The feminine in modern art - Benjamin, Simmel and the gender of modernity

The concept of 'the feminine' has generally been employed to denigrate the work of women artists. A central project of feminist art historians, theref ore, has been to challenge the use of the term. This article argues instead that the term can be mobilized in a more productive way, to investigate th e very constitution of discourses of gender and, in particular, the discurs ive production of modernism as itself 'masculine'. Reading for 'inscription s in the feminine', as well as for tensions and contradictions in 'the masc uline', allows for a critical practice which is based on interrogation rath er than correction, and which refuses the idea of modernism as monolithic. The article approaches these questions about modem art through a discussion of gender and modernity and, in particular, through an exploration of the prospects of such a critique available in some of the writings of Georg Sim mel and Walter Benjamin.