![]() ![]() ![]() Johnson considers these artists’ erasure from the art historical record highly jarring given that their life and work embodied textbook examples of misunderstood modernist forerunners: i.e., stylistic innovation, run-ins with conservative authorities, as well as acclaim abroad in advance of recognition at home (for instance, the “skying” of Tina Blau’s masterful Spring in the Prater at the Austrian Artists’ Guild in 1882). Indeed, painters like Funke and Koller often transmitted French postimpressionistic influences ahead of their male colleagues, in a more purely autonomous manner than Gustav Klimt and other allegorical painters, while exemplifying the Vienna modernists’ interest in psychological interiority and nascent abstraction in the decorative. ![]() Such an approach, Johnson maintains, is not useful, for the art historical “mothers” that she spotlights were leading practitioners of the dominant strategies of modernism. whose themes have not always fit into the dominant narrative structures of art history” (p. Drawing case studies from five highly successful women painters and sculptors closely connected to the Vienna Secession (Tina Blau, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Broncia Koller, Helene Funke, and Teresa Feodorowna Ries), Johnson refutes the historiographical tendency to lump women artists into an aesthetic “room of their own,” seeking explanations for women artists’ canonical exclusion in “a new center. The Memory Factory flies in the face of feminist art historical inquiries stressing women’s difference and embeddedness within separate institutions to argue that “women artists were not part of a separate sphere, but integrated into the art exhibitionary complex of Vienna” (pp. In 1916, when surmising the perils of separate women’s art institutions, an anonymous reviewer for one of Austria’s leading feminist periodicals quipped that “the best success that one might wish of them is that they might no longer be necessary.” Julie Johnson’s important and meticulously researched study of women artists in Viennese modernism lends support to the idea that corrective exhibitions, institutions, and monographs serve to ghettoize women artists from the art historical canon. Frauenkunst and Its Discontents: Women Artists in the Circles of the Vienna Secession ![]()
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