Ruth Ellen Weisberg - The Good Daughter
Ruth Ellen Weisberg is perhaps an artist best known for her sensitive subject matter, at once narrative and often autobiographical, heavily influenced by her experiences as a female artist, subjected to the male gaze and perspective. With her 1989 Tandem Press color lithograph, The Good Daughter, Weisberg employs a combination of the formal characteristics of coloring and perspective present within the print medium to achieve a dual sense of intimacy, intrusion, and eventual camaraderie with the figure.
The Good Daughter was printed at Tandem Press, a fine arts publishing studio and gallery affiliated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Education and currently located in Madison. Weisberg specifically sought out this studio, seeking to work with Master Printer Andy Rubin, whom she respected as a specialist in the lithography medium.1 In a telephone interview in 1992, Weisberg implies that Tandem’s printmaking tools at her disposal allowed her to produce a work of art that at once exceeded her expectations and enhanced the aesthetic properties of the print: “The scale of the monotypes encouraged me to use rollers as drawing tools, which created interesting aesthetic consequences.”2
When asked about the subject matter of The Good Daughter, Weisberg replied that the title and subject are merely devices with which she intends the viewers to extrapolate meaning and draw on their own experiences. Titles, she says, are “very short poems...evocative, thought-provoking, poetic, impossible.” She never intended for this work to have a fixed meaning. Even now, Weisberg herself capitalizes on intentionally providing the viewer with a narrative figure of sorts, one who “pulls away the curtain” and guides the viewer through the story. Nonetheless, the “daughter” of whom the print speaks is indeed Weisberg’s own, Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, whom Weisberg has depicted numerous times in her works throughout the years.3
Within The Good Daughter, a deep sense of intimacy pervades the entire portrait. Not only do the viewers direct their gaze at the daughter of the artist herself, but there is also a feeling of intrusion on her space. Weisberg’s daughter sits on a bed, surrounded by wrinkled sheets and looking outward into space. She shows no indication that she is aware of the viewer’s presence and therefore does not directly engage with the viewer through eye contact or other gestures. The palette of beige, peach, and murky browns contribute to a “white-washed” effect, similar to the effect of a photograph that has been overexposed. Large swaths are left bare, with little to no shaded effects. Art critic Donald Kuspit comments on the stark contrasts of light and dark, which “expressively unify her figural scenes, ‘softening’ their objectivity.”4
The Good Daughter is unlike what most would consider a “traditional” portrait; the sitter is not angled toward the viewer, engaging in eye contact, or formally posed in front of a backdrop. Accustomed to perceiving specific behavioral cues lent from society, viewers may go so far as to interpret the subject as emotionally detached. They are uncomfortably pushed into a private moment with her daughter, yet also drawn to the figure in an intimate sense, urged to empathize with the daughter.
Indeed, curator Andrew Stevens of the Chazen Museum of Art explains Weisberg’s art as she “has consistently examined her [Weisberg’s] own place in the concentric realms of family, society, and history.”5 Beginning around the 1980s, Weisberg began exploring personal narrative as a popular and powerful influence in her works. Even in 2004, years after the inception of The Good Daughter, she felt that many women’s stories had still gone unannounced to the world.6 She often portrays young women in her works, to which Barbara C. Gilbert of the Skirball Cultural Center remarks that Weisberg creates her works “in a woman’s voice” and thus “has reclaimed the female body,” which has historically been subjected to a male perspective and thus controlled by the half of the population with no physical agency over the aforementioned subject matter.7 Indeed, throughout her artistic career, Weisberg identified first and foremost as a feminist artist. Alongside contemporary female artists like Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro,8 Weisberg took advantage of the intimate connections afforded by her own life experiences as well as the experiences of other women and how they had contributed to her artistic trajectory and world perceptions.
Kuspit implies that Weisberg places her figures in a dreamscape of sorts, a world unlike the ones with which her viewers are acquainted. This could partly be due to her interest in “how images look through the lens of memory.”9 A recent 2015 catalogue raisonné from Weisberg’s gallery in California explain that, “making art is her [Weisberg’s] personal way of obliterating the boundaries of time and place and of using imagination and empathy to suggest parallel realities that are zones of the ‘in between.’”10
Both the stark lighting and sharp angling of perspective contribute to a greater sense of unease and disorientation for the viewer, akin to the bright flash of sunlight one encounters upon waking from sleep. Perhaps in this way, Weisberg intends to draw the audience into her portrait and forge a personal connection with them, as they too can empathize with the sense of sleepiness upon waking from slumber, as it appears her daughter has just done the same.
It is difficult for the viewer to see the sitter’s face, let alone discern her exact facial expression. This is due in part to the unusually sharp vantage point from which the viewer is positioned, as opposed to the traditional frontal or three-quarter position of posed portraits. The reason such poses were historically popular was attributed to the greater sense of clarity to the viewer and their ability to view as much of the sitter as possible.
In order that a viewer may more fully empathize and even become the subject of a portrait, a popular trope used by artists remains the creation of a mask-like impression of the figure or even, as in this case, completely eliminating any and all distinguishing facial features. The sitter becomes a vessel into which the viewer can insert himself or herself, understanding and living the life of the portrayed figure. Indeed, Weisberg herself stated in an interview: “I want to share with people, and I want them to be able to project themselves into my images.”11
The Good Daughter exemplifies the figurative and autobiographical experiences she so cherishes in narrative art. She has used the medium of lithography to her full advantage, manipulating color and relative shading in order to produce a portrait that altogether succeeds at drawing the viewer into its intimate setting, expressing its narrative origins in her daughter’s figure, and finally inviting the viewer to partake in this personal space, to see and experience life as The Good Daughter did.
Elizabeth Bigelow
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1Ruth Weisberg, interview by Elizabeth Bigelow, December 3, 2015, phone interview, transcript.
2Andrew Stevens, Tandem Press: Five Years of Collaboration and Experimentation (Madison: Elvehjem Museum of Art, 1994), 24.
3Ruth Weisberg, interview by Elizabeth Bigelow, December 3, 2015, phone interview, transcript.
4Ruth Weisberg, Ruth Weisberg: Unfurled (Los Angeles: Skirball Cultural Center, 2007), 28.
5Stevens, Tandem Press, 23.
6Weisberg, Unfurled, 16.
7Ibid., 11.
8Ibid., 15.
9Gary M. Ruttenberg, Ruth Weisberg Prints: Mid-life Catalogue Raisonné, 1961-1990: Fresno Art Museum, June 1990 (Fresno: Fresno Art Museum, 1990), 13.
10John Seed, “Ruth Weisberg: The Adventure of Living In Between,” in Ruth Weisberg: Reflections Through Time, ed. Jack Rutberg (Los Angeles: Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Inc., 2015), 59.
11Ruttenberg, Ruth Weisberg Prints, 15.