Driven to Abstraction

‘Elles font abstraction Women in Abstraction’ Centre Pompidou

Today we are going back to a thorny topic, one that maddeningly never seems to go away. Yes, that’s right. Women as Artists. You remember how much fun we had with the exhibition at the Cognacq-Jay, Empire des Sens, when the subject was Women as Art. When all we had to do was admire a breast here, a bottom there? An advance accepted here, another thwarted, there. Well, not this week. The polemics of a few weeks ago, when I discussed the exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg, “Women painters, Birth of a Fight (1780 - 1830)” may return, but probably with less vitriol. Been there, done that. This week we look at some great art, by some artists you probably know. But alas, we will also confront some definitely not great ways that women artists and their art have been marginalized and even ignored by those who control the narrative of what gets seen, who gets celebrated.

The curator of this exhibition, Christine Macel writes,"To explain the process of making female artists invisible, it seems important to me to show how the history of art was made mainly by men, with the idea that artists fit into each other, as if each one had to be the heir of something, with an idea of tree. And in this tree, there are no women.” Women may have been absent from the history of abstraction, but, from the start, they were very active in its creation.

The exhibition at the Pompidou is huge in every way. Examples span the globe (from France to Chile, Russia to Mexico), cover 120 years (1860 - 1980) and include not only painting and sculpture but decorative arts and fashion, interior design and dance, film and photography. A show of this size cannot be encyclopedic. The curators picked and chose and so will I. But if you are in Paris now or coming to Paris this summer, you have to see this exhibition.

Right after the last, I mean the first confinement, over a year ago now, I wrote about an exhibition at the Musée Maillol, on spiritualism and art, called ‘Esprit es-tu là? Les Peintres et les voix de l’ai-delà.’ Mostly it was about people who believed in Spiritualism and artists who created works of art while being directed by a Spirit. The focus was on the work of three 20th century men, three laborers, who swore their hand moved at the direction of a Spirit. Let me think - work in a coal mine vs paint by numbers. I wouldn’t have had any more trouble than they did deciding which to do. A few well known artists appeared in the exhibition, in reference to Mme Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner and Theosophy, among them Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian. Work by a few women also showed up but not the two who are highlighted in the exhibition at the Pompidou. Which is interesting because at the Pompidou, these women are described as precursors of this movement, those male giants of art. Hmmm

Georgiana Houghton (1814-1884) claimed that her completely abstract, non-objective paintings were produced through an automatic process, that her painting hand moved under the direction of spirits. The non-referential shapes and colors in Houghton’s paintings were sacred symbols, each element carrying a unique meaning. (Figure 1) This is the same claim that those laborers in the exhibition at the Maillol made, except Houghton made her claims 40 years before they did. She produced her first abstract works, which she referred to as 'spirit' drawings, in 1859 during private séances. When Houghton worked, “abstraction” was not yet a concept in art, maybe the lukewarm reception her work received during her lifetime was because nobody knew how to look at it.

Figure 1. Eye of the Lord, Georgiana Houghton

But why her work isn’t better known now, why she wasn’t in the exhibition at the Maillol, is a puzzle. Gender bias anyone? How else to explain the neglect of Houghton's achievement, particularly in view of the link to spiritualism which her art shares with that of later male ‘pioneers’ of abstraction. (Figure 2)

Figure 2. Spirit Drawings, Georgina Houghton

Women were accepted in Spiritualism but as mediums during a séance. Women were the vessels through which the spirit passed. It was men who translated spirituality into art.

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a formally trained Swedish artist with bonafides from the Swedish Royal Academy of Art who became involved with spiritualism and Theosophy. Her first major group of largely nonobjective paintings (1906-15), The Paintings for the Temple, (Figure 3) reflected her practice as a medium. They are an articulation of her mystical views of reality. Stylistically, they are all over the place - biomorphic and geometric shapes, expansive and intimate scale, maximalist and reductive composition and color. Her dream (vision?) was to install her paintings into a spiral temple. Nothing came of this plan. In the years after completing The Paintings for the Temple, she continued to push the boundaries of her abstract vocabulary. But eventually she decided that the world was not ready for her art. Her will stipulated that her work could not be shown for 20 years after her death. But it actually took 40 years for her work to be shown. (Figure 4) By then, the history of abstract art had already been written, the pioneers already selected and anointed. She didn’t make it into the history books.

Figure 3. Paintings for the Temple, Hilma af Klint

Modern dance leaps into this exhibition with a fascinating section devoted to the American dancer, Loïe Fuller, celebrated here as a woman who used her body to create new forms, whose dances were performative abstraction. (Figure 5) Born in 1862, outside of Chicago, Mary Louise Fuller became Loïe when she got to Paris 30 years later. She was wildly successful, dancing with the Folies Bergères for over a decade. (Figure 6) Fuller experimented with lengths and colors and materials of her costumes to see how light could be reflected as she moved. These variables were as important to her as her body, which was sometimes hidden under voluminous layers of fabric. There is a film of someone performing Fuller’s most well known piece, Serpentine Dance but it isn’t her. (Fig. 7) She refused to have her performances filmed fearing they would be stolen. And I guess this film of somebody else dancing her dance is proof that she had reason to be worried. She even tried to patent the dance but her application was denied because her dance told no story, the criteria for copyright protection at the time. The precedent set by Fuller's case remained in place until 1976, when U.S. Federal Copyright Law extended protection to choreographed works.

