Women as artists from XVIII to Twntieth century

Women as artists from XVIII to Twentieth Century. Life and art. It is very interesting to study the relationship between women artists and the Academies in the Eighteenth Century.The attitude of artists’academies to women members was contradictory. On the one hand a few women were elected members by most of these institutions:On the other hand election did not mean admission to all previlegies enjoied by male members.Their election was essentially honorific ,like the award of an honorary degree. The Academy Royale in Paris began with a most liberal statement of intentions from Louis XIV himself who declared that the Academy should be opened to all gifted artists regardless of their gender. Despite the rule of 1706.a few women were elected Academicians by the Paris Academy The first of these was a foreigner,,Rosalba Carriera who became member during her triumphal visit to Paris in 1720.Only in 1783 was elected Elizabeth Vigèè Lebrun (FIG. 1 ) who became a successful portraitiste of the Parisian aristocracy before she was twenty. In the Vasari corridor at the Uffizi we see her selfportrait at an easel,that was painted in 1790. ..Her selfporrait that she was asked to create and given to the Grand Duke Ferdinand the third of Lorena remains one of the artist’loveliest selfportraiyals.Her youthful gaze,the elegance of her pose and the quality of her clothes make this painting a pure delight.In a letter to Huber Robert ,now kept at the Docet library in Paris, she writes “My painting fro Florence enjoys the greatest success. They call me Madame van Dyck and Madame Rubens”:By 1776 she had been appointed court painter and produced dozens of royal portraits including a painting of Marie Antoinette with her children.She also was an artist’s daughter as the father was a painter,and she had the patronage of the queen herself Marie Antoniette .she obtained membership to Rome’s Accademia di San Luca and the Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg under the patronage of Catherine the second.. Also Angelica Kauffman (Fig:2 ) was an artists daughter,as her father was a minor Swiss painter of portraits and fresco :she accompanied her father on a five .year journey through Milan,Venice ,Parma and Naples. Italy taught her its charm and England developed it.What sets Kauffmann distinctly a part from most women artists of her time ,is her refusal to accept a career as a painter of portraits ,or still lives,or some other minor genre :Instead she decided to become a history painter.,This field was generally considered unsuitable for a woman, as women were not allowed to draw from the nude model .Kauffmann had contacts with the most important persons in Italy like Goethe and she accepted the theories of Neoclassicism written by Winckelmann.She established herself in Rome and got many commissions from English travellers from 1763 to 1766 when she moved to London.During the reign of George III, London was second only to Rome as the artistic center of Neoclassicism ; thanks to Joashua Reynold who had created in 1768 the Royal Academy of Art, Kauffman was one of the founding members of the Royal Academy , along with Mary Moser ,painter of flower pieces ,one of the only two women so honoured.. In 1781 Kauffmann married the Italian painter Antonio Zucchi resident in England and returned to Italy , to Naples where she painted a large group portrait of Ferdinand IV and Caroline(FIG.3 ,Napoli)) and she painted also many allegorical subjects like this one ,the Immortality, for porcelains(FIG4, Schlesseim Castle ) ). Goethe and Herder spent much time with her in Rome : when she died in 1807,Canova himself assumed charge of the funeral and two of her pictures were accepted in triumph in a funeral< procession reminding that made for the death of Raphael.. Despite the fact that women were to be denied admission to the Ecole des beaux Arts in Paris until almost the end of the 19 cent. .and despite the fact that they had to study their craft apart from their male colleagues,women artists nevertheless made progress as a group and as individuals in the years following the French Revolution. Other women artists had difficulties to assert themselves in the society : the case of Marie Guillamin Benoist is revealing. Pupil of Vigèè Lebrun is famous for her portrait of a Negress (Fig:5 ,Louvre) which made her reputation when it appeared in the Salon of 1800.This work may well be considered a black equivalent of David’s portrait of Madame Trudaine at the Louvre and a pictorial manifest of the 1794 decree abolishing slavery ,similar to Girodet’s Portrait of the Deputy Belley )(Versailles )in which a distinguished black sitter is also brilliantly represented. Despite Madame’s