Our guest for March is Sophia Bennett, who has been here before. She writes about herself:
Sophia Bennett's novels tell the adventures of creative young people in the worlds of fashion, music and art, and have been translated into over a dozen languages. She is the winner of the Times/Chicken House Competition for Threads and the Romantic Novel of the Year for Love Song, and has been shortlisted for the Booktrust’s Best Book Award for You Don’t Know Me. Amanda Craig, writing in The Times, called her ‘the queen of teen dreams’.
Sophia teaches Writing for Children at City University and regularly gives masterclasses on aspects of writing. She is currently a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, based at St George’s University of London.
She lives in London, where she can be as close to as many art galleries as possible. The Bigger Picture is her first work of non-fiction. (But probably not her last.)
Welcome back, Sophia!
Rejection, failure,
anxiety and disappointment – a story of women in art
In 1979 a ground-breaking artwork called
The Dinner Party was exhibited at the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It celebrated great women in history and
the female-centric art forms of needlework and painting on china. In three
months over 100,000 people came to see it. Many of them wrote to the artist
afterwards to say it had changed their lives. It was the most successful
exhibition in the museum’s history.
The work was due to go on tour but instead it was boxed up
and put away. Art critics called it ‘kitsch’ and museums didn’t like its
focus on female anatomy. All except one decided not to show it. A planned tour
was cancelled. The artist, Judy Chicago, spent that summer alone and $30,000 in
debt from the cost of making it.
The Dinner Party
consists of three tables in a triangle, with custom-made settings for 39 great
women in Western history. The names of 999 others are painted on the tiled
floor. It took Chicago five years to make it, with the help of nearly 400
mostly female contributors. She did it because she had realised that in order
to be recognised as a serious artist herself she needed to reintroduce women
into history – where so often their contributions had been forgotten. She also
wanted women to celebrate themselves, their bodies and what they made. Now this
seems obvious, but in 1979 the idea was too radical to survive the censure of
the art establishment.
Chicago was born Judy Cohen in 1939. She took her adopted
name in 1970 when she launched herself as a feminist artist, to divest herself
of ‘all names imposed upon her through male social dominance’. She was,
however, always grateful to her own father for the liberated, pro-feminist
example he set. He had encouraged her to express her ideas and to take art
classes, which she did from the age of five at the Art Institute of Chicago.
After this start, it came as a shock to her when, at art
school in Los Angeles, her teachers did not value her opinions or her art. At
first she tried to please them but, frustrated, she went on to study female
artists and writers and developed her own style, introducing softness and
female-centred experience into her paintings and sculptures – which can be as
big as a room, or as small as a biscuit.
Today, The Dinner
Party is on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, with
regular exhibitions to explain how it was made. As well as making art, Chicago
has for decades encouraged communities of women to come together and support
each other. Nearly fifty years before the #MeToo movement, she was describing
and addressing the same issues. Finally, the world has caught up with her.
* * *
Or what about Gwen
John - Rodin’s rejected muse, whose letters to the female object of her desire
were locked in a cupboard?
To look at the muted tones and inner stillness of her
paintings, you would think Gwen John had a quiet life. In fact, she was daring,
independent and passionate. She was once overshadowed by her beloved younger
brother, Augustus, but she has since become the more famous ‘John’.
Gwen was a lawyer’s daughter, born in Tenby, a seaside town
in Wales in 1876. Her mother died when she was eight. In 1895, aged 19, she
left her unhappy home to join Augustus at the Slade School of Art in London.
After living in a run-down London squat, John and a fellow artist called
Dorelia McNeill decided to walk to Rome, selling paintings along the way. This
was not normal behaviour for young women in 1903!
In fact, they ended up in Paris where John was soon
modelling for Auguste Rodin to earn money while she painted. They had a long
affair and she moved to Meudon, a suburb of Paris, to be closer to him. However,
Rodin did not return John’s obsessive passion. She nearly stopped working, but
her brother Augustus encouraged her to pursue her talent. As I’ve found, the
story of women in art often includes men who supported them – fathers,
brothers, partners, lovers – only for their legacy to be ignored by the people
who wrote that story later on.
John’s paintings portray the opposite of her precarious
adventures. Their closely-related tones suggest calm, intimacy and reflection. Leading
a solitary existence, she painted mostly interiors and portraits of women,
including the local nuns. Her sitters look thoughtful, as though they have a
deep interior life. John doesn’t make them look idealised and beautiful, but
intelligent and interesting. Often, she would create many different versions of
a painting until she felt she had got it right.
She was unlucky in love again, this time with a woman called
Vera Oumancoff. Gwen showered Vera with letters enclosing over a hundred
drawings and watercolours. Unmoved, Vera stuck them in a cupboard. John’s final
days were spent in Meudon, in a house on stilts set in an overgrown garden,
surrounded by cats she fed with expensive paté. She set off for Dieppe one day
in 1939, and died there, aged 63 – eccentric and independent to the end.
