Or they could merely be using all of themselves as subject matter for their art, which for Gauguin just happened to be male. Perhaps in modern art all these statements, Pollock's as well as mine, can simultaneously be valid. The lecture never pauses to ask. Art is complicated enough to need interpretation. It will not do to confuse subject with meaning.
Many periods have a familiar set of stories.
Pollock briefly mentions Artemisia Gentilleschi, who recast such excuses for male leers as Susanna and the Elders . This great woman artist turned representations of dirty old men against her seventeenth-century tormenters. The problem, again, is a rhetoric of certainty. Pollock's style exploits what it sees and despises expressions of desire. When this woman from England's fading empire asks to leave sexuality out of polite company, she may be more Victorian than she thinks.