The Return To Reality: Carole Feuerman’s Feminist Art by Donald Kuspit

Goddess, 2006, Oil on Resin, 51 x 21 x 32 (inches).

By DONALD KUSPIT, February 2023

There is a path that leads back from phantasy to reality, that is, of art….an ego thus educated has become ‘reasonable,’ it no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality principle, which also, at bottom, seeks to obtain pleasure, but pleasure which is assured through taking account of reality, even though it is pleasure postponed and diminished.                                 

-- Sigmund Freud, “Introductory Lectures”(1)

Are we here dealing with still another separate line of development, the development of the individual’s capacity to enjoy a self-contained (creative) aloneness…which is not loneliness?                                      

-- Heinz Kohut, “Remarks About the Formation of the Self”(2) 

Some Art Historical Background

In November 1910 the English critic and art historian Roger Fry organized the exhibition “Manet and the Post-Impressionists“ in London, signaling that art had changed—art had become modern, and with that “mad,” as the public thought, and “foreign,” for it was French rather than English, and with that intelligible, stable, and sensible rather than unintelligible, unstable, and “experimental,” as the English art historian Ernst Gombrich said modern art is.  Its alienness signaled its turn inward, toward feeling, as Fry said, and away from fact, as he emphasized.  The expression of subjectivity became more important than the representation of reality—objectivity.  “The subjective turn, in which we come to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths,” as the philosopher Charles Taylor writes, was not simply a deliberate turn away from classicism to romanticism, as he remarks, but more insidiously an expression of alienation and anomie, ideas that became intellectually au courant more or less at the time art became modern, not to say avant-garde.  Its much-noted individualism is the result of what the sociologist Émile Durkheim called the weakening of collective consciousness in modernity.  Its pursuit of what Baudelaire called “the sensation of the new” —the new quickly becoming the old and stale, the pursuit of the new becomes endless, thus the endless inventiveness of modern art, dead-ending in the development of what the modernist critic Clement Greenberg called “novelty art,” the belief that “anything goes” so long as it is “sensational”—is symptomatic of what Durkheim called the breakdown of standards and values in modern society. 

Alluding to Fry’s exhibition, his friend Virginia Woolf, who wrote his biography, declared that “On or about December 1910 human character changed.”  Like Ezra Pound, she believed that “artists are the antennae of the human race,” and the works of the artists in the exhibition signaled that the human race had changed, whether for the better or worse was unclear.  Woolf was convinced that Fry was right in thinking that the works in the exhibition signaled that people were becoming more absorbed in their personal feelings than interested in public facts—they were turning inward rather than looking outward.  People were turning away from consciousness toward the unconscious.  In unconscious phantasy facts--external reality--serve as symbols of feelings--internal reality.  This was gospel for the Symbolists and the Surrealists who followed in their footsteps, and in psychoanalytic dream theory.  Virginia Woolf, a pioneer in stream of consciousness novels, so-called psychological realism, was clearly obsessed with her own feelings and phantasies, in an attempt to psychoanalyze herself.  She and her husband Leonard Woolf were acutely aware of psychoanalysis, at the time an innovative theory of the subject—they published the first English edition of all of Sigmund Freud’s works in their Hogarth Press.   But it was not simply because of intellectual curiosity that led her to psychoanalysis.  She knew she was mad, knew that what she called the “lava of madness” was the tainted soil in which her art grew.  She had three mental breakdowns, which hospitalized her, and attempted suicide three times, finally succeeding the third time, drowning herself in the water of life rather than buried under the lava of madness.  Psychiatry didn’t help, but writing was a stay against the inevitable.  It was a bandage on a wounded psyche, but it was not a cure.  It remained so in the last letter to her husband, where she writes she intends to commit suicide.  In an unstoppable stream of consciousness, she describes her feelings as the characters in her novels do, treating herself as one of them, acknowledging that they are all symbols of herself.  It is clear from the letter that her feelings mattered to her more than his.  Self-absorbed to the end, she lost sight of reality.  

Survival of Serena, 2017, Bronze, 43 x 81 x 36 (inches).

It has been thought that Woolf’s emotional problems began when she was continually sexually abused by her older half-brother when she was a child.  It is said to be one of the reasons she became an ardent feminist, arguing for the equality of the sexes, and that women have the same rights as men.  In the 1980s Woolf inspired the feminist pursuit of equal rights in the United States.  Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” written in 1929, has become a classic of feminist literature.  I will argue that Feuerman’s art is quintessentially feminist, not because her triumphant female figures signify that women are now equal to men in society, which traditional feminism argued, but because they affirm that women are inherently--biologically--superior to men, as the new feminism argues.  The anthropologist Ashley Montagu convincingly argues this in “The Natural Superiority of Women.”  The statistical fact that women live longer than men confirms this.  The extraordinary fitness of Feuerman’s female swimmers indicates as much.  They are classically perfect:  “sound minds in sound bodies,” to allude to Aristotle’s idea of a healthy human being.  I am suggesting that Feuerman’s art is classical in spirit if not in form, in that she paradoxically idealizes the female figure, suggesting that her female swimmers spring from the sea as Aphrodite did, by making her beautiful body all too real--hyperreal.  But Aphrodite was the goddess of love, passively waiting for Hercules, the goddess of war.  She needs a strong man to confirm that she is a woman, while Feuerman’s strong women stand alone, however active, as a swimmer is.  Their raison d’etre is not to make love, but to be themselves.  They are autonomous.  They are calm and collected rather than seductively displaying their bodies.  They exist to be themselves, not to serve men.  To hyperrealize the female figure is to idolize her, and with that to turn her into what Goethe called “the eternal feminine.”  She leads men, as he said, rather than follows them.               

