Art in Translation Journal - First Prize Winner for Scholarly Writing (Getty Foundation)
Leilani Alontaga Caithness
![Leilani Alontaga Caithness]()
Leilani Alontaga Caithness
Collections Specialist for Modern & Contemporary Fine Art, Historic Clothing and 3-D Objects at San Diego History Center
Art in Translation?(AIT) publishes the best writing from around the world on the visual arts, architecture, and design in?English translation. The journal was launched on 26 February 2009 with generous funding from the?Getty Foundation, Los Angeles.
In 2011 while studying my History of Art, Masters Degree (Honors) at the University of Edinburgh, I won Art in Translation Journal First Prize Winner for Scholarly Writing.
First Prize - Leilani Alontaga (Aberdeen) for Daniela Hammer-Tugendtat, “Kunst, Sexualit?t und Geschlechterkonstruktionen in der Abendl?ndischen Kultur” (Art, Sexuality and the Constructions of Gender in Western Culture”),?MuSIEum: Displaying Gender, 2000
Original Article
Abstract
This article interrogates constructs of sexuality and gender in Western art. Since the early Renaissance, art flaunts sexuality almost exclusively through the female nude, while the male body and desire remain invisible. In Titian’s erotic?Dana?, Zeus is morphed into golden rain; in Rembrandt’s version, he immaterializes into pure light; with Klimt’s?Dana?, the sexual act becomes a female autoeroticism. Those images that show the male partner in sexual action and without mythological disguise are rare in Western art. The problem is not misogyny but asymmetry. Even modern and avant-garde artists perpetuate traditional conceptions that equate culture and intellect with man, and sexuality and passivity with women. A change only occurs in the 1990s with artists confusing such conceptions. Traditional art history has suppressed the eroticizing effects of erotic art, although the boundary between art and pornography continues to be reframed.