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The Life of Lady Art Students: Changing Art Education at the Turn of the CenturyAuthor(s): J. Diane RadyckiSource: Art Journal, Vol. 42, No. 1, The Education of Artists (Spring, 1982), pp. 9-13Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776485Accessed: 25/08/2008 07:07

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The Life of Lady Art Students:

Changing Art Education at the

Turn of the Century

J. Diane Radycki

he most popular romance in art history is the exciting bohemian life of artists and

art students in Paris at the turn of the century. Not all of the characters in this romance, however, could lead the attractive life. Clive Holland, in "Lady Art Students' Life in Paris" (The Studio, 1903), gives us another picture.

The lady art students of the present day are going to Paris in increasing numbers. That the life they lead there differs from that led by their male companions, both as regards its freedom and its strenuousness goes without saying.... She lives a solitary existence, varied only by the daily visit to the school or atelier; the incursions of artist friends (if she be emancipated these will be of both sexes); the occasional visit to a place of amusement, when an escort is available; or the equally occasional dinner at a restaurant. (pp. 225-26, then p. 228)

Female art students were not socially free in the bohemian paradise and, in Paris, a restricted social life was an artistic deprivation. The revolutionary generations of artists who con- gregated in the art schools and ateliers of Paris also congregated in its cafes. Away from the watchful eyes of conservative masters, they could freely argue among themselves and push each other towards more radical visions.

Clive Holland notes that

The stronger natures among the girl art students will probably decide upon attending one of the mixed classes, and there they will work shoulder to shoulder with their brother art students, drawing from the costume or the living model in a common spirit of studenthood and camaraderie.

A few years earlier it had not been possible for women and men to work together in classes, life drawing or otherwise. In fact, if there was a

Fig. 1 Women's Studio, Paris, c. 1900.

bohemian way of life for "lady art students," it was not their fraternization with men, but their banding together to fight discriminatory edu- cation, in opposition to many male art students as well as academicians.

ineteen hundred and three, the year of Holland's article, was a landmark for

French women artists. For the first time they could compete for the Prix de Rome. This step toward egalite in education was taken by the Academy at a time when its influence in the art world had diminished considerably. But it was not an anemic system or an awakening con- science that made the Ecole open its doors. It was women, organized as the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs, who "stormed the erst- while impregnable citadel of the Beaux-Arts."'

The Union des Femmes was founded in 1881 by the fifty-six-year-old sculptor, Mme.

Leon Bertaux, herself the daughter of a sculptor. Within a decade of its founding, the organiza- tion had more than 400 members and was holding annual exhibitions in the spacious Palais des Champs Elysees. The Union's goals were set out in the first issue of its newsletter:

First, to mount annual exhibitions of members' work; second, to represent and defend the interests of its members'; third, to establish a sense of solidarity among women artists; fourth, to contribute to raising the artistic level of women's work; fifth, to nurture to the best possible advan- tage the innate and acquired talents of women artists.2

"The best possible advantage" was defined as an Ecole des Beaux-Arts education, and to this end the Union engaged in a twenty-year struggle with the French art establishment.

Spring 1982 9

The "strong efforts... necessary to get women admitted" were made under the leadership of the Union's second president, Virginie Demont- Breton, daughter of the painter Jules Breton.3 In her autobiography, Demont-Breton says that after receiving her second Salon medal she pledged herself to securing the entrance of women to the Ecole and their participation in the concours leading to the Prix de Rome. Seven years later, on May 10, 1890, she and Mme. Bertaux were finally granted their first audience with a commission from the Ecole. The thirty-one-year-old Demont-Breton was "expanding energetically on what I considered a question of simple justice" when she was suddenly interrupted by one of the council members, Charles Garnier, architect of the Paris Opera. He "exclaimed with vehemence that it was not possible, that putting young men and young women under the same roof was setting fire next to gunpowder and it would produce an explosion that would enflame all of art."

Academie Colarossi, like Julian's or Academie Suisse, was one of the popular free ateliers of the day. After liberating Colarossi's-without the sexual explosion predicted by Garnier-the Union went on to lobby successfully the govern- ment to vote funds for the higher art education of women. However, this long fought for victory was not easily put into effect. Paris newspapers report that male art students came out in hundreds "to hoot" at women going to school the first day.

Paris was still stunned by the conduct dis- played by men only ten days previously during a catastrophic fire at a charity bazaar, which claimed the lives of 122 women, children, and old people. Adult males escaped. With their fists and with sticks, they struck down the women ahead of them in their rush to the exits.

