Women artists, woo-wooery and versatility

[oursin]

Spotted this the other day: Major show to celebrate UK’s forgotten female trailblazer of abstract art.

I Am Not An Art Historian but the name Paule Vézelay did seem vaguely familiar.

Vézelay has a... versatility in what she did: paintings, sculpture, textiles, illustrations and poetry. She was dextrous and constantly reinvented herself[.]

Again, not an art historian but my general acquaintance with modernist women suggests they were out there exploring different media all the time, and did not spurn the commercial.

(E.g. the Dora Maar exhibition a few years ago and prior to that the Sonia Delaunay one.)

Plus, okay, Moore and Hepworth are mega, but how many British artists have institutions named after them, plus we observe that Vézelay got a Tate retrospective in 1983, even if she had to live into her 90s (like a lot of women artists) to get there.

Okay, totally spurning the commercial and generally retreating from the world, come on down, Hilma af Klimt, currently at the centre of a ding-dong over ownership of her work, and dismissed as 'crazy', for her interest in theosophy - though one of those pieces says Rudolph Steiner's anthroposophy, not the same thing. But either way, hardly the only artist at the time interested in those movements or involved in some kind of occultism/mysticism. (Casts guilty glance at so far unread work on Ithell Colquhoun....)

There were also some fairly weird allotropes of more mainstream religious traditions going on among les artistes, e.g. Eric Gill's RC craft communities including lay orders and cassock wearing:

Gill's religious beliefs did not limit his sexual activity, which included several extramarital affairs. His religious views contrast with his deviant sexual behaviour, including, as described in his personal diaries, the child sexual abuse of his adolescent daughters, an incestuous relationship with at least one of his sisters, and also sexual experiments with a dog.

Comments

[spiralsheep]

When Mary Butts (discovered, forgotten, re-discovered, currently forgotten again? I can't keep track...) was temporarily living with Aleister Crowley's "cult" she recorded an incident with a dog* so Gill was, alas, far from unique.

*ETA: Or possibly a goat, the details escape me but a goat would be more on-brand for Crowley.

[oursin]

I had always heard of it as being about a goat. There was also, I think, some episode involving a camel, or transmogrifying one of his acolytes into a camel?

One does wonder if ex-acolytes went round making up their 'top that!' Aleister stories.

[spiralsheep]

Apologies, my ETA crossed with your comment.

I suppose changing someone into a camel is more ambitious than a frog - nouveau magician outdoes traditional witches!

The oddest thing, as your post makes clear, is that Crowley was mostly not especially notable, except for his publicity seeking and preference for provoking the establishment rather than accepting lucrative comissions from them.

[oursin]

I cannot imagine Aleister keeping it quiet if the great and the good commissioned his services!

[redbird]

I'm pretty sure it was turning someone into a camel, but (as Monty Python would later put it), "[he] got better!"

I don't know why Crowley wanted a reputation as the worst man in the world, beyond just wanting attention. It did make him effectively un-libelable, in the legal sense, because nothing anyone else said could have made his reputation worse. "Effectively" because to sue for damages, you have to be able to convince the court that you were in some measurable way harmed by the libelous statement.

[I would ask "why do I know these things?" but this one is at least partly Avram Davidson's fault.]

[contrary_cal]

to sue for damages, you have to be able to convince the court that you were in some measurable way harmed by the libelous statement

See the recent and unedifying case of Ben Roberts-Smith, who sued for defamation only to be told by the judge that following the finding he had committed war crimes, he had no good character remaining for anyone to possibly defame.

[azara1]

Hilma af Klimt now joins Joaquín Sorolla on my 'best artist I'd never heard of before' list.

It seems that she didn't exhibit her abstract paintings in her lifetime, and left instructions that they were not to be exhibited until 20 years after her death. So it wasn't a case of her work being known but neglected all those years, but instead it made quite a splash when finally exhibited more than 40 years after she died. I suppose missing the initial splash made it easy for me never to become aware of her at all.