York. A memorial to her friend artist’s processes and working methods.
Dag Hammarskjöld, this mono- A number of the works have been dis-
lithic form embodied UN ideals cussed in earlier publications.3 But no
of international cooperation and previous publication has given the proto-
world peace. As in all of her types for Hepworth’s late metal works
monumental outdoor sculpture, this kind of attention. Readers who are
Hepworth was deeply con- not familiar with Hepworth would do
cerned with structural complex- well to begin with her inspiring pictorial
ities, introduced to her early on autobiography, published in 1985, and
by her father. Text and photo- the fine volume by Penelope Curtis and
graphs document the complex Alan G. Wilkinson, Barbara Hepworth: A
structure of the armature and Retrospective, written for the major exhibi-
final bronze and give new tion at the Tate Gallery Liverpool in 1994.
insight into the how the timeless But anyone with real interest in the
simplicity of modernist sculp- thought and working methods of this
ture is achieved. important modernist sculptor should
The volume includes several study this fine book by Sophie Bowness,
other essays that will be of who is now at work on the catalogue
particular interest to museum raisonné of Hepworth’s work.
professionals. Frances Guy,
Head of Collections and Julie L’Enfant is professor of art history
Exhibitions at the museum, and chair of the Liberal Arts department
Fig. 2. Hepworth with the plaster Single Form at Morris discusses the financing of the at the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul,
Singer, May 1963. Photo: Morgan-Wells Plates.
Hepworth Wakefield, which Minnesota. Her most recent publication
included the Art Fund and the is Pioneer Modernists: Minnesota’s First
Cheltenham, England (1969–72). Lottery. Architect David Chipperfield Generation of Women Artists ( 2011).
The prototype for Winged Figure is the discusses the evolution of his modernist
only one from among these four major design of irregularly shaped concrete Notes
commissions that survives and is the cen- boxes, with attention to the use of 1. On direct carving, see Penelope Curtis,
tral piece in the Gift. The ethos of the natural and artificial light. Project Sculpture 1900-1945: After Rodin, Oxford
company, based on partnership of work- director Gordon Watson recounts its History of Art (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1999), 73-104.
ers and management through common development from 1996 until the start of
ownership, particularly interested the construction in 2007. Jackie Heuman 2. Barbara Hepworth, Barbara Hepworth:
Carvings and Drawings (London, 1952),
artist. Bowness traces the project from contributes a valuable essay on the
“1931-1934” section.
early sketches through the construction conservation of the prototypes.
3. An example is Conversation with Magic
of armatures (first wooden, then alu- Barbara Hepworth: The Plasters is an Stones (1973), which appears in Barbara
minum) to the final aluminum cast. invaluable contribution to the scholar- Hepworth: Works in the Tate Gallery
Another particularly interesting commis- ship on Hepworth. Complementing the Collection and the Barbara Hepworth
sion examined in depth is Single Form, the excellent essays are illustrations through- Museum Tate Ives, by Matthew Gale and
twenty-one-foot bronze on the plaza of out, both color and black-and-white, that Chris Stephens (1999).
the United Nations Building in New crystallize the authors’ insights into the
The Memory Factory: that one might wish of them is that they art exhibitionary complex of Vienna” (4-
The Forgotten Women might no longer be necessary.”1 Julie 5). Drawing case studies of five highly
Johnson’s meticulously researched successful women painters and sculptors
Artists of Vienna 1900 study of women artists in Viennese closely connected to the Vienna
by Julie M. Johnson modernism lends support to the idea Secession—Tina Blau (1845-1916), Elena
Purdue University Press, 2012 that corrective exhibitions, institutions, Luksch-Makowsky (1878-1967), Broncia
and monographs serve to ghettoize Koller (1863-1934), Helene Funke (1869-
Reviewed by Megan Brandow-Faller women artists from the art historical 1957),2 and Teresa Feodorowna Ries
canon. The Memory Factory flies in the face (1874-1956)—Johnson refutes the histori-
S
urmising the perils of separate of feminist art historical inquiries stress- ographical tendency to lump women
women’s art institutions, an ing women’s difference and embedded- artists into an aesthetic “room of their
anonymous reviewer for one of ness within separate institutions to argue own,” seeking explanations for women
Austria’s leading feminist periodicals that “women artists were not part of a artists’ canonical exclusion in “a new cen-
quipped in 1916 that “the best success separate sphere, but integrated into the ter … whose themes have not always fit
WOMAN’S ART JOURNAL
58
into the dominant narrative structures of draws more from the arsenal of memory the opposite of Modernism” precisely
art history” (111). Such an approach, and Vergangenheitsbewältigung (‘coming because of its frilly feminine
Johnson maintains, is not useful, for the to terms with the past’) studies than tra- connotations (11). Here, the Viennese
art historical “mothers” that she spot- ditional feminist art historical inquiry. As architect and cultural critic Adolf Loos’s
lights were leading practitioners of the such, Johnson privileges not only formal famous dictum comes to mind, that
dominant strategies of modernism. visual analysis, which indeed she does “[w]herever I abuse the everyday-use-
Indeed, painters like Funke and Koller masterfully, but contextualized readings object by ornamenting it, I shorten its
often transmitted French Post- of nonvisual sources such as feuilletons, life span…. Only the whim and
Impressionistic influences ahead of their artist biographies, and humorous texts. ambition of women can be responsible
male colleagues, in a more purely Historiographically, The Memory Factory for the murder of such material.” 5
autonomous manner than Klimt and represents an important contribution to Johnson’s point is, thus, that imposing a
other allegorical painters, while exempli- the Schorske dialogue on Viennese mod- Franco-centric definition of modernism
fying the Vienna Moderns’ interest in ernism. In his classic collection of inter- on Vienna marginalizes women’s
psychological interiority and nascent disciplinary essays Fin-de-siècle Vienna: participation in a distinct brand of
abstraction in the decorative. Johnson Politics and Culture, cultural historian modernism, never as autonomous or
considers these artists’ erasure from the Carl Schorske attributed a blossoming of self-critical of its medium as Greenberg
art historical record highly jarring, given modern art, culture and literature to the would have liked.
