Exhibition: ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920’ at Tate Britain, London

Exhibition dates: 16th May – 13th October 2024

Curator: Tabitha Barber

Attributed to Levina Teerlinc (Flemish, 1510-1576)
Portrait of a Lady holding a Monkey
1560s
Watercolour and bodycolour heightened with gold and silver
Image: 46 × 46 mm
Frame, circular: 62 × 62 mm
Victor Reynolds and Richard Chadwick

There have been some mixed reviews of this exhibition – “tremendous show… an archaeological dig into the nation’s cultural past” (Jonathan Jones in The Guardian); “niggardly photography section… Only rarely do women’s art and women’s history spark together in this show… For even the best of the artists here are occasionally represented by the least of their works, quite apart from the mystifying omissions.” (Laura Cumming in The Guardian).

Indeed, Laura Cumming poses an interesting question: “Here is a dilemma straight away: which should take precedence, the painting or the fact? Should the show present art on its own terms, or as instance, evidence, expression of social history? It is an extremely complex remit…”

Having not been to London to see the exhibition I can only make generalised comment, but in my opinion the presentation should be a combination of both – art and social history – recognising that one does not exist, emerge, without the other. Art does not live in a bubble isolated from society and society itself is influenced by new ideas, new concepts of art. It’s not the chicken and the egg, it’s the scramble to make sense of living in this world using art as an expression, a (real, surreal, revolutionary, dream, abstract etc…) vision of the world that surrounds us.

Just from compiling this posting I have been enlightened as to the lives of many artists that I had never heard of before. I have admired their work and learnt about their lives and the conditions under which they worked. The exhibition has brought into my consciousness (and the consciousness of others) artists that I would have never have known about. It tells their stories in however fragmented a way … but at least it tells them. And that is a very good thing.

My particular favourites in the posting are three portraits where the sitter stares directly at you: Joan Carlile’s perceptive Portrait of a Lady Wearing an Oyster Satin Dress (1650s, below) so captivating of gaze, so incisive in its simplicity; Maria Cosway’s beautifully rendered Self Portrait (Nd, below) such a luminous and engaging presence; and Gwen John’s powerful Self-Portrait (1902, below) vibrant of colour, full of self-assurance. Wonderful evocations of humanity.

Scottish artist Dame Ethel Walker observes,

“There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist – bad and good.”

And that is what his exhibition gives you the obligation to do: to educate yourself, to make yourself a little more informed, to use your brain, eyes, and heart …and make up your own mind about the merit of the work.

I for one are very grateful for that opportunity.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS. I have added relevant text from the large print guide and other bibliographic information from accredited sources to illuminate the works presented.

Many thankx to the Tate for allowing me to publish the art work and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at right, Lucy Kemp-Welch’s Colt Hunting in the New Forest 1897

Spanning 400 years, this exhibition follows women on their journeys to becoming professional artists. From Tudor times to the First World War, artists such as Mary Beale, Angelica Kauffman, Elizabeth Butler and Laura Knight paved a new artistic path for generations of women. They challenged what it meant to be a working woman of the time by going against society’s expectations – having commercial careers as artists and taking part in public exhibitions.

Including over 150 works, the show dismantles stereotypes surrounding women artists in history, who were often thought of as amateurs. Determined to succeed and refusing to be boxed in, they daringly painted what were usually thought to be subjects for male artists: history pieces, battle scenes and the nude.

The exhibition sheds light on how these artists championed equal access to art training and academy membership, breaking boundaries and overcoming many obstacles to establish what it meant to be a woman in the art world.

Text from the Tate Britain website

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura) c. 1638-1639 (below)

Artemisia Gentileschi (Italian, 1593-1653)
Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura)
c. 1638-1639
Oil on canvas
98.6 x 75.2cm (support, canvas/panel/stretcher external)
Royal Collection Trust
© His Majesty King Charles III 2024

Gentileschi claimed that ‘all the … Princes’ displayed her self-portrait in their galleries. In addition to this work, Charles I owned another self-portrait, which is now lost. Here, Gentileschi uses her own image to portray the allegorical figure of Pittura (also the Italian feminine noun for painting), who she depicts in a working apron before an easel absorbed in the act of creation.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

As a self-portrait the painting is particularly sophisticated and accomplished. The position in which Artemisia has portrayed herself would have been extremely difficult for the artist to capture, yet the work is economically painted, with very few pentiments. In order to view her own image she may have arranged two mirrors on either side of herself, facing each other. Depicting herself in the act of painting in this challenging pose, the angle and position of her head would have been the hardest to accurately render, requiring skilful visualisation.

Text from the Royal Collection Trust website

Installation view of the exhibition ‘Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920’ at Tate Britain showing Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders c. 1638-1640 (below)

Artemisia Gentileschi (Italian, 1593-1653)
Susanna and the Elders
c. 1638-1640
Oil on canvas
189.0 x 143.2cm (support, canvas/panel/stretcher external)
Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2024

Likely commissioned by Queen Henrietta Maria, this work was displayed in her Withdrawing Chamber in Whitehall Palace. The subject is an Old Testament narrative on virtue and faith. Susanna, bathing in privacy, is spied on by two elders who attempt to sexually assault her. When she resists them, the men accuse her of adultery. Susanna is arrested and about to be put to death until the men are questioned, and her innocence is revealed. Here, Gentileschi depicts Susanna as vulnerable and fearful, shielding her nakedness. She returned to the subject throughout her career.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

This spring, Tate Britain will present Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920. This ambitious group show will chart women’s road to being recognised as professional artists, a 400-year journey which paved the way for future generations and established what it meant to be a woman in the British art world. The exhibition covers the period in which women were visibly working as professional artists, but went against societal expectations to do so.

Featuring over 100 artists, the exhibition will celebrate well-known names such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffman, Julia Margaret Cameron and Gwen John, alongside many others who are only now being rediscovered. Their careers were as varied as the works they produced: some prevailed over genres deemed suitable for women like watercolour landscapes and domestic scenes. Others dared to take on subjects dominated by men like battle scenes and the nude, or campaigned for equal access to training and membership of professional institutions. Tate Britain will showcase over 200 works, including oil painting, watercolour, pastel, sculpture, photography and ‘needlepainting’ to tell the story of these trailblazing artists.

Now You See Us will begin at the Tudor court with Levina Teerlinc, many of whose miniatures will be brought together for the first time in four decades, and Esther Inglis, whose manuscripts contain Britain’s earliest known self-portraits by a woman artist. The exhibition will then look to the 17th century. Focus will be given to one of art history’s most celebrated women artists, Artemisia Gentileschi, who created major works in London at the court of Charles I, including the recently rediscovered Susanna and the Elders 1638-40, on loan from the Royal Collection for the very first time. The exhibition will also look to women such as Mary Beale, Joan Carlile and Maria Verelst who broke new ground as professional portrait painters in oil.

In the 18th century, women artists took part in Britain’s first public art exhibitions, including overlooked figures such as Katherine Read and Mary Black; the sculptor Anne Seymour Damer; and Margaret Sarah Carpenter, a leading figure in her day but little heard of now. The show will look at Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, the only women included among the Founder Members of the Royal Academy of Arts; it took 160 years for membership to be granted to another woman. Women artists of this era are often dismissed as amateurs pursuing ‘feminine’ occupations like watercolour and flower painting, but many worked in these genres professionally: needlewoman Mary Linwood, whose gallery was a major tourist attraction; miniaturist Sarah Biffin, who painted with her mouth, having been born without arms and legs; and Augusta Withers, a botanical illustrator employed by the Horticultural Society.

The Victorian period saw a vast expansion in public exhibition venues. Now You See Us will showcase major works by critically appraised artists of this period, including Elizabeth Butler (née Thompson)‘s monumental The Roll Call 1874 (Butler’s work prompted critic John Ruskin to retract his statement that “no women could paint”), and nudes by Henrietta Rae and Annie Swynnerton, which sparked both debate and celebration. The exhibition will also look at women’s connection to activism, including Florence Claxton‘s satirical ‘Woman’s Work’: A Medley 1861 which will be on public display for the first time since it was painted; and an exploration of the life of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, an early member of the Society of Female Artists who is credited with the campaign for women to be admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. On show will be the student work of women finally admitted to art schools, as well as their petitions for equal access to life drawing classes.

The exhibition will end in the early 20th century with women’s suffrage and the First World War. Women artists like Gwen John, Vanessa Bell and Helen Saunders played an important role in the emergence of modernism, abstraction and vorticism, but others, such as Anna Airy, who also worked as a war artist, continued to excel in conventional traditions. The final artists in the show, Laura Knight and Ethel Walker, offer powerful examples of ambitious, independent, confident professionals who achieved critical acclaim and – finally – membership of the Royal Academy.

Press release from Tate Britain

Joan Carlile (English, 1606-1679)
The Carlile Family with Sir Justinian Isham in Richmond Park
1650s
Oil on canvas
Lamport Hall
CC BY-NC-ND

Joan Carlile (English, 1600-1679)
Portrait of a Lady Wearing an Oyster Satin Dress
1650s
Oil on canvas
30.8 x 25.5cm
National Portrait Gallery, London
Government Art Collection
Purchased from Philip Mould Ltd, 2018

Joan Carlile or Carlell or Carliell (c. 1606-1679), was an English portrait painter. She was one of the first British women known to practise painting professionally. Before Carlile, known professional female painters working in Britain were born elsewhere in Europe, principally the Low Countries.

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at left, Joan Carlile’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady known as Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart and Duchess of Lauderdale 1650s (below); and at right, Portrait of an Unknown Lady 1650-1655 (below)

Joan Carlile (English, 1606-1679)
Portrait of an Unknown Lady (installation view)
1650-1655
Oil on canvas
Support: 1107 × 900 mm
Frame: 1205 × 1012 × 73 mm
Photo: Tate

Joan Carlile (English, 1606-1679)
Portrait of an Unknown Lady known as Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart and Duchess of Lauderdale
1650s
Oil on canvas
The Bute Collection at Mount Stuart

Here, Carlile uses the same white satin dress seen in a nearby painting. The pose, with the sitter elegantly gathering a handful of fabric, is taken from works by Charles I’s portrait painter, Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641). The sitter is sometimes identified as Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart and Duchess of Lauderdale. She was Carlile’s near neighbour in Petersham, at Ham House. The broken columns in the background are often used to symbolise loss.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Joan Carlile (English, 1606-1679)
Portrait of an Unknown Lady
1650-1655
Oil on canvas
Support: 1107 × 900 mm
Frame: 1205 × 1012 × 73 mm
Photo: Tate

Portraits by Joan Carlile are rare and this is one of only approximately ten that can be identified. Of these, two are in public collections (Ham House, Surrey, and National Portrait Gallery, London), while others are held in historic house collections and family trusts in the United Kingdom, for example Lamport Hall, Burghley House and Berkeley Castle. Carlile seems to have specialised in small-scale full length portraits of figures, usually female, set in large landscape or garden settings. The composition employed here, in which the figure holds the skirt of her dress with one hand and shawl with another, was most likely a template arrangement. It appears in two other portraits, one showing the figure facing the same way as here, the other in reverse, but with both figures wearing the same white satin dress. This repeated composition adds weight to the proposition that Carlile was a professional artist. The wife of Lodowick Carlile (or Carlell), a minor poet and dramatist who also held the office of Gentleman of the Bows to Charles I, Joan Carlile lived with her husband in Petersham, a suburb of London. However, in 1653 their neighbour, Brian Duppa, recorded that ‘the Mistress of the Family intends for London, where she meanes to make use of her skill to som more Advantage then hitherto she hath don’ (quoted in Toynbee and Isham 1954, p.275). In 1654 Carlile is recorded as living in London’s Covent Garden, then the heart of the artistic community (see Burnett 2004/2010, accessed 2 October 2015).

Text from the Tate website

Joan Carlile challenged societal expectations by becoming one of Britain’s first professional women artists in the 1600s, earning her living as an oil painter. Initially employed in King Charles I’s household, Carlile liked to paint in her spare time. With the outbreak of the Civil War, she began painting to support herself.

Carlile moved to Covent Garden in the 1650s – then the centre of the art world – and set up a successful commercial portrait business. Her template of carefully posed figures in silk gowns against landscape backgrounds, seen here in Portrait of an Unknown Lady (1650-5), proved extremely popular. Admired as a professional artist in her lifetime, only a small number of her portraits still exist, some which have never been seen in public.

Text from the Tate website

In her Portrait of an Unknown Lady (1650-1655) the astonishing nacreous lustre of the sitter’s white silk gown, shown full length, shines against the foil of the dull brown foliage behind her. At this point, the Civil War had ended but the restoration of the monarchy was still in the future, and Carlile’s painting, with its overt celebration of luxury and leisure (the spotless pale fabric speaks of both) seems provocative.

It is possible that Carlile taught Anne Killigrew (1660-1685), an accomplished painter and poet whose family encouraged her creative pursuits, although it’s not clear if she ever painted professionally. Only a handful of Killigrew’s works survive today, including Venus Attired by the Three Graces, which reveals her interest in mythological scenes.

Although she died of smallpox aged just 25, Killigrew stands alongside Beale and Carlile as one of Britain’s first female artists.

Alicia Foster. “Blazing a trail: Britain’s first women artists deserve to be better known,” on the Art UK website 13 May 2024 [Online] Cited 03/09/2024

Anne Killigrew (English, 1660-1685)
Venus Attired by the Three Graces
c. 1680
Oil on canvas
Support: 1120 × 950 mm
Frame: 1282 × 1102 × 63 mm
Falmouth Art Gallery
Purchased with the assistance of the Victoria and Albert Museum Purchase Grant Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund, the Beecroft Bequest, Falmouth Decorative and Fine Arts Society, the Estate of Barry Hughes in memory of Grace and Thomas Hughes and generous donations from local supporters
Public domain

Anne Killigrew has been described as the most celebrated female English prodigy of the Seventeeth Century. A poet and artist of great beauty and repute, Killigrew died of smallpox at the age of just 25. Anne’s exceptional qualities as an artist and a poet were highly praised in her short lifetime. The poet John Dryden dedicated a poem to her in which he refers directly to this picture: ‘Where nymphs of brightest form appear, and shaggy satyrs standing near’ (from ‘To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady Mrs Anne Killigrew Excellent In The Two Sister-Arts of Poesy And Painting: An Ode’). Anne Killigrew worked at the Royal Court of King James II as Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen. Anne’s grandfather, Sir William Killigrew, was the Governor of Pendennis Castle, and his son, Dr Henry Killigrew moved to London to work as chaplain to King Charles I. He later became master of the Savoy Hospital.

Text from the Falmouth Art Gallery website

Mary Beale (English, 1633-1699)
Sketch of the Artist’s Son, Bartholomew Beale, Facing Left
c. 1660
Oil on paper
Support: 325 × 245 mm
Frame: 421 × 340 × 32 mm
Tate
Purchased 2010
Photo: Tate

In the late 1650s and early 1660s Beale and her family were living on Hind Court, off Fleet Street in London. She painted privately and had a painting room in her home. Her husband had a civil service position as Deputy Clerk of the Patents. Portrait sittings of family and friends were often social occasions, with conversation and dinner afterwards. It is in this period that Beale produced small oil sketches on paper of family members, particularly her two young sons. Whether they relate to larger oil on canvas portraits is unclear.

This oil sketch of a young boy, shown in three-quarter profile, is of Mary Beale’s eldest son Bartholomew, baptised in 1656. His appearance, both in age and costume, is very similar to that in Mary Beale’s Self-portrait with her family (Geffrye Museum, London), painted c. 1659-60, before the birth of her youngest son Charles. It relates closely to another sketch of Bartholomew in oil on paper painted at the same time, Sketch of the Artist’s Son, Bartholomew Beale, in Profile c. 1660 (Tate T13245). Whether these sketches are connected to the production of the Geffrye Museum portrait, or were simply executed at around the same time, is not known. They are painted in oil on paper, which seems to have been a feature of Beale’s working method in the early 1660s but is not known in her later career, when she made preparatory sketches in chalk on paper or in oil on canvas (see, for example, Portrait of a Young Girl c. 1679-81, Tate T06612). When this sketch was made, the Beale family was living in Hind Court, off Fleet Street in London, where Mary Beale’s husband, Charles, was employed as Deputy Clerk of the Patents Office. It is difficult to determine whether Beale had much of a commercial portrait practice at this date, but documents certainly record the production of portraits of family and friends. In her ‘painting room’, Beale had ‘pencills [sic.], brushes, goose & swan fitches’, as well as ‘quantities of primed paper to paint on’ (George Vertue, transcription of Charles Beale’s 1661 notebook, now lost, quoted in Barber 1999, p. 16).

Text from the Tate website

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Mary Beale’s Anne Sotheby 1676-1677

Mary Beale (English, 1633-1699)
Anne Sotheby
1676-1677
Oil on canvas
Tate
Purchased with funds provided by the Nicholas Themans Trust 2024

Beale’s husband kept a daily record of her activities in the studio. Two of his over 30 notebooks and a few partial transcripts are still known. They record Beale’s sitters, her painting stages, her painting materials and her prices. For her commissioned works, she borrowed poses from the portraits of the court artist Peter Lely (1618-1680). Anne Sotheby’s pose is taken from his portrait of Lady Essex Finch. Beale charged £10 for paintings of this size. Her sons acted as studio assistants; her youngest, Charles, was paid to paint the drapery in this portrait.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Mary Beale (née Cradock) (1633-1699) was an English portrait painter. She was part of a small band of female professional artists working in London. Beale became the main financial provider for her family through her professional work – a career she maintained from 1670/71 to the 1690s. Beale was also a writer, whose prose Discourse on Friendship of 1666 presents a scholarly, uniquely female take on the subject. Her 1663 manuscript Observations, on the materials and techniques employed “in her painting of Apricots”, though not printed, is the earliest known instructional text in English written by a female painter. Praised first as a “virtuous” practitioner in “Oyl Colours” by Sir William Sanderson in his 1658 book Graphice: Or The use of the Pen and Pensil; In the Excellent Art of PAINTING, Beale’s work was later commended by court painter Sir Peter Lely and, soon after her death, by the author of “An Essay towards an English-School”, his account of the most noteworthy artists of her generation.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Mary Beale (English, 1633-1699)
Mary Beale
c. 1666
Oil on canvas
109.2 x 87.6cm
National Portrait Gallery, London
Purchased, 1912
CC BY-NC-ND

Beale is shown holding an unframed canvas on which are sketch portraits of her two sons, Bartholomew (1656-1709) and Charles (1660-1714?)

Mary Beale (English, 1633-1699)
Self Portrait
c. 1675
Oil on sacking
89 x 73cm
West Suffolk Heritage Service
Purchased
CC BY-NC-ND

The early English portrait painter Mary Beale (1622/1623-1699) had a father who was an amateur artist, miniature painter and a collector of paintings (her family owned work by Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck) and her husband, Charles, was also an amateur painter and ran her studio in London’s fashionable Pall Mall.

Unusually, in her case, her talent was matched by her spouse’s high regard of it, and she was allowed to supersede him and establish a professional career. She took on female apprentices, though no records of their subsequent careers survive.

Alicia Foster. “Blazing a trail: Britain’s first women artists deserve to be better known,” on the Art UK website 13 May 2024 [Online] Cited 03/09/2024

Exhibition guide

Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 celebrates over 100 women who forged public careers as artists. The exhibition begins with the earliest recorded women artists working in Britain. It ends with women’s place in society fundamentally changed by the First World War and the first women gaining the right to vote. Across these 400 years, women were a constant presence in the art world. Now You See Us explores these artists’ careers and asks why so many have been erased from mainstream art histories.

Organised chronologically, the exhibition follows women who practised art as a livelihood rather than an accomplishment. The chosen works were often exhibited at public exhibitions, where these artists sold their art and made their reputations. Most of the women featured belonged to a social class that gave them the time and opportunity to develop their talents. Many were the daughters, sisters or wives of artists. Yet even these women were regarded differently. Now You See Us charts their fight to be accepted as professional artists on equal terms with men.

Many of the exhibited works reflect prejudiced notions of the most appropriate art forms and subjects for women. Others challenge the commonly held belief that women were best suited to ‘imitation’, proving they have always been capable of creative invention. From painting epic battle scenes to campaigning for access to art academies, these women defied society’s limited expectations of them and forged their own paths. Yet so many of their careers have been forgotten and artworks lost. Drawing on the artists’ own writings, art criticism, and new and established research, this exhibition attempts to restore these women to their rightful place in art history. Now You See Us aims to ensure these artists are not only seen but remembered.

Women at the Tudor Courts

There are significant gaps in our knowledge of women’s artistic lives in the sixteenth century. As is the case for many artists in this exhibition, their lives are poorly documented and often hidden behind those of their husbands and fathers. The problems this presents are evident in this room.

Susanna Horenbout (1503-1554) and Levina Teerlinc (c. 1510s-1576) are among the earliest women in Britain to be named as artists. Their reputations are clearly recorded. In 1521, Horenbout’s skill was admired by the German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), and in 1567, both artists were praised by the Italian historian Lodovico Guicciardini (1521-1589). Yet no works by Horenbout have been identified, and those attributed to Teerlinc are not certain.

