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Thanks so much, Gill.
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It's a real delight for me to be here in chilly Canberra
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and talking to Jennifer Higgie,
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who I believe is in a very warm sunny London this morning.
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Welcome Jennifer.
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Thanks so much for joining us for this discussion
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about some of the self-portraits in our current exhibition
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Shakespeare to Winehouse,
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which is a fabulous selection of works
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from the National Portrait Gallery in London
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that we have here for.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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Another month or so.
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It's for anyone who doesn't know Jennifer.
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She's an art historian and a writer.
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You might be familiar with the Bow Down podcast,
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which Jennifer hosts.
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It's a fabulous series of interviews
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about women artists to whom we should all bow down.
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It's fabulous.
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I highly recommend it.
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And just recently, just last year,
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she's published a wonderful book called
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The Mirror and the Palette
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Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience:
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500 Years of Women's self-portraits.
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And a number of the artists that Jennifer discusses
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in the book are represented in Shakespeare to Winehouse.
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And so we're really fortunate for Jennifer to be here
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and to start sort of telling us a little bit more
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about some of these intriguing women
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represented in the exhibition.
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And there's a very good chance.
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We might sort of stray off to portraits
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which aren't in the exhibition,
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but which Jennifer discusses in her book.
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So it'll be a fabulous discussion and we've all been
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really looking forward to talking to Jennifer.
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So let's go.
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I thought what a good way to start, Jennifer
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would be to start with a quote from your book,
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because if nothing else I believe this exhibition
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that we have from London is a really fabulous
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sort of demonstration, I guess, of that idea
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that a portrait and perhaps particularly a self-portrait
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is never just an artwork.
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It's never just a representation of what someone looks like,
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but a fabulous lens onto all of the other histories
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that are sort of existing and going on around it.
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And there's one point in your book
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where I'll just quote if that's okay.
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And then I'll sort of hand over to you to sort of take over,
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if you like,
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where you say, "a painting will always reveal something
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about the life of its creator, even if it's the last thing
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the artist intended.
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A self-portrait isn't simply a rendering
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of an artist's external appearance.
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It's also an invocation of who she is
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and the time she lives in,
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how she sees herself,
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and what she understands about the world.
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And you use those phrases to introduce
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discussion of artists, such as Angelica Kauffman,
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who was one of the first two women admitted
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to the Royal Academy in 1768.
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And we are very fortunate that a beautiful self-portrait
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by Angelica is represented in the exhibition.
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I'm wondering if you could sort of tell us a little bit
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about that work and how it is that Angelica's self-portrait,
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as you say, sort of tells us about the times
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that she's living in and how she sees herself in the world.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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Angelica Kaufman was a really remarkable artist.
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She was a child prodigy in Switzerland.
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She travelled around with her father who was also an artist.
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And when she came to London, she set up
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as a professional artist and did very well.
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She was good friends with Joshua Reynolds.
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And as you mentioned, she became one of the first
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two women to be admitted to the Royal Academy,
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but she was admitted to the Royal Academy
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not as a full member, but as an associate member.
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So she and her fellow artists, Mary Moosa,
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who was a brilliant painter of still lives and flowers.
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While they were, oh, isn't this amazing,
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two women have been admitted to the Royal Academy?
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They weren't allowed to attend meetings
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or the formal dinners, and they were constantly sidelined.
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So I think what's wonderful in this, in this self-portrait
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from the national portrait gallery in London
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is that, ostensibly, it seems like
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quite a demure self-portrait.
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She's gazing at her, she's at work.
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You know, she's a woman who is skilled,
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but it's quite modest in a way,
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but you dig a bit deeper and there are certain signs
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within the painting that I think are really telling.
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For example, she's not depicting herself
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in fashionable garb.
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She's depicting herself in loose robes
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that sort of allude to classicism.
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So she's saying that she knows about the precedence
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of painting, but also she's in very comfortable clothes.
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She's depicting herself at work.
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Now this is a time when women had no political agency,
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they were barred from the life room,
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they weren't allowed to be in a room with an naked man.
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So, she wasn't initially able to get those skill sets
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that were necessary to become a professional artist.
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She was constantly patronised and sidelined,
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but still she's a professional artist.
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So I see this painting of herself at work
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as a sort of quiet rebellion in a way,
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because she's saying, yes, I am sidelined,
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yes, I have no political agency, but look at me,
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I'm a woman and I'm at work.
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And so I think it's a very beautiful and powerful
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self-portrait in that sense.
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Mm.
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And even just sort of by the fact
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that she's painting herself and she painted herself
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quite frequently, as I understand.
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She was one of her main subjects,
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she's making a statement about her lack of access
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to the training and the facilities and so forth
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that her male counterparts and that the other.
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How many men was it that were admitted to the Royal Academy
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in 1768, compared to just sort of Mary and Angelica?
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Yeah, there were 34 men.
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34 men.
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But of course the 34 men had full membership,
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whereas the women didn't.
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There wasn't a full member of the Royal Academy
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until Laura Knight in 1936, and so,
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which is sort of extraordinary really.
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And women were pounding on the doors of the Royal Academy,
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not only to be allowed to be members of it,
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but also to study there, because it was the preeminent
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art school in London.
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And, you read the sort of increasingly despairing petitions
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that groups of women across the ages
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presented to the Royal Academy.
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They were begging that they were allowed to study
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and they were polite and they're fervent,
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and they're respectful,
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but they're increasingly desperate.
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And it wasn't until 1860.
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It's a rather wonderful story
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where a young artist called Laura Herford was so incensed
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by this lack of access to the Royal Academy
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that she actually applied as a student
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using only her initials, LH, and she was accepted.
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And then when this was discovered
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that LH was actually Laura Herford,
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they had to let her in, because bizarrely,
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they discovered that it actually wasn't written
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into their constitution that women weren't allowed
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to study there.
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Everyone had just assumed that that was the case.
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So anyway, Laura Herford, first female student,
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that's, yeah.
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But I think, as you say, one of the reasons
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I think that so many women did self-portraits
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from the 16th century on,
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is that because they weren't allowed to study
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in the life class.
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They turned to the subject that was always available,
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which was themselves.
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And that's why I called my book,
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The Mirror and the Palette,
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because if they had a mirror and a palette, they could,
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they had access to a subject that they could explore.
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And further to that point,
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Hector's just put on the screen this painting,
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which is now in the Royal collection.
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It's a picture by Johan Zoffany
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of the inaugural members of the Royal Academy.
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And you can see there on the right hand side
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of the composition, Mary and Angelica represented
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as images on the wall,
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because as you pointed out, Jennifer,
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they wouldn't have been allowed in this room
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with sort of semi-naked and naked men.
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I mean, this painting is so inadvertently hilarious,
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really.
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It is.
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I mean, first of all, Zoffany is commissioned to do
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a portrait of the Royal Academy missions.
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And you'd think knowing the rules that women weren't allowed
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in the life room that he might have chosen
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a different location for his portrait.
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No, he decided to have all of the men
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surrounding one naked man.
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And then there are these rather glum little portraits
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up on the wall of Mary Moser and Angelica Kaufman.
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And I mean, these are extraordinary women
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who were blazing with life and were blazing with society,
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but in those little portraits they look sort of
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dour and a bit dead, really, like portraits of.
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So, I mean, what an insult!
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I mean, you can't imagine how infuriating
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that must have been for them, anyway.
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But you mentioned that idea of having a mirror
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and a palette and being able, and having yourself
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as the such an accessible, always available subject.
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And as you also pointed out,
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Angelica was hardly the first woman.
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I mean, the portrait that's in the exhibition
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is from the 1770s,
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but 300 years or before that,
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there are women making self-portraits.
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And there's a beautiful little image,
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which is reproduced in your book
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from the early 15th century, if I remember correctly
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and it's a woman sort of seated at a table,
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painting her self-portrait, and you can see her,
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you can see her face reflected in the mirror
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and in the portrait that she's painting.
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So I was wondering if you could sort of elaborate
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on some of those, some of Angelica's predecessors.
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Hmm, yeah.
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You know, one of the sort of lies that has been taught
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with the stories of traditional art history
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is that women really only came into their own
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in the 20th century, whereas there are strong documents,
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documentation, rather, of women painting
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since the beginning of time.
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And there's even a theory that a lot of cave painting
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was done by women, because of the shape of their hands.
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There have been studies on that,
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but this rather wonderful little painting,
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and we're not quite sure who made this painting,
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it's an illuminated manuscript,
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is really, it's basically a triple portrait
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because you've got an illustration of Marcia
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who was meant to be one of a major painter
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from classical times.
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But the painter of this, the artist of this picture
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has depicted her in mediaeval dress.
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And she's looking at herself in the mirror
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and she's also painting herself.
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So you can see herself in her painting in this painting,
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in her mirror.
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And, it's a clear documentation of a woman painting
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a very long time ago and painting herself.
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But the first, really the first self-portraits
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that we know of that are authored were,
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if we go to 1548, and there's a really
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radical and wonderful, but seemingly modest little painting
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by an artist called Catharina van Hemessen.
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And here she is, and Catharina van Hemessen was born
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in Antwerp, and her father was quite a successful painter.
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And this is actually a story that we hear again and again,
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that because women were barred from training,
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apprenticeships, academies, you name it,
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a lot of them, not all of them, but some of them
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who were to become successful artists were born
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into a family of artists.
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And Catharina van Hemessen's father was a well-known artist.
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And so therefore she immediately had access to a studio
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and also it's important to stress access to mirrors
264
00:12:13.890 --> 00:12:17.010
because mirrors at this time were actually luxury items.
265
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They were very, very expensive and very rare,
266
00:12:20.190 --> 00:12:22.260
but they were often to be found in artist studios
267
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because they were so useful,
268
00:12:23.430 --> 00:12:26.910
obviously for the tools of the artist.
269
00:12:26.910 --> 00:12:28.667
And so here she depicts herself.
270
00:12:28.667 --> 00:12:30.570
It's a rather clumsy little painting.
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It's quite small.
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00:12:33.000 --> 00:12:35.280
She looks rather startled.
273
00:12:35.280 --> 00:12:36.600
She's in her finery.
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00:12:36.600 --> 00:12:38.700
She's painting in velvet, which would've been unusual
275
00:12:38.700 --> 00:12:40.650
at the time because normally she would have
276
00:12:40.650 --> 00:12:42.120
some kind of smock on.
277
00:12:42.120 --> 00:12:44.880
But so she's saying many things in this picture,
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00:12:44.880 --> 00:12:48.900
she's saying, I am a woman of modesty
279
00:12:48.900 --> 00:12:50.250
because she's dressed very modestly,
280
00:12:50.250 --> 00:12:52.710
but I am also a woman who is respectable.
281
00:12:52.710 --> 00:12:54.600
I am dressed in velvet.
