A Conversation with Art Herstory's Erika Gaffney

Anyone who has studied art history can attest that much of the work included in major textbooks and courses is still dominated by men. The project to bring stories of women artists to light has been going on in earnest since the mid twentieth century and there are many scholars and organizations contributing to this important work. One such endeavor is Art Herstory, the brainchild of Erika Gaffney. She brings to light work by women artists on multiple platforms - from stationary dedicated to historical makers, to social media posts that buoy contemporary women artists. Erika earned a BA from St. John’s College and pairs her work on Art Herstory with a career in publishing. I had a conversation with her about the work she is doing.

Can you share some of your personal and educational background? How do you come to the work you are doing?

Art Herstory Founder Erika Gaffney

My BA is in Liberal Arts, and I am an acquisitions editor in scholarly publishing, working mostly on books to do with early modern studies and/or art history. Art Herstory has flowed naturally from my job: there are many scholars in my network who work on early modern women, including some who study women artists, specifically. And my work in art history publishing ensures that I am comfortable navigating permissions issues.

How did Art Herstory get started and what is the goal of the project?

In Fall 2017, I was inspired to send a “real” (paper) birthday card to a feminist art historian friend. I wanted to send a card featuring a painting by a Renaissance woman; but it took a long time to find one. The lack of availability of cards reproducing works by historic women artists really bothered me. Art Herstory began with the goal of supplying such cards. But it grew organically—the project does seem to have a mind of its own!—to support the movement to recover the names, works and stories of history’s women artists accessible to today’s art-loving public.

How do you think sharing stories of these women artists shifts perceptions or changes the history of art?

My favorite answer to this question must be credited to historian Merry Wiesner-Hanks, the author of the very first Art Herstory guest post. In Why Do Old Mistresses Matter Today?, she writes, “… a failure to take female Old Masters into account leaves us with a short view, which impoverishes the question and limits our understanding.” It is important to remember that many of the women who almost vanished from art history were not only talented, they were famous in their time. Their work was sought after by kings and popes! How can we gain a full and balanced understanding of our art historical heritage, when whole segments are erased, and on completely arbitrary grounds?

Can you talk about the role of note cards in the work you are doing?

One idea behind the note cards was to invest historic women artists with the trappings of success, in a sense. Another was to use note cards to expose historic women artists to an audience of art-lovers who, if only they had the chance, would love to learn about women artists who have been hidden in the shadows of history. Unfortunately, historic women artists as a theme doesn’t seem compelling enough for museum shops to carry such cards year round. But happily, these days more and more museums are hosting temporary exhibitions about female makers, and some museum shops have at least sold Art Herstory cards in support of such shows.

Art Herstory stationery on display

Does the work of Art Herstory go beyond Old Masters?

Oh yes! While Art Herstory note cards are limited to Old Masters, at least for now, Art Herstory holiday cards reproduce art by women from later periods. For blog post topics, the only restriction is that the artist be deceased—admittedly it is an arbitrary limitation, but Art Herstory is a one-person, volunteer operation and I had to draw the line somewhere. And women of all periods feature in Art Herstory social media posts; in the quarterly “new books about women artists” round ups; and in most segments of the monthly newsletter.

What is something you have learned in the process of coordinating Art Herstory?

I’ve learned so much—about women artists and art history, but also about more practical matters. Managing the blog on the website, I’ve learned (to an extent from my college-age daughter) about search engine optimization and readability scores. I’ve learned how to post new products, run an Etsy store, generate a presence on social media, and ship orders from my home. I’m still trying to get up to speed on the best way to work with museum- and bookstore buyers. To give just three examples of things I’ve learned in an art history context: I’ve discovered that a much larger percentage than I would have imagined of botanical artists are—and were—female. I know more now about saints’ attributes than I would ever have imagined. And very specifically: I learned that in their time, flower painter Rachel Ruysch enjoyed far more commercial success than Rembrandt!

What has the feedback been from people who have interacted with Art Herstory?

The people I’ve heard from—by email, or on social media—are grateful to have access, in some cases at long last, to information about women’s artistic achievements throughout history. Some people—of all genders, from multiple cultures and backgrounds—are sad, sometimes even outraged, that women were largely absent from their high school and college textbooks and lectures. And in terms of products, overwhelmingly customers have expressed appreciation for the quality of the cards, as well as for the idea behind them.

How can people support the work you are doing?

Here are some ideas:

• Buy cards! They truly are high quality stationery products, and they make a unique gift. Revenues help to offset the project’s considerable expenses. Readers can shop online at the shop on the Art Herstory website and/or from the Etsy store.

• Follow along on social media: Art Herstory is on Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, and (at least for now) X.

• Subscribe to the (free) monthly newsletter: go to the landing page, scroll all the way down, and enter your name and email address into the short form at the bottom of the page.

• Propose new products: what kinds of items do you purchase regularly, on which you’d like to see art by historic women?

