Painting through the canvas ceiling: The Clark exults the triumphs of early British woman artist-activists
You can view more than 80 objets d’art, ranging from monumental paintings, woodcuts, and fine embroidery to stained glass, all direct from England, at Williamstown’s Clark Art Institute through Sept. 14.
During a press reception, the exhibit’s curator, Alexis Goodin, explained that the exhibit’s title “A Room of One’s Own” derives from a 1929 essay written by Virginia Woolf. This is also the eponymous title of the exhibit’s 288-page, full color companion catalogue, which the curator edited while also contributing a chapter (Yale University Press).
Regarding Woolf’s liberating work, Goodin said that the author “was quite nervous about the reception of the book, whether it would resonate with people, whether they would take it seriously.”
It has become the cornerstone of feminist literature and has never gone out of print. Woolf argued that women, to be truly free, must be independent of means and given full rein to explore their creativity.
That room could be either metaphorical or an actual refuge for contemplation or artistic advancement. Goodin explained that both Woolf and her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, “felt acutely that they didn’t have the same opportunities to engage in public, to learn the sciences, math and writing.”
Women of the Victorian era were raised under strict moral codes, the expectation being that motherhood and the domestic life was an end in itself. Both sisters were home schooled, and overall women weren’t encouraged to seek higher education.
When their parents passed on, Woolf and Bell would manage a more liberal household with new ideas and friendships ripened with visits from their brother’s colleagues at Oxford. A seismic movement was developing.
Around the year 1905, the sisters initiated informal weekly soirees of writers, artists and intellectuals, so named for its meetings in elegant Bloomsbury, west London. Among the members of the Bloomsbury Group were the economist John Maynard Keynes, the novelist E.M. Forster and the biographer Lytton Strachey.
They had no rigid doctrine, however, as Goodin noted that “there was an idea to do away with traditional structures.” There were complex relationships among the members and several of the men were openly gay, although at that time one could be arrested and jailed for the offense.
It’s considered that the group, which waned during the years of World War I, was extremely influential in modernizing literary and artistic standards.
If post-Victorian England was becoming more liberal, there remained mountains to summit. Many of the female artists of that era were avid suffragettes. It took three-quarters of a century of protest and campaigns for women to become voters. In 1918, Parliament passed a restrictive law allowing voting rights only to women over the age of 30 who owned households or property or were married to husbands who did. In a breakthrough, women could also be candidates for the House of Commons. Another decade would pass before women, aged 21, found full equity at the polls.
For talented women artists aspiring to receive academic training, for centuries there was a vanishing horizon.
“Most art schools, prior to 1860 were not as friendly to women students,” Goodin said. One person, however, the artist Laura Herford, threw a thunderbolt.
“She submitted her dossier to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1860 and used only her initials,” she said. The exclusively male institution was impressed with Herford’s talent and assumed the portfolio to be a man’s work.
Upon their surprise discovery they “grudgingly accepted” her as a student. By 1871, the prestigious Slade School, attended by several of the women exhibited here, also began accepting female students. There was, however, strict gender segregation.
“They were not involved in the same training as men because it involved the human figure posing, often nude,” Goodin explained. Instead, when female students were drawing from life, the models would be semi-clothed.
Over time, barriers collapsed. In 1936 the painter Dame Laura Knight became the first woman to be awarded full membership at The Royal Academy of Arts. She was the first woman to receive such distinction since the institution’s founding in 1768. Today some 40% of its members are women.
Goodin spent more than two years composing and detailing this unique exhibit of 25 artists. It required four trips to England for meetings with curators and scholars and hours poring through archives and museum storage facilities.
The show’s cynosure may well be a Mary Lowndes’ illuminated, stained glass triple panel, measuring some 20 square feet. Created in 1910, “The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple” is considered a monumental work, one of 100 projects she designed during her career. Of enormous energy, she partnered with Alfred Drury to form a cooperative, The Glass House, which provided studio space and instruction for beginning students.
Co-founding the Artists Suffrage League, during World War I she also organized a trade union for female munitions factory workers.
In another gallery, and from a later war, you’ll find an inspirational 1943 painting Knight created for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. Goodin explained that during the Second World War British women were not allowed to bear arms. Regarding the image “Balloon Site, Coventry,” Goodin said “It’s a very powerful painting … It shows women at work, very active and doing important work on the home front.”
Among the displays there is an assortment of the 50 Wedgewood ceramic dinner plates commissioned by the art historian Kenneth Clark in 1932. For “The Famous Women Dinner Service,” Bell and Duncan Grant painted rather cartoonish renderings of the well known, ranging from the actress Greta Garbo to Pocahontas and Cleopatra.
Nearby there are several complex embroideries, including one using intricate gold thread, created by May Morris, the daughter of the painter and designer William Morris. By age 23 she was the director of the embroidery department at her father’s business. Since women were banned from many all-male leagues, she formed The Women’s Guild of Arts and went on to edit her father’s 24 volumes of collected works.
There are also paintings from Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein), a woman born to wealth and whose oil studies could be virtually photographic. Her rendering of “Tulips,” found in the galleries, caught the eye of Queen Mary and is part of King Charles III’s Royal Collection. For more than a decade, the artist left her easel to successfully campaign for uniformity in the quality and color of artists’ paints and supplies.
Elizabeth Forbes excelled at pastoral scenes of children and contemplative atmospheres, and with her husband, founded The Newlyn Art School. The most eerily romantic of the paintings is a large work she created in 1900.
A hammered copper frame outlining oak branches displays “Will o’ the Wisp,” a painting based upon a fantastical poem by William Allingham. A young woman, stolen by fairies is held captive in the mountains for seven years. When she returns to her village, her friends have left and she is depicted in a mournful pose. Look closely and you find scurrying rodents and wee folk nearby. A mysterious, phosphorescent white mist softly blankets the scene.
This exhibit for many may be among the highlights of the summer season. It’s a testament to pioneering artists who endured formidable obstacles to become recognized for their brilliance.
“A Room of Her Own” continues through Sept. 14. Works by Berenice Abbott, Isamu Noguchi, Mariel Capanna and outdoor sculpture are also on display. The Clark is open daily in July and August, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $20; under age 18 and students are free.
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