A cat’s paw of a conundrum

Sekai Machache, Light Divine Sky 1, 2021. Digital print direct on aluminium. The Fleming Collection. Photo: Antanas Budvytis ©️ Sekai Machache

There’s much debate over whether exhibitions of “women painters” are a good thing. This isn’t new. After the First World War, Scottish painter Norah Neilson Gray was furious that the Imperial War Museum wanted to buy her painting of a doctor examining injured soldiers in a makeshift Scottish hospital in France as part of its “Women’s Work” collection, rather than simply as an ungendered painting offering useful commentary on war. Quite right. However, Charlotte Rostek, author of an excellent accompanying book about Scottish Women Artists, a new exhibition of 50 artworks (the majority paintings) in the remarkable Sainsbury Centre outside the attractive market town of Norwich, maintains: “it is still necessary to right a balance, for even if the present may seem triumphantly hopeful, the past is still yet to be wholly won.” (Not all the works in the book, including Neilson Gray’s, are in the show. The exhibits come from the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation (which has the best collection of Scottish art outside major museums) boosted by artists’ loans).

Whatever your view, this exhibition in Norman Foster’s impressive building designed to hold the Sainsbury art collection, set in huge grounds, on the campus of East Anglia University, offers works from painters ranging across 100 years and represents the struggles and successes of artists who also happened to be female.

The earliest work is a small black-and-white ink and watercolour sketch dated 1889 by Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852-1936). Working in the Arts and Crafts tradition, Traquair had a successful career painting murals and producing other decorative forms of art. The curators would have liked to include at least one 18th-century work, as there were several painters from that era who made it, especially Katharine Read (1723-1778, a famed portraitist who trained in Europe); but alas the Fleming does not yet own such a work. One hopes it soon will. Fortunately, the accompanying book includes these, too.

Scottish women painters faced the difficulties of all British female artists, of getting an artistic education and of resisting or surmounting the obligations of domesticity and motherhood. It began to become easier to gain an artistic education and an all-important artistic career (granting financial independence) from 1885 under the directorship of Francis Newbery at the Glasgow School of Art, but even after that, female art teachers were blighted by a marriage bar until 1945. This meant that on marriage, a woman could not continue to teach, but a man could. This is hard to stomach, now.

Agnes Miller Parker: The Uncivilised Cat, 1930. The Fleming Collection. © The Copyright Holder. Image The Fine Art Society. Photo: John McKenzie

 Among numerous striking pictures, Agnes Miller Parker’s The Uncivilised Cat from 1930 (above), gives a devastatingly graphic account of the artist’s break-up with her painter husband, William McCance. The colours are cheery, the painting vivid and dynamic, but the problem is serious, even sad, and relates to the very brilliance that created the image. This is a catspaw of a conundrum, as all women (and we all know the feline euphemism) understand. The couple had moved in 1920 from Scotland to London, to become part of Wyndham Lewis’s circle, which influence shows. The angularly planed, elegant black cat is busy drawing our attention to a book by birth-control-pioneer Marie Stopes, having just knocked over a vase of lilies (purity and marriage) and a small statue of Venus — which it has literally toppled off its plinth. Beyond the window a red racing car (perhaps a Riley) with one occupant — man or woman? — zips away. Beneath the well-clawed cat’s paws, a pound note indicates the root of the problem: Parker is fast becoming more successful than her husband.

Many successful women painters avoided the marriage conundrum altogether by staying single; others had friendships with other women that were not always clearly defined and which are not greatly clarified in this show. The friendship of Glasgow-trained artist Joan Eardley (1921-1963) and Margot Sandeman (1922-2009) is painted into permanence yet not explained by Sandeman’s large Two Painters in a Landscape from the late 1950s (below), which represents one of their regular painting trips to Arran. The bleak landscape; the rural, mannerly clothing of Sandeman on the left; their blank faces, and Eardley’s almost dislocated arm, its hand holding a pencil or pen, stretching out for no apparent purpose, make this painting both compelling and disturbing. Part of a landscape certainly; but what landscape? A real one — or an emotional one?

Margot Sandeman Two Painters in a Landscape, late 1950s. The Fleming Collection. Photo: Stockley

 One of the most beautiful paintings is Dorothy Johnstone’s Girl with Fruit, from 1925. The large, luminous and colourful canvas shows an attractive, poised sitter (Belle Kilgour) at a kitchen table, eating fruit. Johnstone (1892-1980) was technically assured; the painting is done with ease; details of architecture and a cloth in the background simply sketched; the girl’s face and direct look compelling. Here is a painter who corrected the line of the sitter’s left shoulder with rapid, almost careless overpainting, visible to all; a painter confident and quick. But Johnstone got married and had to leave Edinburgh and give up teaching. Her career, as the caption bleakly states, “was curtailed”.

Dorothy Johnstone Girl with Fruit. 1925. The Fleming Collection. Photo: Stockley

[Detail showing correction on left shoulder]. Photo: Stockley

 Several paintings by Elizabeth Blackadder, predating her flowers and cats, are revelatory, particularly a sizzling red one that’s surely a homage to Matisse’s 1911 The Red Studio; plus more recent works by artists such as Sekai Machache, help the curators achieve their aim of showing a brighter future — one where the word “woman” won’t need to be in the exhibition title, whether its content is bittersweet, as here, or not.

 To get the best out of your trip there’s also a terrific Picasso exhibition examining the precocious young artist’s development alongside a stunning supporting cast of painting and sculpture that includes Vuillard, Degas, Berthe Morisot, and many others, tucked away in the good lower-floor galleries. Don’t miss this treasure.

Attaboy! At Pablo Picasso: A Legacy. Photo: Brera at brera-london.org

Scottish Women Artists: Transforming Tradition

In partnership with the Fleming Collection

Until 3 July 2022

Pablo Picasso: The Legacy of Youth

Until 17 July

 Sainsbury Centre

Norwich

https://www.sainsburycentre.ac.uk

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