Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (In That Order), by Bridget Quinn

                                                                       

Author Bridget Quinn begins Broad Strokes with a memory of an encounter with a particular painting by a woman artist. It's a powerful approach. Over the two decades when I taught courses about women artists, I saw many students experience the jolt of recognition when they saw themselves in art (or the lives of artists) from distant countries and long ago centuries. Artist Judy Chicago has said that, upon seeing Judith Leyster's self-portrait for the first time, she felt she was seeing her own identity across the centuries. We can learn about art, and more, by studying the artists in this book.

                

Self-Portrait, Judith Leyster, Dutch, 17th c.

The first artist Quinn introduces is Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, the equal of any of the Old Masters. She is our Old Mistress. Artemisia achieved greatness despite the fact that she was raped by her art instructor at age 17, then put on trial (to prove her innocence) which involved driving screws through her thumbs. Not all women artists have been tortured, but they've all faced obstacles that male artists never encounter.

• Marriage for men, for instance, has not meant carrying and delivering a baby every year (a distinct possibility in the years before birth control). Are we really surprised to learn that Judith Leyster quit painting after having five children? Or that Rosa Bonheur determined never to marry after seeing her own mother work herself to death? And Paula Modersohn-Becker represents many other artists who died during or after childbirth (Eva Gonzalès comes to mind).

• Another impediment for women artists has been exclusion from the art establishment. Today, women aren't prohibited from attending art schools or submitting work for official exhibitions. Why then does work by women comprise only 30% of museum collections and gallery shows, on average?

• Misattribution has also been an issue for women. Only her distinctive signature, discovered when paintings thought to be by Franz Hals were cleaned, restored credit to Judith Leyster for the majority of her oeuvre. Marie Denis Villier's "Charlotte du Val d'Ognes" was attributed to Jacques-Louis David until 1977. It's worth noting that these two women were mistaken for the greatest artists of their times!

• Trumped up rivalries between artists pitted women against one another, reflecting the notion that a woman artist was such a novelty that there could only be one at a time. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, both successful artists in 18th c. France, were set up as competitors. Decide for yourself whether one of these artists was inferior to the other. 

 Self-Portrait of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard with
 Two Pupils, French, 18th c.

Portrait of Marie-Antoinette and Her Children,
Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, French, 18th c.

   
          

   


  When Quinn encountered the Labille-Guiard painting (above), it's impact was nothing less than a realization what her own life's work was to be. It was Frida Kahlo's paintings that cracked me open. After losing my parents while I was in college, I ran away to Mexico. I was alienated, grieving, a mess. Seeing Frida's work in a Latin American art history class was like hearing her telling me, personally, "Look, I'm not saying the pain is gong to go away. I'm saying that you take your pain and use it to create art." I've been learning from women artists ever since.

"Without Hope", Frida Kahlo, Mexican, 20th c.

                                                             

Women communicate by telling each other stories about our lives. Throughout the book, in addition to telling artists' stories, Quinn generously shares her own personal experiences of being affected by art and artists--how the work of Paula Modersohn-Becker embodied her fears about the impossibility of being both a mother an artist, or how she saw Edmonia Lewis's vibrant sculptures of Native American subjects resonate with her Native half-sister. 

 The author's informal, chatty writing style is appealing, but she also slides effortlessly into the lyrical as in this description of Alice Neel's self-portrait, painted in old age:

                       Her body is a fallen landscape of battles gone by, her 

                       broad, distended belly rests across flaccid thighs while 

                       large, fleshy breasts dangle almost as low. Neel gave birth 

                       to four children, and it shows.

Self-Portrait, Alice Neel, American, 20th c.

The artists in Broad Strokes stand for hundreds-thousands-who knows how many other women who have created works of art. The question is not, "Why have there been no great women artists?" but rather--considering their circumstances--"How have there been so many great women artists?"
       
May I suggest Broad Strokes, Volume II, as accessible and conversational as this book, about lesser-known women artists? And please be sure to include more delightful portraits by illustrator Lisa Congdon!

Portrait of Kara Walker, Lisa Congdon, American 21st c.

                                                                       

            

                         


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Forever Free Playlist

 These musical works follow the plot of my book, Forever Free: A Novel of Edmonia Lewis. You can listen to them on my Spotify playlist.




Native American flute

Edmonia Lewis was raised in her mother's Ojibwe culture. Flute and drum music would have formed the soundtrack of her childhood.

Lead, Kindly Light

Yet this Christian hymn would not have been unknown to the Ojibwe, who translated songs they enjoyed into their own language. 

The Song of Hiawatha

In turn, the Ojibwe tale of Hiawatha was retold in English in Longfellow's epic poem. It was a familiar note for Edmonia when she left her forest home to attend a white school.

