AGO’s Making Her Mark exhibition reveals historical women’s art by breaking categories – The Globe and Mail Achi-News

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The new Making Her Mark exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario begins with a 53 year old question: “Why have there been no great female artists?” That was the title of a 1971 essay by the American art historian Linda Nochlin and the question still bedevils art museums today, whose historical collections are full of paintings and sculptures made almost entirely by men.

Nochlin helped organize a show of women artists at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1976; three years later, author Germaine Greer charted the domestic responsibilities and patriarchal professional structures that prevented women from painting The Obstacle Race. These exercises revealed some figures who are now highly praised, such as the Italian Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi; the 17th century Dutch painter Judith Leyster, whose work has sometimes been wrongly attributed to Frans Hals; and the 18th century French portraitist Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun.

These famous artists are not the point of Making Her Mark, which includes only one tiny Gentileschi, one Leyster self-portrait and a few fine examples of Vigée-LeBrun – among more than 230 objects exhibited by around 70 of different artists or communities. , some known, some anonymous.

Rather than looking for the exceptions, Making Her Mark considers all female artistic activity in Europe from 1400 to 1800. It offers paintings, many prints and a handful of sculptures, but disregards the traditional hierarchy of the so-called fine arts for the decorative arts. to include ceramics, silverware and textiles. It also largely ignores the distinction between professional artists and amateurs, including private domestic crafts and devotional handicrafts made in convents.

The exhibit was organized thematically, not chronologically, by AGO curator of prints and drawings Alexa Greist with Andaleeb Badiee Banta and Theresa Kutasz Christensen of the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it originated last year. It takes the year 1400 as a starting point because that is the beginning of the Western canon of named artists and it ends in 1800 because women began to be admitted to art academies in the 19th century. (Though the show notes that prohibitions against women’s participation before 1800 were not as insurmountable as is sometimes suggested.)

So what does all this offer the viewer who might be more interested in beautiful things and compelling stories than correcting historical wrongs? The rare objects in this large exhibition are often examples of the decorative arts. They are rare partly because textiles, paper and ceramics are more fragile than paintings and sculptures, and some pieces may have been used regularly in the home.

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The 18th century British fashion designer Anna Maria Garthwaite is represented not only by a spectacular dress with floral embroidery (from the collection of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Virginia), but also by a small scene of a manor house and garden that she made entirely. paper cut with a knife (on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London).

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Working as a freelancer for the Sèvres factory, early 19th century French porcelain artist Pauline Rifer de Courcelles, known as Madame Knip, was able to reproduce in detail the ornithological specimens she saw in the natural history museum in Paris : A vase with African birds and six plates from a series of South American birds are highlights among several sets of ceramics.

The show also includes samplers, those technical displays of a young woman’s best needlework. Here, a precise and graphical map of Europe stands out. It was stitched by a boarding school student named Elizabeth Hawkins in Britain in 1797. Nearby is a 300 year old crewelwork bed curtain embroidered with wool, silk and cotton. by MK Herbert, its exotic flowers and birds are as pleasing today as they must have been in 1692.

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The high point of these domestic pieces, often made by women for their own homes, is a wooden stand with a small cabinet on top. Both are decorated with paper filigree (or quill work): small cylinders of rolled paper that mimic the look of expensive wood inlay. It was created by Sophia Jane Maria Bonnell and her companion Mary Anne Harvey Bonnell in England around 1789, and is one of only seven surviving examples of paper filigree furniture in the world.

We know little about the makers if they were professionals: In many cases, widows took over the studios of artisan husbands (whose toxic professions often killed them young). In many countries widows were allowed to use their husband’s late money features and could get new ones of their own. But sometimes credit was not given: Making Her Mark, which includes a Hepplewhite chair, argues that the famous classical furniture style should be properly attributed to George Hepplewhite’s widow, Alice.

Much less is known about the private or domestic manufacturers: MK Herbert, for example, is now nothing more than a name. One can imagine that Christensen, the exhibition’s research assistant from Baltimore, did a lot of heavy lifting to track down buried histories.

The painters, competing in a male-dominated field where individual artists were celebrated, tend to be better known, and there are many fine paintings and drawings in this exhibition – as well as some that are not. so elegant. Flower paintings and portraits are most prominent, as women could not aim for religious or historical scenes higher in the genre hierarchy.

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Marie Victoire Lemoine’s 1785 Portrait of a Youth in an Embroidered Vest stands out as virtuous: a painting of an African boy in a satin jacket, probably a servant in a French household (whether enslaved or free), rendered with impressive sensitivity to skin tones, physiognomy and character. Similarly, a small portrait by Susannah-Penelope Rosse of Nell Gwyn – actress, wit and mistress to Charles II of Britain – shows a face that bounces out of history. Meanwhile, the pencil drawings of women painting or sewing by Fanny Guillaume de Bassoncourt are remarkable for their almost obsessive linear detail.

The nudity is rare, as women were not allowed to study life drawing, hindering their progress in what is known, not coincidentally, as draughtsmanship. Among the rarest things in this show are three chalk drawings of nudes, two of them male, by the Italian artist Giulia Lama (who received commissions for large-scale historical and religious work). Their treatment of muscles reveals that Lama somehow gains access to living models, and the sketches are the only known examples of male nudes drawn from life attributable to a woman named before 1800. Meanwhile, a self-portrait by Anne Guéret from 1793 showing her depiction of a nude angel also suggests cracks in the presumptive exclusion .

However, most women did not attend life drawing classes, and one sometimes senses a lack. Federation of Galicia Judith with the Head of Holofernes from 1596 is a static thing: The didactic panel indicates that the quiet, jeweled Judith is contrary to the violence of her action. What is missing is the comparison with Gentileschi’s dramatic treatment of the same subject, a painting at the Detroit Institute of Arts that was on view in Baltimore but could not make it to Toronto. If you compare the two in the catalog, you can see why Gentileschi remains the most famous female artist of the Italian Renaissance.

Next to the Galizia Amalia von Königsmarck is almost laughable Allegory with Self Portrait and Profile Portrait of Ulrika Eleonora the Elder: The queen of Sweden and two allegorical figures all seem to share the same face as the artist himself. The exhibition ends with far more convincing self-portraits – a smiling Leyster leaning back from her happy work in 1630; Guéret composed turns from his sketch – as he records female artists claiming professional recognition by showing themselves with the tools of their trade.

Of course, the singular celebrity they understand is a male construct. The main message in Making Her Mark is that you have to look at the categories from a different angle to discover all kinds of women making all kinds of art.

Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe 1400-1800 continues at the Art Gallery of Ontario until July 1.

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