Have so much to write about – again – and have had so little time to do it. I’ll do a couple of catch-up posts but will start with our most recent trip to London, to meet up with old friends of Philosopher to see the exhibition of women artists, ‘Now You See Us’ at Tate Britain, followed by lunch in a Georgian restaurant in Pimlico. The exhibition covered as many women artists the curators could get hold of, working between between 1520 and 1920. Battleaxe had mixed views. All these photos of paintings are by me, from the exhibition, so the quality is not that great…
Firstly, who are Philosopher’s old friends? Well, they are his genuine peers – some were at University with him all those years ago. They are a distinguished band – including Professors and Emeritus Professors of philosophy, psychoanalytic psychology, medieval history… Of course, Philosopher himself is an Emeritus Professor, but he keeps his light firmly hidden under a bushel. You may wonder, what do academic notables talk about when they get together? Rest assured, exactly the same as any other group of somewhat older people – ailments, difficulties of seeing a GP, children and grandchildren, the horrors of Brexit and Trump in the US, holidays, public transport…
So, there we were at Tate Britain, wandering round a very large exhibition of the work of over 100 women artists. it started with several rooms of seventeenth and eighteenth century paintings. Apart from the occasional stars like Artemesia Gentileschi and Angelica Kauffman, the others seemed to have made their way by painting in the style of their male peers. There were many, many walls full of Lely-Romney-Gainsborough look-alikes, some highly competent, some less so. This part of the exhibition reminded me a famous sexist quote – something about ‘It’s not that she can do it well, it is surprising that she can do it at all..’ Sorry, I’ve Googled for ages, but still can’t remember who said it. (curses, should have asked him in the first place, Philosopher says it was Dr Johnson, comparing women preachers to dogs walking on hind legs.) Battleaxe would say, yes exhibition curators, of course she can do it, and yes, she can do it well. We all know that, it’s obvious, so you don’t need to rub our noses in it, and also tell us in endless detail about how incredibly hard it was for any self-respecting female to even lift a paint brush back then.
But I guess those early women could only deal with the world they lived in. But still, frankly, I think the curators should have cut them down drastically, and given more space to artists whose work has more to tell us than ‘it’s surprising they could do it at all’. 1920 was a very sudden cut-off – Laura Knight was one of the more recent to feature, but during the 1920s and 30s there was a real flowering of women’s art. Think Dod Proctor, Eileen Agar, Barbara Hepworth… and then you think Frida Kahlo – but of course all the artists in the exhibition had to be British. So we had no impressionists like Berthe Morissot, Mary Cassat… no Sonia Delaunay, or Russians – Natalia Goncharova, Ljubov Popova – I’m sure you can think of lots more… I feel this made the exhibition a bit restricted if it was intended as a review of the development of women’s art.
It wasn’t until we got into the Pre-Raphaelite/early Victorian period that women started painting subjects of direct interest to them. Issues of women’s equaity and rights were far more in focus by then… Here is an example, a bit mawkish but making a point:
It was good to see some watercolours by our old friend, Barbara Bodichon, who lived in Hastings. I have written plenty about her, over the years. Notably, she stayed at Clive Vale Farm, on the site of this house. It would have been lovely to have seen her painting of the fields outside her windows at the farm – the same view as I can see now. Presumably it is lost. She stayed here with her friend Anna-Mary Howitt – at the exhibition they reproduced part of a letter from Anna-Mary -see below. It is from another of her letters that we know about the time the two friends spent here – see the post link above.
Talking of Hastings – no Marianne North?
This is quite an interesting note – about the separation of ‘art’ from what was clearly perceived as a lesser, womanish sort of business – ‘craft’. As a WI member, the boring old question ‘what is art?’ often crops up when I look at some of the best creations that would be categorised as ‘craft’. Talking of which, dammit would you believe it, I have somehow agreed to produce a collage for a WI class at the autumn South of England show… now, surely, collage is ‘art’? Oh who cares, I’ll have the divvil’s own job to produce something…
To finish with the exhibition, a couple of the more modern works:
After, we all headed to the Iberia Georgian Restaurant, near Pimlico Underground – a new culinary experience for us all. We all tried some very different things. I had a go at tarragon flavoured Georgian lemonade. Battleaxe would not recommend – it tasted of sugar-water mouthwash…but what a fabulous colour!
However, the borsh soup was excellent, and the steamed beans main course I had was also excellent. Most of the others tried something called Khinkali, or Georgian dumplings filled with spicy meaty mixture. The waiter said that they had to be eaten with the fingers, picking them up by the handle bit at the top.
As you can see, they looked totally bizarre. They didn’t meet with a massively enthusiastic response though. Plenty of other main dishes would have been far tastier. Philosopher had a very good chicken thing. Would Battleaxe recommend the restaurant? Yes, I think so, just about. The set menu at £23 for two courses was reasonable, but on the other hand alcohol was savagely expensive.
So, a nice day out. Another trip to London to add to the three I have already had since coming back from Turkey, and there’s sun at Pett Level and Fairlight Hall, the Frida Kahlo kaftan and Where the Wild Things Are… more details to come…