• Read Art Herstory blog posts, contribute guest posts, and/or write comments on posts by other writers.

• Spread the word about Art Herstory – on social media, among friends, or (for teachers at all levels) within the classroom!

What is next for Art Herstory and for you?

For me, I will continue to publish books about women artists, as well as blog posts—my Art Herstory work integrates seamlessly into my work on the book series Illuminating Women Artists. For Art Herstory, I’d like to produce more in the way of non-card products. I’m contemplating a monthly wall calendar, themed around one or more historic female artists. But, not in a position to fund such a project on spec, I might launch a Kickstarter campaign.

A collection of images by women artists used for holiday cards by Art Herstory

Looking at A Medieval Devotional Ivory

One of my favorite works of art at the RISD Museum is an object which might otherwise go unnoticed. It isn’t very large or impactful on first glance but, at about the size of a small book, it is tucked away in a corner under glass. An ivory diptych dating to around 1300, this piece depicts in exquisite detail scenes from the shared lives of Jesus Christ and his mother Mary. An exceedingly well crafted artwork, it is also one of arresting beauty. It is difficult to understand the views and opinions of those who lived hundreds of years before us, but occasionally art can make it possible. In the case of ivories like this one, we can step back in time and begin to enter the medieval mind and to experience the religious devotion that has largely come to define this period in European history.

Unknown Artist, French, Île de France, Diptych with scenes of the Nativity, the Crucifixion, and the Last Judgement, Ivory with traces of polychromy, ca. 1275–1325, each panel is 9.5” x 5.25”

Small ivory devotional objects in the form of miniature would-be altarpieces were extremely popular in the medieval Christian world and were produced en masse in workshops, the finest of which were located in France. These pieces, typically in diptych or triptych form, could be set up on a table within a domestic setting and then folded shut for travel. The life of the aristocratic class who could afford such an indulgence was a mobile one. Sculptural images such as this were the three dimensional equivalent of books of hours and psalters. A plethora of religious tools engaged lay Christians in a kind of prayer that matched their clerical counterparts.

Ivories would have been richly painted with polychromy, and now a few examples survive of similar works which retain their coloring. Because these objects were so purposefully tactile and because much of medieval devotion centered on the touching, caressing, and even kissing of iconic images, most extant ivories are largely denuded of color. RISD’s retains some traces, which the careful observer can find in the fine crevices of the ivory’s detailed carving.

In a contemporary world so impacted by the new norms of social distancing and in which church services for Easter weekend have largely been cancelled or moved online, the type of individual prayer common in the Middle Ages takes on a new resonance. Objects like this facilitated and were integral to the interior lives of the faithful in a time when public displays of religion were counterbalanced by rich private prayer lives in a complicated puzzle of devotion.

In RISD’s ivory, the viewer witnesses the intertwined stories of Mary and Christ, starting in the lower left register with an episode called The Annunciation in which the Angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will bear God’s child. Mary holds a prayer book, signifying her unique faithfulness. Between her and the angelic messenger stands a vase holding a lily, a symbol of her purity as a spotless and holy virgin. In the same lower register, we can follow the continuous narrative. The figure of Mary appears again, this time laying on a cot next to the swaddled Christ child at The Nativity. She looks down adoringly at the child while above her within a cloud shepherds are told of the good news by an angel faraway. The visual constructions used in ivories followed rubrics which created images that were easily readable and readily duplicated. The result is something like a cross between a comic strip and a storyboard.

Unknown Artist, French, Île de France, Diptych with scenes of the Nativity, the Crucifixion, and the Last Judgement, Ivory with traces of polychromy, ca. 1275–1325, left panel, 9.5” x 5.25”

Across the central vertical hinge of the diptych the narrative continues. In the entire bottom right register, The Adoration of The Magi is depicted. At the left, a groom handles three horses entering a city gate indicating the far journey of the travelers. The three kings occupy a central space within this frame, each taking on a unique stance and presenting their individual gifts to Christ who stands precarious but confident on his mother’s knee. On the rear of the panel three oak leaves likely indicate the kingly lineage of Christ within the House of David. All medieval images, from great public works down to small personal ivories, are filled with a thickly layered language full of multivalent signs and symbols. For a medieval viewer, details that may be lost on us would have been common parlance. The three gothic arches which hover over each seen are a more clear symbol, underscoring the trinitarian nature of Christian belief.

Unknown Artist, French, Île de France, Diptych with scenes of the Nativity, the Crucifixion, and the Last Judgement, Ivory with traces of polychromy, ca. 1275–1325, right panel, 9.5” x 5.25”

In the upper registers of the panels, Christ’s crucifixion appears at the far left, followed by the crowning of his mother as Queen of Heaven. After the vertical hinge the story is consummated with The Last Judgement. Christ sits centrally, bookended by angelic hosts holding the instruments of his martyrdom - another common conceit in medieval art. Mary kneels at Christ’s righthand, signaling her preeminent status within a Christian canon which numbers saintly individuals in the thousands. Below these heavenly people, in a second register demarcating the earthly realm, minute figures awake in their tombs and raise from the dead in a moment of prophetic foreshadowing. Such is the everlasting life promised in Christian scripture.

