autumn 2019 study programme women artists · became a prominent portrait artist with many...

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Autumn 2019 Study Programme Women Artists We began our study programme on Women Artists by watching a BBC documentary on The Story of Women in Art, which went from the Italian Renaissance to the Golden Age of Dutch Art. We have already studied some women artists during the course of other study programmes: Judith Leyster (1609-1660); Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755 – 1842); four female Impressionists; and three Newlyn women artists, so we were keen to investigate further (and we may return to this study area again in the future). The women artists we studied in 2019 were as follows Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807) was one of the most successful artists of her time and a founding member of the Royal Academy. She was born in Switzerland but raised in Italy, where her mother taught her to speak not only German and Italian but also English and French. She was a talented musician but had also been taught to paint by her artist father who soon recognised that she was a child prodigy. She chose art over music as a career and received further artistic training in Italy before travelling to London in 1766, where she helped to found the Royal Academy and enjoyed an unprecedented career as a history painter and portraitist. She moved to Rome in 1782 with her second husband, Antonio Zucchi, where her studio became a hub of the city’s cultural life. Kauffman’s career was unusual for a female artist in the late 18th and early 19th century. A highly acclaimed portraitist, she identified herself primarily as a history painter, working for patrons across Britain and the continent, including Catherine the Great. 1794 Self-portrait of the Artist hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting. (National Trust: Nostell Priory) 1770-75 Self portrait (NPG)

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Page 1: Autumn 2019 Study Programme Women Artists · became a prominent portrait artist with many distinguished commissions and exhibitions . She was the most famous female artist in the

Autumn 2019 Study Programme

Women Artists We began our study programme on Women Artists by watching a BBC documentary on The Story of Women in Art, which went from the Italian Renaissance to the Golden Age of Dutch Art. We have already studied some women artists during the course of other study programmes: Judith Leyster (1609-1660); Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755 – 1842); four female Impressionists; and three Newlyn women artists, so we were keen to investigate further (and we may return to this study area again in the future). The women artists we studied in 2019 were as follows Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807) was one of the most successful artists of her time and a founding member of the Royal Academy. She was born in Switzerland but raised in Italy, where her mother taught her to speak not only German and Italian but also English and French. She was a talented musician but had also been taught to paint by her artist father who soon recognised that she was a child prodigy. She chose art over music as a career and received further artistic training in Italy before travelling to London in 1766, where she helped to found the Royal Academy and enjoyed an unprecedented career as a history painter and portraitist. She moved to Rome in 1782 with her second husband, Antonio Zucchi, where her studio became a hub of the city’s cultural life. Kauffman’s career was unusual for a female artist in the late 18th and early 19th century. A highly acclaimed portraitist, she identified herself primarily as a history painter, working for patrons across Britain and the continent, including Catherine the Great.

1794 Self-portrait of the Artist hesitating between the Arts of

Music and Painting. (National Trust: Nostell Priory)

1770-75 Self portrait (NPG)

Page 2: Autumn 2019 Study Programme Women Artists · became a prominent portrait artist with many distinguished commissions and exhibitions . She was the most famous female artist in the

1764 David Garrick (Burghley House) 1767 Sir Joshua Reynolds (NT: Saltram House)

1772 Rinaldo & Armida (English Heritage,

Kenwood)

1774 (Penelope Sacrifices to Minerva for the safe return of her son, Telemachus ( NT: Stourhead)

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) Mary Cassatt was born into an affluent family in Pennsylvania in 1844. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and in 1865 Cassatt went to Paris to continue her studies. She attended classes in the studios of the academic artists Jean Léon Gérôme and Thomas Couture and also travelled widely in Europe studying and copying old master paintings. In 1874 she settled permanently in Paris, where her work was regularly shown at the Salon. The following year she saw the pastel work of Edgar Degas, a leading Impressionist in a gallery window. She became his friend and he admired her work. Cassatt was one of a relatively small number of American women to become professional artists in the nineteenth century when most women, particularly wealthy ones,

Page 3: Autumn 2019 Study Programme Women Artists · became a prominent portrait artist with many distinguished commissions and exhibitions . She was the most famous female artist in the

did not pursue a career. Apart from a period in the USA during the Franco-Prussian War, Cassatt spent her life in Paris and did not become famous in her own country until relatively late in her life. Most of her work deals with portraits of family members and mothers and children although she never married and had children of her own. In her later years she suffered with cataracts, which affected her work and eventually caused her to stop painting after 1914. She died in 1926 at Château de Beaufresne, near Paris.

