With its latest exhibition on surrealism, the Centre Pompidou invites visitors to an unprecedented deep dive into he movement born in 1924 with the publication of André Breton’s Manifesto. This maze of artworks, where art, literature, and cinema intertwine, offers an ambitious re-reading of this iconic period in art history.

This exhibition echoes a previous one, Surrealism au Féminin?, which focused on female creators who actively participated in the movement. Organized with a only female artists approach, it aimed at highlighting these often-forgotten creators to shed light on their essential contributions. This new exhibition raises the question: What changes have we observed in terms of gender representation in artistic exhibitions? Has the treatment of women artists improved since that retrospective, particularly in an era where social and ethical issues are central to contemporary debates?

With nearly 500 works and documents, the exhibition offers a rich thematic journey alternating between paintings, graphic arts, and the many extensions of surrealism, such as cinema and literature. True to the tradition of historical exhibitions, it aims to dazzle visitors while immersing them within the surrealist imagination.

AN AMBITIOUS EXHIBITION: LAYOUT AND THEMES

Overall Description

The exhibition is structured around 13 major themes, each divided into sub-themes spread across several rooms. It begins in narrow, dimly lit spaces that gradually open into larger, brighter rooms. The layout, designed like a labyrinth, genuinely evokes this sensation. Visitors move around a circular room, reminiscent of the spiral of a snail’s shell, which expands as one progresses.

The themes aim at synthesizing the many facets of surrealism. Among them are: Mediums, Dreams, Alice in Wonderland, Chimeras, Political Monsters, Mothers, Melusine, The Forest, The Philosopher’s Stone, Night, Eroticism, and The Cosmos.
This thematic approach seeks to cover the richness and diversity of surrealism while providing an overarching view.

Excessive Thoroughness?

The exhibition is extremely dense and it takes a long time to cover it. The first rooms, narrow and crowded with artworks, complicate navigation, particularly for visitors with physical disabilities. Guests must weave between paintings and installations, often at the expense of a smooth and comfortable experience. Adding to this challenge is the lack of seating, which prevents visitors from resting or fully immersing themselves in a piece, despite the lengthy nature of the visit.

While offering great variety and catering to diverse tastes, the abundance of works ultimately detracts from the experience. Too many paintings hung together overwhelm the visual space and hinder movement. Crowds gather, struggling to find their way or to contemplate the artworks under proper conditions.

It is only in the second half of the exhibition that visitors can access more spacious areas and finally breathe. However, by then, physical and visual fatigue may have set in:

• Visual abundance makes it difficult to focus on some specific artwork. This is compounded by the presence of large screens, particularly in the second room of the exhibition, which can be challenging for people who are photosensitive.
• The lack of seating throughout the journey forces visitors to remain on their feet, an added strain in such a long exhibition, especially for those with disabilities.

This lack of comfort ultimately weighs on the overall experience. While the intention to represent the diversity of surrealism is commendable, a more selective curation of works could have created a smoother, more enjoyable, immersive experience.

CREATING CONTRASTING ATMOSPHERES

Colors and Aesthetics of the Exhibition

The exhibition unfolds primarily in shades of gray and black, gradually transitioning to increasingly lighter shades of gray. This choice enhances the convoluted feel of the layout: visitors are never entirely sure where they are or whether they are leaving one gallery or entering a new one. This intentional disorientation seems designed to offer an immersive experience that mirrors the surrealist ethos of confusion, with artworks displayed on uniform and seemingly endless walls.

However, a few rooms stand out with splashes of color:

• A pale yellow wall in the section dedicated to The Realm of Mothers,
• Red walls in the section The Tears of Eros,
• A dark blue wall marking the transition to Cosmos.

While these variations provide some visual relief and create rhythm in the journey, the progression toward brighter lighting as the exhibition continues can strain the eyes. At times, the contrast between atmospheres lacks coherence and could be softened to enhance visitor comfort.

Visitor Comfort and Interactive Features

The exhibition aims to be accessible to a broad audience but struggles to fully achieve this goal:

• Physical access: As mentioned previously, the narrow spaces and overabundance of artworks make the layout less suitable for individuals with disabilities
• Comprehension access: For novices, the exhibition provides an overview of the main ideas of surrealism, serving as a kind of educational introduction. For more informed visitors, it functions more as a synthesis, with the diversity of artists displayed becoming the main attraction.

However, children and families are not well accounted for. The long journey and lack of playful interactions make the exhibition less engaging for younger audiences. A child-friendly path, at eye level or including interactive activities, would have been a significant asset, similar to the successful initiatives seen at the Musée d’Orsay.

Visitors are presented with a display that, despite its abundance of artworks, feels more like an open catalog than an immersive, contextual exhibition. As a complex and provocative movement, Surrealism, benefits from being explored through engaging methods such as projections, videos, or multisensory spaces.

Some interactive elements do appear in parts of the exhibition, such as well-chosen film excerpts like Hitchcock’s Spellbound, but these are sparse.

THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN SURREALISM AND IN THE EXHIBITION

Female Figures and Their Marginalization in Art History

In this regard, the exhibition stands out positively: the inclusion of women is fully realized. Unlike many exhibitions where women are relegated to the status of “exceptions,” with only a few artworks on display, here they represent nearly 50% of the featured artists. They are not isolated in a dedicated section but are fully integrated into each theme. This approach presents them as active participants in surrealism rather than as marginal or accessory figures. This progress appears to stem partly from the work initiated in the exhibition Surréalisme au Féminin ?, which had already started redefining their place in the movement’s history. Some works featured in that earlier exhibition reappear here, but the current selection stands out by presenting new pieces and deepening our understanding of women’s contributions. Their themes, techniques, and compositional choices significantly enrich our perception of surrealism.

For example, Suzanne Van Damme’s Couple d’oiseaux anthropomorphes (1944) offers a unique perspective. This work subtly questions the relationship between gender and representation, a theme often overlooked by male surrealist artists. By attributing human behaviors and attitudes to birds, Van Damme highlights gender biases imposed on both sexes, while criticising the dynamics of power they generate. This poetic yet critical dialogue about stereotypes and gendered categories considerably enriches our understanding of surrealism.

Female Creators in the Exhibition

Among the celebrated female artists, we find iconic figures such as:

• Leonora Carrington, Dora Maar, Remedios Varo, Claude Cahun, Meret Oppenheim, Toyen,
• And many others, showcasing the diversity of women’s contributions to the movement.

Their equal treatment with male artists is a true success. They are highlighted not as curiosities or muses but as creators in their own right. This recognition resonates with the audience: throughout the exhibition, one can hear visitors marveling at their works, enthusiastically commenting on them, and sometimes expressing greater admiration for them than for their male counterparts.

Certain works deserve to be spotlighted as powerful examples of their contribution to surrealism, such as:

Although the exhibition also includes texts and writings by some female creators, it lacks a more in-depth reflection on their impact on the artworld. How did they contribute to writing surrealism’s history or questioning its codes, and how does this enrich our understanding of the movement?

Room for Further Exploration?

While the exhibition succeeds in showcasing female creators, it is more reserved in exploring representations of gender.

• For instance, in the Melusine section, female representations lack contextualization. Who is Melusine? What symbols are associated with this figure in the artists’ works?
• Similarly, in The Tears of Eros, representations of sex and women are approached aesthetically but lack deeper analysis regarding gendered meanings or dynamics of power.

Surrealism has always played with notions of gender, deconstructing and reinventing them, but the exhibition only partially delves into this theme. Clearer educational frameworks could have gone beyond visual contemplation to explore central surrealist concepts, such as:

• The reinvention of traditional roles through mythological figures like Melusine.
• The interplay between masculine and feminine in the works of Claude Cahun or Toyen.
• How female creators used their works to respond to or subvert dominant male visions within the movement.

This raises the question of whether surrealism is as equalitarian as this exhibition might suggest. However, it avoids addressing the misogynist aspect of the movement or from certain members within it.

Lastly, a feminist perspective through history on women’s contributions to surrealism would have added an essential layer of analysis to understand their place—not only in this movement but also in an ever-evolving history of art.

BETWEEN DISCOVERY AND FRUSTRATION: THE TRANSMISSION OF KNOWLEDGE

Uneven Educational Content

For knowledgeable enthusiasts of surrealism, the exhibition’s explanatory panels offer little new information. They remain very general, merely introducing the main concepts and themes of the movement. While this approach may suit a novice audience, it risks leaving visitors seeking deeper insights or fresh perspectives somewhat unsatisfied.

