On the surface, “Her Paris” plays out like a bit of nostalgia for the bad old days when women were denied opportunities to study, make and exhibit art solely on the basis of gender. The works on display at the Denver Art Museum, mostly by overlooked female painters from the Impressionist era, are skillfully executed and a joy to behold and evoke a corresponding pity for those poor femmes from the late 19th century who just couldn’t get a break. If only they lived in our own enlightened age of equality for all. Oh, well, let’s just savor them now.
But have things really gotten better? The work of men still rules at the auction houses and far outnumbers the work of women held in the country’s largest museums where, published surveys reveal, male directors are paid considerably better then female directors.
And there are these little reminders, sharp jabs that come along not infrequently, that women still get a raw deal. Just down the street, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, there is current group show of 25 artists, just three of them female. Math like that is hard to reconcile.
Still, today’s female artists don’t suffer the same outward discrimination that “Her Paris” painters like Cecilia Beaux, Anna Ancher and Marie Petiet endured in varying degrees — barred from major painting academies, omitted from exhibitions, ignored by critics, even prevented from drawing nude male models.
Nor do they face the same sort of societal pressures that the show’s Louise Abb—ma, Elizabeth Nourse and others had to work around, like the expectation that they would focus their efforts on domestic scenes and images of children and young women.
And certainly more female artists succeed today, following the path of the few women who emerged as stars from the Impressionist age and whose work is routinely featured in the many exhibitions that revive the period for today’s audiences — and which are frequently blockbusters for the museums that present them.
They make up the limited names visitors to “Her Paris” are likely to recognize. Mary Cassatt, the best-known of all female Impressionists, is represented with several works, including the popular “Children Playing on the Beach” from 1884, which brings a candid, naturalist feel to a scene of two toddlers having their fun in the sand.
There’s also Berthe Morisot’s 1892 “Lucie L—on at the Piano,” a straightforward depiction of a young, upper-class female honing the skills expected of those in her social station. Louise Catherine Breslau, who carved out serious respect in her day, shows us why with “Tea at Five o’Clock,” which brings an emotional feel to a daily ritual that painters of the time captured regularly
After that, the recognition factor drops sharply, though that’s what makes the exhibit interesting, in fact, a lot more interesting than most Impressionism shows. It’s not that Claude Monet or Pierre-Auguste Renoir or Camille Pissarro are something to sneeze at, but we’ve seen an awful lot of them in these hyped retrospectives.
We haven’t seen Fanny Churberg and her thundering “Waterfall” from 1877. The talented Finnish painter never got her due and, as the exhibit tells us, gave up her brush just a few years after creating the work.
Nor do we recognize Annie Hopf’s 1889 “Autopsy (Professor Poirier, Paris)” in which the unknown Swiss painter captures a scientist just as his blade cuts into the chest of a corpse.
There are numerous unexpected encounters like this in “Her Paris.” The level of talent is high and the pieces fully represent the interests and methods of painters of the time period who worked mostly in oil on canvas.
The exhibit — a traveling attraction organized by the American Federation of Arts and curated by Laurence Madeline — can be overly positive at times, stressing not the adversity women faced, but their triumph over it in simply getting the work done. It starts out strong with a series of paintings by female artists of female artists. These painters were recording their own history, putting it down on canvas and the work is significant on several levels.
But “Her Paris” is ultimately forced to dwell in the realities of exclusion and discrimination. There are a few notable exceptions, though for the most part we see women painting the things women were supposed to paint: their clothes, their kids, their houses, and all sorts of pretty things, like “The Pink Slippers” that Eva Gonzal—s captured in 1879. There’s plenty of triumph in technique, but don’t be fooled; these women had their place.
Exhibits like “Her Paris” try to make up for history’s unfairness by showing evidence that the way we remember things isn’t the way they really were. It is a futile effort in many ways. Men are the historic figures of this particular art age because the times would not have had it any other way. Women were a sideshow, a novelty.
This exhibit doesn’t break them free from that. Rather, it reinforces the notion by doing the same thing Paris did a century-plus ago: separate them from men. They remain here, in Denver in 2017, a novelty act. If you want to end segregation, stop segregating. Curate shows that — finally — show women painters alongside men, integrated fully into the checklist of works on display.
That’s probably a good rule, as well, for curators of contemporary art right now.— Gatekeepers are more fair to women today because they are sensitive to issues of equity (and because so many of them are women).— But exclusion isn’t quite nostalgia yet. Those sharp jabs from galleries and museums do keep coming.
“Her Paris: Women Artists in the Age of Impressionism” continues through Jan. 14 at the Denver Art Museum. Info at 720-865-5000 or denverartmuseum.org.
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