Woolf’s cathartic stream of consciousness style is clearly derived from free association in psychoanalytic therapy.  “Only in the past does one have complete emotions,” she wrote, and psychoanalysis deals with the past.  Her characters are clearly what psychoanalysts call her internal objects—externalized and socialized, and with that not entirely imaginative, for many of them are based on people she had serious relationships with, sometimes sexual, for she had affairs with women as well as men, apart from her relationship with her husband, “the dirty Jew,” as she called him, whom she said she loved, however often she betrayed him.  Virginia Woolf was a sick woman, and shared the public’s view that modern art was sick, which is why Fry’s exhibition of modern art inspired her own art.  She was 28 when Fry’s display of phantastic modern art opened, and gave her permission to make her own phantastic modern art, as emotionally expressive and formally innovative, personal and experimental, as the modern French art that Fry exhibited, in contrast to traditional art, impersonal however much it conveys the personality of the artist.  

Chrysalis, 2017, Lacquer on Epoxy with Crystals, 33 x 18 x 36 (inches).

In 1912, almost coincidental with Fry’s exhibition, Kandinsky published “Concerning The Spiritual in Art, Painting in Particular,” declaring that “objectness, the depiction of objects,” was “discredited in art,” the expression of “inner life”—“feeling”—all that mattered.  The “inner element” of “pure art,” as he called it in 1914, is “the emotion of the artist’s soul.”  It is the “abstract content” of the work of art.  Its “form” is the “material expression of this abstract content.”  It is not the form of an object—an impure form because it defines and describes an object--but a form that has aesthetic autonomy, that is, exists in and for itself rather than to objectify some material.  Determined to awaken from “the nightmare of materialism,” and convinced that art is “one of the mightiest elements” in “the spiritual life,” and “can divine the internal truth,” the artist need not “seek the ‘inner’ by way of the ‘outer’” but can find it in “color and form” alone.  Thus the importance of what he calls “the psychological working of color” and his remark that “feelings are the parallels of color” and, finally, that the work of art will be judged by the quality of feeling in it.  

Like Kandinsky, for Picasso the expression of feeling—the more disturbing the better, like the anxiety Kandinsky’s apocalyptic abstractions enact (they are the first action paintings)—is the be-all and end-all of art.  Kandinsky’s non-objective works and Picasso’s Cubist works—anti-object if not non-objective--are the seminal works of modernism.  Cubist works have their own apocalyptic and fantastic aspects, and are also abstract and anxious, implicitly rather than overtly, as Kandinsky’s abstract phantasies are.  If apocalypse means total destruction, then Picasso and Kandinsky both destroy objects, Picasso leaving their remains scattered on the canvas, Kandinsky dissolving them into oblivion.  Picasso’s dissection of objects reduces them to shallow signifiers.  Detached from the reality they are meant to represent they become meaningless.  Kandinsky’s Abstract Expressionism and Picasso’s Cubism are the seminal arts of the Age of Anxiety.  As Picasso said, “Cézanne would never have interested me a bit if he had lived and thought like Jacques Emile Blanche, even if the apple he painted had been ten times as beautiful.  What forces our interest is Cézanne’s anxiety—that’s Cézanne’s lesson; the torments of Van Gogh—that is the actual drama of the man.  The rest is a sham.”  For Picasso the rest is classical art, art that idealizes the human figure rather than distorts it to dramatize a feeling, as Picasso does in such surrealist works as Woman with Flower, 1932, mocking her body by turning it into a ludicrous phantasy.  Woman becomes an absurd figure in them, indicating Picasso’s patriarchal misogyny, already evident in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 and such nihilistic works as Ma Jolie, 1912.  They are phantasies that seem to come straight out of his unconscious like dreams, not to say nightmares--anxiety dreams, as the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones notes.  Picasso’s use and abuse of woman’s body in his art also suggests his patriarchal attitude to her.  It is also implicit in the patriarchal representation of inert odalisques, the female odalisque a slave or concubine in a harem ruled by a man.  She may be a servant, but she exists to serve him sexually.  The more passive and beautiful she is, the more desirable she is, for it indicates that she will not resist his advances.  The many passive odalisques—beautiful Venuses--painted by male artists makes the point clear.

The argument of this essay is two-fold:  that Carole Feuerman’s depiction of the female figure is implicitly a feminist response to and rejection of the patriarchal depiction of young women as mindless passive sex objects, and that Feuerman is the leader in the return to reality from surreality, to perception from phantasy, to objectivity from nonobjectivity, parallel to the so-called “return to order” that developed in France after the first world war.  Just as it rejected the anarchic, “insane” avant-garde art that developed in Paris before the first world war and found inspiration in classical art, so the “return to reality” rejects the anarchic, “insane” expressionist painting that developed in New York after the second world war and finds inspiration in photographic realism--a two-dimensional realism that Hyperrealism transformed into three-dimensional realism, sculpture giving a completer, truer sense of objective reality than photography.  It is not only mimesis carried to an extreme, but mimesis perfected. The human figure is not the flat plane to which a photograph reduces it, but an object that occupies space, indicating that Hyperrealist sculpture is consummately realistic rather than nominally realistic, as photography is.  Photography became more important than painting in the 20^th century—critics have said it is the modern art form par excellence, as distinct from painting, the traditional art form par excellence—suggesting that Hyperrealism is the postmodern art form par excellence, for it is correlate with reality rather than simply refers to it, as photography does.  Hyperrealism does not simply signify reality but makes it epiphanically manifest.  However empirically precise, it is a visionary art, uncannily insightful as well as reliably descriptive.  Hyperrealistic sculpture is not only more directly engaging than photorealistic painting, but more aesthetically sophisticated, as Feuerman’s hyperrealistic sculptures make clear.  