The decision to favor an introductory approach is likely due to the exhibition’s length, but this choice quickly reveals its limitations. The abundance of artworks, visual stimuli, and themes overwhelms the visitor’s attention. In such a context, it becomes difficult to linger over the explanatory panels, which often go unnoticed:

• Panels placed in narrow spaces cause crowds to gather, blocking navigation.
• This has a deterrent effect, preventing visitors from reading the texts comfortably.

The labels accompanying the artworks, although present, suffer from several major flaws:

• Size and readability: They are often too small and placed too low, making reading complicated, especially in crowded spaces.
• Lack of detail: The information provided is minimal, failing to place the artwork in a broader context or allowing visitors to fully appreciate its contribution to the theme.

For an exhibition of this scale, an additional effort to enhance the quality of the educational materials would have been welcomed.

CONCLUSION

The surrealist exhibition at the Centre Pompidou amazed with the scale of its ambition: 500 works spanning a century of creation, exploring diverse regions such as Latin America, Japan, and the United States. However, this abundance of works and themes, while enriching, tends to scatter the visitor’s centre of focus rather than articulating a clear narrative. While the major names—Dalí, Magritte, and Max Ernst—provide solid anchors, works by lesser-known creators struggle to find their place in this sprawling collection, often presented without the necessary context to fully grasp their significance.

The exhibition occasionally strays from the central history of the movement by attempting to cover too much, including late works from the 1960s and international extensions. This might irritate those seeking a clear and concise overview, especially compared to previous exhibitions such as La Révolution surréaliste (2002) at the Centre Pompidou or Surréalisme au Féminin? (2023) at the Montmartre Museum, which stood out for their clarity and focus. Here, although the immersive and thematic approach is appealing, it loses coherence for quantity.

Nonetheless, the exhibition captivates with its diversity and the special attention given to female creators, who are often overlooked this movement. Its notable success in drawing crowds, even on weekdays, hints at the potential for it to become a “blockbuster” exhibition in the sense of Emma Barker (Contemporary Cultures of Display), should it reach 250,000 visitors. Already travelling, the exhibition began in Brussels and will move to Madrid, Hamburg, and Philadelphia by 2025, offering an international audience the opportunity to explore this retrospective.

In the end, this exhibition highlights the ongoing challenge of balancing ambition and access. It is a commendable attempt that, with greater concision, could have left a more lasting impression.

Written by Ariane TASSIN

The post Surrealism at the Centre Pompidou appeared first on Women's Art Tours.

A founding member of the Impressionists and the only woman to join in their first exhibition, Berthe Morisot attempted to seize slices of modern life with swift brushstrokes and pastel-hued tones

“They’ll become painters”

Berthe Morisot was born in an affluent family with a fondness for the arts. She grew up in chic Western Paris. Her father was a senior administrator who had studied architecture at the School of Fine Arts. Her mother was, supposedly, the great-niece of Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

As befits a bourgeois environment, Berthe Morisot, along with her sisters Yves and Edma, took music lessons. They started to study art from 1857 with Alphonse Chocarne, who taught them the basics of drawing. The sisters had little affinities with Chocarne. Yves soon gave up painting. Berthe and Edma decided to enter the workshop of Joseph Guichard, who enabled them to copy masterpieces from the Louvre : classical statues and Italian Renaissance painters such as Titian and Veronese. “They’ll become painters” asserted Guichard to the sisters’ parents.

Through Guichard, the Morisot sisters met landscape artist Camille Corot and other members of the Barbizon school. Berthe was expressing a growing interest for plein-air painting, often working in watercolour. In 1864, the Morisot sisters made their Salon débuts as amateur painters. The first review of a painting by Berthe was released in the press: “the white fabrics wrapping the young lady’s body are so fine and lavishly coloured, the landscape’s hues are real (…) painted with much energy”. Edmé Tiburce Morisot set up a workshop in the garden’s house for his daughters, while their mother welcomed Parisian fashionable society (politicians, artists, writers) on Tuesday evenings.

Relationship status: it’s complicated

In the end of 1867, during a sketching session in the Louvre, the Morisot sisters got acquainted with Édouard Manet thanks to painter Henri Fantin-Latour. After the scandals related to Lunch on Grass and Olympia (1863), Manet had made for himself quite a reputation. In the first place, Edma Morisot communicated her fascination to the painter, but her wedding to a naval officer made her quit art practice.

The close link building up between Berthe Morisot and Édouard Manet at that time was rather complex. The possibility of a sentimental relationship between the two artists may have been exaggerated by biographers. Morisot sat for the Edouard Manet a dozen times, but contrary to his other model, Eva Gonzales, she has never been portrayed as an artist at work, but rather as a “femme fatale”, as critics pointed out. Besides, Manet required her to make alterations to her canvasses (Young Lady by the Window, 1869) or even re-painted some parts (Mrs Morisot and her Daughter, Mrs Pontillon, 1870).

And yet there was a fruitful, mutual exchange in their practice. Manet took up Morisot’s motif of the figure seen from the back from Woman and Child at the Balcony for his Railway of 1872-1873. The railings of this canvas by Morisot hark back at The Balcony by Manet. She sometimes resented this influence: “I’ve realised it looks just like Manet” she wrote to her sister about this View of Paris, “I am quite upset about it”.

In 1872, Morisot asked Manet to show her work to art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who bought some of her canvasses and watercolours. Her colour range became lighter, less inspired by Manet’s style. The stays at her sister’s second home in the outskirts of Paris show this evolution (The Cradle ; The Butterflies’ Hunt, 1874).

The same year, Morisot got married to Edouard Manet’s brother, Eugene. She never sat for Manet again, but did her utmost, after the painter’s death in 1883, to acquire the portraits he had made of her. She organised a monographic exhibition in 1884 dedicated to him, and joined forces with Claude Monet to make the State purchase Olympia.

First impressions

December 1873: Berthe Morisot, as well as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir et Edgar Degas founded the Anonymous, Cooperative Association of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers. Manet was invited, but refused to join. Even if Morisot’s painting, Blanche, had been accepted, the Salon jury of 1873 had been particularly harsh. This alternative society would enable its participants to exhibit outside of traditional institutions.

The first Impressionist exhibition took place in 1874. One week before the opening, painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes had tried to deter Morisot from participating, but there she displayed fourteen oils on canvasses (including The Cradle), three pastels and three watercolours.

The following year, Morisot and the Impressionist group were involved in an auction sale at Drouot’s. This created such an uproar that policemen were placed in front of the building. According to Renoir, Pissarro punched someone in the face for calling Morisot names because she dared to sell her work. She achieved the highest price with Young Woman with a Mirror (480 francs).

Albert Wolff ranked amongst the most scathing reviewers of Impressionism, but at the second show of 1876, he singled out Morisot’s paintings as more palatable to the eye: “there’s also a woman in the lot – such is the case in any famous groupings – her name is Berthe and she looks rather strange. Her feminine grace remains stable within the excesses of delirious spirits.”

From 1877 onwards, Morisot’s “uncomplete” touch, for which she had been reprimanded, was seen in a more positive light. Critics started to praise her feathery brushstrokes and carefully-orchestrated compositions. Woman at her Toilette met with general acclaim at the fifth Impressionist exhibition. For George Rivière, Morisot had even managed to outshine her master: “Her eye (…) is even more sensitive than Mr Manet’s”.

a family of one’s own

The 1870s were punctuated by her wedding and the birth of her daughter. In 1875, the Manet couple spent their honeymoon in England, where Berthe Morisot could admire the works of Gainsborough and Turner. The seascapes she made in watercolour conveyed the shimmering water reflections and whimsical weather effects of the British coasts. The canvas on the right depicts the buoyant activity of Cowes, a seaport town located in the Isle of Wight.

Morisot’s husband remained a constant support throughout her career. Interestingly, Eugène Manet is the only grown-up man featuring in her oeuvre. In this painting made during the couple’s English holiday, she replaced the traditional female figure circumscribed to an interior with a portrait of her husband’s. He is seating with almost his back to the viewer, facing the window. This interplay of gazes, inside and outside spaces, is characteristic of Morisot’s elaborate compositions.

