Becoming Artists Self-Portraits, Friendship Images and Studio Scenes by Nordic Women Painters in the 1880s

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by Nordic Women Painters in the 1880s
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This book is published with grants from Gunvor och Josef Anérs stiftelse Gerda Boëthius’ minnesfond Stiftelsen Konung Gustaf VI Adolfs fond för svensk kultur Kungl. Patriotiska sällskapet Torsten Söderbergs stiftelse Berit Wallenbergs stiftelse Åke Wibergs stiftelse
Becoming Artists: Self-Portraits, Friendship Images and Studio Scenes by Nordic Women Painters in the 1880s Academic dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Art History at Stockholm University, to be publicly defended on Friday 4 June 2021 © Carina Rech 2021 Cover image: Bertha Wegmann, The Artist Jeanna Bauck, 1881, detail of fig. 60. Photo: Nationalmuseum. © for illustrations, see list of figures on p. 436 isbn 978-91-7061-854-3 (pdf)
table of contents
Artists, Locations and Social Fabric 15
Material 21
Theories and Methods 34
Emulation as Admiring Rivalry 72
From Stockholm to Paris 74
Emulating the Past and the Present 77
Strategies of Self-Promotion 80
Julia Beck’s Internationalism 92
Organizing Her Legacy 99
II. The Friendship Image 101 The Friendship Image as Genre Category 103
Women’s Friendships in the Nineteenth Century 106
Professional and Emotional Community 110
Corresponding Lives: Jeanna Bauck, Hildegard Thorell and Bertha Wegmann 118
Doubled Portrait 140
Fashioning Two Versions of Jeanna Bauck 161
Collaborative Practice and Dual Authorship 184
III. The Studio Scene 199 The Studio as Imagined and Lived-In Space 202
The Appropriation of the Working Studio 217
The Touch of Clay 229
Venny Soldan as Worker-Artist 235
The Paragone of the Sister Arts 240
Eva Bonnier’s Studio Interior:
An Allusion to Pygmalion 243
The Sitter’s Share or the Sitter’s Risk 252
The Self-Portrait Extended into Space 255
Concluding Discussion 267
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Acknowledgments
Over the course of researching and writing this book – one that examines artistic communities defined by intellectual and creative engagement and affective bonds – I have had the good fortune to have been welcomed into similarly enriching academic circles. Working on this dissertation has been intimately intertwined with the five years I have been living in Sweden, and many of the peo- ple I have met since my arrival have played a part in this research project. Along the way I have accrued many debts to colleagues, organizations, friends and family:
First of all, I would like to thank my fabulous advisors Sabri- na Norlander Eliasson and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe for unflag- ging support, intellectual brilliance and scrupulous readings of the manuscript in all its stages. My deep-felt gratitude goes to Karin Sidén, Director General at Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, for her trust and encouragement, and for giving me the unique opportu- nity to be both a PhD candidate and a curator. Warm thanks to all my dear colleagues and friends at Waldemarsudde for cheering me along the way. I am enormously grateful to Katarina Wadstein Mac Leod who has simply been the best opponent for the final seminar I could have wished for, and many thanks to Andrea Koll- nitz for the diligent final review of the manuscript.
Warm thanks are due to my colleagues at the department of art history at Stockholm University. My dear friend Elin Andersson has tirelessly commented on this manuscript and helped me sharpen my theoretical arguments. Hanna Bäckström, Birte Bruchmüller, Sara Callahan, Marta Edling, Peter Gillgren, Lotta Granqvist, Ylva Haidenthaller, Elin G. Håkansson, Emma Jansson, Dan Karlholm, Fredrik Krohn Andersson, Catharina Nolin, Elin Manker, Tanja
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Schult, Mårten Snickare, Jeff Werner and Mia Åkestam have gen- erously shared their expertise and regularly commented on this manuscript in the context of the High Seminar, the National PhD Seminar and beyond.
I would like to thank Tomas Björk for sharing his enormous expertise on nineteenth-century art with me and Anne Wichstrøm, Lena Holger and Hans Henrik Brummer for their kind interest in my project. Charlotta Krispinsson has been a great colleague and friend from the first day of my arrival in Stockholm and has taught me how to apply for grants in Sweden, which is why this book looks so pretty!
