On the Cover
Rosemarie Beck
House of Venus (1994)
oil on linen, 60" x 52".
Hood Museum, Dartmouth College.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ONE POINT PERSPECTIVE
By Elsa Honig Fine
PORTRAITS
Rosemarie Beck
By Martica Sawin
Janet Sobel: Primitivist, Surrealist, and Abstract Expressionist
By Gail Levin
Jacqueline Jackson: Art as a Spiritual Unfoldment
By Sandra Hamilton-Hohf
Maryann Webster: Motherboards, Mutant Gardens, and the Human Condition
By Shelly Ezzard Smith
Anita Berber: Imaging A Weimar Performance Artist
By Susan Laikin Funkenstein
ISSUES AND INSIGHTS
The American Girls’ Club in Paris: The Propriety and Imprudence of Art Students, 1890-1914
By Mariea Caudill Dennison
Christina of Sweden’s Patronage of Bernini: The Mirror of Truth Revealed by Time
By Lilian H. Zirpolo
REVIEWS
The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars
edited by Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer
Reviewed by Ute L. Tellini
Marie Laurencin: Une Femme Inadaptée in Feminist Histories of Art
by Elizabeth Louise Kahn
Reviewed by Heather McPherson
A Life of Creation: An Autobiography
by Charlotte Perriand
Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living
edited by Mary McLeod
Reviewed by Anna Novakov
Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo’s Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation
by Gannit Ankori
“My Grandparents, My Parents and I”
curated by Gannit Ankori
Frida Kahlo’s Diary
translated into Hebrew by Gannit Ankori
Reviewed by Salomon Grimberg
Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective
edited by Elizabeth A. T. Smith
Reviewed by Virginia Pitts Rembert
Sarah McEneaney
edited by Ingrid Schaffner
Reviewed by Robin Rice
Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell
by Jane Golden, Robin Rice, and Monica Yant Kinney
Reviewed by Judith E. Stein
Contemporary Arab Women’s Art: Dialogues of the Present
edited by Fran Lloyd
Reviewed by Linnea S. Dietrich
Feminine Fables: Imaging the Indian Woman in Painting, Photography and Cinema
by Geeti Sen
Reviewed by Sarita K. Heer
The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader
edited by Amelia Jones
Reviewed by Cassandra Langer
Feminism-Art-Theory, An Anthology 1968-2000
edited by Hilary Robinson
Reviewed by Marilynn Lincoln Board
An artist once told me that her greatest fear was that her work would be forgotten once she was no longer here to represent it. Every artist, living or not, needs a champion, or a Boswell, to write her life, to place her work. Sometimes the heirs or executors of the artist’s estate can hinder the process. They may be greedy, charging exorbitant fees for reproduction rights, or overprotective of the artist’s (and family’s) reputation. The latter is the case with Marie Laurencin, whose family has censored her papers and refused requests for direct quotations from them, according to Heather McPherson in her review of Elizabeth Kahn’s biography of the artist. The biography focuses on Laurencin’s artistic and sexual identity while trying to dispel the myths perpetuated by Apollinaire’s extravagant praise.
Janet Sobel (1894-1968), Rosemarie Beck (1923-2003), Jacqueline Jackson (b. 1916), and Maryann Webster (b. 1947) are fortunate to have found champions––in Gail Levin, Martica Sawin, Sandra Hamilton-Hohf, and Shelly Smith, respectively. Researching and writing an article for WAJ is demanding work, requiring commitment and devotion, as the authors work without remuneration and often are pushed through several revisions.
Levin has carefully documented the life and work of Janet Sobel, whose “meteoric fame was as remarkable as her subsequent obscurity was undeserved.” A naïve artist, she was championed by, among others, Clement Greenberg, who cited Sobel’s “all-over” paintings from the early forties as an influence on Jackson Pollock.
Sawin’s article evolved from an essay she wrote for Rosemarie Beck’s recent traveling retrospective. Coming of age as an artist during the mid forties, Beck was first drawn to abstract art, but became “one of the foremost contemporary representational painters during the zenith of Abstract Expressionism. The very painterly House of Venus (1994), on the cover, encapsulates Beck’s various interests: still life, music, art history, and crowded, ambiguous space.
Oregon-based Hamilton-Hohf writes that Jacqueline Jackson’s primary focus is the Oregon landscape. Jackson’s early works are “interpretive” rather than “descriptive,” and during the last several decades she has developed a “spontaneous abstract style.” Although her work is regional (and well known there), it is not provincial; she represents the kind of overlooked artist that WAJ was created to document.
Also well known in her region, Utah artist Maryanne Webster operates in the intersection between art and technology. Her ceramic, Giottoesque mother-and-child images unnerve viewers when they discover the radiation symbols, computer circuitry, or genetically altered creatures embedded in these traditional-looking religious icons. Author Shelly Smith reports that Webster’s goal is to alert viewers “about the effects of computer and biotechnologies on the environment, culture, and the human condition.”