Horenbout and Teerlinc were both daughters of Flemish manuscript illuminators and were likely trained in their family workshops. Both arrived in England to work at the court of Henry VIII. But as women, they were not employed as artists. While Horenbout’s brother Lucas Horenbout (1490-1544) was Henry VIII’s painter, she served Anne of Cleves as one of her Gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber. Teerlinc served Elizabeth I likewise. This does not mean that they did not paint – at court, their artistic talents would have been a distinguishing skill – but, as is a common feature of this exhibition, written histories have failed to record their activities.

Working in a different context – as a scribe and calligrapher – the works of Esther Inglis (1571-1624) can be identified. Inglis authored more than 60 manuscript books and included her name and self-portrait in many. Raised in Scotland, she may have learnt the art of calligraphy from her mother, Marie Presot (active 1569-1574).

Artemisia Gentileschi

Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi arrived in London in c. 1638-9 by invitation of Charles I. Like other European rulers, Charles I employed artists of international reputation to signal the cultural sophistication of his court. Gentileschi had prestigious patrons across Europe, including the Grand Duke of Tuscany and Philip IV of Spain. She was the first woman to be a member of the Academy of the Arts of Drawing in Florence, and in Rome, her house had been ‘full of cardinals and princes’. Gentileschi’s fame as an artist was augmented by her status as a woman.

In London, Gentileschi worked for Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria. Records suggest she produced seven works for the royal collection. These included self-portraits and large history paintings, with subject matter drawn from classical history, mythology, and the Bible. Only the two displayed here are still known. Gentileschi often placed women at the centre of her works, depicting narratives that celebrate their strength and virtue. Susanna and the Elders is an example of the kind of work for which Gentileschi was celebrated.

Gentileschi achieved in her lifetime what many women who came after her had to fight to attain: she was a professional artist who ran her own studio, was a member of an art academy, worked from life models and was ranked as a serious artist alongside men. Despite this, Gentileschi’s status has fluctuated over time, and the artist has faded in and out of art history.

Early accounts of Gentileschi’s work focus on her personal life as much as her painting. Like many of the women artists who came after her, the details of her biography continue to dictate interpretations of her work.

The First Professionals

In 1658, historian William Sanderson (c. 1586-1676) published Graphice. The use of the pen and pensil. Or, The most excellent art of painting. The publication lists contemporary artists practising in England. He includes four women working in oil paint: ‘Mrs Carlile’ (Joan Carlile), ‘Mrs Beale’ (Mary Beale), ‘Mrs Brooman’ (probably Sarah Broman) and ‘Mrs Weimes’ (Anne Wemyss). Carlile and Beale are believed to be two of the earliest British women to have worked as professional artists. Very little is known about Broman or Wemyss beyond snatches of information in archives.

This short list highlights how unusual it was for British women to pursue art as a profession in the seventeenth century. Women had little agency over their own lives and were subject first to their fathers and then their husbands. Limited to the domestic sphere, they were not expected to conduct public lives. Many women painted privately with no thought of turning it into a career. While young men began as apprentices or assistants in the studios of professionals, this route was not open to most women.

In the seventeenth century women writers, poets, playwrights and artists began to give voice to those questioning their secondary status and petitioning for women’s rights. They argued that it was lack of education, not ‘weak minds’ that limited their opportunities. This fight for equality and access to education runs throughout the exhibition.

The First Exhibitors

The first public art exhibition in Britain took place in London in 1760, and art shows soon became an important part of the city’s social calendar. Founded in 1768, the Royal Academy quickly emerged as a driving force in cultural life, with its Summer Exhibition attracting tens of thousands of visitors every year. Other venues, including the Society of Artists and the British Institution also hosted exhibitions.

Women artists played an active part in this competitive world. An estimated 900 women exhibited their work between 1760 and 1830. Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser were both founding members of the Royal Academy (although, as women, they weren’t awarded full membership and were excluded from the Academy’s council meetings and governance). Despite this precedent, it would take more than 150 years for the next woman to be elected to membership.

Kauffman is one of the few women artists of the eighteenth century whose profile has been sustained. Many others made names for themselves, but their careers are not well documented. Even Moser is less well known, perhaps because she painted flowers while Kauffman pursued the ‘high genre’ of history painting, depicting historical, mythological and biblical narratives.

Art critics of the time often criticised women for their ‘weak’ figurative work, yet they were denied access to life-drawing classes. Women artists also had to battle social expectations. Publishing a private or studio address in an exhibition catalogue was a signal of commercial practice, but painting for money was considered improper. Women artists of higher social rank were listed as ‘honorary’ exhibitors; some exhibited simply as ‘a Lady’, and after marriage, many switched their status from ‘commercial’ to ‘amateur’.

‘Just What Ladies Do For Amusement’

In 1770, the Royal Academy banned ‘Needle-work, artificial Flowers, cut Paper, Shell-work, or any such baubles’ from its exhibitions. They also banned works that were copies. Other categories of art that the Academy considered ‘lower’, such as miniature painting, pastel and watercolour were also treated dismissively. Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), the Academy’s President, said that working in pastel was unworthy of real artists and was ‘just what ladies do when they paint for their own amusement’.

These ‘lower arts’ were ones that women practised the most. Small in scale and considered less technically challenging than oil painting, they demanded less equipment and could be pursued at home. They were taught to middle and upper-class girls and were the realm of women who pursued art as amateur accomplishment.

Despite this, these art forms offered opportunities for women to earn a living. Many turned miniature painting, needlework and pastel into lucrative professional careers, supplementing their income through tutoring. Their patrons were often women, and some boasted large, fashionable clienteles and even galleries which became tourist attractions.

Founded in 1754, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (the Society of Arts) offered cash prizes and medals in many categories, including the ‘polite arts’. Awards were given for patterns for embroidery, copies of prints, drawings of statues and of ‘beasts, birds, fruit or flowers’, as well as landscapes. Some prizes were specifically intended for young women. The Society was a stepping stone to a career and many of the artists in this exhibition won medals. Yet most of the women recorded as submitting work for competition can no longer be identified beyond their names.

Flowers

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, painting flowers was considered a suitably delicate pursuit for women. Imitating nature (rather than demonstrating creative or imaginative flair) was thought to be an appropriate outlet for women’s artistic skills. Flowers were also at the heart of respectable hobbies like embroidery, botany and gardening. In the 1850s, the women’s periodical the Ladies’ Treasury called flower painting ‘a ladylike and truly feminine accomplishment’. When Mary Moser exhibited Cymon and Iphigenia (based on a poem by John Dryden, 1631-1700) at the Royal Academy in 1789, a reviewer urged her to stick to flowers. She painted flowers ‘transcendently’, he noted, and should do ‘nothing else’.

Many women were employed as professional illustrators, recording plant species for horticulturists and botanical publishers. Some conducted hybrid careers, working as illustrators and drawing tutors while exhibiting flower paintings for a wider market. In the Victorian era, critics applauded several women artists as leaders of the genre. Yet the idea that flower painting, especially in watercolour, was an exclusively amateur pastime has damaged the legacies of many accomplished artists who successfully worked within this genre.

Victorian Spectacle

Grand exhibitions were a defining part of the Victorian art world. The Royal Academy, the leading art institution since 1768, was still Britain’s most prestigious exhibition venue, but was later criticised for its traditional conservatism. New venues, such as London’s Grosvenor Gallery, which opened in 1877, became rival spaces, and exhibitions in Liverpool and Manchester offered fresh opportunities for exhibiting artists. The Victorian era was also the age of World Fairs. Major exhibitions were held in London and Paris, and in 1893, the World’s Exposition in Chicago was visited by over 25 million people.

This room explores the successes of women artists on this public stage. Many of the works on display were shown in these exhibitions. They won international medals, praise from art critics and public recognition. Yet women tackling ‘male’ subjects, such as battle scenes, caused surprise. Opinion was also divided on women painting the nude: some thought it immoral, others brave.

Exhibitions gave women a public platform to build substantial reputations, and some became popular names. Despite this, membership of the Royal Academy, which was a mark of professional recognition, remained out of reach. As a result, women had no automatic exhibiting rights and were reliant on committees of men selecting their works for exhibition. Without institutional support, they had to navigate the commercial art market on their own.

Women artists’ campaigns for access to the Academy joined calls for greater equality in society. From the 1850s, women petitioned for equal rights to education and work, as well as women’s suffrage. These causes are reflected in the works in this room.

Watercolour

Watercolour was considered one of the ‘polite arts’ best suited to women. However, there were few opportunities to practice professionally. The principal watercolour societies – the Old (founded in 1804) and the rival New (founded in 1807 and reconstituted in 1831) – restricted the membership of women. Membership of the Old was limited to six women (in practice, usually four), while the New admitted around ten.

In both societies, women were confined to the category of ‘Lady Members’ until the end of the nineteenth century. They had no say in governance and were denied access to the financial premiums awarded to full members. Since the annual exhibitions of both societies were closed to non-members, most women had limited opportunities to exhibit their work.

Against these odds, many women water colourists achieved significant commercial and critical success. They enjoyed solo shows and developed commercial relationships with dealers, taking control of their careers.

In 1857, a group of women founded the Society of Female Artists (later, the Society of Lady Artists in c. 1869, then the Society of Women Artists in 1899) to promote the work of women artists in Britain.

Photography

The announcement of photography in 1839 marked a major shift in the art world. In its first decades, photography was a laborious practice that required an understanding of chemistry and optics, as well as expensive equipment. It needed more money, specialist instruction and time than most other art forms. For women who had access to these privileges, the medium provided new opportunities.

From its foundation in 1853, the Photographic Society of London welcomed women members. However, they rarely attended meetings, which were scheduled in the evenings when women required a chaperone to leave the house. The atmosphere of the meetings was described as a ‘men’s club’ and it wasn’t until 1898 that the Society belatedly banned smoking ‘in respect of ladies’ attendance’. Meetings often included papers on new techniques and equipment, providing significant benefits to those who were able to join.

Women participated in London’s first public photographic exhibitions at the Royal Society of Arts in 1852-3 and at the Photographic Society in 1854. The Amateur Photographic Association, established in 1861, also welcomed women from its outset. In the 1890s and early 1900s, London’s Photographic Salon became a key venue. Founded by the Linked Ring Brotherhood, who promoted photography as a fine art, Salon exhibitors included women from across Europe and the US. A photograph of British photographer Carine Cadby in silhouette, examining one of her glass plate negatives, featured on the cover of the 1896 Salon catalogue. Despite this, women were not elected as members of the Linked Ring until 1900. By 1909, they numbered just 8 among 63 men.

Art School

Women were excluded from enrolment at the Royal Academy Schools, Britain’s principal art academy, until 1860. Laura Herford (1831-1870) was the first woman admitted. She had submitted her work for consideration using only her initials and was assumed to be a man. Once women gained entry, they were determined to achieve equal access to training.

Women were barred from the Academy’s life-drawing classes until 1893. Their exclusion from this vital component of art education was justified on many grounds. Chiefly, it was to ‘protect’ women’s supposed modesty, but also because they were considered amateurs who lacked the intellectual capacity to practice art at the highest level. Women students marshalled critical support for their cause and submitted petitions. Life drawing was considered essential to the training of men pursuing careers as artists. Why, they argued, was it not also essential for women?

The Female School of Art, founded in 1842, provided another route into art education. Like several regional schools, such as that in Manchester, it encouraged women into vocational careers in design. Women also had access to private academies, including Sass’s and Leigh’s (later Heatherleys) in London, which prepared students for admission to the Royal Academy Schools. And some women artists, such as Louise Jopling, established their own art school.

In 1871, the founding of the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London signalled a fundamental change of attitudes. From the outset, the Slade offered women an education on equal terms with men. Studying from life models was a central focus of teaching and by the turn of the century, women students outnumbered men by three to one. Access to life drawing had been regarded as the last barrier to equal opportunity. Now they could study from life, some critics argued it was up to women to prove they could be successful artists.

Being Modern

The first two decades of the twentieth century saw rapid change for women, with their rights, roles and opportunities evolving at an unprecedented pace. The First World War signalled a decisive change for women’s place in society and in 1918, after decades of campaigning, some women finally gained the right to vote.

At the same time, the art world was also changing. New art groups and exhibiting societies rejected tradition and promoted modernist aesthetics. Instead of figurative realism, they privileged form, colour and experimentation. Many saw modernism as an opportunity for greater artistic freedom. However, despite growing liberalism in art and society, women artists still faced challenges. The New English Art Club became a rival exhibiting venue to the Royal Academy but was slow to admit women. The Camden Town Group labelled itself ‘progressive’ but openly excluded women.

While modernism is often presented as the dominant movement of the early twentieth century, it doesn’t account for all artistic production of the period. Membership of the Royal Academy, an exhibiting venue many now regarded as too traditional, remained a symbolic goal for many women. When Annie Swynnerton was elected an Associate Member in 1922, Laura Knight said she had broken down the ‘barriers of prejudice’. In 1936, Knight was elected a Royal Academician, becoming the first woman to achieve full membership since the eighteenth century.

The artworks in the final room of the exhibition explore this complex period. Their variety reveals women forging their own paths and pursuing professional careers with purpose and confidence. While many chose not to challenge traditional artistic values, they pushed the boundaries of what was expected of them, paving the way for generations of women artists who came after them.

Text from the Tate exhibition guide

Mary Delany (English, 1700-1788)
Rubus Odoratus
1772-1782
The British Museum
Bequeathed by Augusta Hall, Baroness Llanover in 1897

Delany was not a professional artist. However, she pursued art with a seriousness of purpose, working in a range of artistic and decorative mediums. She was in her early seventies when she turned to botanical collage, which stemmed from the Dutch art known as knipkunst or schaarkunst. Over the course of a decade, Delany created nearly one thousand botanically accurate collages of plants made from intricately cut pieces of coloured paper. In this collage, Delany shows a flowering raspberry, which was introduced to Britain from North America in 1770.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Mary Knowles (English, 1733-1807)
Needlework Picture
1779
Silk (textile), wool, giltwood, glass (material) embroidered, dyeing
89.2 x 84.5cm (frame, external)
Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2024

Mary Morris Knowles, born of a Quaker family in Rugeley, Staffordshire, was celebrated as much for her intellect, religious conviction and unusual powers of conversation as for her skill with the needle. A friend of the poetess Anna Seward (‘The Swan of Lichfield’) and of Dr Johnson, she is now regarded as an important early protagonist of the feminist viewpoint in English cultural life. Her support for the abolition of slavery, her investigation into mystical science and her knowledge of garden design, in addition to her accomplishment as a needlewoman, suggest the breadth of her interests. In 1771 she was introduced by her fellow Quaker Benjamin West to Queen Charlotte, who remained on terms of friendship with her over the next thirty years and whose interest in female accomplishments, notably needlework, was well known. Mrs Knowles’s visits to Buckingham House included an occasion in 1778 on which she presented her 5-year-old son George to the King and Queen.

Following the first visit in 1771, the Queen commissioned Mrs Knowles to make a copy of Zoffany’s portrait of George III in needlework or ‘needle painting’ as it was also known. This technique ‘so highly finished, that it has all the softness and Effect of painting’ was achieved with a combination of irregular satin-stitch and long-and-short stitch, worked on hand-woven tammy in an arbitrary pattern and at speed, using fine wool dyed in a wide range of colours under her own supervision. Eight years later Mrs Knowles embroidered the self portrait showing her at work on the Zoffany which, like the earlier piece, she signed with initials and dated. This appears always to have been in the Royal Collection and was presumably also commissioned by Queen Charlotte.

Text from the Royal Collection Trust website

Mary Black (English, c. 1737-1814)
Messenger Monsey (1693-1788)
1764
Oil on canvas
127 x 101.6cm
Gift from Frederick Walford, 1877
Royal College of Physicians, London
CC BY-NC-ND

This portrait of the physician Messenger Monsey (1694-1788) is Black’s only known oil painting. Black likely hoped it was a step towards establishing herself as a professional artist, but the issue of payment caused friction. Black hope to charge her client £25, half the amount charged by leading portraitist Joshua Reynolds, but after Monsey’s complaint offered to drop it to a quarter. Monsey considered Black’s expectation of a fee improper. He claimed it would damage her reputation if word got out, and even referred to her as a ‘slut’ in a letter to his cousin.

Wall text from the exhibition

Little is known of the father-and-daughter artists Thomas and Mary Black. Thomas was mainly employed painting draperies for more successful painters, and Mary usually painted copies of old masters. In a letter from Monsey to Mary Black, the doctor wrote: ‘I was bedevilled to let you make your first attempt upon my gracefull person… drawn like a Hog in armour’.

Text from the Art UK website

Black was clearly unfazed by awkward sitters. She built a flourishing artistic practice, painting and teaching the aristocracy, earning enough to live independently (she never married) and keep servants and a horse and carriage at her London home. She died there in old age just as the nineteenth century began.

Alicia Foster. “Blazing a trail: Britain’s first women artists deserve to be better known,” on the Art UK website 13 May 2024 [Online] Cited 03/09/2024

Mary Moser RA (English, 1744-1819)
Standing Female Nude
Nd
Black and white chalk on grey-green paper
49 x W 30.2cm
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

As women were excluded from life drawing classes, many took their own steps to improve their anatomical knowledge. They sketched from casts and statues and copied from other artists’ drawings and anatomy books. These rare works show that some artists found ways around these restrictions, although little is known about how Moser and Stone accessed life models.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Mary Moser RA (English, 1744-1819)
Flowers in a vase, which stands on a ledge
1765
Watercolour and bodycolour on paper
The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge

From the same series as the work nearby, this watercolour represents Sagittarius. The vase is filled with a cascade of late flowering plants: asters, chrysanthemums and rare pale nerines, captured in the cold light of winter. In addition to her professional profile as a Royal Academician, Moser acted as a royal tutor. She was part of Queen Charlotte’s circle and taught the princesses botany, embroidery and flower painting. She worked alongside other artists, including Meen and Delany, whose work is also displayed in this room.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Admired for her striking paintings of flowers, Mary Moser was recognised for her talent from a very young age. She trained with her father, an acclaimed artist and goldsmith, winning her first medal for flower drawing at 14. At just 24, she became one of only two female founders of the Royal Academy, alongside Angelica Kauffman.

Moser painted portraits and historical scenes, but her skilled floral still life works, like Flowers in a vase, which stands on a ledge (1765), were praised by critics. Though still life was traditionally seen as a ‘lesser subject’, her floral works were so widely appreciated she received royal commissions, including one from Queen Charlotte. Despite recognition and the exhibition of many paintings, few of Moser’s works survive today.

Text from the Tate website

Mary Moser RA (English, 1744-1819)
Vase of Flowers
Between 1758 and 1819
Oil on canvas
72.1 x W 53.6cm
The Fitzwilliam Museum
Gift from Major the Hon. Henry Rogers Broughton, 1966

The exquisite attention to detail in her painting, with its beads of dew and butterflies on the wing, was perhaps nurtured by seeing her father’s work; as a goldsmith and medallion maker, this was also his talent. But the gorgeous sensuality – seen also in her approach to the nude figure – was entirely her own. She married, aged 53, but also had an affair with the estranged husband of another artist: Maria Hadfield Cosway (1759-1839).

Alicia Foster. “Blazing a trail: Britain’s first women artists deserve to be better known,” on the Art UK website 13 May 2024 [Online] Cited 03/09/2024

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Angelica Kauffman’s Colouring 1778-1780 (below)

Angelica Kauffman RA (Swiss, 1741-1807)
Colouring
1778-1780
Oil on canvas
1260 x 1485 x 25 mm
© Royal Academy of Arts, London
Photo: John Hammond

This painting is part of a set of the four [titled ‘Elements of Art’] commissioned from Kauffman by the Royal Academy to decorate the ceiling of the Royal Academy’s new Council Room in Somerset House which opened in 1780. …

Kauffman represented each of her four Elements of Art as women. Female personifications of abstract concepts and values were commonplace in European art but depicting all four as women was unusual. Design (or Disegno), in particular, was known as ‘the father of all the arts’ and was traditionally depicted as a man, often in contrast to Colour or Painting personified as a woman (see Baumgartel). In Design and Colouring, the women are physically engaged in the act of creating whereas in Composition and Invention they are shown in contemplation. In Invention the figure looks to the sky for inspiration and in Composition she is deep in thought with her head resting on her hand in the traditional gesture of melancholy or reverie.

Text from the Royal Academy website

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at centre, Maria Cosway’s Georgiana as Cynthia from Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ 1781-1782 (below); and at right, Cosway’s A Persian Lady Worshipping the Rising Sun 1784 (below)

Maria Cosway (Italian-English 1760-1838)
Georgiana as Cynthia from Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’
1781-1782
Oil on canvas
Chatsworth House
Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / Bridgeman Images
Public domain

Maria Cosway (Italian-English 1760-1838)
A Persian Lady Worshipping the Rising Sun
1784
Oil on canvas
61 x 73.7cm
Sir John Soane’s Museum
Gift from the artist, 1822
By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
CC BY-NC-ND

As well as portraits, Cosway exhibited history paintings. This work was shown at the Royal Academy in 1784. Although only a few of Cosway’s history pictures can be located now, paintings such as this one were well known through reproductions made by leading engravers and print publishers. Cosway’s success was hindered by her husband, who did not like her to paint professionally. She reflected later that had he permitted it, she would have ‘made a better painter, but left to myself by degrees, instead of improving, I lost what I brought from Italy of my early studies.’

