Art | Hale, Hale

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Hale, Hale
Time to celebrate Ellen Day, Lilian Westcott, and many more

BY JEFFREY GANTZ

" A Studio of Her Own:Women Artists in Boston 1870–1940 "
At the Torf Gallery in the Museum of Fine Arts through December 2.

Any show that celebrates a category of artist — whether it’s women or Mensa members or the hearing-impaired or southpaws who paint only on rainy days — begs the question. You might well be wondering what " Women Artists in Boston 1870–1940 " have in common. Whether you could name a single one of these artists. Whether you’d be able to tell the works in this show are by women if you didn’t already know. And whether there’s any reason to go see " A Studio of Her Own " other than that it’s August and the Museum of Fine Arts’ air conditioning is firing on all cylinders.

The answers, in order, are: quite a lot; probably not; sometimes; and absolutely. Organized by Erica E. Hirshler (the MFA’s John Jacob Moors Curator of Paintings, Art of the Americas), " A Studio of Her Own " doesn’t make big conceptual claims about what women’s art has to tell us — it’s more of a historical survey, a look back at how Boston women claimed the right to be artists, how they developed, how they related to one another and to their male peers. What makes the show, however, is the excellence of the art: Ellen Day Hale, Lilian Westcott Hale, Elizabeth Vaughan Okie Paxton, Polly Thayer, Gretchen Rogers, Gertrude Fiske, and more deserve to be as well known as their male counterparts (who they were, in some cases, married to). It’s not an overwhelming exhibit: some 80 works thoughtfully arranged in three sections of the Torf Gallery, the first two painted dove gray, the third slate blue. But it engages. Most big museum shows are like arguments; this one is an intelligent conversation. I left, reluctantly, after two hours, feeling I had more to say — and hear. Maybe that’s what women’s art has to tell us.

The art itself isn’t revolutionary in any obvious way. Boston has never been avant-garde, as a city or (its enthusiasm for Impressionism excepted) an art center, so it’s not surprising — and it shouldn’t be a cause for complaint — that these women pioneers are as conservative as their male peers. Or that most of " A Studio of Her Own " is given over to that bastion and preserve of the male artist, oil painting. What is surprising — and gratifying — is that Boston had such a flourishing community of women artists. In the aftermath of the Civil War, women claimed their places at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Massachusetts Normal Art School (now the Massachusetts College of Art), and they played a major role (nearly half the members were women) in the founding of the Society of Arts and Crafts.

Perhaps I have difficulty transcending the typical male view of art as oil painting, but I didn’t find the metalwork or Sarah Wyman Whitman’s book-cover designs in the opening room very compelling. (Sarah, however, gets the last word, as we’ll see.) The sculptures are another matter. Anne Whitney’s marble bust of Women’s Christian Temperance Union president Frances E. Willard balances independence (the pulled-back hair and severe collar) with femininity (the leg-of-mutton sleeves); her bronze Le Modèle shows the head of an aged working-class woman bowed down by memories and grief. Also arresting in the first room are the art nouveau publicity-poster lithographs by Ethel Reed; in the one for the book In Childhood’s Country, a young girl with a wave of blond hair looks startlingly like Mae West. Reed herself was a mystery: in 1895 her engagement to the painter Philip Hale was announced; in 1896 she left for Europe; in 1897 she exhibited at the Society of Arts and Crafts but then is said to be in Ireland. After 1898 there’s a report of her losing her sight. That’s it.

Philip Hale is a continuing presence in this ladies-only show. His sister Ellen Day Hale is represented by two paintings that any male artist (Philip included) would be proud to claim. In Self-Portrait (1885, when she was 30), she looks straight at us, with her resolute, boyish face and short red bangs under a black cap, and the black fur she’s holding sets off her white artist’s hand — it’s an unsettling marriage of Velázquez and Manet with a touch of Klimt (the sea-change " something rich and strange " wallpaper behind her). The more Impressionistic Morning News (1905) shows us a very different woman, perhaps a young society wife. Dressed in a creamy, filmy gown that seems to melt into her, with a breakfast tray in the background, she’s perusing the morning newspaper. So why doesn’t she sit down and read it over breakfast? Is she just a news dilettante? Or does she believe there are more important things in life than what the press (almost exclusively male) has to tell her?

