The Artist Who Captured the Contradictions of Femininity

The Atlantic

6 days ago

Observing a woman get ready to go out is, for many girls, an early glimpse at the ritualistic preparations that femininity can entail. For the artist Christina Ramberg, watching her mother getting dressed for parties—in particular, putting on a corset called a merry widow, which gave her an hourglass figure—revealed the extent to which the female form was a ruse. 'I can remember being stunned by how it transformed her body, how it pushed up her breasts and slendered down her waist,' Ramberg later observed. 'I used to think that this is what men want women to look like; she's transforming herself into the kind of body men want. I thought it was fascinating,' she said. 'In some ways, I thought it was awful.'
These dueling reactions, fascination and repulsion, come up in Ramberg's paintings, which, especially early in her career, fixated on the artifice of the female body—all the different ways that women construct themselves, with the aid of the mass market. Her striking portraits of women's body parts feature torsos strapped into corsets, feet shoved into high heels, intricately arranged updos. The images are crisp, flat, and slyly cropped or angled to never show faces. And although they're sensual, they're also depersonalized and often off-kilter; sometimes, hair is parted in unnatural directions, or skin is patchy. The dueling presence of unruly and taming forces in these paintings recalls the consumer products that divide women's bodies into conquerable parts: the sprays that restrain, the undergarments that shape. As the artist Riva Lehrer puts it in one of several essays accompanying a traveling exhibit of Ramberg's work, currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 'Without the face, the body must tell all.'
What it tells, in these paintings, is by turns sobering and playful—and never sanctimonious. Ramberg's explorations began to take shape in the late '60s, when she was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago painting on small, cheap Masonite panels. She became affiliated with the Chicago Imagists, a loose grouping of figurative artists whose work tended toward the colorful, grotesque, and surreal (though, at times since its initial use, the label has seemed to result in a downplaying of the stylistic differences among its members). One of Ramberg's teachers at SAIC and a mentor to the Imagists, Raymond Yoshida, was a deep pedagogical influence. He was an avid visitor of flea markets and instilled in students like Ramberg a love—and practice—of collecting items. Collecting, Yoshida said, was a way of establishing a pattern of 'looking,' and Ramberg over time amassed hundreds of dolls that she displayed in her apartment. Her paintings of fragmented bodies are their own kind of collection—and their own pattern of 'looking.'
Ramberg wasn't unique in probing the commodification of female sexuality, though a particular blend of compositional rigor, sly humor, and curiosity gave an engrossing velocity to her paintings across the 1970s and '80s. The period in which she developed as an artist was charged with contradictions, one that saw second-wave feminism cresting amid a cultural tug-of-war over sexual liberation. Gloria Steinem had by that point published her exposé about working undercover as a bunny at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Club; Playboy magazine, then headquartered in Chicago, hit the peak of its circulation in the early '70s. (Perhaps ironically, Ramberg's work occasionally appeared in the publication.) Cindy Sherman would, in the early '80s, make her famed photographic series in which she posed as centerfold models, drawing attention to the mechanics of male attention.
Similar cultural shorthands are at play in Ramberg's paintings. Her early work pulls from the brisk visuals of advertisements, the seriality of comic panels, the close crops of voyeuristic photography: These familiar elements initially draw viewers in, and might even seem to point toward a more standard indictment of the male gaze, or of consumerism, but Ramberg threw changeups that turned her paintings darker and more intriguingly complex.
One series, for instance, shows thick tranches of hair cinched into the shape of corsets, or possibly vases; the plaited tresses are sharp tricks on the viewer's eye, a menacing yet sensual play on the controlling perfection that shapewear (or, perhaps, home decor) helps to enforce. The interplay between skin and fabric in some of her images also seems mischievous. Ramberg had an enduring interest in fashion—at 6 foot 1, she often made her own clothes—and rendered fabrics carefully. She might give a bustier a fine, pebbly texture, redirecting the viewer's attention away from bare skin, while also perhaps nodding to how idiosyncratic personal taste can be when it comes to the materials we wear. In one image from 1971, a white fabric wound around a hand turns into a partial glove, snugly encasing just three fingers, leaving the other two free; with delicate humor, it hints at the thin line between what we wear and what we are.
