A "room" in American art for the woman artist from the gilded age to the modern period - Book Review

Kirsten Swinth. Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 305 pp., 40 b/w ills. $18.95 paper.

Erica E. Hirshler. A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston, 1870-1940. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts Publications, 2001. 304 pp., 64 color plates, 85 b/w ills. $40.

The phrase a "a room of one's own," coined by Virginia Woolf, refers not only to the physical space necessary for creating art but also to the hitherto ungranted space within the canon for women artists. (1) Published the same year, Kirsten Swinth's Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930 and Erica Hirshler's A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston, 1870-1940, which accompanied Hirshler's exhibition of the same title, present new material on American women artists and create "room" for women in the American art-historical canon. Concentrating on roughly the same time period, the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, both scholars argue that women artists possessed agency and maneuvered various social and professional obstacles. Yet they take two different--but complementary--approaches to the rich material of women's art. Focusing on New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, Swinth describes women artists' relationship to the art world as a dynamic one, as a narrative of "gain, backlash, and recouping," in which women gained ground in the art world during the 1870s to the 1880s, lost it in the 1890s, and tried to recoup it in the opening decades of the twentieth century (4). Swinth considers these shifts and dynamics in terms of women's interest in professionalism. By focusing only on Boston and key groups of successful women artists, Hirshler, on the other hand, performs a thorough and microcosmic study of women's achievement from 1870 to 1940. Rather than engaging in a broad cultural study, Hirshler explores the lives of particular artists, their artwork, and the "integrated relationships that enabled many of them to excel" (xii). Thus, while Swinth offers explanations for why we have not heard of the work or names of particular women artists, Hirshler familiarizes us with the work and names of a number of them. Both scholars provide a necessary antecedent narrative for existing scholarship like Ann Eden Gibson's Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), which deals with the Abstract Expressionists' marginalization of women artists, artists of color, and nonheterosexual artists and reinstates these artists in the canon.

At the heart of Swinth's tripartite narrative of gain, backlash, and recouping lies the idea that women artists participated in the greater middle-class project of professionalization. Swinth defines the steps that women artists took from decade to decade in their relationships to the dominant discourse of art and its institutions, and argues that professionalism was the way in which women artists navigated gender biases in art. In her opening chapter, Swinth explains that women entered art schools in the late nineteenth century in droves for a couple of reasons. First, as an extension of their domestic roles, women were designated as "cultural guardians" alter the Civil War, a role permit tins women to easily segue into careers as artists (18). Second, women also benefited from the new art-educational system in America; derived from a European model, it was based on merit and objective standards of artistic achievement, which were new measures for art training that gave women the opportunity to make unhindered advancements. But despite these encouraging changes, women still had to overcome the obstacle of being perceived as dilettantes, and professionalism became a way of dealing with this misconception. Swinth writes:

   At the most basic level, professionalism
   represented the best available expression
   of middle class women's ambitions
   and the best available marker of the
   seriousness of women's intentions....
   Given the widespread trivialization of
   women's artistry, professionalism
   offered an apparent ungendering (35).

In her second chapter, Swinth takes us to Paris, where American women artists--like their male counterparts--prepared themselves to become professional artists by earning valuable credentials. Swinth suggests that these women played active roles and "strategically and deliberately" plotted their courses from art student to artist (50). One way in which the American woman artist was calculated involved her finances. Convincing her parents to invest in her future, and by extension the family's future, the woman artist asked for and received money from home, which gave her the opportunity to manage her own finances and experience a greater degree of autonomy. In addition, she actively controlled her training by frequently changing mentors and seeking out training in areas of painting that would prepare her for the art market at home. Furthermore, when the male teacher-female student relationship grew stifling in its sexual or romantic overtones, women artists redefined the relationship by altering the signifiers for it. In an advice book for other female art students, artist Ellen Day Hale reconfigured the mentor student relationship as a father-daughter relationship, abandoning the dynamic in which female students were "seduced" by the "exaggerated praise" of their male instructors (48). And women vigorously submitted their paintings to the Paris Salon, a venue that gave them more exposure and yielded useful professional connections and patrons. Ultimately, Paris served American women artists in a paradoxical manner: while the experience gave them new freedoms and a network of connections with which they would return to the United States, the experience also perpetuated the separation of the sexes.