six artists worth remembering
Gwen John, Fanny Fleury, Olga Boznańska, Alice Pike Barney, Maria Wiik, and Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz.
Brilliant, talented, determined artists.
Brilliant, talented, determined women.
These women trained at the finest academies in Europe, exhibited at the Paris Salon, won medals for their work and earned the praise of critics. They stood by and studied with some of the most celebrated male artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and yet many of us have never heard of them. I certainly hadn’t.
I read of these women and marvel at how hard they must have fought just to be seen. Not only as worthy artists, but as intelligent beings capable of serious intellectual and creative output. These women lived in a time where numerous “intellectuals” believed that female brains were too small for complex, serious or educated thought. In 1886, William Withers Moore, then president of the British Medical Association, warned that overeducating women could lead to a disorder he termed "anorexia scholastica," an affliction which made women immoral, insane and asexual. He wasn’t alone in that idea, and his theory (along with several others like it) was generally accepted scientific opinion of the time.
Women of a certain class were generally expected to procreate. To socialise. To express interest only in gentle and wholesome topics. To sketch politely in parlours or play the pianoforte. Art, in a woman’s hands, was a charming hobby and certainly not a vocation.
But these six women knew they were capable of offering so much more. Fanny studied under the same masters as the widely celebrated portraitist John Singer Sargent, and yet despite critics singing her praise it is her classmate who fills museum walls, whilst Fanny earns barely a footnote. Anna won medals at the Paris Salon and the Exposition Universelle before she died at thirty-eight, well before she could open the school for women artists of which she had long dreamed. Olga was offered a professorship at the very academy that refused to admit her as a student. She turned this offer down, choosing instead to remain in Paris where she died alone, during the Nazi occupation, having spent forty years creating some of the most psychologically penetrating portraits in European art.
Each of these women stood bravely beside their male peers and demanded the same recognition. I can only imagine the treatment they would have endured, from politely dismissive rejections to outright jeers and hostility. Yet still they stood as artists, asking only to be seen as professionals and for their art to be taken seriously.
Such a simple request.
I often think about their actions and how they would translate in modern times, and it pains me to realise how many opportunities women still have to fight for today. How many places women still bravely stand and ask to be seen as professionals and to be taken seriously.
Such a simple request.
Artists have always been the ones who lead the way to change, using their creativity to challenge us to think or see differently.
These six women didn't just make beautiful art, they made a case for the humanity, intelligence and accomplishments of their entire gender. At a time when the abilities of women were actively being diminished by patriarchal "authorities", they wedged their small feet into doors that had been shut. They expressed their opinions and desires with paint, canvas, and stubbornness. Their bravery and creativity undermined these egregious theories, sparked heated conversations, and forced many to question long held beliefs.
I won’t forget that I have dear friends who, when younger were not even allowed their own bank accounts, houses, or credit cards. I honestly can’t fathom that. Every freedom I have as a woman today has been won by women in the past. Brave women who fought to create these opportunities that I now enjoy. I run my own business, I am taken seriously as a creator, I vote, gosh I even have my own bank account because women like these six fought for it, fought for me, fought for us. They fought by simply refusing to stop painting.
Each MEMENTO dress features the artworks and self-portraits of one of these six women. A short biography also comes with the dress, because wearing their art is incomplete without knowing who they were. I encourage you to read more on their lives, as I think you'll find their stories as amazing as I do.
