Modern Mythmaking: Thérèse Bonney’s Masculinity and the Challenge of Biographical Writing (original) (raw)

2020, "Art Historiography as Creative Nonfiction" Session, SECAC

Abstract

With her career as a photographer, journalist, business owner, collector, and curator, Thérèse Bonney (1894–1978) challenges how we structure biographical writing within art histography. Her images of artists’ studios, war-ravaged towns, Nazi-looted art, and concentration camps emphasize both the objective and subjective nature of “documentary” photographs as a mythmaking exercise for professional photographers. Scholars often assume that the biography of an artist is a stable and self-evident framework to chronologically organize art-historical questions. But my writing on Bonney exposes the layered invention of self in which Bonney would slowly reimagine her life, often writing about an event the day it happened, then a year later, and again 5 or 10 years later. Further, it considers how the eighty portraits by and of Bonney, her name change to “M. T. Bonney” to appear more masculine, and her employment of male clothing all contributed to the image-making of the modern female artist. In each instance, Bonney situated herself in different frameworks that slowly panned out and turned the personal experience into a mythmaking exercise. Writing about her life requires creatively blurring the edges of real and imagined to consider how Bonney fashioned herself at times as male in order to appear modern.

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