Broad Strokes, page 3
Hands. Artemisia’s left hand, holding her palette, rests on a solid table or stool, indicating her grounding in the material necessities of the craft, while her right hand is held high, grasping the brush. Here, where brush meets canvas, is where inspiration and intellect meet.
Face. The artist has done nothing to flatter herself in terms of appearance, and does nothing to seduce the viewer into admiring her. She looks away from us, lips closed, eyes intent on her work. A dark shadow falls along a third of her face.
But it is her face that tells everything. Here, Artemisia does omit one key aspect of La Pittura’s depiction that is called for by the Iconologia: the Allegory of Painting should be depicted with a gag around her mouth, because painting is mute.
Virtually all depictions of La Pittura include this device.
Artemisia refuses the gag.
When I was a teenager, there was a bar my father liked called The Quiet Woman. Hanging in front was a wooden pub sign, of the kind found outside Ye Olde England–type alehouses. The sign consisted of the carved and painted outline of a woman’s body outfitted in seventeenth-century dress, with no head. There was the stump of a neck, but then nothing after.
The Quiet Woman. Get it?
Artemisia Gentileschi was never quiet. She was instead the heroic center of her own art, fashioning a new language of womanhood, in action and in form.
Her heroic women are not man-eaters, but man-beaters. That’s one reason why her Judith Severing the Head of Holofernes appalled so many for so long. Not only is a woman depicted performing a heinous act on a man, but also it’s a woman daring to depict it.
Artemisia refused the gag. And from four hundred years away she speaks to us still, saying: Dare to be great.
CHAPTER 2:
JUDITH LEYSTER
I can’t decide whether Leyster feels contemporary or makes me feel Old Dutch.
—PETER SCHJELDAHL
EVER READ THE DA VINCI CODE, or see the movie? They both begin with the gruesome murder of a Louvre curator. It’s fiction, of course, but calls to mind real Louvre crimes, like the famous theft of Leonardo’s own Mona Lisa in 1911 (recovered two years later). Or less famously, the 1893 discovery that the magnificent new Frans Hals the Louvre had recently acquired was . . . not by Hals at all.
The “Hals” affair may be more boondoggle than crime, but still a novel- (or movie-) worthy event. I picture the painting uncrated in a dim gallery. Slats of wood eagerly pried apart, nails and boards left scattering the ornate parquet floor. Someone pulls on white gloves and eases the painting from its protective bed. Those assembled—all men—chuckle with undisguised pleasure as the titular Carousing Couple is held up to the light.
It’s a coup, no question. Dutch seventeenth- century painter Frans Hals was hugely popular in late nineteenth-century France. His loose brushstrokes and lively subjects (drunken duo, anyone?) appealed to Modernist sensibilities. French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists loudly admired, and even copied, Hals’s work. And now not only does the Louvre have a wonderful new painting by the Dutch Golden Age master, but “one of the finest he ever painted.” Awesome.
The painting is bundled off to conservation (the smoke, sweat, and spit of centuries mar its lively surface), where after painstaking cleaning what’s revealed is decidedly not the signature of Frans Hals. I like to imagine the men of the Louvre gathering around the painting to take a look as the conservator grimly points.
Judith Leyster. Monogram (detail of Carousing Couple). 1630.
Right there, above the foot of the male half of the Carousing Couple. No signature at all, but a monogram of a strange sort of J with a star shooting out to the right. Unfortunately for the Louvre, this same J monogram has been noted before, by one Wilhelm von Bode writing on the history of Dutch painting a decade earlier. He decided the J referenced Frans Hals’s less esteemed brother, Jans. Bad news.
But von Bode was wrong. It was “worse” than that. In the flurry of accusations and the following trial—you’d need an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of who was suing whom and where—the fabulously named art historian Cornelis Hofstede de Groot unraveled the monogram’s true source: a previously unknown woman painter named Judith Leyster.
The Louvre was pissed. Token reparations were paid. And then silence. In the words of feminist writer Germaine Greer in her pioneering study of women painters, The Obstacle Race, “At no time did anyone throw his cap in the air and rejoice that another painter, capable of equaling Hals at his best, had been discovered.”