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Maria Cosway (Italian-English 1760-1838)
Bouquet of Flowers
1780
Watercolour on paper
The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)
Bequeathed by Sir Robert Clermont Witt, 1952
CC BY-NC-ND

Maria Cosway (Italian-English 1760-1838)
The Judgement of Korah, Dathan and Abiram
c. 1801
Pen, ink and oil on canvas
37.5 x 29.2cm
Yale Center for British Art
Paul Mellon Collection
CC BY-NC-ND

Maria Cosway (1759-1838) (after)
Self Portrait
Nd
Oil on canvas
61 x W 50.8cm
Temple Newsam House, Leeds Museums and Galleries
Bequeathed by Sam Wilson, 1925
CC BY-NC-ND

Sarah Biffin (English, 1784-1850)
Self-portrait
c. 1821
Watercolour and bodycolour on ivory
Private collection

Biffin, whose baptism record notes that she was born ‘without arms or legs’, taught herself to sew, write and paint using her mouth and shoulder. She wrote that, as a child, ‘I was continually practising every invention; till at length I could, with my mouth – thread a needle – tie a knot – do fancy work – cut out and make my own dresses’.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at left, Clara Maria Pope’s Peony 1822 (below); and at right, Pope’s Peony 1821 (below)

Clara Maria Pope (British, 1767-1831)
Peony
1822
Bodycolour on card
The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
Courtesy the Natural History Museum

Clara Maria Pope (British, 1767-1831)
Peony
1821
Bodycolour on card
The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
Courtesy the Natural History Museum

Pope appears in museum records under many names: Clara Leigh, Clara Wheatley (her first husband was the artist Francis Wheatley, 1747-1801), Clara Maria Pope (she married actor Alexander Pope in 1807) and Mrs Alexander Pope. Her changes of name have obscured her career as an artist. She exhibited watercolour landscapes and portraits, miniatures and genre works, but above all, Pope was an artist of flowers. She worked for the leading botanical publisher Samuel Curtis (1779-1860). The scientifically accurate peonies depicted here are 2 of 11 designs. They may have been intended as plates for a work that was never published.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Augusta Innes Withers (English, 1792-1877)
The Canon Hall Muscat Grape
c. 1825
Watercolour on paper
444 × 352 mm
RHS Lindley Collections
Courtesy the Royal Horticultural Society, Lindley Library

Withers was employed by the Horticultural Society to make official ‘portraits’ of varieties of fruit growing in their orchards. The quality of Withers’s work meant her high fees were not questioned. Here, she paints sunlight glowing through grapes and the translucency of the skin of gooseberries in great detail. Withers drew and handcoloured engraved illustrations in the Horticultural Society’s Transactions and made illustrations of fruit for John Lindley’s Pomological Magazine in 1828 (Lindley was Secretary of the Society). Withers was also regarded as one of the best teachers of botanical illustration.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at left, Rebecca Solomon’s Sherry, Sir?
c. 1858-1862 (below); and at right, Solomon’s A Young Teacher 1861 (below)

Rebecca Solomon (English, 1832-1886)
Sherry, Sir?
c. 1858-1862
Oil on canvas
Private collection

Solomon often painted scenes of domestic life and interiors, which were considered more suitable subjects for women artists than history painting. Solomon’s domestic scenes include subtle commentary on social hierarchies. Sherry, Sir? depicts a maid with a silver tray. It reprises a well-known painting of the same title, painted by William Powell Frith (1819-1909) in 1851, but unlike Frith’s painting, Solomon draws attention to domestic labour and the hierarchies of a middle-class home. Solomon was the sister of artists Abraham Solomon (1823-1862) and Simeon Solomon (1840-1905).

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Rebecca Solomon (London 26 September 1832 – 20 November 1886 London) was a 19th-century English Pre-Raphaelite draftsman, illustrator, engraver, and painter of social injustices. She is the second of three children who all became artists, in a prominent Jewish family. …

Solomon’s artistic style was typical of popular 19th-century painting at the time and falls under the category of genre painting. She used her visual images to critique ethnic, gender and class prejudice in Victorian England. When Solomon started painting genre scenes, her work demonstrated an observant eye for class, ethnic and gender discrimination. Solomon’s paintings reflect a combination of interest in the theatre and commitment to social consciousness that is not exist in other artist’s painting in the nineteenth century.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Solomon painted in a more equivocal manner… She [the subject of the painting] is equally attractive and demure, but, by being painted from the side and against the background of a middle-class interior, the viewer is invited to reflect on her social status.

This is framed in a genre painting and by no means a piece with pretensions to social realism, but Solomon seems to be underlining the definite restrictions on this young woman’s position in society.

The pictures hanging behind her may contribute to that interpretation of the artist. They are not yet identified, but it seems that on the left we are shown an allegorical subject later than Gainsborough or Reynolds, depicting a young peasant boy or young peasant girl holding a dog in a landscape. On the right, a more specific engraving of a genre painting from Solomon’s own time showing what appears to be an itinerant family of street vendors. By placing his servant girl between these two paintings, Solomon seems to be asking us to compare.

José Luis Jiménez García. “La otra versión de la ‘Sherry Girl’,” on the Diario de Jerez website 07 June 2023 [Online] Cited 28/08/2024 Translated from the Spanish by Google Translate

Rebecca Solomon (English, 1832-1886)
A Young Teacher
1861
Oil on canvas
61 by 51cm
Tate and the Museum of the Home

Rebecca Solomon’s painting is a complex reflection on gender, race, religion and education in mid-nineteenth century London. As with many of her works, it considers women who worked in better-off households as professional carers. In A Young Teacher, Solomon modifies a traditional domestic scene between mother and child, with the surrounding books stressing the theme of learning. The woman at the centre of the image was modelled by Jamaican-born Fanny Eaton, who became a prominent muse for many Victorian artists and featured in some of the most iconic paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite period. …

Believed to be the first Jewish woman to become a professional artist in England, Rebecca Solomon’s work shone a light on inequality and prejudice at a time when these subjects were far from mainstream. She was active in social reform movements, including as part of a group of 38 artists who petitioned the Royal Academy of Arts to open its schools to women.

Text from the Tate website

Emily Osborn (English, 1828-1925)
Nameless and Friendless.
“The rich man’s wealth is his strong city: the destruction of the poor is their poverty” (Proverbs: 10:15)
1857
Oil on canvas
Support: 825 × 1038 mm
Frame: 1042 × 1258 × 75 mm
Tate
Purchased with assistance from Tate Members, the Millwood Legacy and a private donor 2009
Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED

Osborn exhibited widely and was supported by wealthy patrons. She was also part of the ‘rights of woman’ debate, campaigning for more public roles for women. Nameless and Friendless, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1857, dramatises the difficulties faced by women artists. Osborn shows a young woman offering a painting to a sceptical dealer. With no reputation (‘Nameless’) and no connections (‘Friendless’), she has little chance of a sale. Behind her, two leering men emphasise the impression of her isolation and vulnerability.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Emily Mary Osborn’s Barbara Bodichon (1827-1891) Nd (below)

Emily Mary Osborn (1828-1925)
Barbara Bodichon (1827-1891) (installation view)
Nd
Oil on canvas
120 x 97cm
Girton College, University of Cambridge

Martha Darley Mutrie (British, 1824-1885)
Wild Flowers at the Corner of a Cornfield
1855-1860
Oil on canvas
Support: 821 × 632 mm
Frame: 958 × 781 × 65 mm
Photo: Tate (Seraphina Neville)

Martha Darley Mutrie is considered one of the leading painters of flowers active in Britain in the nineteenth century. She was born in Ardwick, near Manchester. She trained together with her sister, the painter Annie Feray Mutrie (1826-1893), under George Wallis (1811-1891) at the Manchester School of Design from 1844 to 1846, and also undertook private lessons with him. The sisters began exhibiting at the Royal Manchester Institution from 1845 and at the Royal Academy, London, showing there consistently from the early 1850s. Their work was regularly well received by the critics. Mutrie and her sister moved to London in 1854, where they painted flowers in interior settings, carefully arranged, and also outdoors in mock natural settings.

Despite the prominence of women artists painting still lifes and flowers, the men practitioners of the genre, such as George Lance (1802-1864) and William Henry ‘Birds Nest’ Hunt (1790-1864), received greater critical and institutional attention. Martha and Annie Mutrie achieved success that was otherwise rare for women working as artists at the time.

The art critic John Ruskin admired both artists’ work and wrote about one of Annie’s pictures in his review of the 1855 Royal Academy exhibition. In his review Ruskin suggested that she abandon artificial compositions and paint instead ‘some banks of flowers in wild country, just as they grow’ (John Ruskin, Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, 1855). This painting might be seen as a response to Ruskin’s insight and the advances in science that in the 1850s brought a new focus to the study of nature, with arguments over beauty and truth.

Text from the Tate website

Florence Claxton (British, 1838-1920)
‘Woman’s Work’: A Medley
1861
Oil on canvas
Martin Beisly Fine Art, London

In the 1850s, Claxton became part of the UK’s first organised movement for women’s rights. Woman’s Work satirises women’s opportunities for professional employment. At its centre a group of women fawn at the feet of a man seated below a statue of the Golden Calf – a false idol. Confined by
a surrounding wall, doors to professions such as medicine are shut to the women. Only the artist Rosa Bonheur has managed to scale the wall’s heights. The painting was exhibited at London’s National Institution for Fine Arts in 1861 and received mixed reviews. Some praised its comic strength but others described it as ‘vulgar’.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty
1865
Albumen print
Wilson Centre of Photography

Annie Keene (1842/3-1901) was an artist’s model at the Royal Academy Schools. Cameron showed Keene’s portrait at the 1866 Hampshire and Isle of Wight Loan Exhibition, and it was for sale at her 1868 exhibition at London’s German Gallery. In this photograph, Cameron’s shallow depth-of-field gives a bold effect. Her friend, the scientist and photographic innovator John Herschel (1792-1871), praised the portrait as ‘a most astonishing piece of high relief – She is absolutely alive and thrusting out her head from the paper into the air’.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Elizabeth Butler (British, 1846-1933)
The Roll Call
1874
Oil on canvas
93.3 x 183.5cm (support, canvas/panel/stretcher external)
Royal Collection Trust
© Royal Collection Trust / His Majesty King Charles III 2024

Butler specialised in battle paintings, challenging society’s expectations of women artists. The exhibition of The Roll Call at the Royal Academy in 1874 was one of the greatest art sensations of the nineteenth century. It was praised by Academicians and hung ‘on the line’ (the most prestigious, eye-level position). The painting proved so popular with the public that a policeman had to be stationed nearby to protect the adjacent paintings. Queen Victoria summoned the work to Buckingham Palace for a private viewing, and the copyright sold for the enormous sum of £1,200.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

The Roll Call captured the imagination of the country when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874, turning the artist into a national celebrity. So popular was the painting that a policeman had to be stationed before it to hold back the crowds and it went on to tour the country in triumph. The painting’s focus on the endurance and bravery of ordinary soldiers without reference to the commanders of the army accorded with the mood of the times and the increasing awareness of the need for social and military reforms.

Though the public had been exposed to other images of the Crimean War, primarily prints, photographs and newspaper illustrations, never before had the plight of ordinary soldiers been portrayed with such realism. Butler researched her subject by studying A. W. Kinglake’s seminal history of the Crimean War, as well as by consulting veterans of the Crimea, several of whom served as models for the painting. She also painstakingly sought out uniforms and equipment from the Crimean period in order to be correct in the smallest military details. The sombre mood and simple yet dramatic composition Butler achieved in The Roll Call vividly epitomised the grimness not only of the Crimean War but of all wars.

Text from the Royal Collection Trust website

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at left, Louise Jopling’s Through the Looking-Glass 1875 (below); and at right, Jopling’s A Modern Cinderella 1875 (below)

Louise Jopling (English, 1843-1933)
Through the Looking-Glass
1875
Oil paint on canvas
Support: 539 × 437 mm
Tate
Purchased with funds provided by the Nicholas Themans Trust and Tate Patrons 2024
Photo: Tate (Sonal Bakrania)

This is a self-portrait Jopling made while pregnant with her son, Lindsay, in 1875.

Jopling was one of the most successful and best-known women artists of the late nineteenth century. She exhibited regularly and, from the 1880s, ran her own art school for women. Jopling hosted receptions and established connections with many artists and art dealers. She carefully planned the exhibition of her work by choosing venues appropriate to each painting’s scale and ambition. Jopling sent this self-portrait to the Society of Lady Artists in 1875. In the same year, A Modern Cinderella, hanging nearby, was shown at the Royal Academy. Both works were purchased by the dealer Agnew: this work for £26, but Cinderella for £262.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Tabitha Barber, curator of the exhibition, said: “What’s happened to Jopling’s legacy is the story of what’s happened to most women artists … They have been regarded, studied and judged differently.”

Jopling, who in 1901 became one of the first women admitted to the Royal Society of British Artists, was a celebrated artist in her day, Barber said. Her patrons included the de Rothschild family, and the Grosvenor Gallery founders Sir Coutts and Lady Lindsay. “At a time when women weren’t allowed to be members of the Royal Academy, her works were exhibited there almost every year and spoken about in the press. She was reviewed by male art critics, and reviewed well.”

Jopling’s paintings were also commercially successful, selling for some of the highest prices that British female artists could command – albeit far less than their male contemporaries.

“She is among a handful of female artists who were society figures and household names – and it just seems so astonishing that they’re so little known now,” said Barber.

Donna Ferguson. “Tate Britain acquires first painting by pioneering English female artist overlooked for a century,” on The Guardian website 12 May 2024 [Online] Cited 02/09/2024

Louise Jopling (English, 1843-1933)
A Modern Cinderella
1875
Oil on canvas
Support: 910 × 700 mm
Private collection

A Modern Cinderella shows a model removing her fine clothes at the end of a painting session. A glimpse of Jopling’s easel can be seen in the mirror’s reflection. In 1875, Jopling exhibited this work at the Royal Academy. There, the model’s naked shoulder was cause for criticism. Although one reviewer thought it was ‘quite harmless’, a picture dealer’s wife reportedly said that ‘she could never hang such a thing in her house’. Jopling also showed the painting at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where she had also trained.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

If this is, indeed, a self-portrait, Jopling has painted herself as somewhere in the liminal space between the social groups she simultaneously belonged to and was excluded from. Despite Jopling’s notoriety and prominence among high-class Pre-Raphaelite artist circles, she experienced a high degree of discrimination. In 1883, she was commissioned to paint a portrait for 150 guineas but lost her employment in favour of Sir John Everett Millais, who requested 1000 guineas for the same project (Clement). In the traditional circles of high society, Jopling was looked down upon for pursuing a career in the fine arts, which was inherently a masculine task. The woman in the image is either taking the dress off or putting it on, but either way, has turned her back to her easel, which could be interpreted as forfeiting a part of her true identity to fit either end of the accepted spectrum of femininity. The underclothing she portrays herself in fit the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic style of dress, which fit natural waists and emphasised a woman’s beauty through medieval and Greek-inspired silhouettes (Shrimpton, Jayne. Victorian Fashion. Shire Publications, 2016). The inclusion of this white aesthetic dress, as well as the scandalous drop of the strap is a signal of societal rebellion against traditional beauty norms. The woman in the image could also be read as shedding the skin of the two dresses before her to reveal her true, natural, artistic self below.

Emily Goldstein. “‘A modern Cinderella, 1875. Oil on Canvas’ by Louise Jopling,” on the COVE Studio website 23/10/2020 [Online] Cited 02/09/2024

Marianne Stokes (Austrian, 1855-1927)
The Passing Train
1890
Oil on canvas
Support: 600 × 760 mm
Frame: 885 × 955 mm
Private collection

Marianne Stokes (née Preindlsberger; 1855-1927) was an Austrian painter. She settled in England after her marriage to Adrian Scott Stokes (1854-1935), the landscape painter, whom she had met in Pont-Aven. Stokes was considered one of the leading women artists in Victorian England.

Annie Louisa Swynnerton ARA (British, 1844-1933)
Mater Triumphalis
1892
Paris, musée d’Orsay
Donated by Edmund Davis, 1915

Swynnerton campaigned for women’s suffrage, access to professional training, and equal opportunities. She rebelled against the belief that ‘women could not paint’. Exhibited at the New Gallery in 1892, Mater Triumphalis was regarded as a bold work. It brought Swynnerton international recognition, winning a medal at the 1893 World Exposition in Chicago. Despite this, Swynnerton received mixed reviews from British critics. They were impressed by the artist’s skill and the painting’s ‘quivering life’ but found the ‘frank realism’ of the woman’s naked body disconcerting.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Henrietta Rae’s Psyche before the throne of Venus 1894 (below)

Henrietta Rae (British, 1859-1928)
Psyche before the throne of Venus
1894
Oil paint on canvas
Support: 1941 × 3058 × 31 mm
Frame: 2525 × 3826 × 270 mm
Lent from a private collection, courtesy of Martin Beisly Fine Art

Rae was determined not to be pigeonholed as a ‘woman artist’. She painted classical nude compositions despite the belief that they were not a suitable subject for women artists. Against these odds, Psyche Before the Throne of Venus was a success at the 1894 Royal Academy Exhibition, and Rae received praise from critics as well as members of the Academy. The periodical The Englishwoman’s Review described the painting as ‘the most ambitious and successful woman’s work yet exhibited – one which could not have been executed a few years ago, when we had not the opportunity of studying from the life’.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Lucy Kemp-Welch’s Colt Hunting in the New Forest 1897

One of the most important pieces of art ever inspired by the New Forest was a painting by Lucy Kemp-Welch (1869-1958), entitled ‘Colt Hunting in the New Forest’. This painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1897, when she was only 26 years old. It was an impressive canvas measuring 1537 x 3060 mm (approximately 5ft x 10ft) and was described as depicting ‘a wide glade in the forest, along which race a number of colts unwilling to relinquish their liberty and to fall into the hands of the four mounted lads who try to catch them’.[1] Lucy Kemp-Welch was born in Bournemouth, in 1869, and spent much of her time wandering in the New Forest, where she ‘personally studied the wild ponies in this pleasant part of England’.[2] Her love of horses and wild ponies remained with her all her life. In order to capture the energy and excitement of the pony drifts for ‘Colt Hunting’ she actually had the full-sized canvas transported to the Forest, where she sketched from life, as the commoners galloped their ponies past her. When the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy it caused a sensation and was promptly purchased for £525.00.[3] The buyers were trustees of the Chantrey Bequest, who administered a large sum of money left in the will of Sir F. L. Chantrey to obtain works of art by British artists, in order to create a national collection. It was only the third time, since its creation in 1875, that the Chantrey Bequest had purchased artwork by a woman. Lucy Kemp-Welch became a celebrity overnight.[4]

In the same year that Lucy Kemp-Welch exhibited ‘Colt Hunting in the New Forest’, the Tate Galley was built and her painting was transferred to this new, public collection. However, ‘Colt Hunting’ was immediately archived and has never been publicly exhibited. Indeed, there are rumours that the Tate Gallery loaned the painting to the Royal Academy during the Blitz ‘in the hope that the Luftwaffe’s friendly bombs might rid them of this monstrous woman’s work for good’.[5] It is difficult to conceive of the prejudice against women in the late Victorian period and early 20th century, particularly women such as Lucy Kemp-Welch, who stepped out of the roles proscribed to them by a patriarchal society.[6] Her sympathies for the suffragette movement certainly didn’t endear her to the male-establishment figures that controlled the art world. She nevertheless continued to paint and made a successful, and award winning (Paris Salon) career as an artist.

newforestcommoner. “Lucy Kemp-Welch: Colt Hunting in the New Forest,” on the New Forest Commoner website November 27, 2016 [Online] Cited 28/08/2024

Gwen John (Welsh, 1876-1939)
Self-Portrait
1902
Oil on canvas
Tate
Purchased 1942
Photo: Tate (Mark Heathcote and Samuel Cole)

John exhibited this self-portrait at the New English Art Club (NEAC) in 1900. It was her debut as an exhibitor. The NEAC had been founded as a forward-thinking artists’ group, created out of dissatisfaction with the art establishment, exemplified by the conservative Royal Academy. Tutors from the Slade, where John had trained, were on the NEAC committee. Despite its progressive stance, in 1900 John was one of only 16 women exhibitors among 75 men. John’s choice to show a self-portrait was perhaps a deliberate assertion of her presence.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Here is a dilemma straight away: which should take precedence, the painting or the fact? Should the show present art on its own terms, or as instance, evidence, expression of social history? It is an extremely complex remit…

[Laura] Knight is strongly represented with a sequence of cliff-edge paintings; but what about her near-namesake, Winifred Knights? The Deluge is a shattering masterpiece of British modernism, painted in 1920 and thus eligible, yet not here. And why are the ethereal and supremely original blue cyanotypes of Anna Atkins (1799-1871) missing from the niggardly photography section, along with Christina Broom (1862-1939), pioneering photojournalist, whose stirring portraits of suffragettes would have been so apt?

