Another forgotten model turned painter
Self‑Portrait, c. 1876. Victorine Meurent (b. 1844). At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
From a Washington Post article by Sebastian Smee:
This self-portrait showed up at a flea market in Vanves, a suburb of Paris, in 2010. It was snapped up by a dealer, Édouard Ambroselli, then purchased from Ambroselli by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, late in 2021. It hangs now in that museum’s storied Impressionist gallery, in the company of paintings by Van Gogh, Renoir, Gauguin, Monet and Degas, alongside two paintings of the same woman by Manet.
What makes it so special?
To begin with, it’s one of fewer than half a dozen paintings attributed with any certainty to this artist, Victorine Meurent, and it’s the only one in a museum outside France. That’s disappointing, because Meurent, who lived into her 80s, exhibited at the prestigious Paris Salon about half a dozen times, earned her living as an artist for many years and was inducted into the Société des Artistes Français (the French Society of Artists) in 1903.
Victoire Meurent
Flâneuse, another
Défense d'afficher, Paris, 1937 by Marianne Breslauer
Défense d’afficher. Do not advertise. And yet, there she is, Elle s’affiche. She shows herself. She shows up against the city. - Lauren Elkin
Environment matters
Drawing my Days, by Jane Heinrichs
Photo via library of congress, a strip mall in Plainfield, Indiana
On strip malls:
Don’t we deserve better? Humans don’t just thrive no matter where you put them. Environment matters. Environment is determinative, constitutive; it makes you who you are, it makes you do what you do. My father’s best architecture teacher, Louis Kahn, used to tell his students to think like the beams, feel like the beams, what’s pushing you in, what’s pulling you down, and that’s how you think through a building.
- Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse
Suzanne Valadon: A Creative Life
Suzanne Valadon and her son, Maurice
“A circus performer, single teenage mother, and art model turned painter, Valadon blazed a unique path through the Belle Epoque, and created a body of work as vivid and honest as her life.” - Messy Nessy, read more here.
On Shadow Work
The Swan, Hilma af Klint
Uses of Sorrow
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
- Mary Oliver
Flâneuse
“I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping. It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing. It will be a book about envy and a book about barely visible things. This book would be a book also about the history of literature and literature’s uses against women, also against literature and for it, also against shopping and for it. The flâneur is a poet is an agent free of purses, but a woman is not a woman without a strap over her shoulder or a clutch in her hand.”
- Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women
“An American Girl In Italy” by Orkin, Florence, 1951.
The clouds will burst and the sun will shine again.
1 - Madge Gill at the Eades Family Home c.1904. Courtesy Betty Newman.
2 - “The clouds will burst and the sun will shine again.”
Circular Time
Images found on Pinterest and altered to suit my mood. Sources of images, to the best of my ability:
Dancers: Barbara Morgan’s Martha Graham photos (1940s).
Braided hair: Contemporary/stock image of elderly hands.
Spiral illustration: Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (ca. 1900).
Underwater silhouette: Modern stock/CC photo (often labeled “Underwater dancer”).
Twisted tree silhouette: Another modern, likely personal/stock photo.
Woman & children ring dance: A late‐19th/early‐20th‐century Pictorialist photograph, probably from Alice Boughton or Gertrude Käsebier.
Small Kindnesses
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
~ Danusha Laméris
Maira Kalman
Notes of: Orange
First Row: 1. Rose Clearfield, 2. Andre Brasilier, 3. Sarah Jarrett, 4. The back stacks at The London Library
Second Row: 1. Karyn Lyons, 2. Nancy Drew, 3. unknown (Pinterest), 4. Jamie Chase
Third Row: 1. David Burdeny, 2. Yikartu Bumba Turlapunja, 3. Art Unlimited Market, etsy, 4. Sally Strand
Fourth Row: 1. Guo Fengyi, 2. Mark Monroe Preston (?), 3. Karyn Lyons, 4. Les Goodman (?)
Fragile Beauty
A few of my favourites from the collection of Sir Elton John and David Furnish at The V&A South Kensington.
Dakota Hair, 2004, by Ryan McGinley
Alec Soth, The Farm, Angola State Prison, LA, 2002
Bruce Davidson, Black Americans, New York City, 1962
Robert Frank, Tolly, 1955
Sally Mann, Deep South
Automatic Collage
Madge Gill’s automatic writing and Myrninerest.
Base: The Flatiron, Edward J. Steichen
Overlay: Madge Gill’s automatic writing
Spooky Lady: Madge Gill’s Myrninerest
Madge Gill
Excerpt from The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel:
Madge Gill (1882-1961) began her hypnotic drawings and embroideries after experiencing astonishing visions. As haunting as they are mesmerising (she felt her work was guided by her spirit, “Myrninerest,” each work leaves me captivated, musing over who this figure (or figures) is, how it came to be, and waht visions Gill experienced to feel such compulsion to create it.
Born illegitimately in Walthamstow, London, Gill was raised in an orphanage and later forcibly sent to Canada to work as a labourer. On her return to the UK,, she took work as a nurse at Whipps Cross Hospital but continued to face hardships. Suffering from life-threatening illnesses, the loss of an eye and a whole set of teeth, Gill gave birth to a stillborn child, then lost a son to the Spanish flu epidemic.
In March 1920, though, her life suddenly changed. Controlled by higher powers, in a ‘trance-like state’, Gill began embroidering and producing ink drawings at aggressive speed. Later admitted to hospital where she was put under the care of Mr Helen Boyle, a progressive doctor who encouraged her automatic drawings and writings, Gill’s artistic practice thrived and was championed by her son, Laurie. (…)
While the figures in her work remain unresolved, scholars have suggested they might be self-portraits, or images of her Myrinerest, her dead children of the family she never knew. All we know is that in a letter to a friend, Gill once wrote, “My pictures take my min off the worries.”
Lee Miller in Hitler's Bathtub
From The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel:
When covering the liberation of Dachau, Miller wrote “I implore you to believe this is true” in a note to British Vogue, accompanying one of her most significant articles, titled “Believe it”, featuring a devastating image of deceased, fragmented, skeletal and starved bodies pile up on one another, their bare bones made visible by her night-time flash.
Never afraid to enter into terrifying places, on the same day she left Dachau, Miller - along with her friend the Jewish photojournalist David E. Scherman - broke into Hitler’s Munich apartment. It was here that they famously photographed Miller sitting in Hitler’s bath, his muddied bathmat evidently stained by her military boots.
A Day at The Met
1 - The Eternally Obvious, René Margritte
2 - Family admiring Jackson Pollock, taken by Sophia Mucha
3 - The Guiding Light, Harold Ancart
4 - Reflecting pool, Temple of Dendur
5 - The Roof Garden, Petrit Halilaj