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.