Politics and Aesthetics of the Female Form, 1908-1918

193 Pages·2018·3.46 MB·English

by  Georgina Williams

Politics and
Aesthetics of the
Female Form,
1908–1918
Georgina Williams
Politics and Aesthetics of the Female
Form, 1908–1918
Georgina Williams
Politics and Aesthetics
of the Female Form,
1908–1918
Georgina Williams
Winchester, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-75728-5 ISBN 978-3-319-75729-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75729-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934370
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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For Michael, Hannah and Joseph
A
cknowledgements
In writing this book, my appreciation is extended to the Imperial War
Museum, the Museum of London, Brigid Peppin, the Courtauld
Institute of Art, the Women’s Library at LSE, Unilever and Prof. Alan
Armstrong. Access to relevant media would have been made far more
difficult had it not been for the excellent library services at Winchester
School of Art and the Hartley Library at the University of Southampton.
I am grateful for the help and support of everyone at Palgrave
Macmillan, and in addition remain indebted to the attentive eyes of
Dr. Jane Birkin, Dr. August Jordan Davis, Dr. Sarah Hamiduddin,
Hannah Williams, Michael Williams and Adrienne Bishop.
Finally, my love and appreciation goes to my wonderful family,
Michael, Hannah and Joseph—as always.
vii
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Women in the Frame 1
2 The Reshaping of Society and the Rise
of the Avant-Gardes 17
3 Inside and Outside the Frame: The Female Figure
as Subject and Artist 45
4 The Politics of Aesthetics and the Woman Question 77
5 From Presence to Absence: Exploiting Female Sexuality
in Visual Culture 107
6 A Visual Genealogy: Tracing the Threads
as Nodes Within a Network 135
7 Women in the Frame: To Be Concluded 163
Index 179
ix
l f
ist of igures
Fig. 1.1 William Hogarth’s line of beauty 4
Fig. 1.2 Future 2017 (© Georgina Williams) 5
Fig. 1.3 The Suffragette 1912, Hilda Dallas (© Museum of London) 9
Fig. 2.1 Of Value 2017 (© Georgina Williams) 25
Fig. 2.2 B ovril: A Ministering Angel 1901 (nurse giving Bovril
as medicine to a soldier), S. H. Benson (Reproduced
with kind permission of Unilever from an original
in Unilever archives) 29
Fig. 2.3 Belgian Red Cross 1915, Charles A. Buchel (© IWM) 30
Fig. 2.4 Remember Scarborough! 1915, Lucy Kemp-Welch (© IWM) 36
Fig. 3.1 T hese Women Are Doing Their Bit 1916, Septimus E. Scott
(© IWM) 51
Fig. 3.2 A portrait of a British Red Cross Nurse circa 1914–1918,
Horace W. Nicholls (© IWM) 53
Fig. 3.3 U ntitled (Female Figures Imprisoned) circa 1913,
Helen Saunders (The Samuel Courtauld Trust,
The Courtauld Gallery, London, © The Estate
of Helen Saunders) 65
Fig. 4.1 V otes for Women circa 1908, C. Hedley Charlton
(LSE Library Collection, TWL.2002.02.01) 88
Fig. 5.1 Women’s Royal Naval Service 1917, Joyce Dennys (© IWM) 109
Fig. 5.2 A female worker… 1918, George P. Lewis (© IWM) 126
Fig. 6.1 Containment 2017 (© Georgina Williams) 153
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Women in the Frame
At the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘a first generation of educated
women sought to correct an historical record that had left them out’.1
Although often a complicated association, the ties connecting women
with modernity nonetheless served to empower them into understand-
ing their position within the changing cultural landscape.2 Politics and
Aesthetics of the Female Form, 1908–1918, examines how the pictorial
representation of women in Great Britain during this decade contrib-
utes to this positioning, including the ways in which women pictori-
ally represented themselves. Historical periods and events are uniquely
exposed through the artwork of the era; by considering visual constructs
and pictorial tropes as mechanisms by which certain artworks can be ana-
lysed, alternative perspectives are provoked and previously considered
explanations and analyses re-evaluated. This book is an art-historical
work, with the objective of demonstrating cultural and political impact
on contemporary perceptions with regard to imagery of the female form.
Studies within the field of visual culture ‘provide the possibility of
unframing some of the discussions we have been engaged in regarding
presences and absences, invisibility and stereotypes, desires, reifications
and objectifications from the disciplinary fields… which first articulated
their status as texts and objects’.3 Conversations around the art-historical
as a method of cultural examination exposes points of view related not
only to the artwork as an object, but also to the elemental objects con-
tained within each image. Artworks can be expressive of personal, public,
or political narrative,4 but that is not to say the creation and utilisation
© The Author(s) 2018 1
G. Williams, Politics and Aesthetics of the Female Form, 1908–1918,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75729-2_1
2 G. WILLIAMS
of art to dispute previously held suppositions is risk-free; female artists
have always fought exclusion, confronting ‘limited options, public
anger and professional scorn’ alongside ‘condemnation and censor-
ship’.5 Nevertheless, female artists have consistently opted for ‘audacious
action over safe acceptance’, enticing risk in pursuing ‘political expres-
sion’, seeking ‘provocative subjects’ and, importantly, ‘giving a voice to
the voiceless’.6 When this is expanded, a clear dichotomy can be seen
between woman as artist and woman as subject, even when the latter role
is facilitated by other women. It is this considered pictorial representa-
tion of women that forms the basis of this book as a means by which this
era of history can be supplementally explored.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, ‘the arguments in art
criticism and art history’ in respect of female artists ‘centred around two
critical questions: what are the qualities of women artists’ work … and
what is the relationship of women’s work to contemporary concepts of
femininity?’7 Although the quality of women’s artwork during the pre-
scribed era has some bearing on the aims and objectives of this explora-
tion, of more import is what it was women wanted portrayed and how
this may or may not differ from the actuality of their pictorial representa-
tion. This is pertinent because during the decade that forms the temporal
context of this book many women were fighting both for and against a
“feminine” perception, in the sense that in certain circumstances wom-
en’s femininity was often used to undermine them. One principal exam-
ple of this is the opposition women encountered in their fight for equality
and which occurred both textually and pictorially. This aspect runs par-
allel to an exploitation of women’s femininity, including in advertising
and in imagery employed by the State during the First World War. These
dual perspectives are explored throughout, taking into account decisions
the women concerned needed to make regarding what they could use to
their advantage, and what aspects, when they had control over the sit-
uation, they selected to specifically fight against. In respect of suffrage
movements, art historian Lisa Tickner believes the related imagery was
‘Too “artistic” for the interests of political history’ and ‘too political
(and too ephemeral) for the history of art’,8 an observation that can
equally be applied to pictorial posters, postcards, pamphlets and ban-
ners associated with other propagandist campaigns, including those con-
nected to the First World War. This pictorial archive has not particularly
featured even in documented histories specific to pictorial propaganda,
nor in those of women working as artists and designers,9 but is an