#jennifer higgie

[pintoras]

What I long for is the freedom of going about alone, of coming and going, of sitting in the seats of the Tuileries, and especially in the Luxembourg, of stopping and looking at the artistic shops, of entering churches and museums, of walking about the old streets at nights; that's what I long for; and the freedom without which one cannot become a real artist. Do you imagine that I get much good from what I see, chaperoned as I am, and when, in order to go to the Louvre, I must wait for my carriage, my lady companion and family?

Marie Bashkirtseff (Ukrainian, 1858-1884), quoted in Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women's Self-Portraits

[abwwia]

Bow Down: Women in Art

Shahidha Bari on Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman

This episode of Jennifer Higgie’s podcast series about women in art, Bow Down, features the cultural historian, radio presenter and author of Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes , Shahida Bari. She discusses the life and times of the two women founders of London’s Royal Academy, the trail-blazing 18th-century artists Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser. There are many other episodes of Bow Down, although most focus on modern and contemporary artists.

LISTEN HERE : https://www.athenaartfoundation.org/listen/bow-down-shahidha-bari-on-mary-moser-and-angelica-kauffman

[earthiercurator]

Artist Gwen John to Auguste Rodin

[ghoulierstudio]

[alexanderfintain]

Georgiana Houghton, "The Eye of God", 1862.

[this-is-not-yesterday]

My Top 10 books of 2024 (as in ones that i read not that came out in 2024)

(in no particular order)

The well of loneliness (radclyffe hall) absolute classic for all the melancholy lesbians (me) loved it, took me like a month to read and i felt like i was living it it, it was great

The mirror and the palette (jennifer higgie) this was the second ever art history book i read and i loved it it got me well into it because all my previous experience with art history had been boring, sterile and emotionless (at least to me) i never really connected with any artists until i read this book, also read it while i was camping and that was so much fun trying to read with a half dead torch in a one man tent i can't sit up it

Albert and the whale (philip hoare) got this book from the library because i liked the cover and it was incredible, read it in a few days, it told such a story and was so tangential and rambly in a way i love, was a journey, learned many things, think about it all the time

The power (naomi alderman) got this at fopp cos i read disobedience (same author) the year before (also from fopp) and i wasnt expecting a sci-fi thing after disobedience but i loved it, read it really fast cos it was so good i was so invested the story was just like cliff-hanger, good tv type of story where its not predictable and i was genuinely gasping at the plot twists and i probably cried also

Seven steeples (sarah baume) this was kind of alarming to read (in the same sort of way as the discomfort of evening was to me but less horrifying and ruining) cos it was so similar to sort of what goes on in my head and the kind of thing i would write if one day i wrote a book so it wasnt quite as enjoyable as the prev. 4 for that reason but it was very beautiful and affecting.

Tipping the velvet (sarah waters) i read this a whole year ago now so its somewhat hard to remember but i think it was an incredible story in a similar was to the power where it was exciting and easy to read, there was a section in the book i really loved when the main character is on her own for a long while and from what i remembered i loved the ending but a couple of characters in the beginning were a little annoying

The sixth extinction (elizabeth kolbert) LOVED. read it in the summer got it from the library, it was so good, it had good story telling for a non fiction book which i like and it was about global warming but was mainly about cool ecology things in relation to global warming so it was still somehow fun to read - frogs, bats, loved the bit about geology so much im such an amateur geology nerd, coral lots of stuff hard recommend

The story of art without men (katy hessel) first art history book i read, made me study art history, i looked up introductory/overview art history books and got the story of art which i read a bit of and was immediately put off and dismayed but the complete lack of women artists (in the first edition there were 0, in later ones i think there have been a couple amongst the hoades of men) so when i saw the story of art without men i thought perfect hell yeah and it was great loved it, incredible introduction. (now i unfortunately study predominately men against my will and am forced to balance it out by reading about women in my free time)

our wives under the sea (julia armfield) loved the story definitely cried at least a couple of times but was two short for me to be that attatched to the characters. i loved that it seemed like it could be a metaphor interpreted in loads of ways but also was just great as a scifi weird thing anyway on its own. the bits in the submarine i liked a lot, more than the bits on land i think.

the outsider (camus) + metamorphosis (kafka) combining these two because theyre both very short and i read them at a similar time both in about a day and so although i loved the writing and the story of both and i think about them often, i just don't get as attached to short books and don't remember them so well. i think i will reread them both at some point though and maybe have more to say (also enough has been said about these books to fill the ocean lets be real)

[thoughtportal]

What all these women have in common is that they’ve become fixtures in Western institutions in the past few years. Houghton is currently the subject of a show at Australia’s Art Gallery of NSW that finds a parallel for her drawings in the abstractions by Wassily Kandinsky, a much better-known artist. Blavatsky’s name recurs regularly in texts for exhibitions, including the 2018 retrospective for af Klint at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, which became the most well-attended show ever staged there. It turns out you can cram all this art referencing invisible worlds, spectral figures, and more into museum walls, those hallowed settings where art history is made.