The show is thick with flowers, descending from Delany right down to Helen Allingham’s twee cottage gardens, all ready for their postcard reproductions. And if Allingham, then why not the visionary genius of Beatrix Potter? Weak pre-Raphaelite schlock fills the largest gallery, along with Victorian pieties such as Emily Osborn’s distressed gentlewoman, eyes downcast, awaiting the verdict of a dealer on her latest canvas, while two male artists leer in the background. Nameless and Friendless is terminally mawkish.

Only rarely do women’s art and women’s history spark together in this show. You see it in Ethel Wright’s fabulous 1912 portrait of the suffragette Una Dugdale Duval, in an arsenical green dress beneath a wallpaper of ludicrous fighting cocks, where Wright’s modern bravado exactly meets that of her sitter. And you see it in Gwen John’s immortal 1902 self-portrait, small and distanced, light catching her eyelashes in an atmosphere of hushed stillness, so direct and yet so self-contained: the momentous assertion of reticence.

That epochal image appears on the exhibition posters, perhaps promising too much. For even the best of the artists here are occasionally represented by the least of their works, quite apart from the mystifying omissions. The theme of Now You See Us is undoubtedly riveting. The captions (and the excellent catalogue) are superbly written. But art is trumped by social history too often in this show, words overshadowing images.

Laura Cumming. “Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 review – revelations and mystifying omissions,” on The Guardian website 19 May 2024 [Online] Cited 02/09/2024

Gwen John (Welsh, 1876-1939)
Chloë Boughton-Leigh (1868-1947)
1904-1908
Oil on canvas
58.4 x 38.1cm
Tate
Purchased 1925

Gwendolen Mary John (22 June 1876 – 18 September 1939) was a Welsh artist who worked in France for most of her career. Her paintings, mainly portraits of anonymous female sitters, are rendered in a range of closely related tones. Although in her lifetime, John’s work was overshadowed by that of her brother Augustus and her mentor and lover Auguste Rodin, awareness and esteem for John’s artistic contributions has grown considerably since her death.

Gwen John trained at the Slade School of Art in London, where her brother Augustus was also a student. She settled in Paris in 1904, working as a model, becoming Rodin’s mistress and immersing herself in the artistic world of the metropolis. She lived in France for the rest of her life, exhibiting on both sides of the Channel. The portrait shown here is of a Paris friend, Chloë Boughton-Leigh. The subdued colouring, short foreground and self-absorption of the sitter create a deeply intense atmosphere. John showed it in London, at the New English Art Club.

Text from the WikiArt website

Minna Keene (née Bergmann, Canadian born Germany, 1861-1943)
Decorative Study No. 1, Pomegranates
c. 1906
Carbon print

The subject of this photograph is believed to be of Violet Keene, Minna Keene’s daughter.

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Ethel Wright’s The Music Room, Portrait of Una Dugdale 1912 (below)

Ethel Wright (British, 1866-1939)
The Music Room, Portrait of Una Dugdale (installation view)
1912
Oil on canvas
Private collection

This portrait of suffragette and women’s rights activist Una Dugdale Duval (1879-1975) was exhibited at the Stafford Gallery in October 1912. Its flat areas of colour and bold outlines represent a stylistic shift for Wright, who had exhibited at the Royal Academy since the 1880s. Wright shows Duval as cultured and sophisticated, dressed in green, a suffrage colour. Wright made the work the same year Duval made national news for her refusal to promise to obey her husband during their marriage vows. In 1913, Duval published a pamphlet, Love and Honour but Not Obey.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Ethel Wright (British, 1866-1939)
The Music Room, Portrait of Una Dugdale
1912
Oil on canvas
Private collection

Vanessa Bell (English, 1879-1961)
Still Life on Corner of a Mantelpiece
1914
Oil on canvas
Support: 559 × 457 mm
Frame: 614 × 512 × 49 mm
Tate
Purchased 1969
© Estate of Vanessa Bell

In 1913, Bell left the Friday Club for the short-lived exhibiting society, the Grafton Group. It included artists who were experimenting with post-impressionism. She was also a founding member of the Omega Workshops. Based in Bloomsbury’s Fitzroy Square, the Workshops aimed to remove the false divisions between fine and decorative arts. The mantelpiece in this painting was in Bell’s house at 46 Gordon Square in London. The objects on it include handmade paper flowers from the Omega Workshops. Bell’s use of an unconventional low viewpoint, fractured, abstracted forms and bright colours show her exploring different techniques associated with twentieth-century art movements.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Dame Laura Knight DBE RA RWS (English, 1877-1970)
A Dark Pool
1917
Oil on canvas
460 × 458 mm
Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne
© Estate of Dame Laura Knight. All rights reserved 2024 / Bridgeman Images
Image credit: Laing Art Gallery

Anna Airy (English, 1882-1964)
Shop for Machining 15-inch Shells: Singer Manufacturing Company, Clydebank, Glasgow
1918
Oil on canvas
Support: Height 1828 mm., Width 2133 mm
© Imperial War Museum

In 1918, Airy received a commission from the Imperial War Museum, thereby becoming Britain’s first official woman war artist. Her 1.7 by 1.8-metre canvases depict munitions production and war-related heavy industry. She later recalled the hot and dangerous conditions in which she worked. A former Slade student, Airy enjoyed a high public profile, won through exhibition and good reviews at the Royal Academy. In 1915, an art critic hailed her as ‘the most accomplished artist of her sex’. Airy was aware, however, of the prejudice women artists still faced. Galleries and buyers, she said, felt ‘safer with a man’.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Anna Airy (English, 1882-1964)
Study for ‘The L Press: Forging the Jacket of an 18-inch Gun, Armstrong-Whitworth Works, Openshaw’
1918
Oil on canvas
Private collection

Olive Edis (British, 1876-1955)
War
1919
Carbon print on paper
Wilson Centre for Photography

Edis was Britain’s first woman war photographer. She was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to photograph the activities of servicewomen on duty in France and Flanders. This bleak, blasted landscape captures the impact of the First World War.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Dame Ethel Walker’s Decoration The Excursion of Nausicaa 1920 (below)

Dame Ethel Walker DBE ARA (Scottish, 1861-1951)
Decoration: The Excursion of Nausicaa
1920
Oil on canvas
1835 × 3670 mm
Tate
Purchased 1924
Photo: Tate

Writing to J. B. Manson (Monday, 2 June, no year given, but almost certainly 1924), the artist described her work thus:’… Nausicaa early one lovely summer’s morning goes to her father and mother – the King and Queen – to ask permission to have a waggon and mules given to her to take her and her attendants and to fill it with the clothes of the palace that require washing, also with dainties and wine and good food for a forthcoming picnic – and go down to the river adjoining the sea to wash them – which he gives her. On arriving at the river they unharness the mules and are unpacking or unloading the waggons of the clothes and the food for the picnic, and are beginning to wash them in the river. A little wood divides the sea from the river where the goat girl – kneeling by the tree near her goats – hears the strange voices that are sounding in her usually silent little wood. To show it is the sea a girl, nude, has stepped up on to the bank after bathing….’ The story is based on Book VI of the Odyssey: ‘… they spread/The raiment orderly along the beach/Where dashing tides …/… leaving the garments, stretch’d/ In noon-day fervour of the sun, to dry.’

Text from the Tate website

In her lifetime Scottish artist Ethel Walker was celebrated for her trailblazing paintings of the female form. A teacher before she painted fulltime, she developed her own unique style – large, mural-like paintings, which she called her ‘decorations.’ Walker often painted male and female nudes confidently placing female sensuality at the centre of her work, as seen in Decoration: The Excursion of Nausicaa (1920). Its dream-like vision of a feminist utopia was ahead of its time.

Working steadily for decades, she achieved many professional milestones, exhibiting around the world and representing Britain at the Venice Biennale four times. In 1943, Walker was made a Dame of the British Empire, and after her death The Times called her ‘the most important woman artist of her time.’ Despite this, it is only now that her artistic legacy is finally being recognised.

Text from the Tate website

‘There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist – bad and good.’

– Ethel Walker

Tate Britain
Millbank, London SW1P 4RG
United Kingdom
Phone: +44 20 7887 8888

Opening hours:
10.00am – 18.00pm daily

Tate Britain website

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Exhibition: ‘Álbum de salón y alcoba (The Bedroom and Dressing Room Album). Instalación de David Trullo’ at Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid

Exhibition dates: 24th April – 22nd September, 2024

Kaulak (Antonio Cánovas del Castillo y Vallejo) (Spanish, 1862-1933)
Studio portrait
1921-1922
Photographic positive
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid

Kaulak (22 December 1862 – 13 September 1933), was a Spanish photographer, art critic, editor and amateur painter. His uncle was prime minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, assassinated in 1897 by an anarchist, hence his use of a pseudonym; the meaning of which is unexplained, although the word appears to be of Basque origin.

What fabulousesness!

An archive of ‘galant photography’ and other art works illustrating the intimate public and private scenes of a couple in Spain in the 1920s-1930s which builds a memory, a narrative. The exhibition combines photographs and documentation of the most varied kinds, with elements of the daily life of its time.

“… above all [the exhibition] makes us reflect on our own archives: what we keep and what we discard, what we hide and what we reveal, how we build and invent our own history, how we want to be remembered and what we leave to those who come after us.”

The appreciation and enjoyment of difference pictured through photography and art, telling a story otherwise long forgotten.

I have added appropriate bibliographic text where possible.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Anonymous photographer
Portrait
c. 1935
Photographic positive
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid

The Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas (MNAD) in Madrid, a state museum of the Ministry of Culture of Spain, joins the PHotoESPAÑA 2024 festival with the opening of Álbum de salón y alcoba. Una instalación de David Trullo, which can be visited free of charge until September 22.

From a forgotten collection that contained public -or living room- photographs and private -or bedroom- scenes of a couple in the 20s and 30s of the last century, the visual artist David Trullo has made this exhibition. The installation is “the result of opening an unnoticed time capsule and putting it in context with pieces from the museum and other collections to explore the limits of intimacy, leading the viewer to surpass them.”

In addition to putting a “rediscovered treasure” into context, the installation offers a review of how photographic documentation is exhibited and interpreted. It also proposes to reflect “on our own archives: what we keep and what we discard, what we hide and what we reveal, how we construct and invent our own history, how we want to be remembered and what we leave to those who come after us.”

The installation is, in itself, an album that captures the intimacy and public life of the 1920s and 1930s, combining the most varied photographs and documentation with elements of the everyday life of her time. It includes pieces and archives from several private collections, the Museo Sorolla, the Muséu del Pueblo d’Asturies, the Museo Nacional del Teatro de Almagro, the Asociación para la Enseñanza de la Mujer-Fundación Fernando de Castro and the Museo de Historia de Madrid, among others.

Between “the living room” and “the bedroom” a route is traced that goes from the preservation of intimate albums – among which a positive by Kaulak stands out, – through the first advances in amateur photography, to the ‘galant photography’, more or less erotic, and other genres of popular culture that include among its protagonists Tórtola Valencia, Sara Montiel, Conchita Piquer or the queer copla singer Miguel de Molina.

Text from the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas website

Advertising design for ‘Florido y Cía’ (Florido and Co.)
c. 1930
Watercolour on paper
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid

Anonymous photographer
Miguel de Molina
1937
Photographic positive
Colección Pedro Víllora

Miguel Frías de Molina (Málaga, April 10, 1908 – Buenos Aires, March 4, 1993), known artistically as Miguel de Molina, was a Spanish singer of copla. Tortured, expelled from Spain and later persecuted by the Franco dictatorship for being a “faggot and a red”, he settled in Argentina in 1946, invited by Eva Perón.

He had an unmistakable personal style combining cabaret, flamenco dancing, deep vocal emotionalism, spectacular costumes and a narcissistic stage persona that made him extremely popular with audiences. His gay identity was openly acknowledged with a sense of humour that was very close to what today would be recognised as ‘low camp.’ Between 1936 and 1942 Molina spent most of the Spanish Civil War on Republican ground. This together with his homosexuality and sympathies for the Left had disastrous consequences for his career. He left Spain for Argentina, where he was hugely successful. But life in exile was not easy and the Argentinean government soon threatened him with expulsion. Molina credited the direct intervention of Eva Perón with helping him stay in the country and continue his career. Unfortunately his overt support for the Perón government made him a despised figure once the Peróns were driven from power. The rampant homophobia of the changed political climate and the cultural shift that accompanied it proved detrimental to his mental and emotional health, prompting him to withdraw from artistic life in 1960. While many personalities who were faced with persecution under Francoism were being rediscovered in the 1980s, Molina, by then bitter and withdrawn, languished in obscurity. It was not until two films that celebrated his life were released a decade later that his uniquely stylised performances and colourful life would finally be celebrated.

Anonymous. “Miguel de Molina – Nominee,” on The Legacy Project website Nd [Online] Cited 21/08/2024

Anonymous maker
Fan
c. 1925
Lacquered wood and painted and corrugated paper
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Masú del Amo

Bruno Zach (Austrian born Ukraine, 1891-1935) (designer)
Figure of a woman with a fur coat
c. 1920
Cast bronze
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Fabián Álvarez

Bruno Zach (6 May 1891 – 20 February 1935) was an Austrian art deco sculptor of Ukrainian birth who worked in the early-to-mid 20th century. His output included a wide repertoire of genre subjects, however he is best known for his erotic sculptures of young women.

Muchas Gracias (Thank You) Magazine, Year VII – No. 344
September 13, 1930
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid

Translated text at the bottom of the magazine:

Thank you very much
For this rascal
We want to tell this little bitch that it fits her well. But we stumbled upon the fit.

Oswald Haerdtl (Austrian, 1899-1959)
Cocktail set
1924
mouth-blown glass
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Lucía Morate

Oswald Haerdtl was an important Austrian architect, designer, and architecture teacher.

He studied under Kolo Moser and Oskar Strnad at the Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule, and entered Josef Hoffmann’s master class in 1922, soon becoming his assistant. From 1935 to 1959, he was head of the architecture department. His teaching, architectural projects, and international connections, to Italy and France in particular, made him a lasting influence on post-war Modernism in Vienna, bringing a sense of lightness and elegance into the design vocabulary.

Text from the J & L Lobmeyr website

Ramón Peinador Checa (Spanish, 1897-1964)
Advertising design for ‘Perfumes Oriente’
1925
Wash on paper
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Javier Rodríguez Barrera

Ramón Peinador Checa (Madrid, December 25, 1897 – Mexico City, May 26, 1964) was a Spanish painter, draftsman, engraver, illustrator, designer and decorator who, exiled in Mexico, became a naturalised citizen of that country.

Photography lies and deceives us. What the camera shows us is staged, either by us or by the eye of the person who creates the images. What we commonly call a “photographic archive” is nothing more than a fragmented collection transformed over the years, with which a memory, a narrative, is built.

From a forgotten collection containing public photographs -or from the living room- and private scenes -or from the bedroom- of a couple in the twenties and thirties of the last century, the visual artist David Trullo proposes this installation.

It is the result of opening an unnoticed time capsule and putting it in context with the pieces of the twentieth century that put an end to the monopoly of the professional photographer. Cameras and processes are simplified and photography is becoming an essential accessory for any occasion, and not only for amateurs, including the female sector: the Kodak Petite from 1926 is promoted as a camera ‘for smart and modern girls’.

In addition to putting a rediscovered treasure into context, the installation proposes a review of the way photographic documentation is displayed and interpreted, but above all it makes us reflect on our own archives: what we keep and what we discard, what we hide and what we reveal, how we build and invent our own history, how we want to be remembered and what we leave to those who come after us.

During this period, Madrid reinvented itself and became as cosmopolitan as other European cities, although it was the bourgeois and aristocratic elites who truly enjoyed it. A surprising and varied sexual atmosphere also emerged, along with new ways of understanding bodies, identities and relationships that were reflected in publications, advertising and photography, with the so-called ‘galant photography’ flourishing within it.

The National Museum of Decorative Arts joins PHotoESPAÑA 2024 with David Trullo’s installation ‘Album of living room and bedroom’

~ With a selection of images from the public and the private, the visual artist discovers a photographic capsule that time has preserved to be reread from the present day

~ The tour includes everything from photographic positives by Kaulak to portraits of Sara Montiel, Conchita Piquer or the queer copla singer Miguel de Molina

The National Museum of Decorative Arts (MNAD), a state museum of the Ministry of Culture, is joining the PHotoESPAÑA 2024 festival with the inauguration of ‘Album of living room and bedroom. Installation by David Trullo’, which can be visited free of charge until September 22.

From a forgotten collection containing public photographs – or from the living room – and private scenes – or from the bedroom – of a couple in the 1920s and 1930s, the visual artist David Trullo has created this proposal. The installation is “the result of opening an unnoticed time capsule and putting it in context with the pieces from the museum and from other collections to explore the limits of intimacy, leading the viewer to surpass them.”

In addition to putting a “rediscovered treasure” into context, the installation offers a review of the way of exhibiting and interpreting photographic documentation. It also suggests reflecting “on our own archives: what we keep and what we discard, what we hide and what we reveal, how we build and invent our own history, how we want to be remembered and what we leave to those who come after us.”
From living room to bedroom

The installation is, in itself, an album that captures the intimacy and public life of the 1920s and 1930s, combining photographs and documentation of the most varied kinds, with elements of the daily life of its time. It features pieces and archives from various private collections, from the Sorolla Museum, the Muséu del Pueblo d’Asturies, the Museo Nacional del Teatro de Almagro, the Asociación para la Enseñanza de la Mujer-Fundación Fernando de Castro or the Museo de Historia de Madrid, among others. Between “the living room” and “the bedroom” there is a journey that goes from the conservation of intimate albums – among which a positive by Kaulak stands out – through the first advances in photography for amateurs, to reaching ‘galant photography’, more or less erotic, and other genres of popular culture that include among their protagonists Tórtola Valencia, Sara Montiel, Conchita Piquer or the queer copla singer Miguel de Molina.

Text from the National Museum of Decorative Arts exhibition press dossier

Antonio Peyró (Spanish, 1882-1954)
The Baticola (Elena Plá Toda)
1934
Glazed ceramic
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Masú del Amo

Antonio Peyró Mezquita was a Spanish ceramist.

‘Reciprocal pleasure’, cover by Josep Renau Berenguer
1933
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Masú del Amo

Josep Renau Berenguer (Spanish, 1907-1982) was an artist and communist revolutionary, notable for his propaganda work during the Spanish Civil War. Among his production, he is remarkable for his art deco period, his political propaganda during the Spanish Civil War, the photo murals of the Spanish Pavilion in the International Exhibition of 1937 in Paris, a series of photomontages titled Fata Morgana or The American Way of Life, and murals and paintings made in Mexico, such as Tropic, dated in 1945.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Louis Majorelle (French, 1859-1926) (designer)
Sofa
1901-1926
Silk velvet
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Lucía Morate

Louis-Jean-Sylvestre Majorelle, usually known simply as Louis Majorelle, (26 September 1859 – 15 January 1926) was a French decorator and furniture designer who manufactured his own designs, in the French tradition of the ébéniste. He was one of the outstanding designers of furniture in the Art Nouveau style, and after 1901 formally served as one of the vice-presidents of the École de Nancy.

Louis Majorelle is one of those who contributed the most to the transformation of furniture. Thanks to posterity, we recognise today a piece of furniture from him as we recognise a piece of furniture from André Charles Boulle and Charles Cressent, the french Prince regent’s favourite artists. During the early 18th century, Cressent replaced the magnificence of ebony and tortoiseshell associated with tin and copper by the softer harmonies of foreign woods. Like him, Louis Majorelle dressed the elegant structure of Art Nouveau furniture with exotic wood inlays.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Álvaro Retana (Spanish born Philippines, 1890-1970)
Figure for Celia Gámez
c. 1920
Ink and graphite on paper
Colección Pedro Víllora

Álvaro Retana Ramírez de Arellano (Batangas, Philippines, August 26, 1890 – Torrejón de Ardoz, Madrid, February 10, 1970) was a writer, journalist, cartoonist, fashion designer, musician, libertine and Spanish couplet lyricist.

Celia Gámez Carrasco (August 25, 1905 – December 10, 1992) was an Argentinian film actress, and one of the icons of the Golden Age of Spanish theatre. She was more commonly known in Franco’s Spain, particularly in her later years, as La Protegida.

Vitín Cortezo (Spanish, 1908-1978)
Figure for Celia Gámez
1939
Mixed technique on paper
Colección Pedro Víllora

Víctor María Cortezo Martínez-Junquera, also known as Vitín Cortezo (Madrid, June 10, 1908 – March 2, 1978) was a Spanish painter, illustrator, costume designer and set designer.

Anonymous maker
Bloomers and cotton slip with silk knit stockings
c. 1930
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Fabián Álvarez

Karl Klaus and Franz Staudigl
Figure (Serapis Wahliss series)
1913-1914
Painted and glazed ceramic
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Fabián Álvarez

Karl Klaus (Austrian, 1889-1925) was a student of Josef Hoffmann. The figure was designed for Serapis-Wahliss, a noted Viennese retailer and manufacturer of porcelain. Franz Staudigl was an Austrian painter born 1885 – died 1944.