Figure 6. Poster for La Loie Fuller, Folies Bergeres

While Loïe Fuller combined modern dance with costume and lighting, Sonia Delaunay combined abstract painting with fashion and design. (Figure 8) Delaunay is currently featured in two temporary exhibitions in Paris, this one and one at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme. And btw, she was the first living female artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre, in 1964, 15 years before her death.

Figure 8. Sonia Delaunay Painting (left) Dress (right)

Sonia Delaunay was born Sarah Stern, maybe in 1885, maybe in Odessa. Five years later, her mother sent her to St. Petersburg to live with her brother, Sarah’s uncle, a wealthy lawyer, and his wife. They eventually adopted her and she became Sonia Terk. After studying art in Germany, she moved to Paris to continue her studies. Pressured by her family to return to Russia, she entered instead into a "marriage of convenience" with the German art dealer and gallery owner Wilhelm Uhde. It was the perfect solution, Uhde could hide his homosexuality and Sonia could stay in Paris, access her dowry and gain entrance to the Paris art world. Through her husband she met the Comtesse de Rose and her son, Robert Delaunay. Uhde and Sonia divorced when Sonia and Robert became lovers. Sonia Terk became Sonia Delaunay a few months before their son was born. At first life was easy. Her aunt in St Petersburg died, bequeathing her property. Robert was a minor aristocrat. They had a private income which enabled them to entertain and hold salons frequented by fellow artists.

It’s possible that Sonia moved from painting to needlework so that she and Robert did not compete. One critic suggested that maybe Sonia and other modernists saw no distinction between fine art and applied art. That my friend is wishful thinking. Maybe history painting was no longer a thing, but painting has always been a masculine art and needlework has always been the domain of women. (Figure 9) Women clamber to be taken seriously as painters. How many men do you think have switched from painting to embroidery? By choice ? And I am not talking about artists like Picasso whose designs were translated onto textiles by others.

Figure 10. Sonia Delaunay, costume design for Ballet Russe

With the Russian Revolution, the Delaunay’s financial situation deteriorated when Sonia’s properties were confiscated and rent monies stopped arriving, And so there they were, in their early 30s, needing to earn a living for the first time in their lives. Of course, with her needlework and design skills, Sonia was able to transition from art to commerce. They had been in Madrid during the First World War. They met Diaghilev. Back in Paris after the war, Sonia began designing costumes for the Ballets Russe. (Figure 10) By the mid-1920s, Sonia was creating textiles and clothing and had a fashion house called Sonia. And all was well. Until the Nazis arrived and they were forced to flee Paris. That was 1940, Robert died of cancer the following year.

The Delaunays had been there for each other while Robert was alive and Sonia continued to champion his legacy after his death. But with him gone, she put aside her needles and picked up her brush and began painting again. (Figure 11) The feminist art historian, Griselda Pollock noted that modernist culture made it possible for ambitious and creative women to enjoy new freedoms, especially in Paris. However, these modernists did not write their own history. It was written in the 1950s, a terrible decade for women. And the contribution of women was ignored, especially the women who moved so easily between art and design, like Sonia Delaunay, an ‘artist in her own right’ and not just the wife-of-the-more-famous Robert. Women being as talented as their husbands is not unique to artists, of course. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of 9 women in a class of 500 at Harvard Law School. The dean of the law school asked her and the other women why they were taking places rightfully belonging to men. She graduated first in her class at Columbia Law School and had an almost impossible time finding a job. Just saying. This kind of stuff is everywhere, even if you don’t look for it.

Another woman who moved between painting and design, this time, interior design as well as textile design, was Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginal Woolf and one of the key figures in the Bloomsbury Group. You know, that group of artists, writers and intellectuals who denied being a group but who all agreed on quite a few things, among them, the importance of the arts. Here is what Dorothy Parker said about them: "they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles".