1878 Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (National Gallery Of Art, Washington, D.C)

1880 Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child

(LA County Museum of Art)

1886 Child in a Straw Hat (Private collection)

Page 4: Autumn 2019 Study Programme Women Artists · became a prominent portrait artist with many distinguished commissions and exhibitions . She was the most famous female artist in the

1892 The Bath (The Art Institute of Chicago) 1902 Margot in Blue (The Walters Art Gallery,

Baltimore)

1908 Girl in Green (City Art Museum of St Louis, Missouri)

1914 Young Woman in Green, Outdoors in the Sun (Head of a Young Woman) Worcester Art Museum, MA.

Page 5: Autumn 2019 Study Programme Women Artists · became a prominent portrait artist with many distinguished commissions and exhibitions . She was the most famous female artist in the

Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) Cecilia Beaux was born in Philadelphia to a French father and an American mother who died when she was twelve days old. Her griefstricken father returned to France, leaving his two small daughters to be raised by their mother’s family. Beaux showed early talent and studied at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) from 1877–79, exhibiting there in her final year. In 1885, her work Les Derniers Jours d'Enfance aroused a good deal of critical attention and won a prize at PAFA. Two years later, it was accepted for the Salon in Paris and from 1888-9 Beaux studied at the Académie Julian, Paris. She also painted in Concarneau, Brittany and travelled in Italy. In the USA she was elected to Society of American Artists in 1893 and was the first woman to teach at PAFA (1895-1915). She exhibited in London and Paris and was awarded medals and prizes for her work. From 1899 she became a prominent portrait artist with many distinguished commissions and exhibitions. She was the most famous female artist in the USA, and achieved fame in London and mainland Europe too. Following a serious injury in 1924 she painted little, but in 1935 she was honoured with the largest lifetime exhibition at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died in Gloucester, MA in 1942.

1885 Les Derniers Jours d'Enfance (PAFA, Philadelphia)

1887 Portrait of Harold and Mildred Colton (PAFA, Philadelphia)

1894 Self Portrait

(National Academy of Design New York) 1898 Man with the Cat - Henry Sturgis Drinker

(Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC)

Page 6: Autumn 2019 Study Programme Women Artists · became a prominent portrait artist with many distinguished commissions and exhibitions . She was the most famous female artist in the

1902 Teddy Roosevelt (PAFA, Philadelphia) c 1905 Ernesta Drinker (Private Collection)

1920 Admiral Sir David Beatty

(Smithsonian American Art Museum DC) 1920 Georges Clemenceau

(Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC)

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter and member of the Mexican Communist Party, known for her numerous self-portraits, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, the human body and death. She suffered from severe physical and mental illness throughout her life and was married (twice) to the artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957). The marriage was unhappy and both parties were unfaithful. In the late 1930s she exhibited in New York and Paris, despite severe ill-

Page 7: Autumn 2019 Study Programme Women Artists · became a prominent portrait artist with many distinguished commissions and exhibitions . She was the most famous female artist in the

health and many hospital stays and operations in the late 1940s and early 1950s, she was productive However, she did not achieve a solo exhibition until 1953 in Mexico, which she was taken to see while bedridden. She died a year later, with the official cause of death being recorded as a pulmonary embolism.

1937 My Nurse and I

(Museo Dolores Olmedo. Mexico City) 1944 The Broken Column

(Museo Dolores Olmedo. Mexico City)

1935 A Few Small Nips

(Museo Dolores Olmedo. Mexico City) 1940 Self-Portrait with Necklace of Thorns

(Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX)

Page 8: Autumn 2019 Study Programme Women Artists · became a prominent portrait artist with many distinguished commissions and exhibitions . She was the most famous female artist in the

1949 The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth, Mexico, Myself, Diego and Senor Xolotl

(Frida Kahlo Museum, Mexico City)

1954 Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick (Frida Kahlo Museum, Mexico City)

Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was a French-born, American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, such as the Maman spiders, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to somewhat traumatic events from her childhood. She did not achieve real fame until she was in her early 70s in 1982 when there was a retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1983, she was named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture. Other honours included the Grand Prix National de Sculpture from the French government in 1991; the National Medal of Arts, presented to her by President Bill Clinton in 1997; the first lifetime achievement award from the International Sculpture Center in Washington; and election as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1993 she represented the United States in the Venice Biennale. A second international retrospective was organized by the Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2007 and travelled to New York, Los Angeles and Washington the following year. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte/Reina Sofia in Madrid and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg also mounted retrospectives. Although she exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement. She died following a heart attack at the age of 98.

Page 9: Autumn 2019 Study Programme Women Artists · became a prominent portrait artist with many distinguished commissions and exhibitions . She was the most famous female artist in the

1946 Femme Maison (MOMA, New York)

1947-49 The Blind leading the Blind (Detroit Institute of Arts Museum)

1968 Fillette

(MOMA, New York) 1974 The Destruction of the Father

(MOMA, New York)

1999 Maman

(Cast in bronze and installed at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, this is one of 6 installed in different places around the world).