Central to Their Lives

Description

Scholarly essays on the achievements of female artists working in and inspired by the American South

Looking back at her lengthy career just four years before her death, modernist painter Nell Blaine said, "Art is central to my life. Not being able to make or see art would be a major deprivation." The Virginia native's creative path began early, and, during the course of her life, she overcame significant barriers in her quest to make and even see art, including serious vision problems, polio, and paralysis. And then there was her gender. In 1957 Blaine was hailed by Life magazine as someone to watch, profiled alongside four other emerging painters whom the journalist praised "not as notable women artists but as notable artists who happen to be women."

In Central to Their Lives, twenty-six noted art historians offer scholarly insight into the achievements of female artists working in and inspired by the American South. Spanning the decades between the late 1890s and early 1960s, this volume examines the complex challenges these artists faced in a traditionally conservative region during a period in which women's social, cultural, and political roles were being redefined and reinterpreted.

The presentation—and its companion exhibition—features artists from all of the Southern states, including Dusti Bongé, Anne Goldthwaite, Anna Hyatt Huntington, Ida Kohlmeyer, Loïs Mailou Jones, Alma Thomas, and Helen Turner. These essays examine how the variables of historical gender norms, educational barriers, race, regionalism, sisterhood, suffrage, and modernism mitigated and motivated these women who were seeking expression on canvas or in clay. Whether working from studio space, in spare rooms at home, or on the world stage, these artists made remarkable contributions to the art world while fostering future generations of artists through instruction, incorporating new aesthetics into the fine arts, and challenging the status quo.

Sylvia Yount, the Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, provides a foreword to the volume.

Contributors:
Sara C. Arnold
Daniel Belasco
Lynne Blackman
Carolyn J. Brown
Erin R. Corrales-Diaz
John A. Cuthbert
Juilee Decker
Nancy M. Doll
Jane W. Faquin
Elizabeth C. Hamilton
Elizabeth S. Hawley
Maia Jalenak
Karen Towers Klacsmann
Sandy McCain
Dwight McInvaill
Courtney A. McNeil
Christopher C. Oliver
Julie Pierotti
Deborah C. Pollack
Robin R. Salmon
Mary Louise Soldo Schultz
Martha R. Severens
Evie Torrono
Stephen C. Wicks
Kristen Miller Zohn

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des Arts
• Women's Studies
• Artists
• Newcomb Pottery
• Catherine Wiley
• Culture and Society
• Elizabeth Catlett
• Mary Pinchot Meyer
• Elisabet Ney
• Picturesque
• Doris Ulmann
• Sophonisba
• Mammy archetype
• General officer
• Art
• General
• Robert Henri
• Kara Walker
• Augusta Savage
• Sofonisba Anguissola

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 20 juin 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611179552
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 19 Mo

Extrait

CENTRAL TO THEIR LIVES

CENTRAL TO THEIR LIVES
SOUTHERN WOMEN ARTISTS in THE JOHNSON COLLECTION
Edited by LYNNE BLACKMAN
Foreword by SYLVIA YOUNT
Essays by
MARTHA R. SEVERENS
DEBORAH C. POLLACK
EVIE TERRONO
KAREN TOWERS KLACSMANN
ERIN R. CORRALES-DIAZ
and DANIEL BELASCO
THE JOHNSON COLLECTION in association with

