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Mary Ann Caws – Anne Reynes Delobel,
Glo-rieuses modernistes. Art, écriture et
moderni-té au féminin.
Anke Gilleir
When Dora Carrington died in 1932, one of the portraits she painted of the writer Lytton Strachey was of-fered to the National Gallery, where it was declined, “probably because the painter was a woman.” This causal remark in the biographical picture of the British painter from the book Glorieuses modernistes by Mary Ann Caws and Anne Reynes-Delobel, even if only indicated as “probable”, sounds more than familiar to anyone who has dealt with the history of women writers and artists in Western culture. In their 1981 seminal study
Old Mistresses. Women, Art and Ideology Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker revealed the deeply ingrained
gendered prejudices of art history. Both the history of artistic practice as its historical recordings wielded a rhetoric and ideology that claimed the fundamental incompatibility of femininity and creativity. Thus the field of art production did not differ that much from the structures of ‘common’ social life from which it singled itself out since the beginning of modernity. In the introduction to the new edition of Old Mistresses some thirty years later, Griselda Pollock points out the unchanged need for inclusive approaches to art. Not in order to enlarge the pantheon of great artists, but to fathom the gendered language, norms and procedures that structure the discipline and practice of art today still. Mutatis mutandis the same can be said about the literary canon, which was little affected by the sequence of emancipatory buzzwords that popped up in literary studies over the last decades.
So, well-documented studies about the work of women writers and artists, the conditions in which they created, the positions they negotiated, and most of all their artistic language remain a desideratum. May Ann Caws’ and Anne Reynes-Delobel’s collaborative book Glorieuses modernistes. Art, écriture et modernité auf
féminin is in many ways a contribution to this fundamental issue in the mechanisms of human culture. It
contains a collection of nine biographically structured essays that offer a survey of the life and work of nine women artists and writers from the modernist period, each of them labeled “glorieuses modernistes” (glorious modernists). In their introduction the authors use the word “créatrices” to reinforce the transdisciplinary and often transgressive positions these women took up in the field of cultural production of their time, in spite of the great differences between them. The phrase “bien étonnés de se trouver ensemble” does come to mind when consecutively reading the portraits of writer Judith Gautier (1845-1917), painter Suzanne Valadon
(1865-Glorieuses modernistes. Art, écriture et modernité au féminin.
Mary Ann Caws – Anne Reynes Delobel
Liège : Presses Universitaires de Liège 2015, 224 p. (Littératures 2) ISBN: 978-2875620811
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1938), Gide translator and writer Dorothy Bussy (1865-1960), the Canadian landscape painter Emily Carr (1871-1945), German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907), dance reformer Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), Bloomsbury painter Dora Carrington (1893-1932), surrealist photographer Claude Cahun (1894-1954), and the American writer Kay Boyle (1902-1992). At the outset the authors meet this objection by pointing out that their selection was informed by former research, preferences and even a degree of coincidence (“serendi-pity”), yet insist that all their historical subjects nonetheless possessed a truly modernist attitude in the “origi-nal and radical mode of the relationship with their time”. Instead of a theoretical discussion on where and how exactly the dates of modernism are to be set, this book works bottom-up from a broad range of texts and works produced by women writers and artist who positioned themselves in a world that boldly recast the value laden concepts of tradition. Indeed, if one aspect of European modernism is depicted convincingly throughout the diverse portraits (with the exception of Emily Carr, whose life-long fascination with the Canadian landscape and social seclusion make her an awkward appearance among the “glorieuses modernistes”), it is the uncom-promising vitality and nonconformity of artistic life and performance around the turn of the century, in parti-cular in its then world capital Paris. It was this Mecca for aesthetic experiment, social freedom and financial patronage modernists from the entire planet either looked up at or flocked to, that equally attracted the women from this gallery and in many cases played a key role in their artistic careers. Judith Gautier, Suzanne Valadon, and Claude Cahun were there at the outset, for artists like Paula Modersohn-Becker, Isadora Duncan or Kay Boyle Paris was the place to be inspired and to cast off (gendered) role patterns they had been socialized with. Sometimes only for a short period of time, as in the case of Modersohn-Bekcer, but the experience of the city could equally be at the root of a life-long activism, as in the case of Kay Boyle. “Art, écriture et modernité au féminin” also reveals the transnational character of European modernism. Though not connected in any biographical way, each of the portraits witnesses how in the flow of artistic creativity and mediation national boundaries were transgressed in an almost self-evident gesture: Judith Gaultier translates Wagner, Isadora Duncan moves across the European continent in search of a new aesthetics of movement, Modersohn-Becker becomes a pupil of Rodin, Bussy settles in the South of France and dedicates her life to the translation of Andre Gide, Carr sets out to retrace the indigenous cultures of North America. The wealth of documentary material used in this book shows women artist who indeed seem to have possessed “une authentique désir de collaborer avec le monde”. The case of a “modernité au féminin” extends the notion of art to include a variety of autobiographical texts that can be read as forms of self-representation, which, as the authors argue, “font prevue d’une énergie créatrice et d’une excentricité héroïque qui forcent l’admiration et demandent notre at-tention”. In order to encourage further research, the book concludes with a list of bibliographical references to primary sources (including translations), archives and research literature for every artist and writer.
In spite of the rich material and the intense documentation of the vicissitudes of European modernism in which these women participated (I certainly learned a lot), Glorieuses modernists is also somewhat dispropor-tionate looked at from various angles. Without entering the discussion as to why some artists were included and not others, some portraits are more extended and profound than others. Whereas Suzanne Valadon is evoked both as an artist and persona in ways that help understand her work, the chapters on Dorothy Bussy and Dora Carrington, however, are almost entirely devoted to the complex relationships that consumed their lives, not to their creative singularity beyond. The chapter on Paula Modersohn-Becker’s difficult struggle for artistic autonomy contains little information that sheds new light on her work or person. There is some
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irony to the fact that the last pages of the short text most of all deal with Rainer Maria Rilke’s requiem of Modersohn-Becker, whose early death fascinated him more than the living artist. As a reader I found myself frequently entangled in the webs of erotic, emotional, or otherwise personal relationships that no doubt had great impact on these women artists, but that overshadow the exploration of their cultural production. I could not help but think of Griselda Pollock’s conclusion that documentaries on women artists almost always focus their private lives, sexuality and possibly the tragedies they lived through in ways that would be unimaginable for male artists. Art and literature need not be looked at in purely formalist manners, but in the case of women, the lack of theoretical or methodological reflection can amount to a setback in a redrawing of cultural history that first and foremost wants to analyze women’s work instead of their roles as feminine subjects. The subtitle of the chapter on Judith Gautier, “muse orientale”, is somewhat symptomatic in this sense. Glorieuses
moder-nistes is in many ways a highly interesting document on European modernism, from a certain feminist angle,
it leaves things to be desired.
Anke Gilleir is professor of German literature at the University of Leuven and member of the MDRN
re-search group (www.mdern.be) Email: anke.gilleir@kuleuven.be
