Women. Art. Professionalism. Isolated concepts or a natural
combination? I’ve been pondering this question for the past three weeks, ever
since I started embroidering in the campus parking lot half an hour before
starting work to take advantage of the natural light that has waned by the time
I extract myself at the end of the day.
The convergence of women, art, and professionalism is also
the subject of the book, Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in
Canada, 1850-1970 (McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2012). Full disclosure: I am a
former Queen’s employee and my former place of work, the Agnes Etherington
Art Centre, is mentioned on the opening page of the preface for its
contribution to feminist art history.
An outgrowth of the inaugural Canadian Women Artists History
Initiative conference, this multi-authored, hefty tome is a very useful
addition to academic library collections supporting gender studies or Canadian
art history.
While reading Kristina Huneault’s introductory chapter about
the ill-fitting concept of professionalism for women artists, my mind kept
flitting back to Eunice Lipton’s Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search for Manet’s
Notorious Model and Her Own Desire (1992, Charles
Scribner’s Sons). Spurred
on by Linda Nochlin, who famously asked why there have been no great women
artists, Lipton traveled to Paris to restore dignity to Victorine Meurent,
Edouard Manet’s model. Although Meurent was an exhibiting artist and a member
of an esteemed professional art society who declared herself an artist twice in
the French equivalent of the census, her contemporaries and later art
historians dismissed her as an amateur and a prostitute. Huneault’s parallel examples from Canada are lower profile
but no less gripping. She identifies discrepancies between a census count of
female artists compared to the membership in the Ontario Society of artists.
And then there’s the case of Charlotte Schreiber, the only female artist
accepted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in its first 50 years, who
couldn’t attend meetings because it would have meant being alone with 39 men.
If you read this book, the historical references may make
you angry, whether it’s the virile description of the Group of Seven or the
flipside, emphasis on the feminine stature and fashion of Canada’s first female architect.
(Curiously, the impulse to emphasize the gender of artists continues today, as
one of the female artists’ techniques in the book is described as loving). At the very
least, you’ll probably find yourself annoyed by comments like Group of Seven
member A.Y. Jackson calling the arts appreciation show hosted by his former lover
Anne Savage “quite a little job” (p. 121).Yet, there’s inspiration to be found
in women’s comments; consider Margaret Watkins’ retort about a critic who
passionately disliked her photo of dirty dishes: “Evidently the poor duffer
knows nothing of Modern art” (p. 170).
Lest you get the impression that art is unique in its gender
bias, Jennifer Salahub reminds us that it affects other disciplines too. As a
librarian, I found her comment disheartening: “…when I first began to research
Canadian needlework in the 1980s, the Library of Congress Catalogue directed me not to needlework, sewing, or even
embroidery but to the letter ‘w’—women’s work.” (p. 138). I tend to be angry
rather than annoyed when I read such things, but this book helped me slow down
and resist a knee-jerk response. Reading the rest of Salahub’s chapter about
intriguing artist, Hannah Maynard, I learned that the Victorian artist included
textiles in her photos to maintain a lady-like image while pursuing an
unconventional career. From a contemporary perspective (read: privileged life—the kind where I am allowed to drive and work and vote), it’s so
easy to overlook awesomely experimental work and harp on what’s traditional,
like the artist marketing herself as Mrs. Richard Maynard.
The most poignant content for me was Sherry Farrell
Racette’s roll call of names of Akwesane artists who practiced basketweaving.
Seeing a photo by Mary Kawennatakie Adams, the first artist on the list—of a
basket adorned with teeny decorative baskets the size of a thumbnail—had a
tip-of-the iceberg effect and served as a strong argument that female
Aboriginal artists have been grossly overlooked by the existing model of art
history. Add to that other groups like nuns that have historically been heavily
engaged in craft and the entire concept of professionalism starts to fall
apart.
Image: reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: https://www.mqup.ca/rethinking-professionalism-products-9780773539662.php?page_id=73&#!prettyPhoto/1/
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