16

“TO BE SOMEONE AND NOT SOMETHING: SOUTHERN WOMEN ARTISTS’ QUEST FOR EDUCATION”

Avery Close

Wofford College

March 7th, 2016

Throughout history, women have been linked with domesticity, while men dominated the public sphere of politics and professional life. For centuries, a woman’s success was measured in her ability to bear children and raise them, and until fairly recently, very few women dared to step outside of this status quo. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, gradual social and political advancements were empowering women to seek equality in many different realms, including the arts. As women gained access to some of the most prestigious art institutions in the United States, they were able to create works on the same level as their male counterparts. Just as the American academies looked to Europe for inspiration, the artists of the Southeastern United States wanted to establish their own schools in their home states. Regardless of gender, Southern artists faced the hierarchical structure of the arts with the determination to establish themselves as equal to their Northern and European predecessors, in the same way that women sought to gain equal opportunities as men.

With the development of the feminist movement, contemporary scholars have attempted to understand the minimal presence of women in the arts up until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Author Laurie Schneider Adams describes the feminist challenge as a two fold approach: one side which studies the way women have been discriminated against throughout history, and the other looking at the way feminist art historians have recovered information about the contributions of women to the history of art.[1] This method is especially applicable when studying the works of Southern women artists who, until this progressive period, were either nonexistent or overlooked. Many women, regardless of their location, faced circumstances that either prohibited or discouraged them from pursuing careers in the arts, such as societal pressures to conform to particular stereotypes or simply not having access to necessary training in the arts. Thus, it is necessary to understand the obstacles these women faced in order to fully appreciate the significance of their contributions to their communities and the art world at large.

Prior to the twentieth century, the majority of women who worked in the arts were restricted to the “lower arts,” or crafts. Sewing, needlepoint, and embroidery were common activities among women because they could be worked on from home and easily set aside when more pressing matters arose. Some women occasionally took up painting or drawing as a hobby, but almost never as a career. The instances of successful female artists in history were mostly those whose fathers or husbands were artists as well, and thus they were exposed to the artistic sphere, albeit in a less active role than their male counterparts. In addition, women artists typically painted genre scenes, landscapes, portraits or still-lifes, subjects that can be designed with little to no artistic training. For centuries, the artistic canon, or the most influential elements and principles in the construction of art, has been “considered a patriarchal construct – which values the notion of genius and confers it exclusively on men.”[2] In the more recent centuries, however, the art world has started to place a greater emphasis on the educational benefits of artistic creation, and scholars and artists alike have become more inclined to doubt the belief of an intrinsic genius. Thus, with the rejection of the male dominated canon, women were able to move into the sphere of well-respected artists and create on the scale that had, for centuries, previously been reserved only for men.

One of the most well-known feminist art historians, Dr. Linda Nochlin, also rejects the idea of an innate artistic talent and instead focuses on the importance of education in the developing artist. Nochlin believes that education is the source of equality between the sexes and, by teaching equality, then we are able to change the way that women are viewed not only in the arts, but in society as well.[3] In her writings, Nochlin repetitively draws attention to the disadvantages that women face in comparison to men, especially in the pursuit of proper artistic training. In “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” Nochlin offers her explanation for this issue, claiming that,

“The question of women’s equality – in art as in any other realm – devolves not upon the relative benevolence of ill-will of individual men, nor the self-confidence or abjectness of individual women, but rather on the very nature of our institutional structures themselves and the view of reality which they impose on the human beings who are part of them.”[4]

According to Nochlin, in order to reverse the deeply ingrained gender roles of our society, women must not only be offered the same opportunities as men, but “they must view their situation with that high degree of emotional and intellectual commitment necessary to create a world in which equal achievement will be not only made possible but actively encouraged by social institutions.”[5] In her opinion, women have the ability to determine their own futures and invert the existing gender discrimination, a trend that will materialize in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as women began to push for equal opportunities in artistic educational institutions and careers in the art world.

As Nochlin pointed out, it would be through women’s acive pursuit of artistic training that would bring them to a more comparable position in the art world. By the end of the nineteenth century, women had gained access to some of the most prestigious art academies in the United States, such as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Art Students League in New York City. As early as 1824, the Pennsylvania Academy had two female students in attendance, albeit in separate classes from men.[6] Based on the model of European academies, American art academies followed a strict curriculum that moved from basic drawing skills to figure drawing and painting, with increasing difficulty on each level.[7] It would take over two decades for women to be able to work from the nude figure, training that is absolutely necessary in the creation of history paintings, which, at the time, were the most premier and challenging of all subjects, reserved only for the most talented and learned artists. The demand for these grand commissions “made drawing of the nude figure the foundation of picture making and the central skill to be learned,” and it should come as no shock that mainly men were creating these monumental works.[8] Women would ultimately be excluded from life courses until the end of the nineteenth century, preventing them even attempting to paint on this level.