Blow Ye the Trumpet Blow

Later, when she settled in Boston to study sculpting, Edmonia understood her father's Haitian heritage. She celebrated with other blacks when Frederick Douglass announced the passing of the 13th Amendment, the abolition of slavery, in Tremont Temple.

The Old Folks at Home 

I imagine Edmonia and the other residents of her Boston boarding house gathering in the sitting room each evening. Whoever had an instrument would have played it, with the others singing along to melancholy songs as each of them remembered faraway families. 

When Johnny Comes Marching Home

The sight of the 54th Battalion marching off to war inspired Edmonia to sculpt a bust of their leader, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.

Napule Bella

The bust of Colonel Shaw was a tremendous success. She sold enough copies to pay for passage to Rome, where she began her sculpting career in earnest.

Regina Caeli (plainsong)

As the threads tying Edmonia to her native beliefs unraveled, she sought a new spiritual life by converting to Catholicism.

I Vespri Siciliani

Isabel Chomeley, one of Edmonia's new Catholic friends, joined her in attending Verdi operas at the Teatro della Quattro Fontaine near her studio.

Cantico del Sol di San Francesco

Isabel introduced Edmonia to Franz Liszt, another Catholic convert who entered a monastery after the deaths of his son and daughter.

Cleopatra's Theme

After years of study and work, Edmonia created her masterpiece, The Death of Cleopatra, which she showed at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.


Different Drum

In Philadelphia, Edmonia sees John Langston, the attorney who represented her when she  was accused of attempted murder while a student at Oberlin College. They had grown close during her previous visits back to the States, and finally, Langston proposed. Edmonia was torn. Langston was now a politician; as his wife, she would be expected to give up her art.

Hi Henry's Triumphal March

In the years after Edmonia's return to Rome, her life grew quiet, centering around work and prayer. That is, until the day she learned that Buffalo's Bill's Wild West Show--featuring "wild savages"--was in Rome. She was drawn to the show, which was pervaded by a carnival atmosphere.

Tribal Drums

When Edmonia comes across the encampment where the Indian performers live, long-lost feelings of belonging returned. Her life had come full circle.

Review: Georgia, by Dawn Tripp

Georgia focuses on the period in the artist’s life when she was in relationship with Alfred Stieglitz. When the photographer first encourages Georgia O’Keeffe and begins courting her via letters from New York, she is overwhelmed. She tries to take it in during sojourns through the Texas night:

“I lie there in the cold quiet, a small though moving at the edges of my mind-

the possibility that he is like that open space, vast like these plains, this night,

vast enough it seems sometimes to hold me.”

            Georgia joins Stieglitz in New York, where he makes a series of nude photographs of her. She’s unself-conscious about them, as they portray someone so beautiful that she speaks of the woman in the photographs in the third person. When Georgia begins to show her work in Stieglitz’s avant-garde art gallery, the public is already familiar with her through the nudes. Every critic references them. The series of giant flower paintings she creates only provide the critics with all the more evidence of her “feminine” nature. No wonder Georgia later so vehemently denied feminists’ interpretation of her flower shapes as vaginal!

            In response, Georgia returns to the hard, abstract style she originated in Texas. But Stieglitz advises against painting in this style. He won’t show the abstracts or the city paintings Georgia creates from their apartment window.

And he’s controlling in other ways, like dissuading Georgia from having a child. She feels “cut down if I want too much”. Stieglitz loves her, or his idea of her—her new American painting, her clarity and strength—so much so that he cannot bear for her to go on painting trips on her own. Yet Georgia can’t bear to be constantly contained.

            When Georgia’s independence is too much for him, Stieglitz is unfaithful. After his third affair, Georgia travels to Taos, New Mexico. It’s reminiscent of Texas, and she begins to remember who she was before she met Stieglitz. “Curious, how something as inarguable and simple as wide-open space can rearrange me back into myself,” she thinks. And “…For the first time in a dozen years, it occurs to me that perhaps Stieglitz is not my life, but a detour from it.” Still, Georgia returns to Stieglitz again and again, until the psychic contortions required to fit his image of who she is result in a crisis that convinces her return to Taos.

                                   

            The author’s lyrical writing matches Georgia’s paintings. Her grasp of Georgia’s character and how it intersects with Stieglitz’s feel utterly authentic. And her descriptions of the process of painting give you the vicarious thrill of being in this artist’s head.

                        Day after day, it is the desolation of this country that enthralls

                        me. How the wind sweeps the light and throws it into vibrant

                        shifting patterns of color and shadow against the cliffs…I paint,

                        and I am not the woman that he made.