Anonymous photographer
Concha Piquer
1927
Photographic positive
Museo Nacional del Teatro, Almagro

María de la Concepción Piquer López (13 December 1906 – 12 December 1990), better known as Concha Piquer (and sometimes billed as Conchita Piquer), was a Spanish singer and actress. She was known for her work in the copla form, and she performed her own interpretations of some of the key pieces in the Spanish song tradition, mostly works of the mid-20th century trio of composers Antonio Quintero, Rafael de León y Manuel Quiroga.

Anonymous maker
Perfume bottles
1850-1900
Engraved and gilded silver and blown glass
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas. Madrid
Photo: Fabián Álvarez

Anonymous maker
Paul Koruna, Paris (no dates) (photographer)
Promotional poster for ‘Rosalío’
Nd
Montage of photographic positives
Colección Ramón Gato

Anonymous maker
Paul Koruna, Paris (no dates) (photographer)
Promotional poster for ‘Rosalío’ (details)
Nd
Montage of photographic positives
Colección Ramón Gato

Anonymous maker
Manila shawl
1876-1925
Embroidered silk
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photos: Javier Rodríguez Barrera

National Museum of Decorative Arts
c/ Montalbán, 12. Madrid

Opening hours
Tuesday – Saturday: 9.30am – 3.00pm
Sundays and holidays: 10.00am – 3.00pm
Afternoons (Thursday): 5.00pm – 8.00pm

National Museum of Decorative Arts website

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Exhibition: ‘The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar’ at Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Exhibition dates: 26th April – 15th September 2024

Altstadt (Rupertinum)

Curator: Katharina Ehrl

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Simmeringer Heide und Erdberger Mais, 1967-1976
Silver gelatine print on baryta paper, brown toned
Museum der Moderne Salzburg
© Bildrecht, Vienna 2024

Deriving pleasure from the dérive

In recent weeks Art Blart has posted on social documentary photographers of the urbanscape: David Goldblatt documenting social conditions in South Africa under apartheid and Roger Mayne with his “mixture of reality and unreality” photographs of the communities of Southam Road and surrounds, London.

One could argue that both could be seen as a focused urban male flâneur (or flâneuse in the case of a female), who saunters around the city observing society – the serendipitous Mayne more so than the working in series focused Goldblatt. And here we have another photographer of the urbanscape until recently unknown to me, that of the magnificent Austrian photographer Elfriede Mejchar (1924-2020) who – according to the exhibition text – is another flâneur, “her flaneur-like practice underlying her earlier bodies of work.”

But Mejchar’s was a very concentrated photographic practice, one in which the photographer again and again “explored Vienna’s peripheral zones on the southeast edge of the city” to create photographic series often created over several years. Therefore, rather than being a wandering dilettante photographer, I believe that Mejchar was a focused conceptual artist who used Guy Debord’s “Theory of the Dérive” (1956)1 (or “drift”) to ground her photographic practice.

With its focused flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters, one of the goals of the dérive includes studying the terrain of the city (psychogeography), the exploration of urban environments that emphasises interpersonal connections to places. The pyschogeography of the urbanscape.2

A quotation by Grant W. Ray is instructive in this regard:

“Debord’s Dérive is not simple a walk through the streets of the city, of chance encounters. Instead one must move rapidly and decisively through the urban space, with intention… They should be aware of their surroundings, of the “… ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction…” Thus the most talented photographers who’s oeuvre includes the investigation of the urbanscape. The walk itself, the interaction of operator, camera, and site breaks down the normal relationship we have with public urban spaces. Their activity alone is the Dérive.”3

Working decisively and with intention, at the edge of the city, in spaces with no boundaries, where there were few people, or using different typologies of the city such as hotel rooms in which she stayed during her everyday job, Mejchar focused on the pyschogeography of the urbanscape through her reflective, non-decisive moment photographs, capturing “the complexity of this desolate and yet, in her eyes, beautiful landscape” and the changes that were happening to the urbanscape.

“Elfriede Mejchar consciously broke away from the photographic mainstream and the reportage style that was popular at the time. Rather than searching for the so-called “decisive moment,” she approached her subjects in a strongly conceptual and serial manner. She focused not on the extraordinary but on the unspectacular and the commonplace, the everyday and the banal, repeatedly addressing these in new ways in her photographic series.” (Text from the Wien Museum website)

Working with the periphery, the borders between urban and rural spaces, the non-decisive moment, landscapes subjected to human interventions and photographs in series, Mejchar’s photographs are more than mere representation of these sites: they challenge the viewer to “instigate more than just chance encounters for the viewer looking at the photographs,” through an understanding of the “subtle variations of the daily social realities created and maintained through public works and layout.”4 “The photographers activity of finding these sites is the dérive, the photograph itself is the pyschogeography, the questioning.”4

With her training as a classical photographer in the manner of Sudek, Brassaï or Tudor-Hart (see the first two photographs in the posting On Her Own. The photographer Elfriede Mejchar) grounding her later objective conceptual photographs, Mejchar’s point of departure is the pleasure she derives from the focused dérive and the results of her activity (through the objective and precise eye of a topographer a la Bernd and Hiller Becher) – the questioning photographs – brought to the attention of the viewer.

Mejchar investigates “traces of civilisation that humans leave in nature or along the edges of the urban fabric” and in so doing brings peripheral things (and her ideas about them) to the centre of our attention, making them psychologically valuable for all of us. The artist derives pleasure from her measured dérive and investigation of the evanescent, posing important questions about seemingly mundane things before they pass out of sight, memory, and existence.

And in her pleasure, is ours.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

See another posting about the artist’s work: On Her Own. The photographer Elfriede Mejchar at Wien Museum MUSA, Vienna, 18th April – 1st September, 2024

1/ “Psychogeography describes the effect of a geographical location on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.

How do different places make us feel and behave? The term psychogeography was invented by the Marxist theorist Guy Debord in 1955 in order to explore this. Inspired by the French nineteenth century poet and writer Charles Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur – an urban wanderer – Debord suggested playful and inventive ways of navigating the urban environment in order to examine its architecture and spaces.”

Anonymous. “Psychogeography,” on the Tate website Nd [Online] Cited 13/09/2024

2/ Guy Debord (November 1956). “Theory of the Dérive”. Les Lèvres Nues (9). Translated by Ken Knabb.

3/ Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” 1958 on the Bureau of Public Secrets website Nd quoted in Grant W. Ray. “Dérive,” on the Silverpoetics website 13 July 2009 [Online] Cited 20/08/2024

4/ Ibid.,

Many thankx to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Poesie des Alltäglichen. Fotografien von Elfriede Mejchar / The poetry of the everyday

To mark the centenary of her birth, in 2024 three museums in Austria host exhibitions of works by the photographer Elfriede Mejchar (1924-2020, Vienna, AT). The Museum der Moderne Salzburg presents the artist as a portraitist. Curator Katharina Ehrl guides you through the exhibition in this short film.

In 2024, three museums host exhibitions of works by the Austrian photographer Elfriede Mejchar (1924-2020, Vienna, AT). The Museum der Moderne Salzburg is collaborating with the Landesgalerie Niederösterreich and the Wien Museum to honor the artist’s work at three different locations on the occasion of her 100th birthday, with each location offering a different focus.

Salzburg’s contribution to this collaborative project will present the artist’s portraits. With her series of works entitled “Artists at work” (1954-1961), for example, Mejchar demonstrates impressively how she engages with the artistic personalities of Christa Hauer, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Josef Mikl and Arnulf Rainer by mapping their working situation in their studios. But she also demonstrated the same precision of perception when encountering the inanimate objects in her surroundings, thereby giving landscapes, flowers and discarded furniture the appearance of animated portraits.

The photo collections at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg hold a total of 665 photographs by Mejchar. Otto Breicha, the first director of the Museum’s predecessor institution, was a long-time colleague of Mejchar who recognised the artistic value of her photographic work and helped to promote it. As early as 1982, one year before the official opening of the Rupertinum, a comprehensive collection of her work was added to the photographic collection that later grew through further purchases and donations and today constitutes a focal point of the Museum’s photographic holdings.

Text from the Museum der Moderne Salzburg website

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing at left, work from Mejchar’s series Eine Kostümierung der geliehenen Identität (A Masquerade of Borrowed Identity) (below); and at right, photographs from the series Nobody is Perfect (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing work from Mejchar’s series Künstler bei der Arbeit, 1954-1961 (Artists at work, 1954-1961) (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Arnulf Rainer
1954-1961
From the series Künstler bei der Arbeit, 1954-1961 (Artists at work, 1954-1961)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Arnulf Rainer (Austrian, b. 1929)

Arnulf Rainer (born 8 December 1929) is an Austrian painter noted for his abstract informal art.

Rainer was born in Baden, Austria. During his early years, Rainer was influenced by Surrealism. In 1950, he founded the Hundsgruppe (dog group) together with Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer, and Josef Mikl. After 1954, Rainer’s style evolved towards Destruction of Forms, with blackenings, overpaintings, and maskings of illustrations and photographs dominating his later work. He was close to the Vienna Actionism, featuring body art and painting under the influence of drugs. He painted extensively on the subject of Hiroshima such as it relates to the nuclear bombing of the Japanese city and the inherent political and physical fallout.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Christa Hauer
1954-1961
From the series Künstler bei der Arbeit, 1954-1961 (Artists at work, 1954–1961)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Christa Hauer-Fruhmann (Austrian, 1925-2013)

Christa Hauer-Fruhmann (b. March 13, 1925 in Vienna; d. March 21, 2013 in St. Pölten) was an Austrian painter. …

She was initially under the artistic influence of her father and created representational works such as landscapes, portraits and nude drawings. At the end of her stay in the USA, around 1960, she turned to abstract painting, particularly action painting, color field painting and informal art. Later, cosmic forms and a turn to nature determined her works.

Text from the German Wikipedia website translated by Google Translate

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
1954-1961
From the series Künstler bei der Arbeit, 1954-1961 (Artists at work, 1954-1961)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Friedensreich Hundertwasser (Austrian, 1928-2000)

Friedensreich Hundertwasser Regentag Dunkelbunt (born Friedrich Stowasser, born December 15, 1928 in Vienna; died February 19, 2000 on board the Queen Elizabeth 2 off Brisbane) was an Austrian artist, who worked primarily as a painter, but also in the fields of architecture and environmental protection. …

Artistically, he was an opponent of the “straight line” and any kind of standardisation throughout his life. This is particularly evident in his work in the field of building design, which is characterised by imaginative liveliness and individuality, but above all by the inclusion of nature in architecture.

Text from the German Wikipedia website translated by Google Translate

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing photographs from Mejchar’s series Porträts von Künstler-Photographen und Kunstvermittlern (Portraits of Artist Photographers and Art Educators) (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Aglaia Konrad
1988
From the series Porträts von Künstler-Photographen und Kunstvermittlern (Portraits of Artist Photographers and Art Educators)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Aglaia Konrad (Austrian, b. 1960)

Aglaia Konrad (born 1960) is an Austrian photographer and educator living in Brussels. …

Konrad’s photographs explore urban space in large cities. Konrad’s work has been to known to be distinctly international in that it highlights urban elements independent of cultural markers. Her work highlights the ubiquitous elements of urban life through methods like filming a city from the perspective of a moving car or compiling a series of aerial views of skyscrapers.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Prof. Dr. Otto Breicha
1988
From the series Porträts von Künstler-Photographen und Kunstvermittlern (Portraits of Artist Photographers and Art Educators)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Otto Breicha (Austrian, 1932-2003)

Otto Breicha (b. 26 July 1932 in Vienna; d, 28 December 2003 in Vienna) was an Austrian art historian, publicist and museum director. …

Breicha is considered an important integration figure in the Austrian art and literature scene of the 1960s. As director of the Rupertinum he collected works by Kurt Moldovan, Günter Brus, Fritz Wotruba and Gotthard Muhr, among others. He edited portfolios by Karl Anton Fleck, Gotthard Muhr, Peter Pongratz, Alois Riedl, Karl Rössing, Johannes Wanke, Max Weiler and many others.

Breicha built up an important photo collection in the Rupertinum. He also took photos of authors himself, especially during his time at the Austrian Society for Literature from 1962 to 1972.

Text from the German Wikipedia website translated by Google Translate

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing photographs from Mejchar’s series Simmeringer Heide und Erdberger Mais, 1967-1976 (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

The Creative Element in Documentation

Created between 1967 and 1976, the photographic series “Simmeringer Heide und Erdberger Mais” (Simmeringer Heide and Erdberger Mais) is Mejchar’s first long-term cycle, for which she takes hundreds of pictures over the years. The series uses the photographic medium to explore the Viennese periphery. Simmeringer Heide and Erdberger Mais are areas on the southeastern outskirts of Vienna that were altered by humans and gradually taken over by commercial operations which transformed them into an industrial landscape. Mekchav first discovers them at a time when unused parcels of land (locally known as “Gstatten”), derelict market gardens, and scattered industrial structures are still defining features of the scenery. What sets the series apart is the choice of subject and the matter-of-fact manner in which the photographer treats it, compiling a kind of anecdotal inventory. The shots demonstrate that Mejchar’s objective in there art – as in the documentary photography that is her day-to-day work – is to render exactly what the objective and precise eye of a topographer sees. In framing an area in the urban periphery as a landscape, she trains this eye and her lens on a subject that has been largely absent from Austrian photography.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing work from Mejchar’s series Hotel (Fremdenzimmer), 1970-1986 (Hotel (Guest Room), 1970-1986) (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Hotel (Fremdenzimmer), 1970-1986 (Hotel (Guest Room), 1970-1986)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper, brown tones
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Flachsspinnerei in Stadl-Paura (Flax spinning mill in Stadl-Paura)
1986
© Elfriede Mejchar/Landessammlungen NÖ

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing work from Mejchar’s series Die Monatssesseln, 1986-1988 (The Armchairs of the Month, 1986-1988) (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Die Monatssesseln, 1986-1988 (The Armchairs of the Month, 1986-1988)
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Oscillation (Salzburger Landesatelier) (Oscillation (Salzburg State Studio))
1988
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing work from the Mejchar’s series Eine Kostümierung der geliehenen Identität (A Masquerade of Borrowed Identity) (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Eine Kostümierung der geliehenen Identität (A Masquerade of Borrowed Identity)
1989
Gelatin silver print on baryta paper
Museum der Moderne Salzburg
© Bildrecht, Vienna, 2024
Photo: Andrew Phelps

Introduction

Elfriede Mejchar (1924-2020 Vienna, AT), the grande dame of Austrian photography, was in the employ of the Federal Monuments Office for almost forty years. Meanwhile, she also began her groundbreaking work on the outskirts of Vienna. Harnessing the photographic series as a documentary and investigative medium, she limned an imposing portrait of the urban landscape. Her work, which had a lasting influence on the evolution of photography in Austria, now also stands as an important documentary record of the country in the postwar period.

As a professional photographer, Mejchar traveled to various regions throughout Austria, including in Lower and Upper Austria and Styria, to capture buildings and cultural assets of art-historical significance in photographs. Yet she also used her official trips and her scant free time to pursue her own photographic interests, which focused on the small and seemingly trivial and the traces of civilisation that humans leave in nature or along the edges of the urban fabric and that receive little if any attention. It may seem that the documentary dimension is less important in the resulting works, that it is eclipsed by the narrative element. In fact, Mejchar fuses both, scrutinising her motifs with an attentive eye that picks up on the singular or peculiar and registers it without manipulation.

Elfriede Mejchar was not interested in the so-called “pivotal moment” and did not care for the conventional photojournalistic style of her time. Her work began when people had left, and she approached her themes from a very conceptual angle. Both the documentary series she created under the open sky and the object photographs, still lifes, and collages she made in her studio reflect this approach. She photographed the “evanescent before it evanesces”, in urban and rural landscapes and everyday scenes, capturing the changes that affected the particular scenery and its distinctive atmosphere.

The Creative Element in Documentation

Produced between 1967 and 1976, the photographic series “Simmeringer Heide and Erdberger Mais” is Mejchar’s first long-term cycle, for which she takes hundreds of pictures over the years. The series uses the photographic medium to explore the Viennese periphery. Simmeringer Heide and Erdberger Mais are areas on the southeastern outskirts of Vienna that were altered by humans and gradually taken over by commercial operations which transformed them into an industrial landscape. Mejchar first discovers them at a time when unused parcels of land (locally known as “Gstätten”), derelict market gardens, and scattered industrial structures are still defining features of the scenery. What sets the series apart is the choice of subject and the matter-of-factly manner in which the photographer treats it, compiling a kind of anecdotal inventory – empty lots, paths and roads, utility poles and a select few close-ups. The shots demonstrate that Mejchar’s objective in her art – as in the documentary photography that is her day-to-day work – is to render exactly what the objective and precise eye of a topographer sees. In framing an area in the urban periphery as a landscape, she trains this eye and her lens on a subject that has been largely absent from Austrian photography.

The use of a sulfur-based solution to tone the photographs – which is the cause of the brownish tinge – reflects a recurring concern in Mejchar’s photographs: existence in time and impermanence. In this instance, the technique’s purpose is not to alter the colour, but rather to make it more durable.

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing at left, work from Mejchar’s series Künstler bei der Arbeit, 1954-1961 (Artists at work, 1954-1961); and at right, the wall text ‘The Artist as Chronicler’
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

The Artist as Chronicler

Portraiture plays a role early on in Elfriede Mejchar’s work; she receives her professional training in a portrait studio. She subsequently makes a conscious choice to avoid the genre, but then, in the 1950s, returns to it.

“Künstler bei der Arbeit”, 1954-1961 (Artists at Work)

The series “Künstler bei der Arbeit” (Artists at Work) is her first major cycle of portraits, comprising over 340 gelatin silver prints. Mejchar is often brought in to capture exhibitions in installation shots, especially at the Vienna Secession, where she is introduced to many young artists waiting to make a name for themselves as well as some of their older colleagues who have been active since before 1945. The incomprehension with which the visitors gaze at abstract art that does not represent anything with any accuracy prompts the young photographer to record the intensity and seriousness with which the artists dedicate themselves to their craft, often braving considerable hardship. The series accordingly focuses on visualising the real studio and workplace settings of thirty-six artists, including Christa Hauer, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Josef Mikl, and Arnulf Rainer.

“Porträts von Künstler-Photographen und Kunstvermittlern”, 1988-1994 (Portraits of Artist Photographers and Art Educators)

In the body of work “Porträts von Künstler-Photographen und Kunstvermittlern” (Portraits of Artist Photographers and Art Educators), by contrast, Mejchar undertakes to depict everyone involved in fine art photography in Austria in the late twentieth century. Over the years, the series grows to comprise eighty double portraits, each composed, in accordance with a rigorous conception, of an en face portrait side by with a three-quarter view. The works have a distinctly staged quality, underscored by the unvarying austere setting and the emphasis on the hands, among other aspects. In this respect they recall Mejchar’s final examination, in which she had to realise a portrait both in profile and en face to demonstrate her command of photographic lighting designing and the handling of human sitters.

With these two projects, Mejchar becomes an important chronicler of the Austrian arts scene.

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing at left, work from Mejchar’s series Oscillation (Salzburger Landesatelier) (Oscillation (Salzburg State Studio)) (above); and at right, the wall text ‘The Other Gaze’ (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

The Other Gaze

“Hotel (Fremdenzimmer)”, 1970-1986 (Hotel (Guest Room))

As part of her work for the Federal Monuments Office, Elfriede Mejchar has to travel a great deal, mainly to more rural areas. The photographic series “Hotel (Fremdenzimmer)” (Hotel (Guest Room)) is a kind of lasting documentary record of these trips and perhaps the most significant one. Bed, table, chair, mirror, wardrobe, patterned wallpaper, and sometimes a washbasin: for over fifteen years, the photographer captures her rooms with their often spartan furnishings in the numerous modest hotels and inns that – though it may not look like it at first glance – provide her with accommodation. Here and there one does espy a toothbrush, a pair of shoes, a ruffled bedcover, all traces that reveal the ostensibly absent photographer’s presence. A certain melancholy suffuses these shots of hotel rooms as witnesses to a world that has all but disappeared

“Die Monatssesseln”, 1986-1988 (The Armchairs of the Month)

The same melancholy is also unmistakable in the photographs of objects that have outlived their usefulness and been discarded and, it seems, forgotten. In the series “Die Monatssesseln” (The Armchairs of the Month) Mejchar portrays found motifs such as discarded seating furniture. The series shows a wide variety of such items, from kitchen chairs to living-room armchairs and even car seats, that have become part of the natural or other scene where they were dumped. No less diverse than the pieces of furniture and their environments are the feelings they elicit; as Mejchar puts it, “a mess can be beautiful in its own way.”

“Oszillation (Salzburger Landesatelier)”, 1988

The dreariness of the hotel rooms contrasts with the sober-mindedness and lucidity of the photographs in “Oszillation (Salzburger Landesatelier)” (Oscillation (Salzburger Landesatelier)). Yet although the two series are very different on the surface, both are sustained by a minimalism that is operative on the level of the motifs, in the austere interiors, as well as in Mejchar’s precisely chosen camera angles. These photographs capture the rooms of the State of Salzburg’s studio residence for visiting artists, located, like the Salzburger Kunstverein, in the historic Künstlerhaus. Mejchar herself lives there for a while in 1988, a change of working environment that is reflected in her output from the period.