On a par with the spectator’s body, for it is more or less the same size and looks more or less the same and inhabits the same space, the hyperrealistic body engages the spectator emotionally by reason of its uncanny familiarity even as the spectator tries to understand its construction, clearly ingenious, as its detail indicates.  It becomes a kind of mirror of the spectator’s soul, for he or she projects himself or herself into it, unconsciously identifying with the individual inhabiting the body.  Looking at Feuerman’s female figures, with their emotions visible on their faces, but not distorting their bodies for expressive effect, as they do in modernist art, the female spectator cannot help thinking of her body and emotions.  I think Feuerman’s female figures are meant for the female spectator, but the male spectator can find his emotions in their faces, for emotions are universal.  More broadly, they seem to mirror is innermost self, for Feuerman’s female figures come into their own as autonomous introspective selves, independently of their gender.  Looking at the body and face of any one of them—and they’re all implicitly autobiographical, so that one is looking at the body and into the soul of Feuerman--and with that internalizing her, the spectator becomes aware of his or her own body and individuality, for it is as individual as he or she is, and seems to mirror himself or herself, forcing him or her back on himself or herself, compelling him or her to become self-reflective.  In sharp contrast, the photograph keeps the spectator at a safe distance, and with that inhibits insight, not to say self-reflection.  Hyperrealistic sculpture is more intimate than realistic photography, and as such more engaging, less distancing.       

New York abstract expressionism is epitomized by Jackson Pollock’s paintings.  Overtly nihilistic as Cubism was covertly nihilistic—their advocate Clement Greenberg said they carried Cubism’s emphasis on the material medium at the expense of the object (nominally) represented or suggested to an extreme, indicating that Cubism was implicitly nihilistic or, as Picasso said, destructive—they were militantly non-objective.  Braque makes the point clearly when he writes “I couldn’t portray a woman in all her natural loveliness…I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume of line, of mass, of weight.”  This suggests that the figure is no longer a viable subject matter for art, as Greenberg argued.  It also suggests that “abstract” beauty involves the repression, not to say denial, of woman’s “natural loveliness,” and with that unconscious hatred of woman.  Just as the return to order involved a return to the reality of the figure, so Feuerman’s art involves a return to the reality of the figure—to the reality of woman’s body, in repudiation of Braque’s reduction—mistreatment—of it to a sum of geometrical fragments, rubble reducible to mathematical terms, adding up to nothing recognizably human let alone lovable.  Braque in fact described his art as “objects shattered into fragments,” indicating that it is, however unwittingly—unconsciously--an expression of what psychoanalysts call “fragmented subjectivity,” perhaps involving psychosexual repression, as his remarks about the female figure suggest.  He was certainly not like the irrepressibly sexual Picasso with whom he developed Cubism.  To turn a woman’s naked body into an abstraction, and with that to make it ugly and unlovable, is to repress one’s desire for her—to sacrifice one’s sexuality on the altar of art—and perhaps to suggest that one is incapable of love.  It certainly suggests a lack of libido.  Cubism was the beginning of the modern rejection of “the all too human” that the critic Clement Greenberg, an advocate of avant-garde art, said was necessary if art was to become ascetically pure and with that to “progress,” to where less and less clear, unless involuted and convoluted expression(ism) is progressive.  Feuerman restores what the misogynist Braque and Picasso destroyed—showed that woman was not only naturally lovely, as Braque said, but with a will of her own, a “will to power,” as her swimmers make clear.  

Carol Feuerman’s confrontational realism—her so-called hyperrealism--is a repudiation of abstraction in all its modes—gestural or geometrical, to use Alfred Barr’s distinction.  Her hyperrealism implies that abstract art has become decadent, if not at the end of its creative life.  It has become wallpaper, as the Marxist philosopher Max Horkheimer has said.  Hyperrealism is the new creative frontier.  Feuerman is the only woman artist in the history of art who has been credited with being the innovative initiator of a movement and style, a credit she shares with Duane Hanson and John De Andrea.  But where their Hyperrealism—Maximalist Realism, as it can be called, in acknowledgement of the art historian Robert Pincus-Witten’s concept of Maximalism as an “aesthetic of excess,” involving the “elaboration of detail,” sometimes to a baroque extreme, in contrast to Minimalism, the view that “less is more,” in which formalist abstraction dead-ended—is masculinist, her Hyperrealism is feminist.  That is, where De Andrea’s and Hanson’s figures, whether female or male, are peculiarly unemotional, a certain stoic acceptance of their lot in life regarded as masculinist since Marcus Aurelius, Feuerman’s figures—all female—are conspicuously emotional.  They have an inner life; resonate existentially; they are not matter-of-factly given.  In contrast, the feelings of De Andrea’s and Hanson’s figures are fixed on their faces like masks.  They are puppets rather than living beings.  The works of De Andrea and Hanson are little theatre stage sets, a sort of tableaux vivant of a social scene.  Their figures are peculiarly dehumanized and devitalized, whereas Feuerman’s females are all too human and alive, indeed rebelliously human and vital, for their autonomy indicates they refuse to accept the socially assigned role of “second sex,” that is, secondary to men, the first not to say most important, superior sex in patriarchal society.        