Elizabeth Doe Stone, my dear friend, thank you for sharing the passion for the nineteenth century with me and for answer- ing all my questions, both the trivial and the intellectual ones. My colleague and friend MaryClaire Pappas has diligently comment- ed on this manuscript in its final stages. I am deeply grateful to my colleague Emilie Boe Bierlich in Copenhagen for an inspiring dialogue on Bertha Wegmann. The research by my friend Anna- Carola Krausse on the German-Swedish painter Lotte Laserstein has inspired me to become a scholar myself. Thank you for all your encouragement! Øystein Sjåstad has helped me during my research trips to Oslo and invited me to submit a paper to Kunst og Kultur. Nicholas Parkinson has assisted me to find my way through the French archives and their digital collections. Warm thanks are also due to Görel Cavalli-Björkman for helping me to get access to the Bonnier family archives, and to Anna Meister at Waldemarsudde for proofreading my Swedish transcriptions and for putting me in contact with relatives of artists whose private archives have proven essential for this project. I am grateful to Patricia G. Berman for putting me in contact with the Ambassador John L. Loeb Jr. Dan- ish Art Collection.
Catharina Nolin, Thomas Elbæk-Jørgensen and Sine Krogh have helped me with my transcriptions and translations of let- ters by Danish artists. Jostein Svanemyr has double-checked my Norwegian transcriptions. At an early stage in this project, Karin Borgkvist Ljung at Riksarkivet has taught me how to read Bertha Wegmann’s at times hopelessly difficult handwriting. Thank you all so much!
My work has profited enormously from research undertaken in numerous museums and archives and I would like to thank all the institutions that have allowed me to study the artworks in their col-
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lections, to conduct research in their archives and to reproduce their images. Special thanks are due to Eva-Lena Bengtsson at Konst- akademien for welcoming me to her tiny but vast archive and for generously sharing her encyclopedic knowledge of the nineteenth century and its women artists. Many thanks to Carl-Johan Olsson at Nationalmuseum for his enthusiastic support of this project and for taking me to the museum storages, Eva-Lena Karlsson for giv- ing me my first job in Sweden as a museum educator at Gripsholm Castle where the idea for this project took shape, Linda Hinners for inviting me to participate in Nationalmuseum’s research project on women sculptors, Martin Olin for editing my article in RIHA Jour- nal and Magnus Olausson for helping me out with an essential im- age which I would not have been able to reproduce otherwise. I am grateful for the collaboration on Bertha Wegmann with Gertrud Oelsner and Lene Bøgh Rønberg at the Hirschsprung Collection in Copenhagen. Many thanks to Knut Ljøgodt who invited me to a gentlemen’s club with a marvelous art collection, and to Vibeke Waallann Hansen at Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo, Sara Hemmingsson at Kalmar konstmuseum, Kristoffer Arvidsson and Eva Nygårds at Göteborgs konstmuseum, Charlotta Nordström at Thielska Gal- leriet, Mette Bøgh Jensen at Skagens kunstmuseer, Maria Maxén at Nordiska museet, Veronica Olofsson at Anna Nordlander Museum and Harald Larsen in Skellefteå.
Julie Arendse Voss at Bruun Rasmussen Kunstauktioner has provided images of works by Bertha Wegmann in private own- ership and Pedro Westerdahl at Bukowskis has helped me get in contact with private collectors. My deep-felt gratitude goes to the relatives of artists who have shared their memories, artworks and private archives with me and to the private owners of artworks who welcomed me to their homes. I want to thank in particular Agne- ta and Hanna Pauli, Sylva and Håkan Bengtsson, Charlotte and Fredrik Klingberg and Lars Lodmark.
I am grateful to Lars Engelhardt and Lars Edelholm at Walde- marsudde for their help with image editing and photography of archive material and artworks in private ownership. Thanks a lot to Erik Hungler at the Department for Culture and Aesthetics for helping me with the administrative work involved in publish- ing this book, and to Tove Marling Kallrén and her colleagues at Makadam förlag for turning the manuscript into such a beautiful book. Many thanks to my friend Victoria Louise Steinwachs for looking after our Berlin home.
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I am grateful to my family: my dear father Herbert who fol- lowed me around countless museums in Europe, my mother Mon- ika and my best friend Manfred who share my love for art and old things, my sister Bianca, my grandmother Agnes and my parents- in-law Erika and Wolfgang. Most of all I would like to thank Malte, who means more to me than words can express.
This book is dedicated to the loving memory of my grand- parents Hermann and Margarete Rech.