In the end, only the sky is vast enough to hold Georgia. I wish that every young woman who has been told she is complicated or difficult would read this book to learn that—like Georgia—the truth is that she is powerful.

Soundtrack for La Luministe

To help you enjoy the music I've chosen to accompany my novel about Berthe Morisot, here's some context about each selection. Click the link to go to the Spotify playlist and listen to each: https://open.spotify.com/user/paulabutterfield/playlist/4WXPexpiHJ3U7CSLhzCnfM


1. Tea Picking Dance featuring the koto, a traditional Japanese instrument, signifies the moment when Berthe sees her first Japanese print. The simple image of a woman in the private act of brushing her hair influenced her work ever after.

2. When the Morisot family attends the opening of the opera Don Giovanni, Berthe is absorbed by the story of a father and son who are in love with the same woman. The lyrics to the aria, Non Mi Di Bell'Idol Mio could be describing  Berthe's growing attraction to Edouard Manet.

                                                      I cruel?
                                                      Ah no, my dearest!
                                                      It grieves me much to postpone
                                                      a bliss we have for long desired…

3. Gioachino Rossini, a neighbor of the Morisots, plays Let's Dance at one of the weekly dinner gatherings Cornelie Morisot institutes to find husbands for her daughters.

4. After the German siege of Paris, Berthe goes to Cherbourg to visit her sister, Edma. The combined joys of seeing her sister again and of being away from the deprivations of Paris come through in her exuberant marine paintings. From Dawn Till Noon on the Sea, from Debussy's La Mer, conveys the wind, the waves, and the freedom Berthe enjoys while perched with her easel overlooking a harbor on the northwestern-most tip of Normandy.

5. If Berthe had spoken English, she might have used it on several occasions to tell Edouard Manet You're No Good.

6. It's Berthe's daughter, Julie, who lures her back to painting in the Bos de Boulogne after a period of mourning. There, they come across a concert by Cécile Chaminaud, whose light, charming Etude Symphonique, Opus 28, reminds Berthe of what life has to offer.

7. As Impressionism's popularity wanes, Berthe's friendships with her colleagues grows. She learns that Renoir has a penchant for singing songs from the latest operas, such as this one from Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann.

8. Renoir, Monet and Degas stagger down the sidewalk after one of Berthe's weekly dinners singing songs like Nini Peau de Chien, made popular by café concert crooner Aristide Bruant, extolling the charms of a prostitute.

9. At the end of her life, Julie ponders the nature of the relationship between her mother and Edouard Manet. Julie admires the French chic of the new American First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, so I Loved You in Silence, from Camelot, seems an appropriate song to conclude the soundtrack to La Luministe.

Painting it Forward

                              

         In the past, a woman who wished to be an artist had very little chance of pursuing that goal unless her father was an artist, himself. By the Renaissance, even a non-artist father could help by hiring painting tutors for his daughter, provided he was a Humanist who believed that women were educable.

         In 17^th c. Holland, botanical artist Maria Sibylla Merian learned from her father, an engraver, and her step-father, a Flemish flower painter. Though she was taught via this traditional route, Merian broke the pattern when she taught her daughters (and a maid, by some accounts) to observe and record the natural world. Flower paintings were hugely popular in her time, but Merian’s interest in botany and insects went beyond pretty pictures. After separating from her husband, she and her daughters travelled to the Dutch colony of Surinam in Africa, a dangerous undertaking, to do scientific research that resulted in The New Book of Flowers. For more about Merian and her daughters, here’s an informative blog post:

http://blog.catherinedelors.com/maria-sibylla-merian-and-her-daughters-at-the-crossroads-of-art-and-science/

         A century later in France, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard became one of only two women elected to join the Academy Française. Women during that time had no access to art education, let alone studios or models, so Labille-Guiard took it upon herself to teach promising young women artists in her own studio. It was common for women artists to paint self-portraits showing themselves at their easels, but She recorded this process in her painting, Portrait of the Artist with Two Pupils, Mlle Marie-Gabrielle Capet & Mlle Carraux de Rosemond. Radical as she was in circumventing the Academic system, she was still an 18th c. woman who made sure to show herself and her students to their best advantage. It's doubtful that the artist actually worked dressed in sumptuous silks with diaphanous trim, elaborate hairstyle topped by a feathered hat!  

         Another French artist, Berthe Morisot, took time from exhibiting with the Impressionist painters in the late 19^th c. to teach her daughter Julie and her nieces to draw and paint. Of the group, her niece Paule Gobillard showed the most talent. In these two paintings by Morisot, Paule sits in the same spot in the studio, marked by the classical statue behind her. Two things about that statue: First, it would have stood in for a live model; a nude model was out of the question for women artists. Second, it suggests that Paule, and likely her cousins, had usual spots where they worked in tante Berthe’s studio, which indicates that their art classes were routine.

