OSHER AT JHU, INGLESIDE AT KING FARM : MONDAY MORNINGS, SEPTEMBER 16 TO DECEMBER 9, 2024
Artemisia Gentileschi: Allegory of Painting (Self Portrait)

ARTIST BIOS        SOME BOOKS        SYLLABUS (flat)     SYLLABUS (foldable)
CLASSES:    [1]    [2]    [3]    [4]    [5]    [6]    [7]    [8]    [9]    [10]    [11]    [12]   

The image above shows a woman painting, but not just any woman. This is Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1652), a female master in the male world of baroque Rome. The daughter of a painter, she was raped in her teens by one of her father's students, took the case to court, and then had to submit to torture to prove that her accusation was not frivolous. Many of her paintings were a lot less benign than the Self Portrait as the Muse of Painting shown here; she specialized in Biblical heroines such as the wrongly-accused Susannah—or Judith and Jael, both of whom took bloody revenge against male oppressors. Her story, though, raises interesting questions about how far it is permissible to view an artist's oeuvre in the light of her bio, or indeed her gender.

But Artemisia's success was largely an exception. The iconic 1989 poster of the activist group The Guerrilla Girls demanded: "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?" They had a point. Even today, when many more creative artists are women, recognition remains sparse. So why? The opening class in our course will zip through the typical history of women in the arts: as ideals of perfection, as muses, as models, as helpmeets, and just occasionally as patrons—but all too seldom as artistic creators in their own right. But this will be the only class to do so. The remaining eleven will attempt to correct the imbalance, at first picking individual exceptions out of convents and courts, but quickly acknowledging the flood of talent that—often with great difficulty—soon became the reality.

Although the examples above come from the visual arts, I use the terms "artists" to include composers, poets, novelists, and choreographers; some of the earliest and strongest voices to emerge are revealed in music and verse rather than paint. Look through the bios of everyone featured in the course—including some remarkable female patrons as well as the artists they supported. There are over 130 names, at least 50 of whom were unknown to me before I started this work. I cannot think of one whose art I am not glad to have seen, or whose verse or music has failed to move me. rb.

Some practical details: click the links above for a printable syllabus; the "foldable" version will print out as a booklet on two-sided printers. I shall also produce weekly handouts in the same two formats; the RESOURCES link under each image will turn GREEN when these are ready. Immediately after each class, this same link will give access to all the images shown in the class, the texts quoted, my outline script, and all video and audio clips that are available.

A Video Preview of the class can be found HERE. The examples shown in the video are the opening of Black Bottom (2020) by Nkeiru Okoye, The Entombment of Christ (1700) by Luisa Roldán with the Miserere by Raffaella Aleotti, Judith and Holofernes (1613) by Artemisia Gentileschi with "Tradimento!" by Barbara Strozzi, and Helen Reddy singing her iconic anthem "I am Woman" at the International Women’s Day rally in Washington, 2003. Please note that this video has the incorrect location on the first screen; it should be Ingleside, as above.

	September 16
Gérôme: Pygmalion.    Inset: Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti's muse and a painter and poet herself	RESOURCES

1. It's Your Pedestal—Stay There!

The image shows Pygmalion, an 1890 painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme. A male artist creates an ideal female image, and brings her to life, where she remains his creature. This introductory class offers a background to the rest of the course: the traditional view of women in the arts, idealized as models of virtue and purity—placed on a pedestal, as it were, but seldom allowed to step off it as creators in their own right. Of course we also sometimes see the opposite view, not virgin but whore. Only when artists move away from the extremes and show women in a nuanced manner—or when more women at around this same period begin to flex their creative muscles in literature, music, or art—do we get the promise of seeing them as complex human beings and potential agents on their own behalf.