Judith Leyster. Born 1609 to a non-artistic Dutch family. Obtained her artist training from no one knows who. But by age twenty she’d painted her Self-Portrait, a precocious display of obvious mastery.
Dressed in high style in a corseted wine- colored dress, accented with a most unsuitable projecting collar and matching white lace cuffs, Leyster is glorious in attire, and in attitude. She turns casually toward us, painting arm balanced atop a pokey-looking chair finial. Her mouth is slightly open as if to speak, and the start of a sly smile says she’s up to something.
There is at least one joke in the painting. As New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl has pointed out, Leyster’s paintbrush, held with assurance in her beautifully rendered right hand, aims directly at the crotch of the merry fiddler on her canvas. Deep meaning? Or a near-adolescent’s bawdy humor? Maybe a little of both. In the phrase of my friend art historian Mark Trowbridge, “This pipe is not just a pipe” (that’s a Magritte pun, for those keeping art history score at home). Whatever it means, the whole painting feels lively and a little naughty. It makes me hope that if I’d been twenty in 1620s Haarlem, Judy Leyster and I would’ve hung out.
Judith Leyster. Self-Portrait. c. 1630.
Her pointing paintbrush isn’t the only veiled meaning in the painting. Infrared photography shows that the fiddler now depicted was not Leyster’s first impulse. The musician covers what was originally the face of a young woman. Schjeldahl speculates that it may have been a self-portrait—a fascinating meta-portrait within a portrait—and that covering her own face with that of a male figure was a premonitory act of self-effacement. In other words, Leyster predicted her own erasure from the history of art.
There’s no question that Leyster understood the challenges for a woman artist, in history and in the marketplace. By 1633, the year of her Self-Portrait, Leyster had joined the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke as just its second female painter ever. It’s possible that utilizing a monogram—a conjoined JL, plus shooting star—rather than her signature may have been aimed at a marketplace not quite ready for a talented woman painter.
Leyster came of age in a peaceful era of rocketing prosperity for newly independent Holland. For the first time in Western history, artists didn’t depend on the wealth of the church or aristocratic patrons. Instead, they competed in an open market increasingly interested in status luxury goods, from tulips to oil paintings. It was an era of upheaval and unheard-of social mobility. Both essential if you are, say, the eighth of nine children in a cloth-manufacturing family, a girl, and it turns out you want to be an artist.
Her family embraced the prosperous moment, changing its name (from Willemsz to Leyster) and its business (from weaver to brewer), and Judith emulated their example by futzing her own identity on canvas. The new family name, and also the name of their brewery, meant “Lodestar” or “Leading Star.” It’s a statement, and so is Leyster’s use of a monogram that is both distinctive but somewhat opaque. She is a leading star. She is also mysterious. Maybe, like women writers such as George Sand and George Eliot, she assumed a non-feminine nom de plume so her work would not be ignored out of hand. Or possibly, as a painter with no connections in the art world, associating herself with the family brewery might offer familiarity and notoriety. Hey, beer sells.
Whatever the reason, Leyster used her monogram from the outset. Her earliest known paintings, Serenade and Jolly Topper, both from 1629, are signed with it. And thank goodness. Without her unique symbol, Leyster might be entirely lost. As Virginia Woolf famously laments in A Room of One’s Own, “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”
Within a decade of her rediscovery in 1893, Leyster was embraced by a women’s movement looking to find inspiring forebearers. She was included in early twentieth-century retrospectives on women in art, and the first doctoral dissertation on Leyster was written in the 1920s by a female student.
It took longer for mainstream art history to acknowledge her. Whitney Chadwick, in her survey Women, Art, and Society, quotes James Laver from 1964: “Some women artists tend to emulate Frans Hals, but the vigorous brushstrokes of the master were beyond their capability. One has only to look at the work of a painter like Judith Leyster to detect the weakness of the feminine hand.” Typical but without merit. Leyster was tough enough for ten Lavers. Even her earliest work reveals a bold, independent, and preternaturally self-assured artist.
