Women Who Took Up Art When Most Women Didn't
Chive Mynde
Women Who Took Up Art When Most Women Didn't
By DEBORAH WEISGALL
BOSTON-- THIS city's most famous female painter is fictional: Amy
March, Jo's beautiful, blond, spoiled younger sister. For the girls in
"Little Women," all artistic ambition was possible: Jo would become a
writer, Amy a painter.
In "Little Women," art imitated life. Louisa May Alcott published her
novel in a time and place — Boston in 1868 — of unusual
opportunity for women. The city's economy and culture were flowering;
Boston's prominent ladies, many of whom had been active abolitionists,
had the means to pursue their own passions and the conscience to help
less privileged women do the same. Louisa's sister, May Alcott
Nieriker, was among the first generation of Boston women to become
artists. Many were famous and successful in their day and as
formidable as their more enduring literary sisters.
Most, however, are forgotten now.
A fascinating exhibition "A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston
1870-1940," which is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts until Dec. 2,
demonstrates that these artists fell into obscurity both because they
were women and because they lived in Boston. By the 1930's, the city
that once advocated advanced social and artistic ideas seemed
hopelessly stagnant to the avant- garde.
The exhibition's organizer, Erica E. Hirschler — the curator of
American paintings at the museum — has not only restored women
to their proper place in the history of Boston art; she has also
restored a portrait of a city and revealed new and subtle aspects of
its singular and resolutely realist aesthetic.
The show and its catalog, which Ms. Hirschler wrote, examine the
careers of more than 40 women, interweaving discussions of their work
and their lives.
Most of these women were well-born. Along with the means to afford
instruction and studios of their own, they inherited significant
social and familial obligations. For most, their time was not their
own.
In an interview at the museum, Ms. Hirschler talked of being struck by
how familiar these experiences would sound to women today. "These
artists struggled with the feeling that you should be both an artist
and a wife and mother," she said. "Many never married; many married
late." Several entered into "Boston marriages" — unions with
other women.
At issue was not opportunity or education; Boston's great teachers
— William Morris Hunt, William Rimmer, Edmund Tarbell, William
Paxton, Philip Hale — were happy to teach and encourage women,
although in the 19th century art classes for men and women were held
separately (with higher fees for women) and life- drawing classes
threatened to topple moral standards. Most of Boston's female artists
also studied in Europe; May Alcott Nieriker even published a self-help
manual: "Studying Art Abroad and How to Do It Cheaply," filled with
advice on where to buy rags and sturdy shoes. But certain subjects
— children, flowers, domestic scenes — were considered
women's themes, as were media like watercolor. It was the rare review
that did not discuss a woman's art in terms of its masculine or
feminine qualities.
The real problem was mixing art with life. Three generations of women
who were artists in Boston formed a thriving, supportive community,
but their stories are often fraught with compromise. Sarah Choate
Sears married one of the richest men in Boston when she was 19, in
1877. For a while she produced bold and elegant flower studies, then
in the 1890's she took up photography; her young daughter served as
her convenient subject in intense and eloquent images.
Sears counted F. Holland Day, Alfred Stieglitz, Mary Cassatt and John
Singer Sargent among her friends; she sponsored Maurice Prendergast's
first European trip, and, unlike most of her Boston contemporaries,
she was attracted to modernism. She joined the Photo-Secession in New
York, introduced Cassatt to Gertrude Stein, and bought works by
Cézanne, Braque and Matisse.
But she stopped working in 1904 to take care of her husband in his
final illness; after his death, she managed the family finances. In
1925 she began drawing again, vivid, bright flowers, exploding with
pent-up ideas. It is hard not to wonder what would have happened had
she not missed out on 20 years.
Elizabeth Boott married the painter and teacher Frank Duveneck over
her father's objections. She was 42; her son, born a year later in
1887, consumed her time, but she managed to paint a large watercolor
for the Paris Salon jury. The day it was accepted she caught pneumonia
and died a week later. Boott's friend Henry James wrote to her father
that her death relieved her from "perpetual struggle and
disappointment."