Although born almost three centuries apart, Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-89) and Anita Berber (1899-1929) were both maligned by their early biographers. Both defied the expectations for women of their time and class, and their improprieties rather than their accomplishments are still highlighted. Christina, an intellectual, chose not to marry and was accused of being both a hermaphrodite and a seducer of men. Lilian Zirpolo highlights Christina’s previously ignored patronage activities, especially of Bernini, focusing and placing in context her commission for the mirror “Truth Revealed by Time.”
Berber, a Weimar performance artist and (mostly nude) dancer, had three husbands, lovers of both genders, and a drug habit. Susan Funkenstein focuses on Otto Dix's 1925 “portrait in red” of Berber, which “epitomizes sexuality constructed as an artifice.” Funkenstein examines Berber’s films, writings, and publicity photos as well as reviews of her work, and suggests how recent trends in performance art are rooted in her erotic theatricality. Like many articles submitted to WAJ, Funkenstein’s on Berber was reshaped from a section of her dissertation.
To protect young American art students from the temptations of fin-de-siècle Paris, the expatriate Protestant community opened the American Girls Club of Paris in 1893. (Its doors closed at the beginning of World War I.) The scandalous behavior of these young students was reported in women’s and art magazines, and even in the New York Times. The club, writes Mariea Dennison, “encouraged moral rectitude” and was perceived as a “counterforce” to the rampant bohemianism of the young. Dennison reports on the club’s activities, including the formation of its exhibiting arm, the American Woman’s Art Association of Paris.
Some of the women who resided at the club stayed on or returned to Paris after the war. The 14 mostly “groundbreaking” essays in The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars, edited by Whitney Chadwick and Tarza Latimer and reviewed by Ute Tellini, discuss gender and race, fashion, lesbian imagery, and modern art practices, as well as women’s absence from the acknowledged cornerstones of modernity.
Neither Laurencin nor the architect/designer Charlotte Perriand, both active in Paris between the wars, are indexed in the above book. Perriand is the subject of two recent publications, an autobiography and a collection of essays edited by Mary McLeod, reviewed here by Anna Novakov. Perriand’s most noteworthy contributions to modern design were in the “areas of standardization and prefabrication,” some in collaboration with Le Corbusier. A Perriand table sold at auction this year for more than a million dollars, serious money for a designer Le Corbusier had earlier dismissed from his studio with “We don’t embroider cushions here.”
Frida Kahlo has been extravagantly served, if not overanalyzed, by her life chroniclers. One of the more persistent may be Dallas psychiatrist Salomon Grimberg, who reviews the Israeli art historian Gannit Ankori’s Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo’s Poetics of Identity. The review focuses on Ankori’s discussion of Kahlo’s My Grandparents, My Parents and I (1932). The painting was also the focus of an exhibit curated by Ankori for New York’s Jewish Museum, reviewed here as well.
Lee Bontecou’s return to the New York art scene after a 30-year hiatus was widely heralded. Hers was the last exhibit at MoMA’s Queens outpost before the museum moved into its cavernous new space in Manhattan. Fortunately for the viewer, the work could be experienced intimately. One could peer into the sooted black holes of Bontecou’s menacing wall pieces, and observe with delight the hanging Bosch-like fantasies. Of the five essays in the lavishly produced catalogue, Virginia Rembert found Donald Judd’s (written in 1965) the most satisfying for its “strength and specificity.”
Robin Rice reviews Sarah McEneany’s “maverick modernist” paintings (and the accompanying catalogue) from her 2004 exhibit at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Virtually all her works are self-portraits; many show her alone at her easel. Rice is a co-author of Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell, which features one of McEneany’s murals. Philadelphia has evolved from a graffiti-marred city to the mural capital of the U.S., and this book, writes reviewer Judith Stein, documents the path to that distinction.
Two books reviewed in this issue document the struggles of women seeking creative freedom in societies that oppress them. Contemporary Arab Women’s Art: Dialogues of the Present, edited by Fran Lloyd (reviewed by Linnea Dietrich), features 18 artists from 10 different countries. Foremost among their concerns are issues of gender, nationality, religion, and hybridity in the Arab diaspora. Feminine Fables: Imaging the Indian Woman in Painting, Photography and Cinema, by Geeti Sen (reviewed by Sarita Heer), examines the ways in which Bharata Mata, or Mother India, is used in Indian visual culture and how these images affect women’s lives
The review section concludes with two hefty anthologies:The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, edited by Amelia Jones (560 pages), and Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968-2000, edited by Hilary Robinson (706 pages), reviewed by Cassandra Langer and Marilynn Board, respectively. While questioning some selections, the reviewers praise the collections for introducing a new generation of women to the hard-won victories and ongoing struggles of women in all areas of the visual arts.
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