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| La Vague ("The Wave") (1897), exhibited in the Claudel room of the Musée Rodin |
This is not just some disgruntled feminist grudge. That would be too petty a label to place on a much larger issue.
One that has been going on since the dawn of time. Some recorded history by some forgotten male scribe hunched over a dim desk under the furious fervent direction of some fanatical scholastic male.
Altered facts perpetuated by colonizers and conquerors all over the world.
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| sculptors, Auguste Rodin & Camille Claudel |
Layered over this cesspool is an even more flagrant and fraught transgression. That of the [often over aged] male presiding over the [often under aged] budding young female of exceptional substance.
In the art world, where boundaries are more flexible and imprecise, where passion and creation are put on the pedestal, along with the latest muse of some popular artist - beloved or scorned, the women however skilled are almost certainly overshadowed by their scandal.
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| Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera - Mexico, 1933 (Photograph by Martin Munkácsi) |
At college in Fine Arts, my immediate heroes were Frida Khalo and Georgia O'keefe. Successful as they manage to be, their lives were hunted by so much sorrow and suffering. Beloved as they were by their patron and mentor lovers, they had to fight hard to be recognized for themselves.
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| Alfred Stieglitz attached this photograph to a letter for Georgia O'Keeffe, dated July 10, 1929. |
How many others never even came to light, buried and forgotten forever?
Even in our present age of #MeToo there are too many sordid stories that have yet to shock us into making a stand, drawing the line, making laws to protect us - more, better, fuller.
Men have [mis]managed our world for far too long. Time to change all that.
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