Carole A. Feuerman, carolefeuerman.com, is recognized internationally as a pioneer sculptor who shaped the Hyperrealism movement beginning in the late ‘70’s. In her art career that spans over four decades and four continents, she has produced an extensive body of work in steel, bronze, and resin. Her work is found in numerous public outdoor venues and private collections including the Emperor of Japan, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Malcolm Forbes — to name a few. She has taught, lectured, and presented workshops at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, Columbia University, and Grounds for Sculpture.  She has had nine solo museum retrospectives, and is included in the permanent collections of 19 museums. She had a solo show in the 2017 Venice Biennale and in 2018 she has a solo show in Knokke, Belgium. In 2011, she founded the Carole A. Feuerman Sculpture Foundation.

So, why was this major contemporary and highly esteemed artist excluded from the current Met Breuer “Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body” exhibition? In this article Feuerman offers her insight about that question and her thoughts about the patriarchy that exists in the art world. 

It’s been an honor and privilege to know Carole for many years. I am grateful that she agreed to allow Manhattan Arts International to publish this article. It’s part of our series of articles in connection to our annual “HerStory” online art exhibition. I highly recommend you visit Carole Feuerman’s website to learn more about her and her artwork. ~ Renée Phillips

The Patriarchy that Exists in the Art World

By Carole Feuerman

Carole Feuerman, The Midpoint, Lacquer on Resin with 24K Gold Leaf, 22″ x 16″ x 53″.

I’ve been making sculptures for almost five decades. My most well-known sculptures are figures of women; many of them are captured in a moment where they’ve emerged from water and are in a moment of self-reflection. The figures are extremely lifelike. Children ask their parents if the figures are real people, they don’t know how to react to them, they’ve never seen anything like them.

The art movement I’m associated with is called hyperrealism. The term was first used in 1973 as hyperréalisme by the Belgian art dealer Isy Brachot. The show he put together focused on the American men painting intimately detailed photorealist works on canvas, but the term became more broadly applied in the years that followed. Artists like me that were building and painting life-like fiberglass or bronze sculptures came into its fold. The term even reached back into time, and so the body of Pop sculptures that people like Claes Oldenburg and Duane Hanson were producing in the 60s and early 70s became part of the lineage too.

For as long as there has been a thing called “hyperrealist sculpture” I’ve been someone who has shaped and defined the width and breadth of that movement. However, in the production of the history of hyperrealism and even more of the history of life-like sculpture, I have seen my work passed over and reduced while my contemporaries have been elevated.

1. Men’s voices have dominated the industry of art criticism.

Carole Feuerman, Leda and the Swan, Lacquer on Resin with 24K Gold Leaf and Swarovski Crystals, 80″ x 90″ x 42″.

Hyperrealism is featured prominently in a show on at Met Breuer right now called “Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body” (1300-Now). I respect and value the 120 art objects that are included in the show, and in principal I don’t mind that my work doesn’t appear. The thing is, The Met and MoMA and institutions like them are big players in deciding which practitioners become the canon of a movement. When people a century from now look back at the art world of this era, they will look to the shows at big museums as objective descriptions of today’s art, not the particularity of galleries or the overwhelming quantity of work at international art fairs.

When I went to visit that show, it got me thinking about what differentiates my work from those of my contemporaries from the 1970s and 1980s, and what could be obscured from history if the work of art makers like myself are left out.

So here we go: I think we should talk frankly about the operation of patriarchy in the art world.

The Thesis

1. Men’s voices have dominated the industry of art criticism. See Clement Greenberg, see the Royal Academy of Art, etc.

2. Even when it comes to female subjects, the art that is valued is that which depicts the gaze of male artists. See the ratio of nude women subjects to women artists in the Met’s Modern Art Sections that the Guerrilla Girls made famous: 85% of the nudes are women, while only 5% of the artists are.

3. Art which elevates the way a woman looks at anything, and maybe especially women, is written out of history.  See Romance novels, see Lifetime movies, see the silo-ing of feminist art.

Alright sure, this has been said before, but I want to speak to what is specifically lost by dismissing my perspective on female identity.

My sculptures of women are portraits of strength and power and balance.

Carole Feuerman, DurgaMa, Lacquer on Bronze, 90″ x 91″ x 101″.

My sculptures of women are portraits of strength and power and balance. They aren’t an allegory for these things, which of course has been a long staple of the use of women’s bodies in men’s art. Instead, each figure is at a point in her personal journey that has allowed her to recognize these things in herself.

John de Andrea and Duane Hanson have also been associated with the hyperrealist sculpture movement from its inception. Hanson’s figures play with a tradition of satire: they are unhealthy, they have a problematic relation to consumption, they are parodies of the American domestic image that was airbrushed into every magazine of the 1960s. De Andrea’s sculptures have more to do with mine, in that the politics of his figures are less explicit; however he has acknowledged within his own oeuvre the particularity of his perspective, and the centrality of a hetero-normative sexuality in his work.

This is particularly on display in sculptures like de Andrea’s 1980 piece “Self-portrait with Sculpture”, which was included at the Met show. In this work, a clothed male figure regards a nude female figure seated on a pedestal above him. De Andrea has created several variations on this theme, with a clothed male figure, sometimes identified as a self-portrait or as an ”artist,” and a nude female who is usually anonymous. These works are wonderful I think, in that they openly talk about the gendered subjectivity present in all production and consumption of artworks. However, that is a beginning of that conversation not the end. De Andrea participates in that tradition: male artist, female subject, male gaze, male power.

My Art Subverts It.

If hyperrealism is a tool, then my practice of representing women is an expansion of what that tool can be used for that’s worth noting.

Carole Feuerman, Grande Catalina, Lacquer on Resin, 38″ x 17″ x 62″.

The figures of women I create are not constructed for the male viewer to regard as a symbolic other, but for the human viewer to connect with as the vehicles of their individual lives. Each of them is in a moment that holds their inner strength, their power, and the wisdom that they’ve gained from the challenges they’ve overcome in their lives. I think that’s at the heart of their success in the art market. I also think that if hyperrealism is a tool, then my practice of representing women is an expansion of what that tool can be used for that’s worth noting.

My pieces don’t confront you with their personhood. They mostly don’t stare out at you and demand a response. That’s because they don’t need your gaze, their dialogue is internal, and that internal reality is something that has been left out of representations of women again and again. I don’t want people to look back at this era of art making and say that the internal reality of women was missing from the practice, but when work like mine and from art makers like me is left out of the canon that is exactly how it will look and the women artists after me will have to start from scratch again.

That’s the function of the glass ceiling right?

My career has been to make this tool for talking about the experience and reality of women, and I want the artists who come after me to have that tool. If I can’t break through into the canon, then they won’t have it, they’ll have to spend their careers inventing it for themselves and then never get to the point where humanity really moves forward, when we’re asking: alright, so what’s next?

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