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
© 2018 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN: 978-1-61117-954-5 (cloth)
ISBN: 978-1-61117-955-2 (ebook)
Unless otherwise noted, all images are property of the Johnson Collection, LLC.
Frontispiece: Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer (1873–1943), Portrait of Madeline McDowell Breckinridge , 1920, oil on canvas, 48¼ × 37 inches
Front cover design by BookMatters
This volume accompanies the exhibition of the same title .
Exhibition venues include
Georgia Museum of Art , Athens
June 30–September 23, 2018
Mississippi Museum of Art , Jackson
October 6, 2018–January 20, 2019
Huntington Museum of Art , West Virginia
March 2–June 30, 2019
Dixon Gallery and Gardens , Memphis, Tennessee
July 28–October 13, 2019
Gibbes Museum of Art , Charleston, South Carolina
January 17–May 3, 2020
Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens , Jacksonville, Florida
June 23–November 29, 2020
Taubman Museum of Art , Roanoke, Virginia
January 30–June 13, 2021
Contents
FOREWORD
SYLVIA YOUNT
INTRODUCTION
SUSANNA JOHNSON SHANNON
EDITORIAL NOTE
“THE PEDESTAL HAS CRASHED”: ISSUES FACING WOMEN ARTISTS IN THE SOUTH
MARTHA R. SEVERENS
SISTERHOODS OF SPIRIT: SOUTHERN WOMEN’S CLUBS AND EXPOSITIONS
DEBORAH C. POLLACK
SUFFRAGE, SOCIAL ACTIVISM, AND WOMEN ARTISTS OF THE SOUTH
EVIE TERRONO
“OF THE SOUTH, FOR THE SOUTH AND BY THE SOUTH”: THE SOUTHERN STATES ART LEAGUE
KAREN TOWERS KLACSMANN
“CONTRARY INSTINCTS”: ART HISTORY’S GENDERED COLOR LINE
ERIN R. CORRALES-DIAZ
EYES WIDE OPEN: MODERNIST WOMEN ARTISTS IN THE SOUTH
DANIEL BELASCO
THE WORKS OF ART
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DIRECTORY OF SOUTHERN WOMEN ARTISTS
NOTES
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
Anne Mauger Taylor Nash (1884–1968), Portrait of a Young Girl , oil on canvas, 23⅞ × 19⅞ inches
Foreword
Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection is the third survey exhibition and publication to be organized by the Johnson Collection, marking another exciting contribution to the overdue investigation of a critical dimension of American art history—artistic production and reception in the American South. Having long been concerned with regional art worlds as well as women artists and artists of color in my own scholarship, I am particularly cheered by the expanding interest of academy- and museum-based scholars in these lesser-known figures of our discipline.
Stronger literary traditions in the region have allowed many Southern women writers of the period covered by this catalog—late 1890s to early 1960s—to flourish on a national, even international stage, from Kate Chopin to Zora Neale Hurston to Harper Lee. While visual art had a later start in the South, in the eighteenth century there were “face painters”—for example, Henrietta Johnston and Mary Roberts, based in Charleston, South Carolina—who pioneered professional careers, among the first in the nation.
Conservative gender norms and biases embraced throughout nineteenth-century America created challenging obstacles for women intent on pursuing careers in the arts, but many persisted. Education was key, and in the post-Civil War decades, more art schools opened their doors to women. Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and New York’s Cooper Union and Art Students League were leading institutions that inspired Southern women to leave their homes and head north in pursuit of art studies from the 1880s through the early decades of the twentieth century. Artist-educators Thomas Eakins, William Merritt Chase, Cecilia Beaux, Robert Henri, and others served as influential mentors to a generation of women from the South—painters, sculptors, and photographers, as well as teachers, patrons, and museum founders. That many of these women congregated in both year-round and summer art colonies in the North and South—Shinnecock, Long Island; Cos Cob, Connecticut; Blowing Rock and Tryon, North Carolina, to name a few—suggests a more complex picture of social and cultural cross-fertilization than has often been acknowledged. Colleges in the region, such as Converse, Newcomb, Randolph-Macon, and Spelman, also nurtured the growth of artists and independent women in both the so-called fine and applied fields. Progressive clubs and suffrage organizations were as critical to creating networks of support and opportunity for women in the South as they were throughout the United States. In the thoughtful and revealing essays that follow, these and other subjects are given well-deserved attention in the context of works in the Johnson Collection.
How do we define an artist’s Southern identity, whether she is native-born or transplanted, a permanent resident or a seasonal visitor? Does an iconic figure like Georgia O’Keeffe—who attended boarding school at Virginia’s Chatham Hall and spent some of her twenties in Charlottesville, then taught in South Carolina at Columbia College—bear traces of that experience? What about the internationally acclaimed Massachusetts-born sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington, who married into an established family with Virginia roots and lived the latter half of her life in South Carolina; or the Florida-raised Harlem Renaissance sculptor and teacher Augusta Savage, who struggled to overcome the challenges of her Southern past?
The Johnson Collection is to be commended for casting a wide net in its formation of holdings that reflect a range of socioeconomic, racial, and stylistic differences among women artists associated with the region—trained and untrained, professional and amateur, working in a variety of media. Moreover, the consequential scholarship that the Johnson Collection is supporting will serve as an important complement and corrective to the greater emphasis that has heretofore been placed on women active in the larger art centers of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati.
Having descended from generations of inspiring Southern women, grown up in the North as well as the South, and worked in art museums from Boston and Philadelphia to Atlanta, Richmond, and New York, I have both personal and professional interest in seeing the art historical record of women’s achievements—across America—recovered and shared. Only then will we all be able to appreciate more inclusive narratives and enriching cultural experiences in our classrooms, galleries, and museums. It is high time.
SYLVIA YOUNT LAWRENCE A. FLEISCHMAN CURATOR IN CHARGE OF THE AMERICAN WING THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Introduction
“Art is central to my life. Not being able to make or see art would be a major deprivation.” Nell Blaine, quoted in Roy Proctor, “Green Thumb”
Nell Blaine’s assertion about the centrality—the essentiality—of art to her life has a particular resonance. The Virginia modernist painter was seventy years old when she made this comment in 1992 during an interview about her fifty-first solo exhibition. Blaine’s creative path began early, informally, and academically, and over the course of her life, she would overcome significant barriers in her quest to make and see art, including the premature death of her mother, serious vision problems, polio, and paralysis. And then there was her gender. Nearly four decades prior, Blaine had been hailed by Life magazine as someone to watch, profiled along with four other emerging painters whom the journalist praised “not as notable women artists but as notable artists who happen to be women.”
We are, as a species, wired for creativity. Scrawls on cave walls gave way over the ages to museum masterpieces. In the eons between, men and women have recorded their experience and expressed their ideas in countless formats. And throughout history, women gifted with the instinct to “make art” have had to scrape and squeeze and salvage the space—literal, temporal, and emotional—to pursue it. In many aspects, Blaine’s struggle is not singular, but rather typical, especially in the conservative American South in the late nineteenth and nascent twentieth centuries. Whether constrained by family responsibilities, societal expectations, or a narrow menu of professional tracks, women have perpetually needed a sustained and sturdy sense of purpose when it comes to composing, studying, or selling art.
I was born into what is popularly labeled the millennial generation, and my entrée to art—its production and its appreciation—has been comparatively easy and unquestionably rewarding. A fervent feminist, my mother, Susu Johnson, enrolled in women’s history classes as a graduate student in the 1970s, and she’s been studying, teaching, and preaching women’s history ever since. Susu’s understanding of the obstacles women working in all spheres have faced—and still face—was a lesson she shared early and often, along with the reminder to be grateful to the trailblazers. As the proud graduate of a women’s college, she believes deeply and vocally in the enormous value of female capacities and contributions in every endeavor. A generation down the line, I see her curriculum being administered anew with my two-year-old daughter, her first grandchild.


Nell Blair Walden Blaine (1922–1996), Anemones with Red Cloth , circa 1961–1962 (detail), oil on canvas, 30 × 18¼ inches
My childhood was infused with art, enlivened by art. That exposure—and the joy it inspired—led me to pursue an art history major at Washington and Lee University. It was aroun