Is she right or is she wrong

I've enjoyed this thread, it's so good to have been able to share different opinions without being targeted personally, as often happens on political discussions. I'm spending next weekend with someone I call "my arty farty friend" she's opened my eyes to so many cultural things over the past 35 years. We have completely different taste in artistic styles but we can spend very happy times together at galleries and exhibitions disagreeing over art.

L’Origine du Monde by Gustav Courbet is in the Musée d’Orsay. Seen by many people every day.

Grammaretto, so sorry 😂

I'm still visualising male and female buses which Grandmabatty's post put in my head 😂🤣

Its not to my personal taste (would not have it on my wall) but I dont have any intrinsic objection to it in a shop window.

Witzend I think it's the Courbet painting you are talking about. It's a wonderfully detailed painting, but you probably wouldn't show it to many people.

Jasmine Alicia Carter is the woman who uses menstrual blood.
She's quite celebratory about being a woman but also wants to lift taboos.

I just think it’s an advertising technique by a not very good artist.

Thank you Elegran

I wouldn't want a painting of menstruation on my wall, but I have seen in the city art gallery of modern art a very large painting of a naked and obese woman who was obviously of very, very low intelligence lying on a scruffy sofa with her legs apart, and a lecherous expression on her vacant face, in a parody of paintings like Manet's famous one of the beautiful courtesan Olympia reclining naked, waiting for a client, or of Titian's Venus of Urbino.

The reaction of the group being shown this painting on a tour of the gallery was one of disgust, and some said that it shouldn't be on show to the public. Yet when shown Olympia, they had accepted it as "Art".

The tour guide then explained the artist's motives in creating it. Both women are in approximately the same pose - but one elegantly, the other inelegantly. One is young and beautiful, the other older and ugly. One can make intelligent conversation, the other would be hard pushed to make any conversation at all. Yet they both portray women whose raison d'etre is the same - as sexual objects for men to lecher over and use. Naked women are Art with a capital A if the reason they are naked is disguised, but not if the disguise is dropped and the sordid reality revealed.

I wouldn't want this on my wall either, but in a public gallery, accompanied by text from the artist to interpret it, it is a reminder that admiring an "artistic" sexual nude but not a "disgusting" realistically sexual one is a form of cultural hypocrisy.

In the years before Manet exhibited Olympia, women in public paintings were usually shown fully dressed or coyly draped in diaphanous draperies. Olympia received reviews very similar to the comments on here about depicting menstrual blood. Nowadays nudes like Olympia are part of the art "establishment". The painting I saw was a progression to show a sexual nude "warts and all"

As a parallel, any mention of menstruation, particularly in mixed company, used to be taboo, but no longer is it mentioned only in euphemisms in private. I have not seen the picture referred to, but I imagine the artist probably means it in much the same way - as depicting female physical reality "warts and all"

Why would anyone use menstrual blood to paint a picture? Is she off her rocker as must anyone daft enough to buy one.

Allira are you a cross-stitch artist?

Esmay

Michelle Gaulthier puts a whole new slant on cross stitch .
I don't think that I'll be introducing her interpretation of vulvas or menstruation at my craft group .
By the time ,we've served tea and biscuits and threaded needles for the ladies , who are in their nineties ... I think that they'd find it a bit much .

The thing is, been there, done that, glad to see the back of it!!

Babs03

Well I dare say Tracey Emin’s cluttered and unmade bed would have raised a few eyebrows. Also Frida Kahlo’s depictions of her miscarriage. Art has always shocked and outraged people, but it is after all about self expression. If all art were the same how boring it would be and of course we would miss out on debates like this.

Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime, Turner's later paintings were despised by art critics, Rembrandt and Vermeer were not appreciated in their lifetime. IMO Art should provoke something other than "I'd be happy to have that on my wall" but that's just the way I think about it, I'm perfectly happy for others to think differently.

Esmay

Michelle Gaulthier puts a whole new slant on cross stitch .
I don't think that I'll be introducing her interpretation of vulvas or menstruation at my craft group .
By the time ,we've served tea and biscuits and threaded needles for the ladies , who are in their nineties ... I think that they'd find it a bit much .

I've a couple of cross stitch kits to attempt but none by her 😁xxxxxxxx

Michelle Gaulthier puts a whole new slant on cross stitch .
I don't think that I'll be introducing her interpretation of vulvas or menstruation at my craft group .
By the time ,we've served tea and biscuits and threaded needles for the ladies , who are in their nineties ... I think that they'd find it a bit much .

I love the bed.

Well I dare say Tracey Emin’s cluttered and unmade bed would have raised a few eyebrows. Also Frida Kahlo’s depictions of her miscarriage. Art has always shocked and outraged people, but it is after all about self expression. If all art were the same how boring it would be and of course we would miss out on debates like this.

We're an odd lot aren't we? Most of us will watch blood and guts violence on the TV yet find menstrual blood quite offensive even though it is a normal and natural part of being female. We'll queue up to view paintings like Caravaggio's 'The Beheading of St John the Baptist' and it's ilk but get upset by a pretty naive painting of a woman showing her vagina as if it's more acceptable to show the violence of decapitation and death than it is to show a body part still attached to it's owner.

rafichagran

I agree menstruation should not be a taboo subject, but I really do not want to see a painting of it, where would you hang the picture, I can't think of anywhere.
I really cannot get in the mindset of anyone who paints that stuff. I am not a prude, far from it, I just don't get anyone wanting to paint it.

I agree 100%. It’s ghastly and, like you, i can’t get into the head of the ‘artist’. If anyone in my family painted such an unpleasant picture I would be seriously worried!
When all’s said and done, this is a picture of blood coming out of a female’s va*ina! Why?? And I thought Tracey Emin’s unmade bed was bad!
Give me strength!

I agree menstruation should not be a taboo subject, but I really do not want to see a painting of it, where would you hang the picture, I can't think of anywhere.
I really cannot get in the mindset of anyone who paints that stuff. I am not a prude, far from it, I just don't get anyone wanting to paint it.

Dh and I watched a BBC art programme recently where a painting of the same graphic type was shown at the end - it was by a well known artist of IIRC the 19thC, but I forget his name.

Unlike this example, it was painted in a traditional style, though. As the presenter said, ‘A picture of where we all come from!’
Not that I’d want it on my wall!

Having just returned from Rome I'm afraid I have seen so many naked men and women either in statues or paintings, as I have said in an earlier post, I am not the slightest bit bothered by this one. Michelangelo did not concern himself with hiding genitalia when painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel although there were those who thought the nudity was inappropriate in the Pope's chapel! After Michelangelo's death the artist Daniele da Volterra was hired to cover up some of the genitals in The Last Judgement by adding fig leaves and loincloths, which earned him the nickname “Il Braghettone” (“The breeches maker”) but I'm pleased to say that most figures were left as Michelangelo (and nature) intended. However, I do find the painting by Lucien Freud of his daughter "Rose" very disturbing. It's not the quality of the painting nor the nudity that bothers me but the nature of the relationship and the context of the painting, knowing this, I would not wish to view it.

The best question so far is what would the reaction have been if a man had done that particular image and displayed it on the high street or if an unknown man had painted it on the side of a house.
It’s too late to ask that question now as ha been demonstrated.

(I couldn't open the reference NotSpagetti but found Michelle Gauthiers work by googling)