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What two paintings from the 1930s can tell us about women’s issues
43 Plays5 years ago
Around 1930, two British artists, Agnes Miller Parker and Jessica Dismorr, went to work on a pair of paintings—one a modernist Madonna and Child, the other depicting a highly symbolic portrait of a rampaging cat—that are now on view at the Fine Art Society’s galleries in London and Edinburgh. FAS principals Emily Walsh and Rowena Morgan-Cox explain to Ben how two women painters made their mark during a time when the art world was still male-dominated.
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Transcript
Post-WWI Art Evolution
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects.
00:00:12
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:13
Speaker
The years following World War I were turbulent ones for the evolution of British art.
00:00:19
Speaker
The chaos and horror of the war drove some artists toward absurdist movements like surrealism and Dada, while others abandoned the lionization of industry and progress that had characterized the pre-war years.
00:00:33
Speaker
Then the Great Depression only brought further anxiety and drove some artists toward escapism and a return to classical and representational painting.
00:00:43
Speaker
But at the same time, important social and cultural changes were happening across the UK.
00:00:48
Speaker
The war had brought huge numbers of women into the workforce.
00:00:52
Speaker
Women won the right to vote beginning in 1918 and including all women by 1928.
00:01:00
Speaker
Gender and sexual norms were under fresh examination and also fascist sentiment was on the rise across Europe at the same time.
Jessica Dismore and Agnes Miller Parker's Contributions
00:01:12
Speaker
It was in this context right around 1930 that two women artists, Jessica Dismore and Agnes Miller Parker,
00:01:21
Speaker
set to work on the paintings that we'll be discussing today.
00:01:25
Speaker
These two paintings are featured at the Fine Arts Society, which is celebrating the reopening of their London Gallery with a double exhibition occurring simultaneously in their spaces in London and Edinburgh.
00:01:37
Speaker
Here with me to figure out what these paintings are all about are Emily Walsh, Group Managing Director of the Fine Arts Society in Edinburgh, and Rowena Morgan-Cox, Managing Director of the Fine Arts Society London.
00:01:52
Speaker
Hello, Emily and Rowena.
00:01:54
Speaker
Hello.
00:01:55
Speaker
Hello.
00:01:56
Speaker
So, Emily, I want to start with the painting by Agnes Miller Parker, which is at the Edinburgh Gallery and which bears the curious title, The Uncivilized Cat.
Analyzing 'The Uncivilized Cat'
00:02:08
Speaker
And listeners, you can see pictures of both of these paintings online at themagazineantiques.com and also at thefineartsociety.com.
00:02:21
Speaker
But Emily, can you just start off by telling us what exactly is depicted in this painting?
00:02:27
Speaker
Of course, there's a cat who is making quite a ruckus.
00:02:33
Speaker
Yes, so at first appearance is quite an innocent looking still life.
00:02:37
Speaker
A black cat with very green eyes has landed upon an open book.
00:02:42
Speaker
The book on closer inspection is by Marie Stopes and is Love's Creation, which was published in 1928, two years before this painting was made.
00:02:53
Speaker
Love's Creation was a book that explored the debates around females changing lives.
00:02:59
Speaker
sexuality and independence and a lot of the conversations that Marie Stopes had had over the previous decade.
00:03:06
Speaker
Behind this book is a green spine of a book that's just visible, can be seen.
00:03:13
Speaker
The book Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves, which was an autobiography that described the passing of an old order following the First World War.
00:03:24
Speaker
And then to the right of the cat is a toppled over vase of colour lilies and a maquette of the goddess Venus.
00:03:32
Speaker
And the story goes that when Venus saw colour lilies, she was so overwrought with jealousy that she bestowed a yellow pistol upon the lily.
00:03:44
Speaker
And within the context of this picture, it suggests this lust and sexuality that women were not allowed to display or indeed possibly feel.
00:03:53
Speaker
Behind it, there is a bunch of daffodils and beyond that, a fast car zooming off into the distance.
Parker's Vorticist Influence
00:04:02
Speaker
And how would you describe the style and manner of painting?