Hyperrealism, whether masculinist or feminist, is of major art historical importance, because it signals, with decisive insistence and convincing authority, that the imaginative phantasy of so-called advanced art is at an end.  It has exhausted the expressive and aesthetic possibilities that began with Odilon Redon’s art, “a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium,” as the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans famously wrote in Against The Grain, 1884.  “The artist must wait upon the unconscious,” Redon declared.  Art has been doing so ever since, until the unconscious ran out of creative steam, exhausted its creative potential, as it finally did with Jackson Pollock’s paintings, supposedly a direct expression of the unconscious, as he said.  As his so-called “all-over paintings” make clear, the result of blind, mindless indulgence in the unconscious is chaos, suggesting the language of the dream the unconscious spoke—or rather muttered with increasing incoherence—had become pointless gibberish, “mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless,” as the critic Robert Coates wrote.  It had become “a sound and fury signaling nothing,” he added, quoting Shakespeare.  What began with the lithographs in Redon’s “In The Dream,” 1879 ends in Pollock’s painting Portrait and a Dream, 1953, the split between nightmarish chaos and a damaged, distorted face epitomizing Pollock’s lifelong mental illness and alcoholism.  It seems that Pollock was fated to die in an automobile accident while drunk in 1956.  Four years of psychoanalytic treatment (1938-1942) did him little emotional good.  I dwell on Pollock because his art shows the insane results of submissive indulgence in the unconscious.  It confirms Nietzsche’s observation:  “If you look into the abyss the abyss will look into you.”  Strange as it may seem to say so, Pollock’s art has its place in the collection of psychopathological art of the insane that the German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn organized in 1922.  “It immediately became ‘the Bible of the Surrealists’,” reminding us that Pollock was profoundly influenced by Picasso’s Surrealist works, which he saw in an exhibition of Picasso’s art in 1939—when Pollock was in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.  Pollock’s art is the endgame of modernist abstraction, and like all endgames an announcement of its decadence.

Splash, 2008, Oil on Resin, 15 x 12 x 5 (inches).

Virtually all the movements of modern art, from Expressionism through Surrealism were influenced by Redon’s art.  Even what Kandinsky called his “experiments in the realm of feeling” have their precedent in Redon.  He embraced romanticism, a “mode of feeling” that had nothing to do with “choice of subjects” or “exact truth,” as Baudelaire said.  Hyperrealism shows that they have once again become important—all-important, if high art is to have a future.  For the romantic Baudelaire “hallucination” and “hysteria” are inseparable from artistic creativity.  Hallucination and hysteria have had their insane day, indicating that it is time to return to observation and sanity—to make art that adopts the reality principle, attends to the external world, which Hyperrealism does with observational persistence, for there is finally little pleasure in insanity.  Hyperrealism is an ego art, as its exploration of the egos of the figures it represents indicates, rather than an id art, as modern art tends to be, blindly searching for pleasure in raw expression or refined phantasy, often destroying the object of its desire in the process, as the distortions and contortions of Expressionism and Surrealism, carried to a nihilistic extreme in Pollock’s art, indicate.  Pollock’s art does not advance art but destroys it.  One wonders why an art that is emotionally and cognitively regressive—blindly instinctive--can be called “advanced” let alone “modern.”  

It has been said that the avant-garde revolution that changed art—it began with romanticism and climaxed in abstract expressionism—was a defensive response to the dehumanizing industrial revolution that changed society.  It created what has come to be called the technological society.  As the social historian Lewis Mumford wrote, machines are more important than human beings in it, all the more so because human beings have become completely dependent on machines, indeed, unable to survive without them.  The restoration of realism in Hyperrealism suggests that it is possible to be human in the technological society, even if it sometimes make one feel a machine—a robot, like De Andrea’s and Hanson’s figures seem to be, going through the motion without feeling anything, as their estranging passivity suggests.  But Feuerman’s figures are flexible and alive, as their bodies and emotions show, and as such not robots, but uncannily human, suggesting that hers is a new kind of humanistic art, unlike the old Renaissance kind, and as such totally against the grain of what the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset called the dehumanization of art in modernity.    

With the advent of Hyperrealism, it seems clear that art has decisively turned away from phantasy towards reality, from the irrational towards reason, from the monstrous to the civilized, from the unconscious to the unconscious.  Freud famously said that he was more interested in the consciousness with which Dali created his art than his unconscious, which was more understandable and predictable than his consciousness.  Dali’s art dwelled on the same old irrational dreams that everyone had, but his consciously made paintings only he could make indicated that he was quite rational—that he had an ego not only an id.  “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” 1797-1799 Goya’s famous etching declared; Hyperrealism shows that art has become reasonable again—no longer monstrous.  Hyperrealistic figures are not monsters, not hallucinations, not nightmares--not victims of the unconscious--but fully conscious, reasonable, socialized human beings.  Having egos, they are capable of dealing with the demands of reality.  They no longer seek pleasure in phantasy, but selfhood in reality.  They hold their own—have staying power, endure and even flourish--in whatever situation they find themselves in rather than escape it in phantasy.  Hanson’s people seem to belong in what the sociologist David Riesman called “the lonely crowd,” De Andrea’s naked females seem like models passively waiting to be dressed, Feuerman’s females are long-distance swimmers in the sea of life.  They’re all grounded in reality rather than unrealistic.  They’re not asleep but fully awake.  All of her figures are particular individuals with distinct personalities and an inner life, unlike Redon’s figures, all fantastic appearance with no purposeful reality.  