Benoist ‘s success and her devotion to her profession,and the numerous commissions received by Napoleon, she was deprived of the opportunity to exhibit in the Salons because her husband became Conseiller d’Etat in the Restoration government and she was forbidden to participate to public exhibition for the sake of their husbands’ career. To devote a lifetime of effort to being a serious artist was a considerable accomplishment for a ninetenth century woman,when marriage ant its concomitant domestic duties so often meant the end of even the most promising careers. With some exceptions like the case of Rose Bonheur who was the first woman to receive the cross of the French Legion of Honor which the Empress Eugenie conferred in 1865 to demonstrate that genious has no sex. Bonheur enjoyed official success in France as in England and America : she also was an artist’sdaughter because her father was a landscape’s Painter . Rose referred to sketch animals in the Bois de Boulogne and she was used to spend her time in the horse fairs and cattle markets (Fig.6,Thomery,Musée Rose Bonheur, Chateau de By ) where she used going in men’s clothes obtaining official autorization for her dress from the prefect of police in 1852. She had a woman companion ,the artist Natalie Micas with whom she shared an independence from convention and a dedication to work. Another non conformist artist was Suzanne Valadon,the illegitimate daughter of a laundress,as we see in this painting that represents herself in the hand of the mother (.FIG.7 ) . She began her career in the Monmartre section of Paris and lived outside conventional moral standards ,lover of the most famous artists as Puvis de Chavannes, , Toulouse Lautrec, Renoir .In 1883 she bore an illeggitimate son, Maurice Utrillo.She made many works, waitress, and circus acrobat , and artist’s model ,posing for Zandomeneghi,de Nittis, Puvis Toulouse Lautrec and Renoir.In the Blue Room (,FIG. 8 , Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne ),the aggressive gaze,dangling cigarette and languorous pose of the model recalls the women of Toulouse Lautrec’s brothels ,even if she is kin to Romantic odalisques and to the voluptuous nudes of Renoir, but Valadon has foregone the passivity of such models for a more dominant and aggressive image. Completely different from Valadon’st style is that one of Berthe Morisot who lived in Paris with her sister Edma (Fig. 9,Washington, Nat,Gallery) and together began to draw at a very early age following the painting of the Barbizon painters Rousseau, Millet ,Daubigny and particularly Corot who invited them to paint at Ville d’Avray ,and became their mentor and a close family friend. Berthe made her debut at the Salon of 1864 and her work was seen regularly in the salons whereas her sister married and abandoned the career.In 1874, the year of the first impressionists exhibition, Berthe married Eugene Manet,the brother of Edouard whom she loved in secret and for whom she posed as model in the famous painting The balcony and the portrait of herself. Her style grew up freer under the Manet’s guidance culminating in a bolder palette and a daring treatment of planes ,in broad ,fluent brushstrokes. Morisot devoted herself to the interiors scenes as this one ,Mother and Child (Fig.10, Paris, Louvre )and the other one for which her mother and sister were often the subjects (Fig. 11, Washigton, N:G ).Their portraits like this one (FIG: 12 ,Milano, GAM ), show ,the accidental pose and fleeting impression of a particular moment in time which are set down with intimacy, warmth,and serenity . Another impressionist painter is the American Mary Cassatt who lived most of her life in Europe .she went abroad with the wave of art student who,felt it necessary to complete their training in Paris.Unlike the others however Cassatt became a member of one of the most important groups in the history of art ,the Impressionists. Her first three Salon entries in 1872, 1873, 1874, were of Spanish subjects à la Manet :her grasp of the essentials of the new realism was recognised by Degas who told looking at her painting,” voila quelqu’un qui sent comme moi !Degas and Cassatt later met and their admiration for each other’s work led to a close and fruitful association. She felt the influence of Degas as we see in this portrait of a woman in black (Fig.13,Louvre ) and she specialised herself in intimate paintings for which models were taken from her family as in this woman with mandolino (Fig. 14 ,New York, priv. coll ) and she got the fame as a mother and child painter ( Fig. 15 ,Washington,Nat.Gal), also for exorcising her difficult relationship with her mother ( Fig.16 , Louvre )..She was interested in the effects of the light palette and the vigor of the visible