The Leyster/Hals comparison is common. She did her share of jolly genre scenes—drinkers, lute players, fiddlers—reminiscent of Hals (her Self-Portrait is a type pioneered by Hals: a sitter captured mid-turn as if greeting the viewer), but her work could also be radically unlike his, anticipating the quiet, tense interiors of Vermeer.
Leyster’s tiny masterpiece, The Proposition, just 1 ft/30 cm high and less than 1 ft/30 cm wide, is one example. Here, a woman in a white smock sews intently by candlelight while a bearded older man in a fur hat leans over her, touching her shoulder with one hand and offering her money with the other. She ignores him. He insists, casting a dark, looming shadow. Candlelight highlights the coins thrust beneath the woman’s face. At her feet, a brazier glows beneath her skirt. The room must be cold. She could probably use the money.
It’s a creepy, unsettling scene, ripe with Mephistophelean overtones. The man is temptation, no doubt. The fur hat, strange indoors, implies wealth, but also something else. It looks foreign, at least very un-Dutch. From where does this dark stranger hail? At any rate, the older man does not seem to belong next to the much younger woman, who rebuffs his offer by focusing on her work.
Sewing—the old in and out—can easily be construed as a sexual metaphor. In fact (thanks again, Dr. Trowbridge), the medieval Dutch word for sewing was slang for “making carnal union.” In modern Dutch, sewing is still used the same way, though probably now better translated as a single word starting with f.
Judith Leyster. The Proposition. c. 1631.
Regardless, in seventeenth-century Holland, needlework was something all proper women, highborn or low, should do well. Something a well-brought-up woman took pride in. It’s Leyster’s innovation to insert this virtuous activity into a scene of seduction that would usually take place in a brothel or bar. There, the come-on is depicted as welcome, a lark, some fun. But in Leyster’s scene it is unwanted, unacknowledged, and, as the dark shadow implies, sinister.
In other words: this scene is from the woman’s point of view.
Judith Leyster. Early Brabantian Tulip. 1643.
It’s tempting to read The Proposition as a parable of the artist, resisting easy money and sticking with her creative work. Maybe saying, too, that a woman painter is as virtuous as any seamstress.
It’s also tempting to see it as a preemptive rebuff to the assaults on Leyster’s reputation far in the future.
Not long after her resurrection from a historical black hole, people began concocting all kinds of liaisons for Leyster. She was Rembrandt’s lover. Or no, she was Hals’s lover. There is in fact no more evidence that she was romantically involved with either man than there is of a love affair between Hals and Rembrandt themselves. It is a wholesale fantasy based on the fact that she was a woman, they were men, alive in the same nation in the same century. They must have had sex.
Though there was no romance between Leyster and Rembrandt (or Leyster and Hals or between Rembrandt and Hals or, oh, never mind), there was romance between Leyster and another Haarlem painter (sex, too). It’s impossible to know whether this was good or bad for Leyster personally. But for the history of art, the line is pretty clear: all but two of Leyster’s known works were painted between 1629 and 1635. On June 1, 1636, Leyster married fellow painter Jan Miense Molenaer. He was more successful than she was in terms of sales, though her inferior as an artist. We don’t know why there are no Leysters from the six months before her marriage, though things for Haarlem painters were difficult just then due to an outbreak of plague. The Guild of St. Luke suspended its annual dues that year and the following, as its members found it difficult to generate income in a city more concerned with survival than pretty pictures.
Possibly to escape the plague and in pursuit of a better art market, the newlyweds moved from Haarlem to Amsterdam within months of their marriage. There, Leyster gave birth to five children between 1637 and 1650: Johannes, Jacobus, Helena, Eva, and Constantijn. Only Helena and Constantijn survived to adulthood.