00:04:08
Speaker
Well, when Agnes Miller Parker moved to London in 1920 with her husband, William McCants, and they became involved with the Vorticist movement, which is a London group active throughout the 1920s, and it displays some of the technique and styles of that group.
00:04:28
Speaker
The artist William Roberts lived with them briefly in their Earl's Court flat, and he was a great influence over her paintings in this decade.
00:04:37
Speaker
And that sort of sculptor volumetric stylization of everything in the picture, it comes from him.
00:04:45
Speaker
Yeah, so what do you say are the characteristics of that method of painting?
00:04:52
Speaker
What's sort of distinctive and recognizable about it?
00:04:57
Speaker
It's highly stylised, quite schematic in a way.
00:05:01
Speaker
She painted in tempera, which is quite unusual, and in fact there are very few examples of her work from this decade.
00:05:10
Speaker
She went on to be better known as a wood engraver in subsequent years.
00:05:16
Speaker
But it's very stylistic.
Symbols in Parker's Work
00:05:18
Speaker
I mean, it has also hints of the sort of art deco movement.
00:05:22
Speaker
So it's quite sort of flattened and perfect in its presentation.
00:05:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:30
Speaker
And the cat, which is really quite a visually interesting figure in this picture in terms of the way it's posed and shaped, it occupies maybe a quarter of the frame.
00:05:47
Speaker
So it really does dominate the picture.
00:05:50
Speaker
Why a cat?
00:05:52
Speaker
Why did she decide to paint essentially a portrait of a cat?
00:05:59
Speaker
Agnes and her husband, William McCants, were very keen cat lovers and owned many cats.
00:06:06
Speaker
And you'll see in the work that she did subsequently that they often feature either as part of a tale that she's retelling or one of her best-known wood engravings is a picture of a cat called The Challenge.
00:06:20
Speaker
Cats seem to be very much a part of their life.
00:06:26
Speaker
And so there are, you know, you've described a number of the sort of objects featured in the scene.
00:06:34
Speaker
There's also a pair of eyeglasses.
00:06:37
Speaker
There's a water glass that's been tipped over.
00:06:41
Speaker
You know, the cat is clearly just making a nuisance of itself, sort of tearing the whole scene apart.
00:06:48
Speaker
But
00:06:51
Speaker
But it seems that a number of these objects are quite concretely symbolic, and many of them symbolic around, as you've described it, ideas having to do with sexuality, femininity.
Italian Futurism and the Motor Car
00:07:11
Speaker
Is this a primarily symbolic painting?
00:07:16
Speaker
Or how would you describe Miller Parker's sort of intentions as best as you can derive them?
00:07:27
Speaker
Well, I suppose the interwar period was a period of great change and shift anyway.
00:07:36
Speaker
I think looking at Miller Parker as an individual, she made a very remarkable decision in 1918 to marry William McCants, who was a conscientious objector.
00:07:47
Speaker
And in fact, they married a year before he was released from his work camp.
00:07:51
Speaker
This would have come with
00:07:52
Speaker
a high level of social opprobrium, but it also suggests that she was on side with his decision to do that and to go along with it.
00:08:03
Speaker
Later on in their marriage, she, in personal correspondence, describes how sick of his laziness and selfishness she is.
00:08:13
Speaker
And she decides in 1955 to leave him, not the other way around, and then goes on to divorce in the 60s.
00:08:20
Speaker
And again, this is a time when...
00:08:22
Speaker
the housewife still very much existed and this picture for me is a rejection of all the Victorian housewife tropes of being the angel of the house which although the Victorian existed right into the 20th century and to some level today so she's making in my opinion it's a decision to stand away from all of that and to show her independence both personally and professionally
00:08:51
Speaker
You mentioned the motor car in the background.
00:08:55
Speaker
You can sort of see it in the upper left corner of the painting through an open window.
Jessica Dismore's 'Mother and Child'
00:09:04
Speaker
What do you make of that?
00:09:05
Speaker
It sort of reminds me of the Italian futurists of some years earlier.
00:09:13
Speaker
Why do you think that's included?
00:09:17
Speaker
I suppose the vortices were interested in industry and the machine age, and maybe it's a reference to that.