that their life and work embodied text- disillusioned ‘sons of liberalism’ who A broader critique in Johnson’s work,
book examples of misunderstood mod- abandoned Late-Imperial Austria’s with as much relevance today as in
ernist forerunners: e.g., stylistic innova- increasingly antagonistic political reality 1910, when the Association of Austrian
tion, run-ins with conservative authori- to find meaning in an aesthetic culture of Women Artists curated a landmark
ties, as well as acclaim abroad in feeling.3 For Schorske and his followers, historical retrospective of women
advance of recognition at home. the heroic trio of Klimt-Schiele- artists’ works (which dwarfed Linda
Similarly, Johnson shows how artistic Kokoschka exemplified a generational Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris’s
personalities like the flamboyant struggle that exploded in Klimt’s well- more famous 1977 retrospective), is how
Russian sculptor Teresa Ries created known walkout from the conservative the seemingly straightforward story of
more than one succès de scandale. For Austrian Artists Guild to found the modern art as presented in the “white
instance, a well-known anecdote tells of Vienna Secession in (1897), an artists’ cube” space of museums has only
Ries’s delightfully provocative life-size union dedicated to the philosophy of Ver served to reify women’s omission and
marble sculpture of a witch sharpening Sacrum, the idea of art as a sacred spring the modernist band-of-brothers myth.
her toenails before the Sabbath attract- to rejuvenate modern life. Making As Johnson correctly insists,
ing comment from conservative women artists visible in the Schorske
Emperor Franz Josef. Today, however, dialogue on Viennese modernism, a Too often, the work is expected to
Ries’s work remains buried in the base- body of literature which has, according rise to the surface on its own, but
ment of the Vienna City Museum Depot, to the author, “inadvertently reinforced curators (and art dealers) who
a poignant comment on the necessity of the silencing of women’s pasts” or pro- serve as the gatekeepers of art
active scholarly intervention to combat moted false notions that women could museums and gallery spaces have
the invisibility of women artists’ works. not exhibit publicly whatsoever, repre- rarely acknowledged that the
Indeed, in light of Ries’s and other sents an important corrective in space itself can enhance or alter
artists’ Jewish backgrounds, Johnson’s Johnson’s study (3). Building on the pio- the work of art itself (13).
work serves to remind the reader that neering studies of Sabine Plakolm-
fin-de-siècle Vienna is not a safe histori- Forsthuber, Johnson’s book numbers In a scathing critique of an interview
cal landscape divorced from the exigen- among the first English-language works with curator Kirk Varnadoe, Johnson
cies of two World Wars and the on women artists in the circles of the points a finger at MoMA’s exclusion of
Anschluß. On the contrary, as the final Vienna Secession.4 women artists from its 1986 rendition of
chapter on the post-1938 erasure of these Johnson, however, casts her net more the “Vienna 1900” show. 6 Clearly, the
artists’ lives and legacies reveals, the broadly than just Vienna, rethinking issue is not quality but, as Johnson
seemingly-innocent territory of Vienna women artists’ non-participation in the accurately surmises, a lack of active
1900 intersects with Austria’s turbulent shaping of international modernism as scholarly and institutional intervention
relationship with National Socialism defined by Clement Greenberg. As in preserving the memory of women
and the Holocaust more directly than Johnson duly notes, Greenberg’s artists, an issue only compounded by
scholars and the public have previously Franco-centric definition of modernism the wartime destruction of works and
acknowledged. does not fit the Central European sources.