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00:12:54.600 --> 00:12:56.850
She's painting a picture of the Virgin
283
00:12:56.850 --> 00:12:59.520
because it was very important for women in pre-modern times
284
00:12:59.520 --> 00:13:01.920
to stress that they weren't loose women,
285
00:13:01.920 --> 00:13:04.320
that they were respectful women
286
00:13:04.320 --> 00:13:06.600
because to be an artist was to be a bohemian
287
00:13:06.600 --> 00:13:08.913
and could have been perceived as being very,
288
00:13:10.290 --> 00:13:12.720
to have what might have been perceived at the time
289
00:13:12.720 --> 00:13:13.770
as loose morals.
290
00:13:13.770 --> 00:13:16.290
So she's painting a picture of the Virgin to reiterate
291
00:13:16.290 --> 00:13:19.710
that she's a religious woman, and up at the top
292
00:13:19.710 --> 00:13:21.180
of the painting, you can't quite see it here,
293
00:13:21.180 --> 00:13:22.860
but you can see the inscription.
294
00:13:22.860 --> 00:13:25.290
She says, "I, Catharina van Hemessen,
295
00:13:25.290 --> 00:13:28.620
painted this age 20 in 1548".
296
00:13:28.620 --> 00:13:32.580
Now to our 21st-century eyes, this picture looks quite,
297
00:13:32.580 --> 00:13:33.720
it's a nice little picture,
298
00:13:33.720 --> 00:13:36.270
but it's quite modest and it's a little bit clumsy,
299
00:13:36.270 --> 00:13:37.920
but what is radical about this
300
00:13:37.920 --> 00:13:40.530
is that it's the first painting we know of
301
00:13:40.530 --> 00:13:43.920
by anyone of any gender of an artist
302
00:13:43.920 --> 00:13:46.710
painting themselves at an easel.
303
00:13:46.710 --> 00:13:49.980
So there were self-portraits by men at the time,
304
00:13:49.980 --> 00:13:51.210
although they were quite unusual
305
00:13:51.210 --> 00:13:54.570
because most artists at the time are working to commission
306
00:13:54.570 --> 00:13:57.990
and they're painting religious subjects or still lives
307
00:13:57.990 --> 00:13:59.940
or paintings that would sell.
308
00:13:59.940 --> 00:14:01.770
And so it was rare for them to turn their lens
309
00:14:01.770 --> 00:14:02.850
on themselves.
310
00:14:02.850 --> 00:14:06.060
But Durer, of course, had made his remarkable self-portraits
311
00:14:06.060 --> 00:14:08.550
around 1500, but they're very Christlike.
312
00:14:08.550 --> 00:14:12.000
He depicts himself as his rather otherworldly creature,
313
00:14:12.000 --> 00:14:14.370
Jan van Eyck famously painted himself.
314
00:14:14.370 --> 00:14:17.700
It's considered a self-portrait with a turban.
315
00:14:17.700 --> 00:14:19.650
But Catharina van Hemessen, this young woman
316
00:14:19.650 --> 00:14:23.220
is the first person to depict herself as an artist
317
00:14:23.220 --> 00:14:26.040
at an easel, and again, a bit like the Angelica Kaufman
318
00:14:26.040 --> 00:14:26.873
self-portrait.
319
00:14:26.873 --> 00:14:30.060
I think she's saying, "look at me, I am painting.
320
00:14:30.060 --> 00:14:32.550
And isn't this remarkable, I am a woman."
321
00:14:32.550 --> 00:14:35.940
And one of the reasons I think that she might have inscribed
322
00:14:35.940 --> 00:14:38.580
her painting with "I Catharina van Hemessen painted this",
323
00:14:38.580 --> 00:14:41.640
is because the history of art is the history of women
324
00:14:41.640 --> 00:14:43.740
being excluded or mis-attributed.
325
00:14:43.740 --> 00:14:45.930
And so it's quite, it often happened
326
00:14:45.930 --> 00:14:49.830
that if they painted themselves, then after they died,
327
00:14:49.830 --> 00:14:51.930
their self-portrait might have been attributed
328
00:14:51.930 --> 00:14:53.460
to a male painter.
329
00:14:53.460 --> 00:14:55.173
So we know they did this.
330
00:14:56.040 --> 00:14:58.320
And I think it's something that we'll no doubt see
331
00:14:58.320 --> 00:15:00.090
throughout the discussion
332
00:15:00.090 --> 00:15:03.660
is that the use women painting themselves
333
00:15:03.660 --> 00:15:05.100
with their brushes, with the easel,
334
00:15:05.100 --> 00:15:06.600
with the palette, like you say,
335
00:15:06.600 --> 00:15:08.520
really sort of making a statement.
336
00:15:08.520 --> 00:15:10.080
I'm not just an amateur,
337
00:15:10.080 --> 00:15:12.840
I'm not just doing this because it's an accomplishment,
338
00:15:12.840 --> 00:15:16.260
I'm a professional serious painter.
339
00:15:16.260 --> 00:15:17.093
Exactly.
340
00:15:17.093 --> 00:15:17.926
Yeah.
341
00:15:17.926 --> 00:15:18.759
And it's one of those things.
342
00:15:18.759 --> 00:15:20.550
And this is another thing which I think comes across
343
00:15:20.550 --> 00:15:23.070
really beautifully in the exhibition,
344
00:15:23.070 --> 00:15:24.090
as well as in your book
345
00:15:24.090 --> 00:15:29.090
is the persistence of these motifs and these themes
346
00:15:29.220 --> 00:15:33.210
from 400 years worth of portraiture.
347
00:15:33.210 --> 00:15:35.940
This need, particularly on the part of women,
348
00:15:35.940 --> 00:15:39.180
this sort of strident, really quite strident statement
349
00:15:39.180 --> 00:15:42.960
that you can make that sort of quiet rebellion
350
00:15:42.960 --> 00:15:45.090
just by portraying yourself,
351
00:15:45.090 --> 00:15:47.013
holding the tools of your trade.
352
00:15:48.120 --> 00:15:50.070
Absolutely, absolutely.
353
00:15:50.070 --> 00:15:51.990
And as you say, we see this again and again
354
00:15:51.990 --> 00:15:53.880
that women are painting themselves with the tools
355
00:15:53.880 --> 00:15:57.167
of their trade to say, "I can work, I can do this",
356
00:15:57.167 --> 00:15:59.760
because at this point in time, women were expected
357
00:15:59.760 --> 00:16:01.989
to be wives or mothers or nuns.
358
00:16:01.989 --> 00:16:05.477
They won't be professional artists.
359
00:16:05.477 --> 00:16:09.510
And so the women who did achieve a role
360
00:16:09.510 --> 00:16:12.060
as a professional artist, I mean, I can't imagine
361
00:16:12.060 --> 00:16:14.327
how phenomenal these women were.
362
00:16:14.327 --> 00:16:16.920
And Catharina van Hemessen herself became,
363
00:16:16.920 --> 00:16:19.680
she had a remarkable career.
364
00:16:19.680 --> 00:16:23.040
She went to Spain and with her husband and then,
365
00:16:23.040 --> 00:16:26.130
he was an organist and she was working
366
00:16:26.130 --> 00:16:28.533
as a professional artist in the court of Spain.
367
00:16:29.370 --> 00:16:31.383
But then we lose sight of her.
368
00:16:31.383 --> 00:16:32.550
We don't even know when she died.
369
00:16:32.550 --> 00:16:34.710
She went back to Holland and it's possible
370
00:16:34.710 --> 00:16:36.120
then she started having children
371
00:16:36.120 --> 00:16:38.610
and that put an end to her career or she died.
372
00:16:38.610 --> 00:16:39.960
We don't know.
373
00:16:39.960 --> 00:16:41.880
Hmm, and once again,
374
00:16:41.880 --> 00:16:46.880
these are all the sort of having to give away one's career
375
00:16:47.160 --> 00:16:49.200
because you've had children or because you've married
376
00:16:49.200 --> 00:16:52.590
and you've got a home to run, is another thing
377
00:16:52.590 --> 00:16:54.690
which sort of persists throughout the centuries as well.
378
00:16:54.690 --> 00:16:56.820
We might sort of talk about that a little bit
379
00:16:56.820 --> 00:16:59.250
perhaps when we come to Nora Heysen,
380
00:16:59.250 --> 00:17:01.290
a little bit further down the track.
381
00:17:01.290 --> 00:17:04.500
But you were mentioning about how amazing these women
382
00:17:04.500 --> 00:17:06.900
must have been to have made a living from their art
383
00:17:06.900 --> 00:17:10.680
at this time, which I think leads us naturally
384
00:17:10.680 --> 00:17:14.790
to artists like Artemisia Gentileschi.
385
00:17:14.790 --> 00:17:17.730
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about her?
386
00:17:17.730 --> 00:17:18.563
Yeah.
387
00:17:18.563 --> 00:17:19.403
Amazing woman.
388
00:17:20.360 --> 00:17:22.650
What an extraordinary, extraordinary woman.
389
00:17:22.650 --> 00:17:27.000
Yeah, she was born in 1593 in Rome, again,
390
00:17:27.000 --> 00:17:29.580
her father was a painter, which is why she had access
391
00:17:29.580 --> 00:17:33.840
to training materials, but she was remarkably gifted.
392
00:17:33.840 --> 00:17:35.850
I mean she was accomplished paintings
393
00:17:35.850 --> 00:17:38.370
by the age of 15 and 16.
394
00:17:38.370 --> 00:17:39.390
Wow.
395
00:17:39.390 --> 00:17:44.143
Tragically she was raped by her tutor when she was 17,
396
00:17:45.180 --> 00:17:47.583
who was a famous artist called Tasso.
397
00:17:49.020 --> 00:17:50.670
Anyway, there's been a lot written about this,
398
00:17:50.670 --> 00:17:52.200
so I won't go into it in great depth.
399
00:17:52.200 --> 00:17:57.200
But she went to trial and awfully one of the reasons
400
00:17:59.427 --> 00:18:02.490
she went to trial wasn't so much that she was raped,
401
00:18:02.490 --> 00:18:06.990
but rather that she had her father's property, i.e. her
402
00:18:06.990 --> 00:18:10.820
had been damaged and possibly stopped her
403
00:18:12.420 --> 00:18:14.460
from becoming a married woman later on
404
00:18:14.460 --> 00:18:16.170
because she had been defiled.
405
00:18:16.170 --> 00:18:18.480
Anyway, she was tortured during the trial,
406
00:18:18.480 --> 00:18:19.830
which went for about a year.
407
00:18:19.830 --> 00:18:21.480
But in the end she actually won the trial.
408
00:18:21.480 --> 00:18:26.370
And her rapist was banned from Rome as a punishment.
409
00:18:26.370 --> 00:18:27.992
But because he was friends with the Pope,
410
00:18:27.992 --> 00:18:29.160
he didn't really go.
411
00:18:29.160 --> 00:18:31.320
So he didn't really have any punishment at all.