	September 23 September 30
Plautilla Nelli / Hildegard von Bingen (inset)	RESOURCES

2. Behind the Veil

A look at the often extraordinary work produced by women who were nuns in convents. Most spectacularly, we have the poetry, music, and painting of the multi-talented Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), the "Sibyl of the Rhine." Convents often provided the training, materials, and forces for performance less available to women in secular life. Such environments nurtured the poetry of Saint Teresa of Avila (1515–82), the painting of Plautilla Nelli (1534–88), and the music of Vittoria Aleotti (1575–1620) and Isabella Leonarda (1620–1704). But not all such stories ended happiply: the Mexican poet Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648–95) was forced to renounce her writing in an oath signed in her own blood; and Sister Corita Kent (1918–86) renounced the veil rather than give up the art which was such an important part of the protest movement in the Vietnam War era.

	October 7
Properzia de' Rossi / Francesca Caccini (inset)	RESOURCES

3. The First Professionals

A secular pendant to the previous class: medieval and renaissance women who carved a place for themselves as professional creative artists at a time when most fields were dominated by men. Among those whose work we shall sample are the Italian-born French poet Christine de Pizan (1364–1430), the Florentine sculptor Properzia de' Rossi (1490–1530, the only woman given her own chapter in Vasari's Lives of the Artists, 1568), the composer Francesca Caccini (1587–1640, the first woman to write an opera), and of course our headline artist, the painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1653). Powerful though her work is, however, this is a class characterized by its extraordinary range of music, in both style and emotional effect.

	October 14
Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun: Countess Golovina / Isabella d'Este (inset)	RESOURCES

4. At Her Majesty's Command

From Pharaoh Hatshepsut to Queen Victoria, royal women have also made their mark on the arts through their commissions and patronage. Some might be ruling monarchs: think of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare or the French regent Catherine de Medici and Rubens. Others might be the wives or mistresses of potentates, seeking for a sphere in which their personal influence might be given free rein: Isabella d'Este commissioned many major artists and writers of the Renaissance, and Madame de Pompadour played a similar role in the French rococo. Inevitably, most the artists involved were men, though the portraitist Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755–1842) spent six years of her life in the court of Catherine the Great.

	October 21
Angelica Kauffmann: The Spencer Children / Phillis Wheatley (inset)	RESOURCES

5.Domestic? Why?

The painter of the picture above is the Swiss-born English artist Angelica Kauffmann (1741–1807), an excellent and sensitive portraitist. She did not choose to confine herself to this field where women were more traditionally accepted, but moved into the "higher" genre of history painting, traditionally the province of men. But this is not the case with most other painters, composers, and writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Do women artists particularly excel in domestic subjects, or are these all they got the chance to do? To what extent is the smaller scale of their works—portraits and short lyric pieces—constrained by their domestic responsibilities? Or, in the case of the once-popular American poet Phillis Wheatley (1753–84), by her status as a slave?

	October 28
Alma Mahler by Oskar Kokoschka, one of her lovers / Camille Claudel (inset)	RESOURCES

6. Intimate Relations

What happens when two creative artists are linked by emotional bonds? We look at Fanny Mendelssohn (1805–47) and her brother Felix, and the tragedy of Camille Claudel (1864–1943) and her lover Auguste Rodin. Married artists include two poets: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61), more famous than her husband at the time, and Sylvia Plath (1932–63), whose husband Ted Hughes could not cope with her needs. Paula Becker (1876–1907) had a loving husband in the older painter Otto Modersohn, but her artistic development could only take place apart from him. And the composer Alma Schindler (1879–1964) ended her career when she married Gustav Mahler, but continued as the muse and lover of many other men of genius, after and even before his death.

	November 4
Marie Laurencin / Martha Graham (inset)	RESOURCES

7. Primadonna Assoluta

Nowhere is the female star more extravagantly worshipped as a goddess (hence the word diva), yet more insistently depicted as a victim, than in romantic ballet and opera. But women seldom were in control. Although bel canto coloratura gives the performer some creative autonomy, actual female opera composers used to be rare: there is the former singer Pauline Viardot (1821–1910) in the 19th century and the formidable English composer Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) at the turn of the 20th, and many more today. On the other hand, female choreographers such as Bronislava Nijinska (1891–1972) in ballet and Martha Graham (1894–1991) in modern dance have played a major part in shaping the dance scene today.

