Katherine Keenum

Art historian Christine Guth has alerted me to the time Lilla Cabot Perry spent in Japan, beginning in 1897. Perry, whose style was much influenced by Claude Monet's Impressionism painted as many as thirty-five pictures of Mount Fuji, but this intimate, domestic scene of a woman showing a picture book to two little girls seems to me more likely to inspire a story.

It's interesting that the child in the middle stares out as if at a camera. That might suggest an awareness of a fourth person in the room. Perry? a narrator? another character? Turn it around: what might the painting suggest about a Western artist in Japan at the turn of the 20th C?

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An article, Ukrainian Painters: The Modern, led me to Oleksandra Ekster, whose participation in the Modernist movement at the beginning of the 20th C is clear in her works. She either reflected or helped shape a number of avant-garde styles. A summary of her career, found at the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv, points out that she "educated a whole generation of the theatrical design innovators …who contributed to the development of Ukrainian theatre in the 1920s." And it is the theatricality of this Carnival in Venice that strikes me, both in the flatness of background buildings and the Commedia dell'arte costumes.

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Anna Nordgren—another Scandinavian female artist who studied first at the Académie Julian and then with Carolus-Duran! She was in Paris at just the time the real Jeanette or my fictional character could have known her. She even exhibited at the Salon of 1879, which plays a part in Where the Light Falls. If I had known Lady in a Train Window when I was first researching the novel, I wonder how it might have shaped my imagination?

How I wish I had known Interior of a Studio in Paris by Eva Bonnier when I was writing about Sonja at work in Where the Light Falls! I have seen 19th C photographs of sculptors' studios and their works-in-progress. Photographs are excellent sources for historical details and accuracy. But as David Hockney often reminds us, the camera does not see what the human eye sees. Oil painting, moreover, has a tenderness and tactility all its own—even in digital reproduction!
 
Eva Bonnier is new to me, a Swedish contemporary of the real Jeanette. You can read more about her and her place among the Scandinavian artists who studied in Paris in the well-illustrated article, The context of Anders Zorn's paintings in Sweden.
 

Exhibition alert: Women Reframe American Landscape: Susie Barstow & Her Circle is on view at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site from now until October 29th. The website has loads of information and images about this female artist who was as successful in her day as the men whose names are remembered for their grand paintings of the American landscape. Simultaneously comes publication of  the first book-length study of her life and art: Susie M. Barstow: Redefining the Hudson River School. I'll be going to the exhibition and look forward to learning more!

A quick follow-up to Bernhardt and Japonisme. Here's a decorated fan painted by female artist Louise Abbéma portraying Sarah Bernhardt in a kimono. What better to inspire some detail or other for a new story set among women in Paris at the time of the 1889 Universal Exposition? For more about the vogue among Western artists for painting Asian-influenced fans, click here.
 
Image via Wikipedia Commons.

Almost a year ago, on February 28, 2022, Russian forces destroyed the local history museum in the city of Ivankiv northwest of Kyiv. It was a house museum and held many works by Ukrainian folk artist, Maria Prymachenko. Neighbors and staff managed to save at least fourteen of her paintings. By September 2022, an Exhibition of Rescued Paintings by Maria Prymachenko was held in Kyiv. You can read more about her in Flowers for Peace: The Spirited Art of Ukrainian Artist Maria Prymachenko That is Now Becoming a Symbol of Hope. For the darker undertow in her work, see Cannibalism and genocide: the horrific visions of Ukraine's best loved artist. If only flowers, birds, and the sun were army enough!

Exhibition alert: The Ring, by American artist (and opera singer) Suzy Frelinghuysen is featured in Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art, a show at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, open through March 19, 2023. You can read more about this painting and the show here and more about the fascinating artist and her husband here.

An article, Hilma af Klint: Swedish mystic hailed as the true pioneer of abstract art, in the Guardian calls attention to a new biography of and film about a woman artist who flourished in the early 20th C. She still astonishes today. At first sight, her work reminded me of Agnes Pelton's—and it came forty years earlier. If she is as new to you as she is to me, I recommend Hilma af Klint's Visionary Paintings, a review of the 2018 show at the Guggenheim by the late Peter Schjeldahl. As a quick introduction to her work, it is informative, well illustrated, and as always with Schjeldahl lively and engaging. Image via Open Culture post on the publication of the af Klint catalogue raisonné.

For a fantasy story I am writing, I've been reading up on the gemstone Lapis lazuli and came across a story in ChemistryWorld— Blue teeth reveal medieval nun's artistic talent. Yippee! The archeological discovery of a particle of ultramarine pigment in the nun's dental tartar offered material proof that nuns worked as illuminators by at least the late Middle Ages. The finding is also covered in Harvard Magazine's Manuscripts Illuminated…by Women. It's of no use to me for my story, but, oh, what about in future?!?

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