Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital

10. Great Lady Painters, Inc.: Icons of Feminism, Modernism, and the Nation

GREAT LADY PAINTERS, INC. ICONS OF FEMINISM, MODERNISM, AND THE NATION Paula Rabinowitz As always art is the pulse of a nation. —Gertrude Stein, Paris France Half of the things they had me send are in the basement too. —Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb. —Andre Breton, Surrealism and Painting America, she [O’Keeffe] says, can give her all she wants. —Peyton Boswell, Jr., Modern American Painting In 1996, to honor the hundredth anniversary of the birth of “the most renowned of . . . American women painters,” the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp featuring one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Red Poppy paintings.1 That same year, the Canadian government began a massive project designed to produce a new national school curriculum about “Canada’s most famous woman painter,” Emily Carr.2 A few years earlier, in 1991, Mexican journalists coined a neologism, “Fridamania,” to describe the quasi-hysteria erupting over Frida Kahlo’s life and work after Madonna announced that she had purchased a number of the artists’ paintings and had plans to acquire the rights to her life story.3 It would seem that the 1990s ushered in an astonishing interest in these North American women’s work, an interest that coincides with 10 new understandings of hemispheric interdependency and exploitation resulting from NAFTA, the Internet, and changing immigration policies. That these women painters, who forged their careers during the heyday of American modernism (1920s–1930s), have become accessible (even marketable) icons of womanhood, creativity, national identity, and modernism in the 1990s is both perfectly logical and truly bizarre. Lately, it seems, modernism—that which we thought we had successfully posted—has returned, like the repressed it was supposed to have unleashed, postmarked for a second, post-post time. Modernism is being revisited, pluralized, resuscitated , resurrected, rethought, reinscribed, reincorporated. No longer can we be sure of what modernism, once a stable/staple movement, is or was. Where once there was a certain consensus about the tenets of modernism—formal innovation, surface over depth, self-referentiality—now there are one, two, many modernisms, spanning various continents, unevenly developed among multiple populations. Modernism has acquired gender, sexuality, race, even class identities that complicate and alter its “structure.”4 Yet these complications remain dependent on certain modernist notions of identity and difference (such as gender), of representation and form (such as landscape), of space and time (such as nationalism) that tend to collapse into its structure itself.5 Feminism, which in its (so-called) second wave organized under the banner of international solidarity among women against capitalist exploitation and male chauvinism, has, paradoxically, been central to this modernist structure and has as such aided the recent rise of O’Keeffe, Kahlo, and Carr beyond celebrity status to iconicity.6 So has the emergence of various forms of commercialized art trophies—posters, postcards, refrigerator magnets, coffee mugs, and so forth. The intersection of feminism and the marketplace has been both an effect of modern culture and one of its primary supports. That women’s lives, voices, paintings are part of a modern national discourse should be obvious, but is not easily recognized because the heuristic of the public/private split laces the personal to women, placing them apart from the political, keeping them separate from the larger realm of power—the modern nation. Women’s lives do not conform to traditional autobiographical narratives of great men: they are about daily life of those closeted off in the domestic routines of home and family, so the story goes—and women’s paintings lack the tradition, even more so than women’s writings, to fit into a national canon of landscape or heroic portraiture.7 “For most women,” writes Germaine Greer, “portraiture was not one of the multifarious media of well-developed painterly genius but the outer limit of their capacity, a calling followed by constraint.”8 In a sense, never having been premodern, women’s art can hardly embrace modernism . Moreover, modernism itself has a curious history in the Americas, P A U L A R A B I N O W I T Z 194 where the most modern movements were found in industrial design—the Chrysler Building, grain elevators, the River Rouge Ford Plant (i.e., in the service of capital)—rather than as oppositional antibourgeois aesthetic movements in art and literature. The very aspects that symbolized American...