Carina Rech Stockholm, March 2021
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Introduction
In 1911, Axel Romdahl (1880–1951), the curator responsible for the art department at the Gothenburg Museum, visited the Swedish artist Hanna Hirsch-Pauli (1864–1940) in her villa in Storängen on the outskirts of Stockholm. He had come to purchase a painting for the collection of the museum, and his first intention was to ac- quire her genre painting By Lamplight from 1885.1 However, when Romdahl saw the portrait of the Finnish artist Venny Soldan-Bro- feldt (1863–1945), which Hirsch-Pauli had exhibited in the Salon of 1887, he changed his mind.
At the time of their Paris sojourn, the two artist friends Hanna Hirsch and Venny Soldan were not yet married.2 In the portrait, Soldan is represented seated on the wooden floor of their shared studio in Montparnasse, which is rendered in striking simplicity: Nothing to distract from the artistic activity displayed, nothing to call into question the professionalism of the represented artist. The interior is not a home, but a workshop. Soldan is modeling in clay and addressing her colleague with a concentrated gaze and a slight- ly opened mouth, as if she is about to speak. The composition is en- tirely focused on the artistic and intellectual exchange between the artist-painter and the sitter-sculptor. The making of art is staged as a dialogic endeavor rather than an individualist pursuit.
In a hitherto unpublished memo, Romdahl emphasized the significance of the acquisition of the portrait of Soldan- Brofeldt, praising its “perky representation of the woman of the eight- ies and its solid, skillful painting”.3 The museum’s representa- tive Carl Lager berg (1859–1922) commented on the purchase in similarly laudatory terms in the museum yearbook the follow- ing year, calling the portrait of Venny Soldan-Brofeldt “an image
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characteristic of the decade of emancipation and realism”. Ac- cording to Lagerberg, the composition of the painting was “al- most provocatively uninhibited” and the execution “powerful and solid”.4 In the aftermath of Romdahl’s visit, Hirsch-Pauli wrote to Soldan-Brofeldt, informing her friend about the museum’s offer to purchase the likeness. The sitter replied that the painting was “a true museum piece” and that she would gladly accept the offer to share the remuneration with the painter.5 In the 1910s, with twen- ty-five years of historical distance, both Romdahl and Lagerberg described the portrait of Venny Soldan-Brofeldt as a representative image for the 1880s – a decade shaped by emancipation and real- ism. Romdahl even called the portrait a truthful representation of the “woman of the eighties”, as if Soldan-Brofeldt personified the woman of her time.
More than seventy years later, in 1988, Liljevalchs konsthall, an art museum in Stockholm, organized the groundbreaking exhi- bition De drogo till Paris: Nordiska konstnärinnor på 1880-talet (They Moved to Paris: Nordic Women Artists in the 1880s) and the cu- rators Lollo Fogelström and Louise Robbert used the portrait of Soldan-Brofeldt as the key visual, reproducing it prominently on the cover of the catalog.6 In the wake of feminist interventions in art history, this exhibition brought late-nineteenth-century Nordic women artists to renewed public attention, and, once more, the portrait by Hirsch-Pauli seemed best to visualize the essence of the artists’ liberating experiences abroad.
Today, the portrait of Venny Soldan-Brofeldt is still considered an epoch-making image, because it seems to capture the profes-
Fig. 1. Hanna Hirsch-Pauli, The Artist Venny Soldan- Brofeldt, 1886–87. See fig. 77 for a full- page reproduction of the painting.
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sional self-confidence that Nordic women artists acquired in the 1880s. However, when studying the artworks that they produced during this decade, one soon begins to notice that this portrait is not exceptional. In the 1880s, Nordic women artists were explor- ing new ways of fashioning artistic identity in painting, not only by portraying themselves, but also by depicting their artist friends and their studio spaces. This study sets out to examine the artists’ strategies of self-fashioning in painting and to analyze how they inscribed themselves in the visual history of their profession.
Aim and Research Questions
The aim of this study is to analyze how Nordic women painters negotiated their professional identity in painting during the 1880s, focusing on the genres of the self-portrait, the friendship image and the studio interior. It explores how artistic identity is fashioned in painting through self-representation, through collaboration with a colleague and in interaction with the interior of the studio as a constitutive space of artistic professionalism.
