Artverve - on women's art | Issue 5 | Mar 2016

Art V erve on women’s art magazine

An SLWA Publication * Issue 5 * Mar 2016

in conversation with

Liliane Lijn

Women Photographers Special Edition

LEE MILLER VIVIAN MAIER TINA MODOTTI

Women on the frontline

Art, Politics & War

Modern Scottish Women

Painters and Sculptors 1885-1965

Feminist voices at The World Goes Pop PLUS

* Book Reviews * What’s On *

ArtVerve Editorial Team

Melissa Budasz

is an artist, curator and director of SLWA. She studied painting at Camberwell and Norwich Schools of Art, graduating in 1997 and has a studio at Brookmill Studios Deptford, London. She blogs regularly and writes articles on her practice, collaborations, exhibitions and research projects and publications. A multi-media painter, her work connects to symbolic and discursive systems such as myth, philosophy and psychoanalysis referencing nature, the female body and literature.

Moira Jarvis

worked for many years in art education and completed an MA in Fine Art painting at Wimbledon College of Art (UAL) and now works in one of the Cannizaro Park studios in Wimbledon. A curator and researcher for SLWA, Moira’s work explores personal and collective histories and our place in the natural world. Current concerns are the environment and how we can reconnect with nature for our psychological and physiological wellbeing.

Editor

Melissa Budasz editor-artverve@slwa.co.uk

Co-Editors

Pia Goddard Moira Jarvis Laura Moreton-Griffiths A SLWA Publication

Rosie Campbell

is a Trustee of SLWA and has a BA in Fine Art. She is an enthusiast for, and collector of women’s art. She was a director and co-proprietor of research & marketing consultancy Campbell Keegan Ltd for 35+ years. She has considerable experience of research around social, cultural and creative industries and has conducted several research commissions for the Arts Council and various other DCMS bodies.

She was a member of the steering group who founded the think tank ‘Demos’.

Laura Moreton-Griffiths

is an artist and curator and studied at St Martin’s School of Art in the late 80s and Camberwell College of Arts, graduating in 2008 with a degree in painting. Her diverse practice explores the extended field of painting and sociopolitical narrative. Interested in overlooked histories, the underbelly of Englishness and contemporary anxiety; her paintings, drawings and sculptural objects are developed from collages of cultural and art-historical references.

Intern Researcher Daisy Shayler

PR/Social Media Rosie Campbell

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Pia Goddard

is a fine art photographer, poet and short story writer. After completing a degree in sculpture at Chelsea and an MA in Fine Art, Architecture & Critical Theory from KIAD in 1994, she worked for many years as a photojournalist and art educator. Her current practice is mainly image and text based, encompassing traditional crafting techniques. Her focuses are the tyranny of objects and the landscapes of transition: physical, emotional and imagined.

Daisy Shayler

is a fine art student, studying for her BA at Central Saint Martins, London. Her interests are identity, childhood, the family and the domestic within feminist art practice. She usually works through the mediums of film, photography, installation and performance. She is currently completing a work experience year as an intern for SLWA.

Contributors

Melissa Budasz Joan Byrne Rosie Campbell Pia Goddard Moira Jarvis Laura Moreton-Griffiths Daisy Shayler ArtVerve * Issue 5 * Mar 2016

25 51

What’s on 53

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4 ArtVerve's

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IN FOCUS 4

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Melissa Budasz & Moira Jarvis discuss the feminist Voices at The World Goes Pop, Tate Modern

25 Women on the Frontline Art, Politics & War

by Laura Moreton-Griffiths

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FEATURES

Women Photographers Special Edition

Melissa Budasz in conversation with the artist Liliane Lijn

15 Rosie Campbell's review of Modern Scottish Women Painters & Sculptors 1885-1965

20 influential Women Photographers

34

ArtVerve's selection of 20 influential photographers

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Moira Jarvis reviews the Lee Miller exhibition at the Imperial War Museum

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Vivian Maier The Woman Behind The Lens by Pia Goddard

47 Revolutionary Nomad Tina Modotti by Melissa Budasz

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BOOKS 51 Daisy Shayler reviews Dorothy Bohm's new book About Women 52 Pia Goddard reviews Annie Leibovitz's book Women, a series of photographs accompanied

by Susan Sontag's text

WHAT'S ON 53 Exhibitions & event listings for the next 6 months in London, UK wide and internationally

Copyright Information

Front cover Liliane Lijn, SHE - moonmeme, 1992-ongoing Photo credit: Richard Wilding 2014 4 Liliane Lijn, Stardust Ruins, Ruins of Kasch 2008. Photo credit: Liliane Lijn 15 Agnes Miller Parker (1895-1980) Round Pond (Serpentine), 1930 Tempera on canvas, 90 x 59cm Private collection 22 Evelyne Axell, The Pretty Month of May, 1970. © DACS, London / ADAGP, Paris 2016. Photo credit: Paul Louis 25 Priscilla Thornycroft Oh I Was Very Lucky, London (1944) © IWM (Art.IWM ART 17476) 38 Lee Miller, Anna Leska, Air Transport Auxilliary, Polish pilot flying a spitfire, England, 1942 (4327-45) Images © Lee Miller Archives 41 Pia Goddard's tribute to Vivian Maier in SLWA's installation I'm Inside Ring The Bell, International Women's Day 2013 47/49 Tanner Street, London SE1. Photo Credit: David Randall-Goddard Contents

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Liquid Reflections 2nd series 1968 © Liliane Lijn

Melissa Budasz in conversation with artist

Liliane Lijn

Stardust Ruins, Ruins of Kasch 2008. Photo credit: Liliane Lijn

Born in New York in 1939, Liliane Lijn is an internationally acclaimed artist who has had a prolific career spanning 50 years. After studying archaeology and history of art in Paris, she began experimenting with pictures based on jigsaw puzzles, and shadow paintings made by drawing in the air with molten plastic and then began in 1961 to inject drops of polymer onto the surface of Perspex blocks ‘to trap photons’. Her first kinetic light works called Echo-Lights and her Poem Machines, which are motor or hand-turned cones or drums printed with words, letters and signs, were shown in her first one-woman exhibition at La Librairie Anglaise, Paris, 1963. She has since worked continuously with light, using all materials, which are conducive to transference, reflection and refraction of light: glass, perspex, water, copper, nickel, neon, etc. Lijn lived in Athens between 1964-66, and since 1966 mainly in London. In 2005, Lijn was ACE NASA, Leonardo Network artist in residence at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Public commissions include Solar Beacon, a solar installation in collaboration with astrophysicist, John Vallerga on the two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and Light Pyramid, a beacon for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in Milton Keynes.

Liliane Lijn

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Liliane, Robbert Dijkgraaf said at Tate Modern’s recent panel discussion, The Power of Light, that light is a metaphor for science, and how matter and light interact is the way we understand the world. Would you say this is true of your practice?

Robbert Dijkgraaf spoke of light as a metaphor in science that shows us what is not there, making manifest the invisible.

I like to think that my work looks at the relationship between matter and light. As Robbert said, their interaction describes the world, the universe. Light is anything that travels at the speed of light. Light and matter are interchangeable according to Einstein’s famous equation E=MC2 . My work is multilayered, examining light from a feminine perspective.

But what is a feminine perspective? I see it as receptive, complex, refined, personal and interconnecting.

I have been fascinated by reflections, since I was a small child, staring at flickering reflections of light on the wall of my room on the fourth floor of a tall building, where sunlight entered only rarely and for short intervals. Reflections, light and shadow.

You have said you are interested in the behaviour of materials and how the end piece is not perfect in form. Would you say a lot of the discoveries in your work happen as happy accidents or is the process more controlled?

Some of the discoveries I have made as an artist occur accidentally, others, probably the majority, derive from observation, often of quite small details in the world around me. Even when one discovers something by chance, one has to be prepared to embrace that chance.

Liliane Lijn

An openness to random events goes hand and hand with precision and control in my practice. Perfection carries with it the seed of death.

In some ancient cultures, possibly Japanese, a small imperfection was purposely made on the most perfectly crafted art object. I do not aim for perfection. I want to encourage both awareness and contemplation. So, for example, my Koans need to be perfectly white to allow the viewer to focus on the thin luminous lines that appear to oscillate on that surface. These lines, are, in fact, planes of Perspex that have been sandwiched between the elliptical sections of the cone, the latter having been cut into a number of sections.

Once, the cone is bonded together, the perspex planes appear on its surface as lines.

When the cone spins, these lines appear to rock up and down.

Observing their interaction somehow melts the volume of the cone, the lines becoming dominant, more and more as daylight recedes, and describing with their motion the conical form. The cone must be white, without any marks, like a blank page, to enable the viewer to enter into a contemplative state in which they will actually see matter dissolved by light.

Language and thought interact in a number of ways in your art - for example in Poem Machines (1962–63) and in your Poemcons between 1964-68 when you collaborate with the poets Nazli Nour and Leonard D. Marshall. You have said that it was your intention to explode both prose and poetry, remembering their origin in vibration. Can you expand on this?

I wrote continuously, poems and prose, from the age of eleven or twelve and imagined that I would become a writer. When, at the age of fourteen, my parents moved to Switzerland ArtVerve

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Atom Born Beings, Poem Machine, 1962-63. Photo credit: Richard Wilding 2014

and my main language became Italian, although I continued writing, I became more interested in expressing myself visually with imagery.

In the early 1960s, I became interested in Science, principally in optics and light. Visiting the Palais de La DÊcouverte in Paris, I was mesmerized by Fresnel’s experiment with the diffraction and polarization of light. I created an experiment using parallel lines in motion on two spinning cylinders to create interference patterns and was very excited to see colours emanate from the vibrating black lines. It then occurred to me that words were formed using letters of the alphabet and letters from lines.

I decided to try using words instead of lines, beginning with the alphabet. Then a poet friend of mine, Nazli Nour, asked me to make her poems move. Using Letraset that at the time could be obtained in varied fonts, colours and sizes, I rubbed abridged versions of Nazli’s poems onto metal drums that I then made to rotate at quite high speeds. At speeds of 60 to 70 rpm the words blurred into visual vibrations.

I felt I had created a confluence of logos (word) and light, where written language dissolves into the visual equivalent of sound. I called these works Poem Machines, introducing Liliane Lijn

the machine as a conscious statement of opposition to what I felt was the elitism and effeteness of much contemporary mainly male poetry, in which language, meaning and rhythm seemed to lose contact with the real world.

I wanted to explode language to return it to its original intensity.

In the 1980s you made the series Cosmic Dramas - in particular, Lady of the Wild Things and Woman of War. These are two mixed media performing sculptures that enact a computer controlled 6-minute drama, which includes movement, song, and the transformation of sound to light. Can you tell us the history of how these works evolved, as I know they took many years to make?

These works were initially conceived in Paris in 1959, when I saw in a sky illuminated by a vivid sunset reflecting off small clouds, a very clear image of a towering goddess figure. I immediately tried to paint what I saw that evening. I now only have a very poor transparency of the ensuing painting but it shows a massive triangular form, part figure, ArtVerve

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part architectural structure. I wrote about the rediscovery of this tranny in the catalogue for my exhibition at Fischer Fine Art in 1986, in which I exhibited the Conjunction of Opposites (the title for the combined works Lady of the Wild Things and Woman of War).

conscious representation and also began to use materials that were associated with the feminine such as glass beads and feathers.

Feather dusters, in particular, represent her body somewhat ironically as housewife. I was particularly pleased that I could combine that association with the archaic image of the ‘I was amazed to see a prismatic bird Goddess birth-tree since they are so clearly related. gigantic against a turbulent sky. She rises central, grounded and formal, surrounded Heshe, made immediately after the Feathered by chaos in the form of flying creatures. I Lady in 1980, is an ambiguous bisexual figure, realized that the imagery of the painting was 6' high with a tank prism for a head and a body so complex and emotionally laden that I had of purple and orange synthetic fibres used been unable to deal with it as a whole. I had, industrially for brushes, in particular, car wash over the years, to dismantle it, unconsciously machines. The car is an extension of the body. to analyze it and, bit by bit, to reconstruct, I have often experienced it as a symbol of my clarify and make real that chimera, which had own body in dreams, but on the other hand, appeared to me on the 6th floor balcony of it is generally thought of as a male object, but my apartment in Convention, a Polish quarter that way of thinking is open to discussion and in Paris.’ change.

In Feathered Lady, the soft stacked palm-like feather dusters represent the female body as tree.1 There is an ancient connection between certain trees and the female body. The palm is the Tree of Life in both the Sumerian and Babylonian Garden of Eden stories. In ancient Sumerian epigraphy tree is drawn as a mesh or net, and the idea of the net has been used in contemporary physics as a metaphor of life.

The coincidence between these associations and my constant use of net and mesh is striking. My fascination and use of the net in numerous materials - steel mesh, crocheted copper wire, aluminium and paint began in the early 1960s. In 1966 I invented and patented a way of using open weave (net) fabrics to create kinetic clothing. The hard tank prism, used as periscopes in 2nd World War tanks, was a representation of the head but in this sculpture I softened the precision of the prism with a headdress of tremulous piano wire and glass beads. Whereas before the feminine had entered my work elliptically in archaic symbols such as the cone or in sinuous movement, in this sculpture I began to move towards a more Liliane Lijn

In Heshe, I attempt to unite contradictory feelings and messages. Jung's basic male female archetypes, the anima in the man and the animus in the female are not so much complimentary as an attempt to reconcile opposites.

This has entered very often into the thought processes underlying my work. As a girl I had been brought up to believe that both mind and spirit were male qualities, whereas body and emotions were distinctly feminine.

On the other hand, I experienced my mind as acutely present and felt distinctly uncomfortable thinking of it as a male attribute, or to use Jungian terms the animus side of me. My interest in Buddhism led me to understand that this was mainly due to Western Christian man's inability to accept the integration and interchangeability of opposites both in the world and within his own psyche. Jung is very much a man of his generation in that he considers the animus or male figure in women to be pejorative and ArtVerve

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the anima in men as a beneficial influence.

I did not feel the need to look for an image of the masculine, I focused my attention on the female or the shape shifting essence, She. In our culture, most icons of authority, energy and vitality are male.2 Part of me felt connected to the purity of thought present in the contemplation of light, but, on the other hand I needed to find icons for the disturbing feelings and powerful drives that I experienced and that caused me to feel divided between my prismatic male mind and my un-representable female body.

I made Lady of the Wild Things in 1983.

As a result of recent performances I had given from my book Crossing Map, I had the idea to make the figure responsive to the human voice.3 I designed a system that would allow the sculpture to transform sound into light emitted by 250 LEDs.