    Feuerman’s Self-Realization:  Individuation Through Art                        

The aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand and the suggestive power of primordial images on the other….Individuation then is nothing but ego-centredness….Individuation is an heroic task.                                                                                                                                                                                    Carl Jung, “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious”(3) 

Among the many differences between Feuerman’s hyperrealism and the hyperrealism of Hanson and De Andrea the crucial difference is that her hyperrealism serves a personal end, theirs serves a social end.  Their hyperrealism deals with Jung’s persona, “the social face the individual presents to the world.”  Their figures have a social face that depersonalizes and deindividualizes them, especially because their faces all seem to have the same fixed expression.  It makes them impersonal to the extent that they seem to have no personality.  They are anonymous, nameless, unlike Feuerman’s figures, who are implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, Feuerman herself--Feuerman as a particular individual determined to be herself, or rather determined to come into her own as a self, go through the process of becoming an autonomous self, withdrawing from society into herself.  All one has to do is to look at a photograph of Feuerman as a healthy young woman in a bathing suit to realize that all the healthy young women in bathing suits that her art repeatedly depicts are stand-ins for Feuerman.  

Wearing a bathing suit rather than a dress Feuerman’s young females have divested themselves of what is in effect the social face of a respectable woman—certainly the item of clothing conventionally associated with a woman, announces the presence of a woman, indicates that person wearing it is not a man, who usually wears pants not dresses.  To go around in a bathing suit, as Feuerman shows women—all implicitly herself, as I want to emphasize—is to deny that she is another ordinary woman, however much her curved body and full bosom make it clear that she is a woman, and a very fit, beautiful woman.  Hers is not another face in the crowd, but the face of a person who has left the crowd—who has become an individual.  She shows the method she uses to divest herself of her persona—she does so by turning inward and with that away from the everyday world—from society.  Her art seems social, but it is highly personal, not to say introspective.  Feuerman seems to be saying that it is necessary to turn away from society—in a sense reject it to become what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott calls a True Self rather than a False Self— to come into one’s own as an individual rather than spend one’s life as a cog in a social machine.  Hers is a radically subjective hyperrealism, more particularly a feminist hyperrealism in which woman’s body—implicitly Feuerman’s, to repeat myself--becomes the screen on which her emotions are acted out, not to say worked through, as psychoanalysts would say.  

De Andrea’s hyperrealism is an objective hyperrealism, in which a naked young woman—stereotypically attractive, but emotionally vacuous—is matter-of-factly given.  Banally obvious, she seems purposeless.  Hanson’s hyperrealism is socially critical, the human figure inseparable from its social situation, which is the real theme of the work, not the body.  Their works are executed with a certain artistry, but with no aesthetic sensibility, in contrast to Feuerman’s works, which are aesthetically remarkable, at least to my eye.  Often richly colored and subtly formed, they have sensory appeal.  They are aesthetic phenomena in themselves, works in which forms and colors have aesthetic appeal and abstract autonomy apart from the all too human emotional content represented.  Hyperrealism has been said to be a postmodernist art, in that it is representational rather than abstract, as modernist art is.  Clement Greenberg, the doyen of modernist criticism, an advocate of abstraction as the be-all and end-all of art, said it was no longer possible to paint a figure in modernist times, but Feuerman’s female figures are ingeniously, subtly abstract, all the more so when they are fragments, or compilations of fragments, seemingly of lost masterpieces, but masterpieces in themselves.  They are not “objects shattered into fragments,” as Braque said his Cubist works are, but have what he called “the beauty of volume, of mass, of weight” that makes them abstract, even if their volume, mass, weight is that of the human body—the beautiful female figure—rather than purely mathematical.  They are not formal things in themselves, as they are in Cubist abstractions, but inform objects, as they do in representational painting.  In Feuerman’s art they convey the vitality of the female body rather than converge in what has come to be called a transcendental abstraction.        

Feuerman’s works are modernist—ironically modernist--to the extent they read as abstractions—the partial figures clearly do.  They are deeply modernist in that they make the “subjective turn,” to recall Charles Taylor’s words, but Feuerman finds sanity in the “inner depths” not insanity, as Virginia Woolf did.  Not everyday sanity, the sanity that permits one to function in the everyday world, without being driven mad by its insanity—“the war of all against all” that Thomas Hobbes spoke of—but rather the sanity that comes with autonomy, and finally the unshakeable sanity that comes  with what Kohut calls “creative aloneness.”  Feuerman’s art is about her achievement of creative aloneness—the imperturbable autonomy evident in her upright swimmers.  Virginia Woolf had to have a room of her own to turn inward, but Feuerman did so in public—openly rather than covertly.  Woolf’s room was a refuge from a world in which a woman was an inferior person, indeed, not even a person but a decorative object, at her best a beautiful object who existed to give men pleasure.  It was a sick room—a room in which she could write about her sickness, which finally turned into “a sickness unto death,” as Kierkegaard called it—depression that ended in suicide.  She rebelled against the patriarchal society in which she grew up but punished herself for rebelling against it by feeling bad about herself.  There is not the slightest hint of depression, let alone suffering, in Feuerman’s females, but rather the elation and joie de vivre that come from self-possession.  Feuerman’s females do not rebel against patriarchal society, and certainly do not feel bad about themselves, but stand apart from it, implicitly role models of humanity at its best, as idealized and self-possessed as classical figures are.  They are, in their own way, goddesses—modern goddesses; they certainly seem as untouchable and  invulnerable as the ancient goddesses.    