RISD’s ivory is a small artwork so full of detail that it can be looked at again and again and enjoyed for hours. It invites contemplation even from an unbeliever. Contemplation of design, of form, of composition, and of narrative. Not to mention of the historical sociological implications such works have.

There tends to be a reading of the Middle Ages, fed by the common misnomer “the dark ages”, as a time of religious terror and general ignorance. In reality the picture is much more complicated. While there was enormous inequality and limited access to education, most Christian adherents during this period had a faith that was both profound and uncynical. The evidence that comes down to us paints a picture of sincere religious devotion borne out in public and private displays of faith that took place across a calendar packed with holy days both high and low. There was a frank belief in theological certainty and an acceptance of both heavenly salvation and hellish damnation. Christianity was also, though, a social practice set within a milieu shared with university foundations which gave us most of the eminent European institutions whose names are now taken as shorthand for learnedness.

The works of art which survive from this period are equally complex and ivories tell just one part of that story. From the guilds of Parisian sculptors that produced them, to the courtly figures who prayed over them, many members of a stratified society laid hands on these objects. And later, similar works were coveted by a spectrum of collectors who wanted to use them as emblems of their own sense of history; they were bought and sold by robber barons in the nineteenth century and looted by Nazis in the twentieth. Today, regulations around endangered species make the purchase of works that include ivory incredibly problematic if not entirely illegal.

The ivories that are available for public appreciation exist mostly under glass in the corners of quiet medieval galleries in museums. But they still hold a kind of magnetic sway. For a viewer in the twenty-first century, that appeal is much more commonly about craft and construction than about religion and devotion but it still exists. These are objects designed to pull one in close, to be educative and inspiring.

The same ivory that we observe now was handled seven centuries ago by a devotee. The same rivulets of tiny botanical borders that we can lingeringly appreciate in a museum were also known intimately by someone of another time entirely in the drafty bedchamber of a great house in Northern Europe. These are two worlds connected not necessarily by the same faith or by the same societal structure, but bound instead by an object. This object.

Therefore an ivory like this can tell us much not only about Paris in 1300, but about our time and place. It can show us that the interior life and indeed the solitary life are not always to be avoided but can instead be fulfillingly embraced. And such lives can also bring a recognition and appreciation of a kind of beauty - one which is both transcendent and even, occasionally, sublime.

Alone Together: Seeing Hopper’s Isolated Bodies

Recently a set of memes highlighting the comic appropriateness of Edward Hopper’s work in our new reality of social distancing have been making the rounds online. The first shows Hopper’s seminal work, Nighthawks, one of the most recognizable images in American art; except in lieu of the few patrons in the original, the space is totally vacant. The second illustrates a collection of Hopper’s paintings of lone figures staring out windows with a pithy line something along the lines of “we are all characters in Edward Hopper paintings now”.

As unease and anxiety sweep the world alongside the rising COVID-19 pandemic, viewers are suddenly reappraising the isolated bodies depicted in so many of Hopper’s paintings. Audiences are beginning to see themselves again in the pale sadness of Hopper’s protagonists, and decades old artworks are taking on new and unexpected meanings.

Edward Hopper’s oeuvre is full of spartanly populated spaces in the heart of normally bustling cities; a girl dining alone in a late night restaurant, a pensive usher in a theater, a man and woman working silently in an office, an empty street, a storefront. Looking at these images now, and knowing what we know about government-mandated separation from our colleagues, our friends, our families and loved ones, they transform into something different. In light of current events, Hopper’s paintings of urban isolation become perceptibly more relevant and more poetic to people living nearly a century later.

Edward Hopper, Automat, 1927, collection of The Des Moines Art Center, Iowa

In Automat, from 1927, a young woman sits staring into a cup of coffee set against the vast black chasm of an unbroken plate glass window which faces a lightless street. Punctuating the halo of darkness is the reflection of two rows of lights that recede behind the viewer into the restaurant. No other patrons are visible; it’s just a woman and her cup of coffee. One of her hands is still gloved, as if she just entered this space from the chilly unseen street beyond. She is heavily draped in a green coat, but below the table, we see her bare crossed legs.

In a normally social space, and at a table with two chairs, a diner sits alone. This image might seem strange and there has always been a persistent weirdness to Hopper’s work - a kind of understandable surreality. For viewers today, this kind of surreality is now all too real and we are all living it. Social interactions are banned and tables of two have been reduced to tables of one.

Edward Hopper, Night Windows, 1928, collection of the Museum of Modern Art

A year after Automat, Hopper painted another lone female character this time seen in a glancing moment probably viewed from a passing elevated train. We see a tripartite grouping of windows on the rounded corner of a building. At the right, the warm glow of a shaded lamp illuminates a red curtain. In the left, a white curtain is blowing out the open window. In the center we see just part of the figure, leaned away from us and taking part in some obscured activity. She wears a pink slip and the pale Rembrandt-like flesh of her arm and legs are made all the more glaring by the darkness of the structure’s exterior.

