Writing, Erasing, Silencing: Tina Blau and the (Woman) Artist's Biography (original) (raw)

2005, Nineteenth-century Art Worldwide

Writing, Erasing, Silencing: Tina Blau and the (Woman) Artist's Biography by Julie M. Johnson A canon, in art history, is a virtual museum of works deemed worth remembering. But the canon's very existence depends upon silencing the things on its periphery. Any center, as historian Joan Scott remarks, "rests on-contains-repressed or negated material and so is unstable, not unified."[1] Recent art historical studies have shown that the aesthetic values of the canon were expressed as well by women artists as by some of the established male heroes of the history of art. Women artists therefore make visible the instability and disunity of the dominant canonical system. But this is no reason to reject the canon; the problem with rejecting canons altogether is that they represent the successful repetitions of history. The most memorable histories of Vienna 1900 have centered on the Secession and its role as a heroic avant-garde in battle with moribund art institutions. The early reception of Vienna 1900 (its first scholarly revival occurred in the 1960s) stressed a dichotomy between sexual repression and the freedom of modernist artists and thinkers like Freud. In the images that have become most canonical, the sexual freedoms of artist heroes Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele are apparent. The emphasis on Freud and Klimt as revealers of sexual truths is one image of Vienna 1900 that persists today, but it is incomplete. Michel Foucault suggests that readings of the sexual repression of the Victorians reflect our own preoccupation with seeing sexuality itself as a source of truth. He proposes that sexuality is produced in and through power relations, and all the talk about sex is really about power.[2] No wonder Klimt and Schiele, through the more widely known histories of the period, have become the heroes of Vienna 1900. This view of Vienna is based on a kind of identification with the past-one associated with uncovering the "truths" of modernity-as located in sexuality.[3] It is a long-accepted fact that women did not have access to the sexual freedoms that men artists did, and this is one of the reasons that their imagery appears less frequently in canonical studies and major exhibitions. The rediscoveries of many women artists have been initiated by artists who were searching for art historical "mothers" with whom to identify.[4] Indeed, Joan Scott believes that all history writing depends upon identification-a selective delving into the past-in a process that uses fantasy to create coherence out of chaos.[5] The repetitions or "echoes" of history are part of this process: there are inevitable distortions that occur over time and over the generations, but identification is required for these repetitions to take place. This is as true for the established canon as it is for the new research on women artists. Austrian Impressionist Tina Blau (1845-1916), painted aesthetically innovative works, like the 1883 In the Tuileries Gardens (Sunny Day), in which she allows the paint to hover over the canvas; the brushstrokes and color taking precedence over the figures and landscape that they represent (fig. 1). But the connection of her work to her person meant that she would not be included in the universal histories of modern art, because she was a woman (fig. 2). Had Blau's paintings been valued according to a system based on aesthetic criteria alone, it is clear that she would have been included in histories of modernism during her