Is there any way to free these women from the deadening force of the canon? Higgie makes a valiant attempt by writing something that is not necessarily a history. The Other Side broadly has a chronological structure, but it does not always move from Point A to Point B, as a textbook might. Partly, that is an attempt to reflect the very nature of this art itself, which, as Higgie points out, resists rationality and scientific study.

[thisisyesterdaystudy]

The Mirror and The Palette

by Jennifer Higgie

This book tells the story of female artists from the renaissance to the modern day (20, I just counted them) through their self portraits. I think it did an amazing job of telling the history and personality of the artists and how this influenced their art. A lot of the chapters I related to and felt connected to my life. Here are some highlights:

Gwen John (1873-1939)

Gwen John was welsh (as am I) and I saw myself in her reclusiveness and obsession (and her love of cats). I love her portraits and their muted colours, the models reserved expressions. The book includes her 1902 'Self-Portrait' which I saw at the Tate Now You See Us exhibition (the exhibition was great maybe I'll write about that another time). I like that her eyes are just slightly staring into space, instead of at the viewer

I also love her 'A Corner Of An Artist's Room In Paris' (1907-9) which I think is a self-portrait in another font - its a reflection of her but more enigmatic than a portrait. It shows her room she rented from money earned being an artist's model - she has a room of her own despite a lack of inherited funds which is a powerful message after hundreds of years of female artists being only upper class daughters or wives of artists, able to work in their husband or father's studio. Although Gwen John wasn't a hugely successful artist at this time, she was independent, living alone and free to paint as she wished.

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c.1656)

Artemisia was taught by her painter father and was producing professional works by the time she was a teenager. She was, when she was 18, raped by an artist employed by her father to teach her painterly perspective. Her subsequent arduous trials are recorded in a 300 page transcript. Her history paintings (a genre not deemed suitably feminine at the time) often feature prominent female characters who were usually treated as secondary to the male characters in other artists renditions. One of my favourite examples of this is Susanna and The Elders (1610)

Her self-portrait featured in this book is based on the symbol for painting from 'Iconologia' and shows her engrossed in her work, brandishing a paintbrush. I love this painting because of the energy and passion shown and because its so different from other artists self-portraits of the time which were much stiffer and less dramatic.

'Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting' (1638-9)

[puddleheaart]

" To trust in art is to trust in mystery." - Jennifer Higgie, The Other Side

[masterblackoak]

“Their home was old, enormous, filled with tunnels, abandoned passages, nooks and corners ~ and a library filled with her great-grandfather Prince Paul Dolgorukov’s rich collection of books. Helena devoured his tomes on the occult sciences, magic and alchemy ~ including Solomon’s Wisdom, a Jewish book written in Greek in the first century B.C….

   An aged serf who worked for the family, Baranig Bouyak, was a healer and magician; he taught Helena about the occult properties of plants and the language of bees ~ and predicted great things for her future. She later recalled in a letter to a friend: ‘All the devilries of the Middle Ages had found refuge in my head…’”  

(This passage comes from a book called The Other Side ~ A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World, which was written by Jennifer Higgie.)

[chihiro142bus]

Been reading a lot Jennifer Higgie, she is just an incredible writer. She talks about woman in the art world and talks about the spirit world - I love it

[heavenlyyshecomes]

hi dear!!! if you’re still up for the book recs: 🪞

hi hi i love this emoji very much omg will recommend the mirror and the palette by jennifer higgie !!

[ghoulierstudio]

Happy accidental discovery

[anja04blog]

How did the Gorilla Girls combine feminism and art?

Chapter 1 – What is feminism and why is it needed in art?

Over the years feminism has started to become associated with negative connotations, and those who call themselves a feminist are sometimes looked down upon for being ‘too dramatic’ or ‘attention seeking’, even by other women. As Emma Watson stated in her speech on gender equality at the United Nations in 2014, ‘..I have realized that fighting for women’s rights has too often become synonymous with man hating..’. Feminism by definition is the belief that men and women should have equal rights, and aims to establish and define the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism has grown and adapted I many different areas of today’s society, but in this essay, I want to focus on a particular group that has helped raise awareness for it within the art world.

Throughout art history there is evidence of just how overlooked and uncredited women have been in the art world. For example, In H.W. Janson’s ‘History of art’ first published in 1962 only 27 of the 318 artist included in the book are women. This book has sold more than 4 million copies in fifteen different languages, each one lacking in female representation. The impression books like this give are that work created by female artists hold far less value than the work produced by men. Thinking back now, even in school we learnt about very few female artists in comparison to male ones. As Jennifer Higgie writes in her book ‘The Mirror and the Pallet’ ,’History is a story told in words: if women aren’t mentioned in books, they may as well have never existed’.