Historically, this image has been viewed as a meditation on the type of voyeurism that can easily occur in a city and also as an examination of the duality of urban life. It is an observance of the closeness in which people live with one another and also the existential distance they have from one another.

In cities like New York, where current issues of distance take on a level of actual practical difficulty, this unique relationship of people to one another within space has become starkly clear. Looking at Night Windows now, it becomes more about separation of space and diminution of physical proximity.

Edward Hopper, New York Movie, 1939, collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York

New York Movie, a painting from 1939 which has been in MoMA’s collection since 1941, shows a uniformed theater usher leaning against a wall for a moment of introspection out of view of the few patrons watching a film. In a pool of light cast by a shaded fixture, she leans her head on her hand, supporting her elbow with the flashlight she uses to guide moviegoers to their seats. She closes her eyes just for a moment. The architectural column and wall running down the center of the image form a compositional device to divide the woman on the left from the couple of individuals seated at right. Each of the three characters inhabits their own world within shared space. They are all alone, together.

As movie theaters and other gathering places close, Hopper’s theater takes on a new sense of romance. Places taken for granted in the seventy years since this image was painted are at once precious and missed. And the usher, the type of worker who labors with the public is newly seen by a contemporary audience. People once taken for granted are now essential.

The relationship between service workers, cashiers, custodians and the public is also now more tense and more uncertain. Physical barriers, like the wall in this image, are reconsidered and become vitally important in distancing people from one another. Now, rather than merely benign objects of happenstance, such dividers are seen as necessary safeguards of personal space.

Edward Hopper, Office in A Small City, 1953, collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In a later work from 1953, Hopper returns again to the subject of the lone figure - this time a man, at a desk staring out a window in Office in a Small City. We see the man externally through a window with crystal clarity. He places his palm on his desk and stares out over the rooftops of a neighboring building which has much more detail, charm, and warmth than the battleship gray facade of his own workplace. Jo Hopper said of the painting that it was an image of “a man in a concrete wall”. That is to say it’s an image of a figure trapped inside the circumstances of his life.

In some regards looking at this today there might be a feeling of jealousy. Oh, to be liberated from the confines of one’s home in favor of an office! But there is also a sense of oneness with the character. We are all looking out the same window, alienated from our surroundings and neighbors.

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning, 1930, collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Hopper created many iconic images and one of his most recognizable is Early Sunday Morning, a painting completed at the peak of his production in 1930. In it, the variegated surfaces of 7th Avenue facades are at once representational and abstract. The sunlight of dawn casts long unbroken shadows from hanging signs for tailors and barber shops across the windows of closed storefronts. The city, a place normally defined by people, by crowds, by what Walt Whitman called “the glorious jam”, is desolate. It is reduced to architectural and geometric forms - to a picture plane. The peoplelessness of Hopper’s 7th Avenue isn’t just a metaphor for the brooding urban isolation of his time, but also for the physical realities of our own. Looking at the painting in 2020, it becomes less conceptual and more illustrative. It looks like our neighborhoods now look on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays.

In John Patrick Shanley’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning play Doubt: A Parable, the playwright inserts the memorable line “doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.” The same can be said of our current state of affairs. We are all bound together by doubts, uncertainties, and anxieties. And when we look at Hopper’s protagonists, it is understandable to see much of the same and to feel a new connection to these old pictures.

In a world seemingly much more connected and social than that of twentieth century New York, we are newly aware of isolation and separateness.

So, what can art like Hopper’s provide for us in times of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear? What do these paintings matter? If nothing else, there is something to be said for the reassuring stability of art across time. After all, as they say, art is long, life is brief. Most art, be it the great, the good, or the terrible, will outlast us and for that reason it innately has a tendency to give us something as precious as it is rare: perspective.

Now when we look at Hopper’s paintings we are less likely to see characters that we feel estranged from on the basis of their singularity, but individuals that we feel increasingly more connected to and understanding of. Hopper’s paintings of lone bodies have now become objects of empathic emotion in ways unlike before.

All at once Hopper’s distant, lone characters are knowable and recognizable. That’s because they’re us.

Looking at Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Flight Into Egypt

Henry Ossawa Tanner (American, 1859-1937), Flight Into Egypt, oil on canvas, 1923, Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Henry Ossawa Tanner (American, 1859-1937) was one of the most celebrated artists of his generation. His paintings are often emotive and evocative and regularly draw on biblical and spiritual themes to underscore moral lessons. They also regularly employ aesthetic qualities unique to the French-inflected American Art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period when artists in the United States increasingly drew inspiration from their European counterparts. Tanner’s depiction of the Holy Family’s Flight Into Egypt, painted in 1923, is a hallmark of his production. At the current moment in our national history and especially during this holiday season, Tanner’s image takes on a new resonance and a new poignancy.

