Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie (26.1985)

Julia Henshaw

IMAGES OF WOMEN IN POLISH SYMBOLIST ART

The images of women that abound in European art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries speak of the fantasies and fears of the artists who created them: middle-class men
living in a world whose values and expectations were changing1. That era marks the beginning
of the „modern” world in which we live. In the late twentieth century we live as heirs to that
world: after all, one hundred years of human history can easily be spanned by three generations.
The standards by which our grandparents lived may have been repeatedly challenged and changed
but they are not entirely forgotten.

The nineteenth century was a time when women’s perception of their place in the world
began to change drastically. It is easy to document the origins of the first wave of feminism in
the late eighteenth century. At the time of the French Revolution, with its characteristically
male chauvinist cry of „liberté, égalité, fraternité,” the Declaration of the Rights of Man was
soon followed by the publication of the Declaration of the Rights of Women by the feminist
Olympe de Gouges. In the following year, 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft publishes A Vindication
of the Rights of Women in London. Forward-looking European social critics took up the challenge
of fighting for a more equal place in society for women: this was the tone of such early feminist
activists and theorists as Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Tubman in the United States and
Henrik Ibsen, Friedrich Engels, and August Bebel in Europe. By the last decade of the nineteenth
century, although equality was still far from being accomplished, there was a sufficient movement
away from the traditional roles of wife and mother as being the only ones open to women to
cause men living in the increasingly urbanized industrialized world to be uncomfortable. „Women
outside their traditional, imposed roles appeared as a threat to them (men), as an evil force
promising to destroy established institutions, rights, and priviledges”2. As women began to join
the labor force in greater numbers, and with women demanding educational opportunities as
well as legal and political rights, it seems apparent that men began to realize that they were
losing some portion of their long-established power over the „weaker sex.”

The fear that men consciously or subconsciously felt becomes quite obvious when one looks
at images of women in late nineteenth-century art: these male artists seem most consistently to
have perceived women as alien creatures, and very often dangerous ones. At times this strange
„otherness” is projected in a blatantly negative, hostile image — such as those of the deadly
chimera or femme fatale — at other times the male artist’s animosity and gynophobia leads him

1. Carol Duncan, „Virility and Domination in Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting”, in Feminism and Art History, N. Brou-
de and M. Garrard, eds., New York, 1982, p. 244.

2, Reinhold Heller, „Some Observations Concerning Grim Ladies, Dominating Women, and Frightened Men around 1900,”
in The Earthly Chimera and the Femme Fatale, exh. cat., Chicago, 1981, p. 9.

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