00:09:24
Speaker
Perhaps one could also read something more phallic into it.
00:09:28
Speaker
It also has the look of a toy car, as well as perhaps possibly a racing car of the time.
00:09:35
Speaker
All right, I want to bring in our second painting.
00:09:41
Speaker
And this one is at the London Gallery.
00:09:43
Speaker
The title is Mother and Child.
00:09:48
Speaker
It was made by Jessica Dismore.
00:09:51
Speaker
You've dated it circa 1932.
00:09:54
Speaker
So Rowena, can you tell us, what does this painting show?
00:10:02
Speaker
So the painting is called Mother and Child, as you say, and it's painted at a similar date to the Parker painting.
00:10:13
Speaker
But even though Jessica Dismore was very involved with the Vortices movement as well, and in fact she was one of only two women artists who signed the Vortices manifesto,
00:10:28
Speaker
This painting is from a period kind of much after that.
00:10:35
Speaker
Really, again, as you'd mentioned earlier, she, because of, as a reaction to the war, she's moving towards figuration, away from the abstraction of her kind of earlier work.
00:10:51
Speaker
And this is really, she goes back to abstraction, but this is really her kind of figurative period.
00:10:57
Speaker
Unlike the painting that Emily was describing, there isn't a lot of kind of symbols to unpick in this image, but I think it's definitely worth a second look.
00:11:10
Speaker
Obviously, there are expectations of the mother and child image of something very sentimental and kind of verging on the kind of twee, but this image is...
00:11:26
Speaker
On second, look is very different from that.
00:11:30
Speaker
You've got an incredibly strong-looking mother here.
00:11:35
Speaker
She's got a very kind of defined jaw and you can even see the musculature in her arm and her kind of solid chest as she kind of holds the baby towards her.
00:11:50
Speaker
And equally, on the other side, you've got a child that...
00:11:55
Speaker
kind of seems realistic and to have an agency of its own.
00:12:00
Speaker
So she's really kind of scrapping all of the classic virgin and baby Jesus imagery that one might expect in a picture of a mother and child.
Breaking Conventional Symbolism
00:12:16
Speaker
She's doing something different, right?
00:12:19
Speaker
and new, I think, with this work, in a similar way to kind of Parker reinventing, reinventing is still life.
00:12:31
Speaker
And that's why we had wanted to kind of
00:12:34
Speaker
draw a comparison between these two artists not only because of their associations say with the vortices but also as women artists I guess creating a new visual language that is specifically female or at least coming from a kind of female perspective and that is
00:13:00
Speaker
recognizing a woman and her child to kind of work outside of...
00:13:08
Speaker
and stereotypes as Dismore herself did.
00:13:14
Speaker
In fact, it's interesting that Dismore didn't want children from a very early age.
00:13:22
Speaker
She was quite definitive about that and also didn't get married.
00:13:29
Speaker
And aside from a kind of speculative relationship with Wyndham Lewis,
00:13:36
Speaker
that there's slight disagreement on from friends and various sources, didn't have any other kind of romantic or sexual relationship that was really significant.
Female Perspectives in Art
00:13:52
Speaker
Interesting.
00:13:52
Speaker
So just for a moment to go back to the style of the painting, you've drawn some comparisons with the Miller Parker picture, but visually, they're quite different.
00:14:11
Speaker
In this case, the mother and the child fill the entire frame
00:14:15
Speaker
There really is very little else to look at aside from the two of them.
00:14:20
Speaker
There's no field full of symbolic objects.
00:14:26
Speaker
But they're also just painted in a very different manner.
00:14:31
Speaker
There's none of the flattening, the sort of angularity.
00:14:35
Speaker
They're much more organic sort of creatures.
00:14:42
Speaker
So it's differences from the uncivilised cat, predominantly, as you say, in the style of the painting.
00:14:52
Speaker
In the uncivilised cat, there's a very slick stylisation that Emily was talking about that kind of...
00:15:01
Speaker
seems close to the Art Deco movement as well as the kind of vortices influences that Miller Parker had.
00:15:11
Speaker
But with Jessica Dismore, hers is slightly more kind of impressionistic.
00:15:18
Speaker
She's quite...