Morisot had become “Mrs Manet” for her friends, but she kept signing her work with her maiden name. Her fame and social status led her to receive celebrities from the artworld on Thursday evenings. She seemed to dislike Eva Gonzalès, but befriended other women revolving around the Impressionists, such as Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt. Thanks to the American artist, she was involved in two exhibitions of the Woman’s Art Club of New York. Morisot was particularly close to poet Stephane Mallarmé, who became her daughter’s guardian when Eugene Manet died in 1892.

The birth of Julie Manet was the only event that could make her miss an Impressionist exhibition. Julie Manet soon became her favourite model, portrayed in an endless array of poses and activities. These canvasses show the child growing up and the passing of time. Mother and daughter shared everything, notably art practice.

Shine a light

Berthe Morisot had thus become a leading figure of the Impressionist movement. In 1882, she was exhibited in London, and showed some pieces alongside Pissarro and Monet at two Salons of “the XX”, an avant-garde group of Belgian painters, sculptors and engravers. Thanks to Durand-Ruel, her work was displayed at the New York National Academy of Design in 1886 and at other institutions in the United States. This enabled her to get better acquainted with the American art market.

Her first solo exhibition took place in 1892 at the Boussod and Valadon gallery founded by Adolphe Goupil, an art dealer formerly opposed to Impressionism. This event was much celebrated in the press. Furthermore, when Gustave Caillebotte died in 1894 and bequathed his collection to the French State, Mallarmé pointed out the absence of Morisot’s work. Following his advice, the Museum of Living Artists (actual Musée du Luxembourg) purchased Young Girl in a Ball-Gown.

In the 1880s, Berthe Morisot spent almost every winter in Nice. She enjoyed the South for its warm weather and dazzling light. She often sailed on fishermen’s boats to paint directly from the motif. Illuminated Boat was made during her last stay in Nice. It displays the glittering reflections of the moon onto the ripples.

Morisot’s interest in landscape can also be perceived in the many images of her secondary residence located in the South-West suburbia of Paris. Her style, which grew more and more dynamic, makes us feel that paint has been applied in a single session. Compositional devices are quickly delineated, and colours patches seem to appear in a blur. But light, and light especially, catches the viewer’s eye.

Innovating

Berthe Morisot tried to recreate movement in her canvasses. She was inspired by her surroundings, the natural environment, and daily life. Modernity in 19th century art has traditionnally been defined according to the terms of Charles Baudelaire. ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ explores the interrelations between aesthetics and lifestyle within the scope of the public domain, dominated by the male gaze.

However, Morisot’s subject-matter was inherently contemporary. She didn’t hesitate to depict domestic toil. By relentlessly representing laundrywomen, seamstresses and wet nurses, she endowed these silent, unvisible activities with dignity.

Morisot’s way of experimenting with expressive brushstrokes reveal her constant research on oils’ material aspect. She sometimes scraped her canvasses to achieve various textures, while some were completely covered with paint. From 1885, she gave more significance to outline. This emphasis on simplified shapes betrayed an influence of Japanese prints, by placing compositional elements away from the centre. Sitters were easily recognisable, but her technique bordered onto abstraction.

In her final years, Morisot explored other artistic media, ranging from sculpture to etching. She illustrated a collection of poems by her friend Mallarmé. Her Cherry-Tree series is a double portrait of Julie and her cousin, Jeanne Gobillard, in the Manet house-garden. She came up with these monumental compositions after many charcoal and pastel sketches.

legacy

Berthe Morisot died aged 54, after caring for her daughter who had been sick. She donated most of her artworks to her Impressionist friends. The first posthumous tribute was a retrospective show at the Durand-Ruel gallery in 1896. Mallarmé wrote the catalogue’s introduction.

Julie Manet described the excitement caused by this event in her diary: “at the end of the day, you wonder how we’ll ever be ready for tomorrow (…) as the sun sets, as a few paintings only retain some sense of light and as these portraits of young ladies seem even more lively, the Japanese screen really looks like a wall. Mr Monet has asked Mr Degas to remove this screen in the backroom, but Mr Degas argues that people won’t see the drawings anymore”.

Berthe Morisot has fared well in the lineup of European and American institutions: the Musée de l’Orangerie has dedicated a major exhibition to her in 1941 and in 1960 she was celebrated at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In the mid 80s, a travelling show was organised at the National Gallery of Washington, whose works went to two other American venues. More recently, the Thyssen Museum in Madrid (2012) and the National Museum of Fine Arts in Québec (2018) have set up monographic exhibitions.

Thanks to the bequests of the artist’s heirs, the Musée Marmottan-Monet owns the largest public collection of Morisot’s works: www.marmottan.fr/en/collections/berthe-morisot/. In 2013, Morisot became the best-priced woman artist when After Lunch (1881) was sold at a Christie’s auction for $10.9 million. The Metropolitan Museum (bit.ly/3bADydl) and the Art Institute of Chicago (bit.ly/3i8XDZo) boast a nice range of drawings accessible online. You can discover her paintings on display with our Musée d’Orsay tour: womensarttours.com/visite/danger-women-at-work/.

“I don’t think there’ll ever be a man treating a woman as an equal. This is the only thing I’d have required, because I know I’m worth it”

Berthe Morisot, 1891

The post Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) appeared first on Women's Art Tours.

establishing one’s reputation

Raised in a lower middle-class background with her two sisters, Rosalba Carriera started her artistic activity by making lace-patterns – her mother’s trade. When the industry’s economy began to waver, Carriera had to find other sources of income to support her family.

Trained by Jean Steve, a French miniature artist settled in Venice, she launched her career by painting on the lids of snuff-boxes, which popularity grew in the late 17th century on account of tobacco imports to Europe. As Venice became a landmark of the Grand Tour – an essential step in artistic education – she could benefit from the taste of connoisseurs and would-be painters for such boxes. Rosalba Carriera is credited to be one of the first artists to use ivory instead of vellum for miniature.

This technique requiring great care and attention to detail was used to decorate decorative objects or jewellery: lockets, rings… Portraits of celebrities, family members and potential spouses would be spread as such, for remembrance or as tokens of affection.

from miniature to pastel

By 1703, Carriera had completed her training in the workshop of the engraver Guiseppe Diamantini. She then specialised in portrait-making, almost exclusively in pastel. The choice of this genre led to commissions by Christian Cole, first Duke of Manchester and ambassador in Venice. Other portraits of influential figures included those of printmaker Antonio Maria Zanetti, Frederick IV of Denmark and August III of Poland who collected her drawings.

In 1705, Rosalba Carriera was appointed emeritus painter, a title granted to non-resident artists, by the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome. She perfected her pastel technique over the course of her career by enobling it, regarding it as serious practice. Traditionally employed for sketches, it was her favourite medium for portraiture, especially to enhance facial features.

She appreciated pastel’s flexibility, allowing her to convey the inner psychology of each sitter through blended hues and its velvety aspect. She innovated by binding chalks together in order to achieve a wider range of colours. Besides, she used the various sides of white sticks across studies in charcoal to seize the glittering textures of lace and satin. Carriera’s work is often reinscribed in the context of the Rococo, an ornemental style privileging illusionistic devices, twisting curves, subtle plays of light and tonalities (an expression of the Late Baroque movement).

To Paris!

In 1715, art collector and amateur Pierre Crozat paid her a visit to Venice, then invited her to stay at his 5 years later. For 18 months, Rosalba Carriera’s triumphant sojourn in the Mecca of the Arts was marked by constant commissions from the French aristocracy and gallery outings. This was minutely recorded in her diary, which her great admirer, the Abbé Vianelli, had had published in 1793.

She made about 40 portraits of the Dauphin, young Louis XV, contributing to the change of taste for more intimate, spontaneous portraiture in bust as opposed to more formal oil pictures. To keep pace with this flow of orders, she was assisted by her sister Giovanna and her brother-in-law. She also executed allegorical subjects inspired by Ancient mythology.

Rosalba Carriera met with painters Antoine Watteau and Antoine Coypel, and influenced the work of Quentin de La Tour. She was elected member of the Royal Academy of Paris by popular acclaim on 26 October 1720: womensarttours.com/gendering-the-louvre-an-introduction/. If the Rococo style lost its appeal by the end of the 18th century, her style remained an inspirational model for Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun.

the grand tour

Rosalba Carriera was received by the Este family of Modenna in 1723. Along with Giovanna, she visited Parma. She went to the Austrian court in Vienna, where Holy Emperor Charles VI became her patron, his wife being taught drawing by the pastellist. This laid the foundation for the Alter Meister Gallery in Dresden.