The LEDs were inserted into the perforations of the steel wings in patterns corresponding to 6 channels that related to both volume and different sound frequencies. Therefore, the larger the vocal range expressed, the greater the spread of light across the sculpture. In addition, an increase in volume increases the speed of change of the lights. The wings are covered with a fine plumage of red and green fibres. The head, a tank prism, is encased in a headdress of very fine black aluminium mesh.

The double mesh creates moire patterns that pulsate as one moves around the sculpture.

I took my title from Robert Graves who mentions the Lady of the Wild Things in The White Goddess.4 In reinventing the archetype of the Goddess, I wanted to reinvest the feminine with spiritual power. Lady of the Wild Things is patterned on the lunar archetype.

Her light side, which is woven in red and green fibres, opposite and complimentary colours,

Cosmic Dramas, Conjunction of Opposites 1986 Photo credit: Thierry Bal

Liliane Lijn

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remains passive until activated by sound, but is warm and engaging, even seductive.

Her dark side is all embracing and, as death is in our society, unacknowledged. As the archetype from which she takes her name, she represents life in death and death in life.

As if her reaction to sound begged for a singer as a complimentary figure, the inspiration for my next work came from a song I wrote that spoke with a violence and anger that I did not know was mine. I felt as if the earth was singing through me, although the lyrics are complex and hold more than one meaning.

These lyrics described the Woman of War. It then became apparent that the Woman of War would sing to Lady of the Wild Things, who would respond to her song with light. I called the ritual enacted by the two sculptures a Conjunction of Opposites, a dialogue between two female figures, the one reflective, transforming, sensual and the other a fierce warrior, part bird, part insect, part machine.

I've been armoured by your love I've been blasted in your furnaces And poured into your moulds To fit the Image the Image I'm the Image of Woman The Image of She A Woman of War...

The 2014 S/HE series of works explores the relationship between language and gender and demonstrates the interlocking of opposites. Can you tell us more about this project?

I conceived moonmeme in 1992, in the continuing development of my work with language that began with Poem Machines in 1962.

Most of my text works use revolution or spinning to detach words from their context and return them to their original vibrations.

Liliane Lijn

The overall purpose of this project is to cause the meaning of an essential word to be transformed and renewed by the relative motions of the moon, earth and sun, the cosmic movements that control day, night and the tides. This is a project that has occupied me for many years and because of this and the inherent technical difficulties, it has evolved through numerous different approaches.

Originally I had the idea of projecting a word onto the surface of the moon. I envisaged the letters large enough so that they could be plainly seen and read by a person standing on the surface of the earth. Since the moon presents itself to us in a repeating cycle of phases, the letters composing the chosen word would only slowly emerge and then eventually disappear with the waning of the moon. The choice of the word was instantaneous. SHE came to mind as another epithet for MOON since the lunar cycle has since time immemorial been connected to the feminine principle. Working with John Brown, Astronomer Royal of Scotland, I considered using laser technology to project the letters and discovered that most of this technology was comparable to that of star wars. I also investigated the idea of 'earthworks' on the moon, which led me to imagine the eventuality of these moonworks having already occurred and how a viewer on earth could experience moonworks. Another imagined solution is the construction of huge composite ‘kites’, lightweight structures that would orbit the moon and cast shadows on its surface. These shadows would be seen on earth as letters appearing across the lunar surface, as the new crescent moon waxes to become a full moon.

Since actual lunar projection is so challenging technically, I began to explore virtual projection. With the assistance of a postgraduate astronomer, Tom Ruen, I developed a basic real-time website animation that tracks the movements of the moon with the word SHE projected onto its surface.

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(l-r) Heshe 1980 & Feathered Lady 1979 installation shot Liliane Lijn: Sculpture and Drawings 1980, solo show, The Round House Gallery. Photo credit: Stephen Weiss 1980

This animation can be viewed on my website.

It is interactive allowing the viewer to enter any date, both in the past or in the future, to see how moonmeme would appear on that given date. moonmeme, both online and as an installation is accompanied by a sound work and by quotations from Pliny, 5 the Talmud and the Orphics to illustrate the profound connections between the moon and the feminine, as well as human conjectures and fantasies about it throughout the ages.

Interweaving science, myth, art and language, this project is homage to the feminine principal of transformation and renewal, which for millennia was held sacred in the form of the Liliane Lijn

full moon and its recurring monthly cycle.

The cone (or the pyramid) is an important symbol in your work - can you tell us why?

My interest in geometry led me to the cone.

I started using the cone as a development of both the circle and the triangle. These two geometric forms, conjoined in one of my earliest drawings, are both related to and wonderfully merged in the form of the cone.

The cone is a feminine form, since ancient times a symbol of the Goddess. In Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, he describes how the fire was kept alive in early tribal times by allowing a mound of ash to cover it.

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This white hot conical mound sacred to the Goddess was guarded by a woman who became the priestess of the hearth. In a footnote in The White Goddess, Graves writes of the pythagorean pyramid drawn with ten dots, the holy tetractys, that was the most ancient emblem of the triple goddess. The top dot represented position, the next two dots, extension, the next three dots, surface and the four dots at the bottom, 3-dimensional space.

at the University of California, Berkeley, I thought I might be able to explore possible ways of implementing my moonmeme project.

There were about 150 scientists working at the laboratory and I began my residency by having conversations with a few of them. In the first two weeks, I was asked to present my work in the form of a seminar that was not only open to scientists at the lab but also to the general public.

My own observations lead me to believe that the cone is the shape of emission. Both light and sound radiate as a cone, originating in a virtual point spreading outward over 360Ëš.

Many of the scientists at the seminar expressed an interest in my work and asked me to continue a dialogue with them. I became involved in three projects. Solar Hills developed from my meeting with the astronomer John Vallerga, who, having seen images of my work with prisms and spectra (rainbows), thought I might be interested in an idea he had for tracking the sun across the sky and directing sunlight to determined positions. We began working together and this project is now ready to be installed.

The cone form is ubiquitous and appears almost everywhere from the natural forms of mountains, repeated universally in sacred architecture, to the colour capturing cones in our eyes; the elliptical sections of cones are the form of the trajectories of comets and planets. My fascination with cones actually began with forms such as the striped traffic cones on roads, marking the endless roads of adventure.

Throughout your career you have had many artist residencies, including NASA in 2005.

Can you say how this has helped develop your ideas and practice?

Artists residencies are both ancient practice (see Leonardo da Vinci) and a relatively new feature of the contemporary art world. When I lived in New York as a young artist in the very early 1960s, I was given a kind of residency by the owner of a plastic warehouse. He gave me a corner of one of his floors and allowed me to make use of his machines and materials in exchange for a few works that I might produce.

His generosity allowed me to experiment with plastics in a way I could not have done on my own. When in 2005, I became the first artist in residence at the Space Sciences Laboratory Liliane Lijn

I also met Andrew Westphal, who was the principle scientist on the Stardust At Home 6 project, in which dust gathered beyond Mars from comets and stars, was collected using a material called Aerogel and brought back to earth. He encouraged me to investigate this extraordinary material and to work with it.

Aerogel is only 2% matter arranged in a threedimensional lattice or web. It looks a bit like a fragment of sky. I managed to have a few forms moulded for me; cones and rings or cylindrical sections. Some of these broke into fragments while I worked with them and I became more interested in the fragments than the integral forms. They seemed to reflect the light in a more interesting way. I also made a film of my interviews with scientists, Inner Space Outer Space. I am very interested in the way they attempt to communicate their findings to someone who is not familiar with the particular area of their research and does not communicate in the language of mathematics.

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s(l-r) Mars Koan 2008, Three Line Koan 2008, Red Line Koan 2007, Clear Light Koan 2008, Threes 1974-75.

Installation shot, Images Moving Out Onto Space 2015, group show, Tate St Ives. Photo credit: Stephen Weiss 2015

Liliane Lijn

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It seemed to me that in some way, artists and scientists shared the same difficulty in communication with the more general public and also often similar motivations.

vision of the world, as a cosmologist recently pointed out to me. Perhaps the same view as seen by the newly born, before they have mapped out and named what they see. Myths are also coded or encrypted histories, as in the Irish Tree Alphabet and Robert Grave’s The Greek Myths. I was very impressed to read in his abundant end notes that many of the myths revealed/concealed the transition from matriarchal to patriarchal power. In Sumerian mythology I discovered the dynamic feminine archetype Inanna, who descends to the underworld out of interest, to find out, her ear opened to the underworld, since hearing was then more important than seeing. Both mythology and psychology are a looking inward in search of an identity both cultural and individual. Identity is inextricably connected to memory and in the 1990s much of my work was focused on that relationship.

Science and technology have played a significant role in the development of your work. In your 2008 series Stardust Ruins, there lays at the heart a kind of mythical quality - about lost civilizations and evokes a feeling of memory and shared experience; it’s what Jung called the Collective Unconscious and later Campbell called Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths - the cycling between dreams and reality and how stories are also part of a living culture and can develop and change with knowledge (science). How much does mythology and psychology influence your work?

Both mythology and psychology have an important place in my work. Myths are oral What are your current concerns? histories and there is more flux, more layers in At present, I want very much to create a large myths than in written history. The title of one solar installation, Solar Hills, Solar Cities, in of my works with aerogel, The Ruins of Kasch which I can project huge rainbows across the refers to the title of Roberto Calasso’s The countryside or across a city. Stars in brilliant Ruin of Kasch, in which he quotes Frobenius constantly changing colours are seen defining as saying that the legend of the ruin of Kasch the horizon connecting the earth with the is a recollection of a state of things long sky. In a collaboration with scientists in vanished. It’s the story of the passage from Berkeley, California, I have been working on one world to another - a period of transition this project now for ten years and I hope that and the ruin of both worlds. He writes that this year we will be able to find the funding the idea of what is historical comes into to create this intensely moving installation being in this legend. I felt the importance of in which thousands of people might discover fragmentation, the complexity of it and its a new awareness of the sun as a brilliant inevitability. Thinking of Earth as a planet, I star and their own place in the cosmos. considered myself already in outer space and I projected video of different places on earth that I had visited onto the surface of the aerogel ruins. Since what we see are References 1 The first tree in the Druidic Tree Alphabet is the Ailm, a silver reflections of different substances, aerogel, fir, a female tree sacred in Greece to Artemis the Moon-Goddess being almost immaterial, did not resolve the who presided over childbirth, and the prime birth-tree of Northern Europe. Ailm also stood for the palm, the birth-tree perfectly focused images projected onto it. of Eygpt and Babylonia. It's poetic connection with birth is that One saw continually changing colours and the sea is the Universal Mother and that the palm thrives close to the sea. barely perceptible forms. A nearly The quantum Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris Liliane Lijn

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"The supremacy of appearance begins with Zeus, and from it begin the tensions that galvanise Greek culture...No other ancient language had such a rich vocabulary for referring to different kinds of images as Greek. And this markedly visual vocabulary contrasted sharply with that of the Greeks's enemies par excellence: the Persians." [5] They neither made statues nor built temples but made sacrifices to Zeus from the top of the highest mountains, thinking of Zeus as the whole sky, unlike the Egyptians for whom the sky was both feminine and concrete, personified by the protective Goddess Nut. My own background was Judaism, social, moral and patriarchal. Moses had broken the images of the gods and goddesses to which the people of Judea made sacrifice. But his one God Iahu took his name Ievoa or Jehovah from the five-letter name of the Goddess and was able to do so only by virtue of his birth, marriage and death under female auspices.

2

metamorphosis was to be maintained, there was no alternative but to invent objects and generate monsters."

"In Crete she was the supreme nymph Goddess of archaic totem societies...Originally, the poet was the leader of a totemsociety of religious dancers. His verses were danced around an altar or in a sacred enclosure. All the totem societies in ancient Europe were under the dominion of the Great Goddess, the Lady of the Wild Things." Originally, Lady of the Wild Things was a lunar archetype, Artemis, whose name was the name of the Triple Goddess herself. Later she was represented as the Goddess of the Hunt, sister of Apollo and daughter of the Thundergod, the virgin maiden Goddess who presided over childbirth. Eventually Artemis ceased to be an equal partner with Apollo. He was credited with cures while she became a poisoner. The Apollo priesthood weakened the power of the Goddess by departmentalization. With Apollo, who from a 3 Crossing Map, which was published by Thames and Hudson in minor mouse-demon became the God of Reason with the motto 1983, is an interior monologue part science-fiction, part social "Nothing in Excess", poetry and art as magical practise was commentary, in which I look at how our Greco-Judeo-Christian already in decline; from The White Goddess by Robert Graves. analytical culture has blocked the flow of energy. Robert Calasso in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony refers to this 5 Pliny, the Talmud and the Orphics - Orphic Tablet from Thuru 6 a blockage already occurring in Classical Greece." Forms would quote by Roberto Caasso in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony become manifest as long as they underwent metamorphosis...

But as generation followed generation, metamorphosis 6 Stardust At Home http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ became more difficult, and the fatal nature of reality, its about/stardusthome irreversibility, all the more evident...Humans could no longer gain access to other forms and return from them. The veil of All images courtesy and copyright of Š Liliane Lijn epiphany was rent and tattered now. If the power of www.lilianelijn.com 4

Solar Hills, Crissy Field, San Francisco USA2005-ongoing. Photo credit: Liliane Lijn 2008

Liliane Lijn

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MODERN SCOTTISH WOMEN PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS 1885-1965 Modern Two (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art) Edinburgh 7th November 2015 - 26th June 2016

With over 90 artworks by 45 women artists spanning 80 years, some well-known, many have rarely been seen, Rosie Campbell uncovers and celebrates this vital chapter in Scottish modern art history

Joan Eardley (1921-63) Catterline in Winter, c.1963 Oil on hardboard 120.7 x 130.8cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh: Purchased 1964

Modern Scottish Women

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Equally, I associate the ‘Scottish’ canon with being long in figure, especially portrait, painting. The National Galleries of Scotland logo and best-selling print, is the well known Revd. Dr Robert Walker Skating on Duddington Loch by Sir Henry Reaburn (you can probably visualise it - an elegant, quirky, characterful I have to start with the show, in its and quintessentially Scottish image…)

I truly loved this show. Attempting to write about it, I’m conscious that I’m keener to whet the appetite to visit the real, delicious, visceral works, than to provide an erudite or scholarly critique. Maybe if I’m feeling ambitious, I can try to do a little of both…

totality, how it punches, how incredibly seductive and aesthetically luscious Well, again, this show is packed to the brim with people. Mostly women. it is.