The exhibition recreates a room in Vanessa Bell’s Sussex farmhouse, Charleston where Vanessa and her husband Clive Bell moved in 1916. (Figure 12) As one critic described it, Charleston is a study in total artistic immersion … No surface was left untouched. Inspired by Italian fresco painting and post impressionism, the Bells painted everything - the walls, the doors, the furniture. Their home was very much in keeping with what they were designing for the Omega Workshops Ltd. (1913-1919), the collective directed by the Bells, the painter Duncan Grant (with whom Vanessa had a daughter) and the art critic Roger Fry, who was the principal figure behind Omega. He believed that artists could design, produce and sell their own work, and that writers could be their own printers and publishers. Abstract paintings by Bell from this period (rediscovered in the 1970s) (Figure 9) establish a link between the paintings and the abstract patterned textiles she designed for Omega. (Figure 13)

Figure 12. Charleston House, Sussex England, Vanessa Bell

Figure 13. Textile patterns for Omega Group, Vanessa Bell

We’re going back to textiles and sexism to consider another significant moment in modernism. Now in Germany, at the Bauhaus, the art school which opened with such high hopes in 1919 and which was forced to close in 1933. The school focused on unifying individual artistic vision with principles of mass production, aesthetics with function. (Fig. 14)

Figure 14. Professors of the Bauhaus, single female second from right, Gunta Stolzl

The Bauhaus was founded during the Weimar republic, when women had the same civil rights and responsibilities as men. In that spirit, the Bauhaus encouraged women to apply to the school. But that first year, when more women than men applied for admission, the Bauhaus’ founder and director Walter Gropius, worried that too many female students would detract from the school’s credibility, 'unofficially restricted the number of women students’.

Gropius found ways to restrict women once they were accepted into the school, too. Declaring, for example, that women were neither genetically or physically capable of studying architecture, because, well because men thought in three dimensions and women thought in two. Really, are you serious?

And of course this sort of backward thinking didn’t just plague women artists. A colleague of mine at Stanford, a medievalist, had written her dissertation on a Romanesque church. The chairman of the department told her that if she wanted tenure, she would have to change her area of specialization to decorative arts and furniture. Which she did.

So, what to do with all those girls at the Bauhaus. Textiles, anyone? Which is where women went after their first semester of introductory courses. Whether women were forced to do weaving or merely ‘encouraged’ to do weaving, isn’t exactly clear. That they were discouraged or forbidden to pursue other disciplines is clear. So, is there an upside to this? Well, these talented women were able to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear as the weaving workshop became a laboratory for experiments in abstraction and permitted the financial survival of the Bauhaus itself. And how many men studied weaving? Oh, about 13. So the idea that modernists didn’t distinguish between fine art and craft seems even less plausible with actual quantifiable data available.

Gunta Stölzl played a key role in the development of the Bauhaus's weaving workshop. Which she transformed from a neglected department into a first rate one. (Figure. 15) As the only female master at the school, she instituted enormous changes within the weaving department transitioning it from individual pictorial works to modern industrial designs. She applied ideas from modern art to weaving, experimented with synthetic materials and improved the department's technical instruction to include courses in mathematics. The Bauhaus weaving workshop became one of its most successful facilities under her direction.

When I first read about Stölzl, it seemed to me that she willingly bought in to the men’s view of women’s capabilities and assisted the men in keeping the female students in feminine, domestic disciplines. Because of course, she had a vested interest in the success of the weaving department. After all, if there were no students in the department, she had no job. But the more I think about it, the clearer it is that she had no options. She played the hand she was dealt and tried to make the department as rigorous as she could. And she succeeded.

Anni Albers (1889–1994) née Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann was another student at the Bauhaus. She wanted to become a painter. But she was denied admittance into the department.So she tried for glass blowing, also denied. Fleischmann reluctantly bowed to pressure to go into weaving. (Figure 16) What else could she do, it was the only workshop open to women. Fleischmann had never tried weaving and believed it to be too "sissy" of a craft. With Gunta Stölzl as her instructor, Fleischmann soon learned to appreciate the challenges of her new discipline. She explored the functional and architectural possibilities of textiles, designing a cotton, chenille and cellophane fabric that could absorb both sound and light. When Stölzl left the Bauhaus in 1931, Albers took over as head of the weaving workshop.

Figure 16. Textile Designs (mostly), Anni Albers

The Nazis forced the Bauhaus to close in 1933. Albers, who was Jewish, had to get out of Germany. So she and her husband, Josef Albers, ‘an artist in his own right’ (!!!) moved to North Carolina where they taught at the Black Mountain College. Albers became the first textile designer to have a solo exhibition at the MoMA in New York. (Figure 17)

There’s so much more in this exhibition that I would like to tell you about, but like I said a few weeks ago, life is short and art is long. So I will only mention that Peggy Guggenheim (Figure 18) the wealthy socialite and art collector held the first exhibition solely devoted to women in 1943, called 31 Women. Georgia O’Keefe refused to participate because she didn’t want to be labeled as a ‘woman artist’. Although with all those flower paintings that look like vaginas and clitorises (clitorides) (Figure 19) it was going to happen with or without Peggy Guggenheim. One of the artists who did accept the invitation to show in the exhibition was Dorothea Tanning, (Figure 20) who wound up running away with Guggenheim’s husband, Max Ernst. All Peggy said was, "I should have had 30 women. That was my mistake."

Figure 18. Peggy Guggenheim in Venice, Italy

This is an overwhelming exhibition and you really should see it. You’ll be glad you did. Maybe a little angry, too.

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