Historiographically and theoretically, (particularly Viennese) context, which The book’s first five chapters spot-
The Memory Factory is as ambitious and tended to retain narrative elements and light the women artists named above,
complex as the book’s richly document- the decorative, a form of “nascent documenting their public exhibition
ed endnotes. The author’s methodology abstraction [which] came to be seen as records and their posthumous erasure
SPRING /SUMMER 2013
59
daring impressionism and as nodding to Klimt’s Portrait of Frietza
profusion of light, only the Riedler (1908), Johnson’s side-by-side
comments of the French comparison posits the close connection
Minister of Fine Arts of its staging and stylized background
salvaged the picture from to Koller’s My Mother (1907), unveiled at
oblivion, to be eventually the 1908 Kunstschau exhibition. Johnson
purchased for the imperial makes similar arguments regarding
collections. Johnson makes a Koller’s role in transmitting Van Gogh-
convincing case that Blau esque influences to a younger
was selectively excluded generation of modernists. Ironically,
from the Vienna Moderns’ Koller’s work was more “modern” (by
ancestor cult because male Greenberg’s definition) than that of her
Secessionists could not male colleagues. Yet, unlike traditional
swallow the idea of an “Old feminist inquiry (e.g., Linda Nochlin’s
Fig. 1. Tina Blau, Spring at the Prater (1882), oil on canvas, 85 Mistress” as their artistic famous re-reading of images of leisure
1/4” x 114 9/16”. Austrian Gallery Belvedere.
foremother, writing that “the and work in Morisot’s paintings),
Secessionists…never figured Johnson stresses that “finding a new
from the limelight, which Johnson themselves as wrestling with or being aesthetic or center is hardly necessary”
frames in terms of their exclusion from heirs to mothers” (29). That Blau was for Koller because her work reflected
paternalistic mythologies of father-son doubly “other” in fin-de-siècle Vienna, themes of psychological interiority,
plots. Chapters Six and Seven briefly i.e., as a woman and a Jew, further acknowledged by the Schorske school as
examine women’s art institutions, focus- problematized matters, particularly an important leitmotif of Viennese
ing on the critical reception of the after Austrian institutions, including the modernism (112). Ultimately, Johnson
Association of Austrian Women Artist’s Women’s Academy that she co-founded, shows how women artists were
1910 “Art of the Woman” retrospective. were co-opted by the National integrated into mainstream male
The last chapter, “1900-1938: Erasure,” Socialists. During her own lifetime, as a institutions, their works influencing and
takes strides to retrieve Vienna 1900 successful public artist fetching high influenced by their male colleagues,
from a historiographical no man’s land prices, Johnson argues that Blau and, moreover, in Koller’s case, serving
distant from the mid-century cata- consciously avoided connecting her as an organizational mediator after the
clysms, to trace the stories of women work to negative stereotypes postwar fissure of the Viennese
artists in exile and under National- surrounding the feminine in art. institutional landscape.
Socialist persecution. Johnson masterfully compares the In limiting her discussion of Austrian
Johnson hits her stride in the formal outputs of Koller and Helene Funke to women’s artist leagues to the prewar
visual analysis in the early chapters the works of their male colleagues, period, Johnson focuses on feuilletonistic
titled “Writing, Erasing, Silencing: Tina demonstrating how women artists often reactions to the 1910 “Art of the Woman”
Blau and the (Woman) Artist’s served to disseminate the latest show, implying that the leagues ran out
Biography,” “Broncia Koller and developments in French Post- of creative gas after World War I. In fact,
Interiority in Public Art Exhibitions,” Impressionism among the Vienna Austria’s women’s art movement
and “Teresa Ries in the Memory moderns. In her discussion of Koller, a reached its zenith in the interwar period,
Factory.” She uses the example of Jewish painter who sided with the propelled by the institutional parity
Austrian Impressionist Tina Blau to lay progressive Klimt Group after it achieved by Vienna’s Frauenakademie in
the foundations of her argument that seceded from the Vienna Secession in 1919 and the founding of a female
the Vienna Secession’s construction of 1905 and was inaccurately Secession that mirrored the very
identity was self-serving and memorialized as a “painting housewife” disagreements about the value of the
paternalistic. Blau possessed all the due to her interest in interiority and applied and fine arts and in particular
qualities one might hope for in a active role as patron, Johnson’s analysis the role of Raumkunst, or installation art,
modernist forbearer: the stylistic is at its most original. In a manner driving a rift between the Klimt Group
innovation found in her brushwork reminiscent of feminist interpretations and rump-Secession at the end of its
capturing the transitory qualities of of nineteenth-century French “heroic” period. 7 Overall, perhaps it
light and color, her confrontations with Impressionism, in which scholars traced would have been useful to position the
conservative authorities, and her early stylistic points of similiarity and chapters on women’s art institutions at
success abroad. The story of Blau’s most departure among male and female the beginning of the work, for if women
famous canvas Spring at the Prater (1882; artists, Johnson traces Koller’s influence artists were as fully integrated into
Fig. 1), now hanging prominently at the on younger artists including Egon mainstream artistic life as Johnson’s case
Austrian Gallery Belvedere, proves her Schiele and Erwin Lang. For instance, studies would have us believe, then this
point. Almost rejected and then skied at while Schiele’s Portrait of the Painter begs the question of why separate
the 1882 Künstlerhaus exhibition for its Hans Massmann (1909) is typically read institutions were even necessary. Clearly,
WOMAN’S ART JOURNAL
60
while Johnson is correct in countering Notes (Women Artists in Austria, 1897-1938)
false notions that women artists lacked (Vienna: Picus, 1994).
