The Story of Art Without Men

by Katy Hessel

Sea bears striking similarities with Klimt’s famous The Kiss, 1907, made five years later. Klimt would have seen these works (Waerndorfer was a prominent collector of his) – and yet . . . has Macdonald Mackintosh’s name ever been mentioned in reference to Klimt?

Striding into modernity, Paris at the end of the nineteenth century was a place of radical development. Transformed by architect Haussmann’s spectacular renovation (known as ‘Haussmannisation’), streets were enlarged to become sprawling boulevards, and cafés, parks and exhibition spaces sprang up all over the city. A new artistic capital of the Western world had emerged. This followed a time of extensive social change, brought about by the 1848 French Revolution, the Franco-Prussian War and the emergence of the Third Republic in 1870.

‘I don’t think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal and that’s all I would have asked for – I know I am worth as much as they’ — Berthe Morisot, 1890

Making use of her access to upper-class women, Morisot captured vividly and intimately their private worlds, lamenting their lack of independence but also celebrating their small freedoms. The only female participant in the first 1874 Impressionist exhibition, Morisot enjoyed a flourishing career and showed her work in all but one of their eight exhibitions between 1874 and 1886 (her only absence due to illness following the birth of her daughter). She was praised for her quick, feathery, at times rough, brushstrokes as well as for her subjects, which ranged from family life to the fashionable bourgeoisie. One of her finest examples of the latter is, I think, Reclining Woman in Grey, 1879, an unfinished-looking canvas with raw, bare edges acting to draw us into a sea of almost uncontrollable white and silvery splinter-like shapes. Although we meet this woman in an interior scene, the warmth and radiance of her lively expression hints at the increasing confidence and independence of a modern woman.

Born into an upper-middle-class Parisian family, Morisot, along with her sister Edma, showed great artistic skill from an early age, and they were encouraged by their parents, who hired the foremost tutors for them. One tutor, stunned (and shocked) by the sisters’ talent, reported: ‘Your daughters have such inclinations that my teaching will not give them merely the talent of pleasing; they will become painters. Do you know what this means? In your environment this will be a revolution if not a catastrophe.’

The American-born artist Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) was the only non-European associated with the core Impressionists. Showing her work at four of the eight Impressionist exhibitions (the first in 1879), Cassatt was one of the group’s leading figures. A Japanese print exhibition at the École des Beaux-Arts, which she attended in 1890, would prove a great influence on her art in its everyday subject matter, vibrant colours and flat-planed forms. Fortunate in having a supportive mother who accompanied her on her trips to Europe and encouraged her to pursue an artistic career, Cassatt studied in Pennsylvania and arrived in Paris in 1866. Escaping to the French capital was popular among American women artists; the city offered them vast opportunities compared to the strictures of home. Out of the 1,000 or so American artists living there at that time, one-third were thought to be women. Working in a distinctly loose, gestural style (one contemporary commentator noted her portraits were a ‘symphony of colour’), Cassatt painted charming, intimate scenes featuring children and women of all ages caught in the moment: mothers teaching their daughters to read or sew; a pre-adolescent girl immersed in her book or gazing lovingly at her dog. Like Morisot, she gives us a glimpse of the private worlds of women but, I find, in particular she emphasised women’s intellect and learning.

Cassatt and Morisot were instrumental in the development of Impressionism, but their triumphs cannot be separated from the familial financial stability that allowed them the opportunity to pursue such successful careers. Their contemporary Marie Bracquemond (1840–1916), on the other hand, was born into a working-class family, and would go on to depend on her engraver husband for income. For the most part self-trained, Bracquemond nonetheless managed to exhibit at the Paris Salon when she was sixteen. From the late 1870s, she embraced styles and subjects synonymous with the Impressionists, often painting en plein air. A favourite painting of mine is Trois femmes aux ombrelles (Three women with parasols), 1880. Striding out into what seems like an early-spring day, in a scene saturated with shimmering colour, these three women feel liberated and untrammelled by societal restrictions, the outdoor setting reflecting their freedom. This is a work that celebrates the joy, independence and friendships of modern Parisian women, something Bracquemond no doubt would have longed for, constrained as she was by her domineering and demanding husband. He so detested her expressive style (despite her success at three Impressionist exhibitions) that he withdrew all emotional and financial support, resulting in Bracquemond, by 1890, giving up art entirely.