Sarah Wyman Whitman also married late, when she was 46, in 1886, and
then to a man who pretty much left her alone; she had no children. Her
pastel landscape "A Warm Night" is gorgeous with summer's slow dusk,
its heat and haze and a low, full moon. It had hung in storage since
Whitman left it to the museum in 1904.
For Whitman and her contemporaries, the Arts and Crafts movement,
which proclaimed the parity of the fine and decorative arts, offered a
means to obtain equal footing with men. Women designed books, posters,
textiles and exquisite jewelry. Whitman produced distinguished work in
stained glass, including an elegant fire screen that juxtaposes blocks
of clear glass with colored elements. She also designed Celia
Thaxter's classic book, "A Summer Garden," for which Childe Hassam
painted the illustrations.
These women often married artists. They had, of course, less important
careers, even though at least one contemporary critic suggested that
they, in this case Elizabeth Vaughan Okie Paxton and Lilian Westcott
Hale, were better painters than their husbands. But Ms. Hirschler
points out that men and women painted in the same manner. Boston
artists, male and female, wanted beauty; they sought to represent
beautiful objects in the real world, to capture the transience of
light and shadow, the texture of silk and skin. They did not care for
violent emotion; they did not want modernism.
Elizabeth Paxton, many of whose works are lost, painted ravishing
still lifes of moments in time — a finished breakfast tray, a
bedroom with shoes and sheets in sensual dishabille. In "The
Mannequin," from around 1920, a wooden store model is draped in a silk
jacket almost identical to the jacket that the woman wears in William
Paxton's "New Necklace." Figurines and Chinese jars appear in both
paintings, too, but in "The Mannequin" they're jumbled together as if
in a shop, and a price tag dangles from the jacket. Mrs. Paxton's
wooden figure stands as wry commentary on the live model in Mr.
Paxton's luxurious interior — the estate sale, beautifully
rendered.
IN their self-portraits, however, Boston female artists did not seek
to make themselves beautiful. Elizabeth Paxton emphasizes her long
nose, somewhat receding chin and her muscular arm holding a paint
brush. What would her husband have done with her elegant neck,
luscious complexion, lustrous eyes?
Ellen Day Hale bursts like a harpy from a voluminous black cloak; she
catches the asymmetry of her face, her boy's cropped bangs, her
uncompromising eyes. Maria Danforth Page paints herself looming behind
a portrait of her husband; he sits in front of a mirror, so that she,
an apparition, paintbrush in hand, is context, he the subject.
These women were declaring themselves artists, emerging from their
womanly selves. They painted their quandary, but they did so
skillfully, elegantly and, to the larger world, with increasing
irrelevance. Paxton's "Mannequin," set against what was going on in
Europe and New York, seemed backward. In 1930, Katherine Lane Weems
cast meticulously realistic bronze rhinoceroses while Picasso was
making a bull's horns from bicycle handlebars.
Ms. Hirschler notes that those Boston painters interested in modernism
simply moved away from the city, which was easier for men to do. Some
women, like Gertrude Fiske, ventured to paint a landscape defined by
telephone poles or the tawdry carnival rides at Revere Beach. Boston
was too small a town, and the old ideals held. In 1939, Margaret
Fitzhugh Brown founded the Boston chapter of The Society for Sanity in
Art.
Today's postmodernism has abandoned a progressive, linear view of art,
and the works of these women can once again be valued on their own
terms. The Museum of Fine Arts show offers another powerful argument
against progress. The catalog begins with a quotation from the painter
Cecilia Beaux: "I predict a moment when the term `Women in Art' will
be as strange sounding a topic as the title `Men in Art' would be
now." Now was 1915. Even in 2001, a time of extraordinary opportunity
for women, the title "A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston
1870-1940" does not sound strange.
Deborah Weisgall writes from Boston about the arts.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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Science is not belief, but the will to find out.