I suppose because I had my own narrow Often depicted in compelling, defiant associative framework I expected ‘colour’ mood, in several cases emphasising - because I can barely hear the ‘Scottish’ their eponymous role as artists. adjective without the attendant word ‘colourist’ popping into my brain. And Beyond these (perhaps to-be-expected) on colour the show does not disappoint. departure points, the show is delightfully new,

Margaret Morris Fergusson (1891-1980) Red Roofs (Dieppe) 1922 Oil on board, 35.50 x 27.30cm Collection: National Galleries of Scotland, purchased 1984 © The International Association of Margaret Morris Movement Ltd

Modern Scottish Women

Bessie MacNicol (1869-1904) A Girl of the Sixties, c.1900 Oil on canvas, 81.3 x 61cm Glasgow Life (Glasgow Museums) on behalf of Glasgow City Council: Bequeathed by John Keppie 1945 © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection

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surprising, and, in a good way, unfamiliar.

Maybe I’m a bit out of the loop (it is about 40 years since I ‘officially’ studied any art history) but I had heard of precisely 3 of the 45 artists included in this show - Wilhelmena BarnsGraham, Anne Redpath and Ethel Walker.

And, unsurprisingly, each of these, it turns out, moved south and developed associations with French, London-based or (in BarnsGraham’s case) Cornish groups.

were chosen ‘because they were female’, or, indeed, because they were necessarily ‘fashionable’ in their time. In fact, she has done a remarkable job in rooting out great artists, and their work; diligent research and sometimes painstaking detective work has brought to light some women artists buried by history.

For certain, their work has been marginalised and forgotten in a way that the art of male peers has not.

It's tempting to suggest that being a woman artist in Scotland may have been doubly disadvantageous, for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet these 45 included women artists are a really high quality bunch. Having a conversation with the curator of the exhibition, Alice Strang, she was very keen to emphasise that none

I could name two groups I assumed to be contemporaneous: the Scottish Colourists and the Glasgow Boys. Well, it turns out the colourists were, essentially, four men, while the Glasgow Boys were - you guessed right all men…

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004) Glacier Chasm, 1951 Oil on canvas 76.2 x 91.5cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh: Presented by The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust through the Art Fund 2012

Modern Scottish Women

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In the dozen reviews I have since read, I notice that ‘unfamiliarity’ with many of these artists is something of a theme. Alice Strang, herself, lists a ‘top 12’ which is different from the selections of the Scotsman, Telegraph or Glasgow Herald.

45 women artists, but relatively, less about ‘style’ or ‘art movements’. The catalogue, for example, profiles each artist describing her background, private life, studio location and, often, favoured subject matter.

But, for many of these women, the It is a show within which to find your own important discovery is that they were delights. I was completely bowled over by able produce work of such fine quality Joan Eardley’s work. She is an artist I hadn’t and exhibit at all. come across before and who definitely hasn’t had her ‘due’ in terms of recognition and While the Glasgow Boys were bemoaning too posthumous exhibiting. conformist Scottish art school teaching and celebrating the French revolutions in plein air Eardley is a painter who died at 42 from cancer, and impressionistic approaches, their female but achieved a hefty body of work - painting peers were still not allowed to work in the life which became increasingly abstract, but not rooms for fear it would be too shocking or in imitation of the French big hitters (Picasso, corrupting.

Braque, Leger) who clearly influenced many other women in this show.

The women who made it to art training and broke down so many barriers make for For Eardley, working in the early part of the envigorating inclusion stories. Indeed, the last century, abstraction grew organically from central factor in the enfranchising of many her environment and her aesthetic passions; of these women and the production of such her work looks closer to Expressionism - the rich, varied and fine art work, is the story of German version, and, also the new-on-thetheir (final) acceptance into formal training at scene American Abstract Expressionism. She art schools in Scotland. could have been up there with Rothko, De Kooning and Pollock if she had lived longer The 80 years covered by this show, amounts or maybe she couldn’t, being female, lesbian, to a rich illustration of what this change in Scottish and living much of the time in policy unleashed and went on to provide the Catterline, a remote fishing village.

Abstraction in painting is an interesting subtheme in this show. Many of the represented artists move between figurative and semiabstract working, (though all the sculpture is more ‘traditional’ and figurative) but there is a refreshing lack of obsessing about ‘style’ and the extent to which any artist reflects, or is influenced by, contemporaries - which leads to a ‘take as you find’, ‘judge as you see’, experience for the viewer.

Strang talks a lot about the training, hurdles overcome, and circumstances of her chosen Modern Scottish Women

Joan Eardley (1921-63) The Wave 1961 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh © Estate of Joan Eardley. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2015

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bedrock for what is considered something of of women artists from these decades. Alice a golden era in more recent times for Scottish Strang came up with the idea of the show in artists, and Scottish women artists, especially. the course of research into Scottish Colourists and describes how she kept noticing women’s On the basis that the show is eclectic, wide names coming up on the margins, the sideranging and consists of no more than 5 works lines ... by any one artist, beyond this central ‘women finally on a level playing field with their The case is readily made for an all wommale peers’, it is hard to highlight significant en show. Strang feels all her included running themes. This could be construed artists are easily worthy of solo shows, as a (solitary) weakness; walking round the but in some cases the body of work is show sometimes feels a little like snacking at simply too small. a buffet where there is no organisation from savoury to sweet, fish to meat to fruit. There is a light chronology running through the rooms, So what about ‘Scottishness’? Strang is but this hasn’t been constraining. The overall slightly apologetic in her explanation; she has aesthetic impact is never sacrificed. There is, been generous in the definition. Chiefly the for example, impressive sculpture scattered in show includes nationals by birth, ‘adoptees’ each room. Linearity is juxtaposed with tonal who lived/worked in Scotland and/or many study, expressive colour with monotone, who cut their teeth training in Scotland. It figurative work with the most ‘technical’ feels like a considerable mine of talent; all abstraction (in the case of the latter, probably have justifiable connections with Scotland represented by Margaret Mellis, who Damian and build the bigger picture of an 80 year Hirst described as an important influence; period in which women artists broke through think a more restrained - but no less contrived to prominence, succoured by a connection, - Sonia Delaunay). Exclusion from the training, in many cases with two fertile training groups and networks that male artists enjoyed institutions, the Edinburgh and Glasgow art have all contributed to the historical neglect schools.

Mary Syme Boyd (1910-1997) Kestrel about 1936 Bequeathed by the artist 1997 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Modern Scottish Women

Margaret Mellis (1914-2009) White Painting (with Red, Blue, Violet and Ochre) 1964 Oil on hardboard , 122 x 101.6cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh: Purchased 1975

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Scotland has powerful visual art ‘roots’.

In Edinburgh there are an impressive 5 international-weight art galleries. I’ve been to the National and Academy, both a stones’ throw from Waverley station. They have internationally impressive collections; a current show of Melville’s work at the Academy is mouth-watering if you have a taste (as I do) for watercolour.

one of emancipation for Scottish women artists. It also parallels both a time of wider Suffrage and by familiar definition, ‘Modern’ in the wider European art world. So it is a ‘modern’ show in the sense of a new and breakthrough way of thinking about the possibilities for women and it is ‘modern’ in terms of the types of work being produced. If you took all the names off, I think this show would represent a ‘conventional’ categorisation of ‘modernity’ in painting terms, if not in sculpture. Evidence of impressionistic and ‘plein air’ paintings, essays into abstraction (in the later works) and a relaxed and inclusive approach to subject matter.

I feel ashamed that I hadn’t been to either of the National Modern Galleries before, which are a long, determined walk from the station or taxi ride. You need to know you want to go to them. Modern 2, which houses this show, is an ex-public school.

So yes, it’s a ‘modern’ (but definitely not post-modern) show. While the abstract works So, having navigated the ‘Women’ and take themselves rather seriously, there is ‘Scottish’ issues, why is this show described ample evidence of referencing contemporary as ‘Modern’ (and housed at Modern 2)? The methodology and 'owning it’ as we’d say 80 year window represented runs from the these days. Millar Parker had synthetic cubism year (1885) when Fra Newbery first opened and vorticism licked.

Glasgow art school to both men and women students. It is hard to imagine how powerfully restrictive and exclusive art training was in the earlier Victorian years. Strang was keen to point out that though there had been earlier notable flourishings of female artists (in the Enlightenment years) yet the repressive and constraining cultural views of what was appropriate for women during the early part of Victoria’s reign meant it is unsurprising that for decades there were few or no Scottish women artists of note.

What changed was everything, once there was some levelling of access to training.

Bessie MacNicol is a perfect example of a Fra Newbery student who flourished, often signing her work, ambiguously “B MacNicol’ (which may have helped her achieve selection at the Royal Academy in London in 1893) perhaps also, along with the fact that she was on close, and amicable, terms with the Glasgow Boys.

So, ‘modern’ describes the era of this show; Modern Scottish Women

Agnes Miller Parker (1895-1980) Round Pond (Serpentine), 1930 Tempera on canvas 90 x 59cm Private collection

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There is a last socio-cultural issue to mention.

The period covered by this show contains

two world wars. Both wars informed subject matter; the St Johns Ambulance Brigade volunteers included Doris Zinkeisen, who, amazingly, commissioned to record their activities in Europe, also happened to be amongst the first to enter a liberated Belsen.

Her painting of Belsen inmates lying naked, dead, and in all their horrifying slayed masculinity - is both outrageous and poignant in equal measure. While this image is arresting for its intrusive pathos (skeletal rib cages, juxtapose flaccid but pointlessly fleshy penises…), Gertrude Alice Meredith Williams’ equally evocative Spirit of the Crusaders maquette for what was to become the Paisley War Memorial is one of the most astonishing, powerful and creative pieces of sculpture in the show. An estimated 1.2million ‘surplus’ women after the First World War, may, paradoxically have created a freer environment for some female artists, especially those not enamoured of the idea of marriage, babies and domesticity…indeed the cover story of ‘not enough men to go round’ has been mentioned by women known to be

Anne Redpath (1895-1965) The Indian Rug (or Red Slippers), c.1942 Oil on plywood, 73.9 x 96.1cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh: Purchased 1965

Modern Scottish Women

lesbians and those who sought to make their names in creative, bohemian or arty circles.

This said, Anne Redpath was insistent that being female and an artist need not be in conflict with domesticity, or, importantly, motherhood. ” … the experience (of motherhood and home-making) went back into art when I began painting again…”

Three images which sum up the - almost wholly positive - sentiments I personally take away from this show are: Anne Redpath’s famous Indian Carpet for its incredible artistic facility and zeitgeistiness; Dorothy Johnstone’s Rest Time in the Life Class, a lucid expression of the changed circumstance and life opportunities for herself and other women artists; and Doris Zinkeisen’s Self Portrait.

This last choice for the sheer joyousness of characterful portraiture. I love, especially how she described her motive for choosing herself as painting subject.

"there was nobody interesting to paint, so I painted myself”…

Many thanks to Alice Strang and Harris Brine.

All images kindly reproduced with permission, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Dorothy Johnstone (1892-1980) Doris Zinkeisen (1898-1991) Rest Time in the Life Class, 1923 Self Portrait, 1929 Oil on canvas Oil on canvas, 121.5 x 106.2cm 107.2 x 86.6cm City Art Centre, Edinburgh Museums & National Portrait Gallery, London Galleries, Purchased from the Artist with Purchased 1999 the assistance of the Jean F. Watson Bequest Fund and Government Grant-in-Aid 1980

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Feminist Voices

The World Goes Pop Ey Exhibition at Tate Modern

Kiki Kogelnik, Bombs in Love, 1962 Š Kiki Kogelnik Foundation and Simone Subal Gallery, New York Photo credit: Kevin Ryan

Melissa Budasz and Moira Jarivs discuss the development and emergence of the female voice as documented at the recent The World Goes Pop EY exhibition at Tate Modern. Many of the 25 women artists selected have had their work exhibited and archived in a global context for the first time - questioning the dominant role of men in Pop Art. This sets a precedent for other male dominated art movements to be examined and the role of women to be unearthed, celebrated and archived. This exhibition grew out of research at the Tate and conversations about rethinking certain periods of history. The focus was on experimental work in all media that characterised the 1960s. Jessica Morgan, one of the curators, says that there was an 'incredible history that hadn’t been explored and although there was great local knowledge in each country there had never been an attempt to bring the work and ideas together globally.'

Feminist Voices at The World Goes Pop

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MB This exhibition sees an explosion of women artists from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, America and Latin America who have been identified in pop art - embracing popular culture in a political, personal and subversive way. Do you feel that in rethinking certain periods of history it matters in today’s climate, when there are so many successful women artists?

MJ I believe so, because to understand our lives as women it is crucial to understand that we have been seen as ‘the other’ (as Simone de Beauvoir states). This knowledge impacts on our understanding of the often hidden conventions we deal with every day.

As Kalliopi Minioudaki says,

...many female artists participated in the multifaceted return to reality in postwar art that can be identified with pop art by embracing mass and common culture in a variety of ways (personal, impersonal, parodic, critical, celebratory, etc.) that allowed them to voice female subjectivity, while critically positioning themselves in the society of the spectacle.

MB We are used to seeing a dominance of male artists in the pop-art scene (Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenberg and Hamilton) the reflections around feminism and the sexual revolution play a big part in the exhibition.

Other issues are tackled too like fascism - Mari Chorda’s Coitus Pop and The Great Vagina; and religion - the Colombian artist Beatriz Gonzàlez's reinterpretation of Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper over a fake wooden table.

A combination of 'high art' with 'ready-made' objects. 'These qualify as a sort of objet trouvé, upon which I intervened' the artist said. 'The Last Supper was especially popular in Colombia because in every household this image was placed above the main entrance door as a good-luck charm against thieves.

In a way, the image acquired its own life and many spin-offs were produced”.

The political work of Belgian pop artist Evelyne Axell’s The Pretty Month of May, is about the sexual revolution during the Paris civil protest in May 1968 where a group is sitting down, naked. The woman carrying the red banner both references Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People and a photograph of a feminist protest in Vietnam at that time.

Kalliopi Minioudaki

Evelyne Axell, The Pretty Month of May, 1970. © DACS, London / ADAGP, Paris 2016. Photo credit: Paul Louis Feminist Voices at The World Goes Pop

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MB "It’s never too late,” said the curator Jessica Morgan, who spent five years (with her fellow curators) uncovering the hidden stories from an art movement that has largely been remembered as Anglo-American and male. Suddenly art history finds itself being turned on its head as another aspect of the past gets unearthed and revised. The broad language of pop-art enabled a critique, a bending of rules, it freed and liberated many of the women artists looking at themselves through pop in response to the male gaze exposing the female artistic position during the 1960s and 70s and, strikingly, issues that women all over the world continue to face today.

MJ My own feeling is that the artwork in this exhibition supports this argument and actually articulates the issue surrounding pleasure and pinpoints the dilemma that is summed up by the quote by Barbara Kruger ‘How do I as a woman work within the society of spectacle while residing in it?’ It seems that women through their art in the 60s and 70s were much more aware of their own sexuality and how it impacted on their work than their male counterpart.