brushstroke that captures especially in the draperies a scintillating brightness. If the examples of Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt show how much was important for the success the protection and patronage of two artist as Manet and Degas, regarding an other artist, as Camille Claudel the protection of Rodin was also a misfortune because did not help for being appreciated as the master. An interesting consideration is the scarcity of women sculptors and the reason is the difficulty for women to study the nude as it was forbidden to women in the official Academy . The young Camille Claudel (FIG:17 ,Musée Rodin ) in 1884 had to go to the Rodin’s atelier (FIG. 18 )for making sculpture and she became her muse, lover and colleague so clever that her sculpture Sakountala ( FIG. 19 ,Musée Rodin ) looks like the Eternal idol by Rodin (Fig. 20 ,idem ). Her love found many conflicts because Rodin was living with another woman who gave him a child : Camille symbolized her pain in a sculpture The mature age (Fig. 21 ) that represents an old man trained by an old woman ,the rival ,and detained by a young girl,Camille herself. Camille sculpted passionate works like the Waltz ,where you can recognise the influence of the new style ,the liberty (Fig. 22 ),whereas in other works,she expressed her delusion for being forsakened by Rodin as we see in the sculpture The deep thought (Fig. 23 where the stone on the head is the symbol of the depression.Unfortunately she fell in the depressions and later in the persecution mania transformed in madness, so that she was sent by parents to a madhouse where she spent the last thirty years until she died ,even without the assistance of the brother, the famous writer Paul Claudel. Another woman artist ,Gabriele Munter ,got a disappointment from her master and lover,Kandinski who left her for<another woman : Kandinsky had been her master in the Phalanx School that she attended :they fell in love and began to travel in Switzerland, Austria, France ,<Italy from 1903 to 1908 when they settled in Murnau ,a picturesque village in the Bavarian Alps where they lived with the couple of artists Jawlensky and Werefkin who discovered the Bavarian under< the glass paintings making many works in this technique. Throughout her career ,Gabriele Munter joined the association of the Blaue Reiter, created by Kandinsky , that affirmed the notion of color as an expressive element rather a representational vehicle; she painted many landscapes and some personal still lives,and addressed herself to the subject of the human figure. This one (Fig. 24) represents a Young woman ,Milwaukee Art Center ),and can be compared with the artist’s Marianne von Werefkin portrait now in Lenbach House in Munich, caracterised . by abstraction and simplification of human form into salient color areas and by the use of heavy black outline in place of modelling. The effort to overthrow the hegemony of “high art” by merging it with the “minor” arts ,an effort that has characterised one current of avanguard ideology from Synthetism to Constructivism,is by no means a feminine invention ,to extent to which the decorative arts, involving textiles ,have played a role in the career so advanced women artists is striking. Throughout a long and productive career ,Sonia Delaunay has contributed not only to the art of painting ,but has made significant innovations in the decorative arts as well. Born into a Jewish family in the Ucraine ,Sonia was adopted in 1890 by her maternal uncle .Henry Terk and lived in his cultivated household in Saint Petersburg. She moved to Paris in 1905 and looked at the most important artists such as Picasso, Braque, Derain , Vlaminck and the Douanier Rousseau ..Here she met Robert Delaunay and married him late in 1910 ,their mutually supportive relationship was paralleled in the field of art by that of Jan Arp and Sophie Tauber Arp, who were later to become close friends .For his son Claude she made a baby blanket with a cubist drawing and she used this idea to apply picture to the textile.By 1912 the poet Apollinaire had baptised Robert Delaunay ‘s coloristic light filled Cubism ,Orphism, and Sonia had painted her first simultaneous works involving an harmonic unity of abstract,forms,color and motion. Sonia Delaunay applied their discoveries not only to painting ,but to pastels ,collages and book binding as well.In 1913 she collaborated with the poet Blaise Cendrars on the creation of the first Simultaneous book, as you see in this interesting example that discloses ( Fig. 25 ,Paris,Galerie Berés) the visual poetry of nowadays..In addition she created simultaneous dresses ..At the 1914 Salon des independents Sonia Delaunay exhibited her work <Electric Prisms inspired by