Some drawings, such as the series on the continents, reveal her knowledge of current events. Following the great discoveries of the previous century, three other georgraphical areas had entered European knowledge: America, Africa and Asia. Personifications of those were not uncommon in the domain of fine arts, reflecting contemporary discourses on cultural differences through the display of archetypical attributes.

Rosalba Carriera’s artistic production was cut short by the death of her sister in 1738 and her progressive loss of sight – that might have been caused by miniature painting – from the early 1740s onwards. She undertook two cataract surgeries, to no avail.

Still, thanks her connection to Antonio Maria Zanetti who secured her fame in England, King George III bought many of her self-portraits in 1762. Other similar pieces are located in the Uffizi Gallery. In these, she didn’t make any attempts at idealising herself, highlighting her nose and dimples.

A new extensive biography, published during lockdown, is available here if your institution or Uni gives you access to JSTOR: www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv15d8064.

The post Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757) appeared first on Women's Art Tours.

mysterious beginnings

Very few traces of Bernhardt’s family background remain. Even her precise date of birth is uncertain. Her certificate burned in the Paris city hall fire during the 1871 civil war

She was born from a seamstress and her grandfather was a fair stallholder. As a child, Bernhardt was left out by her mother who preferred getting acquainted with Parisian fashionable society. As for her father’s identity, it has always been kept a secret. Sarah Bernhardt grew up in Brittany, raised by her nanny. From a very young age, she was renowned for her eccentric behaviour; she jumped by the window when her aunt paid a visit, in order to exhort her to be brought back to Paris.

She made her stage debut while staying at the convent, and played the part of an angel in a religious show. She left the orders aged 14 to take the entrance exam to a school of performing arts, and passed it with flying colours.

success

In 1862, with the Duke of Morny (her aunt’s lover) as her referee, she got into the Comedie Française – the most prestigious public drama academy of the country. Her first performance was in Iphigenia, a tragedy in verse by Racine. However, she was fired a little after for having slapped another female member and rival. Then, she became a famous demi-mondaine and newspapers capitalised on her scandalous affairs.

Sarah Bernhardt made a deal with the Odeon Theatre, as long as she’d “keep quiet”. Victor Hugo absolutely loved her starring as his protagonist, the Queen, on stage. So much, in fact, that he christened her “Golden Voice” at the party celebrating the hundredth Ruy Blas performance. She was then called back by the Comedie Française. Her portrayals of Phedre‘s eponymous character by Racine and Doña Sol in Hugo’s Hernani received overwhelming praise.

In 1880, she created her own cast and started performing abroad, something she’ll keep doing til 1917. Sarah Bernhardt invented the concept of the live tour and the star-system. She’s the first ever person to have had her act on various continents. Indeed, she’s one of the few French people honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Playwright Jean Cocteau used the phrase ‘sacred monster’ to describe her.

Her good friend Oscar Wilde was commissioned to write Salome for her; she portrayed its main role in 1892. She also played in male drag and was Edmond Rostand’s source of inspiration for The Eaglet, a story based on the life of Napoleon 1st’s son that Bernhardt impersonated. In 1893, she became manager of the Theatre de la Renaissance, where she staged the performances that made her fame (Phedre, The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas, Lorenzaccio by Musset). As a whole, she played in more than 120 shows. She witnessed the birth of cinema, featuring on screen quite a few times.

Repertoire

Sarah Bernhardt was remembered for her bombastic stances and high-flown diction. Her formal acting style was characterised by dramatic body language and presence.

During her teens, the Duke of Morny gave her the opportunity to attend art classes. After the Franco-Prussian war and its following economic crisis, she completed her education at the Julian Academy. She learned about carving and oil painting by studying anatomy. She developed her practice by entering the workshops of Roland Mathieu-Meusnier et Jules Franceschi.

First drawn by naturalism (After the Storm, 1876), her sculpture influenced by symbolism went darker in technique and contents. Through Fool and Death, she came back to her first love: drama. This bronze depicts the hero of The King Amuses Himself, Triboulet. In this Romantic play by Hugo, Triboulet is a cruel, misshapen creature, transforming the king into a dissolute lecherer.

Sarah Bernhardt exhibited her production at the Salon from 1874 to 1897, which didn’t go unnoticed by critics. Her Death and the Maiden was described as “a promise, more than a result” by Emile Zola in 1880. She showed a sculptured dagger entitled Weeds at the World Fair of 1900. Working on bronze, terracotta and marble, her fluid outlines and its floral imagery recalled the Art Nouveau style. She tried her hand at diverse genres and format, from monumental statues to small decorative statuettes.

Sarah Bernhardt represented members of her artistic circle, as in this bust of painter Louise Abbéma. She treated allegorical themes, giving way to curious montages. In this sense, Self-Portrait as a Bat, a fantasy subject, is quite exemplary. It it her most well-known, most reproduced sculpture. About forty works by her hand are known but many have been lost: http://traduction.culture.gouv.fr/url/Result.aspx?to=en&url=https://www.culture.gouv.fr/Sites-thematiques/Musees/Nos-musees/Valorisation-des-collections/Les-femmes-artistes-sortent-de-leur-reserve/Icones/Bernhardt-Sarah

public persona

Anxious to control her own image, the actress elected George Clairin and Louise Abbéma to make her official portraits. As a fierce business-woman, Sarah Bernhardt’s name became a brand, appearing alongside consumer’s goods. Her personal style inspired fashion and beauty products. From 1894 on, she asked Alphonse Mucha to design all her promotional posters.

On 9 decembre 1896, a day celebrating the actress was set up by personalities from the artworld, including painters who have represented her, such as Antonio de la Gandara.

Sarah Bernhardt often took part in French political life and public debate, displaying quite liberal positions. She was also against death penalty. In 1914, she got awarded with the Legion of Honnor.

Rumour had it that she slept in a coffin. Bernhardt actually acted on this so-called scandalous habit to be photographed as such, spreading the image in the media. Since 1887, she suffered from tuberculosis but still performed, on a chair, after having her leg cut off. When she died, she was granted a national funeral. She was the first French woman to receive this type of tribute.

Sarah Bernhardt is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery and features on our Cemetery tour way: womensarttours.com/visite/ghosts-of-women-past-in-the-pere-lachaise/

The post Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) appeared first on Women's Art Tours.

Called by her peers “the Shakespeare of romance-writers”, Ann Radcliffe invented the genre of sensation-fiction

the most popular writer of her generation

In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland appears as some naive heroine with little understanding of the world. She spends her free time reading, her preference going to Gothic fiction, an extremely popular genre in the early 19th century. In fact, Austen mocks Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto (1764) who initiated this type of narrative. Yet Austen directs most of her criticism at Ann Radcliffe. Published in 1794, The Mysteries of Udolpho became a literary hit for young girls from the gentry, eager to experience chills and thrills. Referred to as sensation fiction, Ann Radcliffe’s plots border between melodramatic events and fantastic effets.

Ann Radcliffe’s career was brief and few information about her private life remain. Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) attempted to write her biography but abandoned the project for lack of data. As a result, the “mighty enchantress” was the subject of many rumours. It’s been said that because of her excessive imagination, she’d been sent to an asylum. People believed she’d eat bloody pork chops before going to bed so that her nightmares would be more vivid. Ann Radcliffe entertained this celebrity status: she seldom left the quietness of her bedroom, where she could write at leisure. “She never appeared in public, nor mingled in private society” said her obituary in The Edibunburgh Review.

genesis

Ann Ward was born in Holborn, London. Her father used to be a china manufacturer. In 1787, she got married to journalist William Radcliffe, the editor-in-chief of The English Chronicle. Ann started to write a little after the wedding since her husband would often come back home late at night. The money she earned following her successful publications enabled the couple to travel to Europe. This inspired her for her sublime descriptions of sceneries.

All in all, Ann Radcliffe wrote less than ten novels, enjoying many reprints: The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance and The Romance of the Forest (1790), The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian (1797), Gaston de Blondeville (1826). She transformed Gothic Horror by adding a touch of romance to it, a trait she was lampooned for. This is precisely what Jane Austen parodied.

suspense

Unlike Walpole’s use of the omniscient narrator, Radcliffe focusses on innocent heroines persecuted by frightful counts inhabiting gloomy mansions. Action is perceived through the female viewpoint of the main character. The reader unfolds the plot at the same pace as hers.

