Through modernism and postmodernism, we get to see the drastic change in the “traditional” art style of most artists including many females. We get a glimpse of who the individual really is through the canvas, stone, wood, etc. Each particular female artist makes their work stand out in their own unique style. In this modernism era, it was much more than art, many female artists branch off into their own identities not just as “their husbands’ wives” being able to dress accordingly to how they desire. Women ultimately changed the game, proving that they are just as valuable as men. While they began to start working they had shown that they could provide for a family the same way a man could which embodied the way women were viewed.
In Europe, Vanessa Bell had dipped her toe into the water of modernism by joining Omega workshops filled with many bright-minded colleges who all have different styles of making art. In 1910, she began to experiment with trying new techniques, such as decorating with lacquered boxes developing an art piece with abstract geometric shapes. This group had a knack for using regularly small crafts to design and create their work which had challenged the traditional art forms of mainly just paintings and sculptures. “Their innovative significance lay in the fact that they were modeled on haute couture fashion experiments in Paris and, like the Arts and Crafts Movement in the previous century, they sought to challenge the Victorian distinction between high and low art, or between art and craft.. Their products were tacitly understood to be privileged, distinct from other forms of labor and indistinguishable from “art”, (Chadwick, 257).” As portrayed, this group was special, they turned what most people view as child craft into real art showing that you don’t need a brush and some oil paint to become recognized. They showed tons of people that your own unique style is the real art. Vanessa Bell had found her voice through working creatively showing many that change could be valuable, through her new style she was well recognized during this postmodern time with several of her art pieces being exhibited in “The New Movement in Art” at the Mansard Gallery in London. In her postmodernism period she is praised to be apart of this movement as Chadwick states, “The exaggerated distinction which art historians have made between Bell’s easel paintings and her decorative work has obscured the significant role of decoration in the development of the structure and lyrical and sensuous color harmonies that underlie her later figurative works.”
Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf, 1912
Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf, 1912
The portrait was made in 1912 by Woolf’s elder sister, Vanessa Bell who shows her sister lounging in an armchair while knitting. Woolf’s facial features are blurred, abstracted through the use of bold areas of color. Yet rather than distancing her, this blurring serves to inject the portrait with a sense of intimacy and highlights the painter’s proximity to the sitter.
The Other Room (late 1930s,) by Vanessa Bell
A new exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, Vanessa Bell: 1879-1941, helps us realize the extent to which Bell was one of the most radical painters of her day. Though there have been group shows featuring Bell’s work in the past, this is the first time a major retrospective has been dedicated to her. One of the quieter, more self-effacing members of the Bloomsbury group, Bell was nicknamed “the Saint”. Most of the writings about, and dramatizations of, Bloomsbury give a sense of Bell as a kind of earth mother, withdrawing from London to her Sussex farmhouse to grow children and vegetables, painting the chairs and her lovers.
Growing up Paula Modersohn Becker had been fortunate to grow up in a middle-class family who actually supported her artistic interests, however, once her parents had begun to realize that Paula had been viewing art as a career pathway they started to have their differences on her artistic interests. She had began painting when she was only 16. In 1897 she had already studied in London and Berlin and afterward taken her first trip to Worpswede artists’ community in Northern Germany where she has begun to visualize the artist world first hand working along her side with Fritz Makensen. Growing up she had been one of the first leaders in the modernist movement because she was one of the first women to actually begin working as an artist when women were first expected to be a mother to her household. While working in this time period of the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century she had acquired a light brushwork style of painting and capturing the shifting qualities of French Impressionism as well as beginning to paint many females portraits. Paula had shown many signs of how motherhood wasn’t always in her best interest while her artistic work was shown as more important. Chadwick explained, “Surrounding her figures with flowers and foliage, Modersohn-Becker ignored conventional perspective and anecdotal detail to produce monumental images of idealized motherhood… Her diary records her toward marriage, motherhood, (Chadwick, 287)”. Despite all of this Paula’s case was very unusual, she had always been driven to become an artist during this beginning stage of women playing the household role but she had “little sympathy” for the women’s movement to becoming who they want and independent. It’s strange that she did not have the strong urge to stand up for the movement but she had become a leader in this postmodernism time where she had became an artist through the doubts and criticism. It seemed that she had the mentality that “actions speak louder than words”. Chadwick states, “Scheffler emphasized that woman’s inability to participate in the production of culture because of her ties to nature and her lack of spiritual insight. Modersohn-Becker’s own ambivalence on these points is recorded in an allegorical prose poem in which she acknowledges her artistic ambitions as “masculine” and remarks on the mutual exclusivity of sexual love and artistic success, (Chadwick, 289)”. Here we get to see some action from Modersohn-Becker as she explains how views her work as manly considered that masculine art was mainly referred to as good art back in the early nineteenth century. As we get to see Paula Modersohn-Becker’s view on where her legacy stands on how she described her work basically explaining that her work is just as good as a man’s work. In postmodernism today we can view her work and lifestyle as ambitious due to her attitude toward life during this ignorant time.
Paula Modersohn-Becker (Portrait of a Girl with a Hand Spread across Her Chest ), c. 1905
Modersohn-Becker completed a number of self-portraits that addressed the difficulties she faced as a female artist and her 1906 “Self-Portrait with Amber Necklace” demonstrates how such tensions manifested themselves in her work.
Paula Modersohn-Becker (Kneeling and Standing Girls Nude, Poppies in the Background II), 1906
During this period, the “cult of the child” was in its heyday and images were usually idyllic and bereft of character. The portrayal of nude children were either produced as a matter of course or to exemplify ideals of purity or innocence. An examination of Modersohn-Becker’s paintings of children show them naked or wearing the most plain and indistinct clothing. This was her way of washing out any distracting cultural accouterments and allowing the child to express the artist’s symbolic intent more clearly. Stripped of class and nationality, these images express universal ideas that can have an enduring impact on the art world, despite the artist’s short career.
A pioneer of modern art in Europe and the first woman to paint a full-length nude self-portrait, Paula Modersohn-Becker favored simple forms and complex textures created by scratching into sculpted paint on canvas. Modersohn-Becker trained under Fritz Mackensen in the Worpswede artists’ colony, alongside artists such as Heinrich Vogeler and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke. Her unique visual language—a synthesis of post-impressionist styles balancing French formalism with a German aesthetic—is marked by humanistic representations of local villagers. Drawn to the vibrant Parisian art culture, Modersohn-Becker was influenced by artists like Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, as well as by classical painting.
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