A woman's body has long been the subject of art. Throughout art history, we have seen both male and female artists inspired by the nude female figure. Whether it be in sculpture, painting, photography, or drawing, a woman’s body has been the inspiration for countless artworks, and is no stranger to the public eye.
In her third solo exhibition at P·P·O·W Gallery, Just a Pretty Face by Betty Tompkins removes the nude female body from a sexualized space and places it before us to observe objectively. Known for her iconic Fuck Paintings series, Tompkins started painting large-scale, photorealistic images of sex and the female genitalia in 1969. Now for the first time, her works from the 1990s are seen alongside those of the present day, highlighting her decades-long career of radical artistry.
In the late 1960’s and early ’70s when Tompkins began to show her work, obscenity laws in the US were in flux as the country was undergoing a major change in attitude toward sexuality and expression. In 1973, the Miller v. California decision declared the legal definition of obscenity as material that lacks “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Globally, countries were slowly opening up to conversions about sexual expression, and first-wave feminists engaged in debates about the boundaries of artistic expression.
There had been numerous attempts to shame and censor the work of Tompkins starting in 1973 when her pieces were stopped at French customs and charged with pornography, eventually having to be sent back to the US. They were stopped again in Japan, when luckily Tompkins was more well connected and able to have them released. Even as recently as 2019, Instagram abruptly removed Tompkins’ account claiming it was promoting pornography. After her followers and art dealer rallied behind her advocating for her artistic intent, Instagram ultimately restored the account. Despite these obstacles, her unwavering dedication to challenge societal norms is as strong as it was at the start of her career.
Just a Pretty Face brings together new and rarely before seen works from 1990 to 2024 to highlight Tompkins’ decades-long questioning of how a woman’s body should be represented. Presenting three series alongside each other, Tompkins offers an alternative narrative uniting painting and pornography. When images meant for pornography are taken out of their original context, how do their meanings change?
Tompkins’ first series, Insults and Laments, uses airbrushed acrylic paintings she’s known for combined with the familiar words and phrases of her renowned Women Words series. Vinyl letters are placed on her canvases to read statements echoing gender discrimination, sexual misconduct, and everyday insults women hear. Most of these phrases are quite familiar to women such as “Calm Down,” “You Should be at Home in the Kitchen,” or “Shut Up.” Others strike a cord much deeper, like “No one is going to believe you” or “Why do you make me hurt you?”
The language, while discriminatory in nature, shows no discrimination in which women it’s directed toward. The airbrushed images of genitalia are cropped and zoomed in, eliminating any individuality from the source. These women could be anyone, just as these phrases could be said to any woman. By affixing these phrases to the photos of genitalia, Tompkins removes any taboo or shock value surrounding both the subject and the text, asking the viewer to sit in the same discomfort that women do each day. By contrasting the abhorrent language with the anatomy so coveted by men, Tompkins presents to us an ironic paradox, one that women face each day.
The inspiration for her Fuck Paintings came from an old pornography book of her husband’s in which she was fascinated by the pure beauty of the depicted scenes. As a response to the censorship she faced from her Fuck Paintings, Tompkins continued to source her images from software books for her second series in the exhibition, Defacements. The pieces range from 1992-2003, and in which images were taken from the Taschen book Wheels and Curves: Erotic Photographs of the Twenties. The women are posed fixing cars or sitting atop a hood or flashing a flirtatious look at the reader. Tompkins removes the figures from this context and places them within her own romanticized landscape. When these women are removed from the initial setting, the goal is no longer to present images for male self-pleasure, but just to present them as humans with individual agency.
She puts the women in the garden, in a meadow, or lounging out beside a lake. These images have a classic quality to them, such as the classical sculptures in Pastorale and Bacchanal. Or the woman in Afternoon Idyll, who sits in a similar fashion to that of Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe by Manet, only this time she is in solitude. Her garden is her own, and she gazes at the viewer as though we’ve just interrupted her quiet afternoon.
These classical references are somewhat of a call back to her on going Apologia and Women series, which uses artwork from art history textbooks and fills in the female figure with discriminatory and violent language often used against women. Her commitment to address how women have been portrayed in art history is unrelenting and continues to raise concerns over how museums have long favored artworks of women over artworks by women. This ongoing conversation in the art world has been echoed by numerous feminist artists, most famously by the Guerrilla Girls, who in 1989 first posed the question: Do Women Have to be Naked to Get Into The Met Museum?
In her Tool Series, Tompkins uses domestic objects such as frying pans, cake tins, gardening shovels, and axes which are repurposed into canvases. Images of women are painted on the surface of the equipment, ranging between 3 and 12 inches in diameter. The fine detail and scale of the piece not only requires the viewer to get closer spatially to the work, but to reconsider the images typically meant for male self-pleasure. The use of tools like garden-ware and cookware typically associated with “feminine duties” places women back into the conversation about their bodies; a conversation they had very little say in from the start. By taking the images directly from the privacy and secrecy of a softcore book and placing them directly in front of the viewer on an everyday piece of equipment, Tompkins once again forces the viewer to reconsider the social taboos of the figures.
The series of Just a Pretty Face come together to present side by side, the idealization and degradation of women. By removing the figures from a pornographic setting, Tompkins invites women back into the conversation surrounding their own bodies. Her radical work continues to provide space to respond to the ongoing inequality, harassment and violence toward women.