Change was afoot. Women now had access to the most prestigious schools of the day and, finally, the life room. The undeniable irony is that as soon as this happened, the most popular subjects depicted switched from momentous, grand historical scenes to images of daily life. Subjects that women had been painting for centuries.

Like so many women artists, Claudel has often been overshadowed by her male lover. Despite her influence on Rodin, critics continued to position her as his follower.

Unfortunately, with her limited finances, Modersohn-Becker was back in Worpswede by 1907. She gave birth the following November to a daughter, Mathilde, but due to complications she died just a few weeks later, aged thirty-one. She never achieved recognition in her lifetime – she had sold just a handful of paintings, yet left behind hundreds.

Although she died on the cusp of its moment, scholars have since viewed Modersohn-Becker as an exponent of German Expressionism – a style, as we will discover in the following chapter, which favoured emotion over rigid narrative-led academicism (as Modersohn-Becker wrote, ‘Personal feeling is the main thing

Subtle stoicism and strength are also present in the self-portraits of Pan Yuliang (1895–1977), who is now hailed as one of China’s most notable female painters. She left behind over 4,000 works and enjoyed a seven-decade career.

Orphaned as a child, Pan is thought to have been left in the hands of an uncle, who, when struck by poverty, sold her into a brothel. Marrying around 1912–13, Pan migrated to Shanghai where she learnt to paint. The 1911 Revolution had brought about major societal change and new ideas were reshaping the country – included in this was the embrace of Western-style painting. In 1920 she enrolled at the Shanghai Arts Academy in the Western Art Department, where she would later teach. After a brief stint in Lyon, Paris and Rome in the 1920s, she returned to Shanghai in 1928, earning great success with art critics, who praised her ‘powerful brushstroke’. But in 1937 Pan left for Paris and, caught in the upheaval of the Second World War, she was never to return to China again. In Paris she continued her practice, creating an array of strong portraits, self-portraits and nudes (mostly modelled on herself), often inspired by the aesthetics of her Chinese heritage – using calligraphic lines or depicting subjects in traditional dress. Full of psychological intensity, Pan’s self-portraits can carry deeper, melancholic messages, an example being Self-Portrait in Red, c.1940.

Expressionism emerged in Germany around 1905. Artists (along with writers, poets, musicians and playwrights) abandoned all sense of realism and tradition. They turned to introspection and emotions, and were led by their internal worlds for inspiration. If Modersohn-Becker (p. 123) was the precursor to German Expressionism, then Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) was its pioneer. Working since the 1890s, Kollwitz produced some of the most extraordinary art of the entire century.

Primarily a printmaker, Kollwitz took psychological intensity to new heights with her often stark portrayals of the grief-stricken

Depicting mothers and children wrenched apart by death; individuals filled with anguish and in mourning; poverty, love, hatred and war ‒ Kollwitz’s compassionate images reveal the grim rawness of reality observed through a deeply sensitive lens. Socially conscious and created with acute feeling (she once wrote, ‘I agree with ...

Kollwitz was deemed radical because of her subject matter. Documenting the working classes and the unemployed, she was a master at capturing the emotive intensity of her subjects’ vulnerabilities and their experience of hardship. This is most brutally portrayed in Need, 1893–7, a lithograph of a dark, cramped room, featuring what appears to be a mother in despair. Watched intently by others, she grasps her head in her hands while looking over at her sleeping baby, her agony almost palpable. A few years later, Kollwitz made what is, to me, one of the most jarring, and perhaps shocking, images in the history of art, the etching Woman with Dead Child, 1903. The grief of the mother clinging tightly to her dead infant, her head buried in the child’s body, is so powerfully conveyed. Her emotions are so strong, so raw, so intense, that you can almost hear her cries and feel her tears sink into the skeletal, sculptural corpse.