412
00:18:31.320 --> 00:18:34.740
She married immediately after her trial was over
413
00:18:34.740 --> 00:18:37.955
because she had to reclaim her reputation
414
00:18:37.955 --> 00:18:40.173
as a virtuous woman.
415
00:18:41.100 --> 00:18:44.130
And you know this terrible, terrible thing that happened
416
00:18:44.130 --> 00:18:46.500
to her rather than crushing her, she rose above it.
417
00:18:46.500 --> 00:18:48.519
She threw herself into painting
418
00:18:48.519 --> 00:18:52.860
and she made an extraordinary series of,
419
00:18:52.860 --> 00:18:55.680
it's hard not to see them as revenge paintings
420
00:18:55.680 --> 00:18:58.530
where she depicts herself as Judith
421
00:18:58.530 --> 00:19:00.690
in the story of Judith and Holofernes,
422
00:19:00.690 --> 00:19:04.170
where it depicts the biblical story of this woman
423
00:19:04.170 --> 00:19:08.340
who crept into a camp of an invader to seduce the general
424
00:19:08.340 --> 00:19:10.830
and then ended up decapitating him.
425
00:19:10.830 --> 00:19:14.561
And her versions of this story, they're more violent
426
00:19:14.561 --> 00:19:16.920
than Caravaggio's versions of the story.
427
00:19:16.920 --> 00:19:20.310
I mean, they're very, very graphic, extraordinary painter,
428
00:19:20.310 --> 00:19:23.820
but here she depicts herself as St. Catherine of Alexandria,
429
00:19:23.820 --> 00:19:27.570
again, another woman who was spurned and brutalised
430
00:19:27.570 --> 00:19:29.883
by male power.
431
00:19:31.020 --> 00:19:34.140
In this picture, she depicts herself as St. Catherine,
432
00:19:34.140 --> 00:19:37.830
who was an intellectual, who was a Christian,
433
00:19:37.830 --> 00:19:40.758
who managed to convert hundreds of people
434
00:19:40.758 --> 00:19:45.210
including great intellectuals of the day to Christianity,
435
00:19:45.210 --> 00:19:49.177
and who was eventually put to death for her beliefs.
436
00:19:49.177 --> 00:19:51.513
But when she bled, she bled milk.
437
00:19:52.500 --> 00:19:54.210
And then she was sanctified.
438
00:19:54.210 --> 00:19:57.780
And this was bought by the National Gallery in London
439
00:19:57.780 --> 00:20:00.570
a few years ago, and then did actually a national tour.
440
00:20:00.570 --> 00:20:03.810
And it toured around to prisons and schools
441
00:20:03.810 --> 00:20:06.150
and community centres and church halls,
442
00:20:06.150 --> 00:20:08.670
has promoted discussions around the role of women
443
00:20:08.670 --> 00:20:11.880
in the past, and to discuss the role of mythical women
444
00:20:11.880 --> 00:20:13.560
as she depicts herself here.
445
00:20:13.560 --> 00:20:17.280
And it was a really remarkable, I think, initiative
446
00:20:17.280 --> 00:20:18.180
by the National Gallery,
447
00:20:18.180 --> 00:20:21.450
which only has a tiny, tiny percentage of work
448
00:20:21.450 --> 00:20:23.850
by women in its collection.
449
00:20:23.850 --> 00:20:26.760
And the exhibition that they devoted
450
00:20:26.760 --> 00:20:28.710
to Artemisia Gentileschi two years ago,
451
00:20:28.710 --> 00:20:30.750
which was absolutely fabulous.
452
00:20:30.750 --> 00:20:33.930
That was the first exhibition the National Gallery in London
453
00:20:33.930 --> 00:20:37.710
had ever devoted to a woman painter.
454
00:20:37.710 --> 00:20:41.970
So, yeah, but she was great when she, during the trial,
455
00:20:41.970 --> 00:20:43.980
it came out that she was actually illiterate.
456
00:20:43.980 --> 00:20:46.620
After the trial, she not only became one of
457
00:20:46.620 --> 00:20:48.330
the great painters of the Baroque,
458
00:20:48.330 --> 00:20:50.190
but she also taught herself to read and write.
459
00:20:50.190 --> 00:20:51.780
And her letters are really wonderful.
460
00:20:51.780 --> 00:20:54.090
She became a great letter writer with friends,
461
00:20:54.090 --> 00:20:56.160
such as Galileo, the astronomer,
462
00:20:56.160 --> 00:20:58.472
who she was close friends with.
463
00:20:58.472 --> 00:21:02.100
And she was an absolute powerhouse
464
00:21:02.100 --> 00:21:05.610
and she also had children, all of whom died except for one,
465
00:21:05.610 --> 00:21:08.430
a daughter who also trained as a painter,
466
00:21:08.430 --> 00:21:10.630
but we know nothing about what she achieved.
467
00:21:12.030 --> 00:21:13.980
I'm still quite staggered that
468
00:21:13.980 --> 00:21:15.900
it's only in very, very recent memory
469
00:21:15.900 --> 00:21:18.090
that an institution like the National Gallery in London
470
00:21:18.090 --> 00:21:21.600
has done a single artist show about a woman artist.
471
00:21:21.600 --> 00:21:23.310
That's extraordinary.
472
00:21:23.310 --> 00:21:24.143
Yeah.
473
00:21:25.260 --> 00:21:27.690
And actually just before the pandemic,
474
00:21:27.690 --> 00:21:30.777
I went to Madrid to see another fantastic exhibition
475
00:21:30.777 --> 00:21:32.493
at the Prado.
476
00:21:33.900 --> 00:21:37.050
And that was an exhibition of two Renaissance women artists,
477
00:21:37.050 --> 00:21:41.250
because there were 120 women working as professional artists
478
00:21:41.250 --> 00:21:43.320
during the Renaissance, something that I was never taught
479
00:21:43.320 --> 00:21:44.643
when I was at art school.
480
00:21:46.620 --> 00:21:49.260
And anyways, Sofonisba Anguissola who was the most prolific
481
00:21:49.260 --> 00:21:52.560
self-portraitist between Durer and Rembrandt,
482
00:21:52.560 --> 00:21:54.270
and also Lavinia Fontana,
483
00:21:54.270 --> 00:21:57.210
who, I mean remarkably had 11 children,
484
00:21:57.210 --> 00:22:00.210
but still was one of the great artists of the Renaissance,
485
00:22:00.210 --> 00:22:02.760
and she was another trail blazer.
486
00:22:02.760 --> 00:22:05.280
But the Prado had put on an exhibition
487
00:22:05.280 --> 00:22:07.200
of these two remarkable women.
488
00:22:07.200 --> 00:22:10.710
And it was only the second time in their 200-year history
489
00:22:10.710 --> 00:22:12.600
that they had devoted exhibitions to women.
490
00:22:12.600 --> 00:22:14.880
The first was of Clara Peeters,
491
00:22:14.880 --> 00:22:18.480
who was a great Netherlandish, still-life painter
492
00:22:18.480 --> 00:22:19.830
16th century, 17th century.
493
00:22:25.380 --> 00:22:29.553
We've got a couple of images of Sofonisba, I think.
494
00:22:30.630 --> 00:22:34.827
Yeah, her story is fantastic, Sofonisba Anguissola.
495
00:22:36.524 --> 00:22:37.710
Wonderful.
496
00:22:37.710 --> 00:22:39.150
And there's a wonderful self-portrait actually
497
00:22:39.150 --> 00:22:42.240
by Anthony van Dyck in the exhibition.
498
00:22:42.240 --> 00:22:43.980
And I understand as a young artist,
499
00:22:43.980 --> 00:22:46.230
he sought advice from Sofonisba.
500
00:22:46.230 --> 00:22:47.820
Is that correct?
501
00:22:47.820 --> 00:22:49.890
Yes, that's a really great story.
502
00:22:49.890 --> 00:22:52.080
So, I mean, just to give a bit of background
503
00:22:52.080 --> 00:22:53.220
to Sofonisba.
504
00:22:53.220 --> 00:22:58.220
She was born in 1532 in Cremona to an inter-nobility,
505
00:22:59.130 --> 00:23:01.530
but her family was quite poor, but her father,
506
00:23:01.530 --> 00:23:02.760
although he wasn't an artist,
507
00:23:02.760 --> 00:23:06.090
he was extremely encouraging of his five daughters,
508
00:23:06.090 --> 00:23:08.580
three or four of whom became artists,
509
00:23:08.580 --> 00:23:12.753
but actually Sofonisba was an absolute powerhouse.
510
00:23:13.590 --> 00:23:17.760
She showed great talent from an early age.
511
00:23:17.760 --> 00:23:21.690
It's pretty clear now, it's not absolutely verified,
512
00:23:21.690 --> 00:23:23.850
but there's a lot of information around the fact
513
00:23:23.850 --> 00:23:26.343
that she probably studied with Michelangelo.
514
00:23:27.570 --> 00:23:30.810
She went and worked in the court of Philip II
515
00:23:30.810 --> 00:23:34.980
and there are great stories of her starting the dancing
516
00:23:34.980 --> 00:23:35.880
at his wedding.
517
00:23:35.880 --> 00:23:39.870
I think she was a lot of fun, Sofonisba Anguissola.
518
00:23:39.870 --> 00:23:42.420
And she married at the age of 40,
519
00:23:42.420 --> 00:23:44.310
which was considered scandalously old.
520
00:23:44.310 --> 00:23:47.310
And it's most likely that Philip II decided
521
00:23:47.310 --> 00:23:48.360
that it was time she married
522
00:23:48.360 --> 00:23:51.330
because it was not respectable at all
523
00:23:51.330 --> 00:23:52.163
that she wasn't married,
524
00:23:52.163 --> 00:23:55.230
but she painted remarkable paintings when she was in Spain.
525
00:23:55.230 --> 00:23:58.260
So she married and then her husband died
526
00:23:58.260 --> 00:24:00.720
in mysterious circumstances, possibly murdered
527
00:24:00.720 --> 00:24:03.630
by Albanian pirates off the coast of Sicily.
528
00:24:03.630 --> 00:24:08.630
And she went back to Italy and on the way
529
00:24:09.330 --> 00:24:12.630
she fell in love with a much younger sea captain.
530
00:24:12.630 --> 00:24:14.970
And without asking permission from her family,
531
00:24:14.970 --> 00:24:16.380
she ran off with him and married him.
532
00:24:16.380 --> 00:24:19.080
And she was by now well into her forties.
533
00:24:19.080 --> 00:24:21.270
And they had a really, really happy marriage actually.
534
00:24:21.270 --> 00:24:23.520
And he was greatly supportive of her.
535
00:24:23.520 --> 00:24:25.800
Anyway, she ended up in Palermo
536
00:24:25.800 --> 00:24:28.920
and she was very, very old and van Dyck came to Palermo,
537
00:24:28.920 --> 00:24:31.080
which was in the middle of a plague.