The analysis distinguishes between the occupation of the art- ist and the idea of the artist, meaning the cultural figure and its appertaining symbolic implications and narrative tropes, the most powerful of which is the myth of the artist-genius.7 The focus of the following investigation will be on the idea of the artist, which means that it will not primarily analyze the social reality of being an artist, but its imagination in painting. In her historiographic study about the social construction of the artist, Catherine M. Soussloff has argued that the concept of the artist was gendered male unless explicitly called “the woman artist”.8 Since every artis- tic self-representation reacts in some ways to the idea that is cul- turally held about the artist, this gendered distinction has crucial implications for women artists’ self-fashioning as professionals and it thus raises the question: How did Nordic women painters relate to this discriminatory narrative and appropriate the persona of the artist in painting in the 1880s?9
This study is guided by the following set of questions that pro- ceed from the above: What representational strategies did Nordic women painters employ in order to appropriate the idea of the art- ist, traditionally conceived as male? How did they resolve the his- torical and cultural incompatibility between the role of woman and
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that of the artist? How did Nordic women painters come to terms with the iconographic conventions and pictorial tropes of a pro- fession from which they had largely been excluded? How did they not only adopt these conventions and tropes, but eventually even subvert or circumvent the idea of the artist by offering alternative modes of self-representation?
When studying how Nordic women painters represented them- selves in their professional role, it becomes clear that portraits of artist friends as well as depictions of studio spaces were at least as important as self-portraiture for the artists’ self-fashioning in painting in the period under consideration. From this observation derives the tripartite division of the analytical chapters into Self-Por- trait, Friendship Image and Studio Scene. Further, this structure has prompted two research questions that focus on the social, dialogic and spatial dimensions of (self-) representation: What impact did networks, friendship and mutual portrayal have on the construc- tion of a professional identity in painting? How did women paint- ers integrate the studio space into their self-fashioning in painting?
The study of the paintings is complemented by an analysis of the artists’ correspondence, which has led to the following addi- tional questions: How did the artists conceive of their relationship in writing? What impact did their epistolary exchange have on the construction of their professional identity as individual artists or as members of a larger occupational community?
By combining the detailed analysis of a selection of paintings by women artists from the Nordic countries with a close read- ing of the artists’ correspondence and other written sources, this study investigates the manifold ways by which the painters fash- ioned artistic identity during a period of rapid professionalization and increased public visibility. In short, this book is about women who used painting to stage interventions into the representation of the artist. These representations are more than images of individ- ual women artists; together they form and negotiate a discourse around the idea of the artist. By imagining themselves and one an- other, Nordic women painters repeatedly crossed the boundaries between the genre categories of self-portrait, portrait, genre scene and interior. Their work raises questions about the collaborative potential of portraiture, about individual authorship and the con- cept of the artist as a solitary entity, as well as the relationality of (artistic) identity as moving between subjects and spaces.
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Artists, Locations and Social Fabric
The central protagonists of this book are the Swedish artists Jeanna Bauck (1840–1926), Julia Beck (1853–1935), Eva Bonnier (1857– 1909), Hanna Hirsch-Pauli (1864–1940) and Hildegard Thorell (1850–1930), as well as the Danish painter Bertha Wegmann (1847– 1926), the Norwegian painter Asta Nørregaard (1853–1933) and the Finnish artist Venny (Vendla) Soldan-Brofeldt (1863–1945).
The majority of artists are of Swedish nationality, which is justi- fied by the fact that the country had the most professionalized art education available to women of the Nordic countries, and there- fore Swedish women artists gained a pioneering role during the second half of the nineteenth century. All Swedish artists, with the exception of Bauck, studied at the women’s department of the Roy- al Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. The geographic focal point of this study, however, is Paris, because the above artists all stud- ied in the French capital for formative periods of varying duration in the 1880s. In Paris, they built artistic networks, laid the crucial foundations for their careers and painted the majority of the works that are analyzed here. Besides Paris, Munich played an often over- looked, but considerable role as a training ground for Nordic wom- en artists. Four out of eight artists studied at some point in Mu- nich, Wegmann and Bauck launched their careers in the Bavarian capital in the 1870s and the latter even spent the majority of her life there. The relocation of artistic interest from Germany to France around the year 1880 and the concomitant stylistic development constitutes a frequently described paradigm shift in the history of Nordic art, which has led to the relative neglect of Munich as an important site for the professionalization of Nordic women artists. While all artists covered in this study were relatively mobile, Bauck and Beck were the only ones who spent a greater part of their lives abroad, in Germany and France respectively. The remaining artists returned to their home countries after a temporary sojourn abroad.
Concerning their social background, the eight artists represent a relatively homogenous group, all roughly belonging to the middle classes.10 More precisely, these women came from the lower middle classes to upper middle classes, with fathers working as bookbind- ers, wholesalers, musical composers or publishers.11 Eva Bonnier’s family eventually accumulated a considerable fortune, which at the turn of the century came to assign her an exceptional position as both artist and patron.12
Fig. 2.…