Responding to the, in her words, ‘unspeakably difficult years’ of the First World War, between 1918 and 1923 Kollwitz worked on Krieg (War), a series no doubt shaped by autobiographical experiences. (She lost her youngest son in battle in 1914.) Employing a woodblock technique, Kollwitz adapted her classical style to produce opaque and exaggerated forms. The Widow II, 1922, depicts a mother catching her last breaths of life, a child, executed with barely a few lines, flung across her dying body.

As Expressionism progressed in Germany in the early 1900s, artists also began capturing the intensity of a subject by distorting conventional colouring (which they believed to have spiritual, symbolic meanings), as well as looking to the natural world. These artists were often associated with the group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), formed in Munich in 1911, one of whose leading figures was Gabriele Münter (1877–1962). Münter first started these experimentations with colour after a visit to the alpine market town of Murnau, in rural Bavaria, in 1908. Inspired by her surroundings, her painting suddenly shifted from subdued landscapes to hallucinogenic realms.

As time went on, Marval’s style loosened, with subjects ranging from sprawling bouquets to women bathing in dappled sunlit scenes. Internationally renowned, exhibiting in London, Prague and Tokyo, she also took part in 1913 in the groundbreaking Armory Show in New York City, the first exhibition to propel European Modernism to the other side of the Atlantic, and in 1919 exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Starting out in porcelain painting, then shifting to pictorially flat figures, from the 1910s she began working in a Cubist-like aesthetic: a new style that rejected all forms of perspective and traditional representation. Unlike her male counterparts (representing what some called the ‘arrogant masculinity of Cubism’), Laurencin evolved her own distinct language.

Sometimes painting from a queer perspective (Laurencin had both male and female lovers), she enriched the Cubist vocabulary with a new tradition of sexual desire, as seen in Les Jeunes Filles (The Young Girls), 1910. The elongated, ethereal women depicted as simplistic curvilinear figures, are set against angular green and grey trees, bound together by music and dance, rhythm and form, suggesting a world full of freedom.

In Russia, Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) was becoming the most successful artist of the era, having been in 1913 the first avant-garde artist (of any gender) to achieve a major exhibition at a Moscow museum (showing over 800 works).

‘Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that suits me’ — Claude Cahun, 1930

In the early decades of the twentieth century, ideas around gender types became the subject of much fascination. Representations of queerness and same-sex desire flourished, with artists using their own image to assert nuanced identities that didn’t fit into society’s rigid binary gender categories. Shaving their heads and wearing trouser suits, some women artists would also go on to change their names to masculine or gender-nonconforming ones, signalling the identity they had chosen for themselves. Poets Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley took the single name of Michael Field; Marjorie Moss became Marlow Moss; Hannah Gluckstein became Gluck; Lucy Schwob became Claude Cahun.

Although there are many examples of queer artists throughout this book (Rosa Bonheur, Marie Laurencin, Hannah Höch, to name a few), here I want to spotlight artists working at the height of the European avant-garde who explicitly used their work to make bold statements about same-sex desire: declarations mostly suppressed or ignored in art history. It’s not that I believe their work should be viewed exclusively through a queer lens, for they were, of course, simply great artists. I use the word ‘queer’ for its inclusive connotations, and, in line with recent discourse, I have also referred to some artists as ‘them/they’.

love this bc queer artists gave me pause - im just an artist

Female homosexuality, by contrast, was hardly ever mentioned. In 1921, when a Conservative MP suggested in Parliament that all ‘acts of gross indecency by females’ should be made illegal, the idea was swiftly dismissed for fear the very mention of such acts should lead women astray. Female homosexuality was not unlawful, but it was rather invisible.

