In the years around 1900, an unprecendented attack on women erupted in virtually every aspect of culture: literary, artistic, scientific, and philosophic. Many of the anti-feminine platitudes that today still constrain women's potential were first formulated during this period, as intellectuals of every stripe throughout Europe and America banded together to picture women as static and unindividuated beings whose sole function was sexual and reproductive. Idols of Perversity explores the nature and development of turn-of-the-century misogyny in the works of hundreds of writers, artists, and scientists, including such figures as Zola, Strindberg, Wedekind, Henry James, Rossetti, Renoir, Maurois, Klimt, Darwin, and Spencer, not to mention a host of now-forgotten others. As Bram Dijkstra shows, justification for this wave of anti-feminine sentiment was sought in the most prejudicial aspects of Evolutionary Theory. It was held that the female of the species had not been able to participate in the great evolutionary process that was guiding the intellectual male, nature's chosen "superman," to his ultimate, predistined role as a disembodied spiritual essence. Women were seen as a hindrance to the smooth unfolding of this process, ready at any moment to lure men back to a sham paradise of erotic materiality. To protect the male's continued evolution, there came a flood of pseudo-scientific tracts, novels, and paintings in which artists and intellectuals sought to warn the world's males of the evils lying beneath the surface elegance of woman's tempting skin. Reproducing hundreds of pictures from the period and including in-depth discussions of such key works as Dracula and Venus in Furs, this fascinating book not only exposes the crucial links between misogyny then and now but connects it to the racism and anti-semitism that led to catastrophic genocidal delusions in the first half of the twentieth century. Crossing the conventional boundaries of art history, sociology, the history of scientific theory, and literary analysis, Dijkstra unveils a startling view of women--a war whose battles are still being fought. About the Author: Bram Dijkstra is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, and author of The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech, A Recognizable Image, and other works on literature and the visual arts.

Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture

Literature & Fiction

Dijkstra, Bram

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

At the turn of the century, an unprecedented attack on women erupted in virtually every aspect of culture: literary, artistic, scientific, and philosophic. Throughout Europe and America, artists and intellectuals banded together to portray women as static and unindividuated beings who functioned solely in a sexual and reproductive capacity, thus formulating many of the anti-feminine platitudes that today still constrain women's potential. Bram Dijkstra's Idols of Perversity explores the nature and development of turn-of-the-century misogyny in the works of hundreds of writers, artists, and scientists, including Zola, Strindberg, Wedekind, Henry James, Rossetti, Renoir, Moreau, Klimt, Darwin, and Spencer. Dijkstra demonstrates that the most prejudicial aspects of Evolutionary Theory helped to justify this wave of anti-feminine sentiment. The theory claimed that the female of the species could not participate in the great evolutionary process that would guide the intellectual male to his ultimate, predestined role as a disembodied spiritual essence. Darwinists argued that women hindered this process by their willingness to lure men back to a sham paradise of erotic materialism. To protect the male's continued evolution, artists and intellectuals produced a flood of pseudo-scientific tracts, novels, and paintings which warned the world's males of the evils lying beneath the surface elegance of woman's tempting skin. Reproducing hundreds of pictures from the period and including in-depth discussions of such key works as Dracula and Venus in Furs, this fascinating book not only exposes the crucial links between misogyny then and now, but also connects it to the racism and anti-semitism that led to catastrophic genocidal delusions in the first half of the twentieth century. Crossing the conventional boundaries of art history, sociology, the history of scientific theory, and literary analysis, Dijkstra unveils a startling view of a grim and largely one-sided war on women still being fought today.

Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford Paperbacks)

Arts & Photography

Explores the historical perception of woman as the seductress whose influence undermines the power of the white male

Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

KNOPF

Previous studies of William Carlos Williams have tended to look only for the literary echoes in his verse. According to Bram Dijkstra, the new movements in the visual arts during the 1920s affected Williams's work as much as, if not more than, the new writing of the period. Dijkstra catches the excitement of this period of revolutionary art, reveals the interactions between writers and painters, and shows in particular the specific and general impact this world had on Williams's early writings.

Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams

Princeton University Press

Georgia O'Keeffe has long been recognized as one of America's most adventurous early modernist artists. But critics often suggest that she became a revolutionary despite her American background, not because of it.
 Bram Dijkstra challenges that point of view. In this searching reappraisal of O'Keeffe's work, the distinguished cultural historian shows that her art was decisively shaped by the America in which she grew up. In doing so, he casts new light on the facts of O'Keeffe's remarkable life and offers incisive new readings of many of her most important paintings.
 Art historians have largely accepted the view that O'Keeffe's art was shaped by Alfred Stieglitz and the work of the European modernists she encountered under his tutelage--a view actively encouraged by the famous photographer himself. Dijkstra counters this idea by taking us into the cultural environment of her childhood and by illuminating the details of her early education in art. He shows that O'Keeffe's mature style found its origin in such apparently unlikely sources as Edgar Allan Poe's speculations about the androgynous nature of the soul before industrialism, and in what Dijkstra calls the "transcendental materialism" of the tonalist movement in turn-of-the-century American art.
 Dijkstra also explores O'Keeffe's important--but until now widely neglected--identification with the feminist aims and artistic concerns of the radical periodical The Masses. And he shows that even the daring new styles of illustration featured there, and in other magazines of the period, significantly influenced her development of a personal style. Dijkstra argues, moreover, that O'Keeffe's very American search for an organic abstraction of form that would celebrate nature allowed her to develop a humanist style that deliberately challenged the early European modernists' emphasis on mechanistic constructions of form against nature.
 Beautifully written and painstakingly researched, Georgia O'Keeffe and the Eros of Place is a major reassessment of O'Keeffe's place in American culture and a tribute to the artist's steadfast refusal to abandon her "provincial" belief in the shaping spirit of place.

Georgia O'Keeffe and the Eros of Place

Individual Artists

Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Culture

Women's Studies

Henry Holt Co.

Traces the evolution of a distinctive art form in the United States, noting how most of its contributors were first- or second-generation immigrants living in urban or disadvantaged regions, and examining how the art of the period reflects ideals about equality, dignity, justice, and the challenges of the working class.

American Expressionism: Art and Social Change, 1920-1950

Harry N. Abrams

A resplendent presentation of the nude in American art, photography, and popular culture, from the eighteenth century to the present. With more than four hundred color illustrations, this is the most thorough and wide-reaching survey of the representation of the male and female nude in American visual culture yet published. Bram Dijkstra explores the history of the subject from its earliest manifestations in the paintings of John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West to the taboo-shredding imagery of late-twentieth-century artists such as Alice Neel, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eric Fischl, and John Currin. Dijkstra is a cultural historian who refuses to separate "high" and "low" art, charting instead such momentous historical events as the discovery of pubic hair, the invasion of the pin-up queens, "the inexorable rise of the breast," and the puzzling fluctuations of American prudery. Naked also examines the effects of the early twentieth century’s infatuation with Freudian psychoanalysis and the more recent fascination of comic book art with the legacy of Bettie Page and her seemingly ever more muscular daughters. In chronological and thematic order, the book demonstrates the links between the work of some of the most famous names in the history of American painting (Chase, Cassatt, Hopper), sculpture (French, Powers), and photography (Cunningham, Weston), and that of the outlaw hordes of cartoonists, book-cover illustrators, and visual extremists who, particularly during the last half-century, were able to turn the United States into the world’s principal purveyor of erotic fantasies.

Naked: The Nude in America

Rizzoli

Book by Perine, Robert, Andrea, I., Dijkstra, Bram

San Diego Artists

Perine, Robert

Andrea, I.

Artra Pub

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