In a front-page article headlined "Egoisme Masculin" on May 15, 1897, Le Temps equated the two incidents and lamented, "There is nothing more humiliating for the masculine conscience, and one does not know how to

Fig. 2 (left) Virginie Demont-Breton, 1911. Fig. 3 (above) Virginie Demont-Breton, The Mistletoe, c. 1897.

However another council member, the sculp- tor Guillaume, heatedly objected, "An artist at work thinks of nothing but the work itself, and in a mixed classroom it would not be a matter of men and women, but of artists measuring and encouraging each other."

The vision of such equality caused Garnier to thunder, "Listen to this sage! It is possible that you, oh great sculptor, you are made of marble or wood like your statues, but me, at twenty, if I had seen a pretty little feminine face next to my easel, to the devil with my drawing! Oh! Guillaume! You are not a man!"

To which Guillaume replied, "Oh! Garnier! You are not an artist."4

Demont-Breton was able to prove the narrow- mindedness of Garnier's vision six years later. "That she and her brave Amazons would even- tually win was a foregone conclusion," espe- cially "to those of us who were witness to the determined invasion of the men's class of Colarossi's," reported The Quartier Latin.5

term this similar forgetfulness of duty and of the chivalrous traditions of our race." "Forget- fulness" seems euphemistic, not only in respect to the tragic fire, but in light of the fact that during the male art students' demonstration "it was necessary to make the police intervene in order to protect the young girls," and that "by reason of this disorder, it was announced that the Ecole is temporarily closed." It was not merely the women's presence that caused the protest. According to Eugene Muntz, librar- ian of the Ecole, it was also "the fear of seeing women take their share of the prize money, scholarships and other rewards with which the school is richly endowed." Order was not restored until a month later, when the right of women to compete for the Prix de Rome was rescinded. With the economic threat removed, women were permitted to "attend classes with- out hindrance, copy pictures or plaster casts, or study in the library. The first examination for the admission of women was held on the twenty-ninth of June [1897]. Forty-two candi- dates presented themselves, and ten were ad- mitted. The subject set was a drawing of the Mars Borghese." 6

It took another seven laborious years of petitioning and political maneuvering before women were eligible for the coveted Prix de Rome. Some of the maneuvering can be deduced from reading the annual lists of Ecole prize winners. There was a small network of at least six academicians who supported women's rights. Of the many professors there were three, MM. Duvel, Julien, and Richer, who consistently gave medals to female pupils, who, in turn, were almost always "eleve de" MM. Humbert, DeWinter, or Hannaux. In addition to lining up supporters within the Ecole, women also took steps to defuse the issue of sharing available monies. In addition to the Prix de Rome, the Ecole annually awarded a number of endowed prizes. In 1890, Mme. Besnier established under her maiden name the Prix Bridan. Other prizes founded in this decade that were awarded to women, as well as to men, were the Prix Duffer and the Prix Saint- Aignon Boucher. And in 1904 the Prix Leon Bertaux was established by the husband (and pupil) of the Union des Femmes' first president.

Finally, in 1903, came the announcement:

Notice is hereby given of a letter from the Minister of Public Instruction to the Acad- emy that he has made a decision, the terms of which being "women artists of French birth and single, aged more than 15 and less than 30 years, henceforth will be able to take part in the competition for the great Prix de Rome.7

n 1971, when Linda Nochlin asked "Why Are There No Great Women Artists?," "the

fault," she noted, "lies not in our stars... but in our institutions and our education." Until the late nineteenth century women artists "almost without exception" were either the daughters of artists or were connected to a more dominant male artist. The first clear exceptions were Kathe Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn-Becker.8 Their education, then, is of more than ordinary interest to us. Moreover, Becker, through her letters and journals, allows us to compare the education available to women in London, Berlin, Worpswede, and Paris at the turn of the century. Becker realized that the opportunities for women art students were greater in Paris than anywhere else. In London, as in Paris, the situation was characterized by exclusionary policies, constant petitioning, demoralizing delays, circuitous arguments, and, of course, the shibboleth of Victorian morality applied to the naked human body. However, British women did not organize in professional associations when challenging the Royal Academy. Rather, they did so as informal groups of artists or art students. Still, 1903 was also a landmark for them. "Not until 1903 were mixed classes instituted, and even then a separate class of life drawing for females was maintained."9

When Paula Becker was sixteen, she was

10 Art ournal

Fig. 4 (left) MixedAntique Class at the Slade SchoolofFineArt, London, 1881. Fig5 (right) Women's Studio, Munich, c. 1880.