Nobody Is Perfect

In the late 1980s, Elfriede Mejchar branches out in a fresh creative direction. She has been retired for some years and feels free to take on new challenges. Setting aside the flaneur-like practice underlying her earlier bodies of work, she starts photographing in the studio.

Tapetenbild. Triptychon, 1988 (Wallcover Picture. Tryptic) “Eine Kostümierung der geliehenen Identität”, 1989 (A Costume for the borrowed Identity) “Tagebuch Jänner 1988”, 1988 (Diary January 1988) “Nobody Is Perfect”, 1996

Faces change shapes, snakes coil around heads, open and closed eyes alternate. For the collages in “Tagebücher Jänner 1988,” Mejchar reuses her own photographs; in other series, by contrast, she works with found images such as shots of female models from print advertisements or fuses figural representations with fabric and wallpaper patterns. The works are rapidly composed out of visual fragments that she often only loosely places side by side or in overlapping arrangements, dispelling their aura of perfection. “I build pictures for myself on the wall, from materials that are at hand in the public sphere, that are on public display, but I strip away the ideal of flawless beauty that is constantly rubbed in our faces by dismembering it or covering it up.” It is the temporary and easily mutable that fascinates Mejchar, qualities that had had no place in her professional work.

“Amaryllis”, 1994-1997

Pictures of flowers in fine art, whether painted or photographed, inevitably have a clichéd dimension. Mejchar photographs only a special selection of flowers such as amaryllises, lilies, and tulips that she grows in her own garden. In the studio, rather than recording the flowers with a romantic gesture, she captures their gradual transformations – full blossoms, some full of delicate life, some already wilting and recognisably perishable. Showing them between florescence and decay, in a kind of liminal instant, she revisits a theme that surfaces throughout her oeuvre: the capturing of a state of affairs at a defined point in time.

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing the wall text Elfriede Mejchar: biographical note 1924-2020 Vienna, AT; and some photographs of Elfriede Mejchar working
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar: biographical note 1924-2020 Vienna, AT

Elfriede Mejchar is raised in Lower Austria. In 1939, she moves to Germany, where, from 1941 until 1944, she trains as a photographer with Ernst Ley in his small photography studio in Nordenham, completing her education with the official apprenticeship examination.

In light of the political developments, the young photographer and her mother to return to Vienna in 1944. She gets her first job when the Federal Monuments Office (BDA) hires her to document historic architecture with a view to potential bomb damage. She witnesses the turbulent final weeks of the war in Austria, then returns to northern Germany, before settling in Vienna in 1947. From then until her retirement in 1984, Mejchar works as a photographer for the Federal Monuments Office on a steady contract. She buys her first own camera in 1953, and in 1960 she earns a master’s certificate in photography as an external student at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt Wien. Busy with her daytime work for the BDA, she also starts pursuing her own photographic interests in the 1960s, although she does not publicly exhibit her output until 1976, when the Museum of the Twentieth Century in Vienna mounts the fifty-two-year-old photographer’s first solo exhibition. After retiring in 1984, she dedicates herself entirely to freelance and fine art photography.

Elfriede Mejchar does not win the public recognition she merits until old age; in 2002, she is awarded the Honorary Prize for Photography of the Federal Chancellor’s Office, followed in 2004 by the Honorary Prize for Fine Art Photography of the State of Lower Austria and the Prize of the City of Vienna for Fine Art.

Text from the exhibition

Anonymous photographer
Elfriede Mejchar
Nd
Gelatin silver print

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing photographs of Mejchar’s flower series

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Amaryllis
1997
© Elfriede Mejchar/Landessammlungen NÖ

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Nobody is perfect
1996
Chromogenic print
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg
© Bildrecht, Vienna, 2024
Photo: Andrew Phelps

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Nobody is perfect
2003
© Elfriede Mejchar/Landessammlungen NÖ

Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Altstadt (Rupertinum)
Wiener-Philharmoniker-Gasse 9
5020 Salzburg
Austria

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 6pm

Museum der Moderne Salzburg website

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Exhibition: ‘Stephen Shore: Vehicular & Vernacular’ at the Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson, Paris

Exhibition dates: 1st June – 15th September, 2024

Curator: Clément Chéroux Director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947)
Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975
From the series Uncommon Places, 1973-1986
© Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York and Sprüth Magers

The art of seeing

Since Art Blart started in November 2008 there has been only one posting on the glorious and groundbreaking work of American photographer Stephen Shore, way back in 2018 at MoMA. Shore’s photographs picture “the threadbare banality of the American scene, the jerry-rigged down-at-heels seediness of our rural landscapes and the spatial looseness of our towns.”1

I was so happy that I was going to be able to do another posting on this artist’s work only to be totally let down by the 10 media images provided by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. The installation photographs of the exhibition are great but the actual images only provide a meagre insight into the singular style and pictorial depth of the photographer.

When I saw two of his original photographs, probably the only time I have ever seen originals in the flesh, at the exhibition American Dreams: 20th century photography from George Eastman House at Bendigo Art Gallery in 2011, I commented:

“Two Stephen Shore chromogenic colour prints from 1976 where the colours are still true and have not faded. This was incredible – seeing vintage prints from one of the early masters of colour photography; noticing that they are not full of contrast like a lot of today’s colour photographs – more like a subtle Panavision or Technicolor film from the early 1960s. Rich, subtle, beautiful hues with the photograph having this amazing presence, projected through the construction of the image and the physicality of the print.”

I said in my comment on the MoMA exhibition in 2018, “Shore was showing the world in a different light… and he was using an aesthetic based on the straight forward use of colour. Colour is just there, part of the form of the image. Of course there are insightful subjective judgements about what to photograph in American surburbia, but this subjectivity and the use of colour within it is subsumed into the song that Shore was composing. It all comes back to music. Here’s a Mozart tune, this is his aesthetic, for eternity.”

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ See Stephen Shore, Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography (London: Mack Books, 2022), 172. These lines from Venturi are cited on the back cover of Uncommon Places quoted in Hugh Campbell. “The poorest details of the world resurfaced,” on the Places Journal website, August 2023 [Online] Cited 26/08/2024

Many thankx to the Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Stephen Shore’s photographs of the American vernacular have influenced not only generations of photographers but the medium at large. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, and his large-format color work on the American landscape stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past forty years.

Text from the Aperture Instagram web page

“[F]or attention is of the essence of our powers; it is that which draws other things toward us, it is that which, if we have lived with it, brings the experiences of our lives ready to our hand. If things but make impression enough on you, you will not forget them; and thus, as you go through life, your store of experiences becomes greater, richer, more and more available. But to this end you must cultivate attention – the art of seeing, the art of listening …. To pay attention is to live, and to live is to pay attention.”

Louis Sullivan. Kindergarten Chats (1918) from the epigraph of Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places (1973-1986)

Installation views of the exhibition Stephen Shore: Vehicular & Vernacular at the Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson, Paris

Since the 1960’s, mobility has been central to Stephen Shore’s practice. In 1969, while on a trip to Los Angeles with his father, he took photographs from the car window. During the 1970s and 1980s, he went on several road trips across the United States, resulting in his two most famous series: American Surfaces and Uncommon Places. As the new millennium began, he resumed photographing from different means of transportation: from car windows, trains and planes. For his most recent project, which began in 2020, he used a camera-equipped drone to photograph changes in the American landscape. For over half a century, he developed a form of “vehicular photography”.

The vernacular has been an ever-present interest in North American photography: the culture of the useful, the local and the popular, so typical of the United States. Shore’s work is permeated by multiple aesthetic and cultural issues. The vernacular is one of them. Shore’s mobility allows him to multiply perspectives and encounters with this “Americanness”. In the works selected for this exhibition, the vehicular is, in fact, placed at the service of the vernacular.

Exhibition

With over a hundred images shot between 1969 and 2021 across the United States, Vehicular & Vernacular is the first retrospective of Stephen Shore’s work in Paris in nineteen years. On view at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson until September 15, the exhibition shows the photographer’s renowned series – Uncommon Places and American Surfaces – alongside lesser-known projects never shown in France. A fragment of the Signs of Life exhibition in which Shore participated in 1976 is exceptionally recreated for the occasion. Finally, the photographer’s most recent series, shot using drones, is exhibited for the first time in Europe.

Biography

Born in New York in 1947, Stephen Shore began photographing at the age of nine. At the age of fourteen, Edward Steichen bought him three photographs for the MoMA collections. In 1971, he became the first living photographer to have his work exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum. Shore was one of eight photographers included in the legendary 1975 New Topographics exhibition at Rochester’s George Eastman House, which redefined the American approach to landscape. He is part of the generation that led to the recognition of colour photography as an art form. Rich, diverse and complex, his work transforms everyday scenes into opportunities for meditation.

Press release from the Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson

Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947)
Los Angeles, California, February 4, 1969
From the series Los Angeles, 1969
© Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York and Sprüth Magers

Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947)
Polk Street
1971
From the series Greetings from Amarillo, “Tall in Texas”, 1971
Postcard
© Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York and Sprüth Magers

Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947)
U.S 89, Arizona, June 1972
From the series American Surfaces, 1972-1973
© Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York and Sprüth Magers

Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947)
Amarillo, Texas, July 1972
From the series American Surfaces, 1972-1973
© Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York and Sprüth Magers

Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947)
Second Street, Ashland, Wisconsin, July 9, 1973
From the series Uncommon Places, 1973-1986
© Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York and Sprüth Magers

For the epigraph of Uncommon Places, Shore used lines from Louis Sullivan’s Kindergarten Chats (1918):

“[F]or attention is of the essence of our powers; it is that which draws other things toward us, it is that which, if we have lived with it, brings the experiences of our lives ready to our hand. If things but make impression enough on you, you will not forget them; and thus, as you go through life, your store of experiences becomes greater, richer, more and more available. But to this end you must cultivate attention – the art of seeing, the art of listening …. To pay attention is to live, and to live is to pay attention.” 10

The surfeit of seeing the Uncommon Places images offer means that, even as they seem to make available to view every detail of a highly particularised location, they achieve an archetypal or universal character; they are arguments not so much for the value of specific places as for a more general attentiveness to inhabited environments. In a conversation with Lynne Tillman, Shore discusses the “inherent architecture” of his scenes – the formal and spatial relationships produced through his deliberate technique. He notes how the view camera’s descriptive power “allowed [him] to move back farther and take pictures that were more packed with information, more layered.” This layered distance “allows for lots of different points of interest to exist in the same picture.”11 …

Shore has always been attracted to such scenes of visual coherence won out of incoherence, be it social, economic, or architectural. Back in the 1970s, when Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown commissioned him to make photographs for a number of exhibitions (notably Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City, mounted at the Smithsonian in 1976), the architects were interested in how to capture “the threadbare banality of the American scene, the jerry-rigged down-at-heels seediness of our rural landscapes and the spatial looseness of our towns.”14

Hugh Campbell. “The poorest details of the world resurfaced,” on the Places Journal website, August 2023 [Online] Cited 26/08/2024

10/ Sullivan’s autobiography, The Autobiography of an Idea (1924), notes key episodes of “paying attention” – to a tree, a building, etc. – and the resulting “ideas” as formative in his intellectual and spiritual development.
11/ Shore, Uncommon Places, 182.
14/ See Stephen Shore, Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography (London: Mack Books, 2022), 172. These lines from Venturi are cited on the back cover of Uncommon Places.

Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947)
South of Klamath Falls, U.S. 97, Oregon, July 21, 1973
From the series Uncommon Places, 1973-1986
© Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York and Sprüth Magers

Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947)
Ravena, New York, May 1, 2021 42°29.4804217N 73°49.3777683W
From the series Topographies, 2020-2021
© Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York and Sprüth Magers

Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947)
Meagher County, Montana, July 26, 2020 46°11.409946N 110°44.018901W
From the series Topographies, 2020-2021
© Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York and Sprüth Magers

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
79 rue des Archives
75003 Paris

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 7pm
Closed on Mondays

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

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Exhibition: ‘Rosario de Velasco’ at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Exhibition dates: 18th June to 15th September 2024

Curators: Toya Viudes de Velasco and Miguel Lusarreta

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
Adam and Eve (Adán y Eva)
1932
Oil on canvas
109 x 134cm
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
Photo credit: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Photographic Archive
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

(hidden) in plain sight

When Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid sent me an email about this exhibition I was captivated by the beautiful paintings of Rosario de Velasco, an artist who I had never hear of before, and I decided to do a posting on the exhibition.

Rosario de Velasco was part of the “return to order” movement in Spain which was a style that combined tradition and modernity, associated with a revival of classicism and realistic painting. The paintings are stylish with clean lines and finely honed forms. Among other influences, they evoke Cubism in the tilting of perspective and De Chirico in the slightly twisted perspective of the architectural landscape scenes (for example, see Portrait of Doctor Luis de Velasco (Retrato del doctor Luis de Velasco) c. 1933 below) … while also incorporating magic realism (a style which presents a realistic view of the world while incorporating magical elements) in their story telling.

The press release and various commentators link de Velasco’s paintings to the Italian Novecento and German New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movements and there are visible connections to these movements in the work. De Velasco stated that Novecento was an influence on her art practice. But while there are surface similarities in style to the likes of Christian Schad, for example, I believe that de Velasco’s work is of a different order: for New Objectivity was described by art historian G.F. Hartlaub, as ‘new realism bearing a socialist flavour’. And while de Velasco’s work bears a working class flavour it is anything but socialist.

While New Objectivity mines the satirical, debauched air of decadence of the Weimar Republic, de Velasco’s paintings are a paen (perhaps even a sermon) to motherhood, heterosexuality, religiosity, utopianism and the fascist desire for a clean, lean and muscular art. Figurative stylisation and idealisation are used to evidence this desire for wholesomeness in her paintings of gypsies, peasants and working people (just as the stereotypical form of modern realist painting imposed by Stalin following his rise to power after the death of Lenin in 1924 crushed all extant art movements in Russia including the wonderful, briefly flowering Ukrainian modernist movement).

Indeed, glossed over by the press release in a paragraph or two, is the fact that de Velasco believed in the ideas of the Spanish fascists, in “the ideas of the Falange Española de las JONS and José Antonio Primo de Rivera [which] led her to collaborate with the magazine Vértice between 1937 and 1946, where she illustrated the ideology of the new regime.”1 Her art was placed at the service of propaganda and as an artist she benefitted from being on the side of the regime.

It’s a prickly question: Is her ideology complicit with her art? Can you separate the artist from the art?

And the answer is, no you can’t.

In Rosario de Velasco’s paintings the ideology slips behind the surface but it is still there. Witness the diabolical power of destruction rained down on a civilian population in Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937) – “an emotional response to war’s senseless violence ” – when compared to de Resario’s very Catholic, idealistic preternatural interpretation of a massacre in her The Massacre of the Innocents (La matanza de los inocentes) (1936, below). “She covers up with religious aura what was actually going on.”2

With the transition to democracy in Spain starting after the death of Franco in November 1975, “the exiled and forgotten republican artists were recovered, Rosario de Velasco was ignored both for her genre and for her ideology.”3 But now with her rehabilitation – noun: the action of restoring someone to former privileges or reputation after a period of disfavour – in her privilege, her special right to speak as an artist to all, we must not be blinded to the fact that de Velasco’s art is authoritarian utopian erasing social libertarian hiding dystopian destruction.

As my good friend, writer and philosopher Associate Professor James McArdle commented on Rosario de Velasco’s work: “I think we can admire the art but we must be knowing of its seduction, and be prepared to see straight through it to that layer of ideology ‘hidden in plain sight’.”4

Personally, I believe that it’s not so much hidden in plain sight, but right there in plain sight. If you are an informed, aware, sentient human being you know these things, you feel these things, and you can see these things.

There is never any excuse for a collective forgetting or cultural amnesia of the ideologies of the past for, with the rise of the far right around the world, they are returning to haunt us.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Anonymous. “La matanza de los inocentes,” on the on the Museo Belles Arts Valencia website Nd [Online] Cited 05/09/2024. Translated by Google Translate from the Spanish text

2/ Associate Professor James McArdle email to the author, 04/09/2024

3/ Anonymous. “La matanza de los inocentes,” on the on the Museo Belles Arts Valencia website Nd [Online] Cited 05/09/2024. Translated by Google Translate from the Spanish text

4/ Associate Professor James McArdle email to the author, 04/09/2024

Many thankx to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Rosario de Velasco is part of the “return to order” movement in Spain, parallel to the German New Objectivity and the Italian Novecento, with a style that combines tradition and modernity. The artist admired masters such as Giotto, Mantegna, Piero de la Francesca, Durero, Velázquez and Goya, but also the vanguardists, such as De Chirico, Braque or Picasso and the protagonists of that return to order in Germany and Italy that she met through of magazines and exhibitions held in the 1920s in Madrid.”

Cristina Perez. “La fuerza bíblica de Rosario de Velasco ilumina el Museo Thyssen,” (The biblical force of Rosario de Velasco illuminates the Thyssen Museum) on the rtve website 18.06.2024 [Online] Cited 14/08/2024. Translated from the Spanish by Google Translate

The return to order (French: retour à l’ordre) was a European art movement that followed the First World War, rejecting the extreme avant-garde art of the years up to 1918 and taking its inspiration from classical art instead. The movement was a reaction to the war. Cubism was partially abandoned even by its co-creator Picasso. Futurism, which had praised machinery, dynamism, violence and war, was rejected by most of its adherents. The return to order was associated with a revival of classicism and realistic painting.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Installation view of the exhibition Rosario de Velasco at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza showing in the bottom image, Velasco’s Adam and Eve (1932, above)

Installation view of the exhibition Rosario de Velasco at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza showing Velasco’s Portrait of Doctor Luis de Velasco (c. 1933, below)

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
Portrait of Doctor Luis de Velasco (Retrato del doctor Luis de Velasco)
c. 1933
Oil on canvas
114 x 84cm
José A. de Velasco Collection
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969)
The Jeweller Karl Krall (Der Juwelier Karl Krall)
1923
Oil on canvas
Kunst- und Museumsverein im Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal

This painting is not in the exhibition and is used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza is jointly organising with the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia an exhibition on the Spanish figurative painter Rosario de Velasco (Madrid, 1904 – Barcelona, 1991).

Curated by Miguel Lusarreta and Toya Viudes de Velasco, the artist’s great-niece, the exhibition features 30 paintings from the 1920s to 1940s (the earliest and the most important from Velasco’s career) and a section on her activities as an illustrator. Alongside well known works from museum collections, such as the famous oil Adam and Eve from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, with which the artist obtained the second-prize medal for painting at the National Fine Arts Exhibition in 1932, or The Massacre of the Innocents (1936) from the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia, there will be others on display for the first time that have remained with Velasco’s family and in private collections, some unlocated until recently and only found and identified in the past few years.

Through a selection of paintings, drawings and illustrations and employing an approach that combines general art-historical issues and also explores aesthetic, social and political aspects, the exhibition aims to rediscover and reassess the work of one of the great Spanish women artists of the first half of the 20th century.

Following its showing in Madrid the exhibition will be seen at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia from 7 November 2024 to 16 February 2025.

Text from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza website

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
Seamstress Asleep
c. 1930
Oil on canvas
56 × 75cm
Private collection
Photo: Jonás Bel
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
Still Life with Fish (Bodegón con peces)
c. 1930
Oil on canvas
42 × 60cm
Ibáñez Museum Collection, Olula del Rio
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
Things (Cosas)
1933
Oil on canvas
45.5 × 65.5cm
Private collection
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
Untitled, (The Children’s Room) / Sin título (El cuarto de los niños)
1932-1933
Oil on canvas
55 × 73cm
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
Photo: Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Rosario de Velasco remains one of the least known artists of the 1930s in Spain. Her academic training in Madrid took place alongside Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor and, above all, was the result of her avid curiosity for the Italian Novecento and the German New Objectivity. This interest came to her through magazines and the contemplation of the work of authors such as Carlo Carrà, Felice Casorati and Ardengo Soffici at the Palacio de Exposiciones del Retiro in 1928.

Her approach to the ideas of the Falange Española de las JONS and José Antonio Primo de Rivera led her to collaborate with the magazine Vértice between 1937 and 1946, where she illustrated the ideology of the new regime. In this context we must place the canvas The Massacre of the Innocents (1936), in which Rosario de Velasco used a religious theme to create a work with clear political content created with the aim of mobilising society. The work was presented at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts inaugurated on July 4, 1936 by the President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña, at the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid.

This drift from realism towards political action was a frequent trend at a turbulent time in the history of Spain when art was placed at the service of propaganda. However, with democracy, the exiled and forgotten republican artists were recovered, Rosario de Velasco was ignored both for her genre and for her ideology. The flood of 1957 only deepened the marginalisation of The Massacre of the Innocents and left the painting covered in mud and with water marks for years. The magnificent and disturbing work was attributed to Ricardo Verde based on the monogram with which Rosario de Velasco signed her works, with the initials of her name, RV, until in 1995 its authorship was returned to the artist.

