Three Artists : Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner and O'Keefe. - Three Women - book reviews

Berkeley: University of California Pres 1996 346 pp; 30 color ills., 101 b/w $3500

The latest access into what might be meteed the "Significant Others" discourse is Anne Middleton Wagner's Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner and O'Keeffe A professor of the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley, Wagner began her career as a specialist in 19th-century plastic art (her previous book was Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of the next to the first Empire, New Haven, 1986). However, during the past decade she has move rounded her attention to 20th-century interests writing and lecturing on Minimalist art, the contemporary German artist Rosemarie Trockel and the three women who form the focus of her fresh publication. Large portions of the chapters upon Hesse and Krasner in Three Artists have appeared previously in abbreviated or slightly different form.(1)

Toward the extreme point of her text, Wagner explains that her intent was "to instance the experience, as artists, of three women and likewise to describe the experience, as women of three artists," although she acknowledges that "this next to the first topic has gotten somewhat shorter shrift" (p 287) the pair her subtitle and concluding chapter, "Making a Difference to Modernism: An Epilogue," foreground Wagner's determination to link her make submissives by situating them specifically in relation to the modernist movement; it is not her shoot forward merely to stipulate that they be worthy of prominence in the wider connection of modern art. Nor has she chosen as her main brief to close attention the pernicious ramifications for these women of becoming involved in creative relationships, although she consecrates much attention to this topic.

Three Artists, in fact, shares many characteristics with the Kunstlerpaare/Kunstlerfreunde catalogues generated by the agency of the Kunstmuseum Bern over the past decade (none unfortunately available in English),(2) as well as the diverse essays upon artistic and literary pairings published by means of Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron in Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership (London, 1993) to which Wagner contributed a version of the general Krasner essay. It also bears comparison with another new publication, Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (im)positionings (London, 1994) Choosing a dissimilar cast of characters (Europeans or American expatriates working early in the century) in it Bridget Elliott and JoAnn Wallace specify a similar motive to Wagner's and introduce their possess set of feminist case studies with the powerful question, "Whose Modernism?" Adopting a theoretical framework from Pierre Bourdieu and Toril Moi, they explain their rifle:

Our use of the portmanteau word "(im)positionings" is meant not sole to invoke the reevaluation of writers like Natalie Barney or artists like Nina Hamnett ("imposing" them upon an academy which has refused to recognize the step of their contributions to "modernism"), on the other hand also to suggest our commitment to rethinking modernism as a discursive and historical field.(3)

Elliott and Wallace rehearse for the reader the construction of modernism as a series of autonomous formal interrogations and analyze the character of critics such as Roger cook in the frying-pan Clive Bell, and Clement Greenberg in articulating modernism's true distinctive premises. They include, as well, valuable discussion of Marxist and feminist reformulations and reconfigurations of the foundational notions associated with modernism, greatest in quantity notably "avant-garde," "purity," "self-reflexivity" and "genius" - all implied masculine traits. Elliott and Wallace's revisionist goal - "to uncover the diversity within modernism" by means of asking and trying to answer of that kind questions as "is it sex class and race-specific? did formal experimentation mean the same thing to men and women artists?"(4) - seemingly correlates with a lock opener aspect of Wagner's project, a purposeful recontextualization of the modernist motion as more pluralist than typically conceived. Countering the standard complaints about modernism's patriarchal tenor lodg by means of Griselda Pollock and others, Wagner borrows a metaphor from the of recent origin Testament, quoting John 14:2, "In my father's house are many mansions"; it is her basic contention that, in more [i]or[/i] less of them, female modernists like Georgia O'Keeffe to leeward Krasner, and Eva Hesse made their residence (p. 16).

Paralleling Elliott and Wallace, Wagner charges that "modernism was customarily, significantly a political position for its practitioners, individual often linked to class, religion, education, income, domestic arrangements, and sexual choice" (p 17) To make her points, she chose a sway group that, despite generational differences, shared more attributes in public than not. It might have been more interesting if all of the examples culled had not been white, heterosexual, married, educated, and more or les middle-class, although they were not all of the same religious background. sum of two units of Wagner's three women (Krasner and Hesse) were of European immigrant stock and Jewish, on the other hand wed gentiles; conversely, O'Keeffe, a Christian, became the wife of a israelite of German descent. Although O'Keeffe and Hesse were potentially interested in motherhood, none had children.