Fig. 6 Kiithe Kollwitz, Uprising, 1903, etching (plate 5from Peasants' War).

invited to spend a year with wealthy relatives in England in order to finish her education. "Fin- ishing" included art lessons, as it so often did for daughters of the upper middle class, and it was through this genteel avenue that Becker became involved in art. As her interest in drawing grew, and as her relations with her aunt deteriorated, Becker was sent off to art school, from 10:00 to 4:00 six days a week. She attended St. John's Wood School of Art in London, a private drawing academy with a reputation for having the most pupils (i.e., male pupils) accepted into the Royal Academy School. According to Rex Vicat Cole, who was a student at "the Wood" five years before Becker,

A fortnight was spent in imitating the light and shade of a cup and ball, followed by a cast of an ornament in high relief. Next came six outline and one finished drawing of the features [of the face of Michelangelo's

David]. After that, drawings of hands and feet, a mask, the head and bust, and finally, a cast of the whole figure. ?

Becker found herself side by side with

fifty to seventy ladies and gentlemen in the atelier, most of whom are training to be artists. I think I'm the youngest and I suppose I won't fit in so well among these talented people. But it will be good to see how far I can get, knowing I'm the farthest behind. It spurs my ambition."I

Becker's introduction to art education was to rigorous training, professionally aimed, in un- segregated classes-circumstances very differ- ent from those in Germany.

Becker's spurred ambition led her from these democratic beginnings to Berlin. There, at age twenty, she enrolled in the Zeichen- und Malschule des Vereins der Kiinstlerinnen in Berlin, as had Kathe Kollwitz. That they attended

the same school was not so much a coincidence as a fact of life for German women art students. In Berlin, official policy barred women from the government fine arts schools. They could attend applied and decorative arts schools or drawing seminaries. Typically "Schiilerinnen finden keine Aufnahme" (literally, "female pupils will find no admission"), advertised the kgl. akad. Hochschule fiir die bildenden Kinste in a 1906 German school directory. 2

School policy reflected the Academy's attitude about women accomplishing serious work in the arts. The Prussian Academy's guidelines state:

Membership... falls into two categories: "regular" and "honorary." Onlypracticing artists are eligible to be regular members; honorary membership is for persons who, without being artists, have brought merit to the academy or to art in general, as well as for outstanding women artists [italics mine].13

So after "regular" artists, an afterthought was given for non-practitioners who promoted the arts and for outstanding women artists. In 1919, Kathe Kollwitz was the first woman artist elected to full professorship in the Prussian Academy.

Five years earlier, in 1914, Kollwitz had been elected president of the Frauenkunstverband (Women's Art Union), whose main goal was securing the right of women to teach and study in all public fine arts schools.14 Long before, in the nineteenth century, German women art- ists in Berlin, in Munich, and in Karlsruhe had organized schools for women. The govern- ment obliged by offering token subsidies and recognition of the three schools. Instruction in these schools was traditional, in keeping with their (loose) affiliation with the Academy. Gabriele Munter tired quickly of the Munich Damenakademie. Because she had her own money she had the freedom to leave and was able to join Kandinsky's progressive Phalanx School. It was Kollwitz's and Becker'sparents who decided upon the conventional Verein School for women in Berlin. Living, respectively, in provincial Konigsberg and Bremen and faced with the unprecedented prospect of artistic talent emerging in non-artistic families, they were more likely to be familiar with established rather than alternative schools. So it is no surprise that Kollwitz and Becker attended the same school.

By the end of the nineteenth century, when Becker was in attendance, the school of the Verein der Kiinstlerinnen in Berlin had separate departments of drawing, painting, and graphics and a program to prepare drawing mistresses. One means of providing the fine arts education denied women by the Royal Academy schools was to secure moonlighting Academicians as teachers. Of seven instructors mentioned by Becker in her writings, six were men, four of whom were affiliated with the Academy. 5 The Verein School also provided its students with

Spring 1982 11

hrg. 7 Paula Modersobn-Biecker, Kecllning remale Nuae, iyu,, oil on canvas. ivewjersey, oullecton oJMr. ana Mrs. Alwert Unen.

female role models. The teacher who had the greatest influence on Becker was a woman, the portrait and landscape painter Jeanna Bauck. Bauck's significance was not as a stylistic in- fluence but as a strong model of a serious woman artist.

The teacher who had the greatest influence on Kollwitz when she was a student at the Verein School was Swiss painter and etcher Karl Stauffer-Bern. He recognized Kollwitz's talent and encouraged her to concentrate on drawing and graphics instead of painting. Fol- lowing her success at the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung in 1898 with her print series The Weavers, Kollwitz was invited by the direc- tor of the Verein School, Margarete Honerbach, to join the faculty. Kollwitz taught figure draw- ing and graphics for five years, from 1897 to 1902.16 Becker was in her last year in 1897-98.