Anonymous. “La matanza de los inocentes,” on the on the Museo Belles Arts Valencia website Nd [Online] Cited 05/09/2024. Translated by Google Translate from the Spanish text

The Spanish Civil War marked a turning point in Rosario’s life. Her Falangist militancy and her family environment led her to leave Madrid, traveling first to Valencia and then to Barcelona, where she met the doctor Javier Farrerons, who would become her husband. Thanks to Farrerons, Rosario was released from the Modelo prison in Barcelona, where she was detained. After the war, he settled in Barcelona with his family and continued to participate in various exhibitions, albeit less frequently.

In 1939, she participated in the National Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture in Valencia, and in 1940 she presented her first individual exhibition in Barcelona. Over the following years, she also exhibited in Madrid, at events such as the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1941 and 1954, as well as in various galleries. In 1944, she was selected for the II Salón de los Once, organised by the Academia Breve de Crítica de Arte, an initiative by Eugenio d’Ors to promote post-war art.

Redacción. “Rosario de Velasco: Entre Giotto y Picasso, un estilo único en la pintura española,” (Rosario de Velasco: Between Giotto and Picasso, a unique style in Spanish painting) on the GenexiGente website 28/05/2024 [Online] Cited 14/08/2024, Translated from the Spanish by Google Translate

The outbreak of the Civil War, her Falangist militancy and her family environment lead her to leave Madrid. She travels first to Valencia and then to Barcelona, in Sant Andreu de Llavaneres, where she meets the ophthalmologist Javier Farrerons, her future husband, and who managed to free her from the Modelo prison in Barcelona, where she was detained. Viudes de Velasco explains that “thanks to God, she was in prison for one night because she had the immense luck that the doctor in the prison was a very good friend of the one who later became her husband, and that same night they took her out. The next day her cellmate was shot. That marked her life and she didn’t want to talk about the war again.”

Cristina Perez. “La fuerza bíblica de Rosario de Velasco ilumina el Museo Thyssen,” (The biblical force of Rosario de Velasco illuminates the Thyssen Museum) on the rtve website 18.06.2024 [Online] Cited 14/08/2024. Translated from the Spanish by Google Translate

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Guernica
May-June, 1937
Gelatin silver print

This photograph is not in the exhibition and is used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
The Massacre of the Innocents (La matanza de los inocentes)
1936
Oil on canvas
164 × 167.5cm
Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia
Photo: Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza is jointly presenting with the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia an exhibition on the Spanish figurative painter Rosario de Velasco (Madrid, 1904 – Barcelona, 1991). Curated by Miguel Lusarreta and Toya Viudes de Velasco, the artist’s great-niece, the exhibition brings together around 30 paintings from the 1920s to the 1940s – the earliest and the most important from Velasco’s career – and also has a section on her work as an illustrator.

The exhibition, which is benefiting from the support of the Region of Madrid and the City Council of Madrid, aims to present and draw attention to the work of one of the great Spanish women artists of the first half of the 20th century. In addition to well-known paintings from museum collections, such as the famous oil Adam and Eve (1932) from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, The Massacre of the Innocents (1936) from the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia, Maragatos (1934) from the Museo del Traje, Madrid, and Carnival (before 1936) from the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the exhibition features works still with the artist’s family and in private collections and others that have only been rediscovered and located in the past few months. Following its showing in Madrid, the exhibition will be presented at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia from 7 November 2024 to 16 February 2025.

Rosario de Velasco’s work represents an outstanding example of the so-called “return to order” in Spain, a movement parallel to German New Objectivity and Italian Novecento with a style that combined tradition and modernity. Velasco admired painters such as Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, Velázquez and Goya, but also avant-garde figures such as De Chirico, Braque, Picasso and the exponents of the “return to order” in Germany and Italy, whom she encountered via magazines and exhibitions held in Madrid in the 1920s.

The exhibition also focuses on Velásco’s activities as an illustrator, revealing a graphic artist of great versatility. This is evident, for example, in her illustrations for the 1928 edition of Stories for dreaming by María Teresa León and Stories for my grandchildren (1932) by Carmen Karr.

Rosario de Velasco (Madrid, 1904 – Barcelona, 1991)

Born into a very traditional and religious family in Madrid, Rosario de Velasco began to study art aged fifteen at the academy of the genre painter Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor, a member of the Royal San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts and two-time director of the Museo del Prado. Dating from that period is her Self-portrait (1924), which she signed with a monogram consisting of the initials R, D and V. Inspired by Dürer’s monogram, it has been fundamental to locating some of the artist’s paintings.

The young artist was, however, aware that she needed to go beyond tradition and assimilate the new trends and avant-gardes in her desire to compete as an equal in a largely male world. Her openness and cultural curiosity led her to associate with numerous creators of her generations, particularly women painters and writers such as Maruja Mallo, Rosa Chacel and María Teresa León. Other women friends included Mercedes Noboa, Matilde Marquina, Concha Espina and Lilí Álvarez, the tennis champion whom Velasco painted in the 1930s and with whom she enjoyed playing the sport. De Velasco was also a tireless traveller and enjoyed mountaineering, skiing and rock climbing.

In 1924, the year she completed her studies, the artist participated in the National Fine Arts Exhibition in Madrid and also produced her first illustrations. By the 1930s Rosario de Velasco had established a considerable reputation, taking part in numerous group shows and competitions, such as the National Fine Arts Exhibition of 1932 in which she presented the canvas Adam and Eve, which earned her a second prize medal in the Painting category. The work was exhibited together with all the other entries in the Palacio de Exposiciones in the Retiro park and in various exhibitions organised by the Society of Iberian Artists held in Copenhagen and Berlin, where it was warmly praised by critics for its power and originality and Velasco was singled out as the major discovery of the season. The work is startling in its play of perspective, employing a bird’s-eye view, a device also used in various still lifes and in (Untitled) The Children’s Room (1932-33), another work in the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía, in which the artist disrupts the space through an original arrangement of objects that recalls Cubism.

The majority of Velasco’s most important works date from that decade: Maragatos, which was awarded second prize in the National Painting competition of 1932; The Massacre of the Innocents (1936), which for many years was attributed to Ricardo Verde due to the signature “RV”, until it was correctly attributed to De Velasco in 1995; and Laundresses (1934), a wedding gift to her brother, Dr Luis de Velasco, who appears in another work in the present exhibition.

In 1935 Gypsies was selected to participate in the Carnegie International, an exhibition of artists from different countries organised by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Velasco’s work shared space with that of Carlo Carrá, Otto Dix, Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as Picasso and Dalí. Lost for years, the painting has only recently been located and is one of the major discoveries made during the preparation of this exhibition.

On the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War the artist’s membership of the Falange and her family context led her to leave Madrid. She went first to Valencia and later to Barcelona, to Sant Andreu de Llavaneres where she met a doctor, Javier Farrerons, who later became her husband and who succeeded in liberating her from the Modelo prison in Barcelona where she was being held. After the war the artist settled in Barcelona with her husband and their daughter María del Mar.

In 1939 Velasco participated in the National Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture in Valencia and in 1940 presented her first solo exhibition, in Barcelona. Over the following years she continued to exhibit in Madrid although less often, for example at the National Fine Arts Exhibitions of 1941 and 1954, and at various galleries. In 1944 Velasco was selected for the 2nd Salón de los Once, organised by the Academia Breve de Crítica de Arte, founded by Eugenio d’Ors to promote art of the immediate post-war period. D’Ors was one of the well known figures in the artist and her husband’s circle of friends, together with Dionisio Ridruejo, Pere Pruna and Carmen Conde, among others.

The recent search for works by Velasco which was undertaken via the social media and the media in general has resulted in the identification in private collections of both celebrated works of which all trace had been lost, such as Things (1933), Motherhood (1933), Gypsies (1934) and Pensive Woman (1935), as well as various illustrations for books and a preparatory drawing for the oil painting Carnival (before 1936). It has also brought to light some previously completely unknown works such as Still Life with Fish (c. 1930) and Girls with a Doll (1937).

Press release from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
The Bluebird, drawing for the cover of María Teresa León’s book Cuentos para soñar (El pájaro azul 1927. Dibujo para la cubierta del libro Cuentos para soñar de María Teresa León, 1927)
1927
Mixed media on paper
41 x 27.5cm
Gonzalez Rodriguez Collection
Photo: Jonás Bel
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
The White Leaves of a Waterlily Half Opened, drawing for María Teresa León’s book Cuentos para soñar (Las blancas hojas de nenúfar se entreabrieron, 1927. Dibujo para el libro Cuentos para soñar de María Teresa León)
1927
Mixed media on paper
50 × 32.3cm
Gonzalez Rodriguez Collection
Photo: Jonás Bel
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
The Hullabaloo Gave Him Serious Nightmares, drawing for María Teresa León’s book Cuentos para soñar (Tales to dream about) (La algarabía ciudadana proporcionó serias pesadillas, 1927. Dibujo para el libro Cuentos para soñar de María Teresa León)
1927
Ink on paper
42.3 × 32.5cm
Gonzalez Rodriguez Collection
Photo: Jonás Bel
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
Dear Crab, Leave the Crane, drawing for Mi libro ideal (Querido cangrejo, deja la grulla, 1933. Dibujo para Mi libro ideal de varios autores)
1933
Ink on paper
31.2 × 21.4cm
Gonzalez Rodriguez Collection
Photo: Jonás Bel
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
Motherhood (Maternidad)
1933
Oil on canvas
99 × 89cm
Private collection
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
Gypsies (Gitanos)
1934
Oil on canvas
95 × 132cm
Private collection
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969)
Reclining Woman on a Leopard Skin
1927
Oil paint on panel
680 x 980mm
© DACS 2017. Collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University. Gift of Samuel A. Berger

This painting is not in the exhibition and is used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.

Dix was a key supporter of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement, a name coined after an exhibition held in Mannheim, Germany in 1925. Described by art historian G.F. Hartlaub, as ‘new realism bearing a socialist flavour’, the movement sought to depict the social and political realities of the Weimar Republic.

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
Woman with Towel (Mujer con toalla)
1934
Oil on canvas
82 × 76cm
Private collection
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
Pensive Woman (Pensativa)
1935
Oil on canvas
57.5 × 72cm
Emilia Casal Piga and Guillermo González Hernández Collection
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Installation view of the exhibition Rosario de Velasco at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza showing at left, de Velsaco’s Laundresses / The Washerwomen (Lavanderas) 1934 (below)

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
Laundresses / The Washerwomen (Lavanderas)
1934
Oil on canvas
209 × 197cm
Private collection
Photo: Jonás Bel
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
Maragatos
1934
Oil on canvas
210 × 150cm
Museo del Traje, Madrid
Photo: Museo del Traje. Centro de Investigación del Patrimonio Etnológico, Madrid
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
Carnival (Carnavalina)
1936
Watercolour and graphite on cardboard
29.7 × 21.2cm
Fundación Colección ABC
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
Carnival (Carnaval)
Prior to 1936
Oil on canvas
115 × 110cm
Centre Pompidou, París, Musée national d’art moderne/Centre de création industrielle, adquisición del Estado, 1936
Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn / Bertrand Prévost
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Installation view of the exhibition Rosario de Velasco at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza showing de Velsaco’s Retrato de la familia Bastos (Portrait of the Bastos family) 1936 Oil on canvas

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
Girls with Doll (Niñas con muñeca)
1937
Oil on canvas
84.7 × 61.8cm
Private collection
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Installation view of the exhibition Rosario de Velasco at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza showing at left, de Velsaco’s Lilí Álvarez 1938 (below)

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
Lilí Álvarez
1938
Oil on board
97.8 × 71.8cm
Lopez-Chicheri Daban Family Collection
Photo: Jonás Bel
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Rosario de Velasco (Spanish, 1904-1991)
María del Mar en Vilanova
1943
Oil on canvas
117 × 89cm
Private collection
© Rosario de Velasco, VEGAP, Madrid, 2024

Anonymous photographer
Rosario de Velasco painting
1920s

Anonymous photographer
Rosario de Velasco painting ‘Laundresses / The Washerwomen’ (Lavanderas)
1934
Archive of the Rosario de Velasco family

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014, Madri

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday, 10am – 7pm
Saturdays, 10 am – 9 pm
Closed on Mondays

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza website

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Exhibition: ‘Suburbia. Building the American Dream’ at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB

Exhibition dates: 20th March – 8th September 2024

Curators: Philipp Engel and Francesc Muñoz

Suburbia. Building the American Dream exhibition poster

An offer you can’t refuse

“The “American dream” can be summed up in a mental image that seems frozen in time: a home of one’s own, surrounded by lawns, with a pool in the back garden and a couple of cars slumbering in the garage… Suburbia. Building the American Dream draws us into the imaginary of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry.” (Text from the CCCB website)

To me, there has always be something slightly askew, slightly out of kilter about the “American dream”. It promotes a generalised simulation of a imaginary reality, sold as a lifestyle, more fiction than fact. It is the ghost of desire that haunts the everyday reality of life, entirely on the side of demand: I want therefore I must have.

This desire must be satiated in the nuclear family, the white picket fence, the idyllic family home, the loveable children – as much a surface that reflects the approbation of others as for the sustenance of the self. As Anthony Giddens observes we are inescapably involved in a

“‘reflexive project of the self’: this project is reflexive because it involves unremitting self-monitoring, self-scrutiny, planning and ordering of all elements of our lives appearances and performances in order to marshal them into a coherent narrative called ‘the self’. We have to interpret the past and plan the future in relation to an identity we are attempting to constitute in a particularly immediate and transient social present. Consumerism is central to this self-obsession. This is partly because we not only have to choose a self, but (as Foucault’s line of argument also indicates) have to constitute ourselves as a self who choses, a consumer.”1

The American Dream endeavours to direct the identity we are attempting to constitute (through consumerism), so that it fits into a particularly conformist idea of a wholesome life: patriarchal, hegemonic, puritan (most important in America), god fearing, white – a particularly hyperreal simulation of a world that never existed in the first place. An imaginary construction.2

Photographs reinforce this “imaginary” state of being, this desire for the American Dream. As the wonderful Victor Burgin observes,

“The structure of presentation – point-of-view and frame – is intimately implicated in the reproduction of ideology (the ‘frame of mind’ of our ‘points-of-view’). More than any other textual system, the photograph presents itself as ‘an offer you can’t refuse’. The characteristics of the photographic apparatus position the subject in such a way that the object photographed serves to conceal the textuality of the photograph itself – substituting passive receptivity for active (critical) reading. … With most photographs we see, […] decoding and investiture takes place instantaneously, unselfconsciously, ‘naturally’; but it does take place – the wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imaginary plenitude. The imaginary object here, however, is not ‘imaginary’ [as in fictive] in the usual sense of the word, it is seen, it has a projected image.”3 (My bold and italics)

The photographs of the American Dream, then, deny an impoverished reality in favour of a desired imaginary plenitude. You too can live the dream, because you have seen the evidence of the projected image, and this imaginary identification can have very real effects.

In the desire for the dream we witness (elsewhere in the world) the egocentric obsession of some of the builders in the British series “Grand Designs” where people mortgage themselves up to the hilt, become sick, have marriage breakdowns and can’t finish the project, because of a dream… to build huge houses with 7 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms that no one in their right mind needs to build for 2 people. Or the case of the Australian Melissa Caddick who, in a Ponzi scheme stole A$30 million from investors, including her friends and family, in order to appear a successful business woman. “Caddick used the proceeds of her crimes to acquire “all the trappings of wealth” and that her “success was all a façade and the financial services business was an elaborate front for Ms. Caddick’s Ponzi scheme”.”4

Ego is reinforced by the image reflected back to us by the photograph.

Christopher Lasch comments that, “The proliferation of recorded images undermines our sense of reality. As Susan Sontag observes in her study of photography, “Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.” We distrust our perceptions until the camera verifies them. Photographic images provide us with the proof of our existence, without which we would find it difficult even to reconstruct a personal history…”5

Photographs posit a reality that promotes the dream, that verifies the dream, as ‘an offer you can’t refuse’.

Thankfully, some of the contemporary artists in this posting (I particularly like the work of Weronika Gęsicka) undermine the utopian ideal through wit, humour and critical inquiry.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Anthony Giddens. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991

2/ “In sociology, the imaginary as a Lacanian term refers to an illusion and fascination with an image of the body as coherent unity, deriving from the dual relationship between the ego and the specular or mirror image… “The term ‘imaginary’ is obviously cognate with ‘fictive’ but in its Lacanian sense it is not simply synonymous with fictional or unreal; on the contrary, imaginary identifications can have very real effects.””

David Macey, “Introduction”, Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. London, 1994, p. xxi quoted in “Imaginary (sociology)” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 01/09/2024

3/ Victor Burgin (ed.,). Thinking Photography. Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1982, pp. 146-148.

4/ Farid Assaf SC quoted in Kate McClymont. “Melissa Caddick’s ‘trappings of wealth’ a front for her Ponzi scheme”. The Sydney Morning Herald 29 June 2021 in “Melissa Caddick,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 01/09/2024

5/ Christopher Lasch. The Culture of Narcissism. W.W.Norton and Company, New York, 1978, p. 48.

Many thankx to the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Inside the exhibition: Suburbia. Building the American Dream

Philipp Engel, curator of the exhibition “Suburbia”, examines the origin and vast expansion of residential neighbourhoods in the United States, an urban model centred on constructing large swathes of single-family homes on the outskirts of cities. Engel reflects on the allure that suburban landscapes have stirred in Western culture while highlighting the main issues and contradictions of the model, including segregation, safety paranoia and unsustainable consumption of water and energy.

Introduction

Greg Stimac (American, b. 1976)
Chandler, Arizona
2006
From Mowing the Lawn portfolio
Impressió digital Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago

Who hasn’t longed for the American dream? A big house with a garden, a swimming pool and a couple of cars in the garage. A quiet, safe place to live as a family, close to nature in a people-friendly neighbourhood. This exhibition traces the cultural history of a lifestyle ideal that has been endlessly reproduced on television, in advertising and in cinema, and analyses the validity and the most controversial aspects of its urban planning model.

Suburbia. Building the American Dream draws us into the imaginary of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry. The exhibition goes back to the origins of residential neighbourhoods in the early nineteenth century, explains how they developed massively in the 1950s, and reviews the economic, political and social context of their relentless expansion across the United States.

Now, when more and more families are pursuing their own version of the dream on the outskirts of cities, it is a good moment to analyse the contradictions of an urban planning model based on social, ethnic and gender segregation.

The dream of living in a house with a swimming pool is still very much alive today and has been exported all over the world. The exhibition shows the impact of this highly unsustainable model, based on constant car use, with examples of developments around Barcelona and Madrid.

With abundant historical material, period documentaries, photographs, paintings, films and series, novels and magazines, works of art and everyday objects, the exhibition places us in the mental paradise of the suburb and invites us to rethink the value of the city and public space today.

Suburbia. Building the American Dream presents the work of foremost creators who, from different points of view, help us to take a critical look at the famed American way of life: Jessica Chou, Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Doyle, Gerard Freixes, Rodrigo Fresán, Gabriele Galimberti, Weronika Gesicka, Benjamin Grant, Todd Hido, Joel Meyerowitz, Matthias Müller, Blanca Munt, Alberto Ortega, Bill Owens, Sheila Pree Bright, León Siminiani, Todd Solondz, Amy Stein, Greg Stimac, Angela Strassheim, Deborah Stratman, Ed & Deanna Templeton, Kate Wagner and Christopher Willan.

Text from the CCCB website

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Land. Provincetown
1976
Archival pigment print
Collecció Pancho Saula i Michelle Ferrara / Galeria Alta, Andorra

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Dusk. New Jersey
1978
Archival pigment print
Collecció Pancho Saula i Michelle Ferrara / Galeria Alta, Andorra

The “American dream” can be summed up in a mental image that seems frozen in time: a home of one’s own, surrounded by lawns, with a pool in the back garden and a couple of cars slumbering in the garage. Suburbia. Building the American Dream traces the cultural history of a lifestyle ideal shared far and wide by literature, television, advertising and cinema, and analyses the most controversial aspects of an urban planning model that has spread beyond US territory and reached our shores. Journalist Philipp Engel curates this exhibition with geographer Francesc Muñoz collaborating as adviser on the model in the local context.

Since the 1990s most of the American population has lived in this sprawling urban mass that has continued to spread, even beyond US borders. At a time when more and more families are pursuing their own version of the dream on city outskirts, the exhibition analyses the contradictions of an urban planning model based on social, ethnic and gender segregation. It also shows the impact of this highly unsustainable model, based on constant car use, with examples of developments around Barcelona and Madrid. With abundant historical material, photographs, paintings, audiovisuals, literature, works of art and everyday objects, the exhibition situates us in the mental paradise of the model of residential development inspired by American suburbia, and invites us to rethink the value of the city and public space today.

Suburbia. Building the American Dream decodes an almost abstract landscape that is still valid in pop culture. It does so through the work of foremost creators who help us take a critical look at the famed American way of life. It includes works by Jessica Chou, Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Doyle, Gerard Freixes, Gabriele Galimberti, Weronicka Gęsicka, Benjamin Grant, Todd Hido, Joel Meyerowitz, Matthias Müller, Blanca Munt, Alberto Ortega, Bill Owens, Sheila Pree Bright, León Siminiani, Amy Stein, Greg Stimac, Angela Strassheim, Deborah Stratman, Ed & Deanna Templeton, Kate Wagner and Christopher Willan, among others.