One of the first visibly Sapphic statements in Western art, this revolutionary double portrait (supposedly inspired by a night at the opera) presents Gluck and Nesta side by side in profile, bound together by their love, with Nesta’s golden hair framing Gluck’s like a halo. Although they are united, there is a remoteness to them. Gluck, who is closer to us, appears tense. Nesta, looking upwards and into the distance, is bathed in a celestial light, as if untouchable, with Gluck attempting to hold on to her.

jfc

Known as a haven for queer artists, writers and thinkers in particular, Paris was the setting for a queer community of mostly upper-class women, including art patron Gertrude Stein and writer Natalie Clifford Barney. Barney, famed for her weekly salons, would enter into a fifty-year relationship with American painter Romaine Brooks (1874–1970).

Cahun used performance to allude to their many selves and alter egos, and refused to conform to society’s gender binaries. In their words: ‘Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.’

In the aftermath of the First World War, Europe was scarred by political chaos and the horrors that had been witnessed by so many. Millions had been killed, even more wounded, and artists turned to the imagination and the absurd for relief. So ‘Dada’ was born, an art that refused to define itself (and in the words of its founder, Tristan Tzara, meant ‘nothing’). It was more of a philosophy than an actual style, and the artists associated with it were ardently political. Protesting the establishment, they injected their work with dark humour and satire, no doubt as a way of dealing with the madness of the time.

Hannah Höch (1889–1978), in my opinion, was the most important Berlin Dada artist. She adopted a distinct feminist and queer stance in her art, and reacted to the time through satirical photomontages. She engaged with contemporary social and political issues and shone a light on the oppression of women. Her inventive (and brilliantly punchy) visual language spliced together images and text from journals, newspapers and fashion magazines, and gave a voice to those so often dismissed.

To bring the whole picture together – as if she were the key cog in the machine – Höch places the head of artist Käthe Kollwitz (p. 130) at its centre, atop a dancing body, perhaps to highlight the strength of women.

Although their male contemporary Marcel Duchamp is often credited with inventing the ‘readymade’ (after all, he coined the art-historical term), there are those who claim that he was in fact predated by a woman: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927), who experimented with found objects and assemblages. According to her friend Jane Heap, editor of the Little Review, she was ‘the only one living anywhere who dresses Dada, loves Dada, lives Dada’. Born fifteen years prior to Höch and Taeuber-Arp, by the turn of the century the Baroness had already endured a most eventful life. Raised in a tumultuous household in Prussia, from which she ran away to join the European avant-garde, she helped her husband fake his death and arrived in America in 1910. Making her way to New York City – which was soon to become the artistic centre of the Western world – she married her third (and final) husband, a cash-stricken Baron (hence her title), and, to make ends meet, modelled for Man Ray. She attended salons and befriended Duchamp, who was enraptured by her poetry recitals, fractured lines assembled from slogans, known as ‘ready-made poems’. He once said of her: ‘[The Baroness] is not a Futurist. She is the future.’

Often seeking to shock and provoke, Freytag-Loringhoven wandered the streets wearing little but a blanket, tinned tomato cans tied together with string around her chest, hats adorned with gilded carrots and other vegetables (or sometimes spoons), and stamps on her cheeks. She saw these items (often junk on the street) as ‘wearable art’. With a shaved head and penchant for cross-dressing, she defied gender conventions and refused to conform to societal expectations.

Ever heard of Duchamp’s Fountain, from 1917, one of the most famous works of art (some might say an icon of twentieth century art), which helped kick-start modern art? After the ‘readymade’ (signed under the pseudonym ‘R. Mutt’) had been scandalously rejected by the Society of Independent Artists (an organisation which prized itself on progressiveness), Duchamp penned a rather telling letter to his sister Suzanne, writing: ‘One of my female friends, under a masculine pseudonym Richard Mutt (or R. Mutt), sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.’

I’ll leave it up to you to decide, but the Baroness’s exclusion from art history strikes me as utterly unjust (considering she was making ‘junk sculptures’ before Duchamp). No wonder she called him ‘Marcel Dushit’.