the halo of moving colors radiating from<electric light globes (it was the period when Paris was lighted by electricity) During the travel to Spain and Portugal she was influenced by the latin flocklore ,and she designed the costumes for Serge Diaghilev ballets. In 1920 she became friend of the surrealist group ,including Andrè Breton, Louis Aragon,the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and created the costumes for Tzara’s performances. The couple of Delaunay is parallel to that one of Sophie and Hans Arp : the swiss Sophie Tuaber after studying weavings and embroidering in Zurich ,meets Hans Arp and works with him as you see in this embroidery made on a drawing by Arp ( Fig. 26 , Paris, Centre Pompidou ). Two women painters with a strong personality as Frida Kahlo and Georgia o Keeffe were atist’s wives.as they married the painter Diego Rivera and the photograph Alfred Stieglitz : FRIDA|KAHLO . was born in the Mexico city suburb of Coyoacan ,her father was a German jewish photographer and the mother a Mexican Roman Catholic of mixed Italian and Spanish descent. She was thirteen when she met Diego Rivera who was painting murals and she decided to marry him,in the future. When Frieda was fifteen she had her spine fractured ( Fig.27, Priv. coll, Mexico City ),her pelvis crushed and one foot broken and she had many operations but had a great pain that she tried to overcome with paintings where she feels the influence of native popular art and Mexican identity in a naïve style . Frontal figures , ,irrational space and scale, allowed her to depict the most personal feelings and events without overhelming or repelling the viewer with her physical and psychological torment .She always loved Diego Rivera whom she painted even in her head as you see ( Fig. 28, New York,Priv.coll) Georgia O’Keeffe was born in Wisconsin on a diary farm near Sun Prairie , and studied at the art Institute of Chicago and began to use charcoal to put down abstract shapes that contained her own thoughts and feelings .A friend of her sent the drawings to Stieglitz in New York and he showed them in his avant garde Gallery at number 291 without having her approval but she .had success. He also began his composite portrait of her which consisted of some five hundred photographs taken over a twenty year period. Stieglitz and O Keeffe were married in 1924 but Stieglitz died and she decided to move to New Mexico that she loved.Her work has been labelled “feminine”by many critics because of his many associative connections with the female body ,She has become a feminist model for freedom of thought and action .To her ,the important thing has always been to carry out her own decisions how to make art and satisfy herself..In the early 1920she began to investigate the potential for abstraction using a single flower to fill the entire canvas.The flower form fills the canvas and its petals open to reveal its lighter inner core :brilliant expanses of yellow create strong warm shapes from which small details emerge in powerful three dimensionality(Fig. 29, Newark Museum ).The painting reveals the extension of her investigation of abstraction by eliminating any suggestion of actual petals and presenting only soft rolling and folding shapes in shades that merely allude to their source ( Fig. 30,Fort Worth Museum ) .. In Italy Benedetta Cappa followed her husband Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in her graphic experimentations and paintings ,influenced by the discovery of aerial view, but she liked to differ from her husband signing with her first name, Benedetta .This painting represents an island viewed by the airplane and gives the feeling of distance and abstraction.( .Fig.30,Priv:coll) Antonietta Raphael Mafai asserted herself with her sculptures so expressive and strong compared to the intimate paintings of the husband :in all her works she expressed her lively,rebel nature obliged to be nomad as victim of persecution as jewess.(Fig. 31, Rome, priv.<Coll ) Like Antonietta Raphael Mafai , also Adriana Pincherle ,sister of the Italian writer Alberto Moravia,was victim of persecution ,but she dedicated herself to the painting as pupil of Kokoska ,specialising herself in portraiture , as in this portrait of Anna Banti, wife of the critic Roberto Longhi(.Fig. 32 ,Florence, Longhi Foundation ) Nowadays women artists show a social interest as Shirin Neshat from Iran who is engaged in the defence of the women’s rights and in the demand of peace :she reminds the engagement of the German artist, Kate Kolwitz who in 1924, having lost her son in the First World war , made a poster NO MORE WAR that nowadays is still a present feminist message for peace.(Fig. 33, Berlin,Kate Kollwitz Museum ). Marilena Mosco PAGE 1