	November 11
Lady Edna Clarke-Hall: Cathy and Heathcliff / Emily Brontë (inset)	RESOURCES

8. Authors and Heroines

In England at least, women came to the fore as novelists sooner than they did in other fields, think only of Charlotte Brontë (1816-55) and her sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65), or George Eliot (1819–80). Perhaps this is because writers did not need to be admitted to professional academies before taking up the pen. In America, we might add Louisa May Alcott (1832–88) to the roster of novelists whose heroines explore an evolving vision of womanhood, emotionally independent and morally committed. The second hour takes a lighter turn with children's novels by two European writers, the Comtesse de Ségur (1799-1874) and Johanna Spyri (1827-1901).

	November 18
Berthe Morisot: Beneath the Lilac at Maurecourt / Virgina Woolf by her sister Vanessa Bell (inset)	RESOURCES

9. Group Dynamics

Most artistic groups seem to have been founded and largely peopled by men, but there have been some women who have nevertheless flourished in their company, such as Berthe Morisot (1841–94) among the Impressionists (picture above). The class will consider a lesser-known Impressionist, however, Marie Bracquemond (1840-1916), together with three other remarkable artists: Benedetta Cappa (1897-1977; Futurists), Hannah Höch (1889-1978; Dada), and Lee Krasner (1908-84; Abstract Expressionists). Segments on novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941; Bloomsbury Group) and composer Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983; Les Six) will bring the total to a round half-dozen.

	November 25
Isabella Stewart Gardner (Sargent) / Gertrude Stein (Picasso), Peggy Guggenheim (Janet Scudder)	RESOURCES

10. Patrons and Collectors

Throughout the 20th century, wealthy women played an extraordinary role in supporting contemporary artists and, eventually, bringing their work to the American public. We have Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) and the extraordinary museum she bequeathed to the people of Boston. We have the Americans Claribel (1864–1929) and Etta Cone (1870–1949) supporting Matisse and others in Paris, while their friend Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was one of the first to recognize the genius of Picasso. We have Katherine Dreier (1877–1952), a painter herself, bringing the works of the European avant-garde to New York. And we have the gallerist and collector Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) whose museum in Venice is one of the most remarkable collections of Modernist art in the world.

	December 2
Judy Chicago: The Dinner Party, detail / Paula Modersohn-Becker (inset)	RESOURCES

11. Fighting for Her Place

We have encountered pioneering feminists in earlier classes: Christine de Pizan (1364–1430) wrote a book about celebrated women in history; Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), the mother of Mary Shelley, published her Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792; and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) made an impassioned plea for creative economy in A Room of One's Own (1929). This class will look at their successors: female artists who have made womanhood an essential part of their work. Their anthem might be the iconic 1971 song, "I am Woman, Hear Me Roar," by Helen Reddy (1941–2020). The images above show a 1906 self-portrait by Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907), the first woman artist to paint herself naked, and The Dinner Party (1979), a monumental work by Judy Chicago (b.1939), with place-settings for 39 women in history around a triangular table.

	December 9
Nideka Akunyili Crosby: Nyado / Amanda Gorman and Nkeiru Okoye (insets)	RESOURCES

12. Made in Our Century

The Twenty-First Century has seen an astounding flowering of talented women in all fields of artistic creation. This final class will celebrate work produced in the past two decades. It would be premature to single out names, but I can comment on the three Black artists shown here. Composer Nkeiru Okoye (b.1972) is of mixed American and Nigerian heritage; her 2020 work Black Bottom was commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Painter Nideka Akunyili Crosby (b.1983) was born in Nigeria; much of her work, which won her the MacArthur Award in 2017, is about her marriage to a white American artist. African American poet Amanda Gorman (b.1998) delivered her poem "The Hill We Climb" at the 2021 inauguration of President Biden, the youngest ever poet to be so honored.

 
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