00:15:19
Speaker
clearly looked at pontilism.
00:15:22
Speaker
The surface of the picture is made up with lots of kind of small stabbing brushstrokes, which you can see obviously even in an image online, but definitely in the flesh.
00:15:38
Speaker
Each brushstroke is very much defined.
00:15:42
Speaker
It's very muted colours, which she actually really painted with muted colours all the way through her career, including in her kind of abstract earlier period and later period.
00:15:55
Speaker
I think that they're the colours that...
00:15:59
Speaker
she uses, which I guess makes it more, not subtle is probably the wrong word, but it's definitely understated as compared with Minaparka's painting.
00:16:14
Speaker
There's something soft and gentle about it, which maybe works with the theme of mother and child.
00:16:21
Speaker
And that's why it needs
00:16:24
Speaker
you to think about it more carefully to kind of unravel I think what it's actually saying about the relationship between the two figures you mentioned also that very tight cropping around the figures there's there's kind of nothing else there's a sense of
00:16:43
Speaker
maybe a curtain in the background, they might be standing in front of a window, for instance.
00:16:49
Speaker
But it kind of could be verging on slightly claustrophobic in its kind of structure, which I hope I'm not reading too much into it.
00:17:03
Speaker
It's interesting because Dismore had...
00:17:08
Speaker
a slightly frustrated relationship with her mother, who for a very long time was unwell and an invalid, and who dismal complained of being kind of suffocatingly loving.
00:17:25
Speaker
And you could, and it might be too much, read something of that into this work, partly because...
00:17:36
Speaker
because of that very tight focus on the two figures.
00:17:42
Speaker
Right.
00:17:42
Speaker
And well, and the figures aren't identified, correct?
00:17:45
Speaker
In other words, we don't know who this mother and child might have been or whether they might even have existed at all.
00:17:54
Speaker
As far as we know, they hadn't been identified.
00:17:58
Speaker
I mean, there may well be kind of guesses as to who they were, but I think even the title of the painting suggests...
00:18:12
Speaker
trying to say something generic, but actually rather than the predictable imagery of a mother and child, she's actually saying something much more modern.
00:18:25
Speaker
In some way, it kind of anticipates the strong woman figure that we start to see in kind of wartime propaganda as we get into the
00:18:37
Speaker
to the Second World War.
00:18:39
Speaker
But actually, unfortunately, Jessica Dismore didn't kind of live that long to see that.
00:18:45
Speaker
But it has a sense of
Recognition of Women Artists
00:18:48
Speaker
that.
00:18:48
Speaker
You can imagine the muscular arm of the We Can Do It girls poster from America in the 1940s.
00:19:00
Speaker
in this image.
00:19:03
Speaker
But I think really she's just being realistic about womanhood rather than, as I say, kind of predictable.
00:19:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:18
Speaker
So with respect to both of these pictures, what can you tell me about how they were received in their time?
00:19:29
Speaker
I think Emily might say something similar about the Miller Parker, but we have very little information specifically about how this picture was received at the time.
00:19:44
Speaker
I wish that I could...
00:19:46
Speaker
I could say more to that.
00:19:48
Speaker
But just more generally about Des Moores in this period, so between 1929 and 1934, she contributed 26 of these more figurative paintings to the London group exhibition circle that she was a member of.
00:20:08
Speaker
And I think it's probable that this work was part of that group of pictures.
00:20:21
Speaker
And then more recently, it both has been exhibited at the Fine Arts Society and also at Pallant House Gallery.
00:20:28
Speaker
It was included in the Radical Women exhibition, which was Jessica Dismore and her contemporaries.
00:20:35
Speaker
And that was...
00:20:36
Speaker
at the end of last year and earlier this year.
00:20:39
Speaker
And Emily, what about the Miller Parker picture?
00:20:43
Speaker
Do we know anything about how it was received?
00:20:46
Speaker
We don't.
00:20:47
Speaker
In fact, it's a picture that we acquired recently from Provincial Auction House in the UK.
00:20:54
Speaker
And there was no, apart from an attribution, it didn't have a title with it.
00:20:59
Speaker
And the investigation of the picture really has taken place since we received it.
