ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that painting practice can make a contribution to a central concern within current feminist theory: the rethinking of the sexed embodied subject in ways which undo the separation of mind from body, subject from object, within western epistemology. Lucy Lippard, while identifying Eva Hesse's work as a turning point, saw it as the beginning of something else: the prefiguring of the aesthetic concerns of feminist art practices from the 1970s to the 1990s. The rhetorical claim that painting is dead has been made repeatedly for one hundred and fifty years since Paul Delaroche prematurely declared its demise with the advent of photography. Titian's painting comes out of the tradition of Renaissance image-making which required an ideal viewing point to make sense of it, usually established in relation to a presumed spectator at a set distance from the canvas.
