Plumes et pinceaux. Discours des femmes sur l’art en Europe (1750–1850) by Mechthild Fend, Melissa Hyde, and Anne Lafont, eds., and: Plumes et pinceaux. Discours des femmes sur l’art en Europe (1750–1850)—Anthologie by Anne Lafont, ed., and: Women Art Critics in Nineteenth-Century France. Vanishing Acts by Wendelin Guentner, ed. (review)

Within the historiography of nineteenth-century art history and criticism, women have habitually been confined to the margins (when their activity has been recognized at all). The editors of these collections set out to rectify this situation in slightly different though overlapping ways, either by highlighting the activity of female commentators on contemporary art exhibited at the Paris Salon, or by reassessing the part played by women across Europe in a variety of discursive forms relating to the visual arts. Plumes et pinceaux (together with its excellent accompanying volume of primary texts) examines writers predominantly from France, but also from England and Germany, whose reflections on ancient and modern art took on a variety of forms, from novels and letters to memoirs and travel accounts, as well as more conventional journalistic criticism. Guentner’s volume, by contrast, focuses more firmly on female observers of the French art scene, most of whom published in the periodical press, and above all in journals catering expressly to women, a sector that expanded significantly after 1830.

Both collections are dominated by monographic studies of specific writers. Plumes et pinceaux originated as a conference on “Historiennes et critiques d’art à l’époque de Juliette Récamier,” held in conjunction with an exhibition on Récamier in Lyons in 2009; Vanishing Acts is a collaborative effort between literary historian Guentner and art historians Heather Belnap Jensen and Véronique Chagnon-Burke, who each present essays on two or three critics active between the 1790s and the 1870s. As is inevitable with such collections, overall quality is rather uneven, varying with the insight of individual contributors and the intrinsic interest of the figures they discuss. Nonetheless, both collections offer broad, often challenging, themes that transcend the occasionally pedestrian quality of particular chapters, and encourage the reader to rethink the role played by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women not only in art criticism but in the cultural sphere more generally.

In this respect, Chagnon-Burke is the most probing contributor to Vanishing Acts. Her chapters on female critics and painters in mid-nineteenth-century France question idées reçues regarding women’s access to public culture, stressing the prominence of female exhibitors in the Salon (though her figures are inconsistent: “at least one third of the artists at the Salon were women” during the July Monarchy [95], a figure that “kept growing throughout the nineteenth century until, at its end, women represented about 22% of the total” [119]). Chagnon-Burke blames modernism, with its hostility to minor genres of narrative painting frequently practiced by women, for the obscurity to which this important aspect of nineteenth-century pictorial production has been relegated. She notes, too, that women also played a small, though significant, role as critics, and were more widely represented within mid-century journalism as a whole than is often recognized.

Chapters by Guentner on critics Claude Vignon and Marc de Montifaud illustrate the point, though as both women’s recourse to masculine pseudonyms attests, acceptance into the male-dominated world of the press imposed a range of practical and discursive constraints on aspiring “femmes de lettres.” In her concluding remarks on female art critics and the ideology of separate spheres, Guentner qualifies Chagnon-Burke’s revisionist stance by emphasizing that “Strict...