00:21:04
Speaker
So
00:21:05
Speaker
We have nothing to know about.
00:21:06
Speaker
It's history, I'm afraid.
00:21:09
Speaker
I think in general of Miller Parker's work and how he's received, there is very little known.
00:21:15
Speaker
And this may be in part due to the fact that she continued to work throughout the time.
00:21:20
Speaker
From the time she was in, after she'd moved to London from Scotland,
00:21:25
Speaker
She was teaching in schools and although her husband did a little bit of work in terms of lecturing and he was an art critic at The Spectator, she was the breadwinner and her painting would have taken place at night and therefore being very part-time and he was able to
00:21:43
Speaker
fulfill his requirements as an artist much better and really explore his style and what he was doing.
00:21:51
Speaker
And then from 1930, when her and her husband moved to Wales to the Gregona Press in Paris,
00:21:58
Speaker
He was the instructor, as it were, and coordinated what she did.
00:22:03
Speaker
And she worked very much then to commissioned work to illustrate books.
00:22:10
Speaker
So although they were highly praised at the time, but there's probably more record of how her work as a book illustrator and wood engraver than as a painter during the 1920s.
00:22:21
Speaker
Right.
00:22:21
Speaker
Right.
00:22:23
Speaker
Well, so we've talked a little about the changing circumstances of women around this period.
00:22:30
Speaker
But flesh this out a little more for me.
00:22:35
Speaker
What really was it like to be a woman artist and to be working as a woman artist in the UK at this time?
00:22:44
Speaker
Well, I think if I can jump into this one, because it's interesting what Emily just said about Parker being the breadwinner in her relationship with her husband.
00:22:55
Speaker
And in Jessica Dismore's case, she was one of five girls and her father was a businessman.
00:23:07
Speaker
And they were afforded, I think, an incredible amount of money
00:23:12
Speaker
space and kind of flexibility to really work on their creative talents, I think a lot more than would be afforded other women at this time.
00:23:27
Speaker
And the other advantage or disadvantage for Dismore is that she, whilst her father was alive and she was working as an artist, actually lived off her
00:23:41
Speaker
kind of money that he gave her.
00:23:43
Speaker
And then after his death, she inherited money from him, although it was not as much as she was hoping for.
00:23:52
Speaker
So she was actually kind of...
00:23:54
Speaker
wealthy enough, independently of her artwork and having to sell her artwork, although I know that there have been in letters her mentioning in the later years her kind of
00:24:10
Speaker
efforts to actually make work to sell.
00:24:14
Speaker
But really, she was, as well as an artist, a supporter of the arts.
00:24:22
Speaker
I know that part of her troubled relationship with Wyndham Lewis is because he would often push her to purchase
00:24:30
Speaker
pictures from him for her own collection as a way of supporting him and I think that she would have put money into I think potentially blast
Role of the Fine Arts Society
00:24:45
Speaker
the magazine The Vortices Publish and I guess some of the other exhibiting circles that she was involved in I also slightly think it was a disadvantage for her
00:24:58
Speaker
Because although she had the freedom to work on her creative pursuits and develop her art, it also means that, I guess you're slightly...
00:25:14
Speaker
taken less seriously as an artist because she hasn't had to suffer in that kind of, again, a stereotype of artistic identity for her art.
00:25:27
Speaker
You know, it's
00:25:29
Speaker
it's kind of come to her more easily because she's been able to afford to live anyway without being reliant on the artwork.
00:25:39
Speaker
And I think that kind of image of the struggling artist is actually really important and that she cannot ever identify as that kind of traditional struggling modern artist.
00:25:58
Speaker
And I think the other thing is that although she was involved in just about every interesting exhibiting circle, from the Rebel Arts Centre to the Board to CIS, to the London Group and the Seven and Five Society later on, she's just been slightly written out of history.
00:26:24
Speaker
And I think that's the case for lots of reasons.
00:26:29
Speaker
not least because of the male historian's take on British art history over the years.
00:26:49
Speaker
We'll be back with the Fine Arts Society in just a moment.
