Art History… or HerStory?

Two conspicuously similar paintings of women, one painted by a woman, the other by a man. One hailed as a breakthrough, the other painted 70 years earlier.

Exhibit 1

Marie-Denise Villers: Young Woman Drawing (1801)

What appears to be a well-executed, straight-forward portrait rewards close attention with layers of meaning and some truly groundbreaking formal innovations:

The young woman of the title is looking towards a mirror as she sketches for a self-portrait. The viewer occupies the position of the mirror and so the subject makes direct and searching eye-contact. Cleverly, the white paper on her drawing board reflects the window light onto her face, giving a slightly underlit ethereal softness as the direct light sets her hair aglow. This halo of light lifts her from the flat dark grey wall behind her.

The background is made up of a grid of flat rectangular forms, the floor, the wall, the four panes in the window and the board that rests on her lap. The woman’s organic form fluidly disrupts this strict grid. Her face is expressive and perhaps melancholy.

At her eye level, through the window and in the receding space beyond the picture plane, we see a man and woman outside. Another rigid grid of rectangles in the façade of a building draws our eye to them, although they are small. Their positioning makes these figures significant and we also notice that the window pane that frames them is fractured. The shape of the curved crack in the glass almost exactly echoes the shape made by the back of the chair in which the young woman is sitting, creating subtle visual parentheses that balance the diagonal of her torso.

So perhaps this woman is thinking about herself as she practices her art, about what she may be giving up, in order to pursue a career as a portrait painter. This was not a respectable job for ‘a lady’. Women were expected to marry and supervise the home. A working woman was almost synonymous with a prostitute. By giving herself to art, the idyll of marriage is fractured. Those figures are positioned so they do the same job as a comic-book thought bubble!

This woman is not just a technically good painter. The composition is ambitious and displays many features that will be applauded when other painters experiment with very similar approaches years later…

Exhibit 2

James Abbot McNeill Whistler: Arrangement in Black and Grey, Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1871)

The similar use of repeated forms ‘bracketing’ a composition will also be seen in the works of Paul Cezanne in the 1870s, but James Abbot McNeill Whistler’s most famous painting, Arrangement in Black and Grey, Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1871) bears more than a passing resemblance to Villers’ composition.

Both these works have flattened the canvas and pay attention to the balance of rectilinear blocks of tone and colour. The figures are posed in a similar way, both at a fluid diagonal across the ‘patchwork’ background. The framing and edges of each painting are also given prominence by their composition and points of ‘cut-off’ where they meet the frame. Both paintings present a smaller picture, framed within the bigger picture, and positioned in a way that, to me, suggests a comic-book thought-bubble.

Formally, they’re conspicuously similar compositions, though it has to be said that Whistler’s is the more austere and drab. Villers’ work is much brighter and contains strong narrative and symbolist elements. Her, more humanised, subject also engages directly with the viewer and her style prefigured, and perhaps influenced, modern illustration.

So, why is ‘Whistler’s Mother’ so renowned for this ‘ ground-breaking’ approach to the formal arrangement of shapes and blocks of tonal colour? Why is his painting hailed as a big breakthrough that foreshadows the reductionist and structuralist approaches of Modernism, when Marie-Denise Villers produced a structurally similar canvas 70 years earlier?

Is it because Villers is French? Or a woman?

Some of her works have been wrongly attributed to her contemporary, Jacques-Louis David (including the painting we discuss here, which was catalogued as his portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes when purchased by the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1922) …and there remains some doubt as to the providence of this work, though experts seem to be in agreement about its date.

This means that whoever painted it, they used approaches that were to be key in the development of Modernism and were seven decades in advance of the examples cited in most art histories… (which have been retold, predominantly, by middle-class, middle-aged, white men).