Installation views of the exhibition Suburbia. Building the American Dream at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB showing in the second image photographs by Charlotte Brooks (below); and in the bottom image, visitors looking at satellite images of US cities and suburbs that show their grid layout
© Alice Brazzit, CCCB, 2024

Charlotte Brooks (American, 1918-2014)
[Image from LOOK – Job 57-7621 titled Myers family]
20th December 1957
Film negative
Look magazine photograph collection (Library of Congress)
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

Installation view of the exhibition Suburbia. Building the American Dream at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB showing photographs by Gregory Crewdson (below)

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled (Dream House)
2002
Digital C-print
29 x 44 inches

American photographer Gregory Crewdson is best known for his uncanny images of deceptively serene suburban life. Using Hollywood film techniques and elaborate sets, Crewdson creates what he calls “frozen moments”: meticulously staged scenes whose narrative meaning remains a mystery. Throughout this series, special attention is paid to light. The twilight setting favoured by the photographer functions as a metaphor, an eerie evocation of the darkness on the edge of town.

Crewdson created this twelve-part portfolio, Dream House, as a commission for The New York Times Magazine in 2002. The cinematic character of these frozen vignettes is underscored by the use of Hollywood actors (Gwyneth Paltrow, Tilda Swinton, and Philip Seymour Hoffman among others) whose celebrity contrasts with the “Anytown” anonymity of their environments.

Text from the Mutual Art website

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Julianne Moore (Dream House)
2002
Digital C-print
29 x 44 inches

Sections of the exhibition

Planning A Dream

When the Industrial Revolution reached the USA in the first half of the 19th century, big cities became engines of progress, but they were also seen as dangerous places, in contrast with the opulent nature of the New World. With the emergence of the railway, the tram and the automobile, the mobility revolution prompted the gradual colonisation of city outskirts, transforming the countryside into residential neighbourhoods.

From Llewellyn Park (New Jersey) to Tuxedo Park (New York), throughout the 19th century the first gated communities began to pop up across the United States. At the end of the century, after the West was won, the appearance of the tram gave the middle classes access to the periphery, giving rise to a new type of housing that led to an orderly arrangement of city grids. But it wasn’t until the popularisation of the famous Ford Model T that the US landscape was radically transformed, crisscrossed by roads that became freeways. The automobile became a symbol of freedom, marking the birth of the suburbs that were to spring up everywhere.

This first section includes historical material like the original lithograph View of New York by John William Hill (1836); The American Woman’s Home by Catharine Beecher, the bible of “domestic feminism”; a Ford T Touring (1923) produced by General Motors, and films like The Suburbanite (1908), among other Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton classics.

Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803–1892)
Villa for David Codwise, near New Rochelle, NY (project; elevation and four plans)
1835
Pen and ink, watercolour, graphite
Sheet: 14 5/16 x 9 in. (36.4 x 22.9 cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924
Public domain

Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803–1892)
Ericstan, for John J. Herrick, Tarrytown, New York (perspective)
1855
Watercolour, ink, and graphite on paper
25 5/16 x 30in. (64.3 x 76.2cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924
Public domain

Davis’ most successful castellated villa was built for dry-goods merchant John J. Herrick. The design was dominated by an enormous three-story circular tower facing west over the Hudson River. The tower housed an extraordinary circular parlor that had an intricately vaulted ceiling springing from a massive central cluster of delicate Gothic columns. Ericstan was demolished in 1944.

After Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803-1892)
Friend & Aub (Publisher Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Map of Llewellyn Park and Villa Sites, on Eagle Ridge in Orange & West Bloomfield
1857
Lithograph
14 7/16 x 23 7/16 in. (36.7 x 59.6cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924
Public domain

Morse & Fronti (Charles W. Morse and J. Fronti)
Residence of Mr. E. Hooker, Fremont Ave., Orange, N.J.
1860
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection
The New York Public Library
Public domain

Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907)
Sunnyside on the Hudson
1856-1871
Hand coloured lithograph
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain

Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907)
Sunnyside on the Hudson (detail)
1856-1871
Hand coloured lithograph
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain

Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907)
American railroad scene: lightning express trains leaving the junction
1874
Hand coloured lithograph
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain

Advertising by Samuel. E. Gross.
August Gast & Co. New York
c. 1900
Lithography
Library of Congress

Advertising by Samuel. E. Gross.
August Gast & Co. New York (detail)
c. 1900
Lithography
Library of Congress

Anonymous photographer
Bain News Service (publisher)
Skaters on the lake at Tuxedo Park
1910
Glass negative
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain

Anonymous photographer
Thomas Edison in the garden of his residence in Glenmont
1917
Thomas Edison National Historical Park, West Orange, New Jersey

Anonymous photographer
General Motors Pavilion: Futurama, Norman Bel Geddes. New York World’s Fair. General Motors – Crowds leading into Futurama
1939
New York World’s Fair 1939-1940 records
Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library
Public domain

Catalog of the Aladdin company selling houses by mail
1950
Courtesy Historic New England

Federal Housing Administration, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota
c. 1950
Courtesy Minnesota Streetcar Museum, Minneapolis

The advertisement reads, “With a small down payment your rent money will buy a home. Consult your architect, builder, material dealer or any participating financial institution. Federal Housing Administration.”

The Suburban Room

The suburban explosion was first and foremost demographic, occurring as World War II soldiers returned, eager to set up home. There was no room for them in the crowded cities. With the support of the state, which offered generous loans, suburbs were built using the Fordist assembly-line production logic. It was the “American way of life”, the start of a collective dream that fascinated the whole world.

And so the baby boom took place in 11 million single-family homes fitted with all kinds of electrical domestic appliances, presided over by a brand new television set on which the new suburbanites watched idealised versions of themselves with identical skin colour and the same war experiences, age, mortgage and feeling of uprootedness. The media echoed this phenomenon, and cinema and literature reflected this standardised landscape in which a wife waited at home for her husband with a drink for him in her hand, children went everywhere by bicycle, and everyone had barbecues on Sundays.

Sponsored by the state, Suburbia became a paradise that excluded racial minorities. But little by little, by the sixties, the gates of paradise were opened to African Americans and other minorities, giving rise to a white exodus, the white flight.

As well as a variety of historical material, this section reviews sitcoms portraying the suburbs, from the 1940s to the present day. It also includes the famous illustration New Kids in the Neighborhood by Norman Rockwell and a broad selection of the photographs that make up Bill Owens’ Suburbia (1972), the first book of photographs about this American urban planning model.

Arthur S. Siegel (American, 1913-1978)
Detroit, Michigan. Riot at the Sojourner Truth homes, a new U.S. federal housing project, caused by white neighbours’ attempt to prevent Negro tenants from moving in. Mounted police and whites
Detroit 1942
Library of Congress
Public domain

General Electric advertisement
It’s a promise
1945
Private collection, Barcelona

Anonymous photographer
Aerial view of Levittown
1949
Courtesy Levittown Public Library

Mural of household appliance advertisements published in different American magazines
1947-1962

Mural of household appliance advertisements published in different American magazines (details)
1947-1962

Getting to Work. The Trials to U.S. commuters
Time, January 18, 1960
Library of Catalonia, Barcelona

John Cheever
Time, March 27, 1964
Library of Catalonia, Barcelona

Norman Rockwell (American, 1894-1978)
New Kids in the Neighbourhood
1967
Lithograph
Norman Rockwell Museum Collection

Bill Owens (American, b. 1938)
Suburbia, Cul de sac, Pleseanton, California
1972
Gelatin silver
Bill Owens Archive, Milan

Bill Owens (American, b. 1938)
I don’t feel that Richie playing with guns will have a negative effect on his personality. (He already wants to be a policeman.)
1972
Gelatin silver
Bill Owens Archive, Milan

The Residential Nightmare

And night fell on Suburbia. What had been a dream became a nightmare. The idea of a safe, healthy, happy place was gradually contaminated with fears, terrors and paranoias. Doors were bolted and alarms installed. After all, in the American Gothic tradition, the house, often haunted, had always been a source of horror – evil lurked there. With the appearance of mass-produced housing, a new sub genre called Suburban Gothic was consolidated, and began to manifest itself both in literature and in cinema. Unlike the traditional Gothic, in this new landscape the family residence was no longer tied to a specific territory, as it had been in New England; now, with its white picket fence and green lawn, it could be anywhere in the country. And evil came from outside, it threatened to invade the home and even undermine it. Under the guise of shiny normality, American suburbs always conceal cracks through which terror creeps.

To illustrate this residential nightmare, we take in historical materials of the atomic age, photographs of the dark side of suburbia by Amy Stein, Todd Hido, Gregory Crewdson, Angela Strassheim and Gabriele Galimberti, and Kate Wagner’s installation, McMansionHell. Alberto Ortega, an artist from Seville resident in the US who has devoted himself to painting the suburbs at night, presents two works for the first time at the CCCB.

Todd Hido (American, b. 1968)
Untitled #2214
1998
From the series House Hunting

Angela Strassheim (American, b. 1969)
Untitled (Elsa)
2005
Left Behind series
Courtesy of the artist

Installation view of the exhibition Suburbia. Building the American Dream at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB showing the work of Gabriele Galimberti from the series The Ameriguns with at top right, Joel, Lynne, Paige and Joshua (44, 43, 5 and 11 years old) – central Texas 2021; and at bottom right, Eric Arnsberger (30) and Morgan Gagnier (22) – Lake Forest, California 2021
© Alice Brazzit, CCCB, 2024

Gabriele Galimberti (Italian, b. 1977)
Joel, Lynne, Paige and Joshua (44, 43, 5 and 11 years old) – central Texas
2021
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

Gabriele Galimberti (Italian, b. 1977)
Avery Skipalis (33) – Tampa, Florida
2021
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

Avery Skipalis (33) stands with her firearms in front of her house in Tampa, Florida, USA. Her son looks on from a window. Avery joined the US Air Force when she was 17, and after serving in the UAE, Japan and Germany, left to start a company that offers firearms safety classes to adults and children.

Alberto Ortega (American born Spain, b. 1976)
Annunciation
2023
Oil on aluminium panel
Courtesy of the artist

Alberto Ortega (Sevilla, Spain 1976) creates oil paintings made after miniature sets that he builds as references. The small-scale sets enable him to recreate suburban scenes using details that recall the 1950s. Since he’s able to control the angle and point of view, the lighting, the location of every element, much like a film director would do, his works have a strong cinematic feel.

As an immigrant to the United States, Alberto is intrigued by American suburban life as depicted in film, literature, and visual art. Through these images of American homes, buildings, and neighbourhoods, he portrays society and some of its contradictions. These scenes represent hopes and dreams, the threat of their failure, and alienation.

Text from the Alberto Ortega website

Kate Wagner (American, b. 1993)
Observations from McMansion Hell
2023
Digital print on palboard
Courtesy of the artist

McMansion Hell is a blog that humorously critiques McMansions, large suburban homes typically built from the 1980s to 2008 and known for their stylistic attempt to create the appearance of affluence using mass-produced architecture. The website is run by Kate Wagner, an architectural writer. …

The blog uses Wagner’s commentary atop images of the interiors and exteriors of McMansions, using arrows to note features she finds questionable or in poor taste. Besides critiquing the homes themselves, the website also criticises the perceived material culture of wastefulness McMansions can represent, gives anecdotes of situations when McMansions have been a poor financial investment, and provides other essays on urban planning and architectural history. The blog offers subscriptions with bonus content, generating sufficient funding for Wagner to work on the blog full-time.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Post-Suburbia?

The appearance of New Urbanism in the 1990s began to herald the inevitable death of Suburbia due to the announced depletion of oil that has not yet occurred. Meanwhile, Suburbia continues to spread, transform and diversify. Today, 8 out of 10 Americans live in sprawl and single-family homes, representing 75% of the residential areas where new generations continue to dream of living. This is a new suburbia that is more open but also more unequal.

This suburb is made up of very diverse communities, as captured by the cameras of the photographers Sheila Pree Bright (who portrays African American life around Atlanta) and Jessica Chou (who immortalises the Asian community in Monterrey Park, California). New lifestyles also proliferate there, like at Huntington Beach, a “contemporary suburb” and surfing capital featured in the works of artist and skateboarder Ed Templeton.

This section also focuses on the environmental impact of this highly polluting city model, through the apocalyptic bonsai of artist Thomas Doyle and the satellite photographs of Benjamin Grant, a lethal panorama of the effects of the sprawling city.

Thomas Doyle (American, b. 1976)
Proxy (Haven Ln.)
2012
Mixed media
Courtesy of the artist

Thomas Doyle work mines the debris of memory through the creation of intricate worlds sculpted in 1:43 scale and smaller. Often sealed under glass, the works depict the remnants of things past – whether major, transformational experiences, or the quieter moments that resonate loudly throughout a life. In much the way the mind recalls events through the fog of time, the works distort reality through a warped and dreamlike lens.

Text from the Ronchini Gallery website

Weronika Gęsicka (Polish, b. 1984)
Untitled #16
2015-2017
From the series Traces
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist and Jednostka Gallery, Warsaw

For her series “Traces”, Polish artist Weronika Gęsicka searched through various online image databases for photographs from the 1940s to the 1960s that in her eyes reflect the American way of life at that time. Many of these scenes are full of clichés, showing happy-looking people in an apparently perfect world. The exact origin of the pictures is not verifiable. As a result, they are a mixture of advertisements and private photos. Gęsicka manipulates the idyllic scenes in a playful way by digitally distorting the images. In doing so, she does not follow a strict pattern, but instead decides intuitively what detail she finds fascinating and will edit. In this way, the rather stereotypical scenes of suburban American life are transformed into a humorous, but also uncomfortable reality. Covered faces, deformed bodies and peculiar superimpositions create a distorted version of the American dream. Gęsicka’s photos are characterised by a discomforting, almost oppressive mood that sometimes only reveals itself at second glance: young men at a tea dance, whose heads are submerged in the cleavages of their oversized female partners, family members hidden behind a curtain at the dinner table, or a father coming home from work, separated by a trench from his children, who are running towards him.

In “Traces”, Weronika Gęsicka questions how we perceive images. In doing so, she makes us aware that even the medium of photography, which allegedly reflects reality, is not objective. Each photograph merely satisfies a perception of what is happening and, in the photographer’s eye, remains a subjective likeness. By modifying the images, she is playing with the observer, who is initially confident that he can quickly classify and identify the scene – until he notices that nothing in these pictures is as it seems at first glance.

Anonymous. “Weronika Gęsicka: A Disconcerting Idyll,” on the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation website Nd [Online] Cited 13/08/2024

Weronika Gęsicka (Polish, b. 1984)
Untitled #52
2015-2017
From the series Traces
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist and Jednostka Gallery, Warsaw

Ed Templeton (American, b. 1972)
Contemporary Suburbium
2017
Digital printing on baryta paper
Courtesy of Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

Jessica Chou (American born Taiwan, b. 1985)
The Mark Keppel High School Dance Team at the 2019 Miss Dance Drill Team USA National Dance Competition
2019
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

Benjamin Grant (American, b. 1984)
Berwyn, Illinois
2023
Digital printing
Images created by Overview, source images
© Nearmap

Overview takes its inspiration from Daily Overview – an Instagram account established by author Benjamin Grant. Since he began the project in December 2013, his daily posts have both delighted and challenged his audience from all corners of the globe. For Overview, Grant has curated and created more than 200 original images by stitching together numerous high-resolution satellite photographs. With each Overview, Grant aims to not only inspire a fresh perspective of our planet but also encourage a new understanding of what human impact looks like. He lives and rides his bike in New York City.

Text from the Penguin Books website

Benjamin Grant (American, b. 1984)
Berwyn, Illinois (detail)
2023
Digital printing
Images created by Overview, source images
© Nearmap

Sprawl Reaches Our Shores

The formation of Suburbia as a cultural phenomenon in Catalonia is a reality historically ignored by narratives about the Catalan process of urbanisation, too focused on city growth and the ideological differentiation between an urban, Barcelona-based Catalonia and an “inner” Catalonia, the birthplace of what still today we call the “countryside”.

Suburban Catalonia shows how, in many territories, urban growth no longer corresponds to the well-known metaphor of city growth as an “oil stain”. In fact, an endless mass of oil stains has spread across the territory, giving rise to the same cloned reality everywhere: regional urban sprawl. The sprawl that is so commonplace today developed with the motorisation of society starting in the latter half of the 20th century as part and parcel of a very heterogeneous cultural discourse: the ideological propaganda of the American way of life mixed with local traditions derived from criticism of the built-up, crowded industrial city popularly disseminated in expressions such as “la caseta i l’hortet” (a little house and a garden) that idealised rural life. The path leading from those initial suburban choices to today’s regional urban sprawl is not a straight one, making the Catalan suburb a world yet to be discovered.

Christopher Willan has made a photographic reportage about the Catalan suburban world specially for the exhibition, which also includes Blanca Munt’s installation Mira-Sol Alert about the neighbourhood’s paranoid state of alert and an audiovisual piece by filmmaker León Siminiani that closes the exhibition.

Pere Torné Esquius (Spanish, 1879-1936)
The rocking chair (El balancí)
1913
Oil on canvas
National Art Museum of Catalonia, Barcelona

For different reasons, the singular work of the painter, illustrator and cartoonist Pere Torné Esquius (Barcelona 1879 – Flavancourt, France, 1936) doesn’t fit in with either the modernist proposals or the noucentista style (turn of the century), even though the latter considered him to be one of theirs.

Settled in Paris from 1905 onwards, although he would often return to Barcelona to regularly exhibit there, his work, of apparent simplicity, responded to a certain primitivism which was somewhat naive and with a strong French influence. His painting, highly singular, maintained pictorial and atmospheric values which provided the whole production with a sense of unity.

The favourite topics of Torné Esquius were interior or secluded spaces, such as gardens or living rooms, humble or of artisan extraction. It is worth highlighting, very often, the absence of the human figure and the main presence of inanimate elements that on occasions would cause a disturbing or even alarming effect. He also produced other genres such as landscapes or portraits.

Despite the fact that he was a painter, his professional work was based on illustration, focused on three main lines: children’s literature, the illustration of literary texts and the collaboration in magazines and periodical publications, often satirical, such as Papitu, Picarol or Le Rire, amongst others.

Anonymous. “Torné Esquius. Poetics of the Everyday,” on the Museu Nacional D’Art De Catalunya website 2017 [Online] Cited 13/08/2024

XXIII Barcelona International Exhibition Fair, 1955. USA Pavilion. OITF: Office of International Trade Fair. Single-family house model: “house beautiful prefabricated”
1955
Historical Archive of the College of Architects of Catalonia

Barcelona Metropolitan Area
Orthophoto. Dispersed urbanisation in the municipality of Corbera de Llobregat
2015

Blanca Munt (Spanish, b. 1997)
Mira-sol alert
2023
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

In 2019, photographer Blanca Munt engaged in a neighbourhood chat group created to surveil her own neighbourhood and alert to any potential home burglaries or other suspicious activity. What is initially presented as an effective tool for the neighbours soon becomes a source of speculation, suspicion and paranoia. The seemingly quiet community life in a neighbourhood of well-lit streets and conventional homes founders due to the actual burglaries, but also due to the disintegration of the idea of community when personal security is at stake: mistrust, typically based on suspicious appearance or behaviour, now extends to any neighbours who fail to rigorously conform to the group’s purpose.

With a clean and sober design reminiscent of a real estate or security company brochure, the dispassionate pictures portrayed in Mira-sol Alert intertwine with the mental images stemming from an inflamed rhetoric, which gradually take shape as we learn the self-interested views of the different actors in this landscape – neighbours, suspects, police officers, local authorities – and which appeal strongly to our fears and contradictions. In her own words, Blanca Munt calls for a “reflection on the tension between the privilege of living in a peaceful place and the constant sense of lurking threat encouraged by our current culture of fear.”

Text from the Dalpine website

Christopher Willan (British lives Spain)
Sant Quirze del Vallès
2023
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

Christopher Willan (British lives Spain)
Els Trullols Park-1
2023
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

The Curators

Philipp Engel: Graduate in Modern Literature from the University of Toulouse, with a thesis on Bret Easton Ellis. After ten years in the music sales and distribution business, he started to work as a cultural journalist, specializing in cinema and literature. He is currently a contributor to various periodicals, such as Cultura(s), El Mundo, Cinemanía, Sofilm and Coolt.

Francesc Muñoz: Lecturer in Urban Geography, director of the Observatory of Urban Planning at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and professor at the Università IUAV di Venezia. He has received prizes such as the Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis Attending to Human Values in Engineering (UPC, 2004) and the Bonaplata Award for the exhibition The Light Factory, about the power station in Sant Adrià de Besòs (2014). He has curated shows such as the commemorative exhibition of 30 years of democratic town councils, Local, Local! The City to Come (CCCB, 2010), and the exhibition Architectures on the Waterfront (Fundació Mies van der Rohe, 2019), and was a member of the Cerdà Year Advisory Board (2010).

Press release from the CCCB

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB
Montalegre, 5 – 08001 Barcelona
Phone: (+34) 933 064 100

Opening hours:
From Tuesday to Sunday and bank holidays 11.00 – 20.00
Closed Monday

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB website

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