José Brel y Giralt, Genius, Glory and Love

Gender roles

Gender stereotypes: genius / muse

Gender stereotypes: subject / object

The work Genius, Glory and Love conveys a very clear message: thanks to love, personified here by the women who provide inspiration for poets, (male) artistic and poetic genius achieves glory, inscribing its name and work in the history books. The scene demonstrates the assignment of clearly established gender roles, with the woman as muse and the man as genius. This constitutes a gender stereotype based on a binary opposition which is often repeated in the history of art. But a feminist art history critic has undertaken a reconstruction of these myths, firstly, rescuing female artists from oblivion, and secondly, proposing a new way to write the art history which has traditionally been based on heteropatriarchal models.