00:26:52
Speaker
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00:26:56
Speaker
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Market Challenges for Women Artists
00:26:58
Speaker
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00:27:00
Speaker
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Speaker
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00:27:38
Speaker
Well, so tell me more about this.
00:27:42
Speaker
In the case of both these pictures, we don't know exactly how people reacted to them at the time, but you are showing both of them now.
00:27:53
Speaker
They're both known at this point.
00:27:57
Speaker
They both clearly belong in the canon of British art.
00:28:03
Speaker
How did that come to be?
00:28:05
Speaker
How did they earn their place?
00:28:09
Speaker
These paintings particularly, but also these two artists, when did they sort of break onto the stage of recognition?
00:28:22
Speaker
I think Miller Parker, because of her work as a book illustrator, it was an acceptable female profession, possibly even one that you might have been allowed to do married and children.
00:28:37
Speaker
Miller Parker and McCanns didn't have children, and I don't know whether that was a choice or because they couldn't.
00:28:44
Speaker
But in most female artists' cases, upon having children, they needed to stop, either stop teaching, they were required to step down from their posts, or they just simply didn't have the time in the day to raise a family, keep a house and paint as well.
00:29:00
Speaker
But this wasn't the case for Miller Parker.
00:29:02
Speaker
She was able to, but as I said, she continued to be the breadwinner.
00:29:07
Speaker
in her relationship.
00:29:09
Speaker
But I think she has always, because of the wood engraving and the book illustration, has always been well known.
00:29:16
Speaker
And I think latterly her oils, or tempera even, have been admired, partly because they have struck a sort of accord with the fashions of the time, I think, for the last 20 years, that this very stylised 1920s look is
00:29:32
Speaker
become increasingly fashionable.
Legacy and Neglect of Dismore
00:29:35
Speaker
And of course, in recent years, female painters have started to rise up and have a higher value because they're by a woman.
00:29:45
Speaker
But I think Parker has always had some sort of a name because of the book illustration.
00:29:52
Speaker
I think I'll just jump in here.
00:29:55
Speaker
In Dismore's case, it's slightly different and I think it's made difficult because she committed suicide a few days before Germany, I think, invaded Poland and war was declared in Britain.
00:30:15
Speaker
I think because of her, she was 54, but because I think her life was cut short and because of the circumstances of her death, there seems to be less interest in the years following her death to pull together a retrospective, which is often a kind of traditional way of...
00:30:39
Speaker
either the executors of the will, the family, or I guess artist circles in celebrating the life of an artist.
00:30:47
Speaker
And really, she slightly falls out of art history from that point onwards.
00:30:56
Speaker
And actually, I think in this case, having this work in our opening exhibition is actually because of the work that the Fine Arts Society has done in its history to help kind of resurrect the interest in artists who have often been overlooked.
00:31:18
Speaker
And it's been a theme, at the very least,
00:31:21
Speaker
since the late 1960s that we have done work and particularly well with women artists to gather interest around them again by holding exhibitions.
00:31:38
Speaker
Some of the artists we had shown in their lifetime, for instance, another one of the pictures in the show is a picture by Doris Zinkhuizen, again from around the same period, 1934,
00:31:50
Speaker
And actually the Fine Arts Society did an exhibition of her works in 1949 and then continued to show her work in the second half of the 20th century and we still do today.
00:32:05
Speaker
In Dismore's case, it wasn't until around an exhibition that we did in 2000 that
00:32:14
Speaker
we kind of, that rediscovery started.
00:32:18
Speaker
And then, as I mentioned earlier, more recently, this picture was shown at the Pallon House Gallery exhibition in Chichester, which was, it had Jessica Dismore as
00:32:31
Speaker
as the kind of central thread running throughout the exhibition but actually it was kind of commenting more widely on radical women artists and trying to either to
00:32:48
Speaker
rehabilitate these people's careers and works in the eyes of the general public, or to just cement interest that was already there and gathering slowly, as had been the case with Jessica Dismore.
00:33:04
Speaker
And I think hence why she was the central person in that exhibition.
00:33:13
Speaker
But again, as I'd mentioned earlier,
00:33:17
Speaker
It's very surprising, aside, the kind of suicide aside, that...
