Women Artists in Interwar France: Framing Femininities (review)

Women Artists in Interwar France opens with the startling revelation that almost half of the artists listed in René Édouard-Joseph's four-volume encyclopedia of practising École de Paris artists, the Dictionnaire biographique des artistes contemporains, 1910-1930 (Paris: Art & édition, 1930-36), were female. Equal testament to Paris's status as the centre of the international art world and to women's capacity to overcome impediments to professionalism, this statistic constitutes a further indictment of modernist art history's erasure of the female artist. Paula Birnbaum's book aims to retrieve from complete or relative obscurity a significant number of the École de Paris's female artists, whose sub-Impressionist and post-cubist figurative work has been less rapidly taken up by feminist art historians than that of more avant-garde contemporaries. Additionally, the book provides the first history of Femmes Artistes Modernes (FAM), an exhibiting society established in 1930 and directed until its demise in 1938 by the artist Marie-Anne Camax-Zoegger. The Appendix, listing the names and biographical information of 181 FAM artists, is in itself a considerable contribution to scholarship. Moreover, the book is extensively illustrated, enabling analysis and comparison of previously unpublished works. Beyond these recuperative concerns, Birnbaum provides a detailed study of how female artists operated in relation to the institutional framework afforded by FAM and the conservative political and social context of 1930s France. An early chapter characterizes the gains and concessions of Camax-Zoegger's presidency. So, while FAM's broad interpretation of modern art embraced the diverse practices of a large number of French and international female artists and garnered these artists critical and public acclaim, Camax-Zoegger actively courted bourgeois officialdom as the route to success and publically endorsed a pro-natalist agenda. Subsequent chapters, informed by a nuanced consideration of class, ethnic, and sexual identities, establish how and for what reasons FAM artists acceded to and refused the terms of Camax-Zoegger's ideology. The chapter on the maternal pursues the comparative approach most thoroughly, thereby allowing the greatest diversity of practice among a range of relatively unknown artists to emerge. The chapters on self-portraiture and the female nude focus more consistently on the practices of individual artists already the subject of scholarly attention: Marie Laurencin, Alice Halicka, Suzanne Valadon, and Tamara de Lempicka. Of course, the legacy of these artists continues to require interpretation, but the book misses an opportunity to analyse more fully the work of those almost completely erased by history — although one understands that archival absence and lost output may be at fault here. Throughout the book, an assertion is made that, through the display of contemporary and retrospective work (including work by deceased artists), Camax-Zoegger strove to construct a history of women's art. As a curatorially conceived matrilineal history of modern art, it is a pity that a project of such potential significance to feminist art historians, and to others, did not garner sustained analysis in its own right.