Lilian Westcott Hale is the woman Philip Hale did marry, and with six pieces here, she’s the star of the show. Home Lessons (1919) depicts in profile an earnest young girl standing in front of a globe and holding a book shut as she tries to learn her lesson; she’s so lost in thought, she seems to fuse into her surroundings. (Elizabeth Morse Walsh’s A Maid of Dundee, which hangs right next to Home Lessons, looks hopelessly posed by comparison.) On Christmas Day in the Morning (about 1924) charcoal and colored chalk on paper, is a muted celebration with its gray-green window wreath of leaves and fruit silhouetted against the naked trees outside. On the table below you can just make out a teapot, domestic tranquillity in the midst of the eternal verities of the Incarnation.

Elizabeth Vaughan Okie Paxton was also married to a Boston artist, William Paxton, and to judge by the three paintings she has here, she was more than his equal. Breakfast Still Life (about 1923) is the simplest, a pale gray study of a breakfast tray with boiled egg, cereal bowl (Hirshler posits cream of wheat), thick toast (no Wonder bread back then), a glass of milk, the morning post, all on a fringed cloth; the subtleties of color would do Giorgio Morandi proud. The Breakfast Tray (about 1910) looks straightforward — breakfast table on chair, rumpled bed, lady at her toilette, perhaps — but raises perplexing questions: why does the chair seem to block the door; is the tray coming or going (the grapefruit half looks untouched); what are the black pumps and the newspaper doing on the floor; is the lady in the part of the bed we can’t see?

The Open Window (1922) conjures Vermeer, its subject bathed in light from the window as she sits before her sewing machine. The wall label suggests this portrait is a kind of answer to William Paxton’s 1910 The New Necklace (which you can see in the MFA’s American section) in that it looks at women’s real lives. With its Oriental luxuries — the screen, the figurine, the central figure’s outfit — The New Necklace is bathed in trendy opulence; the lady seated at an exquisite writing desk is showing her friend her new necklace, but she seems bored with it already, as opposed to the wonder felt by Vermeer’s A Young Lady with a Necklace. The lady of The Open Window may be bending over a mere sewing machine, but like Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Jug, she’s timeless.

Women as they see themselves (as opposed to how men see them) is an important theme here. Gretchen Rogers’s self-portrait Woman in a Fur Hat (about 1915) is the show’s poster girl. Although she’s wearing a fur-trimmed coat as well as the hat, her face, turned slightly away from us and in shadow, bespeaks simplicity and innocence — even John Singer Sargent’s women rarely attain such depth. Margarett Sargent (John Singer’s fourth cousin) depicts herself as Beyond Good and Evil (Self-Portrait) (about 1930), sensuous of lip and limb, but with her hands folded in her lap. She’s framed by a cat, a dove, and a large-eared dog, protectors of this seductive beauty. Polly (Ethel R.) Thayer poses more conventionally in Self-Portrait: The Algerian Tunic (1927), with brush in hand, but the tunic is provocatively open, and her enigmatic expression is poised between serious woman and serious artist.

" A Studio of Her Own " closes with a little reading room where you can look at the exhibition catalogue — which is actually a book. Gretchen Rogers’s self-portrait adorns the dust jacket, but if you slip that off, you’ll find one of Sarah Wyman Whitman’s floral designs stamped on the bright red binding (I was indeed hasty in dismissing her) and a detail from a Margaret Jordan Patterson woodblock reproduced on the endpapers. Inside, instead of the usual hit-and-miss profusion of essays, Erica Hirshler has written a 150-page history of these artists that’s crammed with edifying detail (Nancy Hale, Lilian’s daughter, relating how her mother felt compelled to can vegetables, even though all Philip wanted his wife to do was paint) and black-and-white illustrations (don’t miss Sarah Choate Sears’s photograph of her daughter Helen next to John Singer Sargent’s painting of the girl in the same outfit) along with color plates of every object in the exhibit and a biography of every artist. It’s a masterful volume — don’t leave the MFA without it.

Issue Date: August 16-23, 2001