Review of Laura Knight: A Working Life at the Royal Academy of Arts, London

30/10/19

Laura Knight: A Working Life

Royal Academy of Arts, London

2 September 2019 – 2 February 2020

Despite popular belief, Laura Knight (1877-1970) was not, in 1927, the first woman to be elected to the Royal Academy of Arts, London (as an Associate Royal Academician) since the founder members, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser (selected, however, by the King, not elected by fellow members). Five years previously, Annie Swynnerton had received the same honour at the age of 78. Nevertheless, Knight’s election was something of a coup. It went on to take a further nine years for her to become a full member, and 30 more on top of that before she was invited to the institution’s annual dinner. Such were some of the myriad obstacles in the way of female artists at the time – but more on that to come!

Knight (at this stage still Laura Johnson) began submitting (always rather large) paintings to the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in 1895, but was not successful until 1903, the year that she and Harold Knight married. They had met at Nottingham School of Art, where she had enrolled at the age of just 13, having been encouraged by her mother to become an artist. A portrait he painted of her a year later, in 1891, is included in this one-room exhibition, showing her in profile. Knight recalled how it was during the sittings for this painting that she “first got a hint that I meant as much to him as him to me”. 

Luckily for her career, Knight was a self-acknowledged extrovert, who promoted her work wherever and however she could. She featured, for example, in a British Pathé newsreel, sketching and painting models in a mock studio, and she further published two autobiographies: Oil Paint and Grease Paint (in February 1936, the month she was elected to full membership of the RA, and which became an immediate bestseller) and The Magic of a Line (in 1965, the year of her retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy – the institution’s first one-woman show). Certainly, she exhibited widely, initially together with her husband Harold, and she also showed work at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour, the Women’s International Art Club, the Venice Biennale (1914 and 1924), and with the Society of Women Artists, of which she became president in 1932. As early as 1929, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in recognition of her services to art.

Read the full review here

Foreword to Good Figures at The Mall Galleries

09/02/15

Good Figures

curated by Candida Stevens

The Mall Galleries, London

9-14 February 2015 

and

The Downland Jerwood Gridshell, West Sussex

25 April - 3 May 2015

Women in the history of art have repeatedly escaped the canon. Although this sad state of affairs has been challenged over the last (nearly) half a century, kickstarted by Linda Nochlin’s seminal 1971 article ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’[1], there is still an on-going struggle to bring women artists, past and present, on to an equal footing with their male contemporaries, in terms of recognition, exposure, and even just pay. Prestel’s 50 Artists You Should Know (2006) includes just one female artist (Frida Kahlo).

In July 2014, Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998) sold for £2.5million at Christie’s in London. Two months earlier, a Joan Mitchell abstract painting sold for $11.9million at Christie’s in New York, becoming the most expensive artwork ever sold by a female artist. Nevertheless, the Artprice Contemporary Art Market Report 2014 showed that on a list of the 100 top sales that year by artists born after 1945, only four were women, with the most successful among them (Cindy Sherman) achieving just 5.6% at auction of what the top male artist (Jean-Michel Basquiat) made over the same time span.

It was not until 1936 that London’s Royal Academy of Arts, first established in 1768, accepted its first woman (Dame Laura Knight); the RA Schools only appointed their first female professors (Tracey Emin and Fiona Rae) in 2011. Throughout history, women have been denied an art education and, if they were allowed to paint at all, it was only to depict subjects and with media that were deemed suitable, namely landscapes and watercolours. With women not permitted to enter the life drawing room (except, of course, as the model), restricted instead to working from casts and copying existing drawings, early depictions of women by women rarely showed the full figure. Knight was one of the first women artists to defy this with Self Portrait with Nude (1913), a clear challenge to the establishment.

In 1973, Laura Mulvey introduced the concept of the ‘male gaze’[2], presenting ‘woman as image’ (or ‘spectacle’) and man as ‘bearer of the look’[3]. But what about when it is a woman who is creating the image – nude or otherwise – of the woman? How does this change things? In the late 1960s, when feminist artists began to use their own bodies as the subject – and often also the medium – this act of embodying the female subject publicly was critical as a means to politicise the personal and take ‘woman’ away from her position solely as an object of art.[4] [5] Nevertheless, this flurry of self-representation suffered allegations of narcissism and a later generation of feminist artists, influenced by poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and subaltern theory, distanced themselves from aspects of the early women’s art movement and began to refer to their bodies only through their absence or some other indirect means. As Amelia Jones says: ‘Any presentation or representation of the female body was seen as necessarily participating in the phallocentric dynamic of fetishism.’[6]

Yet women artists continue to use their bodies – or representations of the female form – to this day. Good Figures presents the work of 30 such artists, ranging in age from 22-82. Their media span painting, photography, drawing, ceramics, film and sculpture, but they come together here to celebrate their commonalities. Each artist was invited to show her work and to answer the question: Why the female form? What is it that compels some women artists to continue to work reflexively and reflectively in this way?

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[1] Linda Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ ARTnews, January 1971: 22-39, 67-71

[2] Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’ Screen 1975, 16 (3): 6-18  

[3] Mulvey (1975) p62

[4] Amelia Jones, Body Art. Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Press, 1998) p46

[5] Tracey Warr (ed.), The Artist’s Body (London: Phaidon, 2000) p30

[6] Jones (1998) p24

Images:

Eileen Cooper

Free Thinking

oil on canvas

Rachel Deacon

Before the Winged Dance

oil on linen

Liane Lang

Ars Equus

photograph

http://www.tint-art.com/collections/good-figures