Radcliffe’s narratives priviledge intense emotions. Most of the supernaural, unresolved elements of the storyline find some rational elucidation at the end. These can be explained by the heroine’s sensibility, her delusions or mere chance. This literary device led Radcliffe to warn her readership about the dangers of immoderate imagination.

She wished to establish Gothic fiction as a respectable genre; expressing her distate for the direction it had taken with Matthew Gregory Lewis’ Monk (1796). This novel was renown for its extreme violence, subversive themes (murder, rape, incest), that the author justified through the characters’ passions only. Radcliffe sought to achieve a sense of terror, rather than horror, in her novels.

influences

Racliffe’s favourite motifs were: ruins, unrequited love, the triomph of reason. Her descriptions of picturesque landscapes were also noticed by her contemporaries. These were inspired by the paintings of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa. The pictures of these artists reproduced in engravings were decisive to built up her plots’ surroundings, taking place in France or Italy.

Ann Radcliffe used to compare Claude’s works to poetry-writing: “Here was the poet, as well as the painter, touching the imagination, and making you see more than the picture contained. You saw the real light of the sun, you breathed the air of the country, you felt all the circumstances of a luxurious climate on the most serene and beautiful landscape; and the mind thus softened, you almost fancied you heard Italian music in the air”.

Racliffe was admired by many writers of the UK and in the continent. The Brontë sisters, Edgar Allan Poe and Bram Stoker emulated her style. Some of her manuscripts and correspondance are kept in the British Library (London). The institution enhanced Racliffe’s role in the development of Gothic fiction through the exhibition “Terror and Wonder” held in 2014: www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/an-introduction-to-ann-radcliffe.

The post Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) appeared first on Women's Art Tours.

“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”

By starting her novel with one of the most banal yet mysterious sentences of Western literature, Woolf immediately sets the tone. This short novel spans over one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a bored upper middle-class woman preparing a party because she enjoys ‘bringing people together’. Set in the roaring twenties, this story doesn’t reflect the sound and fury of entertainment one finds in The Great Gatsby: every character experiences the aftermath of the Great War by reflecting on her or his own achievements and failures. 

The reader travels back and forth in time, focussing on key moments of Clarissa’s youth. Especially important is her time at Bourton, when she was successively in love with her passionate friends Sally Setton and Peter Walsh. Now, she is a respectable person married to a wealthy man working for the government. Now, Sally lives in a big mansion after giving birth to five big sons. Now, Peter wants to marry Daisy, who’s getting a divorce from her husband in India. When Peter comes back to London and visits Clarissa, the insane maze of memories overwhelms her. 

The secondary plot deals with the hallucinations of Septimus Smith, a war veteran suffering from post-traumatic disorder and schizophrenia: he repeatedly talks to his comrade dead on the battlefield, Evans. This aspect of the novel required much effort, but it was also the most striking in its representation of mental illness: Smith, assisted by his devoted wife, is used to seeing Dr Holmes, who refers him to a psychiatrist. Sir Bradshaw is the perfect combination of the Victorian hygienist and the scientist influenced by recent Freudian theories. The two stories meet when friends of Clarissa’s at the party hear of Septimus’ suicide through Bradshaw. 

Needless to say that Mrs Dalloway, though being Woolf’s most accessible novel, is hard to read: the stream-of-consciousness device following the main protagonists’ flow of thoughts is sometimes quite challenging, sometimes wonderfully easy to rely to. She blurs various narrative techniques to the point that you hardly know who is speaking. To my mind, the best adaptation so far in terms of style and characterisation is the movie The Hours, even if it doesn’t record faithfully the unravelling of the plot. 

Woolf makes the passing of time particularly effective through the recurrent metaphor of the waves. She sneers at the vain hypocrisy of the upper classes. Every protagonist expresses negative comments about their friends, family members or acquaintances, despite the love they might feel for them. In other words: brace yourself, it tackles depression, frustration, loneliness, repressed desires, jealousy and regret, under cover of registering daily activities, however meaningless they seem.

The post “Mrs Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf appeared first on Women's Art Tours.

a star is born

Eighth child out of 9 siblings, Judith Leyster grew up in Haarlem, Netherlands. Her surname was “Ley Ster”, translating as “pole star”. The family moved to the region of Utrecht at the end of the 1620s. As opposed to many of her female contemporaries Judith Leyster didn’t come from an artistic background. In fact she might have entered such a career to support her father from bankrupcy.

Judith Leyster got accquainted with painters versed in the style of Caravaggio. This shows in her treatment of chiaroscuro, as in The Proposition. The woman doesn’t pay attention to the money the man offers her or his attempts at seduction, prefering to be entirely absorbed in her sewing. She’s lit full-face, and this effect is heightened by her white blouse. The male character looming over her, however, is characterised by darker hues, his shadow projected on the wall appearing as ominous. This intriguing picture differs largely from bawdy representations of daily life or people in merriment. Judith Leyster distorted title and subject-matter traditionally attributed to a sexually-charged encounter.

Great master

The details of Leyster’s education are uncomplete; she may have studied under history painter Frans Pietersz de Grebber or Frans Hals. Anyhow, she’s well-enough famous to be mentioned in 1628 by Dutch writer Samuel Ampzing. The first work by her hand was made in 1629.

Back in Haarlem, she made a self-portrait in order to increase her publicity, sitting in a dynamic yet relaxed pose to convey spontaneouness. She’s facing the viewer, mouth half-open as if to speak to him and entreat him to enter the studio. Leyster highlights her wealth and elegance by making a display of various fabrics, such as her lace collar (quite unconvenient for painting in truth!).

We have the impression to surprise her at work. She depicts herself with traditional tools, at her easel, brushes in hand, while the canvas in the making is not over yet. It features a variation of one of her favourite themes, Merry Company, made one year earlier. She then established a link between the visual arts and those of musical harmony.

In 1633, Leyster was admitted at the Guild of St Luke, receving the title of Master Painter. This allowed her to teach and get some apprentices in the studio. Her acceptance as first woman artist to the corporation is subject to debate today. The Guild might have had several female members before, but within the domain of crafts or as male painters’ collaborators.

Painters had had the liberal status of their practice certified since the 16th century in the Netherlands, ranking on the same level as literature or mathematics, to become independent from manual trades. Anyway, no woman was granted membership by the Guild after Leyster, for the rest of the century.

What’s in a name?

A few years after starting teaching, Leyster had to sue her rival Frans Hals for accepting in his workshop one of her students who had left hers 3 days before. The Guild’s archive have recorded that the apprentice had been compelled to pay the sum of 4 florins to Leyster, that is, half of what she demanded. Frans Hals settled the matter by keeping the pupil and paying Leyster 3 extra florins. In the end, the Guild required another fine from Lesyter for not having recorded the apprentice as hers.

Leyster’s technique is closer to Dirk Hals (Frans’ brother), but these connections contributed to her work’s misattributions. Besides, she married painter Jan Miense Moelnaer in 1636, cutting short her independent professional career. Leyster assisted her husband in his artistic production, but she mainly took care of household duties and their 5 childen. She fell ill in 1659 and died the following year. The majority of her pictures were donated or sold to other painters.

Belated recognition

The discovery of her initials or her five-pointed star monogram on some canvasses at the end of the 19th century enabled scholars to re-instate the authorship of her oeuvre. We know about 35 paintings by her. Mainly a genre artist and a portraitist, she also made a history painting drawn from the Old Testament, David with the Head of Goliath (1633).

Very few pieces after her marriage remain: two illustrations in a flowers manual of 1643, a portrait of 1652, and a still-life executed in 1654, recently recorded in a private collection. Her last artwork was made in watercolour and silverpoint on vellum paper.

Judith Leyster has lately been celebrated in Washington museums, on the National Gallery’s website (www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.1485.html#works) or at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, that dedicated an exhibition in 2019 to Flemish women artists: nmwa.org/art/artists/judith-leyster/.

How about talking about Judith Leyster in location, face-to-face ? She features on the Louvre tour, on the 2nd floor of wing Richelieu: womensarttours.com/visite/the-real-queens-of-the-louvre/

The post Judith Leyster (1609-1660) appeared first on Women's Art Tours.

Life’s work

“Art was the only thing for which she felt very seriously” wrote Dante Gabriel Rossetti to poet Algernon Swinburne about his deceased wife. Elizabeth Siddal’s brief but nonetheless spectacular biography reads likes sensation fiction. Pictures of her evoke a certain type of beauty, characterised by pale complexion, heavy-lidded eyes and abundant red hair. Indeed, she became the first Pre-Raphaelite “stunner” by crafting the iconic look of the fair medieval maiden: www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-ophelia-n01506. Remembered through visual and textual depictions, the conflation of her image as a tragic muse has overshadowed her creative output.

