Painting Herself out of a Corner: The Woman Artist in American Society

Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930. By Kirsten Swinth. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 305 pages. $45.00 (cloth). $18.95 (paper).

At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America. By Laura R. Prieto. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. 292 pages. $39.95 (cloth).

What happens when a feminist historian produces a social history of American women artists in the early modern era? Two ambitious studies, published simultaneously, offer answers to this question. Coincidentally, both of them—revised dissertations—adopt a model of professionalization as an organizing and explanatory mechanism, and each overlaps the other to a considerable degree. Prieto casts a wider net, beginning with Anna Claypoole Peale early in the nineteenth century and ending finally with modernist painters, including (inevitably) Georgia O'Keeffe. Swinth contracts her scope somewhat, starting out in the Gilded Age and taking her narrative up to the same modernist finish line. Both draw on archival sources and offer a considerable fund of new information and anecdotes about women's training, struggles, networks, conflicts, and careers. Both concentrate almost exclusively on institutional and social histories and include often fascinating vignettes of lesser-known artists such as Emily Sartain or the Native American Narcissa Chisolm Owen. Both are useful contributions to a field still much in need of further study. At the same time, neither deals adequately with visual images, be they self-portraits or photographs of women students at work in the atelier. As works of history both have notable strengths; as works of art history (women's or otherwise) they exhibit certain failings, large and small. ¹

Swinth systematically works her way through a set of focused chapters, each one anatomizing a different facet of the art worlds in which women made their way first as students and then as professionals. The first two chapters highlight the study of art at home and abroad, as institutions were forced to accommodate the dramatic surge in numbers of female students. During this time, women had to juggle and often choose between marriage and career, while laboring to transcend the onus of amateurism that clung persistently to female artistic practice. In the endeavor to legitimize their enterprise, women artists adopted the trappings and structures of professionalism, which guided and shaped masculine art practice as well. The next two chapters take up the problem of artistic self-fashioning and marketing in the intensely competitive art world of the Gilded Age, when women artists increasingly posed a threat to masculine domination of the field. The fifth chapter considers turn-of-the-century art criticism, which (among other tactics) deployed Darwinian biological essentialism to support the contention that "genius" and "masculinity" went together, naturally and exclusively. At the same time, male artists participated in restructuring the model of middle-class culture. Formerly dedicated to the elevation and refinement of all society, culture now became the domain of an implicitly masculine self-realization. In tandem with these new goals, male artists shucked off the Gilded-Age veneer of refinement and professionalism, refashioning themselves as vigorous individualists. The sixth chapter considers modernist women's attempts to reconcile sexual and professional identity by formulating a language of authentically and immutably female self-expression.

Shaping the narrative is the recurrent pattern of "gain, backlash, and recouping," as women artists negotiated shifting gender ideologies along with discursive and institutional changes (4). Again and again, in Swinth's account, men colonize realms of female endeavor or devise systems of exclusion that push women to the margins. When the "decorating craze" is in full swing, for example, male artists enter the territory enthusiastically, eventually occupying "positions of control in the movement, determining interior schemes and producing designs for decorative art societies" (78). When the gallery system emerges, dealers fill their stables with men, forcing women to find other marketing venues. In one such instance, Swinth exhibits a "small clipping that perhaps best exemplifies the...