Three ways to be a woman artist, according to the movies

Popular culture is a major source of myth, convention, and instruction about what it is to be or do anything. When it comes to what we know about artists, movies play a significant role, as sources of stereotypes, anxieties, and cherished fantasies. The artist biopic almost always establishes the historical (“great”) artist (from Michelangelo to Jean-Michel Basquiat) as abject, with Vincent van Gogh, subject of many movies, paradigmatic. Biopics about women artists (Artemisia, Camille Claudel, Frida, and others) adhere to this construction in spades, usually emphasizing pathology over greatness. Movies express their doubts about art and women through these ambivalent and cautionary tales. The fictional woman artist, on the other hand, is rarely regarded as great. Two patterns are prominent. In minor roles in a variety of genres—e.g. The Big Clock (1948), Rear Window (1954), What a Way to Go! (1964)—women artists are eccentric and ridiculous. When featured in non-comedic films, they are comic relief. This more benign and trivial representation tends to correspond to scenarios in which women are subordinate to men, in the world and the fiction. When she is a more major character, a woman artist is a more menacing entity: narcissistic, alluring, and dangerous—e.g. After Hours (1985); Legal Eagles (1986). This type emerged as salient in the 1980s, when women artists had begun to attain more visibility in culture at large. When she is a feminist, the fictional woman artist is likely to be both ridiculous and menacing (e.g. The Big Lebowski, 1998).