NYAB Event - "In Praise of Women" Exhibition

"In Praise of Women" Exhibition

Spanierman Gallery

This event has ended.

Including forty-eight oils and twenty-nine works on paper, the exhibition covers a broad spectrum of images of women created by American artists from colonial days to the present. The show demonstrates the many ways that the female subject has served to embody cultural ideals and aspirations, while reflecting the changes in women’s lives as social roles shifted over time. It captures how American artists have chosen to pay tribute to different aspects of women while exploring the fascinating and complex relationships between the symbolic and the real and the individual and society.

The patrician ambitions of American colonial society are encapsulated in Copley’s virtuoso pastel Portrait of Mrs. George Turner (1765), which conveys understated elegance and evokes depictions of English nobility. The moralizing story-telling of early nineteenth-century American genre painting is reflected in Portrait of Elizabeth Trull (1831) by Henry Cheever Pratt (a close friend of Thomas Cole and Samuel B. Morse), which shows a well-dressed young subject with a wistful gaze. The theme expressed by Pratt, that wealth and privilege alone could not assure a woman’s contentment, is similarly evoked by J. G. Brown in The Reluctant Bride (1869), in which an affluent young woman in a bejeweled wedding gown wears a downturned gaze, suggesting dismay at exchanging her carefree girlhood for her new married role.

A number of works created in the late nineteenth century express the new freedoms afforded to women within the cosmopolitan cities of Europe. This is reflected in Nelson Bickford’s 1881 image of a French girl in a Parisian café and in Charles Ulrich’s closely cropped view of a Venetian woman in a black fur wrap with an elaborate lace bow. Yet, even the cache of life in Paris could not stave off boredom, as is suggested in Maximilien Colin’s Woman Seated in an Interior (ca. 1891). Featuring a subject who could have arisen from the pages of Henry James or Edith Wharton, Colin’s painting of a well-dressed woman, pausing while reading a book, could have been the painting entitled Souvenirs that Colin exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1891, described in a review as showing a young woman “sitting lanquidly in a chair . . .[she] has evidently exhausted all attempts at killing time with music and reading, and has taken to her own thoughts as the least wearisome.” That American artists in Europe experienced a greater freedom in the painting of the female figure in the outdoors exemplified in many impressionist paintings, such as Louis Ritman’s Maiden by the Side of the River (ca. 1915), probably painted in the artists’ colony of Giverny, France (the home of Claude Monet), in which the figure and the surrounding landscape are conjoined in a vibrantly sensuous canvas.

In the decades following the Civil War, countless American artists began to portray representations of women, often in white dresses, who are seen at rest in quiet interiors or peaceful gardens. Such images seemed an antidote to the tensions of urban life and the crass materialism of the marketplace. Edmund Tarbell’s Portrait of a Woman in White (mid-late 1890s) exemplifies this attitude, capturing the play of outdoor light and color on his subject’s flowing white muslin dress and conveying a sense of harmony and quietude. Other views of women in white include J. Alden Weir’s The Two Sisters (ca. 1890–99) and Louis Loeb’s Eve (ca. 1905). Artists also challenged the banality and unsightliness of metropolitan experience in aestheticized female images. Among such works is Theodore Robinson’s The Red Gown (ca. 1885), in which the elongated line of the red dress worn by the figure, echoed in the work’s vertical format, is set off against the golds, browns, and olive greens of the landscape, which Robinson painted with delicate impressionist brushwork. Among the most dramatic works in the show is the large-scale portrait Edwin Blashfield painted of his wife, Evangeline (ca. 1889), exhibited at the Paris International Exposition of 1889. Seen sidelong and turned away from the viewer, the subject is imbued with perpetual stillness and mystery, similar to that of the golden sphinx visible on the leg of the daybed on which she sits.

A few works in the exhibition by women artists from the period are intriguing in their departure from the typical views of passive female subjects by male counterparts. In Woman Holding Flowers (1893), Louise Howland King Cox (who married the academic painter Kenyon Cox in 1892), portrays a young woman languidly holding cut flowers, who appears weighed down by worry and deep thought. In Alice Pike Barney’s The Gold Chain (1900–11), the kimono-clad figure makes contact with the viewer, as if to communicate her awareness of the contrived nature of her pose and dress. When considering In the Studio (ca. 1895), we find Lilla Cabot Perry following in the mode of the pristine interiors by artists of the Boston School, but instead of an anonymous idealized figure sitting idly, Perry depicted her daughter Margaret focused on writing a letter. A casually placed violin seems to have recently been played.

Beginning in the early twentieth century, images of women became less uniform, as artists acknowledged the unique personalities of their subjects and as options for women broadened. In Portrait of a Woman (Redhead) (1915), Ivan Olinsky departed from his frequent renderings of languorous models in kimonos to depict a woman in everyday clothing, revealing her contemporaneity and showing her intelligence and independence as she considers a decision. Leon Kroll portrays an even more forthright subject, showing his French wife Geneviève-Marie, a friend of prominent Parisian artists, poets, and composers, who steps toward the viewer with an alert and self-aware expression. An artist drawn to the complexity of the human psyche, Allen Tucker used an expressionist approach, reflecting his admiration for the art of Vincent van Gogh, in Portrait in Gray (1920) in which a woman gazes toward us, but is preoccupied with her inner self.

Several early twentieth-century works represent women in professional roles, including The Stroller’s Sketch (1918), a pastel by Robert Henri depicting two female artists sketching outdoors on Monhegan Island, Maine. Luigi Lucioni’s Mili Monti (1941) is a stunning painting of this French-born café lounge singer, in which Lucioni’s crisp line and color match the defined features and direct gaze of his subject. A consciousness of the humor inherent in aspects of women’s fashions and roles is demonstrated in the work of the Surrealist artist Honoré Sharrer, who passed away last year. In Loretta as Lady of Spain (1972), a bloated subject presides over a table on which various enigmatic items reflect the surreal dailiness and odd magic of everyday women’s lives.

Many modernist artists have explored the female form as an erotic symbol, whether as a fertility goddess or a primitive deity. Such a theme has been a preoccupation for Willem de Kooning, who adorned a cover of a book of his drawings in 1967 with a sketch in ink of an exhibitionistic crouching woman. Whether shown as spirit or demon, or as complex and real, the women in American images have personified the many ideals and aspirations that have governed American life and its social fabric through the passing eras as is reflected in the diverse works in this exhibition.