Mary Delany (1700-88) was a witty memoirist aged 72 when she essentially invented paper collage in Britain. Noticing the similarity between a geranium and a piece of red paper, she took her scissors and cut out a petal freehand. The exquisite plant that grew from Delany’s work looked so exactly like a watercolor that people mistook it for a painting. She had discovered a new way, she wrote to her niece, ‘of imitating flowers’.
Delany’s collages are surprisingly beautiful: almost transparent appearances that materialize on inky black paper. They have the translucency of both watercolor and real pressed flowers. Two appear in this exhibition: a blooming raspberry that glows crimson against the darkness and a fragile white lily that unfolds its petals, as it seems, at night. They could be emblems for the show itself: discoveries and rediscoveries, brought out of darkness and into light.
Tate Britain’s Now You See Us spans four centuries of art by more than a hundred female artists. It is littered with revelations. Here are miniatures of Levina Teerlinc, the Flemish ‘paintrix’ at the court of Elizabeth I, including one of the young Gloriana with telltale red eyebrows attributed to Teerlinc. Vibrant portraits by Joan Carlile (1606-79) show satin-clad aristocrats with watery eyes and the occasional double chin, real and recognizable women staring out of the canvas.
The poet and painter Anne Killigrew (1660-85) depicts herself barefoot, with an expression of outright consternation, pretending to be Venus mourning Adonis. Sarah Biffin’s exceptional self-portrait on ivory (1821), which neatly incorporates one of her own sharp miniatures, shows the brush attached to the neckline of her dress. Born without arms, Biffin painted with her mouth.
For every celebrated masterpiece – Artemisia Gentileschi’s memorable 1638 self-portrait with dirty fingernails and sleeve falling away to expose her strong forearm, moving onto an equally bare canvas – there are at least ten unknown names. Margaret Meen’s glorious Passiflora, sober, exquisite and horizonless as a Japanese watercolor, was painted in 1789. Louise Jopling, who studied in Paris and opened her own art school, introduces brilliant colors and seductive draftsmanship into somber Victorian portraits. Ethel Walker’s enormous frieze of naked swimmers from 1920 shows traces of Cézanne and Degas, but presents each woman as a separate identity in the hazy blue light. Yet it is just as overlooked as its sister work.
Walker has represented Britain more than once at the Venice Biennale, which ties in with the show’s central theme: women’s path to recognition as professional artists. Some never break through; others rise only to be forgotten again (Biffin, for example, despite Charles Dickens’ repeated praise in novels). Others cannot live well.
In 1839 Harriet Gouldsmith (anonymously) published A voice from an image, a book in which one of her own landscapes protests against the fact that it is poorly hung at exhibitions and sold cheaply to pay the rent. Gouldsmith once heard her art praised at a show, only because the excitement waned upon discovering she was a woman.
To that end, Now You See US opens not in 1520 but in 1780, with Angelica Kauffman’s saccharine allegory of Invention as goddess in crazy neoclassical whorls. A terrible painting, that’s for sure, but it’s satisfactory for two reasons: the personification of the invention as female, and because Kauffman was one of two female artists who co-founded the Royal Academy.
This immediately creates a dilemma: what should take priority: the painting or the fact? Should the exhibition present art on its own terms, or as evidence, as an expression of social history? It is an extremely complex commission, especially given the great success of Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt: Art and Activism 1970-90, only recently closed and now on tour to Edinburgh and Manchester. Now You See Us tries to go in all directions.
If Helen Allingham’s two cottage gardens, why not Beatrix Potter’s visionary genius?
So here is a beautiful 1857 painting of sheep on a mountaintop by the French artist Rosa Bonheur, their soft wool graced by the fine Scottish light and their spirit of closeness beautifully conveyed. It is a wonderful work on loan from the Wallace Collection. But although Bonheur was enormously popular in Britain, especially after Queen Victoria’s patronage, she only visited the country twice over a few months.
But she serves double duty in this show: She will reappear as an icon of female success in an adjacent photo by Florence Claxton. Women’s work, 1861, is a satire on professional inequality, depicted as a crowd of women walled in a ruined house, with all doors and windows blocked off. Only Bonheur overcomes the barriers and paints the view from high on a ladder. It’s a clearly literal sketch.
Claxton made a strong request for the admission of women to the Royal Academy (none since Kauffman’s time), and joined the campaign for women’s right to receive life lessons. A gallery is dedicated to historical documents and photographs; Yet the masterpiece here is not the male nude you would expect, but a surprising profile head in black chalk by Laura Knight.
Knight is strongly represented with a series of paintings on the edge of a cliff; but what about her near-namesake, Winifred Knights? The Flood is a stunning masterpiece of British modernism, painted in 1920 and therefore appropriate, but not here. And why are the ethereal and highly original blue cyanotypes of Anna Atkins (1799-1871) missing from the sparse photography section, along with Christina Broom (1862-1939), pioneering photojournalist, whose moving portraits of suffragettes would have been so appropriate?
The show is rich in flowers, from Delany to Helen Allingham’s two cottage gardens, all ready for their postcard reproductions. And if Allingham, why not the visionary genius of Beatrix Potter? Faint Pre-Raphaelite schlock fills the main gallery, along with Victorian pieties like Emily Osborn’s Distressed Lady, eyes downcast, awaiting a dealer’s assessment of her latest canvas, while two male artists lurk in the background. Nameless and friendless is terminally mawkish.
Only rarely do women’s art and women’s history come together in this exhibition. You see it in Ethel Wright’s fantastic 1912 portrait of the suffragette Una Dugdale Duval, in an arsenal green dress under a wallpaper of ridiculous fighting cocks, where Wright’s modern bravado meets that of her sitter. And you see it in Gwen John’s immortal self-portrait from 1902, small and distant, the light falling on her eyelashes in an atmosphere of hushed silence, so direct and yet so private: the weighty statement of restraint.
That groundbreaking image appears on the exhibition posters and perhaps promises too much. For even the best artists here are occasionally represented by the smallest of their works, leaving aside the puzzling omissions. The theme of Now You See Us is undoubtedly compelling. The captions (and the excellent catalogue) are excellently written. But art is too often trumped by social history in this show, with words overshadowing images.