Work after work shows a healthy young woman with her eyes closed, in introspective communion with herself, whatever her situation, whether in public or private space, whether naked or clothed, if in a bathing suit that emphasizes her body, calls attention to it by outlining it while seemingly hiding it, as a dress would completely do.  Feuerman heightens its presence by covering it in a bathing suit that tightly clings to it.  The bathing suit is not the traditional veil that covers a woman’s face out of modesty, but indicative of her exhibitionistic pride in her body.  The art historian Kenneth Clark distinguished between the naked and nude female body, the former seductively inviting, the latter ideal and untouchable.  I think Feuerman’s females, however alluring their bodies, are ideal, perfect in and for themselves and as such peculiarly sacred, untouchable, as a goddess’s body is.  A dress that covers her body completely, unlike a bathing suit that confirms that it is perfect, would socialize her.  It would deny that she is the free independent spirit that her swimmer self indicates she is.  Clothing her body completely rather than highlighting it—for the bathing suit is in effect its aura—she would be unable to dive into the depths of the self.  A more conventional woman than Feuerman’s unconventional woman would never think of venturing there.  Feuerman’s swimmer, with her optimistic body, is the invigorating antidote to Woolf’s woman, with her pessimistic mind.  

Survival of Serena, 2006 is exemplary, particularly because it suggests that she is serene because she has survived drowning.  Resting her head on a life-saving rubber tube, as buoyant as her body implicitly is, her eyes are closed, indicating she is at peace with herself, because she is in touch with her inner self, her body no longer on display for the voyeuristic male to fondle with his eyes.  She is a Susanna without the lascivious Elders to spy on her, a beauty without the beast to rape her, a nymph without the perverse Pan to seduce her, turn her into an animal as he is.  She is peculiarly virginal, however seductive her body may be to the so-called male gaze, emblematic of patriarchal oppression of woman.  She is an anomaly in the history of the representation of the female figure, implicitly a nude, her bathing suit existing to emphasize her body, for it clings to its nakedness rather than hides it, making it more emphatically present, as I have suggested, all the more so because it suggests that she is untouchable, that her body is not ready to be skinned alive by a man’s caressing touch.  Her bathing suit also serves to hide her body from the prying eyes of lecherous voyeurs, men aggressively curious about what makes “the other sex” other, different, not only because it lacks a penis, as Freud said, but because it has breasts, unconsciously the mother’s, the first objects of desire for they contain the milk of life, as the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein emphasized.  The contrast between Serena’s red bathing cap and gray rubber tube, with her oddly flattened arms, along with the contrast between the dark gray on the lower part of the rubber tube and the luminous flash on the upper part, confirms her mastery of abstract modelling, that is, her genius for bringing out the abstract in the concrete, the form in matter. The work is also a modern—and ironically modernist—redoing of the traditional classical bust portrait.  It is another indication of Feuerman’s knowledge of classical art, ingeniously evident in her Diana III and Adonis, both 1999, their subtly tarnished, corroded, brownish surface suggesting they are ancient sculptures excavated from the earth.  They are not only testimony to Feuerman’s extensive knowledge of art history, but to her extraordinary technical skill, also evident in her rendering of waterdrops.  

Work after work makes the same introspective point, as the closed eyes of the autonomous figures suggest.  They make it clear that she is looking inward rather than outward, hiding her social face to see her individual face, turning away from the world to find herself, to be herself rather than another stranger in a crowd.  Self-Portrait, 1989 makes it clear that her “portraits” are all implicitly about herself.  Blue Beret and Marita, both 1997, General’s Twin, 2008 and Capri with Swarovski, 2012, make the same point.  The arrangement of fragments—an arm without a hand, a similar shorter arm without a hand, and an extraordinary head crowned with a bright red cloth in Splash, 2011—that ingeniously add up into an aesthetic whole is a masterpiece of creative thinking.  Again and again we see the same introspective woman, comfortably alone with herself, self-possessed even when she is precariously balanced on a white sphere, as in Monumental Quan, 2012.  It is a somewhat more heavenly sphere than the sphere on which a female is precariously balanced in traditional representations of Fortune, Fortune always a    fickle goddess.  Unlike, it seems, Feuerman’s self-certain goddesses.  “Quan” is the Chinese word for authority and power; Feuerman’s women certainly have authority and power.  

Perhaps the consummate statement of Feuerman’s subjective turn, Chrysalis, 2017 shows  Feuerman meditating in a Yoga position, completely self-possessed and ego-centered, unaware of the outside world, her hands together in prayer confirming that she is all together—“spiritualized.”  Unfragmented as the females of Braque and Picasso are, and as such modernized into an expressionist mess or surrealist absurdity, she has become sufficient unto herself, “whole.”  Introspectively autonomous, she has become unworldly, not anti-social but sublimely asocial.  Her praying hands are as classically perfect as Dürer’s rendering of praying hands, confirming her mastery of traditional art. “Chrysalis” comes from the Greek word for gold, suggesting that when a butterfly’s wings unfold after the chrysalis that encloses them opens the butterfly can fly, as Feuerman’s high-flying female diver, clearly a Goddess, 2016, seems poised to do in such works as The Golden Mean, 2012.  Feuerman’s golden goddess is clearly a projection of her ego ideal.   