When Paula Becker came into money of her own, she too, like Gabriele Miinter, left the Verein School with its traditional training in dramatic highlights and smudgy sfumato. Becker chose to leave the city and join the growing artist colony in Worpswede, a picturesque moor village northeast of Bremen. There she studied with the founder of the colony and gold medal winner in German Nature Lyricism, Fritz Mackensen. Becker worked under Mackensen alongside at least two other women students, Ottilie Reylaender and Clara Westhoff.

Mackensen and Becker's teacher/student relationship was not an easy one. Mackensen insisted on a "devoted copying of nature."

Ottilie Reylaender recalled Mackensen critcizing a large nude study Becker was starting. He asked "with a penetrating glance, if what she was drawing was what she saw in nature. Her peculiar answer was a quick 'yes,' and then a hesitating 'no,' while she gazed into the dis- tance." Westhoff, Becker's best friend, charac- terized Becker's attitude as one of "deliberate obstinacy toward her teacher." 17

It was not until Paris that Becker found her true teachers in the art of Cezanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh. Until then, she struggled under Mackensen's charge to "copy nature closely." Mackensen was disparaging of the training at the Verein School, but Becker never was, nor was Kollwitz, perhaps because academic train- ing was too hard won by women for them to be critical of its results. Or perhaps because tra- ditional academic three-dimensionality would be useful to Becker in her more modern version of monumental art.

Mackensen played a formative role for Clara Westhoff, a role similar to that played by Karl Stauffer-Bern for Kathe Kollwitz. Macken- sen encouraged Westhoff away from painting towards sculpture. As the artists of Worpswede grew more successful at the turn of the century, greater numbers of students flocked to the moorland art colony to study with its medal- winning artists. Many of these pupils were women. In addition to Becker, Westhoff, and Reylaender, there were Sophie Botjer, Sophie Wencke, and Hermine Rohte. Of the five found- ing members of the Worpswede colony, three

married pupils. Otto Modersohn married Paula Becker. Fritz Overbeck married his pupil Hermine Rohte. And the third, Heinrich Vogeler, made a model and pupil of the woman he married, Martha Schroder. Schroder was the daughter of a local school teacher. Before the aristocratic and wealthy Heinrich Vogeler mar- ried her, he sent her to the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin so that she could learn how to em- broider his designs.

"Listen, Friulein," advises the exasperated teacher to his earnest scrawny pupil who towers over him in a 1901 Simplicissimus cartoon, "there are two kinds of women painters: the one who want to get married and the others who also have no talent." Before Becker and Westhoff found themselves among "the ones who get married" (Westhoff to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke), the two friends went off to Paris together for six months-Becker to the Acade- mie Colarossi, the Louvre, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; Westhoff to the recently opened Academie Rodin.

Becker worked both in women only and in mixed classes; the latter had not been available to her since she had been a teenager in London. She worked in the Louvre, went to art galleries and artists' studios, and took anatomy courses.

The marvelous instruction in anatomy (given free at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts) will fill the gaps in my deficient anatomical knowledge. Yesterday the knee was explained to us with charts and schematic blackboard

12 ArtJournal

Fig. 8 Paula Modersohn-Becker, Portrait of Lee Hoetger, 1906, oil on canvas. Bremen, Ludwig Roselius Collection.

drawings. We girls are offered something here as nowhere else. 1

"Nowhere else" included Berlin, where, according to Beata Bonus Jeep, a classmate of Kollwitz, instruction in anatomy at the Verein School-at least in 1885-consisted of a box full of bones passed around among the stu- dents. The women were never told which bones were which or how they fit together in a skeleton. 18

The equal treatment accorded women stu- dents in Paris had been hard won by French women artists. In Germany, the artists ap- proached the problem of discriminatory edu- cation differently. Instead of taking action to democratize the system, they set up separate -but equal(?)-facilities. Well, hardly equal. Tuition at the partially state-subsidized women's school was six times that at the Royal Academy's Berlin School. And, inversely, the curriculum was shorter, the study less intense.19

The foundations were firmly set. The Verein der Kiinstlerinnen, founded in 1868, continues today under the presidency of Alice Brasse- Forstmann of Berlin. The Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs' current president is Mme. Asensio-Allenet. But given the ill repute of academic training, the question arises: were the efforts of these organizations worth it?