However, in a twist of fate, Gwen’s hidden letters to Vera
were discovered decades later, along with their exquisite enclosures. The person
who found the letters was Susan Chitty, who went on to publish the first major
biography of John in 1981. This led to the art world’s full appreciation of John’s
talent at last.
Another thing I found fascinating: how once women became
writers of art history, instead of merely the passive objects of it, the bigger
picture of great women’s achievements began to emerge.
* * *
“I fight pain, anxiety
and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness
is to help creating art.”
– From the autobiography
of Yayoi Kusama
Yakoi Kusama is one of the most successful artists alive
today. In 2014 her solo shows – and there were many of them – were attended by
more people than those of any other artist in the world. Her works are alive
with colour and pattern and, to quote one of her works ‘Filled with the Brilliance of Life’. She is known as ‘the princess
of polka dots’.
Yet Kusama has lived with mental illness most of her life.
In fact, this has been a contributing factor to her career. Yayoi sees the
world differently from most people. From childhood she has had severe obsessive
thoughts, and visions where sunflowers or dots on a tablecloth would seem to
multiply until they were infinite and all around her. Though frightened at
first, Kusama eventually found these visions reassuring as if the dots, like
infinite stars, were connecting her to the universe. This is what she has consistently
tried to express in her art.
Her mother did not make it easy. She wanted Kusama to marry,
not become a professional artist, so she took Yayoi’s art materials away. Kusama
simply started creating with old seed sacks and mud. She made thousands of
works before she left Japan, and then destroyed most of them to make room for
more.
In 1957, encouraged by Georgia O’Keeffe, Kusama went to New
York. Here, her avant-garde work influenced Pop artists like Andy Warhol and
Roy Lichtenstein (another fan of dots). She constantly experimented with new
materials and new technologies to create paintings, sculptures, installations and
performance art. And yet she failed to find the success she craved, though the
men around her did. She returned to Japan, disappointed and, it seemed,
defeated.
But she couldn’t stop making art. Today, Yayoi works in her Tokyo
studio by day and lives in a psychiatric institution across the road by night.
With bright red hair and polka dot clothes she is an icon of the art world,
while crowds queue to see her sculptures of dotted pumpkins and ‘Infinity
Mirror Rooms’ around the globe. She says, ‘Love is the most important thing.’
Her art, born out of fear and anxiety, is perhaps so popular because it is
suffused with wonder and joy.
* * *
I learned about Chicago, John, Kusama and a host of other
artists during the intense months of research I did last summer for The Bigger Picture. It was the
brainchild of Holly Tonks, then editor at Tate Publishing. Her idea was to
celebrate Tate’s new emphasis on supporting traditionally marginalised artists,
be they women, non-binary, non-white or not from the Western tradition of
making art. And to target the book at the next generation of artists, art
facilitators and art lovers – ie young teenagers: my audience.
I found out about the project when I was pitching another
book and basically begged to be allowed to write it. With over 50 full-colour spreads
illustrated by Manjit Thapp, the result was a labour of love.
It was made difficult – and therefore more interesting – by
the fact that every artist in the book by definition has a fascinating life,
body of work and artistic process… And I only had a maximum of about 400 words
to describe each one. If she was alive and chose to contribute an interview (16
did) I sometimes had only 200 words. How could I possibly sum up the ground-breaking,
zeitgeist-skewering, post-Communist, internet-savvy multimedia achievements of
Cao Fei in three small paragraphs? I couldn’t, of course. I can only hope the
book will get its readers Googling like crazy.
One of the toughest artist profiles to write was Judy
Chicago’s. I wanted to include her because she is such a central feminist icon,
with something to say about almost every aspect of art the book discusses.
Then, to our joy and astonishment, she also agreed to contribute an interview. I
was thrilled – and had to cut my own wordcount by two thirds. So I was pleased
to know this blog would be a home for what I had to leave out, and the chance
to connect Judy’s journey with some of her fellow ‘rejects’.
For thousands of years – until the lifetime of my young
readers – women have been ‘other’ in the history of art: seen and not heard.
They have known every form of refusal, deprivation, anonymity, disappointment,
invisibility and anxiety. And yet art has been made, always. Great art, even.
Wherever we look, we find it, even if the name of the maker has been lost in
the mists of time.
Women have persisted, extemporised, explored, expressed,
resisted, created, reached out, reached up. I find them all so inspirational. I
love their work. I so admire those other women – curators, critics, historians,
biographers, gallerists, collectors – who since the 1970s have been gradually
reintroducing them into the history of art where they belong.
The teens I write for are besieged by images of perfection
and it is creating levels of anxiety they don’t know how to manage, at an age
when they should be loving the chance to explore who they want to become.
Thinking like an artist is about looking, not looking perfect. Or being
perfect. That is what Gwen and Yayoi and Judy knew. That’s what I hope the
readers of The Bigger Picture can discover
for themselves.