538
00:24:31.080 --> 00:24:36.080
And he sought out Sofonisba Anguissola to do her portrait
539
00:24:36.870 --> 00:24:39.660
because by now she was famous across Europe.
540
00:24:39.660 --> 00:24:42.690
She had painted so many remarkable portraits.
541
00:24:42.690 --> 00:24:46.560
She was the first person to paint portraits of her sisters
542
00:24:46.560 --> 00:24:48.330
in a domestic setting, playing chess.
543
00:24:48.330 --> 00:24:49.980
I think we have an image of that.
544
00:24:52.158 --> 00:24:54.480
And, she was also, she inspired people
545
00:24:54.480 --> 00:24:56.910
like Lavinia Fontana to become artists.
546
00:24:56.910 --> 00:24:58.380
So yeah, this is a wonderful portrait
547
00:24:58.380 --> 00:25:00.513
that she painted in 1554.
548
00:25:02.099 --> 00:25:04.230
The Italian artist historian Giorgio Vasari,
549
00:25:04.230 --> 00:25:06.540
who wrote his famous Lives of the Artist.
550
00:25:06.540 --> 00:25:10.260
He praises this in his book of 1568.
551
00:25:10.260 --> 00:25:11.370
And so we see here,
552
00:25:11.370 --> 00:25:13.830
she's painting her sisters who are laughing,
553
00:25:13.830 --> 00:25:15.990
who are having fun, and they're playing chess,
554
00:25:15.990 --> 00:25:18.960
which at the time was seen as a very intellectual game
555
00:25:18.960 --> 00:25:20.040
and a strategic game.
556
00:25:20.040 --> 00:25:22.680
So it wasn't a usual one for women to be playing.
557
00:25:22.680 --> 00:25:26.880
And so Sofonisba here again in a very coded portrait
558
00:25:26.880 --> 00:25:29.130
is saying, "these are women, they're clever.
559
00:25:29.130 --> 00:25:30.810
They can play chess".
560
00:25:30.810 --> 00:25:31.950
But anyway, back to van Dyck,
561
00:25:31.950 --> 00:25:35.730
So he goes to Palermo, which is in the middle of the plague
562
00:25:35.730 --> 00:25:39.180
and seeks out Sofonisba, who by now is half-blind
563
00:25:39.180 --> 00:25:41.760
and very old, but still really feisty.
564
00:25:41.760 --> 00:25:44.070
And very unusually, he actually wrote a new piece
565
00:25:44.070 --> 00:25:46.050
in his diary about meeting her.
566
00:25:46.050 --> 00:25:49.350
And he says that he learned more from this very elderly
567
00:25:49.350 --> 00:25:52.890
blind woman than he had from all the teachers he'd ever had.
568
00:25:52.890 --> 00:25:56.550
And there's a rather lovely report of her backseat painting
569
00:25:56.550 --> 00:25:58.827
a bit and telling him how to shade things in
570
00:25:58.827 --> 00:26:01.990
and how to under-paint or highlight things.
571
00:26:01.990 --> 00:26:02.910
So, she was a great character.
572
00:26:02.910 --> 00:26:04.980
I mean, wouldn't it be great if someone like Netflix
573
00:26:04.980 --> 00:26:08.220
did a series on, dramatised her life
574
00:26:08.220 --> 00:26:11.460
instead of endless stories about women being murdered.
575
00:26:11.460 --> 00:26:12.303
Exactly.
576
00:26:13.650 --> 00:26:16.650
And, for van Dyck, to say that bearing in mind that
577
00:26:16.650 --> 00:26:21.240
Rubens was one of his teachers, is quite extraordinary.
578
00:26:21.240 --> 00:26:24.090
We've heard endless amounts of about van Dyck
579
00:26:24.090 --> 00:26:26.100
and Peter Paul Rubens, van Dyck rather,
580
00:26:26.100 --> 00:26:31.100
and Peter Paul Rubens, but not about this woman artist
581
00:26:31.920 --> 00:26:34.260
whom he admired.
582
00:26:34.260 --> 00:26:35.093
Revered.
583
00:26:35.093 --> 00:26:38.072
So much and travelled to Italy during a plague
584
00:26:38.072 --> 00:26:40.170
to go and visit.
585
00:26:40.170 --> 00:26:41.720
Yeah, it's quite extraordinary.
586
00:26:42.690 --> 00:26:44.133
Yeah, great story.
587
00:26:45.840 --> 00:26:47.423
Yeah, so Mary Beale.
588
00:26:48.377 --> 00:26:51.750
First, she considered the UK's or England's
589
00:26:51.750 --> 00:26:54.153
first professional woman artist, do you think?
590
00:26:55.650 --> 00:26:58.110
I think she's considered the second
591
00:26:58.110 --> 00:26:59.430
professional women artist.
592
00:26:59.430 --> 00:27:01.060
The first one was Joan Carlile
593
00:27:02.190 --> 00:27:04.590
and she was a little bit older than Mary Beale,
594
00:27:04.590 --> 00:27:06.840
but at one point they were both living in Covent Garden
595
00:27:06.840 --> 00:27:08.850
and it's lovely to think that they might have met.
596
00:27:08.850 --> 00:27:12.390
I'm sure they must have met, but there's no record of it.
597
00:27:12.390 --> 00:27:16.500
But Mary Beale was far more prolific than Joan Carlile
598
00:27:16.500 --> 00:27:19.710
and she left behind a much greater body of work.
599
00:27:19.710 --> 00:27:24.600
And she's also famous for being the first artist,
600
00:27:24.600 --> 00:27:28.450
I think, not just woman in Britain to have written
601
00:27:30.141 --> 00:27:32.820
a very brief piece on how to paint.
602
00:27:32.820 --> 00:27:36.150
So it's the first record with having written of an artist,
603
00:27:36.150 --> 00:27:38.850
giving instruction through writing about how to paint.
604
00:27:38.850 --> 00:27:39.683
And she wrote this.
605
00:27:39.683 --> 00:27:41.970
It's only about 250 words, and it was about
606
00:27:41.970 --> 00:27:44.670
how to paint a peach basically,
607
00:27:44.670 --> 00:27:47.223
and what kind of paint to use.
608
00:27:48.467 --> 00:27:49.770
And she possibly wrote it for her sons,
609
00:27:49.770 --> 00:27:52.650
because her sons trained as artists.
610
00:27:52.650 --> 00:27:55.503
And she led a remarkable life, wonderful life.
611
00:27:56.415 --> 00:27:59.100
And she lucked out because she married a man
612
00:27:59.100 --> 00:28:01.950
who was extremely supportive of his wife
613
00:28:01.950 --> 00:28:06.950
and he was something of a chemist and he experimented a lot
614
00:28:07.320 --> 00:28:11.430
with pigments and opened a very important pigment shop
615
00:28:11.430 --> 00:28:14.100
for painters in London.
616
00:28:14.100 --> 00:28:16.260
And he also helped on her studio.
617
00:28:16.260 --> 00:28:20.973
And basically Mary was the main breadwinner in the family.
618
00:28:22.170 --> 00:28:25.290
Again, she found it hard to get training at the beginning,
619
00:28:25.290 --> 00:28:30.290
but she persevered and she came of age
620
00:28:30.720 --> 00:28:34.290
sort of just after the Civil War had finished in England.
621
00:28:34.290 --> 00:28:36.930
And it actually was a time where, I mean,
622
00:28:36.930 --> 00:28:40.620
despite the awful tragedies of many deaths,
623
00:28:40.620 --> 00:28:42.300
the Civil War was a time when women
624
00:28:42.300 --> 00:28:43.530
who were often left behind
625
00:28:43.530 --> 00:28:46.107
when their husbands or fathers went off to war,
626
00:28:46.107 --> 00:28:49.200
had to run the house or had to run households
627
00:28:49.200 --> 00:28:52.170
or till the fields or do the work that men had been doing.
628
00:28:52.170 --> 00:28:54.810
So a bit like after the First World War,
629
00:28:54.810 --> 00:28:57.480
after the Civil War in Britain, women actually achieved
630
00:28:57.480 --> 00:29:00.000
sort of greater prominence in public life
631
00:29:00.000 --> 00:29:02.550
because they were dependent upon to run the country
632
00:29:03.450 --> 00:29:05.910
because so many men were dead or fighting.
633
00:29:05.910 --> 00:29:10.910
So she sort of bloomed at a moment of rare support
634
00:29:12.090 --> 00:29:13.560
for women.
635
00:29:13.560 --> 00:29:17.040
But again, she often turned to herself and painted herself
636
00:29:17.040 --> 00:29:21.180
and she often painted her family, her husband and her sons.
637
00:29:21.180 --> 00:29:23.190
And she did about, I think,
638
00:29:23.190 --> 00:29:24.810
hundreds of paintings were left behind.
639
00:29:24.810 --> 00:29:28.830
She was extremely prolific and again,
640
00:29:28.830 --> 00:29:31.950
she had to reiterate to her public
641
00:29:34.440 --> 00:29:35.850
in order to get commissions.
642
00:29:35.850 --> 00:29:37.260
She had to make it very clear
643
00:29:37.260 --> 00:29:39.963
that she was a woman of honour and virtue.
644
00:29:41.478 --> 00:29:44.430
And I think it was some distant relation of hers
645
00:29:44.430 --> 00:29:47.160
was a reverend, a vicar.
646
00:29:47.160 --> 00:29:51.510
And he wrote recommendation of her in a pamphlet
647
00:29:51.510 --> 00:29:53.100
that was publicly read.
648
00:29:53.100 --> 00:29:55.800
And so this reiterated that Mary was a most
649
00:29:55.800 --> 00:29:58.920
honourable and virtuous woman and also could paint,
650
00:29:58.920 --> 00:30:01.980
which meant that she ended up getting lots of commissions
651
00:30:01.980 --> 00:30:03.360
because she was deemed respectable.
652
00:30:03.360 --> 00:30:05.430
And that's why she also ended up painting
653
00:30:05.430 --> 00:30:07.470
quite a lot of religious figures.
654
00:30:07.470 --> 00:30:11.190
So like vicars and bishops and people like that.
655
00:30:11.190 --> 00:30:13.800
So yeah, she was great.
656
00:30:13.800 --> 00:30:15.180
Yeah, and once again,
657
00:30:15.180 --> 00:30:18.300
you have in this self-portrait by Mary,
658
00:30:18.300 --> 00:30:21.600
which is in NPG London's collection,
659
00:30:21.600 --> 00:30:24.150
she's again, that's a portrait of her sons,
660
00:30:24.150 --> 00:30:27.030
I think in that she's holding in her hand.
661
00:30:27.030 --> 00:30:30.660
So once again, an artist, a woman artist sort of
662
00:30:30.660 --> 00:30:33.150
reasserting her professionalism, I suppose,
663
00:30:33.150 --> 00:30:38.150
or using a tool of her trade to reassert her legitimacy
664
00:30:39.630 --> 00:30:42.431
as an artist, I suppose, you could say.
