and conveys the inferiority women have faced in the hands of men for centuries. The last picture I chose because it is just one example of the many suggestive paintings we saw. This abstract is entitled "Standing Nude" and the positioning of the woman's body, specifically her hands, exudes a rather suggestive and promiscuous message to the observers of the painting. Overall, I really enjoyed looking at all the art and it was interesting to see how the perception of women changed according to time period as well as the mode of the art.