Historians tut over Leyster’s loss of self on becoming a wife, as if she willfully threw away the artist part of her when she got together with Molenaer. But first it was the plague, and then wooing and a wedding, and then moving to a new city, and then her first pregnancy. And my God, five children! When my two children (two!) were young, I mostly stopped writing for six years. I simply couldn’t manage the time and attention to art, and the time and attention young children required. How much more impossible for Leyster with five? And not just the pregnancies and births and babies and toddlers and the household and her husband’s studio and perhaps her own studio, but the impossible loss, the terrible grief. Yes, what of the deaths of her children, something not once mentioned in any of the many thousands of words I’ve read on Leyster?
Should we be shocked if her oeuvre stopped abruptly with marriage and family? Saddened at such artistic loss, yes, but surprised? How could Leyster have gone on?
But somehow, she did.
For a long time, the only known work signed by Leyster after her marriage was a watercolor from 1643 of a lone tulip. According to Leyster scholar Frima Fox Hofrichter, if painted from life, then Tulip was done in April that year, the flower’s blooming season, shortly after the birth of Helena, her daughter who would live.
Leyster already had other children, along with her newborn, but in some hours of peace, or some way amid the chaos of family life, Leyster painted this flower: simple, well observed, lovely.
Tulip is in all essential ways the opposite of her renowned genre paintings, imparting no parable or moral, symbol of nothing but itself. Beautiful, if slight.
For a century, Leyster’s Tulip was believed to be her final work, a lovely though insufficient coda for a career that began in brilliance and abundance. Then in 2009, a still life by Leyster done in 1654 was discovered in a private collection, painted eleven years later than Tulip.
So Leyster did not stop painting. There must be more Leysters in the world than we know.
I picture a painting uncrated in a sky-lit gallery. Slats of wood eagerly pried apart, nails and boards left scattering the floor. Someone pulls on white gloves and eases the painting from its protective bed. The assembled curators—all women—lean in. A collective gasp. That monogram—“J+L” with a star shooting to the right like an arrow bursting from its bow—they recognize it instantly. Judith Leyster. Stunned silence. Then hugs all around. Then carousing worthy of a Dutch Golden Age master.
CHAPTER 3:
ADÉLAÏDE LABILLE-GUIARD
She had rendered even more faithfully than the glimmer of silk and velvet and the froth of lace the impression of an earnest, recollected personality, whose will and courage are overlaid by patience and steadfastness.
—GERMAINE GREER
AT AGE TWENTY-THREE I began near-daily visits to eighteenth-century painter Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Self-Portrait with Two Pupils (see page 40) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This went on for a good five years. A conservative estimate would put me at, say, twelve hundred viewings.
In the fall of 1990 I’d been assigned Labille-Guiard in Robert Rosenblum’s graduate seminar on Jacques Louis David. I’d never heard of her, did not recognize her work. Rosenblum I knew about before even getting to the Institute of Fine Arts. He was one of two professors there (Kirk Varnedoe the other) who was both hallowed-be-thy-name art historian and pop-culture cool. When Andy Warhol’s diaries were published in early 1991, Rosenblum had his own entry in the index.
Rosenblum seemed to embody the ultimate in worldliness: European in his erudition, American in his earthiness. Short, spiky hair, an amused pose, he was impossibly kind to me and I have no idea why.
Still, I almost didn’t get into the seminar where I discovered Labille-Guiard. “I’m sorry,” Rosenblum had said when I’d handed him the form requiring his signature to enroll, “but you haven’t even had a class with me yet.”
I imagined I was easy to turn away: long hair dyed jet black, a nose ring (when this was unusual), red lipstick, granny boots, and a leather jacket with Edvard Munch’s The Scream charmingly superimposed upon a mushroom cloud. I’d sat in Rosenblum’s Neoclassicism lecture the entire previous semester and he hadn’t noticed. In essence, my greatest fear. I was invisible. While my fellow students had attended Ivies or powerhouse liberal arts colleges like Vassar, Oberlin, and Carleton or overseas eminences like the Courtauld and the Sorbonne, I’d gone to UC Santa Barbara. I came from nowhere, had zero connections, did not matter.
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. Self-Portrait with Two Pupils, Mademoiselle Marie Gabrielle Capet (1761-1818) and Mademoiselle Carreaux de Rosemond (died 1788). 1785.