665
00:30:42.431 --> 00:30:43.833
Yeah, absolutely.
666
00:30:44.790 --> 00:30:48.603
You mentioned the effects of the Civil War,
667
00:30:49.590 --> 00:30:51.240
the English Civil War and what that meant
668
00:30:51.240 --> 00:30:54.900
for women's work generally and sort of women's access
669
00:30:54.900 --> 00:30:56.520
to all sorts of professions and things
670
00:30:56.520 --> 00:30:59.070
that they wouldn't ordinarily get to do.
671
00:30:59.070 --> 00:31:00.060
That's of course another thing
672
00:31:00.060 --> 00:31:02.340
which sort of persists and there's some works
673
00:31:02.340 --> 00:31:03.333
in the exhibition.
674
00:31:04.500 --> 00:31:07.890
Well, one portrait in particular by an artist
675
00:31:07.890 --> 00:31:12.890
named Doris Zinkeisen, which I mean, she was someone
676
00:31:13.410 --> 00:31:17.340
who, she volunteered as a nurse during World War I,
677
00:31:17.340 --> 00:31:18.690
and then during World War II,
678
00:31:18.690 --> 00:31:20.220
she volunteered as a nurse again.
679
00:31:20.220 --> 00:31:21.960
And then towards the end of the war,
680
00:31:21.960 --> 00:31:25.350
she was part of a group of artists
681
00:31:25.350 --> 00:31:28.440
who were sort of contracted by Sir Kenneth Clark.
682
00:31:28.440 --> 00:31:30.690
And they were sent to Europe.
683
00:31:30.690 --> 00:31:33.784
She was based in Brussels to observe,
684
00:31:33.784 --> 00:31:36.780
there she's to observe the activities
685
00:31:36.780 --> 00:31:40.990
of the British Red Cross and the Order of St. John
686
00:31:42.090 --> 00:31:42.993
in Europe.
687
00:31:44.010 --> 00:31:48.090
So she's a woman who was among other things,
688
00:31:48.090 --> 00:31:51.600
she was there to document the liberation
689
00:31:51.600 --> 00:31:55.770
of the Bergen Bellson concentration camp
690
00:31:55.770 --> 00:31:59.340
when it was liberated by the allies in 1945.
691
00:31:59.340 --> 00:32:02.760
And in London prior to that, she and her sister,
692
00:32:02.760 --> 00:32:05.880
Anna Zinkeisen, who was an amazing artist too,
693
00:32:05.880 --> 00:32:09.870
were very much engaged in war work
694
00:32:09.870 --> 00:32:11.490
not just in the volunteer nursing,
695
00:32:11.490 --> 00:32:15.960
but sort of documenting the activities of doctors
696
00:32:15.960 --> 00:32:19.770
and medical hospitals and repatriation facilities
697
00:32:19.770 --> 00:32:21.033
and so forth.
698
00:32:23.182 --> 00:32:26.910
So it's, I guess, a really, really wonderful demonstration
699
00:32:26.910 --> 00:32:31.910
of several, a few centuries after Mary Beale's experience
700
00:32:33.900 --> 00:32:36.540
that women are still sort of making use of
701
00:32:36.540 --> 00:32:40.800
these kind of traumatic events in history
702
00:32:40.800 --> 00:32:45.030
to create opportunities for themselves.
703
00:32:45.030 --> 00:32:47.070
This beautiful portrait by Doris Zinkeisen,
704
00:32:47.070 --> 00:32:50.980
which is in the exhibition is painted in 1929
705
00:32:51.840 --> 00:32:56.840
and was exhibited at the Royal Academy
706
00:32:57.060 --> 00:32:59.133
in the summer exhibition in 1929.
707
00:33:00.030 --> 00:33:03.360
She and her sister both were very much kind of
708
00:33:03.360 --> 00:33:05.223
society portraitists.
709
00:33:06.764 --> 00:33:09.540
And, Doris Zinkeisen, among other things, was
710
00:33:09.540 --> 00:33:12.150
she was someone who was involved in costume design
711
00:33:12.150 --> 00:33:13.680
and design for the theatre.
712
00:33:13.680 --> 00:33:17.010
So she moved in these quite sort of luminous circle.
713
00:33:17.010 --> 00:33:19.560
She knew Lawrence Olivier and Ralph Richardson
714
00:33:19.560 --> 00:33:22.013
and Mark Howard.
715
00:33:22.013 --> 00:33:25.470
And for that reason, she and her sister were talked about
716
00:33:25.470 --> 00:33:28.980
in the social pages as these kind of cocktail-sipping
717
00:33:28.980 --> 00:33:32.610
kind of society ladies and bright young things.
718
00:33:32.610 --> 00:33:35.940
And indeed when she came to Sydney in 1929,
719
00:33:35.940 --> 00:33:37.560
which is where she painted this work,
720
00:33:37.560 --> 00:33:40.890
she rigged up a backdrop in her hotel room in Sydney
721
00:33:40.890 --> 00:33:44.130
and painted this portrait.
722
00:33:44.130 --> 00:33:47.400
To a considerable degree, it was largely created in Sydney.
723
00:33:47.400 --> 00:33:49.410
She's written about in the social pages
724
00:33:49.410 --> 00:33:51.240
in Australian newspapers, as you know,
725
00:33:51.240 --> 00:33:53.970
this delightful Mrs. Graham Johnson,
726
00:33:53.970 --> 00:33:57.810
she was never referred to by her artist's name, of course.
727
00:33:57.810 --> 00:34:00.510
So very much this sort of construction of women artists
728
00:34:00.510 --> 00:34:03.690
as almost sort of dilettantes, if you know what I mean,
729
00:34:03.690 --> 00:34:06.780
like painting portraits of people
730
00:34:06.780 --> 00:34:08.850
who were their social equals,
731
00:34:08.850 --> 00:34:11.880
because that was an appropriate thing for them to do.
732
00:34:11.880 --> 00:34:14.250
But when you sort of really get down to the nitty gritty
733
00:34:14.250 --> 00:34:17.910
of both Doris and her sister,
734
00:34:17.910 --> 00:34:22.470
they're creating these incredibly, incredibly gritty,
735
00:34:22.470 --> 00:34:24.510
incredibly sort of strident work.
736
00:34:24.510 --> 00:34:27.060
So this is Anna Zinkeisen,
737
00:34:27.060 --> 00:34:27.990
and this is another self-portrait.
738
00:34:27.990 --> 00:34:30.360
This is from 1944.
739
00:34:30.360 --> 00:34:33.180
And once again, she's the way she's got.
740
00:34:33.180 --> 00:34:37.075
She's sort of brandishing those brushes in her hand
741
00:34:37.075 --> 00:34:40.710
It's just really I think, this is such a wonderful
742
00:34:40.710 --> 00:34:42.300
sort of strident portrait.
743
00:34:42.300 --> 00:34:45.540
She's got that real kind of Rosie-the-Riveter
744
00:34:45.540 --> 00:34:50.490
sort of attitude happening, but yeah, just really fantastic.
745
00:34:50.490 --> 00:34:52.380
I'm just sort of wondering if you would
746
00:34:52.380 --> 00:34:56.460
from your experience of writing the book and your research,
747
00:34:56.460 --> 00:34:59.717
if you wanted to sort of comment a little bit further on
748
00:34:59.717 --> 00:35:04.717
that sort of notion that portraiture was something
749
00:35:04.830 --> 00:35:08.790
that was appropriate for women artists to do,
750
00:35:08.790 --> 00:35:10.170
it was something, for example,
751
00:35:10.170 --> 00:35:12.900
that didn't sort of compromise their reputation,
752
00:35:12.900 --> 00:35:16.410
or there's also that factor, I suppose.
753
00:35:16.410 --> 00:35:19.260
And I think this must play into the sort of
754
00:35:19.260 --> 00:35:22.440
historical construction of women artists.
755
00:35:22.440 --> 00:35:25.110
A great deal is that portraiture itself
756
00:35:25.110 --> 00:35:29.610
in the hierarchy of artistic genres was towards the bottom
757
00:35:29.610 --> 00:35:31.921
of the latter.
758
00:35:31.921 --> 00:35:33.930
So, Thomas Lawrence, for example,
759
00:35:33.930 --> 00:35:35.160
referred to portrait painting
760
00:35:35.160 --> 00:35:37.260
as this dry-mill horse business,
761
00:35:37.260 --> 00:35:40.380
something that didn't require any kind of creativity
762
00:35:40.380 --> 00:35:41.610
or intellect.
763
00:35:41.610 --> 00:35:42.443
They were the sort of things
764
00:35:42.443 --> 00:35:44.430
that you could just churn out.
765
00:35:44.430 --> 00:35:46.170
And I think that comes into play
766
00:35:46.170 --> 00:35:48.930
with a lot of women artists.
767
00:35:48.930 --> 00:35:50.880
This idea that it was okay to paint portraits,
768
00:35:50.880 --> 00:35:52.680
that was a way that you could still retain your
769
00:35:52.680 --> 00:35:55.050
sort of femininity and your delicacy
770
00:35:55.050 --> 00:35:58.350
and not compromise your reputation.
771
00:35:58.350 --> 00:36:01.440
And I'm wondering if you can think of other examples
772
00:36:01.440 --> 00:36:04.890
from your research and your experience
773
00:36:04.890 --> 00:36:08.733
of that kind of phenomenon in action.
774
00:36:09.810 --> 00:36:12.510
Yeah, I mean, God, what an ignorant comment that was,
775
00:36:12.510 --> 00:36:13.350
wasn't it?
776
00:36:13.350 --> 00:36:16.860
One about diminishing, what a portrait can be?
777
00:36:16.860 --> 00:36:19.200
Because I think it's important to remember too,
778
00:36:19.200 --> 00:36:23.970
that portraits and self-portraits have infinite amounts
779
00:36:23.970 --> 00:36:25.830
of functions in a way.
780
00:36:25.830 --> 00:36:28.440
A portrait can be propaganda.
781
00:36:28.440 --> 00:36:32.340
It can be a calling card to show say,
782
00:36:32.340 --> 00:36:34.080
this is how well I can paint myself.
783
00:36:34.080 --> 00:36:36.240
I can paint you equally well.
784
00:36:36.240 --> 00:36:39.780
It can be an exploration of a psychological reality.
785
00:36:39.780 --> 00:36:43.080
Or it can be a portrait of, or an illusion
786
00:36:43.080 --> 00:36:45.300
to cultural exclusion.
787
00:36:45.300 --> 00:36:48.510
Or it can be coded in an allegorical sense,
788
00:36:48.510 --> 00:36:50.220
or it can be photographic.
789
00:36:50.220 --> 00:36:52.770
It's this is what I look like and here I am now.
