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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.