In the painting, Christ’s mother Mary rides into a gated city while holding the swaddled Jesus. Her husband Joseph follows closely behind. Ahead of their small party a faceless and ghostlike figure carries a lantern which illuminates the scene - the proverbial light in the darkness. The image is executed in a palette which is distinct to the Tonalist-tinted work the artist created throughout his career. Tanner, like many of his contemporaries, was influenced by the French, from Barizon landscapists to Realist painters.

Born in the United States, Henry Ossawa Tanner was one of seven children born to Sarah Tanner, a mixed race woman who had escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad. He studied art under the great Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy and moved to Paris in 1891 to study at the acclaimed Académie Julian. Largely due to the racism he experienced in the United States, and also to the cultural opportunities afforded to artists living in Europe, Tanner made France his home for the remainder of his life. He was eventually recognized for his artistic excellence with the nation’s highest honor, being made a Chevalier in the Légion d'honneur.

Tanner also traveled extensively in the Middle East and drew inspiration for his paintings, including Flight Into Egypt from the topography, the architecture, and the people he saw there. His immersive exploration gave way to studied attempts at capturing an authentic view of a cohesive biblical landscape to match the reality Tanner found on the ground in places like Jerusalem. His paintings are marked by this quest for truth and also influenced deeply by his own sincere religious faith.

Tanner was the son of Benjamin Tucker Tanner, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Living abroad on Christmas in 1896, he wrote home saying "I have made up my mind to serve Him [God] more faithfully.” He went on to dedicate the majority of his career to painting touching religious scenes, including this plaintive image executed nearly thirty years after Tanner’s letter to his parents. It is a painting born out of devout sincerity.

The artist’s spirituality is evident in much of his later work, but to me, Tanner’s subtle treatment of many of these images is what makes his oeuvre so striking. Unlike other artists of the mid and late eighteenth century, Tanner largely avoided the negative impulses of the popular Orientalist movement in his scenes of the real places in which biblical stories are set. His paintings are paintings first and foremost - not illustrations meant to aggrandize Western audiences. Nor are they burdened by the saccharine sentimentality which is evident in other images of similar subjects made during this period. Tanner’s dual influences from his uniquely American Christian upbringing and his immersion in avant-garde European movements shaped his art and his psyche.

In Flight Into Egypt we witness not a laboriously produced illustrative image of a scene from scripture, but a painterly treatment of an emotive human story. The subdued palette and quality of the surface of the painting result in a romantic image, which provokes empathy and understanding. The power of this piece is evident because it succeeds at making us feel something nearly a century after it was painted. It allows us to see the humanity of saintly figures and in turn, the people they represent in Tanner’s time and our own.

As the small party marches slowly past the closed doors of a walled hamlet at night, we also find ourselves attuned to a feeling of alienation, which would come to define many paintings made by Tanner and his peers, particularly those in America. There is a lonesomeness to journey of the Holy Family, one mirrored in the religious experience of many. In this case that lonesomeness and solitude is portrayed by a painter who after his death was classified by his own son as a mystic. 

This painting is deeply, resonantly, profoundly beautiful because it transcends what we expect from such a work. It is also a reflection of Tanner’s own transcendent experience which culminated in his success in France. The story of a refugee family would have been incredibly important for the son of a freed slave, just as it should be important to contemporary viewers watching the American border crisis unfold.

Henry Ossawa Tanner was a painter of remarkable skill, who harnessed his own experience and his religious views to create paintings of breathtaking and unusual sensitivity. His Flight Into Egypt is a singular expression of many of the best qualities of his oeuvre and still has lessons to teach to viewers today.

Why Teach Art History?

I recently finished teaching my first session of a new eight week lecture style class I developed for the Providence Art Club: Art History & Appreciation. I proposed the class because I genuinely believe that a good grounding in the basic history of art can go a long way in helping individuals to develop better connoisseurship skills. It was the first time such a class was offered at the Club and I hoped it would garner enough interest to get the ten or so students needed to run it. Nearly forty students signed up. Over eight weeks, and nearly 300 slides, we covered everything from the Cave Paintings of Lascaux to the use of art in Beyoncé and Jay-Z's new music video. It was a great experience for me as a teacher. And a great reminder to me of the incredible value of art history.

Regularly ranked as one of the least useful, least marketable, least valuable college majors, art history is often used as shorthand for a wasteful course of study. Mocked even by then President Barack Obama, who in 2014 reminded an audience that you can often make more money from a career in a skilled trade than as an art historian. Art historians are portrayed as alternatively icy, stodgy, and elitist in the popular culture. In spite of the negativity surrounding the discipline, it still draws in students at all levels. But what value does it actually have?

Still from the 2003 film Mona Lisa Smile, about a professor who uses art history to challenge her students assumptions at the conservative Wellesley College of the 1950s, starring Julia Roberts.

