Women Art Critics In Nineteenth Century France

Over the past years, studies have begun not only to identify the factors that impeded the full participation of women artists in French cultural life, such as women’s limited access to professional art education, but also to bring to light the considerable artistic accomplishments of women occluded by historians for over a century. A similar effort at historical revision has been under way for French women writers. Works of fiction that enjoyed many editions in the nineteenth-century receded from our field of vision for almost a century before being rediscovered and reissued during the last decades of the twentieth century. Such efforts have resulted in scholarship that has helped revise the history of both artistic and literary expression in nineteenth-century France. Similarly, many women in nineteenth-century France had their art criticism published both in journal reviews and in book form, often for decades, in a number of the most influential venues of their day. However, it is perplexing that they remain almost totally invisible in histories of French culture. Women Art Critics in Nineteenth-Century France: Vanishing Acts is the first sustained effort to bring these prolific and influential critics out from the shadows. Although each of the chapters in this volume results from an interdisciplinary approach, the fact that they are written by scholars in art history and in literature means that there will be inevitable differences in approach and methodology. Thus, we study the women’s reception of specific artworks and aesthetic movements, discuss intersections of aesthetics and politics in their essays and the literary styles and rhetorical strategies of individual critics, explore the social conditions that allowed or impeded their successes, and suggest reasons for their all but disappearance in the twentieth century. In bringing to light for twenty-first-century readers the “vanished” writings of heretofore unrecognized or underrecognized women art critics, the authors hope to contribute to the ongoing revision of women’s role in cultural history. The multifaceted approaches to word/image studies modeled in this book, and the many avenues for further research it identifies, will inspire scholars in a number of disciplines to continue the work of reinscribing women in the history of cultural life.

This book examines the relationship of class, gender and race to visual culture in early nineteenth-century France. Drawing extensively on contemporary sources, the author looks at the work of women artists, women art critics and writers to demonstrate that many of the assumptions about female invisibility and objectification in bourgeois culture and society need serious reconsideration. The first half of the nineteenth century was a complex and contradictory period in the formation and contestation of bourgeois ideologies of 'the feminine'. Women, though at a serious disadvantage, became visible as artists, critics and patrons and were not merely invisible, domesticated or 'constructed' by forces outside their control. Women artists such as Angelique Mongez painted heroic neo-classical nudes, while many named (and anonymous) women wrote art criticism, articulating their views as female spectators. Doy also examines notions of 'appropriate' work for women in relation to landscape, genre, sculpture and the emergence of Realism. Of particular interest is the discussion of the representation of black women during this period, when Fren

In this innovative volume, literary critics and art historians explore the relationship between literature and the visual arts in 19th-century France. Eighteen leading scholars, including Pierre Bourdieu, Germaine Greer, Segolene Le Men, Roger Cardinal and Mary Ann Caws analyse contemporary forms of representation to reveal the rich variety of factors that link image and text.

This book explores a range of social, institutional and discursive conditions in and through which criticism emerged and functioned in 19th-century France, and goes on to develop broader theoretical questions drawn from historical case studies.

Mining various archives and newspaper repositories, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Nineteenth-Century Pioneer of Modern Art Criticism provides the first full-length study of a remarkable woman and heretofore neglected art critic. Pennell, a prolific 'New Art Critic', helped formulate and develop formalist methodology in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, which she applied to her mostly anonymous or pseudonymous reviews published in numerous American and British newspapers and periodicals between 1883 and 1923. A bibliography of her art criticism is included as an appendix. In addition to advocating an advanced way in which to view art, Pennell used her platform to promote the work of ?new? artists, including ?ouard Manet and Edgar Degas, which had only recently been introduced to British audiences. In particular, Pennell championed the work of James McNeill Whistler for whom she, along with her husband, the artist Joseph Pennell, wrote a biography. Examination of her contributions to the late Victorian art world also highlights the pivotal role of criticism in the production and consumption of art in general, a point which is often ignored.

Although the women of the Union were often quite conservative politically, socially, and stylistically, says Garb, they believed that women had a special gift that would enhance France's cultural reputation and maintain the uplifting moral-cultural position that seemed in jeopardy at the turn of the century. Focusing on the developments that made the prominence of the organisation possible, Garb discusses the growth of the women's movement, educational reforms, institutional changes in the art world, and critical debates and contemporary scientific thought.

Examining the relationship of class, gender and race to visual culture in early 19th-century France, this study looks at the work of women artists, critics and writers to demonstrate that many of the assumptions about female invisibility and objectivization need reconsideration.

Critical Voices is a fascinating account of women writing about art in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. Meaghan Clarke employs extensive original research in order to demonstrate the significant contribution made by women to the art world and draws on a diversity of sources, including diaries, letters and periodicals, to highlight the many different forms their criticism took. Focusing in particular on the work of three women - Alice Meynell, Florence Fenwick-Miller and Elizabeth Robins Pennell - Clarke argues that in order to understand fully art debates of the time it is essential we broaden our understanding of the role of women in the construction of art history. John Singer Sargent, James MacNeill Whistler, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Elizabeth Butler, William Holman Hunt, Frederic Leighton, Walter Sickert, Henrietta Rae, and Rosa Bonheur are among the artists considered.