The Countess Zapak (2016)

Probably the most famous piece of early feminist artart with a distinct uplift-the-gender messagewas Judy Chicago's 197479 The Dinner Party, the installation of Great Historical Vaginas now on permanent exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. But Wittenberg introduces me to a group of female artists of the 1960s and '70s who pioneered the painting of sexually explicit images of men as well, and soon I discover that the art world is in the midst of a veritable ManSpoke renaissance. Early last year, the Dallas Contemporary mounted a retrospective called Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, while the Mary Boone Gallery in New York City featured 1960s-era antiwar artist Judith Bernstein under the title Dicks of Deathinspired by the scrawls on the walls of men's bathrooms, she drew cartoon penises shooting bullets or turning into giant menacing screws. Eventually I find my way to the Fight Censorship Group, a girl gang of '60s artists who put this cri de chatte in their manifesto: "If the erect penis is not wholesome enough to go into museums, it should not be considered wholesome enough to go into women."

But Wittenberg's love of sexual material goes deeper than politics or even lust. She's looking for fresh ways to engage art's long history of sexual imagery, from the first cave paintings 12,000 years ago to the lingams of ancient India and the phallic statues of ancient Greece to more modern provocations like Courbet's The Origin of the World, a close-up view of a woman's genitals that is still so upsetting it's been banned on Facebook. She's very interested in technical questions like the contrast between "image and surface," applying high style to subjects that many people consider vulgar. She's also responding to other current artists who are exploring the theme, from Salle and Jeff Koons to Marlene Dumas, a prominent Dutch painter whose earthy subjects range from childbirth to peep shows to, yes, impassioned men. In 2008 and 2009, a Dumas show called Measuring Your Own Grave made an influential splash at both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. And of course, with frank sexual imagery now available on every laptop and with the porn industry outselling Hollywood, Wittenberg is engaging like a journalist with the hot topics and pressing issues (so to speak) of the modern world. As she puts it, "When you're thinking about sex all the time, it has a funny way of wandering into the picture."

It certainly doesn't hurt that her predecessors are finally starting to sell their paintings; this year, the Carnegie Museum paid $350,000 for a series of Bernstein's "screw drawings" from the Mary Boone show. Boone's director, Ron Warren, said that while male artists still find it easier to sell explicit work (it's considered "much more aggressive for females to use sexual imagery"), the message of Bernstein's workits critique of the link between militarism and machismomade it downright family-friendly. "I saw people bringing in their kids and explaining the work to them."

When I email Bernstein for perspective, I inadvertently stumble into a minefield of feminist politics by starting with a general question about women who paint sex. "Women who work with sexual imagery are often lumped together, when in essence their aesthetic and message are very different," she snaps. Maybe this is because I enthused a little too much about Wittenberg, who rejects "identity art" and the notion that a woman should paint from a female perspectivethe closest she's gotten to that is painting the Fox News building like a vaguely phallic still from a Leni Riefenstahl movie.

Wittenberg put me in touch with Betty Tompkins, who was more fun. Still sounding 25 at 68, she laughed her way through most of a two-hour visit to her SoHo studio. She found rejection by all the male-dominated galleries of the '70s "liberating" because she could focus on what she really wanted, which was explosive imagery. "That was in the back of my mind all the timea charged image. It was too late to do it like de Kooning and Hofmannthey were my heroesand I didn't want to be anybody's second place." One day she was flipping through her husband's porn collection, and she framed the shots with her fingers. "I said, 'Now that's a charged image.'"

By now, it's getting late. I've been in Wittenberg's studio for almost three hours. She never seems to tire. She never sits down. She has shown us paintings of a beautiful naked woman straddling a log and paintings of an orgy based on a porn video she found by searching "after school special"she likes to use weird search terms like "back to nature" or "grassy knoll" because they generate unusual images.

Once she lands on a video she likes, she'll print out 50 different stills at different moments and play with them, "meshing" one drawing to the next. "I'll spend days just, like, distancing myself from the photograph and living it, until the direction of the emotional content" sinks in. "I'd be like, Oh, that image really feels red. You know?" Sometimes she's chasing something as simple as a shadow, or a curl of the mouth.

Wittenberg takes us to her newest series: paintings of two men kissing so hard their faces almost merge into one. She's done drawings, monotypes, paintings in black and white and in red and white. The latest is the size of a small car and mostly yellow, with streaks of drippy red that look, in an oddly beautiful way, like oozing blood. She wants to express all the "conditions of the kiss: the unwanted kiss, the loving kiss, the kiss of death, the kiss of Judas, the eternal kiss of God." Eventually, she wants to do three faces kissing themselves into a single face.

Finally, at my request, she shows us the series of paintings that led to Red Handed, Again. She tells the story of the famous painter who first saw them. "I was fussing around, and he took the brush out of my hand and he just pulled it right up as one stroke'The dick is one thing,' he said. 'Part of painting is making a choice and sticking to it. Commit! Go with your gut!'"

This seems like the right time to ask the question that started this adventure. "You said to me it's the hardest thing in the world to sell these paintings," I say. "So what happened when you showed them to collectors and gallery owners?"

At last, she sits down. The very question seems to sap her energy. But her rat-a-tat answer reveals her true spiritrepeating her favorite word about 30 times in rapid succession, she says that art curators in both Miami and the Midwest asked for one of her paintings and insisted that Miami and the Midwest were ready for explicit male imagery, eager for it, hungry for it, drooling for it. So she sent a painting out and quickly got the message that Miami and the Midwest weren't quite so eager for it or hungry for it or drooling for it after all. "So it's been sent to Miami and back, and to the Midwest and back, and now this guy is calling me from Los Angeles for a show in October, and I'm inclined to send him the same dick."

"Decoration is still an important element for painting, and when you have something with an aggressive subject matter, it doesn't know its place."

Why?

"Because I feel like it's the most digestible one in the studioit has nice colors, it's kind of a softer image. It's slightly more decorative."

I look where she's pointing. It's one of her yellow ones, very pretty.

"There doesn't seem to be any real home for any of these," she continues a bit sadly. "It doesn't go in the kids' room; it doesn't go in the living room; it doesn't go in the dining room. Decoration is still an important element for painting, and when you have something with an aggressive subject matter, it doesn't know its place."

But does she intend to keep doing them, I ask, even if they don't sell?

"Yeah," she answers. "I mean, I might die with all these dicks, for all I care."

At that moment, her parrot lands on her shoulder,
and Wittenberg breaks into a smile. She takes the bird in her hand and pushes its feathers apart. "Look at those colors," she says.

This article originally appeared in the March 2017 issue of ELLE.

Have thoughts on this story? Email elleletters@hearst.com.

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What Happens When Women Paint Male Anatomy - Explicit ... - Elle - ELLE.com