The study of works of art is not just about determining whether a painting is by Bruegel or Bacon. First and foremost, art history has power to create empathy and lead to a better understanding of and appreciation for cultures, traditions, and beliefs other than one's own. Art history also builds remarkable analytical and writing skills, born out of the thoughtful consideration of the historical context for a work and paired with a dedicated examination of the object in question. Additionally, studying artworks builds the skills needed to critically process the ever-broadening flow of visual media that comes with contemporary life. In short, studying art history enables closer looking and deeper thinking.

They say that "history is another country", and that although there may be vague commonalities between historic cultures and today's world, it can be difficult for modern audiences to ever truly understand the motivations, attitudes, and values of people living in England during the sixteenth century, or in France during the eighteenth. But through looking at, and deeply examining, the exacting portraits of Tudor courtiers or the lush paintings of the French Rococo it might be possible to gain a better footing in these foreign worlds. And in the process to also hopefully learn something about abuse of power, or despotism, or revolution. More than the rote collecting of facts or points of view, art history stokes continued curiosity about the subjects, techniques, philosophies, and personalities that have shaped visual culture and history. It enables viewers to explore and question the world around them, and to do so with a critical eye.

Teaching Art History & Appreciation reminded me of all the reasons I love this discipline. The skills developed through looking at works of art are easily transferred to the examination of other media. Honing one's eye on great works of art cultivates stronger cross-disciplinary understanding of architecture, film, and design. Talking students through the history of art helped me to better develop my own capacity to see these and other connections, to understand them, and to share them passionately and accessibly with my students.

One of my favorite quotes about education is attributed to Plutarch and goes something like "The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled." In teaching Art History & Appreciation, I had a great opportunity to reflect on the capacity of art history to motivate curiosity and connoisseurship in contemporary viewers and collectors. By walking my students through the history of art, I think and hope that I inspired a better appreciation for the rich complexities of the artworks of the past as well as a better ability to read and understand artworks of the present. At the end of the last class one of my students came up and said that the course had "lit a spark" in her and inspired a more keen interest in art history. I guess then, according to Plutarch at least, I did a decent job.

I'm looking forward to teach Art History & Appreciation again in the future, and am currently writing the syllabus for a followup class on Modern and Contemporary Art. For more information on my teaching projects, visit my Speaking & Teaching page.

John French Sloan's Ashcan Nudes

John French Sloan (1871-1951) is likely best known as one of the key members of the Ashcan School, the rough association of realist artists working primarily in New York at the turn of the century. Sloan's oeuvre is full of the gritty streetscapes typical of his movement. Some of his most well-known paintings like Dust Storm, Fifth Avenue, of 1906, Six O'Clock, Winter, of 1912, or The City from Greenwich Village, of 1922, convey a sense of the complex relationships between New Yorkers and their urban environment. From the beginning of the twentieth century into the depths of the roaring twenties, such images shape an understanding of what it meant to be a New Yorker and, more broadly, an American. Like his peer Edward Hopper, Sloan had a keen sense of the isolation and loneliness that often accompany life in a vast and impersonal metropolis. Upon closer inspection though, Sloan's body of work contains some unexpected images, including a series of nudes produced throughout his career. These images, often executed as etchings, capture solitary moments of female models in the artist's studio. They are artworks full of disparate qualities. At once sensitive and personal, they are also incredibly retrograde. They express, perhaps accidentally, the uniquely precarious relationship between artist and model, while also exhibiting the patent objectification of women which makes female nudes so problematic.

John Sloan (1871–1951), Prone Nude, etching, 1913, 3 1/4" × 6 7/16" (plate), Gift of Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, 1926, Metropolitan Museum of Art

In an early work, Prone Nude, of 1913, Sloan references the canonical nude prototype. His model copies, with a few alterations, the infamous pose from Paul Gauguin's Spirit of The Dead Watching (Manao tupapau), a painting created twenty years earlier in Tahiti, which depicts Gauguin's terrified native wife Teha'amana laying prone on their bed. Sloan's use of the etching process flips the pose, mirroring his own subject to Gauguin's. While Teha'amana spreads her hands slightly in the earlier painting, the model in Sloan's etching half buries her face in folded arms. Both figures tightly cross their ankles and stare out chillingly at the viewer.

The gesture in Sloan's Prone Nude in the final etching also coincidentally recalls that of Francois Boucher's scandalous la Jeune Fille allongée, a portrait of Marie-Louise O'Murphy, the petite maîtresse of Louis XV. Both Gaguin's and Boucher's subjects were underage girls, bound by overtly patriarchal societies to take part in relationships that are unthinkable today. Even without the contextual baggage of Gaguin and Boucher, neither of these associations is a particularly positive one, as both are images of women presented exclusively for objectification. Sloan does not seek to correct the issues with the earlier exemplars, and instead presents a woman along the same lines as Gauguin and Boucher, devoid of agency or power in the face of the presumably male gaze. This continuity remains in Sloan's later depictions of women.

