Rech meticulously unpacks divergent audiences and conflicting goals for Beck’s self-portrait. Beck’s visual expression of admiration for these seventeenth-century painters aligned with that of emerging Nordic artists, such as Ernst Josephson and Hugo Birger (77–79). The author demonstrates that the composition and style of Beck’s self-portrait, her Salon debut, paid homage to canonical painters who were popular at the end of the nineteenth century, including Diego Velázquez and Rembrandt van Rijn (69–72). Rech carefully dissects visual evidence, including costume and subject matter. Rech’s first chapter conceptualizes the manipulation of form, subject, and genre by Nordic women artists in the 1880s to construct a professional and social image “in relation to her contemporary audience and in relation to a pictorial tradition” (65). Her argument builds from Oskar Bätschmann’s theory of the exhibition artist gender, queer, and Scandinavian specialists as well as cultural historians and philosophers who theorize performance and spatial environment as related to the body. Rech includes a good historiographic essay in which the author clearly positions the current project. Rech’s introduction provides brief biographies of the principal artists and identifies points of intersection in their careers. Artwork in the public domain available from Wikimedia Commons. 2, Hanna Hirsch-Pauli, Portrait of Venny Soldan-Brofeldt, 1887. Rech supplements the atelier focus with comparative analysis of Swede Eva Bonnier’s studio interior (1886) and Norwegian Asta Nørregaard’s 1883 self-portrait. įig. 2), which Rech furthermore concludes “unites all the central concerns” of the book (267). Rech anchors the final chapter, “The Studio Scene,” on Hanna Hirsch-Pauli’s painting of The Artist Venny Soldan-Brofeldt (1886–87, fig. 1), a later portrait from 1885, and a situational scene by Bauck depicting Wegmann painting a portrait (1889). Chapter 2, “The Friendship Image,” explores the paintings by Dane Bertha Wegmann of Swede Jeanna Bauck, including the 1881 example featured on the book cover (fig. Chapter 1, “The Self-Portrait,” centers on Swedish expatriate Julia Beck’s 1880 painting executed and exhibited in Paris. Rech structures each section on exemplars of “painterly self-fashioning,” with extended analysis of seven paintings over three chapters. Furthermore, the author asserts that the visualized connections between the women elucidate a strategic network eclipsed or erased in extant monographs, collective exhibitions, and theoretical approaches. In her introduction, Rech summarizes her project: “In short, this book is about women who used painting to stage interventions into the representation of the artist” (14). The book’s publication is timely in that it also coincides with relevant exhibitions, including the forthcoming Hirschsprung Collection retrospective on Bertha Wegmann. Makadam published this book in 2021, concurrent with Rech’s defense of the project as her dissertation at Stockholms universitet. Her analysis of paintings and letters as evidence of self-fashioning benefits from her access to previously unpublished archives and new acquisitions of works by women made by major Nordic cultural institutions. Through her narrow focus on a handful of mostly Swedish middle-class painters and sculptors active in the 1880s, Rech ably examines women’s networks, studios, travels, and personal and professional artistic development. summary in Swedish.ģ26 kr hardcover free open-access PDF at .Ĭarina Rech’s Becoming Artists integrates thoughtful and probing epistolary analysis and careful observation of select self-portraits, paintings of artists’ studios, and friendship paintings to interrogate how a pioneering generation of Nordic women painters fashioned their roles as worker-artists using emulation, collaboration, and appropriation. bibliography, notes, index of names, and 6 pp. Göteborg and Stockholm: Makadam Förlag, 2021.Ĥ48 pp. Becoming Artists: Self-Portraits, Friendship Images and Studio Scenes by Nordic Women Painters in the 1880s.
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