The work (especially from Latin America and Eastern Europe) reflected turbulent political events. But The World Goes Pop is also about artists entering ‘the information age’ and pop is an approach to art through analysing, understanding then often subverting visual culture. I think these threads can be traced through the work of 20th century art by women along with a great deal of wit and humour.

You think about pop art, you think about the white boys from America celebrating consumer culture. Who knew that the language was allowing artists around the world to bend it, to critique the policies of America, to critique the use of women in popular ... shifts in feminist thinking have culture. Who knew? discursively allowed the critical Judy Chicago subversiveness of pleasure to hesitantly resurface since the 1990s It's clear that female artists of the 60s and 70s ... the radical pleasures promulgated were pushed to the margins of art history. As and performed by many female artists Kalliopi Minioudaki says, in pop complement a landscape of subversiveness that in its feminist So did a number of what I have called radical and diversity unfolds a truly pop’s ‘bad girls’ whose strategic avant-garde side in the heart of pop, embrace of pop culture, as well as visual and an early chapter of the essential and sexual pleasure, has often been plurality of feminist politics in the arts. treated at best with feminist suspicion Martha Rosler and at worse with aggression or neglect.

Kalliopi Minioudaki

This exhibition has had mixed reviews but I have found not only the artwork, but the Pop as a category definition becomes abitrary discussions surrounding it, revealing and an as we see a shifting of the gaze. The women important part of reframing the history of art. artists of these years were, willingly or unwittingly, involved in a major change in References Ey Exhibition The World Goes Pop, Tate publications 2015 catalogue content, context, and medium. They were The Tate Modern explodes myths about pop art - Financial Times concerned with shifting both the objectifying Tate Modern’s autumn show, The World Goes Pop, finally gives female pop artists their dues - Independent male gaze and the objectified female gaze. Inside the marginalised world of women and Pop Art: we speak to the curators behind the Tate Modern's new show - The Stylist

Feminist Voices at The World Goes Pop

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Women On The Frontline

Art, Politics & War

by Laura Moreton-Griffiths

Dena Al-Adeeb and Sama Alshaibi collaborative project Baghdadi Mem/Wars 2010 video & photography three suite series: Still/Chaos, Efface/Remain & Absence/Presence All work produced at an artist residency at Light Work in Syracuse, New York, USA

Art, Politics & War

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Women artists have worked with war as a subject for a number of reasons, and in many diverse ways. I want to know what they bring to the predominantly male narrative of war, and to find out about their motivations, and how they have handled the emotional impetus and negotiated the retelling.

It is also essential to ask - why paint war at all? Be it officially commissioned, unofficial, or made by those directly affected - what is it that a painting or work of art does, that other media doesn’t? Why send visual artists, male or female, to the front line, when a photograph or written report would serve? Perhaps it is art’s ability to make some sense of events that are hard to make sense of and communicate beyond words, so that we can walk in another person’s shoes and feel pain and brutality, love and loss.

Human suffering plays out daily on our TVs; news networks compete in ratings wars and use images of war as broadcast wallpaper.

The shear scale of death, destruction and displacement is on a sublime, mathematical scale. It is simply too immense and too horrific to understand. Yet visual art has the power to help us engage on an emotional, non-rational level, and remind in the forgetting. It draws attention to hidden realities and drags difficult issues out in to the open, creating space for intimate moments that allow us to psychologically connect with history, to understanding and compassion, and even action.

Women artists working with war often identify their practice with history painting.

Some of the earliest examples of history painting by a woman artist, are the military scenes painted by British artist Elizabeth Southerden Thompson, also known as, Lady Butler (1846-1933). As one of the highest forms of art, tool of state and nation, battle scenes were then, not usually tackled by women, but not one to shy away from a Art, Politics & War

challenge, Thompson strategically chose to work with the genre to ‘distinguish herself from the ruck’ [1]. Her subjects were soldiers and numerous battles, including the Napoleonic campaigns, Rorke’s Drift, the Crimea, Afghan and Boer Wars, and the First World War; from military scenes rendered in pencil, some of which made were first hand, to watercolours and narratively complex, large-scale paintings in oil. Scotland for Ever!

1881 depicts the Charge of the Light Brigade on an ambitious scale, and Balaclava 1876 is a telling portrayal of foot soldiers returning from battle. In her painting The Royal Horse Guards Retreat from Mons 1914 1927 she paints a British cavalry regiment and it’s wounded, crossing a battlefield in Flanders.

One of the best painters of battle scenes, her work appealed enormously to popular patriotism and achieved critical public acclaim, even forcing Ruskin, to take back his words “that no woman could paint” [2].

The 20th century was a century of tense and escalating events. Beginning in the lead up to the First World War, German artist Hannah Höch (1899-1978) used photomontage to articulate the anxiety she felt from a pacifist perspective [3]. A member of the Berlin avantgarde anti-war, radical left, anti-bourgeois Dada movement, her satirical spliced collages were included in numerous Dada publications. Höch grew more increasingly politically conscious and critical of the Weimar Republic as everyday life in Europe became more precarious. She responded with provocative punk compositions, for example, Incision With The Dada Kitchen Knife Through Germany’s Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch 1920, and Heads of State 1918-20, poking fun at the decadence of German politicians in swimsuits, and High Finance 1923, a critique of the ‘special relationship’ between the financiers and military at the heart of the economic crisis in Europe at the time [4]. In 1933 when Hitler came to power, the Nazis declared Höch’s art degenerate.

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Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945) Death and a woman wrestling over her child, 1910

Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), another German artist whose sculpture, drawing and prints talk of the vicissitudes of life, heartache and sorrow [5]. After her son Peter was killed in Flanders in 1914, she said to a friend:

There is in our lives a wound, which will never heal. Nor should it. [6] Kollwitz’s pacifist and socialist politics influenced all of her work. Champion of the underdog, she depicted working class poverty and hunger in The Downtrodden 1900, Germany’s Children Are Starving 1924, and the tragedy of war in Death and Woman Wrestling for the Child 1910, Killed in Action 1921 and The Survivors 1923. The first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts, Kollwitz was expelled by the Nazis In 1933, and in 1936, her art like Höch’s, was branded degenerate and removed from public view [7]. Profoundly affected, she worked through both wars. In 1942 her grandson Peter was killed on the Russian Front.

WW1 was simultaneously fought on old terms, and on a new Industrial scale. A whole generation of men was lost, children grew up in communities of women without their fathers, and broken men returned to a Art, Politics & War

Olive Mudie-Cooke (1890-1925) In an Ambulance : A VAD lighting a cigarette for a patient 1916-1918. Art.IWM ART 3051

society unable to comprehend their trauma.

Women took over the men’s work, even actively participating in the conflict. This new independence was felt and documented by several women artists. Olive Mudie-Cooke (1890-1925) a volunteer member of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry drove ambulances in France and Italy between 1916 and 1918.

She drew and painted, much of the time from behind enemy lines, making chiaroscuro watercolours and chalk drawings of wounded troops and their evacuation away from the front. In 1919, the Women’s Work SubCommittee, part of the newly formed Imperial War Museum, acquired a number of MudieCooke’s paintings for its collection, including In an Ambulance: a VAD lighting a cigarette for a patient 1916-18 [8]. After the war, the British Red Cross commissioned her to return to France, where she recorded the Voluntary Aid Detachment unit’s continuing relief work.

Her paintings brought home the broken landscapes and grief of women at war graves.

On the home front, recording munitions and other factories that worked to support the war effort, Anna Airy (1882- 1964) was one of the first women war artists officially commissioned and was employed by the Imperial War Museum in 1918. A Shell Forge at a National Projectile Factory, Hackney Marshes, London 1918 was a challenging ArtVerve

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commission. Airy had to work quickly to capture the incandescent colour of the molten shells and the temperature inside the factory was extremely hot. On one occasion, the ground heat was so intense her shoes burnt from her feet [9]. Another painter skilled in portraying the quotidian narrative was Flora Lion. She painted Women’s Canteen at Phoenix Works 1918, a depiction of female workers in a factory in Bradford taking a break. Outwardly confident in their overalls, the women look physically and emotionally exhausted [10].

Staying with the domestic and everyday but moving forward in time to the Second World War, few women artists were able to disassociate from the jittery routine of being at war; some appointed themselves unofficial war artists. Priscilla Thornycroft (1917-) was an artist with no official commission or drawing permit. A supporter of the Communist Party and politically motivated, Thornycroft made quirky drawings and lithographs of the working class experience of the air raids around her local Camden Town [11]. With Oh I Was Very Lucky, London 1944 and In an Underground Station: Old ladies with their false teeth in their pockets 1940 she records the day-to-day reality of the German bombing. An anti-fascist activist she also made posters in support of the left-wing Republicans fighting the Spanish Civil War. Another unofficial artist was British abstract modernist Paule Vézeley [12]. Shortly after war broke out, she returned from living in Paris, largely to escape the approaching Germans and in part to care for her parents. Out on the streets of Bristol where she lived, she photographed and drew the destruction and debris around her. In Damaged Steel Girders Bristol 1941 she achieves an impression of contorted and buckled ruins within her own stylistic practice. Never officially recognised as a war artist, the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery helped Vézeley to obtain a permit to draw the activities of a local barrage balloon centre that was crewed by women [13].

The resulting pastel and charcoal drawings Art, Politics & War

Barrage Balloon 1942 and Barrage Balloon at a Balloon Centre 1942 describe what she saw, again informed by her modernist sensibility.

Dame Laura Knight painted all through the war years [14]. Notable are her portraits of heroic and glamorous women soldiers Corporal Elspeth Henderson and Sergeant Helen Turner 1941, Corporal J.D.M Pearson, GC, WAAF 1940, and Corporal J. M. Robins, Women’s Auxiliary Air Force 1941. She also painted women working in factories, for example, ordnance factory worker Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech Ring 1943, and an all female crew hoisting a barrage balloon in A Balloon Site, Coventry 1943. Recording the cycle of justice, Knight was the official artist at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals.

She worked in the broadcast box just above the defendants, including Hess, Speer and Goering [15], making charcoal studies of the proceedings that she developed in oil back in her studio. Unresolved areas in the painting The Nuremberg Trial 1946 augur the desolate mood and the discomfort felt [16]. Interestingly Knight’s husband, Harold registered as a conscientious objector in WW1. The WAAC also officially commissioned French-English artist Ethel Gabain [17]. Her series of lithographs Women’s Work in the War (Other than the Services) 1941, skillfully show the brute strength and intelligence of women at work supporting the war [18].

Molly Lamb Bobak, the only official woman war artist to be sent overseas, painted her experiences in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps. In her expressive portrait Private Roy, Canadian Women’s Army Corps 1946, she shows us the often-unseen role of African Caribbean women soldiers in the US Army [19].

The Australian War Memorial appointed Stella Bowen as official war artist in 1944.

Her brief was to depict the activities of the Royal Australian Air Force stationed in England at Binbrook, Lincolnshire.

Bomber crew 1944, is a painting of a typical ArtVerve

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Priscilla Thornycroft Oh I Was Very Lucky, London (1944) © IWM (Art.IWM ART 17476)

Lancaster bomber crew, however it proved emotionally traumatic as Bowen had to finish the painting knowing that the crew had failed to return from a bombing mission over Germany [20]. She said of the work:

It was horrible having to finish the picture after the men were lost. Like painting ghosts.

In a sensitive, beautifully observed series of lithographs Children in Wartime 1940, Ethel Gabain depicts Evacuees in a Cottage at Cookham [21] and Boys from South-East London gathering Sticks in Cookham Wood [22] and The Evacuation of Children from Southend, Sunday 2nd June 1940 [23]. A child evacuee herself, Gerda Meyer Bernstein’s practice is wholly informed by a terrifying night spent on the roof of her home during the 1939 November pogroms and the Holocaust.

She travelled for England on one of the last Kindertransport and now lives and works in the US. Bernstein identifies the experience as beginning her “lifelong commitment to making work that addresses man’s inhumanity to man”, with particular weight given to her “concerns with the inequality of women internationally” [24]. Her large-scale installations include They Were Our Children 2011-2012, a distressed / distressing wall of names and dates; Sense Of Loss 2012, a configuration of chains Art, Politics & War

Ethel Gabain, The Evacuation of Children from Southend, Sunday 2nd June 1940 Children in Wartime© IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 264)

and walk-in packing crates; and Exercise in Futility 2008, an arrangement of ceiling hung soldiers’ helmets and kitbags [24].

British artist Doris Zinkeisen was commissioned by the WAAC to record the activities of the Joint War Organisation (JWO) of the British Red Cross Society and the Order of St John, its staff and resources deployed into newly liberated Europe [26]. Travelling by lorry and air, she recorded the rehabilitation and repatriation of prisoners of war and civilian internees, making sketches that she worked on back at headquarters. She spent 3 days at Belsen immediately after its liberation, in its appalling reality [27]. The resulting painting of orderlies washing inmates before they could be moved to hospital uses a dark palette of muted colours. The title Human Laundry, Belsen: April 1945, brings an understanding to the hideous nature of Hitler’s ‘final solution’.

Her son, Murray Johnstone, describing a letter from his mother to his father said:

She always told us that the sight was awful, but the smell she could never forget. She had nightmares for the rest of her life.

Taking up a position of opposition, German artist Helen Ernst was arrested for being a ArtVerve

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Helen Ernst, Women of Ravensbruck Ravensbrucker Zeichnungen. © (MRG/SBG). (Original in Historisches Museum Schwerin, Germany)

communist in 1933 when the Nazis came to power.

After all her drawings and possessions were confiscated or destroyed and several further arrests, she left for Holland where she continued to oppose the Germans, even making several clandestine and documented trips back to Germany with the resistance.

When the Netherlands was occupied in 1940, Ernst was arrested again, and she was deported back to Germany where she spent more than four years in the concentration camps Ravensbrück, built especially for women, and Barth in Pomerania. Shortly after the war, she worked at the State Committee for the Victims of Fascism, but in a tragic turn of events, her drawings of her experience as a prisoner, led her to be accused of spying activities within the camps, and she had her membership and pension withdrawn [28].

Just before her death, two years later, she was acquitted. Pregnant Woman and Women of Ravensbruck 1946, quietly talk of systematic degradation, the blue stripes of the women’s prison uniforms just visible in the charcoal [29].

Another artist who took up opposition to the Nazis, undermining the invading German authority in occupied Jersey was French artist Claude Cahun (1894-1954). An active resistance worker and anti-war propagandist, Art, Politics & War

she made political artistic actions with her partner Suzanne Malherbe and produced anti-German flyers, cut and pasting poems, criticism and excerpts of BBC reports describing Nazis’ atrocities in English and German. The brave pair dressed up and snuck into German military events where they put their flyers in unsuspecting soldiers' pockets and on their chairs, and into cars and windows. In 1944 Cahun was arrested.