In early years women did not have access to the materials and opportunities to create, given that all they had belonged to their husband upon marriage. This has led to a great blank space in art history, where many influential works created by women has either gone uncredited or overlooked simply because of the artist’s sex. For example, in recent years, New York’s Metropolitan Museum discovered that a portrait of a young woman drawing, which eighteenth-century painter Jacques-Louis David had previously been given credit for, was in fact done by a female artist named Marie-Denise Villers (1774-1821). It is examples like this that prove just how much of our art history may be wrong, is eye-opening to think about just how many pieces of work may be hanging in museums with someone else’s name wrongfully upon it.

Chapter 2 - Who are the Guerilla Girls?

The Guerilla Girls are a group of female artists who don gorilla masks in order to anonymously create artwork based on the idea of feminism and discrimination within the art world. In 1998, in their new book the Guerrilla Girls wrote, ‘We are a group of women artists and art professionals who fight discrimination. We’re the conscience of the art world, counterparts to the mostly male traditions of anonymous do-gooders like Robin Hood, Batman, and the Lone Ranger. We have produced over 80 posters, printed projects, and actions that expose sexism and racism in the art world and culture at large… We use humor��� to prove that feminists can be funny… We could be anyone; we are everywhere.’ This particular piece of the quote ‘..We could be anyone; we are everywhere’ really speaks to not only their movement, but feminism as a whole; It is everywhere just like sexism and discrimination. The Guerrilla Girls drew attention to feminism and made it seem like a glamorous club that anyone could join.

The groups decision to remain anonymous is pointedly connected to the history of women in art, It speaks to how in the 1980s many art history courses did not accept a single female artis, every part of their group is a pointed remark at the art world. The members also adopted pseudonyms lifted from real women from throughout art history, who they felt deserved greater recognition and respect including Hannah Hoch, Alice Neel, and Rosalba Carriera. Their role was cemented within the art world when several major organizations supported their cause. In 1986 The Cooper Union organized several panel discussions with art critics, dealers, and curators who made suggestions on ways of addressing the gender divide in art collections.

Chapter 3 - How has their art influenced the world? To create their artworks the Guerrilla Girls use bold visuals, damning headlines and harsh statistics as a way to expose bias and corruption in art, film, politics and pop culture.

One piece of work the Guerrilla Girls have created is their ‘ManifestA’, which outlines what they expect and wish to see not just in museums but also from the artworld itself. One of their points states: ‘CAST OUT institutional racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia and colonialism too.’ Here the Guerrilla Girls are using feminism to try and redefine the art world and create a safe and inclusive community for everyone to be themselves and express that through their art form.

‘Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into The Met. Museum?’ Is probably the groups most recognisable piece of work to date. The piece features a nude lifted Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque, 1814. They converted the nude into black and white and placed one of their signature gorilla masks upon the figure. The posters statistic drew light to the number of nudes (85%) with the number of women artists (5%) in the Met Museum. This piece was designed with bold visuals and a screaming headline to draw attention to the objectification of women in this prominent art institution. As this poster was plastered all over New York, there was no way for the museum to hide from it and the response it got from the public. Prior to this piece, the groups' work had been primarily monochrome text work, utilizing typography to draw people's attention to the facts. However, this piece uses vivid colors and provocative imagery to draw people in. Choosing to use the figure from Ingres’ work to provoke a reaction in the public was smart, calculated, and got the response they were hoping for. It made people think, it made people question, and most importantly, it made people angry. People spoke up about this piece and it gained a lot of traction as it was figures from such an influential art collection. The injustice this quote represented shone a light on just how flawed the industry is.

In conclusion, The Guerrilla girls were able to overcome gender stereotypes and create art which addressed the inequalities that lie within the art world. The group proved to women artists in the 1980s, who felt their careers were precarious enough that they could not succeed as artists and fight the feminist battle too, that doing both was possible. They completely transformed the relationship between art and politics. They influenced a generation of critics and curators to be more inclusive of women and minorities, changing the future of the art world forever. The Guerilla Girls’ influence in undeniable. The work this group created has helped pave the way for so many different groups such as Pussy Riot, a feminist punk rock collective. Whilst this group are influenced by The Guerrilla Girls, they speak out in a different way, using politically loaded lyrics to address LGBTQ rights and feminism. Whilst there are still strides to be taken in creating equality between the sexes and abolishing discrimination within the art world, seemingly small movements like the work this group created, can grow and lead to profound change. (images not included)