790
00:36:52.770 --> 00:36:57.690
So I think there are so many things a portrait can be
791
00:36:57.690 --> 00:37:00.990
that it's almost, you have to go on a case by case basis
792
00:37:00.990 --> 00:37:05.990
on what is the function and role of each of these pictures
793
00:37:06.210 --> 00:37:07.890
that we're looking at.
794
00:37:07.890 --> 00:37:11.910
As you said, an artist can once be glamorous
795
00:37:11.910 --> 00:37:13.320
and be in the society pages,
796
00:37:13.320 --> 00:37:17.700
but can also be responding to the horrors of World War II
797
00:37:17.700 --> 00:37:22.700
or representing a woman as a powerful maker of things
798
00:37:22.830 --> 00:37:27.300
in the midst of a global war where women's strength,
799
00:37:27.300 --> 00:37:30.003
moral and physical was depended on.
800
00:37:30.960 --> 00:37:33.150
You've got someone like Nora Heysen
801
00:37:33.150 --> 00:37:36.360
who was a fantastic painter, who was the first woman
802
00:37:36.360 --> 00:37:40.230
to win the Archibald Prize in Australia.
803
00:37:40.230 --> 00:37:43.527
And, she became Australia's first female war artist,
804
00:37:43.527 --> 00:37:46.083
and she travelled extensively for years,
805
00:37:47.490 --> 00:37:52.490
making really amazing records of nurses and doctors
806
00:37:52.710 --> 00:37:54.810
and soldiers on the field.
807
00:37:54.810 --> 00:37:56.400
She travelled a lot around the Pacific.
808
00:37:56.400 --> 00:37:57.750
She became quite ill, actually.
809
00:37:57.750 --> 00:38:01.590
She travelled so hard, was exposed to a lot of illness.
810
00:38:01.590 --> 00:38:04.140
And in this self-portrait from 1932,
811
00:38:04.140 --> 00:38:07.020
she depicts herself in her father's studio.
812
00:38:07.020 --> 00:38:09.810
And what I love about this self-portrait is,
813
00:38:09.810 --> 00:38:11.850
she's got some of her references on the wall,
814
00:38:11.850 --> 00:38:14.340
artists that she loved like Vermeer,
815
00:38:14.340 --> 00:38:17.280
but she's in a brown velvet jacket and again,
816
00:38:17.280 --> 00:38:20.760
talking, thinking about coded self-portraits.
817
00:38:20.760 --> 00:38:23.430
She bought that brown velvet jacket that she's in
818
00:38:23.430 --> 00:38:26.340
from the proceeds of an exhibition that she just had.
819
00:38:26.340 --> 00:38:28.530
So again, she's looking glamorous,
820
00:38:28.530 --> 00:38:30.750
but at the same time she's wearing a jacket
821
00:38:30.750 --> 00:38:33.832
that she has paid for through her own skills,
822
00:38:33.832 --> 00:38:37.560
this is a very beautiful self-portrait,
823
00:38:37.560 --> 00:38:41.220
but then 10 years later when she's in the midst
824
00:38:41.220 --> 00:38:43.830
of World War II and travelling around,
825
00:38:43.830 --> 00:38:48.510
she's not doing self-portrait so much as turning her gaze
826
00:38:48.510 --> 00:38:50.760
onto the suffering and the bravery
827
00:38:50.760 --> 00:38:54.480
of the servicemen and women that she encountered
828
00:38:54.480 --> 00:38:55.560
on her journeys around the war.
829
00:38:55.560 --> 00:38:58.290
So, also you think of someone like Lee Miller,
830
00:38:58.290 --> 00:38:59.550
a brilliant photographer who was also.
831
00:38:59.550 --> 00:39:00.900
Amazing.
832
00:39:00.900 --> 00:39:04.950
Yeah, it's,
833
00:39:04.950 --> 00:39:06.390
a woman might be glamorous
834
00:39:06.390 --> 00:39:09.480
and she might be in the society pages,
835
00:39:09.480 --> 00:39:12.380
but she might also be extremely brave and very perceptive.
836
00:39:14.910 --> 00:39:17.190
I can't help thinking of that.
837
00:39:17.190 --> 00:39:19.650
Nora Heysen's brown velvet jacket.
838
00:39:19.650 --> 00:39:21.240
I'm pretty sure that's the jacket she's wearing
839
00:39:21.240 --> 00:39:23.495
in this wonderful self-portrait
840
00:39:23.495 --> 00:39:25.530
that she did that's in our collection
841
00:39:25.530 --> 00:39:30.530
painted in 1934 just after she had been set up in a studio
842
00:39:31.560 --> 00:39:33.510
in London by herself.
843
00:39:33.510 --> 00:39:37.200
And it's just the most extraordinary little work
844
00:39:37.200 --> 00:39:40.800
and it is quite little, so when this work is installed
845
00:39:40.800 --> 00:39:44.580
at eye level, it really is as if you're looking at Nora
846
00:39:44.580 --> 00:39:47.520
sort of face-to-face, eye to eye.
847
00:39:47.520 --> 00:39:50.700
Our former director, Andrew Sayers used to say that
848
00:39:50.700 --> 00:39:53.163
this is a small painting, but it's monumental.
849
00:39:55.976 --> 00:39:58.800
And I love that sort of sense that
850
00:39:58.800 --> 00:40:02.940
this is unlike the other self-portraits that she did.
851
00:40:02.940 --> 00:40:05.160
In this, in the early 1930s,
852
00:40:05.160 --> 00:40:08.760
when she was in her early twenties,
853
00:40:08.760 --> 00:40:11.460
it's quite extraordinary that she was so accomplished
854
00:40:11.460 --> 00:40:12.903
at such a young age.
855
00:40:15.655 --> 00:40:17.993
She hasn't tried to portray herself as the artist,
856
00:40:17.993 --> 00:40:20.760
so that the palette and the references
857
00:40:20.760 --> 00:40:24.180
and the bottles of terps and the ease and so forth
858
00:40:24.180 --> 00:40:26.700
that you see in some of those other self-portraits
859
00:40:26.700 --> 00:40:30.120
from the early 1930s are completely absent from this one.
860
00:40:30.120 --> 00:40:33.930
She's just, she's not trying to convince anyone
861
00:40:33.930 --> 00:40:38.930
but herself now that she's in London, she's by herself,
862
00:40:38.940 --> 00:40:40.990
she's kind of looking herself in the eye.
863
00:40:42.213 --> 00:40:44.280
And so scrutinising herself rather than sort of
864
00:40:44.280 --> 00:40:46.320
presenting this kind of artist persona
865
00:40:46.320 --> 00:40:50.673
to an external audience or an external viewer.
866
00:40:52.920 --> 00:40:55.620
She had, I mean, she had a tough time in London
867
00:40:55.620 --> 00:40:56.453
during that trip.
868
00:40:56.453 --> 00:40:59.640
She was criticised by her,
869
00:40:59.640 --> 00:41:02.100
she was studying, even though she was so accomplished,
870
00:41:02.100 --> 00:41:04.050
she sort of went back to art school
871
00:41:04.050 --> 00:41:05.580
when she was here in London.
872
00:41:05.580 --> 00:41:08.370
And she was criticised by her teachers
873
00:41:08.370 --> 00:41:10.230
for not being sort of modern enough
874
00:41:10.230 --> 00:41:12.540
for not sort of like the modernist line,
875
00:41:12.540 --> 00:41:14.970
because she was never particularly interested in modernism.
876
00:41:14.970 --> 00:41:16.890
She saw friends of her father
877
00:41:16.890 --> 00:41:19.440
who was, of course, a famous painter
878
00:41:19.440 --> 00:41:22.320
of gum trees and landscapes, Hans Heysen.
879
00:41:22.320 --> 00:41:25.560
And they were very dismissive of her talent.
880
00:41:25.560 --> 00:41:28.980
She found London cold and she felt alienated.
881
00:41:28.980 --> 00:41:30.690
She was depressed about her work.
882
00:41:30.690 --> 00:41:33.480
So she'd had a very tough time here.
883
00:41:33.480 --> 00:41:36.300
And you can see this picture that
884
00:41:36.300 --> 00:41:39.030
it was a moment of great introspection
885
00:41:39.030 --> 00:41:44.030
and sort of analysing her place in the world, maybe.
886
00:41:45.377 --> 00:41:48.210
And she had to summon faith in herself,
887
00:41:48.210 --> 00:41:51.240
which is a very hard thing often to do it for an artist.
888
00:41:51.240 --> 00:41:54.600
Yeah, and she said that actually sort of later in life,
889
00:41:54.600 --> 00:41:58.140
she recalled that whenever she was starting out
890
00:41:58.140 --> 00:42:02.220
in a new place, she would paint a self-portrait as a way
891
00:42:02.220 --> 00:42:05.970
of creating herself and sort of marking out her territory,
892
00:42:05.970 --> 00:42:10.560
she said, and that is very much, I think, very significant
893
00:42:10.560 --> 00:42:11.940
at this sort of point of her life,
894
00:42:11.940 --> 00:42:14.160
because as you mentioned, her father,
895
00:42:14.160 --> 00:42:18.870
Hans Heysen was this celebrated Australian
896
00:42:18.870 --> 00:42:20.910
landscape painter.
897
00:42:20.910 --> 00:42:25.620
And even though he was very supportive of Nora
898
00:42:25.620 --> 00:42:27.450
and supportive of her becoming an artist
899
00:42:27.450 --> 00:42:30.870
and obviously very proud of her and encouraging.
900
00:42:30.870 --> 00:42:34.110
So she didn't have the same sort of barriers necessarily
901
00:42:34.110 --> 00:42:36.780
that other women of her generation might have experienced
902
00:42:36.780 --> 00:42:40.350
in wanting to pursue painting as a profession.
903
00:42:40.350 --> 00:42:45.350
I guess, having such a famous dad who was also an artist
904
00:42:45.420 --> 00:42:49.320
presented different sort of challenges in a way.
905
00:42:49.320 --> 00:42:54.090
So this is her really kind of staking out her own territory.
906
00:42:54.090 --> 00:42:58.258
He can have the gum trees and I'll have the faces
907
00:42:58.258 --> 00:42:59.490
and the figures.
908
00:42:59.490 --> 00:43:04.490
But yeah, I think probably in my top 10 favourites
909
00:43:05.070 --> 00:43:07.500
in our collection, it's absolutely wonderful.
910
00:43:07.500 --> 00:43:09.660
And she's such an extraordinary story.
911
00:43:09.660 --> 00:43:14.430
I think we could do a whole programme, talk for hours
912
00:43:14.430 --> 00:43:17.613
just about Nora Heysen and her portraiture.
913
00:43:18.720 --> 00:43:21.840
But as you say, she was one of those women,
914
00:43:21.840 --> 00:43:26.840
like the Zinkeisen sisters who demonstrated incredible
915
00:43:28.020 --> 00:43:32.947
sort of bravery and selflessness in her war art work,
916
00:43:33.990 --> 00:43:36.780
or her role as an official war artist.