1. VII. Ausstellung der Vereinigung bildender
altogether the possibility to exhibit their Künstlerinnen Österreichs,” Der Bund XII 5. Adolf Loos, “Ornament und Erziehung,” in
works publicly, it is also true (as the no. 2 (February 1917): 14. Trotzdem: Gesammelte Schriften
(Collected Writings) (Vienna: Prachner,
author acknowledges) that women 2. Chapter Four, “Rediscovering Helene
1997), 177. My translation.
artists could not become regular Funke: The Invisible Foremother,” was
originally published in WAJ, vol. 29, no. 1 6. Suggesting that the necessary evil of
members in the primary exhibition
(2008): 33–40. See also Helga H. corrective studies is still imperative, far
leagues until after World War II. Harriman, “Olga Wisinger-Florian and Tina too little has changed since 1986, as I
All in all, The Memory Factory consti- Blau: Painters in ‘fin de siècle’ Vienna. argued in reviewing the Neue Galerie’s
tutes a tremendous breakthrough on WAJ, vol. 10, no. 2 (1989/1990): 23–28. 2011 “Vienna 1900: Style and Identity”
chronicling women artists in Vienna show. See Megan Brandow-Faller, “Vienna
3. Carl Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna:
1900: Style and Identity” [Exhibition
1900, rethinking many of the dominant Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf,
Review] West 86th: A Journal of
paradigms of feminist inquiry and 1980). Since the publication of Schorske’s
Decorative Arts, Design History, and
compelling essays, scholars have revised
reframing the early-twentieth century as Material Culture, vol. 19, no. 1 (Spring-
and expanded aspects of his “failure of
“hardly a monolithic culture of repres- Summer 2012): 137–41.
liberalism” paradigm, pointing to
sion” (14). It is as rich in documentation Schorske’s neglect of imperial patronage, 7. Applied Artist and designer Fanny
as it is in theory, secondary literature, and the particularly Jewish character of Harlfinger-Zakucka provocatively raised
high-quality black-and-white and color Viennese modernism, and women’s the notion of a separate feminine
contributions as artists and muses. See aesthetic in founding the Wiener
illustrations of both well-known and Frauenkunst in 1926, a radical offshoot
also James Shedel, Art and Society: The
marginalized works by women artists. New Art Movement in Vienna 1897-1914 from the Association particularly
Johnson’s groundbreaking work raises (Palo Alto: Society for the Promotion of emphasizing women’s connection to the
many new questions not only relevant to Science, 1981); Allan Janik and Stephen decorative, applied arts and the
studies of Viennese modernism, but to Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: importance of Raumkunst, boldly
Simon and Schuster, 1973); Steven Beller, declaring that “we are of the opinion that
scholars interested in women and mod- works made by women’s hands bear the
Vienna and the Jews: A Cultural History
ernism more broadly. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, stamp of their female origins in and of
1989); Emil Brix and Lisa Fischer, Die themselves.” Preface to the catalogue of
Megan Brandow-Faller is Assistant. Frauen der Wiener Moderne (The Women the “Verband bildender Künstlerinnen und
Professor at City University of New York of the Vienna Moderns) (Munich: Kunsthandwerkerinnnen exhibit, Wiener
Oldenbourg, 1997). Frauenkunst, in Wie Sieht die Frau?,” May
at Kingsborough. One of her forthcoming 17–June 29, 1930 (Vienna: Jahoda &
projects is on female artists’ engagement 4. The author of numerous book chapters
Siegel), 7.
and articles on women artists, Plakolm-
with children’s art and artistic toys at the
Forsthuber’s best-known work is her
1908 Vienna Kunstschau. Künstlerinnen in Österreich, 1897-1938
SPRING /SUMMER 2013
61