Fortunately her death sentence was never carried out, though her treatment in jail caused her to die early in ill health [30].

Artist Carolee Schneemann continues to be part of the anti-war movement. Her seminal film Viet Flakes 1965, brought to public attention a counter portrayal of the war between the US and Vietnam [31]. The film collages together photographs from foreign newspapers and magazines that Schneemann had collected over a period of five years.

The narrative presents a different story to the official story told by the US government, showing the suffering wrought on the Vietnamese people. A slow, disturbing film, it shows pain, torture and death, set to a sound track of Vietnamese chants, Bach and popular music. Schneemann made another anti– Vietnam war film Snows 1967, documenting an experiential group performance exploring the complex relationships of aggressor and victim, torturer and tortured, lover and loved [32].

Again documenting civilian casualties of war, Frauke Eigen, a German artist and photographer, worked as a photojournalist for a government relief organization in Kosovo [33]. When a mass grave was unearthed in 2000, she was overpoweringly moved by the lost humanity that she witnessed, choosing to document the personal possessions and clothing of the unknown dead. Eigen’s photographs were later submitted as evidence to The War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

Kathleen Palmer, Head of Art at the Imperial War Museum explains: ArtVerve

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This focus upon their personal possessions brings to life the people who had been killed. Since the images themselves are not horrific and graphic, they allow the viewer to relate to the horror in a different way... They allow us to engage with the horror more immediately. [34] Continuing to think about sectarian conflict, it is essential to look at the work of American artist Kara Walker. Her practice is well known for its darkly subversive negotiation of the history of black representation, racial politics, and the sexuality of oppression and domination. With Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) 2005, Walker enlarges the aforementioned wood cut plates, overlaying them with her recognisable silhouettes [35], interweaving Southern antebellum nostalgia, Civil War iconography, and black racist stereotypes and collective shame - examining what she describes as “loving to hate what we hate to love” [36].

Another American Martha Rosler makes work about war and national security, specifically connecting the affect of war overseas on women at home [37]. Her photomontage series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home 19671972, shows domestic interiors juxtaposed with human culpability, and in It Lingers 1993, she plays with German and American triumphalism, and in her photographic series Cuba, January 1981, presented in 2012, she shows an intimate portrait of Cuba from within, made when Cuba was a more closed society.

Aleksandra Domanović is an artist from former Yugoslavia. Her practice is concerned with popular culture and technology, political and economic turmoil, and how we try to heal wounds.

Talking about her video based installation Turbo Sculpture 2010-2013, she explains: Art, Politics & War

Nonny De la Peña Hunger in Los Angeles - Creator De la Peña wearing the goggles to play the virtual reality game

…the turbo prefix implies the effects of social media, politics, television, architecture and urbanism. [38] Domanović’s film From yu to me 2014, documents the emotional and bureaucratic impact of the arrival of the internet in a country on the point of breaking apart [39].

LA-based Nonny de la Peña works with virtual reality and gaming technology to convey the sights, sounds and feelings of the news [40].

Frequently shown in gallery settings, her immersive journalism builds 3D environments around real sound recordings of events. The reconstructions make you an eyewitness. In Use of Force 2013 you stand by as US border guards beat a Mexican migrant to death. With her recent Project Syria 2015, you find yourself on a street corner, children are singing; suddenly a rocket hits and there’s chaos [41].

British artist Fiona Banner exposes the mechanics of war. Her technical yet emotive works include Black Hawk Down 2010, a wall drawing in Indian ink; a vitrine of found newspaper clippings All The World’s Fighter Planes 1999-2009; and large-scale installations, for example, Bollocks and Sperm 2010, described as nose art on Jaguar XZ118 during Operation Desert Storm; and breathtaking works Harrier 2010, a BAe Sea Harrier aircraft, and Jaguar 2010, a polished Sepecat Jaguar aircraft installed on its nose in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain [42].

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Another British artist, Linda Kitson, was commissioned by the Artistic Records Committee of the Imperial War Museum to record the Falklands war. The first female artist to accompany British troops into action, she made more than 400 line drawings of training preparations, transport, fighting, and ceasefire, and the landing ship Sir Galahad on fire Sir Galahad Moored at Fitzroy 1982 [43].

Iranian New Yorker Sara Rahbar’s practice is autobiographical and comes out of a need to understand her need for belonging . Whatever we had to lose we lost and in a moonless sky we marched, Flag #41 2009, recalls her and her families overnight flight from her home and her parents later separation. A mixed media artist she works with military and army textiles, and canvas tarps, making objects and sculpture [44]. In her Flag Series 2005-2011, she tore and shredded fabrics from Tehran’s bazaars and sewed them onto a US flag. She says:

I have always been in a state of running; away from the country where I was born, away from my life, people and circumstances, and constantly watching things fall apart around me, and attempting to put the pieces back together again.

Putting pieces back together again - what about reconciliation? Is it even arts role? The Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project (IARP) brought Iraqi women artists: Dena AlAdeeb, Julie Adnan, Sama Alshaibi, Sundus Abdul Hadi and Tamara Abdul Hadi, to Intermedia Arts, Minneapolis for a series of public talks and collaborations, as part of the exhibition Not About Bombs in 2012 [45]. The programme that set out to draw attention to the misrepresentation of Middle-Eastern women by the Western media, was unable to not talk about the effects of war and Iraq.

Art, Politics & War

In Baghdadi Mem/Wars Still/Chaos 2010 by Dena Al-Adeeb and Sama Alshaibi, the artists explore memory, body and spirit. The Still/ Chaos section of the suite sees Al-Adeeb and Alshaibi trapped in a collapsing padded cell. Against the white background, awkward black forms press against the claustrophobia inducing walls, as the artists are compelled to interact with increasing force, educing resilience, revolt and compliance [46].

A women artist using art for change is Iman, a Syrian subversive cartoonist who signs the hundreds of protest posters she makes simply with her name in English. Frequently working by gas and candle light, in Arabic, everyone and everything that has a negative effect on Syrian life is critiqued, from Iranian and US policy, the international community, the Geneva Convention, to world leaders that play a role in her country’s devastation, including Putin, Ahmedinejad, Obama and Gulf leaders, and Daesh [47]. She often includes the flags of the Assad regime, France and Hezbollah to name a few. In her interview with Zeinab Khalil, a freelance writer and anti-violence organiser, Iman says “You can’t discount the role of civil and media activists, even in this bloody armed conflict. Once that stops, there is no uprising. We are preserving the roots of the uprising, of how it began”. Up against state security, she and her friend’s lives are daily at risk. Imam often commemorates people she knew personally who have been killed or disappeared.

The war has changed everything. One day I am a lawyer living in a flat in Aleppo. Today, I am a refugee.

Displaced, she continues to support and rally her community of opposition. In 2014 she began posting her posters on Facebook where her message has a wide reach. She says, “As long as Syrian blood flows, I must continue.”

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Turner Prize-winner Susan Philipsz’ sound References installation at Tate Britain War Damaged [1]www.artuk.org/discover/artists/butler-elizabeth-southerdenthompson-18461933 Musical instruments 2015-2016, features [2}www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/artists/elizabeth-southerdenbutler recordings of British and German brass and thompson[3] www.inthein-between.com/hannah-hoch wind instruments damaged in conflicts over [4] www.whitechapelgallery.org/about/press/hannah-hoch [5] www.moma.org/collection/artists/3201 the last 200 years [48]. Philipsz is fascinated [6] www.rogallery.com/Kollwitz/Kollwitz-bio.htm by the emotive effect of sound and its ability [7]www.germanexpressionismleicester.org/leicesters-collection/ artists-and- artworks/kaethe-kollwitz/ to activate our memory, and the psycho- [8] www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_Mudie-Cooke [9] www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/106 resonance held in objects.

[10] www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/16808

One such object represented is the Balaclava Bugle, played by Billy Britain to sound the Charge of the Light Brigade.

Falling in battle, Britain was nursed by Florence Nightingale and immortalized in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘valley of death’. He died of his wounds, with the mutilated instrument at his side [49].

The bugle has a gash in it, made by a Cossack that tried to pick it up from the ground with his sword.

In this cursory look through the broad sweep of time, we have seen war become more surreal and the methods of its representation more abstracted, and visual art’s capacity to resensitise us grow in significance. From history painting, modernism and abstraction, to conceptual ideas in a multiplicity of forms – none of the women artists shown here beautify or glorify war and all bring a very different perspective that goes beyond portraits of war and the visual representation of people’s experience to the mechanics of war, broken down in to constituent and contributing factors, and consequences. This has particular resonance in our time of ultra-modernism as the causes that have taken us to war continue to do so and raise urgent questions about corporatisation, acquisition, poverty, prejudice, human rights and dissention. What will war look like in the future? What will art about war made by women look like?

Art, Politics & War

[11]www.blogs.iwm.org.uk/transforming-iwm-london/2013/11/ architecture-of-war-a-letter-from-the-artist/ [12] www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p025lsfp/women-of-our-centuryseries-1- paule-vezelay [13] www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1050001076 [ 1 4 ] w w w. d a m e l a u ra k n i g ht . co m /e d u cat i o n a l - i nfo r m at i o n / bibliography-dame- laura-knight/ [15] www.iwm.org.uk/history/a-short-history-of-the-war-crimes-trialsafter-the- second-world-war [16]www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/military-history/ world-war-two/art452277 [17] www.goldmarkart.com/scholarship/artists-2/ethel-gabain/ [18] www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/10185 [ 1 9 ] w w w.w a r m u s e u m . c a / c w m / e x h i b i t i o n s / a r t w a r / artworks/19710261-1626_private-roy-canadian-women-army_e [20] www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/stella/article.asp [21] www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/10177 [22] www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/10174 [23] www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/10173 [24]www.peoriamagazines.com/as/2015/nov-dec/works-womenartists-display [25] www.gerdameyerbernstein.com [26] www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Zinkeisen [27]www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/apr/07/female-artistsimperial-war-museum [28] www.de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Ernst [29]www.chgs.umn.edu/museum/exhibitions/ravensbruck/ womenHolocaust.html [30] www.thefullwiki.org/Claude_Cahun [31] www.eai.org/title.htm?id=6900 [32] www.eai.org/title.htm?id=6896 [33] www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artwork.php?mkey=99832 [34] www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frauke_Eigen [35] www.columbia.edu/cu/arts/neiman/Walker/ [36] www.paceprints.com/2013/kara-walker-harpers-pictorial-historycivil-war- annotated [37] www.martharosler.net/about [38] www.tanyaleighton.com/index.php?pageId=445&l=en [39]www.rhizome.org/editorial/2014/may/21/yu-me-aleksandradomanovics- internet-realism/ [40] www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonny_de_la_Peña [41] www.immersivejournalism.com [42] www.fionabanner.com/works [43] www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Kitson [44] www.sararahbar.com/index.php?page=23 [45] www.tcdailyplanet.net/iraqi-women-artists-visiting-minneapolisdiscussion-and-collaboration-weekend [46] www.samaalshaibi.com/Baghdadi-Mem-Wars [47]www.medium.com/ummah-wide/a-womans-war-paintf05daf404700#.c3dw091r3 [48]www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/susan-philipszwar-damaged-musical-instruments [ 4 9 ] w w w. b b c . c o . u k / a h i s t o r y o f t h e w o r l d / o b j e c t s / rJ49c3NITFaqZOHa09NjXg

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Jananne Al-Ani (b1966) Jananne Al-Ani uses photography and film to reflect upon the politics of representation and issues around ‘the gaze’. Her films are installed to physically engage the audience, using multiple monitors, largescale projections and sound. Much of her work includes her family speaking poetical narratives that operate on both personal and global levels. She has been influenced by the work of Malek Alloula. She has drawn a parallel between the gaze of a veiled woman and the gaze of the photographer as the privileged gaze. (Contemporary British Women Artists by Rebecca Fortnum) janannealani.net

Eve Arnold (1912-2012) Eve Arnold was the first woman to join Magnum in 1957. She photographed Marilyn Monroe in a lengthy project documenting the many selves of the star, revealing her through a multi-layered composite of both intensely personal and public moments. Her work Moments of Superb Clarity was achieved by a process of collaboration with her subject, a technique she used both with Marilyn and Malcolm X – where she and her subject manoeuvred themselves into positions of trust on either side of the camera, creating intimacy which is evident in the final work.

The truths revealed are deeper for the dual commitment to the final, a sense of something achieved together. Her ability to create this trust helped give her unprecedented access to some of the most politically challenging meetings of the last century. magnumphotos.com/evearnold

20 INFLUENTIAL WOMEN

PHOTOGRAPHERS

Diane Arbus (1923-71) American photographer and writer, often chose subjects who lived in the realm of spectacle - performance artists, drag queens, circus freaks, carnaval acts, the tattooed, the pierced, all of whom Arbus said ‘had already passed their test in life’. Her work in the field of difference or deviance is stark and honest, her subjects’ gaze is confrontational, disturbing and addictive, a peep into the public display of private life often defined by trauma or rejection.

