Doris Caesar
Seated Woman, 1962
Cast bronze
Gift of Harry Caesar
Like many artists of the 19th and 20th centuries who wanted to experiment with medium and style, Doris Caesar’s primary focus was the female nude. From certain angles, "Seated Woman" looks nearly spherical, and the form of Caesar's nearby Kneeling Woman is composed of multiple triangular shapes. Caesar’s agitated surfaces have likewise been compared to Auguste Rodin’s by many critics.
However, unlike her male counterparts, Caesar is often presumed to be speaking about some intrinsic experience of being a woman. For instance, curator John I. H. Baur said that Caesar, “has concentrated on a single theme-the naked female body-and she has wrung from it a poignant expression of what it is to be a woman, or perhaps one should simply say of what it is to be. The flesh has a virginal tautness, it is weighted by the ripeness of maturity, it is hacked and furrowed, hollowed and bossed by childbirth, by desire, by submission and the stress of experience.” And one of her biographers, Martin H. Bush, saw her works as being about both larger themes of human nature and also the role of women during her time, writing that “By using long craning necks that culminate in pitifully small heads, Caesar dramatizes the troubles of day-to-day living and the harsh realities of life. Yet emerging from this seeming awkwardness is an inner beauty, a kind of intuitive strength in the face of pain, and courage in the face of adversity.”