John Sloan (1871-1951), Nude Reading, 1928, etching, 5" x 7" (plate), Gift of Bernard F. Walker, Detroit Institute of Art

In another etching, Nude Reading, completed fifteen years after his Prone Nude, Sloan makes an image more his own. A nude model, presumably resting between poses, lounges on a bed while leisurely perusing a thick book. In the background, the artist's press is littered with materials. The scene is outwardly beautiful and meditative, but shares the same issues with Sloan's earlier Gauguin-inspired print. The woman is depicted in a one-to-one relationship with an object: the press. As the press has "a bed", the model lays on a bed. The insinuations of model as a tool of the artist, no different than a press, are obvious. The work is also a meditation on the process of creating the etching. The subject is present and so is the press on which this very print was likely created. In addition to revealing aspects of the artist's creative process though, it also presents a decidedly traditional view of the model's role in the creation of such work, as a passive object.

John Sloan (1871-1951), Nude and Etching Press, etching, 1931, plate: 4 15/16" × 3 15/16" sheet: 12 11/16" × 9 5/8", Gift of Ernest Shapiro and Family 1995, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In 1931, Sloan revisits the model and press motif in Nude and Etching Press. This time the figure stands with some discernible confidence next to the artist's press. The lithe arms of the anonymous woman replicate the outstretched "arms" of the press. The curvilinear qualities of the press's legs mirror the shapely legs of the model. Again, Sloan presents a woman one-to-one with an object. Neither this figure, nor the Nude Reading, interact with the press at all. Both merely pose in front of the it, and are nearly as still as Sloan's early Prone Nude. Both images elevate and personify the press, while simultaneously diminishing the humanity of the model. This piece, like the earlier nude paired with the press, is an apparent study of the artist's process. Tacked up haphazardly on the wall above the press are nearly a dozen nudes. Perhaps the model here is stretching between more formal poses, with the knowledge that her image too will be added to this collection.

John Sloan (1871-1951), Nude and Arch, etching and engraving, 1933, 7" x 5", on offer at Swann Auction Galleries March 13, 2018 19th Century Prints and Drawings Auction (Est. $1,500-$2,500) This work was Unsold.

Another Sloan nude appeared in Swann Auction Galleries' recent Prints and Drawings sale on March 13. The work, which went unsold, comes two years after the Nude and Etching Press, and features a  model seated uncomfortably on a cushion in front of a window overlooking Greenwich Village. Stanford White's Beaux Art Washington Square Arch stands in bright sunlight in the eponymously named park, framed in the window behind the model. Scenes of city life are also evident, as cars can be seen through and around the arch. Windows of the apartment blocks abutting Washington Square Park form a further backdrop, and an added urbanity. The wrought iron railing and arch give the scene a vaguely Parisian air, imbued with the distinctly Bohemian feeling of the Village in the twenties and thirties. The model here is much more engaged with the viewer than her predecessors, staring out at us wanly. Still though, she is presented one-to-one with an object: the arch. The classical associations of arch and nude are quickly evident. Here though they are updated to New York in 1933, the Città Eterna of the New World.

In all of these pieces the aesthetic values of the Ashcan School are laid out in the medium of the etching. Richly and darkly inked, each plate is thick with crosshatching. Even the smooth-skinned model is criss crossed with descriptive lines. Sloan clearly revels in the textural and linear qualities inherent to the printmaking process and tends to fill the whole field of the plate with lines, independent of their necessity to express value or space. This technique results in prints that are as course as his paintings of metropolitan life. In terms of execution, these images hold together with a stylistic coherence that spans much of Sloan's career.

The problems present in Sloan's portrayals of his models are rather obvious to contemporary onlookers, if not unusual in his own day. The use of models to hone hand-eye coordination and express supposedly universal or eternal artistic values was a time honored tradition and would have been a key point in Sloan's education at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. It is difficult, though, to reconcile the avant-garde nature of so much of Sloan's oeuvre with the way in which he envisaged nude women. He was a leader of a liberal art movement, an avowed communist, and a rebellious spirit, yet his depictions of women are ensnared by many of the trappings shared by more conservative artists.

While they do offer access to usually unseen moments in the artist's studio and creative practice, these nudes also engage in typically misogynistic portrayals of female bodies. They can and should be appreciated for their craftsmanship, for their ability to show Sloan's process, and for their storytelling capability. But they are surprisingly out of step with the values evident in Sloan's life and in his broader body of work.

Exploring American Art in the Nineteenth Century

On October 22 I gave a talk at the Bristol Art Museum on the Providence Art Club, and in the course of preparing for this presentation I revisited my art history and my history to get a better look at the year of the Art Club's founding: 1880. Something that came to mind immediately was the proximity of the Club's beginning to the end of the American Civil War, which concluded just fifteen years prior. For comparison, 2017 is of course just sixteen years after the events of September 11, 2001. This correlation made me curious to explore the War's enormous impact on the cultural life of the United States.