Her work appeared in shows in the 60s in the New York Museum of Modern Art and she was the first American photographer to show at the Venice Biennale. Her own struggle with depression ended in suicide and her life story inspired the film Fur, starring Nicole Kidman as Arbus in 2006. diane-arbus-photography.com 20 Influential Women Photographers

contributors:

Melissa Budasz, Joan Byrne, Pia Goddard, Moira Jarvis & Daisy Shayler

Shirley Baker (1932-2014) Shirley Baker is thought to have been the only woman practising street photography in Britain during the post-war era. In particular she was drawn to documenting Salford and Manchester during a time of massive slum clearance in the 1960s and early 1970s. Her work received little attention during her lifetime but one year after her death, the Photographers’ Gallery staged a comprehensive and joyous exhibition of her work. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Baker ArtVerve

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Dickey Chapelle (1919-65) Chapelle was the first American female war photographer, stationed in Austria in the height of World War II. Despite her lack of education and experience, Chapelle’s photographs for Life magazine capture beautifully the trauma of war. Whilst photographing a humanitarian mission to deliver aid to Hungarian refugees, Chapelle was captured and held in custody by the Hungarian secret police. Despite being held in solitary confinement for 2 months, she returned to photograph the front lines that very same year. On her final trip to Vietnam, Chapelle was killed in a tripwire that sent shrapnel flying. In a role reversal, she became the focus of a photograph as photographer Henri Huet captured her death on film. nojobforawoman.com/reporters/dickey-chapelle/ Margaret Bourke-White (1904-71) A woman of firsts - the first woman to work for both Fortune and Life Magazine, the first female war correspondent to work with the US armed forces, and the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet Industry. Her fascination with the industrial revolution and social change resulted in astoundingly dramatic and beautiful photographs of the new steel production plants and factory workers in the Soviet Union and United States. A compassionate humanitarian photographer, her most famous picture essays documented the misery of mass migration during the years of the Dust Bowl in the American Midwest, and the progress of Allied forces across Europe in World War II. Her images of inmates and guards at the Buchenwald concentration camp at the moment of liberation are harrowing and iconic. gallerym.com/pages/ margaret-bourke-whitebiography

Sonia DelaunayWomen Photographers 20 Influential

Rineke Dijkstra (b1959) Portraits are central to the work of Dutch photographer Rineke Dijstra. The artist generally creates her documentary projects by approaching children and young people in public spaces such as beaches, parks and nightclubs. This results in intense collaborations and, although her models are lifted out of their everyday contexts, they are given leeway to choose the manner in which they express themselves. The photographs have a poignancy and humour that belies their sociological coolness. (Art Now, edited by Uta Grosenick and Burkhard Riemschneider) tate.org.uk/art/artists/rineke-dijkstra-2666d Fay Godwin 1931-2005 Fay Godwin’s route into photography began with taking photos of her family. Though she remained untrained she achieved fame through her photos of literary figures and, in time, she became Britain’s best-known landscape photographer in black and white. This work was motivated by love of the countryside combined with ecological concerns. In addition, she did a good line in humorous pictures. faygodwin.com Nan Goldin (b1953) In 1978, Goldin moved to new York and was soon at home in Manhattan’s nightlife, working, like many artists (including Kiki Smith), as a barmaid at the Tin Pan Alley Bar, and presenting her slide shows, which she constantly changed, expanded and backed with music from 1980 onwards. On the basis of individual photos, she developed a fragmentary sequence of images based on narrative film sequences. The slide show, now encompassing more than 700 slides, is still being shown in constantly changing order with ever-new motifs. (Women Artists, edited

by Uta Grosenick) tate.org.uk/art/artists/nan-goldin-2649 ArtVerve

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Rose Finn-Kelcy (b1945) In the early 1970s Rose Finn-Kelcy made flags and used the wind to animate her image. The Restless Image – A discrepancy Between the Felt Position and the Seen Position. Self-portrait, 1975 plays on that kind of energy, as well as picking up on the widespread interest at that time in the relative positions of the spectator and of the artist. (Modern British Sculpture, edited by Penelope Curtis and Keith Wilson) rosefinnkelcy.com Anna Fox (b1961) Influenced by the British documentary tradition and US 'New Colourists' her first work Workstations observed, with a critical eye, London office culture in the mid Thatcher years. Later work documenting weekend wargames, Friendly Fire was exhibited in the exhibition Warworks at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Netherlands Foto Institute and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. David Chandler, in his essay Vile Boodies, in the book Anna Fox Photographs 1983-2007, said Fox is "regarded as an important part of what might be called the 'second wave' of British colour documentary photography" and that she "helped form its particular style of combative, highly charged use of flash and colour". annafox.co.uk Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) Lange placed herself at the heart of her practice, recognising that her images of people were in some way images of herself.

She was an astute observer of the constructed landscape and how it impacted on the people who moved through it. She is most known for her work for the Farm Security Administration (1935-9). Her pioneering photographic studies of unemployed sharecroppers, displaced families and migrant workers went a long way to convincing people to back the social reform programmes of Roosevelt’s adminstration.

Her observations of people under stress are 20 Influential Women Photographers

expressed through the choice of body language and physical environment; all indicating the extreme tensions undergone by people enduring loneliness, despair and poverty. biography.com/people/dorothea-lange Annie Leibovitz (b1942) Leibovitz is among the most famous portrait photographers of the 21st century. She had produced an astounding amount of incredibly well known images of celebrities, during her time at Rolling Stone magazine and Vanity Fair.

Many of her images are highly controversial, such as the shot of a naked, pregnant Demi Moore. Her most notable image is the Rolling Stone cover of John Lennon curled up with Yoko Ono, shot mere hours before Lennon was killed outside his apartment. Similar to Arnold, she photographs celebrities in their ‘everyday life’ using minimal editing and props to show us these famous personalities in their natural state. annieleibovitz.tumblr.com/ Helen Levitt (1913-2009) Helen Levitt began taking photos in the late 1930s and continued snapping for almost 70 years. In particular, she is known for her street photography shot in New York City in the 1960s (most of that work was stolen) and the 1980s. She was a pioneer in the use of colour.

She had an unerring eye for the absurd. In explaining how she worked, she said: “I would go out and shoot, follow my eyes – what they noticed, I tried to capture with my camera, for others to see.” nytimes.com/2009/03/30/arts/design/30levitt.html?_ r=0 Sally Mann (b1951) Mann is best known for her intimate portraits of her family, her young children and her husband, and for her evocative and resonant landscape work in the American South.

Between 1984-94 she worked on the series Immediate Family which focuses on her three ArtVerve

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young children. While the series touches on ordinary moments in their daily lives playing, sleeping, eating, it also speaks to larger themes such as death and cultural perceptions of sexuality. In Proud Flesh (2009), Mann turns the camera to her husband. Shot over a six-year period, this series of candid and frank portraits reverses traditional gender roles, capturing a male subject's moments of intimate vulnerability. sallymann.com Sarah Maple (b1985) Much of Maple's inspiration originates from being brought up as a Muslim, with parents of mixed religious and cultural backgrounds.

Blurring the lines between popular culture and religious devotion in an unfailingly mischievous manner, her aesthetic narrative urges the viewer to challenge traditional notions of religion, identity and the societal role of women. Maple takes on the most oppressive aspects of the patriarchy, targeting the gender inequities of religion, sex and economics. sarahmaple.com

ambiguous subjects and scales. Her concerns are the human impact of war and the physical scars inflicted by conflict that are exposed, but not explained in Fait (2011) and are echoed in the scarred bodies in Paris hospitals for Every One (1994). The series consists of large-scale close-ups of fresh surgical stitches. Like the terrestrial images of Fait, the framed sections of human flesh remain anonymous and enigmatic and the wounded tissue assumes a geological dimension. tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tateshots-sophieristelhueber

Cindy Sherman (b1945) In Untitled Film Stills Sherman plays a different role in each small black and white image: prim office worker, suburban office housewife, glamorous femme fatale in a minutely staged psychologically intense drama. Her transformation in each shot is so complete that her personal identity disappears and instead of a series of self-portraits, we have a repertoire of 20th century stereotypes. She continues to use her body as her central prop and has worked with colour photography to explore aspects of horror, violence and the grotesque. (Art Bettina Rheims (b1952) Now, edited by Uta Grosenick and Burkhard Known for her images of woman, particularly Riemschneider) those of an erotic nature, Rheims explores cindysherman.com the boundaries of how sexual identities are depicted and pushed. She photographs actors Carrie Mae Weems (b1953) and celebrities for magazines and fashion Epic narratives emerge from her intimate publications often with a promiscuous edge. windows into domestic life, exposing histories The body of work Gender Studies depicts of racism, questioning gender stereotypes, transsexuals, women that have become men, dissecting personal and family identities. men that have become women and those that Storytelling runs through Carrie Mae Weems preferred not to choose a sex and exist as images, bodies of work The Kitchen Table, Slow both, adopting a dual identity.

Fade to Black, American Icons are like the pages bettinarheims.com of poetry books, where the human condition is examined with humour, joy, and a bitter Sophie Ristelhueber (b1949) sweet sadness. Her work, through the use of Engaging with contemporary war zones historical imagery and artefact looks at the through the Surrealist legacy of depaysement, pernicious effect of racism and sexism. Her Ristelhueber’s records the collateral damage tone is gentle, personal and intimate but her of history, the earth and the body using message is global. carriemaeweems.net 20 Influential Women Photographers

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Lee Miller A Woman’s War

Lee Miller in Hitler's bathtub, Hitler's apartment, Munich, Germany 1945 By Lee Miller with David E. Scherman Š Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.

An icon of her time and known for her honesty, free-spirit and intelligence, Lee Miller (1907-77) documented predominantly the effects World War II had on the lives of women from the home front to the front line. Moira Jarvis pays a visit to the Imperial War Museum and gives us this candid snapshot.

Lee Miller

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Lee Miller sent the following dispatch to Audrey Withers the editor at Vogue from occupied Vienna in 1946. The accompanying photograph, found in the exhibition, Lee Miller: A Woman’s War, is called War’s Aftermath: Vienna Austria, September 1945.

It is as bleak as the text and horrifyingly eloquent in its depiction of the dying baby.

For an hour I watched a baby die. He was dark blue when I first saw him. He was the dark dusty blue of these waltzfilled Vienna nights, the same colour as the striped garb of the Dachau skeletons, the same imaginary blue as Strauss’s Danube. I’d thought all babies looked alike, but that was healthy babies; there are many faces for the dying. This wasn’t a two months baby, he was a skinny gladiator. He gasped and fought and struggled for life, and a doctor and a nun and I just stood there and watched…there was nothing to do but watch him die. Baring his toothless gums he clenched his fists against the attack of death. This tiny baby fought for his only possession, life. As if it might be worth something.

Lee Miller

Born in New York in 1907, Lee Miller was part of that generation of women who had gained the right to vote. They had shown it was possible to do men’s work during the First World War but now were mostly back in the home unable to find work in the Depression.

Stunningly beautiful at the age of 19, Miller was stopped from walking in front of a car in Manhattan by the publisher of Vogue, Conde Nast. This chance meeting launched her fabulous modelling career until a photograph of Miller was used to advertise Kotex menstrual pads without her consent. This caused a scandal and effectively ended her career in modelling. She decided to go to Paris.

In 1929 she worked with the Surrealist artist Man Ray and it is in Paris that she learned to be on the other side of the camera and absorb the ideas of surrealist friends, who, influenced by Freud, believed that dreams reveal the workings of the unconscious.

Echoes of the paintings of Magritte and de Chirico are found in her work; the viewpoints and lighting of her compositions are powerful and sometimes strange, executed with great precision and technical skill. Miller returned to New York in 1932 and established a portrait and commercial studio and, during a brief marriage to an Egyptian Aziz Eloui Bey, she met Roland Penrose in Paris.

At the outbreak of World War 2 she was in At the end of the Second World War she was Hampstead living with Penrose and, defying probably the only woman photojournalist orders to return to America, she took a to advance with the allies across Europe. freelance job as a photographer on Vogue.

This decision changed her life as World War In contrast with more experienced colleagues, 2 gave her the opportunity to deploy her Lee Miller was unprepared for this role. As considerable talents. As in World War 1, these a child she suffered sexual abuse, raped by job vacancies were there because men had a so-called family friend and persistently been conscripted to fight. photographed naked by her father. Naturally rebellious, she appeared to be tough and My favourite photographs in the exhibition are distant, but it is now thought that this sexual Women and the Home Front: Hertfordshire, abuse made her vulnerable to the trauma she England, October 1943. It is of Jill Craigie encountered in later life.

Lee Miller

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directing her first film, Out of Chaos (1944), a short documentary exploring the impact of war on British artists. Her other films include To Be a Woman (1951) which examined the issue of equal pay for women. There are also flashes of Miller’s surrealist past in the photo of the American nurse drying her many rubber gloves, empty fingers poking out in all directions.

In 1944 she became a correspondent accredited to the US army and teamed up with TimeLife photographer David E Scherman. As probably the only woman combat photojournalist to cover the front line war in Europe, she witnessed the liberation of Dachau concentration camp. The night after Miller visited Dachau, on April 30, 1945 – Hitler had committed suicide earlier that day – Miller and Scherman entered Munich with the American 45th division and realised they had been billeted in Hitler’s apartment.

Schuman took the iconic photograph of Miller in Hitler’s bath. The boots, still covered in mud from Dachau were positioned in front of the bath. Although the photograph caused controversy at the time it was first published, Miller said that she was only “trying to wash the odours of Dachau away” and for us now the photograph symbolises life over death.

This exhibition reveals “the wide-ranging and transformative effects on women’s lives” through the individual life of Lee Miller and her work during the war; the photographs were mostly of women. Informed by Surrealism and combining her experience as a fashion photographer there is often almost a staged elegance; showing the excitement felt by women liberated from the home, doing vital work, ordinary men and women, liberated from the everyday, taking on new roles. Her photographs bring together the brutal, painful and poignant experiences of war and in today’s political climate are thought provoking.

Lee Miller

I went to the Imperial War Museum when Britain had just completed the second wave of bombing raids on Islamic State targets in Syria. Lee Miller’s work is a stark reminder of the horror of war, its immediate impact and legacy.

Anna Leska, Air Transport Auxiliary, Polish pilot flying a spitfire, White Waltham, Berkshire, England 1942

by Lee Miller © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.

Lee Miller: A Woman’s War is at the Imperial War Museum until 24 April 2016 Many thanks to the Lee Miller Archives and the Imperal War Musuem. All images kindly reproduced with permission.

References

Lee Miller: A Women’s War by Hilary Roberts, 2015 Women at War: Lee Miller exhibition includes unseen images of conflict, Rachel Cooke, The Guardian, September 2015 Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, Whitney Chadwick , 1985 The Look of the Moment, Ali Smith The Guardian 8/9/07 Lee Miller Exhibition Review: More Than Just The Woman in Hitler’s Bathtub, Zoe Craig 19/1015 http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/l/lee-miller www.leemiller.co.uk

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Vivian Maier Finding the woman behind the Lens

by Pia Goddard

Pia Goddard's tribute to Vivian Maier in SLWA's installation I'm Inside Ring The Bell, International Women's Day 2013, 47/49 Tanner Street, London Photo Credit: David Randall-Goddard

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the fl창neur finds the world 'picturesque.'

Susan Sontag

Vivian Maier

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In 1929 Virginia Woolf wrote that all women needed was ‘a room of our own and five hundred a year’ in order to fulfill our creative potential. Approximately a decade after women got the vote in the UK and the USA, Virginia was shooed off the grass by the beadle at New College, for being a woman in a man’s world, and denied access to the library because she was not male. Today money and economic freedom is taken as given for a lot of women, but in the 50s we were still just tiptoeing into the male domains of work, education, art.

Vivian Maier worked in Chicago’s North Shore from the 1950s for about forty years as both a nanny (predominantly a job done by women) and, in her spare time, as a photographer. We knew nothing about her until 2007, when her work and a sizeable amount of her personal effects were accidentally discovered in a lockup storage space in Chicago. Post discovery, she became the centre of a media storm we have feature length documentary films, monographs, websites, blogsites, and videos, and numerous collectors and galleries involved variously in printing, scanning, publicizing, exhibiting and selling her work. There is a genuine desire to bring Maier's work into the light, and behind the scenes a vast amount of time, personal effort and money have been invested in doing just that.