917
00:43:36.780 --> 00:43:39.810
And you mentioned when we were talking about that briefly,
918
00:43:39.810 --> 00:43:43.440
you mentioned Leonora Carrington and Lee Miller,
919
00:43:43.440 --> 00:43:47.490
who of course were on the pretty much
920
00:43:47.490 --> 00:43:50.160
the very sort of pointy end of what was happening
921
00:43:50.160 --> 00:43:54.180
in France and Spain in the 1930s.
922
00:43:54.180 --> 00:43:57.060
Do you want to tell us a little bit more about Leonora?
923
00:43:57.060 --> 00:43:58.080
Leonora Carrington.
924
00:43:58.080 --> 00:44:02.250
She's born into a very wealthy upper-class English family
925
00:44:02.250 --> 00:44:04.500
who were very conservative and wanted her to tow the line
926
00:44:04.500 --> 00:44:06.180
and wanted to present it to the king and queen
927
00:44:06.180 --> 00:44:11.180
and basically live like a society woman and marry well
928
00:44:11.760 --> 00:44:14.970
and have babies, but she had other thoughts.
929
00:44:14.970 --> 00:44:19.230
When she was only 18, she met the surrealist Max Ernst
930
00:44:19.230 --> 00:44:21.900
at a dinner party in Highgate in London.
931
00:44:21.900 --> 00:44:24.630
And she ran away with him and they lived in the south
932
00:44:24.630 --> 00:44:28.920
of France where she painted some remarkable self-portraits,
933
00:44:28.920 --> 00:44:32.730
which were, she always associated with horses.
934
00:44:32.730 --> 00:44:35.190
She loved horses and her self-portrait,
935
00:44:35.190 --> 00:44:38.910
you can see the idea of there's a rocking horse on the wall,
936
00:44:38.910 --> 00:44:43.200
which perhaps she was identifying with as a young woman,
937
00:44:43.200 --> 00:44:45.780
as an animal that couldn't move,
938
00:44:45.780 --> 00:44:49.380
or at least couldn't be free of its shackles.
939
00:44:49.380 --> 00:44:52.410
But out of the window, we see a beautiful white horse
940
00:44:52.410 --> 00:44:55.230
galloping into the landscape, which essentially,
941
00:44:55.230 --> 00:44:57.870
which is what she did when she ran away from London
942
00:44:57.870 --> 00:45:01.110
and from high society to live with a surrealist
943
00:45:01.110 --> 00:45:03.300
in the south of France, who was a good 30 years older
944
00:45:03.300 --> 00:45:06.165
than her, and in front of her, there's a hyena.
945
00:45:06.165 --> 00:45:09.420
Animals are extremely important to Leonora Carrington.
946
00:45:09.420 --> 00:45:12.450
She always said that she preferred animals to humans.
947
00:45:12.450 --> 00:45:15.660
And in front of her is a female hyena
948
00:45:15.660 --> 00:45:18.310
who's coming towards her, and the hyena is lactating.
949
00:45:19.380 --> 00:45:21.210
Leonora is in her white jodhpurs.
950
00:45:21.210 --> 00:45:23.970
So she could ride the horse, she could escape.
951
00:45:23.970 --> 00:45:26.070
She's got her wild hair.
952
00:45:26.070 --> 00:45:28.440
Her hair is sort of lifting as if there's a wind,
953
00:45:28.440 --> 00:45:30.390
even though she's inside.
954
00:45:30.390 --> 00:45:32.940
So she's very much sort of identifying with the freedom
955
00:45:32.940 --> 00:45:35.343
of being outside and the natural world.
956
00:45:36.180 --> 00:45:38.940
And in the wonderful portrait that we see of
957
00:45:38.940 --> 00:45:40.590
that Lee Miller took of her
958
00:45:40.590 --> 00:45:45.590
and Lee Miller of course, was a Vogue model, a photographer,
959
00:45:45.630 --> 00:45:49.060
amused to many of the surrealists, such as Man Ray,
960
00:45:52.020 --> 00:45:52.853
for example.
961
00:45:54.060 --> 00:45:56.490
And when Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst
962
00:45:56.490 --> 00:45:59.490
living in the countryside in the south of France
963
00:45:59.490 --> 00:46:00.840
in the late 1930s,
964
00:46:00.840 --> 00:46:04.110
a lot of their friends came to visit them.
965
00:46:04.110 --> 00:46:06.270
And so Lee Miller came to stay with them
966
00:46:06.270 --> 00:46:09.240
and she took this wonderful portrait of Leonora Carrington
967
00:46:09.240 --> 00:46:11.310
who looks much older than her years actually.
968
00:46:11.310 --> 00:46:14.280
She's only sort of in her teens, early twenties here
969
00:46:14.280 --> 00:46:16.980
but she looks fierce and sort of something wonderfully
970
00:46:16.980 --> 00:46:18.150
ancient and powerful.
971
00:46:18.150 --> 00:46:19.620
And she always wore wonderful clothes,
972
00:46:19.620 --> 00:46:21.420
which were quite flamboyant.
973
00:46:21.420 --> 00:46:23.820
And there's another great photo by Lee Miller
974
00:46:23.820 --> 00:46:25.920
of Leonora Carrington cooking.
975
00:46:25.920 --> 00:46:29.880
And she's in a sort of long-flowing silk dress.
976
00:46:29.880 --> 00:46:32.220
And, she's looking fiercely and independently
977
00:46:32.220 --> 00:46:33.900
out at the camera.
978
00:46:33.900 --> 00:46:38.900
But just soon after this, the World War II happened in 1939.
979
00:46:39.090 --> 00:46:41.880
Of course, Max Ernst was interned,
980
00:46:41.880 --> 00:46:45.060
Leonora tried to free him, but she couldn't succeed.
981
00:46:45.060 --> 00:46:46.770
She ended up fleeing to Spain
982
00:46:46.770 --> 00:46:49.980
where she had a nervous breakdown and was actually
983
00:46:49.980 --> 00:46:53.640
put into a sanatorium and had a dreadful time there.
984
00:46:53.640 --> 00:46:55.710
And she wrote about this at length.
985
00:46:55.710 --> 00:47:00.150
Her parents bizarrely sent her nanny to rescue her
986
00:47:00.150 --> 00:47:04.892
in a battleship, but Leonora escaped from her nanny
987
00:47:04.892 --> 00:47:05.973
at a toilet window.
988
00:47:07.122 --> 00:47:10.350
And she then married out of convenience a Mexican diplomat,
989
00:47:10.350 --> 00:47:13.270
who also was, he wrote a lot about bull fights
990
00:47:14.552 --> 00:47:17.100
and they fled to New York
991
00:47:17.100 --> 00:47:19.260
where Max Ernst Ted had escaped to as well.
992
00:47:19.260 --> 00:47:21.723
But by then he had married Peggy Guggenheim.
993
00:47:22.980 --> 00:47:26.850
Leonora Carrington then stayed for a while in New York.
994
00:47:26.850 --> 00:47:28.530
But then she ended up moving to Mexico
995
00:47:28.530 --> 00:47:30.960
where she spent the rest of her very long life,
996
00:47:30.960 --> 00:47:35.490
where she became an amazing artist and writer.
997
00:47:35.490 --> 00:47:39.810
She was also instrumental in the feminist movement
998
00:47:39.810 --> 00:47:40.833
in Mexico.
999
00:47:41.790 --> 00:47:44.910
And she became lauded as sort of a great Mexican artist.
1000
00:47:44.910 --> 00:47:49.140
Yeah, her life is really full of adventure and intrigue
1001
00:47:49.140 --> 00:47:51.270
and bravery and creativity.
1002
00:47:51.270 --> 00:47:53.490
She never really saw her family again.
1003
00:47:53.490 --> 00:47:55.320
She cut herself off from them
1004
00:47:55.320 --> 00:47:58.620
and she really became her own woman very rapidly
1005
00:47:58.620 --> 00:47:59.733
and very powerfully.
1006
00:48:00.720 --> 00:48:03.630
And of course, Leonora Carrington was part of a large group
1007
00:48:03.630 --> 00:48:06.840
of really extraordinary artists living in Mexico City
1008
00:48:06.840 --> 00:48:09.150
at the time postwar.
1009
00:48:09.150 --> 00:48:11.910
And of course, one of the most famous is Frida Kahlo,
1010
00:48:11.910 --> 00:48:14.760
who was one of the most prolific self-portraitists
1011
00:48:14.760 --> 00:48:16.053
in the 20th century.
1012
00:48:17.124 --> 00:48:20.460
And Frida had suffered a terrible accident on a bus
1013
00:48:20.460 --> 00:48:21.810
when she was in her late teens.
1014
00:48:21.810 --> 00:48:23.810
She'd also had polio when she was young.
1015
00:48:24.840 --> 00:48:26.940
This accident almost killed her.
1016
00:48:26.940 --> 00:48:28.530
And she spent the next few decades
1017
00:48:28.530 --> 00:48:30.570
before she essentially died of her injuries,
1018
00:48:30.570 --> 00:48:34.023
only a few, when she was in her late forties.
1019
00:48:36.780 --> 00:48:40.200
She painted this self-portrait with the portrait
1020
00:48:40.200 --> 00:48:43.500
of Dr. Farrell as a thank-you to one of her doctors
1021
00:48:43.500 --> 00:48:46.770
and surgeons, Dr. Farrell, who had operated on her
1022
00:48:46.770 --> 00:48:48.720
and helped alleviate some of the terrible pain
1023
00:48:48.720 --> 00:48:49.740
that she was in.
1024
00:48:49.740 --> 00:48:52.810
And she's depicting herself basically
1025
00:48:53.878 --> 00:48:57.180
as a homage to her doctor, but she's in her wheelchair.
1026
00:48:57.180 --> 00:48:59.490
You know, she's unable to walk.
1027
00:48:59.490 --> 00:49:04.490
She's essentially holding her own body together
1028
00:49:04.650 --> 00:49:06.050
with the help of her doctor,
1029
00:49:07.234 --> 00:49:10.830
and she's raw and unflinching in her depiction of the pain
1030
00:49:10.830 --> 00:49:13.230
that she was constantly in, but also in the solace
1031
00:49:13.230 --> 00:49:15.870
of the imagination and in the solace
1032
00:49:15.870 --> 00:49:17.340
that her creativity gave her
1033
00:49:17.340 --> 00:49:20.280
because basically it helped her hold herself together
1034
00:49:20.280 --> 00:49:23.970
during her decades of extreme pain.
1035
00:49:23.970 --> 00:49:26.010
But Frida Kahlo was also, you read about her,
1036
00:49:26.010 --> 00:49:27.960
she also had an incredible zest for life.
1037
00:49:27.960 --> 00:49:28.800
She loved jokes.