However, she was already acknowledged as “a real artist” by peers during her lifetime. While Rossetti promoted her “power of designing (and) fecundity of invention”; her patron John Ruskin ranked her amongst “geniuses” like Turner. Despite few years of practice, she crafted a significant body of work: nowadays, a hundred or so paintings, drawings and sketches are spread across various British and American collections, public or private. Apparently not meant to be published, about fifteen poems and fragments have been recovered: www.victoriansecrets.co.uk/book/my-ladys-soul-the-poems-of-elizabeth-eleanor-siddall/. Many of these pieces have survived in the form of photographic portfolios compiled by Siddal’s husband after her death. These are visible, by request only, in the Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam Museums’ print rooms (Oxford and Cambridge).

Curbed by Rossetti’s studio and the annual allowance of £150 he secured on Ruskin’s behalf, she was denied classical artistic education, restrained to a narrow range of techniques and from commercial transactions. Historical and critical interest in Siddal’s career has then dismissed her achievements as limited or due to her addiction to laudanum. Only recently have curators and scholars taken more serious heed of her pictorial and poetical production.

Exhibition history

Through the lens of feminist intervertions in the field of art history, Siddal’s career have been reassessed: she was included in the inaugural travelling exhibition on female painters curated by Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris, from L.A.’s County Museum to the Carnegie and Brooklyn Museums (1971). It notably displayed her illustration of the ballad Clerk Saunders. At this stage, Elizabeth Siddal’s birthdate was incorrectly believed to be around 1834. It seems that both herself and those who mentioned her fancied her as younger. As archivist of the family heritage, her brother-in-law William Michael Rossetti provided the chief basis on available information repeated in numerous writings.

As in the 1857 show of Russell Place nearby her colleagues, Elizabeth Siddal was the sole woman to feature in the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition held at Tate Gallery in 1984. Two other watercolours, The Holy Grail and Lady Clare, were presented. Her entry in the catalogue was the first attempt to disentangle Siddal’s practice from perpetual comparisons with Rossetti’s. By introducing Siddal as a cipher of gender difference, Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock challenged concepts of genius and originality coined in masculine terms.

One of the other lead researchers to document Elizabeth Siddal was Jan Marsh. She was involved in all the leading exhibitions showcasing the artist during the last decades. The 1991 retrospective at the Ruskin Gallery sought to register the whole spectrum of her production. Just as astute was the 2018 monographic display of Wightwick Manor, exposing its own Siddal collection bought at auction by the Manders couple in 1961: www.nationaltrust.org.uk/wightwick-manor-and-gardens/features/a-celebration-of-lizzie-siddal-artist-and-poet.

The major contribution of Jan Marsh in the revision of Siddal’s biography was about her entry into the artworld. It was in 1894, through Frederick George Stephens, that the story of her discovery in a bonnet shop by fellow painter Walter Deverell surfaced. Nevertheless, a Sheffield obituary had stated that thanks to her trade, she became acquainted with Deverell’s father, Secretary of the London School of Design, to whom she showed sketches. Even though The Lady of Shalott is her first work dated and signed (E.E.S. 15 Dec. 1853, see header), this implies that she was drawing before she started studying under Rossetti’s tuition.

the sister arts

Because her verse has been understood as the result of personal expression, Siddal’s pictorial and poetical production have been examined as disjoined modes of creation. However, she was engaged in a total form of art, through which text and image echoed each other. The groundwork of her pictures is illustration of stories that appealed to her, conveying a strong sense of narrative. An equivalent process is to be found in her lyrical rhymes.

Neglecting the staple motifs captivating the Victorians – Greco-Roman mythology – she favoured religious subject-matter, local folklore and British literature. Moral subjects drawn from the Bible permitted her to reconfigure the traditional Virgin and Child theme in a disquieting transcription of motherhood. The emotional charge of her Nativity series translates in the proximity between Christ and Mary.

Popular beliefs and macabre legends were a great influence too. Clerk Saunders represents an old Scottish ballad. Here, May Margaret meets with the ghost of her lover previously killed by Margaret’s brothers. As Clerk Saunders appears through the wall, Margaret makes a vow of loyalty by kissing the wand she’s about to give him. Similarly, fantastic beings and doomed couples were recurrent figures in her poems: “Farewell Earl Richard/ Tender and brave/ Kneeling I kiss/ The dust from your grave”.

poetical language

Elizabeth Siddal enjoyed dramatising literary classics, such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but her main taste lied in Romantic and contemporary poetry. Keats, Tennyson and Browning and ranked amongst her most frequent sources of inspiration. However her re-adaptation of Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott” demonstrates an impression of quietness, as if the main protagonist is controlling her fate as she observes Knight Lancelot through the window. Contrary to other Pre-Raphaelite versions, the Lady doesn’t appear as an alluring fallen woman whose redemption will be achieved through death. Sharing a penchant for the Arthurian Cycle with her fellow artists, Elizabeth Siddal directed her attention to contemplative figures rather than heroic deeds of action.

Variation and repetition are at the core of Siddal’s sense of composition. It allowed her to propose another take on the initial text. Her economy of means materialises in the use of the same sheet to draw diverse set of studies. In writing, slight modifications of a line from one stanza to the next generate a melody that sounds like nursery rhymes: “O mother open the window wide (…) And mother dear take my young son (…) And mother, wash my pale hands”. Simple and unsophisticated, Siddal’s works privilege intensity of feeling and thruthfulness. Love, death, the passing of time and nature are the leitmotiv of her art that resonates with Gothic tones.

Mainly operating on paper, Siddal treated all the elements of the composition with similar depth. She rejected strict notions of perspective and organisation into grounds to enclose her characters in a narrow space. Usually avoiding chiaroscuro, she regarded her pictures like medieval illuminated manuscripts by trying to make tints more opaque through the use of bodycolour, which heightened contrasts. When she wanted to suggest balance in light and shading, she employed brown or sepia ink (sometimes enhanced with charcoal and chalks), as shown in her Macbeths’ study. These reveal her distinctive style of figure drawing as well, defined by linear shapes. Likewise, Siddal’s poetic language pinpoints the reader’s attention to colour and form.

O silent wood, I enter thee/ With a heart so full of misery/ For all the voices from the trees/ and the ferns that cling about my knees

In thy darkest shadow let me sit/ When the grey owls about me flit/ There I will ask of the a boon/ That I may not faint or die or swoon

Aware of Victorian artistic traditions, Elizabeth Siddal exploited the potentials of Pre-Raphaelitism that bound her to the archetype of the accomplished yet vulnerable lady, but it also enabled her to find her authorial voice as painter and writer. Still a powerful icon in the collective unconscious, away from contemporary standards of femininity, the mystery shrouding the figure of Elizabeth Siddal resists any bid of definite scrutiny. If we wish to broaden our conception of British cultural heritage (non-binary, all-inclusive), she certainly deserves to be a part of it as an active creator in her own right.

The post Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862) appeared first on Women's Art Tours.

the eternal feminine

If you think of the Louvre, you’ll have no difficulties identifying its renowned icon, arguably the most famous painting in the world: that is, La Gioconda. Identified as Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a rich clothing merchant, the model’s still attract crowds desperate to take a selfie with her. Little is known about Mona Lisa the woman, her popular enigmatic stare and smile accounting for her mysterious history.

In the world’s biggest museum, the celebration of the female body is depicted in an endless array of poses and techniques. Goddesses, queens, saints, heroines, women of power or caught in their interiors: all embody emblems of a first-class collection. As unquestionable canons of beauty, they typify the eternal feminine offered to the pleasure of the viewer’s gaze. Across various time periods and locations, they define rules of representation of the human body. The Venus de Milo, Liberty Leading the People, Artemis with a Doe, and Winged Victory range among the other “big five” of the museum, always sought-out by visitors.