Until recently, Vivian’s back story has been sketchy - she is a mystery, an anomaly, travelling alone through the streets of Chicago, at one point even taking a road trip on her own to Manila, Bangkok, Shanghai, Beijing, India, Syria, Egypt, and Italy. Although we know what her job was, and that she produced a massive body of work (100,000 -150,000 negatives, 3,000 prints, hundreds of undeveloped 35mm Ektachrome film), whilst she was alive noone knew anything about her photography at all. Finding the woman behind the lens has prompted much research and speculation.

Vivian Maier

Previous employers have expressed many diverse opinions, from inspiring to frightening, silent, funny, efficient, and a loner. Daily, a huge amount of biographical info is added by genealogists, photographers, archivists, documentary film makers, writers and so on, filling in the faint traces of her life. A recent online essay* has filled in even more of the gaps but we still don’t know why she spent her life concealing her passion for photography.

In an effort to find reasons why, its not surprising that her personal life has come under such scrutiny. Not often, maybe never, has such a sizeable body of work turned up without some account for its existence. The usual evidence expected of a practicing artist in order to give the work cohesion, evidence of development - exhibitions, texts, lectures, dialogue with her contemporaries - is missing.

The very size of the body of work is problematic as there is no evidence of any structure or internal logic to it, no personal notes in the margin so to speak, no written intent. During her lifetime it would appear that no-one but no-one knew what she was up to - her photographs were unknown, unpublished, unexhibited, and she rarely printed any of her negatives, or shared them with anyone, except, occasionally, the children in her care.

The subsequent reprinting of the work presents its own set of problems. Different owners of the collection have printed the same images in different ways, and Maier herself was no great printer, giving little guidance in the work she did print to her preferences in the final revealing of the image. Her authorial voice is absent. The choice of images which has been printed is also very problematic - the selection process is not Maier’s. Her voice is again absent, giving no direction in either the printing process, the crop, the actual choice of image, to print or not print, the paper. Who can say what has happened to her original idea? It adds greatly to the ArtVerve

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Maier ‘myth’ to say she worked in isolation.

But Pamela Bannos, a photographer and researcher, believes that she was very well acquainted with twentieth-century candid photography.

economic freedom. Early on she inherited a small legacy, which paid for a camera and a photographic trip to Europe, and for the greater part of her life she was salaried, fed and sheltered in family houses. She could parent without attachment, spend money on herself without guilt, create without restraint, answer to no-one and in the splendid isolation of her lockable bedroom, work as obsessively as she wanted.

My position has always been to try to represent this woman fairly and not get caught up in the circus of 'the mystery nanny,…I'm trying to do this story to represent her as a photographer, as an She also had access into a world rigidly defined artist. by the masculine prerogative of walking Pamela Bannos

Maier spent her formative years in a household in the Bronx with Jeanne Bertrand, a portrait photographer who knew Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum; had photography books about Walker Evans, George Winogrand, Diane Arbus and Henri Cartier-Bresson; had photographed Dali in front of the Museum of Modern Art in 1951, and in 1953 very likely went to the exhibition there entitled Five French Photographers (Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Brassaï, Izis and Ronis). Her work also has resonances of other photographers she may have known about - Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Harry Callahan, Winogrand, Weegee, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander.

It ‘may add to the history of 20thcentury street photography by summing it up with an almost encyclopedic thoroughness, veering close to just about every well-known photographer you can think of …then sliding off in another direction. Yet they maintain a distinctive element of calm, a clarity of composition and a gentleness characterized by a lack of sudden movement or extreme emotion.'

alone and actively looking. Even if her routes around Chicago were mainly circuitous, the pram dictating the direction to and from the house, Vivian walked. With children. And because nannies and children are expected in the world, in places single women and men might not be otherwise seen, parks and streets opened up to Vivian, invisible behind the pram, a vehicle of liberation for the housebound mum, a mother going crazy stuck within four walls.

Virginia Woolf laments the lack of implicit permissions in societies that kept women in the house, restricted the vista to four walls, gave them a partial view. A short 25 years later, Ms Maier is out and about in all weathers, wandering, under the radar, invisible in the way only a woman with a child can be, beyond the gaze of any man out and about on the same streets. Out is in, in the fray, and Vivian was in it, and paid for being in it. And able to slip between the cracks into any place she pleased. Of an evening, pro tem mother disconnected from her charges, she slammed shut the door. It’s almost perfect.

…there was no one around to look at what I was doing - no one interested, no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly Roberta Smith free, working into my own, unknown no one to satisfy but myself.

So Maier had context, time, a room and Georgia O’Keefe

Vivian Maier

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Until the 1920s, street or studio photographers were invariably men. By the 1930s, women had made inroads into photography in public spaces, and into photojournalism. In the US women were employed as magazine photographers to document social change, war, famine, migration, famously Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White, but Kodak was still marketing cameras to women to take snapshots in a world peppered with Kodak Points for the perfect shot.

Our common condition is to attract. We can defy but not be unaware of it...A man can always be seen. Women are looked at.

Susan Sontag

This was the world Maier walked into in her flat shoes, a world defensively defined by masculine privilege. But from behind the lens she challenged the very use of gendered public space - a woman with a buggy and a child may as well be made of air and can step through almost anywhere, enjoying the isolation and unaccountability that comes with being an invisible woman in a man’s domain. Its impossible to say, without seeing the whole body of her work if her journey was rambling, accidental, or predetermined but she photographed everything in her path, as if it were her last visit. Virginia Woolf’s authors, locked in the world of their living rooms and parlours, would have envied this relationship to the city, this impulse Vivian had of telling the story of ‘outside’, of being able to access it and fix it in a photo.

There’s a school of Chicago artists called The Chicago Imagists and part of their work is this finely crafted surface with an edgy bizarre undertone. And for me, her work has that same feeling. There’s a punished, humanitarian, edgy, bizarre world depicted through her eyes. Plus Vivian Maier

she’s very Chicago and I’m very Chicago blue collar. And so those sensibilities for me are embued in her work.

Jeffrey Goldstein

Maier’s charges were not just passports into new space, but also into people’s attention, taking it away from her as she closed in on subjects with her camera, hung discretely round her neck. They enabled her to work up very close to people, do a portrait, and then move on. Sometimes she took the kids to the seediest parts of town to photograph the down and outs, and other people’s children figured a lot in her street journeys, appearing in many of the photos, where she also inserts herself, putting herself in as a tantalizing shadow or a woman in a mirror often swamped in outsize clothes, half hidden, calling as little attention to herself as possible.

She made them for all the right reasons.

She made them to hold on to her place in the world. She made them because to not make them was impossible.

Tony Fitzpatrick

Her black and white photography, crisp detailed portraits, taken with a medium format twin lens Rolleiflex, excluded no-one - all life is there, caught in stolen moments or negotiated. She was adept at both strategies, and treated all barriers with a European sensibility - a sense of entitlement which allowed her to step beyond boundaries into otherwise unavailable worlds. Her use of the Rolleiflex poses an interesting ethical question - many of her subjects don't seem to have noticed her, they are literally caught unawares. Because of the viewfinder position on top of the camera, Maier was able to take images without letting her subjects know they were being photographed. This automatically made her detached, removed any sentimental connection to the subject but created a relationship to the subject based on power.

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When she was occasionally caught by her subjects, the work shows quite clearly how, unmasked, her aggressive, invasive technique made her subjects angry. But other work shows a clearly negotiated connection between subject and photographer. She clearly had no qualms about either way of getting what she wanted as she collected more and more images of the city in action.

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.'

Susan Sontag

Concentrations of humanity in a fixed space either act out or watch the life of the city. The continuous unfolding of the city as event has always drawn spectators. Ebenezer Howard, famous garden designer of Letchworth, said that just riding an omnibus gave him, “a pleasantly visceral jolt. A strange ecstatic feeling at such times often possessed me … The crowded streets-the signs of wealth and prosperitythe bustle-the very confusion and disorder appealed to me, and I was filled with delight."

Like Ebenezeer, Maier, must have loved the city. In the tradition of the 19th century flaneur, or artist poet, who went about the city with his pen and paper, watching and recording what he saw, from an enviably detached position, she strolled with her buggy in territory uncharted for women.

From Baudelaire to Benjamin, the figure of the flâneur, key to understanding city space in the context of ‘modernity’, crucial to understanding concepts of urban, class, gender, alienation, mass culture, and in particular gaze, was a man, a "gentleman stroller of city streets (who) had a key role in understanding, participating in and portraying the city whilst remaining a detached observer…The spectator (was) a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito."

By the early 20th century the flaneur had chucked the pen and grabbed the camera, moved on from text-based narrative descriptions of the street to city life in single frames.

Vivian Maier

Vivian roamed through the urban space, sharing with her male predecessors an aesthetic awareness of it, attuned to it and as joyously anonymous and fearless in it as they. Were Virginia Woolf alive now, trawling through the shelves for women creating narratives of the street over the last two hundred years, she would have found Vivian in the vanguard of women photographers, with a room of her own and an income, at a time when women were just not in the picture or texts of modernity unless in terms of a problematic relationship to the city.

The relationship of women to cities has long preoccupied reformers and philanthropists. In recent years the preoccupation has been inverted: the Victorian determination to control working-class women has been replaced by a feminist concern for women’s safety and comfort in city streets. But whether women are seen as a problem of cities, or cities as a problem for women, the relationship remains fraught with difficulty. With the intensification of the public/ private divide in the industrial period, the presence of women on the streets and in public places of entertainment caused enormous anxiety, and was the occasion for any number of moralizing and regulatory discourses.

Elizabeth Wilson

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But maybe Vivian’s early life in France was what propelled her through the streets with such persistant focus, and with such disregard for descriptions of where and when she could and could not go. Armed with a European sensibility, she exists comfortably on the city streets, a kind of locus of modernism, photography and spectacle. Hers might not be a problematic relationship to the city at all.

Maier’s work is a piece of history we have never seen before, a slice of time documented in single frames, with what would appear to be a unique perspective. Hers isn’t our first insight into that period of time but this a new piece of fabric dug out of the ground, opened up to show colours never seen before. Maier's photos will take on more and more iconic status, not least because of the way they were found, providing another partial, fictionalised view of history. Her particularly large body of work with its own selection and aetheticising process, once we see it all, will acknowledge connections, create equivalences where before there were none.

At the end of her life, the children of her early years as a nanny came to her rescue. The Gensburg brothers, now grown men, saved her from eviction by arranging an apartment for her to live in. In 2008 she was injured in a fall, and subsequently died in Highland Park, Oak Park nursing home on April 21, 2009.

Two years before she had stopped paying for the storage space containing her life’s work, which was sold at auction to three collectors, John Maloof, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow.

Slattery was the first to post and sell images on line, in 2008. When Maloof, whose own box of photos had lain in a cupboard for months, eventually scanned them and saw their worth, he sought out the other buyers and bought their boxes too, including Slattery’s. In one box, he found an envelope with Vivian’s name on it. A google search revealed that she had died just a few days earlier, aged 83.

Maloof’s blog, linked to a selection of Maier's Vivian Maier

photographs on Flickr, launched Maier’s work into the world. The rest, as they say, is history, and the interest in Maier's work and life has grown and grown. Maloof has ended up with around 90 per cent of her work, personal possessions and paperwork, and continues, thankfully, to scan and print Maier’s vast legacy. In 2011 he loaned 72 inkjet prints of her work to her first show in the US - Finding Vivian Maier : Chicago Street Photographer.

Maier's profile is now international and her work is finally getting the attention it clearly deserves though its progress into the light is still surrounded with issues, legal and otherwise of copyright, ownership, reproduction, royalties, inheritance and so on. The State of Illinois has possible claim on the work, some relatives have been found and paid off, though there may be more, and more issues arise as the research gathers pace. Along with all these concerns, questions surrounding the ideas of author, work and market value continue to collide and conflict with the job of getting her work out there for everyone to see. Now that we have found her, we want the whole story, but it could be a very long wait.

References

Pamela Bannos’ website: Vivian Maier’s Fractured Archive R Cahan and M Williams, 2012, Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows Julia Gray, 2013, The Curious Case of Vivian Maier’s Copyright Alex Kotlowitz, 2011, The Best Street Photographer You've Never Heard Of Rosalind Krauss, 1984, Landscape/View: Photography’s Discursive Spaces Robert Kunzig, 2011, Why cities are the best cure for our planet’s growing pains, National Geographic John Maloof, 2011, Vivian Maier: Street Photographer Joel Meyerowitz and Colin Westerbeck, 1994, Bystander: A History of Street Photography Miserere, 2016, Vivian Maier, Chicago’s Mysterious Photographer - A Timeline Geoffrey Movius, 1975, An Interview With Susan Sonta, Boston Review Jill Nicholls, Vivian Maier: lost art of an urban photographer, BBC One imagine Peter Smith, Carolyn Lefley, 2015, Rethinking Photography: Histories, Theories and Education Roberta Smith, 2012, Vivian Maier: Photographs from the Maloof Collection, Art in Review Abigail Solomon-Godeau, 2013, Inventing Vivian Maier, lemagazine. jeudepaume.org Susan Sontag, 1977, On photography and Women, 1999, with Annie Leibovitz Elizabeth Wilson, 1992, The Invisible Flâneur Janet Wolff, 1985, The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity Virginia Woolf, 1929, A Room of One’s Own * Ann Marks and Francoise Perron, 2016, Vivian Maier Developed,(vivianmaierbio.wordpress.com)

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Tina Modotti Revolutionary Nomad

Tina Modotti (1896-1942), Mexican sombrero with hammer and sickle, 1927

by Melissa Budasz I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti

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When I think of a pioneering and passionate photographer of the 20th Century, Tina Modotti stands out - a life and work holding resonance, beauty and truth. Her meticulously composed decontextualized objects, breathtaking landscapes and photography of the places and people she observed, conveyed a tenderness and sharp reality of the times she lived in post revolutionary Mexico in the 1920s.

She made images conveying the dignity and worth of working class Mexican people combining highly charged political content.

Modotti lived a nomadic life in countries that took her from her native Italy to Austria, America, Mexico, Germany, Russia, Spain, France and then back to Mexico City where she died unexpectedly at 45 of heart failure in the back of a taxi. Her death is surrounded by mystery with rumours (given her political notoriety) that some continue to question whether the cause of her death was natural.

As a child born in Udine, Italy, Modotti showed an interest in photography from an early age. She visited the photography studio of her uncle, Pietro Modotti. Tina grew up among the working poor in a politically oriented family. Her early years were spent in Austria (her parents were migrant labourers).