One only has to compare Feuerman’s representations of active—hyperactive--women to the patriarchal representations of a passive—indolent—odalisques in traditional patriarchal representations of woman’s naked body to get the critical feminist point of her art.  It is an important feminist protest art, not only a brilliant account of woman’s self-realization—one woman’s individuation.  An odalisque is a maid in a Turkish harem, typically a young, desirable, sexually attractive woman, a sex slave at the male ruler’s beck and call.  She has no other purpose in life than to give him pleasure.  In the many patriarchal paintings of nude odalisques their bodies seem more beautiful and desirable than they ordinarily are, often because they have been given a classical patina, so that the odalisque seems like an ancient goddess of love rather than the mortal prostitute she was.  A goddess, with her perfect body, is more desirable than a prostitute, with her plain body.  What mortal man doesn’t dream of sleeping with an immortal goddess, or imagine that the woman he sleeps with is one?  Pictures of odalisques, meant for the male eye—the so-call male gaze--gives their viewer vicarious voyeuristic pleasure, no doubt that next best thing to the pleasure one gets from sexual intercourse.  The male spectator can look at the ready and waiting odalisque, her body exposed to his eyes if not available to his hands, as long as he wants, for she can never leave him, for she is an artistic mirage.  Art affords secondary sexual pleasure, Freud said, rather than the primary pleasure sexual intercourse affords.  I am suggesting that all the great masterpieces of erotic art, especially the paintings of odalisques, are pornographic.  When the suffragette Mary Richardson slashed Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus, 1647 in 1906 she was making a feminist protest against pornography, which degrades woman by reducing her to a sexual object, a mindless means to sexual pleasure, and as such more an animal than a human being.  And I am suggesting that Feuerman’s art is also an attack against the many male artists who depict female models as passive odalisques, prostituting them for the sake of art.  Perhaps more speculatively, I suggest Feuerman’s realistic sculptures of intact female women is a constructive feminist criticism of the destructive treatment of female bodies by male modernist artists, among them Kokoschka, who famously declared “Murder, The Only Hope of Woman,” Max Ernst, whose Hundred Headed Woman is a monster, Picasso who reduced woman’s body to a grotesque absurdity, and de Kooning, who slashed it to gestural pieces.  

To emphasize:  an odalisque is a concubine whose only raison d’être is to please men with their bodies.  It was assumed that they have no minds; they were merely instruments of pleasure, not individuals to be taken seriously because they had minds of their own, as Feuerman’s females do.  Odalisques are bodies without souls, at their most desirable beautiful bodies with no will of their own.  To call them individuals is to misread them:  they are social phenomena not intimate friends.  To emphasize:  Feuerman’s females have minds of their own, and their bodies are not owned by any man.  They are not odalisques, even when they proudly display their beautiful bodies, but women who are able to live without men, who are resourceful in themselves, as the fact that they are rarely if ever accompanied and supported by them implies.  They are independent, unlike the odalisques, who are dependent upon men for their existence.

We see the odalisque’s naked body on exhibitionistic display in Titian’s Venus of Urbino, 1534, Venus and Organist and Little Dog, ca. 1550 and Danae and the Shower of Gold, 1554, Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus, 1647, Boucher’s Reclining Nude, 1751, Ingres’s Grand Odalisque, 1814, Ingres’s Odalisque With A Slave, 1839 (confirming that she is some man’s slave), Fortuny’s The Odalisque, 1861, Manet’s Olympia, 1863 (with a servant, confirming that she is some man’s servant), Picasso’s Jeanne (Reclining Nude), 1901, Matisse’s Blue Nude, 1907, Matisse’s Odalisque, 1917, Philip Pearlstein’s Flamingo, 2006, suggesting she was a bird, a dismissive, trivializing way of describing a woman by regarding her as an animal, perhaps one that might fly the artist’s cage (he does the same thing in Nude with Peacock Kimono, 1988, the peacock a more flamboyantly colorful bird than a flamingo), and above all in Goya’s notorious La Maja Desnuda, 1797-1800, officially the first, most confrontational painting of a nude female body in art, no doubt because it shows a nude woman’s uncombed pubic hair, without the negative connotations such wild hair would have if the woman was a prostitute rather than, as it seems, the mistress of a prominent man in the royal court.  It is the unsurpassable model of all the other odalisques, in its confrontational boldness and empirical exactness, and because it has been thought of as peculiarly feminist, for the nude is unashamedly proud of her body—as Feuerman’s feminist nudes are.  But her nudes do not exist for the approving admiration of men, let alone to give them voyeuristic satisfaction, or to serve them sexually, but are sufficient unto themselves, as their introspective inwardness and self-reliance indicates.  Their bodies are vehicles for their souls, not the instruments of male pleasure.  They do not offer themselves to the male gaze, as the women in traditional patriarchal representations of their naked bodies do, however mythologized and idealized their bodies may be to make it more seductive, but signal their independence by way of their inwardness.  Goya’s La Maja Desnuda is particularly notorious because her body is not idealized—classicized—but raw flesh.  It is supposedly feminist, for the naked Maja is supposedly declaring “my body, myself,” a feminist declaration of independence.

Grand Catalina, 2014, Oil on Resin, 32 x 15 x 7 (inches).