Rising Interest in Women Artists
00:33:24
Speaker
that she isn't kind of recognised more compared with her male counterparts, because actually, even in the later years of her life, she was still really involved with some key artists of the period.
00:33:42
Speaker
I mean, being elected to both the London Group and the Seven and Five Society, you know, the Seven and Five Society was...
00:33:52
Speaker
started by Paul Nash, it involved artists including Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth.
00:34:00
Speaker
So, you know, she was always in the centre, in a sense, of the British art movements of the time, and yet she's still been sidelined since her death, and I think that's quite sad.
00:34:18
Speaker
Yeah, well, so how does that translate into the sort of state of the market for her works?
00:34:26
Speaker
Are there interested and dedicated collectors specifically focused on her works or works of the type that she is creating?
00:34:39
Speaker
I think there are lots more people who are generally interested in women artists of this period.
00:34:48
Speaker
This is one picture that's sold in the exhibition.
00:34:52
Speaker
It's sold very quickly.
00:34:53
Speaker
It's sold before the show opened.
00:34:55
Speaker
So I think that's a good sign.
00:34:57
Speaker
But it also might be a sign of its relative affordability compared to some of the other artworks.
00:35:05
Speaker
in the show by male artists working in the 20th century in Britain.
00:35:13
Speaker
It's, yes, it's kind of, it's more, it's had a more accessible price point.
00:35:19
Speaker
And,
00:35:21
Speaker
I hope that, you know, if we continue to do work on her and we continue to support the market, that that can grow.
00:35:29
Speaker
But the other, obviously, issue is, and particularly because of her kind of early death,
00:35:38
Speaker
It means that there are fewer artworks available.
00:35:42
Speaker
Actually, I'm not entirely sure whether it's because she destroyed them or because they have just been lost.
00:35:53
Speaker
due to disinterest even of the family and people around her, that actually it means that the kind of pool of works there to deal in is relatively small compared to other people.
00:36:07
Speaker
I guess Emily said the same of Miller Parker, actually, and I think that can be damaging to the legacy of an artist after their death, particularly in terms of the art market.
00:36:23
Speaker
It's an issue that arises with many women artists and was illustrated very clearly in a very good exhibition in the National Gallery Scotland a couple of years ago of 20th century female artists.
00:36:39
Speaker
And there were several rooms of them, but there were maybe only one or two examples per artist.
00:36:44
Speaker
And when the curator was asked why there weren't more, because it would have been nicer to have seen a room of paintings by one artist or a whole wall of them, there simply weren't the numbers to pull enough, good enough work together.
00:36:58
Speaker
So even if some women artists would have stopped painting, but some may have continued, but the quality wasn't there either.
00:37:06
Speaker
So I think that, I echo what Romina says, that in most cases there are very few examples to draw on.
00:37:14
Speaker
And you do need a critical mass if you're going to create a market, if you're talking about the commercial value of pictures.
00:37:20
Speaker
And although there is a far greater interest in women painters now than there ever has been, there's a huge amount to catch up in terms of their value.
00:37:29
Speaker
They still lag quite a long way behind their male counterparts.
00:37:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:33
Speaker
Well, and is that also true for Miller Parker?
00:37:39
Speaker
I mean, Emily, earlier you suggested that her sort of flattened and angular style is possibly a bit more in vogue or a bit more stylish, I guess, for a modern consumer.
00:38:03
Speaker
Does that lend sort of more collectability to her works?
00:38:09
Speaker
Or are there even enough of hers to make a market?
00:38:13
Speaker
Yes, I think there are very few to draw on to create a market.
00:38:19
Speaker
But actually I do think that it is true, I think, of all artists that they will have their high points and their low points that are entirely dictated by fashion.
00:38:26
Speaker
And it doesn't matter whether you're a woman or a man in that case.
Exhibition Details and Artists' Struggles
00:38:30
Speaker
people's interior decor will change over the decades and you're either in or you're out and this is a style that is in so if listeners are interested in seeing these paintings in person how can they do that
00:38:44
Speaker
Both galleries are open.
00:38:46
Speaker
Obviously there are restrictions in place in the UK at the moment and slightly differing restrictions in Scotland to England.
