Book Review

Canada and the United States

Laura R. Prieto. At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 292. $39.95.

If the discovery that someone else is writing on your topic is every scholar's nightmare, Kirsten Swinth and Laura R. Prieto must have slept badly indeed, for their interests in the professionalization of American women artists from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1920s are very close. Both drew heavily on archival collections at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, and they came to similar conclusions about women's goals, strategies, successes, and disappointments in their art training and professional careers in the face of changing social attitudes and trends in art. Both thoughtfully address an issue that has heretofore been neglected by women's historians and art historians.	1
Swinth's book draws on records of successful women artists associated with the New York Arts Students League, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts School, and Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. It traces the success of two generations of professionals, relying mostly heavily on the best-known women, such as Mary Cassatt, Cecelia Beaux, and Ellen Day Hale. Swinth weds women's history with art history from the post-Civil War era to the end of the 1920s in a sophisticated fashion, to measure young women's art schooling and careers against those of male counterparts. Ambitious middle-class young ladies flocked to the new American and European art academies in the 1870s, determined to reject accusations of dilettantism and indiscretion and to acquire the most rigorous training, especially in figure drawing, which received highest respect in that era. Despite constraints on women's behavior and sexism among some faculty members, women networked at home and abroad and made the most of their opportunities to study, win prizes at exhibitions, and execute commissions. Their success can be observed by the U.S. Census of 1890, which recorded a peak in their participation as artists, sculptors, and art teachers at forty-eight percent. They managed both to avoid scandal and to develop skills to produce art consistent with the goals of their profession: to transmit Anglo-Saxon standards of refinement that would morally uplift their viewers, thus civilizing and unifying all of American society.	2
Nevertheless, obstacles to fame and fortune remained formidable. Rich industrialists preferred to buy Old Masters over home-grown talent, and many women turned to less prestigious arenas (water color, pastels, home decoration, and portraits) to pay the bills. But male peers soon did the same and marginalized women from new associations and dealers of galleries.	3
No sooner had women matched men artists in persuading an American market that they had the qualities to produce satisfying work than critics changed the rules. Calling for a virile modernism to match President Theodore Roosevelt's vigor in the White House, art experts repudiated the notion of art for refinement as merely low-brow, feminine, and entertaining. They called instead for an individualistic, bold self-expression that supposedly only men artists could produce, despite the undeniable power of such independent-minded women artists as Georgia O'Keeffe, Marguerite Zorach, and Theresa Bernstein. The major teachers and taste makers at the turn of the century preached a defeminization of painting that Swinth labels elitist, antidemocratic, difficult to interpret, often hostile to mass consumption, and unconcerned with universality or the potential for unifying all classes through a common culture.	. . .