“Do women have to be naked to enter the museum?” used to claim activist group Guerilla Girls in the late 80s on billboards featuring Ingres’ supine nude in his Great Odalisque. It is said that the Louvre comprises a totality of 460 000 exhibits. Only 663 or so of these have been attributed to women artists. Which means that in large European and American museums, 5% to 10% of their collections is devoted to female creation. A rate that gives food for thought when one realises it equates the proportion of lady artists admitted to the Salon – the official exhibition of the Royal Academy held in the square room of the Louvre Palace lent by the King – before the French Revolution. Initially though, the Louvre as an encyclopedic museum was created to determine standards of excellence. Ordered through “schools” expressing the evolution of styles by Old Masters, its collection was meant to be diverse and representative of mankind’s progresses. When the Central Museum of the Arts opened in 1793, many painters already had their workshops in the former palace.

the woman-artist question

However, the Louvre does feature works by artists celebrated during their lifetime. Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744 – 1818, see header), Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749 – 1803) and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755 – 1842) – the sole female painter of the Ancien Régime to have been the subject of a major retrospective in Paris recently (www.grandpalais.fr/en/event/elisabeth-louise-vigee-le-brun) – were labelled “The Three Graces” by their contemporaries, thanks to their skills. The Royal Academy of the Arts institution didn’t ban women entirely, but when it was founded in 1648, applications by women were so numerous that their entries were limited to a number of 4 for fear of competition. The only candidate to be received within the portraiture category, Sophie Chéron (1648– 1711) depicted herself looking directly at the viewer. Reception pieces were extremely codified exercises, but Chéron accomodated the jury by placing a drawing in her hands, the basis of academic training. This was a means to claim her status as a creative individual.

The quota was technically maintained until the visit of a foreign artist: Venetian-born Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757). She got extremely popular amongst the French nobility for whom she made around 30 pastel portraits, launching the craze for this medium. “La Rosalba” drew directly on paper without any preliminary sketches. The powdery aspect of pastel enabled her to render with subtelty the variations of skin-tones. Sent to the Academy in 1722 from Venice, The Nymph of Apollo was praised for its technical abilities.

The 2nd half of the 18th century was beneficial to women wishing to enter the artworld. 1783 witnessed some unprecedented event in the Academy’s history: the simultaneous reception of two lady artists perceived as rivals in popular opinion. Already known thanks to her ties to painters settled near the Louvre where she grew up, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard had the reputation of some hardworker. Supported by the Countess d’Angiviller, the wife of Louis XV’ minister of the arts, and the Academy’s director, she was received thanks to her portrait of scultor Pajou, a friend of her father’s. Socialite Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun was daughter of a pastel artist who noticed her gifts from a very young age. Technically, her husband’s profession – art dealer – prevented her entry: following the bill of 1776, the Academy forbade members to sell their work for their own account. But Vigée-Lebrun was protected by Queen Mary Antoinette who requested a special exemption from M. Lebrun’s activities.

With the waning of the Ancien Régime, the situation of successful women artists became precarious. The academic system was loosing its influence. Despite the the institution’s reluctance, Neo-Classical painter Jacques-Louis David opened his studio to ladies in 1786, paving the way for subsequent feminine sections in masters’ workshops. Still, the reputations of women renowned through their royal allegiances – such as Anne Vallayer-Coster or Vigée-Lebrun – was under jeopardy. Others, like Marguerite Gérard (1761-1837), managed without institutional support and decided to take advantage of the change of taste in patrons, producing small scenes of daily life.

The French Revolution fostered many promises. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard sided with the reformist party, wishing to open the Academy to women without limitations. The Salon of 1791 was devoid of jury, leaving ample room for female candidates. However, David’s faction of abolitionists won in 1793 and the Academy was replaced by the Commune of the Arts. The question to admit women had not really been really spelled out, so it left them relative agency to exert their profession within and outside the margins of the art system: 207 of them exhibited at Salons held between 1791 and 1815. A few years after the opening the National School of Fine Arts however, they were completely excluded from academic training. As Vigée-Lebrun prophesised: “women reigned supreme. The Revolution overthrew them”.

gender and artistic genres

Because they were restricted to the production of pictorial genres deemed as less “noble” and barred access to certain institutions, women have been written off art history. Besides, most recent publications have turned their attention onto artists from the mid-19th century onwards. Because of lost, detroyed or misattributed works, there’s been no thorough upkeep of women’s stories preceding this period. Some birthdates from the French classical period are still open to debate, as is the case with Louise Moillon (1609/10-1696). Quite exemplary in the decrease of her production after marriage to dwell into household duties, she was mainly active around 1630-1640. Entering the artistic vocabulary around this time, “still-life” didn’t require huge studio space or extensive anatomical knowledge.

It was thought that because of their “weaker” nature, women were incapable of creating or becoming geniuses. In the studio, they prepared canvasses for their master, worked on secondary elements of the composition and copied from those for training. As the Academy’s foundation corresponded to the liberal conception of fine arts, female practice was often associated to crafts. On moral grounds, respectable ladies were forbidden to attend life classes and draw from the nude, thus resorting to a more limited range of formats and techniques.

The controversy launched by the priest of Fontenay in the Journal General de France was exemplary: he argued that representing the nude damaged female decency. Since artists and especially Academicians had to forge their identity around respectability, this was problematic for women trying their hands at the “Grand Genre”, that is, history painting requiring mastery of the human figure through anatomy. 2 years before, the reception piece of Vigée-Lebrun provoked scathing reviews for its lack of idealisation and bare breast exposure. The painter had revealed that despite her lack of academic training in the nude, she could rival with her male counterparts in her rendering of sensuous flesh inspired by her study of Rubens in the Louvre collections.

“Pretty”, “nice”, “delicate”, “sensitive”, “gentle”, “discreet”: a whole new lexicon developed around female creation, believed to spring directly from their inner nature. At times, critics were questioning the authorship of artworks made by women. Despite her efforts to call him “M. Prudh’on” in public, Constance Mayer (1775-1821) suffered from constant associations to her master and lover. Identification of some works is complexified by facts that the couple often worked on the same canvasses, but unsigned paintings of hers have almost always been attributed to her partner. While he produced the preliminary sketch for The Dream of Happiness, Mayer altered the composition by removing the cherubs and giving the human figures more finish.

Some, on the other hand, entirely gave up subject-matters for which they received criticism. Anne Vallayer-Coster discarded portraiture from 1791, while her still-lives were said to be “manly”. She attempted to enoble the genre by achieving a great level of likeliness. Her participation at the Salon of 1771 caused philosopher Diderot to exclaim: “if all new members of the Academy made a showing like Mademoiselle Vallayer’s, and sustained the same high level of quality, the Salon would look very different. Mademoiselle Vallayer astonishes us, even as she delights us – here is Nature rendered with an inconceivable force of truth, and at the same time, a sense of colour that is seductive. Everything is well-observed and felt.”

Collections’ updates

Since 2014, there has been several attempts to make women artists more visible in the Louvre, but these events have been limited to temporary enterprises. The symposium in partnership with the Art History National Institute was inspired by the writings of English-speaking feminist art historians who had a decisive impact on research about female creation. It analysed the role of gender studies in art history, focussing on figures like Judith or examining the importance of fashion in the paintings of Nissa Villiers (1774-1821). 2 years later, a series of lectures labelled “Artists in the Classical Age” dealed with the conditions of practice by women painters. Sadly, by jumping from “stars” to lesser-known figures and priviledging biographical material, there was no reflection on gender categories, no overview nor contextualisation. Eventually, the Louvre has been interestingly active on social media in 2017, when the Museum Week (the first online event on Twitter) promoted #womenMW, probably in echo to the surge of interest in women’s stories provoked by the #MeToo movement.

Without easily accessible data to look for these artists, it is essential to cross information in order to obtain a satisfying result. Many pieces are recorded on the drawings and prints – media rarely displayed due to their frailty – database of the Louvre. Unfortunately, these resources haven’t entirely been translated yet. To this date, about 700 works have been found, by some 30 artists or so, most of them kept in storage. From auction at Sotheby’s in December 2019, the Louvre acquired a canvas by Marguerite Gérard, the pupil then close associate to Jean-Honoré Fragonard. The Interesting Student is one of the first pictures signed by her hand.

To my knowledge, there are only two female sculptors in the collection. Marie-Anne Collot (1748-1821), who operated in the studio of Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, made this bust little before her departure to Russia. Félicie de Fauveau (1801-1886) was involved in the Gothic revival. The Lamp of St Michael of 1830 features the patron of chivalry surrounded by his squires. The Louvre also features works by foreign artists. Thanks to its social mobility, its senators supporting the arts and equal educational opportunities, many women painters were active in Bologna. Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614), who had a doctorate, wrestled directly with her male competitors on the art market, supporting her husband and 11 children.

