The story behind our new Holiday Gifting campaign
What was the late 70s artwork that inspired the concept? Read on to find out.
By now you will have noticed our beautiful ad campaign around holiday gifting on Phaidon.com (check out the great offers here). It was photographed by Lucy Schaeffer, styled by Katlin Taosaka and shot at Le Crocodile Cellar at the Wythe Hotel, Brooklyn.
What you might not have noticed is that what might seem at first to be a fairly familiar holiday concept - a gathering around a festively decorated dinner table - was actually inspired by one of the most famous pieces of feminist art ever created – Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party.
In a year that Phaidon has published books with groundbreaking female artists such as Tracey Emin and Yoko Ono, limited editions with Tschabalala Self, Arlene Shechet, and Anna Park, and the latest in our creative women survey series, Great Women Sculptors – launched in spectacular style with a dinner at the National Portrait Gallery, London during Frieze week with 8 of the 100 plus artists featured in the book in attendance - we thought it would be a fun idea to top it all off with a heartfelt homage to a truly groundbreaking artwork.
Sybil and David Yurman Artists and Jewelers
Chicago, born Judith Sylvia Cohen on 20 July 1939 in Chicago, Illinois, began her career as a fairly conventional minimalist painter and sculptor. Yet her interests turned towards feminist politics and gender equality during the rise of second-wave feminism and women’s liberation movements in the 1960s and 70s.
While some of those early works had a combative tone, this changed with The Dinner Party. The artist conceived the work as a celebratory redress of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper from “the point of view of those who’ve done the cooking throughout history”.
The Dinner Party has places for women whose position in history is fairly well assured, such as Boudica, Queen Elizabeth I, Virginia Woolf and Georgia O’Keeffe; more obscure figures, such as the ancient Greek mathematician Hypatia and the 20th century birth control advocate Margaret Sanger; and mythical women and female gods, such as Kali and Ishtar.
Design: The Leading Hotels of the World
Though Chicago was consciously referencing Christ’s last meal – an all-male dinner party – and chose an equilateral triangle to represent equality, the shape of the work is also a vaginal reference, a biological gender reference that extends into smaller details in The Dinner Party in which Chicago employed traditionally more effeminate art forms such as needlework and ceramics.
The Contemporary African Kitchen
“Each woman is represented by a unique place setting consisting of a needlework runner, symbolizing her personality and attainments and a hand-painted plate with a symmetrical motif variously evoking flowers, butterflies and vulvas,” explains the text in Phaidon’s Body of Art.
Chicago persuaded around 400 volunteers to help her complete the work, assisting in everything from embroidery to biographical research. While most of these assistants were women, a small number of men also contributed to The Dinner Party, which was completed over the course of four years in Santa Monica, California.
Opening on 14 March 1979 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Dinner Party drew 5,000 visitors on the opening night, a total around 100,000 during the work’s three-month run, and an estimated one million viewers, following an impromptu worldwide tour.
Today it is regarded as a pioneering work, influencing the 20th century Pattern and Decoration movement, as well as a later generation of artists, including Grayson Perry and Tracey Emin. The Dinner Party is on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
We can’t claim that our photo shoot, as beautiful as it is, will impact the course of art history in the way Chicago’s work did. However we would like to think it will make your holiday gifting simpler, more effective and ultimately enlightening for those on the receiving end. We might not know what the coming year may hold, but we can at least make it informative, visually exciting and a bit more joyful. Check out the great offers here.
Photographer: Lucy Schaeffer. Stylist: Katlin Taosaka. Location: Le Crocodile Cellar at the Wythe Hotel.