00:38:54
Speaker
But they are both available to be seen Monday to Friday in our galleries, Saturdays as well in Edinburgh.
00:39:01
Speaker
And you can look on our website, which is w.thefineartsociety.com for some high resolution images, which you can zoom into and some further information on
00:39:11
Speaker
both these pictures and all the other pictures that are in the exhibitions.
00:39:16
Speaker
Excellent.
00:39:16
Speaker
Well, I hope that this helps to draw some attention to these artists, I have to say.
00:39:21
Speaker
I mean, both pictures are quite thought-provoking.
00:39:26
Speaker
Have we missed anything?
00:39:29
Speaker
I think something, I mean, it's suggested with the Dismore exhibition
00:39:35
Speaker
It's suggested in my mentioning her suicide, but obviously she kind of suffered with her mental health throughout her lifetime.
00:39:48
Speaker
I wonder if that is particularly important.
00:39:51
Speaker
But on the other hand, you know, it's...
00:39:56
Speaker
You want to kind of avoid reading that into every work because actually I think this picture represents a period when she really is working quite hard.
00:40:07
Speaker
It follows shortly after both...
00:40:12
Speaker
the death of her mother and her sister in the same year.
00:40:17
Speaker
But actually she recovered from that and started a period of kind of real
00:40:27
Speaker
furious energy and this is one of those paintings and I guess there could be something in these very fast drying short brushstrokes that are very thinly applied to a gesso board which
00:40:47
Speaker
which is kind of reflective of that moment of excitement in her work again.
00:40:57
Speaker
And she has another one later on where she returns to abstract painting and kind of works on those very dedicatedly.
00:41:09
Speaker
And then equally she has periods where that little...
00:41:15
Speaker
little survived from that period, either because she wasn't working, because she was unwell, or because she may well have even destroyed the works, or as I said before, the works might have been neglected and lost.
00:41:33
Speaker
But I think that's it, really.
00:41:36
Speaker
Gosh, I mean, yeah, I have to say, hearing about artists destroying their work is always a bit heart wrenching.
00:41:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:46
Speaker
It is, isn't it?
00:41:49
Speaker
Although you've got the slightly more cynical view nowadays with contemporary artists reducing the amount of pictures that go on to the market.
00:41:58
Speaker
That's a different argument.
00:41:59
Speaker
Artificial scarcity.
00:42:01
Speaker
Something else for another day.
00:42:02
Speaker
There's a balance, isn't there, between having too few pictures on the market and too many.
00:42:10
Speaker
I think, sadly, our artists are on the too few side.
00:42:15
Speaker
Yeah, too few.
00:42:18
Speaker
I was just the other day reading a bit about this period in Brahms' life when he felt eternally insignificant next to Beethoven, who was his absolute idol.
00:42:35
Speaker
And this inferiority complex grew to such an extent that at a certain point, he decided that nothing he had ever written or could write would ever be worthy of Beethoven's example.
00:42:49
Speaker
And so he started throwing his manuscripts in the fire.
00:42:55
Speaker
Oh, no.
00:42:56
Speaker
Oh, it's terrible.
00:42:58
Speaker
And it was...
00:42:59
Speaker
his wife actually stepped in and intervened and managed to save quite a bit of his work.
00:43:06
Speaker
But of course, you know, there are some unknown number of compositions of his that were lost forever.
00:43:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:14
Speaker
It's very sad.
00:43:15
Speaker
Statistic temperament.
00:43:19
Speaker
What is it?
00:43:19
Speaker
I guess it's Harold Bloom who calls that the anxiety of influence.
00:43:25
Speaker
Anyway.
00:43:26
Speaker
It's not something.
00:43:27
Speaker
It's not something.
00:43:29
Speaker
Well, thank you both so much.
00:43:30
Speaker
I really had a lot of fun with this.
00:43:33
Speaker
I hope you got a little enjoyment out of it too.
00:43:36
Speaker
Well, thank you.
00:43:37
Speaker
I hope you've got something good in there.
00:43:45
Speaker
I think so.
00:43:52
Speaker
This episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
00:43:56
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit and I'm Ben Miller.