It is difficult, or maybe even impossible, for contemporary Americans to imagine what life in the mid and late nineteenth century might have been like in the same country where they now reside. The culture of nineteenth century America was quite different, the nation still so unshaped, that it is as if the Civil War took place in an entirely other country than our own. But the after affects of the conflict shaped the country that we know today. Just one aspect of the changing and coalescing of American society that took place during the Reconstruction Period was in the area of art and culture.

Before the War, and for decades after, the United States was viewed as a cultural backwater. Bereft of their own art institutions, most American artists traveled abroad to study. In ateliers in Paris, hundreds of Americans worked under the tutelage of French artists who themselves were trained in proper academies using well-worn and respected techniques espoused by the art establishment. This temporary diaspora created a class of cultural ex-patriots the likes of which would not be seen again until The Lost Generation of the 1920's.

Scores of these art pilgrims returned to their country to create art with European skill and American vision. And in doing so, these artists realized that the United States would require cultural infrastructure if their momentum was to continue. Artists along with patrons and the growing mercantile and economic elite drew together to create the necessary institutions that would underpin a burgeoning American art scene. Many of the organizations founded to serve the cultural needs of the nineteenth century found a staying power that continues into the twenty first.

An early exhibition at the Providence Art Club, about 1890, founded in 1880 to stimulate "art culture" in Providence, RI. The Club utilizes the same gallery space for exhibitions today.

In the period between 1865 and 1900, an astounding number of cultural organizations were formed in the United States. Primarily in the wealthy North; philharmonics, libraries, literary societies, social clubs, private studios, art schools, associations, and museums sprung into existence. Many of these were funded by the wealth being piled up in a country whose rapid industrialization was sparked by the disastrous internal conflict of the Civil War. The vast irony of the creative output in the post-bellum era is that the industrial complex that abetted the War was also, at least indirectly, responsible for the cultural flowering that occurred in its aftermath.

The types of organizations that grew up after the War were myriad. They were professional associations, museums, and institutions of higher learning. The Yale School of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, the Pratt Institute, and the Corcoran College of Art and Design all came into existence in this period. Along with other art schools and private ateliers, they made it possible for the first time to educate American artists at home. This broadened the base of art makers and expanded, democratized, and Americanized points of view presented in the art created in the United States.

In the decade and a half after the War, a slew of art museums were founded, too. These institutions, and their wealthy patrons, would bring the treasures of the world to the United States. Many of the nation's preeminent encyclopedic museums were established in the frenzied nineteenth century, including the Detroit Institute of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Smaller museums like the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts and the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence also came into being. Together, the establishment of such institutions is indicative of the widening audience for culture. As the middle class grew, more Americans were interested in the entertainment possibilities inherent in an art museum.

In the middle of this period, another organization was founded. Not a school, or a museum, but a professional association and social club meant to bring artists and collectors together for the pursuit and patronage of art. In 1880, in Providence, Rhode Island, sixteen men and women came together to found the Providence Art Club. Dedicated to stimulating "art culture" in the City of Providence and beyond, the Club would provide a collective impulse for exhibition and networking.

Some early members of the Providence Art Club, circa 1890.

The Club was the first such organization to be co-founded by men and women, forty years before the female founders of the Club would be eligible to vote. The second individual to sign the Club's constitution was the great African-American landscape painter Edward Mitchell Bannister. This community, diverse and potentially radical in its day, made it possible for artists and patrons to meet, and for artists to exhibit their work outside the constraints of traditional commercial galleries.

Over the course of the last 137 years, many of the aforementioned organizations have thrived and grown. The Art Club is no exception. Since 1880, the Club has ballooned from 16 members to over 600, and it organizes more exhibitions now than ever. On November 12, the Club opened The 113th Annual Little Pictures Show & Sale, the largest and oldest exhibition of its kind in the United States. The endurance of the Art Club is indicative of the quality inherent in many other organizations established in the same period. Though established for decidedly nineteenth century needs, the Club continues to serve today's artists and patrons in the same tradition, albeit with expanded and modernized services.

In revisiting the period of the Art Club's founding, I came to appreciate the Club more for its historical role in bringing artists and patrons together. While art schools and museums provided much needed venues to education and inspiration, the Art Club was a practical necessity for mid career artists eager to court new patrons. The fact that six women, and an African-American were so integral to the founding of the Club adds to the organization's particular uniqueness within its milieu.

The broader story of American culture at the end of the nineteenth century is one of a country returning to normalcy after an internal calamity. Economic progress partially sparked by the Civil War resulted in an environment where burgeoning art organizations were able to thrive. The Robber Barons of the Gilded Age underwrote institutions which eventually came to serve diverse audiences all over the United States. Contemporary Americans ultimately owe a debt of gratitude to the artists and connoisseurs of the nineteenth century. Their enormous investment in a cultural infrastructure for a cultureless nation continues to pay dividends today.