At 17, she travelled to San Francisco to join her father and sister where she became a screen actress. She married the writer Roubaix de l’Arbrie Richey and in Los Angeles acted in three silent films and became the model and muse to the photographer Edward Weston who became a mentor and inspiration for Modotti’s development as a fine art photographer and by 1921 she was modelling for Weston and the two soon began an affair.

open a portrait studio. It is here she learnt a lot about photography from him and moved in the same circles as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Pablo Neruda, becoming active in leftist politics. Her photography spanned only 7 years (1923-1930) before dedicating her life to activism for the Communist party.

For years, this nameless, faceless woman, who appeared in so many of Weston’s nudes, was known only as his mistress and muse 1

It took 50 years from her death, when boxes of her photographs were discovered in a farmhouse in Oregon, and her legacy and extraordinary life came to light. I remember seeing her work (alongside Weston’s) at the 2004 Barbican exhibition The Mexican Years: Extraordinary photographs from early twentieth century Mexico and was struck by the natural simplicity mixed with complex undertones. Many of her composed objects typically hammers, sickles, hats and calloused workers hands and feet were the focus, magnifying the part (not the whole) and concentrated largely on three elements. Often they form triangular shapes, a structural device used in renaissance painting. The triangle has been a constant and major element in many compositions in painting (just as much as in sculpture and architecture) ever since.

Modotti often used this structure as a compositional device, which directly draws the viewer in, making her work more accessible as our eyes are drawn to an area of focus within a subtle triangular shape.

The reading of the objects reveals the story - workers hands, Mexican hats, and tools to farm the land, bullets and sharp objects that In 1923 she moved to Mexico with Weston to hint at combat and revolt.

Tina Modotti

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Tina Modotti (1896 -1942) Woman with flag c1928

Tina Modotti (1896 -1942) Hands of the Puppeteer 1929

Woman with flag taken in 1928 is a very significant image. The woman’s expression is stern and the flag is huge with no discernable emblem on it; it is a solid colour. This suggests that she is representing more than just a nation, but an idea. Also, the solid colour of the flag reflects the solidity of the idea it represents - the size of the flag suggests that the idea is rather large and important and could represent something deeper.

Seeing the woman’s strong and upright stance in combination with the huge solid flag symbolizes pride in being a woman.

The bustling streets of Mexico City in the 1920s saw radicals, revolutionaries and exiles and Modotti, at particular points in her short life, became all three. She was quoted as saying,

my life gets in the way of my art

2

As her photography skills began to develop, Modotti’s work included lyrical images of peasants and workers and experiments

Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti (1896 -1942) Telephone Wires, 1925

with architectural interiors, flowers and urban landscapes. Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo said her work was both ‘romantic’ and ‘revolutionary’. In 1926, Weston signed a contract with the writer Anita Brenner to photograph her book on Mexican folk art - Modotti and Weston both took the project on. The job was quite large and required over 400 8×10 negatives and prints, which took several months, and by the end, Tina's relationship with Edward was over, as it was believed he felt her dedication to politics and revolution jarred with his artistic objectives. Weston returned to California and they never saw each other again.

Modotti became the photographer of choice for the blossoming Mexican mural movement, documenting the works of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. Her one-woman retrospective exhibition at the National Library in December 1929 was advertised as ‘The First Revolutionary Photographic Exhibition In Mexico.’

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She had reached a high point in her career as a photographer - developing captivating photographs of the Mexican people in their environment documenting social change and reform, her work is deeply political. She said of her photography in 1929,

Vidalli in Spain, she became a nurse for the Red Aid and possibly a spy and after the fall of Madrid in 1939, was deported from Spain and boarded a ship back to Mexico that was originally bound for New York.

Using an alias, her final three years in Mexico were lived quietly in the country she loved.

Her loyal friend, the poet Pablo Neruda, wrote this epitaph in her memory, part of which can be found on her tombstone in the Panteón de Dolores in Mexico City.

Because it can be produced in the present, and because the camera captures only what exists objectively, photography is the most satisfactory medium for recording real life in all its aspects. That is where its documentary Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life, value lies. If to this is added sensibility, bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam, combined with steel and wire and understanding and, above all, an pollen to make up your firm 4 acknowledgement of historical context, and delicate being then I believe the result is something Pablo Neruda worthy of a place in social production, to which we should all contribute.3 Modotti’s life was peppered with death and tragedy combined with uprooted travels across the globe. She nursed her dying father and then later her mother, suffered the death of her husband Roubaix and parted ways with her mentor and lover, Weston.

In 1927 Modotti joined the Communist party and later fell in love with one of the Latin American exiles, the Cuban athlete, student leader and revolutionary, Julio Antonio Mella.

Their affair was short lived when in 1929 she was implicated in the murder of Mella, shot dead by an unknown assailant as they were walking home together. Although eventually cleared of his murder, officials saw Modotti as a loose canon with a colourful past (Weston’s full frontal nudes of her added to this) and the Mexican authorities had her deported and the following decade she lived in several countries, becoming more involved in politics and less photography. During a love affair with another revolutionary, Vittorio Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti, Glendale, CA, USA, 1921 Photo credit: Edward Weston

References

1 www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/10104447/tina-modottian-amazing-life-in-photography.html 2 www.modotti.com - Tina Modotti Without Walls 1 & 2 3 Tina Modotti: Revolutionary Photographer - Ocean Press 2013 4 Tina Modotti epitaph by Pablo Neruda www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/womphotoj/modottiessay.html#note1 clas.berkeley.edu/research/mexico-radicals -revolutionaries-andexiles-mexico-city-1920s Black Girls 2015, wall relief with toys & singing/ light

up dolls © Margaret Roleke

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ArtVerve Book Review About Women

Photographs by Dorothy Bohm

Bohm signing copies of her new book About Women at The Photographers' Gallery, December 2015

The ArtVerve team were delighted to be at the launch of Dorothy Bohm's new book About Women, published by Dewi Lewis Publishing.

This is her first photobook to focus exclusively on the subject of women. The launch was held at The Print Sales Gallery in the Photographers' Gallery in London. The evening was opened by the director, Brett Rogers, and Bohm, now 91, spoke eloquently about her long association with the Photographers' Gallery. There were also several speeches, including one by Amanda Hopkinson, a friend and collaborator for many years, who wrote the introduction.

All praised Bohm's generosity, friendship and unrelenting passion for photography.

About Women captures and preserves the ever-changing, constantly evolving roles of women, spanning over 70 years of Dorothy Bohm's life. Bohm's strength and apparent blindness to the constraints of her gender run like veins through her book. Travelling widely with her husband, Bohm was able to visit many cities and contrasting societies. About Women, rather than separating photographs Book Reviews

by time and place, juxtaposes women of different ages and nationalities together. This unites us, connects us to different eras and countries, but most importantly to each other.

A sense of beauty combined with fragility is carried through many of the images of young women perhaps suggesting her own feelings at this age, as a child educated away from her family.

About Women puts photographs of real women alongside other representations of the female form, blurring the lines between them.

Mannequins, posters and advertisements form the centre of Bohm’s photographic fascination and the images convey a strong sense of the contemporary woman, constrained by the boundaries of gender. About Women spans all ages, continents and classes. It is a beautiful representation of the life of women not just through her own experiences, but through the lives of the women photographed. review by Daisy Shayler

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ArtVerve Book Review Women

Annie Leibovitz & Susan Sontag Published 1999

In the introduction by Susan Sontag, she says that:

We assume a world with a boundless appetite for images, in which people women and men, are eager to surrender themselves to the camera, but it is worth recalling that there are parts of the world where to be photographed is something off-limits to women. In a few countries, where men have been mobilized for a veritable war against women, women scarcely appear at all.

The imperial rights of the camera - to gaze at, to record, to exhibit anyone, anything, are an exemplary feature of modern life, as is the emancipation of women.

The book is key to an understanding of women in the history of photography (on both sides of the camera) and the ever more

visible diversity of women and their roles in the world. These photographs - astronauts, housewives, victims of abuse, cheerleaders, artists, miners, women in all their glory, women downtrodden - were part of a project that seemed too broad a subject to cover when Leibovitz first considered the idea with Susan Sontag.

Now, in 2016, the project is being expanded.

As Leibovitz says, it is unending. Images from the book (including Cindy Sherman, Agnes Martin, Louise Bourgeois, Hilary Clinton) appeared in January this year in Wapping, and the show Women: New Portraits, includes new work, bringing the total to almost 400 images altogether. The show will travel to ten countries in all, including Istanbul, Tokyo, Mexico City, Singapore, and New York.

Women is an absolute 'must read'. review by Pia Goddard

Book Reviews

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What’s On women's art during next 6 months

London Exhibitions Ittah Yoda: I Think Mango you say Salmon Annka Kulty’s Gallery 472 Hackney Road E2 9EQ to 5 March 2016

Emma Talbot: Unravel These Knots Domobaal Gallery 3 John Street WC1N 2ES to 10 April 2016

Basic Structures Of Austrian Cultural Forum 28 Rutland Gate SW7 1PQ to 1 April 2016

Emma Talbot: Unravel These Knots Freud Museum 20 Maresfield Gardens NW3 5SX to 10 April 2016

Strange & Familiar: Britain as Revealed

by International Photographers Barbican Art Gallery Silk Street EC2Y 8DS 16 March - 19 June 2016

Drawing on Childhood Foundling Museum 40 Brunswick Square WC1N 1AZ to 1 May 2016

Sarah Chilvers & Guilia Ricci Bartha Contemporary 25 Margaret Street W1W 8RX 18 March - 7 May 2016 Anne Rothenstein Beaux Arts 48 Maddox Street W1S 1AY 3 March - 9 April 2016 SLWA-WAL Collaboration Pillow Talk: Conversations With Women Brixton East 100 Barrington Road SW9 7JF 15 March 2016 Tori Wranes Carl Freedman Gallery 29 Charlotte Road EC2A 3PB to April 2016 Neoliberal Lulz Carroll/Fletcher Gallery 56-57 Eastcastle Street W1W 8EQ to 2 April 2016 What’s on

Tell It Slant Frith Street Gallery 17-18 Golden Square W1F 9JJ to 29 April 2016 Ida Kvetny: Surreal Universe Gallery Elena Schukina 10 Lees Place Mayfair W1K 6LL to 15 April 2016 Maria Taniguchi: The Perfect Blue IBID Gallery 27 Margaret Street W1W 8RY to 26 March 2016 Betty Woodman: Theatre of the Domestic ICA The Mall SW1Y 5AH to 10 April 2016 Lee Miller: A Woman’s War Imperial War Museum Lambeth Road SE1 6HZ to 24 April 2016

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What’s On women's art during next 6 months

Susannah Worth: How to do things with salad Jerwood Project Space 171 Union Street SE1 0LN to 30 April 2016

Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen Serpentine Gallery Kensington Gardens W2 3XA to 22 May 2016

Renee So Kate MacGarry Gallery 27 Old Nichol Street E2 7HR 11 March - 16 April 2016

Mel Brimfield and Gwyneth Herbert: The Palace that Joan Built Stratford Underground Station Station Street E15 1AZ Ongoing

Daria Martin: At the Threshold Maureen Paley Gallery 21 Herald Street E2 6JT to 13 March 2016

Susan Philipsz Tate Britain Millbank SW1P 4RG to 3 April 2016

Vogue 100: A Century of Style National Portrait Gallery St. Martin's Place WC2H 0HE to 22 May 2016

Performing for the Camera Tate Modern Bankside, SE1 9TG to 12 June 2016

Peckham Promenade Peckham Platform 89 Peckham High Street SE15 5RS to 25 March 2016

Michelle Mathison Tyburn Gallery 26 Barrett Street W1U 1BG to 19 March 2016

Jo Spence: The Final Project Richard Saltoun Gallery 111 Great Titchfield Street W1W 6RY to 25 March 2016

Guerilla Girls : Until Whitechapel Gallery 77-82 Whitechapel High Street E1 7QX to 4 September 2016

Champagne Life Saatchi Gallery Duke Of York's HQ, King's Road SW3 4RY to 6 March 2016

UK Wide Exhibitions Left hand to back of head, object held against right thigh Bluecoat Gallery Liverpool to 28 March 2016

Julia Margaret Cameron: Influence and Intimacy Science Museum Exhibition Road SW7 2DD to 28 March 2016 What’s on

Fashion Cities Africa Brighton Museum & Art Gallery Brighton 30 April 2016 - 8 Jan 2017 ArtVerve ON CONTEMPORARY FEMALE ART

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What’s On women's art during next 6 months

Julie Merriman: Revisions City Gallery Dublin to 10 April 2016 Alison Wilding + Tess Jaray East Gallery NUA Norwich to 19 March 2016 Subdoqh Gupta: Invisible Beauty Hauser & Wirth Somerset to 2 May 2016 Barbara Hepworth: A Greater Freedom The Hepworth Wakefield to Spring 2016 Janet Mendelsohn IKON Gallery Birmingham to 3 April 2016 Becky Thornley-Fox: Estuary to ocean - painting the edge MOMA wales to 9 April 2016

International Exhibitions This Place Brooklyn Museum New York, USA to 5 June 2016 Judy Chicago: The Dinner Party Brooklyn Museum New York, USA Long term installation Physical: Sex and the Body in the 1980s LACMA Los Angeles, USA 20 March - 31 July 2016 Catherine Opie: O LACMA Los Angeles, USA to 5 September 2016 Diane Arbus: In the Beginning The Met Brewer New York, USA 12 July - 27 November 2016

Tania Kovats: Evapotation Museum of Science & Industry Manchester to 15 May 2016

Louise Borgeois: No exit National Gallery of Art Washington, USA to 15 May 2016

Laura Lancaster The New Art Gallery Walsall to 8 May 2016

Whistler’s mother National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne, Australia to 19 June 2016

Modern Scottish Women: Painters and Sculptors 1865-1885 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to 26 June 2016 Rose Wylie Turner Contemporary Margate to 31 March 2016 What’s on

Making the Australian Quilt: 1800-1950 National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne, Australia 22 July - 6 November 2016 Tracey Emin: I Cried Because I Love You The White Cube Hong Kong 21 March - 21 May 2016 ArtVerve ON CONTEMPORARY FEMALE ART

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ArtVerve magazine

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ArtVerve • celebrates, recognizes and documents women artists, current exhibitions and projects with critical theory • is a forum of ideas and views on women's art • is not driven by ideological principles; for dialogues to become available we are trying to keep it as open as possible • the contributors are not all professional art critics or writers, but practitioners whose contributions are just as valid as they reflect on their contemporaries and their interest in the history and future of women's art • is a magazine written by artists for artists with intelligence, passion and a point of view.

This magazine is produced out of a need to communicate the talent and relevance of women's art historically and in contemporary practice.

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