Mini Post - Elaine Sturtevant

Emanuel Marques
1/27/20

Female Artist: Elaine Sturtevant 

Elaine Sturtevant, Warhol Marilyn, 1965. 

Elaine Sturtevant, also known as just her last name Sturtevant, is an American female artist who was famous for imitating famous male contemporary artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and others. Sturtevant’s replication of male artists work boldly challenges social constructs around gender roles and individuality within the art community and society. Sturtevant’s art of appropriation which proceeded World War II, sought to reinvent contemporary American art, while highlighting the lack of representation of women in art community, as well as all other professions at the time. Sturtevant’s appropriation of other contemporary artist’s work brought to light the non-inclusive environment for women in the art community in the United States. She also questioned the meaning of originality with her artwork, while promoting the notion that appropriation art takes other’s work and adds her own interpretation of the work.

The picture above is one of Sturtevant’s works of art, named Warhol Marilyn, in which she remade Andy Warhol’s painting Marylin Monroe. This specific Sturtevant painting received much attention as Warhol himself reluctantly gave her the screen-maker that he used for his painting. Later, when someone asked Warhol about the process of painting the Marilyn Monroe, he would spitefully respond, “Ask Elaine”.

Sturtevant’s work faced plenty of resistance throughout her life, which discouraged her to the point of not displaying her art for over ten years, starting around the early 1970s. One particular instance of push back that Sturtevant’s work received was from a male artist regarding her repetition of Claes Oldenburg’s The Store, mainly because her work was housed walking distance away from the original painting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/arts/design/elaine-sturtevant-appropriation-artist-is-dead-at-89.html