Today my friend is going to meet me at the British Museum for lunch and then we will see Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave
Hokusai was certainly a great artist, appropriated by Modernism, as he was. So was his daughter, who I suspect was the great woman behind him. Read more here in this excellent review
It's great but packed. Depressing
after the peace and calm of NYC and Mass galleries. I am glad my friend is a member and we can relax and chat in the members' area.
Afterward, I walk to a very
enjoyable and interesting talk courtesy of my own Art Historian at The Royal Academy. It is given by the lovely Eliza Bonham
Carter. Did you know, maybe you did,
that women at the RA, although accepted into it in the 18th century (well three
of them ) were not allowed in the life drawing room till 1936,
a massive handicap, and into the dinners till 1967!!!!!! Having been
sent to a separate room while the men had port and cigars in the 70s,
I can believe this!!
One painting in particular is infamous in the history of the representation of women in British art. If ever there was a commemoration of artistic fraternity, Johann Zoffany RA’s The Academicians of the Royal Academy, appears to be it. The recent foundation of the Royal Academy is memorialised in this group portrait of 35 men, two of them naked models, preparing to embark on a life class.
Remarkably, among the 34 founder members there were two women, Mary Moser (1744-1819) and Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807). Notoriously, however, Zoffany’s institutional portrait excluded them. They appear only virtually, in two indistinct portraits on the back wall to the right. Their physical absence is partially explained by the setting within the life class: a forum from which women were barred on grounds of propriety. Hence the painting is seen to epitomise the ambivalent recognition and conditional institutional support extended to female artists.
Nevertheless, Moser and Kauffman were not the first swallows of a summer of women RAs. After Kauffman’s return to Rome and Moser’s death, there were no further women Royal Academicians until Dame Laura Knight was elected in 1936.
Laura Herford (1831–1870) was a British artist in the early 19th century, and in 1860, was the first woman to be admitted to the Royal Academy schools. Her career was cut short by cholera, nevertheless, she exhibited at Royal Academy twelve times.
Home on the packed out 19.45, tired but fulfilled!
Home on the packed out 19.45, tired but fulfilled!