I have always wanted to be just a pair of eyes, walking through the world unseen, only to see others’ — Jeanne Mammen, 1975

It was now finally acceptable for them to roam the German streets unchaperoned. The New Woman was born. She was provocative and androgynous, dancing in nightclubs or performing in cabarets,

Although short-lived due to the rise of Nazism, this period redefined what had been German artistic identity, energising the art world and producing some of the greatest, most forward-thinking works of the early twentieth century. With her cropped hair and trouser suits, Jeanne Mammen (1890–1976) epitomised the modern woman, embracing same-sex desire in her vibrant Berlin nightclub scenes. Successful, radical and a cunning observer of the day (regularly publishing her satirical drawings in magazines), she depicted women who were bold, glamorous, sensual and free, and her images erupt with colour, rhythm and movement: you can almost sense the pounding music in her jazz-fuelled scenes.

Transporting us to hectic, lively nights, Mammen nevertheless also conveys the gritty reality of Weimar life in her paintings of prostitutes getting ready for work under an electrically lit midnight sky.

The Nazis seized more than 15,000 works and, in 1937, staged two ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibitions in Munich, featuring the likes of Mammen, Laserstein, Modersohn-Becker and Höch. Although the exhibitions were staged to explicitly mock these artists, what they did in fact was to put on public view some of the most revolutionary works in history. Works that spoke truth to both the freedom and tumult and of the age, and captured women in their modern and triumphant glory: accepted, liberated and encapsulating freedom.

One of the most influential and radical art and design schools to emerge during the Weimar era was the Bauhaus (‘building house’ in English). Bauhaus stripped out expressive artistry, enforcing function over form.

But although it prided itself on offering a wide-ranging education and eliminating hierarchies across subjects and media, the school was far from equal. While men were free to experiment, women were mostly shut away in the weaving and bookbinding workshops.

Gertrud Arndt (1903–2000) first joined the Bauhaus to study architecture. However, the hostility of her male peers made this unsustainable, so she reluctantly enrolled for the weaving course, in which she excelled.

Of course the women were important, but it was because they were our muses. They weren’t artists’ – so claimed Roland Penrose, husband of Lee Miller, to legendary feminist Whitney Chadwick, during her visit to his home in the 1980s. When Chadwick later asked artist Leonora Carrington for her thoughts on the Surrealist muse, she replied, ‘I thought it was bullshit. I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse … I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.’

Building on the anti-establishment notions of Dada, in the wake of the political crises and traumas of the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the fear of encroaching fascism across Europe, the artists, writers and thinkers of the Surrealist movement rejected ideas of conventionality and were drawn to the subconscious. They placed emphasis on the power of dreams and the dislocated imagery found in their fantasies or nightmares, engaging in the brutality of the body, in part influenced by the return of missing-limbed veterans from the front lines. Using new methods of working, from Automatism (creating ‘without conscious thought’), which derived from Spiritualism, to collage and photomontage, the Surrealists combined pictures of the real world with those in the depths of our minds.

However, as Carrington’s punchy ‘bullshit’ statement informs us, being seen as a muse was not something these strong-willed women intended to settle for, despite the gatekeepers of art history so often writing it that way.

Women’s role in Surrealism is a powerful, inventive and fascinating one. They switched up the eroticised portrayal of their own bodies by turning their gaze back onto themselves. They looked to represent liberation and oppression, imagination and transformation, as well as magical and sensual qualities in their work. In their depictions of dreamscapes, landscapes and frequently claustrophobic architectural interiors, they showed women as strong, dominating and free.

Motivated by her strong leftist beliefs, she ventured to the outskirts of Paris, London and Barcelona with a hand-held camera (very rare for a woman at that time) and captured subjects ranging from pearly queens to butchers and blind street peddlers in images now considered some of the earliest examples of ‘street photography’. Maar always saw the extraordinary in the mundane, even though she often infused it with a slightly strange, slightly gothic, uncanny atmosphere.