When you visit the Louvre, it requires a lot of time and attention to locate women artists on display. If you’re patient enough to make your way to the Flemish galleries, you’ll have the pleasure to admire The Jolly Couple by Judith Leyster (1609-1660), formely attributed to her rival Frans Hals. The discovery of a star inscribed near the signed monogram when the picture got to the Louvre in 1893 led experts to reassess it. This alluded to the painter’s family name and business; Leyster meaning pole star in Dutch was how her father had called his own brewery.

In addition to that, some works, visible a couple of years ago, are back in storage, lent or donated to other institutions. The Baronness of Krüdener by Anglo-Swiss Angelika Kauffmann (1740-1807) used to be displayed in the paintings section but the opening of the Louvre-Lens in 2012 revealed a need to de-centralise the initial collection. During her Grand Tour, Kauffmann stayed in Rome where she met with the ambassador of Russia’s wife. The simplicity of female grab – the Empire-styled dress of muslin – disclosed her knowledge of the latest European fashions.

Institutional and economic context from the Renaissance to the 1830s made it complex for women who were integrated and/ or rejected by the art system, dependent on successive governments and political upheavals. In that sense, the 19th century marked a step back after the possibilities opened by late 18th century careers and the potentials of the Revolution. Though an example for museums in Europe and abroad, the Louvre established itself around gender difference. Women’s legacies entering the museum are thus valuable assets to shatter traditional art histories and create alternative narratives. We also need to remember that female creation didn’t start in the 19th century and that previous women artists other than Vigée-Lebrun, if curbed by tradition, popular belief or politics, were numerous and effective onto the art scene.

Fancy booking a tour of the Louvre? You’ll find all details of your visit here: womensarttours.com/visite/the-real-queens-of-the-louvre/.

The post Gendering the Louvre: an introduction appeared first on Women's Art Tours.

artistic training and development

Daughter of a liberal drawing master, Marie-Rosalie Bonheur spent her happy childhood years in the countryside near Bordeaux, before the family settled in Paris in 1829. She entered primary education when her mother died, then started to be trained as a seamstress.

Raymond Bonheur supported the artistic abilities of his children, so that Rosa devoted herself to painting and drawing entirely aged 13 as an apprentice to her father. She used to go to the Louvre, copying from the Masters.

In 1839, she began studying animals from nature. She exhibited her work in public for the first time aged 19. In 1848, her prizes enabled her to get a state commission, attracting many wealthy patrons amongst her clients.

This came to be a canvas of great dimensions, Ploughing from the Nièvre (up above). It was so successful at the Salon that the Fine Arts School Headmaster had it acquired by the Museum of Living Artists in the Luxembourg Gardens. The same year, Bonheur took over her father, managing the School of Design for ladies, keeping this position until 1860. “Follow my lead” she told her students “and I’ll make Leonardos in frocks out of you”.

painting like a man

After the Salon of 1853, the monumental painting The Horse Fair got internationally famous, hailed as “manly” by reviews. The picture went touring to Belgium and was shown to Queen Victoria, before travelling to the U.S where it was bought for about 500$.

Bonheur entertained this notoriety by giving interviews and spreading engraved reproductions of her work. At the World Fair of 1855, she displayed Haymaking in Auvergne, for which she was awarded a gold medal. From 1856 onwards, she didn’t need to send works to the Salon anymore, as the whole of her production was already sold in advance.

Rosa Bonheur obtained from the Police Headquarters a licence to wear male garments to go to livestok markets and slaughterhouses, renewable every 6 monts. She crafted her financial and emotional identity as an independent woman. Remaining single for her whole life, she lived with childhood friend and painter Nathalie Micas. Wearing her hair short and smoking, she practiced shooting and horseriding in male garb but her lifestyle wasn’t considered particularly scandalous. Bonheur always wore gowns while appearing in public. “I’ve always led a decent life” she used to say “I’ve never wished to give up my freedom in order to fulfil the saintly mission I’ve been granted. I’ve always wanted to elevate women”. This reveals her refusal to be confined to gender roles, while adapting herself to certain codes required by her condition.

fame

Praised by her male counterparts (Eugene Delacroix, Theodore Gericault and Camille Corot), Rosa Bonheur became the richest artist of the century. At the age of 37, she was the first woman capable of purchasing a mansion house thanks to her work in By, near the forest of Fontainebleau.

She had a large Neo-Gothic styled studio built, using modern materials. The framework was in metal, while she required an electrical system to obtain the right amount of light needed for her practice. The park was created for pets and wild animals to trod by. Restored since 2017, the manor is open to the public by booking slots.

In 1864, Empress Eugenia, wife of Napoleon III, paid her an unexpected visit to invite her to the Castle of Fontainebleau, as shown in the watercoloured engraving below. Busy then at Deer on the Long Rocks, she recalled in a letter to her brother: “her Majesty suprised me with her whole court, you can reckon I wanted to hide away first. I was fortunate enough to be able to take off my overalls to put a jacket on”.

The following year, Eugenia came back to grant her the emblems of the Legion of Honour. This Marie-Antoinette fan who had supported the election of writer George Sand at the French Academy explained that she wanted to “show that genius has no sex”. Rosa Bonheur was the first woman artist to obtain this accolade, promoted to the rank of Officer in 1894. Till then, women could receive the award for acts of bravery or services given to the nation.

In 1867, Bonheur showed her work in public again at the World Fair. She travelled extensively, meeting political and artistic celebrities such as President Sadi Carnot or Buffalo Bill. The latter had come to Paris in 1889 to present his show to the French public. He allowed her to evolve freely in his camp of Neuilly, so that she could sketch from his animals. As a token of her gratitude, she depicted the American huntsman in an equestrian portrait. When his house in Nebraska took fire, Buffalo Bill begged his sister to save just the picture; the rest could go to the flames.

legacy

Met in 1889 after the death of Nathalie Micas, American painter Anna Klumpke (1856 – 1942) came to the Castle of By to make several portraits of Rosa Bonheur and help her writing her memoirs. Suffering from lung congestion without being able to complete the piece meant for the 1900 World Fair, the painter made Anna Klumpke her legal heir. Klumpke wrote her friend’s biography and took care of her oeuvre, recording 2100 paintings, watercolours, drawings, engraving and sculptures. Today, the majority of public French collections are stored in the Prints and Drawings Departement of the Louvre, in the Fontainebleau Palace and at the Fine Arts Museum of Bordeaux. Buried in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Rosa Bonheur rests in the plot bequeathed by the Micas family, with Nathalie and Anna Klumpke, whose remains were transferred from the States in 1948.

Rosa Bonheur became a role-model for 20th century women artists, but her artistic practice was deemed conservative and outdated as opposed to modernist movements that obscured her career and made her fall into oblivion. Some critics and artists of the avant-garde (Paul Cezanne being quite negative about her work) associated her to bourgeois values. Her production was re-discovered at the end of the 80s, thanks to the travelling retrospective of 1997 in Bordeaux, Barbizon and New York.

Styles and techniques

Rosa Bonheur evolved at the margins of current artistic movements, even if she remained close to the school of Barbizon, Realism and plein-air techniques. She deliberately chose to devote herself to anatomy, background landscape-painting and the great format, rather than small genre scenes or still-life. She enjoyed portraying pets from wealthy art dealers, conveying the beauty of animal bodies, their attitudes and presence. Worth noticing is the rendering of fur variety, and the expression of their eyes. Unlike Gericault’s exoticism or the sentimentality of contemporary animal painting, Bonheur’s subjects are not made to look like humans or heroes, to adopt their personalities.

To proceed, she made thousands of preparatory sketches, drawn or sculpted, enabling her to transcribe the character of each species. Her palette is characterised by coloured, neat brushwork. Her minute translation of light associated to energetic outline allows her to enoble the rural environment.

Some sketches reveal a keen sense of humour, though. In her series of the “Truthful Adventures of Lady By”, she appears in comical situations along with her dear pets. Some of these pieces have been digitised on the Orsay Museum website: www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/collections/catalogue-des-oeuvres/resultat-collection.html

Fancy to know more? You can book a tour at the Orsay (womensarttours.com/visite/danger-women-at-work/) or the Pere Lachaise Cemetery (womensarttours.com/visite/ghosts-of-women-past-in-the-pere-lachaise/).

The post Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) appeared first on Women's Art Tours.