Feuerman’s Grand Catalina, 2006, a New World All-American woman, puts all these Old World European women to shame.  Big, strong, hearty, self-possessed, as her inward-looking closed eyes confirm, she can resist, take on, hold her own against any man.  She is no servant, sexual or otherwise, of any man.  Her lesson, for all the passive females, whether Christian or Muslim, European or Asian, in the world is to stay out of bed, get off your couch, stand up to any man, resist his advances, hold your own in defiance of him, don’t passively pose for him.  You’re no odalisque in a harem, no pin-up on his bedroom wall, no sex slave of any male master, but a free spirit with a life of your own, a mind of your own.  You own your body, he doesn’t.  You have ego strength; your beauty is a sign of your power; your health is a sign of your superiority.  You will live longer than any man because you take better care of yourself.  And you are better endowed by nature.  You are more beautiful and real than Botticelli’s Venus, to allude to his famous mythopoetic painting The Birth of Venus, 1485-1486.  And you’re not a myth, but very real—hyperreal.  Rather thin, Botticelli’s European Venus lacks the muscles of Feuerman’s hyperactive all-American swimmer.  Venus seems anemic, suggesting she’s bloodless.  She cannot hold her own against any man, but poses passively—submissively--for the voyeuristic male artist, another mindless model, her stillness making her seem more dead than alive.  She’s certainly not as full of life as Feuerman’s swimmers.  Her body aesthetically interesting, she has no other reason for existing.  She has just come out of the sea, but she doesn’t have the energy to swim in it.  She’s clearly unable to compete with any of Feuerman’s strong, long-distance swimmers.  One wonders if she even knows how to swim.  Venus is a fish out of water and has forgotten how to swim.  Botticelli’s thin model clearly has no will of her.  Not as strong and full bodied as Feuerman’s swimmer, and seemingly lifeless, she needs the wind god Zephyr to breathe life into her, and Flora, the goddess of Spring, to support her, sustain her.  They’re in effect her parents.  She needs them, but Feuerman’s swimmer doesn’t need anyone to support and sustain her.  Like Athena, for she’s wise, she seems to have sprung from Zeus’s forehead.  Feuerman’s strong-willed woman seems to have a good amount of what Jung called the animus, “the masculine side of a woman,” in her psyche.  Botticelli’s Venus may be the untarnished pearl in an oyster shell, as the shell on which she stands suggests, but she’s like the mute female dummy that E. T. A. Hoffmann brought to life with the touch of his magic wand.  (Dare one say his penis.)  She’s certainly a weakling compared to Feuerman’s strong swimmer.  Botticelli’s Venus is the epitome of the obsolete ideal of the passive woman ready to obey any man.  Unlike the odalisques, she’s peculiarly sexless.  She’s a “Phantom of delight,” a “lovely Apparition,” as William Wordsworth wrote in 1803, not a real woman.  She’s a “moment’s ornament,” a passing fancy, and so not worth more than a moment’s attention.  Owned by a man, she is unable to hold her own, she will disappear, unlike Feuerman’s swimmers, who own themselves, and are here forever, being real goddesses rather mythical ones.  

This Summer or Next Summer, both 2010, you will see Feuerman’s all-American bathing beauty in her bathing suit lying on the beach ready to swim after turning inward doing her Yoga exercise.  She keeps in spiritual shape as well as physical shape.  She is clearly at peace with herself.  She is not mindlessly present as Botticelli’s Venus is, but mindful of herself.  Later you will see her on her knees, her body upright, her arms thrown back above her body, her Eyes Open, 2021.  They are in fact closed, apparently sightless, certainly blind to the world, but looking inward in search of insight.  She is not looking out into the world but far into herself.  She is diving into the psychic depths.  She is not going through the motions of a Yoga exercise, keeping physically fit, but keeping emotionally fit, for she is contemplating—dare one say analyzing—herself with her mind’s eye.  It is the proverbial third eye, “a mystical invisible eye, usually depicted as located on the forehead, which provides perception beyond ordinary sight”—provides what the philosopher Jacques Maritain calls “creative intuition.”  Feuerman is a deep-seeing as well as far-seeing artist, a sort of feminist visionary, seeing into woman’s future, for her strong, self-sufficient swimmers are the women of the future, the ideal woman here today in the form of art.  A hyperreal woman is clearly a perfect woman.  She is full of Fire and Harmony, 2021 at once—a union of opposites.  A body on fire and a mind in harmony is a dialectical triumph, as the best art is.   

Feuerman’s statues of females are revolutionary works, for they enlist realism in the service of feminism--woman’s liberation from patriarchal oppression--just as Courbet did when he enlisted revolutionary realism in the service of socialism—the worker’s liberation from capitalist oppression.  His plain-speaking realism was a preparation for Feuerman’s subtle hyperrealism.  It is more aesthetically sophisticated than Courbet’s conventional realism because it has the conventions of modernist abstraction at its command.   Like Courbet’s realism, Feuerman’s hyperrealism is confessional, but what it confesses is profoundly personal rather than politically motivated, however much it is also that, like Courbet’s realism.  Feuerman’s critical feminism is more important than ever because women have lost control of their own bodies, and with that their autonomy. WM       

Notes

(1)Sigmund Freud, “Introductory Lectures,” 423

(2)Heinz Kohut, “Remarks About the Formation of the Self,” vol. II, 769

(3)Carl Jung, “Conscious, unconscious and individuation,” Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1972), 275