Critical Voices: Women and Art Criticism in Britain, 1880–1905 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Critical Voices: Women and Art Criticism in Britain, 1880-1905 Julie F. Codell (bio) Meaghan Clarke, Critical Voices: Women and Art Criticism in Britain, 1880-1905 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. xi + 214 , 37 illus.,$99.95/£55.00 cloth. Meaghan Clarke's groundbreaking study of Victorian women art writers examines their writing from different aesthetic and institutional frameworks and across all levels of periodicals-art journals, women's magazine, quarterlies, monthlies and newspapers-and reveals a female presence in art criticism more active than Victorians and subsequent scholars have recognized. "Both visually and textually, art was crucial to the market of journals, but simultaneously journals were crucial to the art market" (2), Clarke observes, succinctly articulating a vital relationship that embraced class, symbolic capital, and cultural nationalism. Furthermore, Clarke's explorations of the intersections among Victorian feminisms, art writing, and periodicals reveal women critics' elastic views about gender, itself ever-changing during the period. Positioned within and outside institutional loci (Royal Academy, other artists' professional organizations, journalism, individual periodicals' cultural authority), women art critics occupied diverse positions and used their writing about art as a vehicle for social and political, as well as aesthetic, agendas. Clarke deploys a notion of "tactic" as a planned means of intervening without having authority to do so (from Michel de Certeau), often from a border or "para-site" that is marginal yet subversive (from Rey Chow). Chapter 2 surveys Victorian art journalism, several women critics' careers, books for women on professions, editors' attitudes, women in public spaces, the role of university education as journalism became professionalized, and how women negotiated low pay, marriage [End Page 256] (their names were trademarks), and New Journalism. Clarke explores women's criticism in relation to institutions like salons and socio-professional networks both mixed in gender and all-female, to underscore the irony that women "were establishing the field and marginalized within it" (18-19) in "a complexity of masculine and feminine performances, concealing and revealing named identities, a tactic which enabled women to claim discursive authority in a variety of contexts" (23). Here Clarke conveys women's unstable positions on several fronts (femininity, journalism). Chapter 3 focuses on Alice Meynell's prolific career. Meynell and husband Wilfrid wrote under the pseudonyms Alice and John Oldcastle, which disguised them when promoting Wilfrid's work and that of their artist friends. Meynell also wrote anonymously for many different periodicals, including the Pen, the Weekly Register, Merry England, the Magazine of Art, the Pall Mall Gazette, the National Observer, and the World. Her growing reputation assisted that of her popular painter-sister Elizabeth Thompson Butler. (Such puffing was so widespread that Meynell's was hardly unusual.) Meynell contributed to popular artists' biographies and studio interviews by writing on male academicians and women artists. She championed the Royal Academy and was engaged in debates over the nude which, as Clarke notes, were often about women seeing or painting nudes, not nudes per se. Meynell argued that women were not morally compromised by seeing nudes. Admiring the Pre-Raphaelites, Meynell also appreciated impressionism and French-influenced Newlyn painters. She later devoted herself exclusively to suffrage. Chapter 4 is on Florence Fenwick Miller, who wrote in over a dozen periodicals between the 1870s and the 1910s. From a less cultured family than Meynell's, she received a medical degree from the Ladies' Medical College, ran for the London School Board, and became a "platform" woman. She focused on women artists' biographies, which Meynell did not, promoting those she considered "great" (her A-list included Rosa Bonheur, Louise Jopling, Henrietta Rae, Henrietta Ward). Writing a women's column in the London Illustrated News, she "conjoined dress and art, slipping between the two discourses" (94). As editor of the Woman's Signal (1895-99), she wrote to promote feminism through biographies and reviews of women's art in international exhibitions, largely ignored or denigrated by male critics. Through art, she promoted women's equality to a broad readership. Chapter 5 focuses on American Elizabeth Robins Pennell, who, like Meynell, worked in collaboration with her British husband. Clarke offers new archival information about Pennell's authorship, information badly needed for many women journalists. Unlike...