In her journals, Ramberg once described an idea she had for a painting, in which the ruffles of an item of worn clothing would actually be painted as flesh. The implication of clothing as a type of skin is creepy but clarifies Ramberg's intent: She seemed to be exploring the artificiality baked into how we show ourselves to others. In Ramberg's wildest imaginations, clothing is no longer simply a mechanism that pushes up breasts or slims down a waistline; it becomes an authentic, even crucial, layer of self-presentation—as important to our sense of self as flesh itself.
The surreality of this idea expands the perimeter of our emotional response. With that hypothetical conflating of skin as fabric, or fabric as skin—the blurring of our core selves and the 'layers' we put on for the world—Ramberg seemed to question whether most everything about ourselves might be constructed, and whether we are, in fact, what we construct. In all this, she was quite interested in hidden or subconscious desires. Her diaries, which she kept from 1969 to 1980, include sexual fantasies, and she describes dreams of bondage and illicit trysts. To Ramberg, like the complicated memory of her mother lacing herself into a corset, fantasies are ultimately generative—both productive and unpredictable.
Even in grief, Ramberg seemed to find solace in the affordances of fantasy. In 1973, when she was 27, Ramberg lost a baby that she delivered prematurely. Some of her female forms in this period shifted away from overt playfulness, while maintaining an openness to multiple readings— one 1974 painting titled Gloved shows an austere torso, this time wrapped in gauze that could be interpreted as either medical dressing or bondage wear. The ambiguity Ramberg painted into the fabric asks us to leave room for either possibility.
As Ramberg's work changed over the years, the focus of her gaze shifted, too. Some of her later paintings turn women's bodies into mechanistic objects—almost gridlike, compartmentalized structures. In one, a smaller body drops out of the bigger one, as from a factory assembly line. This seeming anxiety about women's bodies as sites of productivity reminded me of Ramberg's diary entries recounting her life. She described her days as a mother (in 1975, she had a child with her husband, the artist Phil Hanson), the aforementioned dreams and fantasies, the work she did in the studio. She documented everything in one place, sometimes using different-colored ink to differentiate between aspects of her day; but she didn't cordon one part of her life off from another. The entangled accounts suggest that she saw everything she did—the chaotic overwhelm of it all—as her work.
The diaries also show a preoccupation with the constraints, and influence, of the domestic realm, the way that the details of the world around you can affect what you make, what you think about, what you see. To me, this is another example of Ramberg's mode of 'looking.' Her interest in fabric—as functional material, spiritual armor, generative art—seems distinctly connected to her interest in working with constraint, rather than trying to bust completely free. This philosophical inclination is apparent even in her later works, when she turned away from the female body: A sequence of quilted works celebrated the structure of geometric patterns, while a series known as her 'satellite' paintings—a stark set of towers that nonetheless look vaguely torso-like—might be read as a stripped-down meditation on form and order.
Ramberg died in 1995 of Pick's disease, which had led to early-onset dementia; she was only 49. By all accounts, she was someone who saw art as a practice, a form of cultural critique, a crucial community; her role as a longtime teacher at SAIC, she later said, kept her connected to 'just beginning and deeply committed artists' and helped her balance 'immersion in my own work.' Perhaps that sense of proportionality explains why her paintings, and the ideas she probed again and again through them, have maintained their acuity. With focused precision but no piety, she explored what happens when 'the individuality of the person is lost to the demands of femininity,' as Lehrer puts it, all the while maintaining curiosity about the powerful psychologies that helped build those expectations. And in examining the entanglements between women and the world they are a part of, Ramberg seemed to understand, ultimately, that a little bit of strangeness can bring precarity to the viewer's experience, and then expand it.