It is ironic that women were putting their energies into getting into the academic art schools in the late nineteenth century, just when the academy had become less relevant, when art was shifting to a more personal and less representational mode. The organizers of

the women's art movement in France and Germany won for women what today is con- sidered a damning set of credentials: gold medals, second and third place Salon medals, medals of honor, honorable mentions, an Academie des Beaux-Arts candidacy, the Legion of Honor, royal commissions, and so on.

Three of the finest early modern artists were women who escaped the trap of the academy. Mary Cassatt and Gabriele Miinter had the maneuverability money allows, while Suzanne Valadon had beauty and a very strong will. Cassatt left the Pennsylvania Academy to see art for herself in Italy and France. Miinter scorned her first academic training and ended up under the guidance of Kandinsky. Valadon had no professional training, but as a model she kept her eyes open to the radical changes in art going on around her. All three propelled themselves into the contemporary art scene in the company of male artists, particularly Degas and Kandinsky.

In contrast, Kathe Kollwitz and Paula Moder- sohn-Becker, both from non-artistic back- grounds, are not linked with any celebrated male artist. For them academic training was not a trap to be avoided; rather, it provided the necessary access. End

J. Diane Radycki, currently a graduate student at Harvard University, is editor and translator of The Letters and Journals of Paula Modersohn-Becker.

Notes Parts of this paper were delivered at the 1980 CAA annual meeting in the session "Women Artists and Social Change: 1850-1950" and at the Busch-Reisinger Museum at the symposium "Wom- en Artists in Early Twentieth-Century Germany." 1 G.C.E., The Quartier Latin, December 1896,

n.p. 2 Wendy Slatkin, "L'Union des femmes peintres

et sculpteurs: An Analysis of the First Organiza- tion of Women Artists in France," French Historical Studies, forthcoming.

3 Eugene Muntz, "The Ecole des Beaux-Arts," TheArchitecturalRecord, January 1901, p. 14.

4 Virginie Demont-Breton, Les maisons quej'ai connues, 4 vols. Paris, Plon-Nourrit et Cie., c. 1926-30, vol. 2, pp. 198- 99.

5 The Quartier latin, n.p. 6 Eugene Muntz, op. cit., p. 14. 7 "Academie des Beaux-Arts," La Chronique

des arts et de la curiosit, February 28, 1903, p. 68.

8 Vivian Gorick and Barbara K. Moran, eds., Woman in Sexist Society, New York, Basic Books, 1971, p. 483.

9 Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists: 1550-1950, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1978, p. 52.

10 Rex Vicat Cole, The Art and Life of Byam Shaw, London, Seeley, Service & Co., Ltd., 1932, pp. 23-28. I am indebted to A.P.

Burton, Assistant Keeper of the Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, and to K.C. Harrison, City Librarian, Westminster City Libraries, for pro- viding me with sources and materials in my search to establish St. John's Wood Art Schools as Becker's school. For further information on "the Wood" and its course of study, see Tess Mackenzie, ed., The Art Schools of London, London, Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1895, pp. 70-71 and C.R.W. Nevinson, Paint and Prejudice, London, Methuen, 1937, pp. 14- 15ff.

11 J. Diane Radycki, ed. and trans., The Letters and Journals of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Metuchen, NJ., Scarecrow Press, 1980, pp. 4-5, then p. 112.

12 Die Fachschulen fiir bildende Kuinste und Kunstgewerbe Deutschlands, Berlin, W. Carl Malcomes, 1906, p. 4.

13 Chronik der Koniglichen Akademie der KIunste zu Berlin, 1901 - 02, p. 5.

14 Henni Lehmann, Das Kunst-Studium der Frauen, Darmstadt, Verlags-Anstalt Alexander Koch, 1914, p. 2.

15 Ludwig Dettmann, professor, Berlin Academy; Ernst Friedrich Hausmann, student, Munich Academy; Martin K6rte, instructor, Berlin Acad- emy; Max Uth, student, Berlin Academy.

16Personalblatt (Kathe Kollwitz), Archiv der Preussischen Akademie der Kinste und Kathe- Kollwitz-Archiv, Akademie der Kunste, Berlin.

17 Rolf Hetsch, ed., Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ein Buch derFreundschaft, Berlin, Rembrandt- Verlag, 1932, pp. 35, 43.

18 Beata Bonus Jeep, SechzigJahre Freundschaft mit KIthe Kollwitz, Berlin, Boppard, Karl Rauch Verlag, 1949, p. 7.

19 Henni Lehmann, op. cit., pp. 11-12.

Spring 1982 13