         It pleased Berthe so much to see her daughter and nieces painting together (no doubt calling up memories of painting with her sister in their youth), that she painted Paule in action. In the unfinished work (lower right), it appears that Berthe hasn’t yet committed to a final position for Paule’s painting arm. The effect is of an arm in motion, caught in the act of painting. (Here’s a video of Paule Gobillard’s paintings throughout her career: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NRMHAL-QaA )

       

           During the 19^th c., segregated art schools for ladies were established, but it wasn’t until well into the 20^th   that women joined men in life-drawing classes in the United States.  

The Museum of Women Impressionists

           I would like to establish a small museum featuring the work of the women 
Impressionists. Berthe Morisot, a founder of the movement, contributed paintings to all 
but one of the exhibitions. Mary Cassatt contributed to four shows, and Marie 
Braquemond’s work appeared in three shows before her husband discouraged her further 
involvement with the Impressionists. Eva Gonzalès never participated in an Impressionist 
exhibition, but as a protégé of Edouard Manet, her style fit within the parameters of 
Impressionism, so I’m including her work in my museum.

            This imaginary museum is not available to tour via Google Art Project, so you’ll
have to use your imagination. I’ll be your decent as we peruse works by the women of Impressionism that include scenes of daily life, featuring family members and friends. Let’s start in the main gallery with a theme that all four artists interpreted--women reading. These paintings are meant to convey that their subjects are intelligent, educated women--reading the newspaper was thought to be especially significant. The outdoor readers show the Impressionist artists fascination with the effects of natural light. When the content of these roughly-contemporary paintings is similar, the differences in each artist's style becomes clear.

                                                    Woman Reading (Cassatt, 1879)

                                                 Reading in the Forest (Gonzalès, 1879)

                                                   Afternoon Tea (Braquemond, 1880) 

                                                       Reading (Morisot, 1873)

     Morisot and Cassatt were the two most active Impressionist painters, so let’s take a 
look at some of their work in this next room. Morisot was as devoted to her sister, Edma, 
as Cassatt was to her sister, Lydia. That closeness and intimacy can be seen in The Sisters 
(Morisot, 1869) and Two Sisters (Cassatt, 1906). Both feature the accessory du jour—a 
Japanese fan. A difference between the works is that Morisot’s was in oil on canvas, while 
Cassatt’s visible marks were made by pastels. 

                                                                                                                                                                                    


         


                                                                                                                                                                         In Mother and Sister of the Artist (Morisot, 1869) and Portrait of Katherine Kelso Cassatt (1889), the artists portray more family members. Although these women are imposing black, pyramidal figures, both Morisot and Cassatt were devoted to their mothers. Is it any coincidence that Cassatt began her series of famous paintings of mothers and children after her mother died?

    











          Both Summer’s Day (Morisot, 1870) and Summertime (Cassatt, 1894) feature women enjoying boating, probably on the lake in the Bois de Boulogne. You might have noticed that all of these Cassatt works were created 20 years or more after Morisot’s counterparts. Was her scene of ladies at leisure and ducks floating on light-dappled water an homage to her old colleague and competitor?

            In a small side room, we can see comparable works by Morisot and Gonzalès, Getting Out of Bed (1886), and Awakening Girl (s.d.). Where Gonzalès depicts an idealized, soft-focus scene of a sensuous young woman rising lying on a ruffled pillow beneath a diaphanous canopy, Morisot portrays a more innocent looking young girl. 

          And notice the different take on seeing and being seen at the theater in Gonzalès’s Box at the Italian Theater (1874) and Cassatt’s Woman in Black at the Opera (1877-78). We know that Cassatt's woman is attending a matinee, as she wears daytime attire, not an evening gown. It's interesting to note that while she observes the crowd, a gentleman in the background is observing her. Gonzalés's subject has set her opera glasses down for a moment, but her companion is scrutinizing someone outside the frame of the picture.

            An alcove is devoted to Braquemond’s luminous, almost-life-sized masterpiece, On the Terrace (1880), which leaves us wondering how this artist's work would have progressed if she had had the opportunity to continue painting
.

            Marie Braquemond turned her artistic talents to china painting. Gonzalès died of childbirth fever in her 30's. Morisot died at age 54. Cassatt lived the longest, until 1926. She saw WWI and women’s suffrage bring women’s lives out of the domestic sphere. But their work documenting the daily lives of women in the late 19^th c. lives on in the Museum of Women Impressionists.