Even in academies that did not explicitly restrict female participation from their courses, women were often discouraged against it, for people believed that they were unable to “tolerate the heat, poor ventilation and crowded atmosphere of life-study classrooms.”[9] Artistic education until the eighteenth century was thus constructed around the “rigorous preparation, rationalized training, and demanding instruction [which] seemed to both embody and require masculine rationality, strength, and autonomous drive.”[10] Women in the American South especially felt this discrimination, for they were raised on the premise that southern women were supposed to be gentle, delicate and proper. For example, artist Emma Josephine Sibley Couper, born in Augusta, Georgia, had to wait until after her father’s death before attending the Art Students League in New York, for he was not supportive of her endeavor to become an artist.[11] However, during her time at the Art Students League, Couper studied with the distinguished artist William Merritt Chase, whom inspired her to pursue impressionistic techniques in her work. Chase was “renowned for his egalitarian attitude,” and often encouraged his female students to pursue their artistic aspirations despite limitations.[12]

Regardless of gender, the American artist during the nineteenth century faced struggles when competing with academic institutions abroad. Despite the country’s growth as a well-respected and developed country, Americans still looked towards the major cities in Europe as the heirs to centuries of development in the arts and humanities, thus allowing them to determine artistic criteria around the world. Serious art students would take a semester, or several, to travel to the European art capitals, such as Paris and Rome, to learn from the works of the classical masters. American academies, such as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, encouraged this experience, offering scholarships for students to study abroad.[13] The Cresson Traveling Scholarship at the Pennsylvania Academy funded students on a yearlong experience abroad and was awarded to many notable twentieth century artists, such as the impressionist Daniel Garber, who painted Summer Afternoon (Figure 1), or the North Carolinian Sarah Mabel Pugh, creator of The Champion (Figure 2). Both artists would later become teachers; however, Garber remained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, whereas Pugh returned to her alma mater, North Carolina’s Peace Institute, an all-womens college in North Carolina.

One of the most recognizable female artists from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Mary Cassatt, also attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and would later study in the major European art centers. Under the influence of Edgar Degas and other Impressionist painters, Cassatt often depicted genre scenes that were focused on domestic life, many of which showed mothers interacting with their children. Cassatt was inevitably torn between the career she loved and the circumstances she was born into, as “she aspired unswervingly towards professionalism and the serious work it entailed but nevertheless honored the feminine sphere of activity.”[14] Although she remained unmarried and childless throughout her life, she still preferred typical “female subjects,” which often depicted mothers taking care of their child, such as Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child (Figure 3).

Cassatt was not the only female artist to have this inclination towards domestic images; for instance, Irma Howard Cook’s Mother and Child in Bed, 1924 is constructed in a similar vein to Cassatt’s maternal images (Figure 4). In addition, both artists received their formal artistic training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Yet, unlike Cassatt, Irma Cook was married and gave birth to two children. As a result, Irma’s life became more private than her husband’s, as she let her career become secondary and chose to focus primarily on raising her children.[15] Whereas her husband, August Charles Cook, was a professor at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Irma taught private art lessons from her basement. Although she may not have been in the spotlight as often as her husband, Irma’s natural talent stayed with her throughout her life and even her husband himself claimed that she was the better artist between the two.[16]

Both Irma Howard Cook and Sarah Mabel Pugh are prime examples of Southern female artists in the Johnson Collection who were forced to leave their beloved hometowns in order to receive artist training, but who also always remained attached to the South. This is the case for many Southern artists, both male and female, who were compelled to move to the North in order to pursue educational opportunities that were unavailable in the South at the time. However, many of these artists drew inspiration from their birth regions as subjects for their artworks. During the nineteenth century, the South was seen as a rural region focused around agriculture, which ultimately offered “a refuge from the mechanization and materialism that dominated the cities of the Northeast and Midwest.”[17] Artists with ties to the South depicted this region with admiration and nostalgia, emphasizing the quaint lives of Southerners in their quiet genre scenes, as well as gardens, forests and swamps of their landscape paintings. Elizabeth O’Neill Verner, a Charleston born artist, often drew her surroundings in many of her pastel works, such as Shem Creek (Figure 5). Shem Creek is similar to William Chase’s Beach at Shinnecock in that they are both created on wood and show an Impressionistic landscape that deemphasizes the human presence in comparison with the environment (Figure 6). However, Chase’s painting was created almost sixty years prior to Verner’s and reflects his Northern heritage, whereas Verner’s drawing shows her loyalty to her Charleston hometown.

As Southern artists began to note the lack of artistic institutions in their home region, many of them attempted to assert their own influences in the arts of the South so that future artists could benefit from their accomplishments. Female artists were especially active in establishing a Southern artistic sphere. For example, it was a group of women who pushed for the formation of the Southern States Art League, one of whom was Alice Ravenel Huger Smith.[18] Along with her friend and fellow artist, Elizabeth O’Neill Verner, Smith was an active figure in the Charleston Renaissance movement, which brought artistic recognition to one of the most remembered cities of the South.[19] Another influential Southern female artist was Adele Goodman Clarke, who was a founding member of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, chair of Virginia’s League of Women Voters for nineteen years, and the dean of women at the College of William and Mary.[20] Many other women followed her example, becoming advocates for equal rights movements for both women and minorities.