1038
00:49:28.800 --> 00:49:30.930
She loved watching Mark's brothers movies.
1039
00:49:30.930 --> 00:49:32.370
She loved singing.
1040
00:49:32.370 --> 00:49:33.330
She loved dressing up.
1041
00:49:33.330 --> 00:49:35.130
She loved holding dinner parties.
1042
00:49:35.130 --> 00:49:39.000
So she always managed to rise above the terrible misfortune
1043
00:49:39.000 --> 00:49:40.623
that life had flung at her.
1044
00:49:43.560 --> 00:49:47.760
Rita Angus, a woman from New Zealand
1045
00:49:47.760 --> 00:49:52.760
who also has a remarkable self-portrait tradition.
1046
00:49:53.280 --> 00:49:54.750
What can you tell us about her?
1047
00:49:54.750 --> 00:49:58.620
Yeah, Rita Angus is a fantastic artist
1048
00:49:58.620 --> 00:50:02.340
and she painted many, many self-portraits,
1049
00:50:02.340 --> 00:50:05.100
right from when she was young as an art student
1050
00:50:05.100 --> 00:50:08.550
in Christchurch to later in the fifties
1051
00:50:08.550 --> 00:50:13.140
where she painted this self-portrait, which is called Rutu.
1052
00:50:13.140 --> 00:50:16.230
And in this painting, Rita Angus is sort of
1053
00:50:16.230 --> 00:50:18.870
exploring her place in the world.
1054
00:50:18.870 --> 00:50:23.870
And also in New Zealand as a woman of Scottish descent,
1055
00:50:24.540 --> 00:50:26.670
she was very aware that she was part of sort of
1056
00:50:26.670 --> 00:50:28.890
colonial culture in New Zealand,
1057
00:50:28.890 --> 00:50:33.000
but she was also deeply fascinated and admiring
1058
00:50:33.000 --> 00:50:36.240
and reverential of Maori culture as well,
1059
00:50:36.240 --> 00:50:39.090
and more broadly Polynesian culture.
1060
00:50:39.090 --> 00:50:44.070
And so here, it's sort of a fusion of different cultures
1061
00:50:44.070 --> 00:50:47.790
in this one painting, which she's trying to sort of
1062
00:50:47.790 --> 00:50:51.150
forge her way in the world and work out what her place is
1063
00:50:51.150 --> 00:50:51.990
in the world.
1064
00:50:51.990 --> 00:50:56.430
So she depicts herself against a lush landscape
1065
00:50:56.430 --> 00:50:58.080
with palm trees.
1066
00:50:58.080 --> 00:51:00.482
There are references to Christianity in the fish
1067
00:51:00.482 --> 00:51:02.943
on her collar.
1068
00:51:03.780 --> 00:51:07.440
She has a halo around her head, which could also be seen
1069
00:51:07.440 --> 00:51:10.143
as the hot Sun of the Southern Hemisphere.
1070
00:51:11.040 --> 00:51:13.020
She was a white woman, but she depicts herself
1071
00:51:13.020 --> 00:51:14.700
as brown-skinned.
1072
00:51:14.700 --> 00:51:17.730
She's holding a flower, which could be a reference
1073
00:51:17.730 --> 00:51:20.430
to the Virgin Mary holding lilies,
1074
00:51:20.430 --> 00:51:25.230
or it could be a reference to a woman in New Zealand
1075
00:51:25.230 --> 00:51:28.113
who is enthralled to the local flora and fauna.
1076
00:51:29.520 --> 00:51:32.130
But I think too, it's important not to be too reductive
1077
00:51:32.130 --> 00:51:33.690
about self-portraits.
1078
00:51:33.690 --> 00:51:36.033
They don't necessarily have a single meaning.
1079
00:51:37.512 --> 00:51:40.020
And, Rita Angus was a very complicated woman.
1080
00:51:40.020 --> 00:51:42.060
She suffered a lot from mental health issues
1081
00:51:42.060 --> 00:51:43.830
later in her life.
1082
00:51:43.830 --> 00:51:47.700
She was a passionate and extremely hard-working artist
1083
00:51:47.700 --> 00:51:51.930
who spent a lot of her time in isolation.
1084
00:51:51.930 --> 00:51:56.040
And so this is a very sort of coded self-portrait
1085
00:51:56.040 --> 00:51:58.800
and the ultimate meaning of which only she would know.
1086
00:51:58.800 --> 00:52:01.380
But we can read things into it.
1087
00:52:01.380 --> 00:52:04.920
The title Rutu, it's almost as if she's trying
1088
00:52:04.920 --> 00:52:09.920
to rewrite her own name into possibly indigenous languages
1089
00:52:12.330 --> 00:52:14.973
or as an alter ego.
1090
00:52:17.400 --> 00:52:19.320
And I think from reading your book,
1091
00:52:19.320 --> 00:52:22.230
I remember rightly she made a lot of work,
1092
00:52:22.230 --> 00:52:24.840
but didn't necessarily sell much of it.
1093
00:52:24.840 --> 00:52:25.673
Is that true?
1094
00:52:26.790 --> 00:52:29.937
Yeah, she really didn't like letting go of her paintings
1095
00:52:29.937 --> 00:52:31.560
and she did become much better known
1096
00:52:31.560 --> 00:52:33.690
towards the end of her life.
1097
00:52:33.690 --> 00:52:38.580
But after she died, they found so much work in her studio.
1098
00:52:38.580 --> 00:52:41.430
She was deeply attached to her paintings
1099
00:52:41.430 --> 00:52:42.990
and she just didn't want to let them go
1100
00:52:42.990 --> 00:52:45.363
because in a sense they were her family.
1101
00:52:46.808 --> 00:52:48.630
And so getting rid of them would've been like
1102
00:52:48.630 --> 00:52:50.583
getting rid of a member of her family.
1103
00:52:51.930 --> 00:52:55.950
Yeah, and I guess a bit like Frida Kahlo too,
1104
00:52:55.950 --> 00:52:59.580
in that sort of health struggles and so forth
1105
00:52:59.580 --> 00:53:02.070
was something that she sort of sought to overcome
1106
00:53:02.070 --> 00:53:05.550
or worked through through her creativity,
1107
00:53:05.550 --> 00:53:07.470
through her painting.
1108
00:53:07.470 --> 00:53:10.710
And I'm sure many artists says definitely
1109
00:53:10.710 --> 00:53:14.220
a therapeutic aspect to painting and to being an artist,
1110
00:53:14.220 --> 00:53:17.340
because it's a way of having a conversation with the world,
1111
00:53:17.340 --> 00:53:19.260
without someone telling you to be quiet
1112
00:53:19.260 --> 00:53:20.400
or diminishing your power,
1113
00:53:20.400 --> 00:53:22.143
or telling you what to do.
1114
00:53:22.994 --> 00:53:25.020
When painting her self-portrait,
1115
00:53:25.020 --> 00:53:28.263
she is powerful and empowered.
1116
00:53:30.540 --> 00:53:32.640
Yeah, and in light of that,
1117
00:53:32.640 --> 00:53:33.870
would you like to tell us a bit
1118
00:53:33.870 --> 00:53:36.210
about Paula Modersohn-Becker?
1119
00:53:36.210 --> 00:53:38.250
Yeah, Paula Modersohn-Becker,
1120
00:53:38.250 --> 00:53:41.670
this extremely interesting self-portrait,
1121
00:53:41.670 --> 00:53:46.670
which is Self-portrait at Sixth Wedding Anniversary in 1906,
1122
00:53:47.340 --> 00:53:49.860
is not what it appears to be.
1123
00:53:49.860 --> 00:53:52.380
Firstly, it's one of the first self-portraits
1124
00:53:52.380 --> 00:53:54.480
which are naked or semi-naked that we know of
1125
00:53:54.480 --> 00:53:57.033
by a woman in the West.
1126
00:53:58.380 --> 00:54:00.720
She depicts herself as if she's pregnant,
1127
00:54:00.720 --> 00:54:02.373
but actually she's not pregnant.
1128
00:54:03.570 --> 00:54:05.940
She has just left her husband at this point.
1129
00:54:05.940 --> 00:54:08.100
Her husband was an artist and they lived together
1130
00:54:08.100 --> 00:54:10.803
in the German artist colony at Worpswede.
1131
00:54:12.509 --> 00:54:15.720
She had run away to Paris where she joined her friends,
1132
00:54:15.720 --> 00:54:18.450
Rilke the poet and his wife, Clara Westhoff,
1133
00:54:18.450 --> 00:54:19.920
who is Paula's best friend,
1134
00:54:19.920 --> 00:54:22.020
who was a sculptor who studied with Rodin.
1135
00:54:23.517 --> 00:54:25.920
And in this painting, Paula Modersohn-Becker is actually
1136
00:54:25.920 --> 00:54:28.620
celebrating her newfound freedom.
1137
00:54:28.620 --> 00:54:30.660
Her married name was Paula Modersohn-Becker,
1138
00:54:30.660 --> 00:54:35.100
but this painting, she actually signed PM, Paula Modersohn.
1139
00:54:35.100 --> 00:54:38.250
She reverts back to her maiden name
1140
00:54:38.250 --> 00:54:39.720
because she wanted to be alone.
1141
00:54:39.720 --> 00:54:41.160
She wanted to be painting in Paris.
1142
00:54:41.160 --> 00:54:43.410
She didn't want to have children with her husband
1143
00:54:43.410 --> 00:54:45.780
and she didn't want to be in a married state.
1144
00:54:45.780 --> 00:54:48.630
She was an absolutely brilliant painter.
1145
00:54:48.630 --> 00:54:51.210
Around this time she's making paintings
1146
00:54:51.210 --> 00:54:56.130
that rival those of Picasso, I think, and Matisse.
1147
00:54:56.130 --> 00:54:58.560
They're powerful, they're original.
1148
00:54:58.560 --> 00:55:03.093
They're enthralled to the past while looking forward.
1149
00:55:05.070 --> 00:55:07.560
But very sadly she found it too tough
1150
00:55:07.560 --> 00:55:09.210
to be in Paris financially.
1151
00:55:09.210 --> 00:55:12.360
She was begging everyone we know for money,
1152
00:55:12.360 --> 00:55:14.250
she knew, for money, rather.
1153
00:55:14.250 --> 00:55:16.140
She wrote, she was a wonderful letter writer.
1154
00:55:16.140 --> 00:55:18.720
And I really recommend that anyone who's interested in her
1155
00:55:18.720 --> 00:55:21.600
reads her letters because she wrote fantastically
1156
00:55:21.600 --> 00:55:24.480
wonderfully, lively, vivid impassioned letters
1157
00:55:24.480 --> 00:55:25.983
to her friends and her family.
1158
00:55:27.030 --> 00:55:29.190
So very sadly within a year,
1159
00:55:29.190 --> 00:55:30.960
she had to move back to Worpswede
1160
00:55:30.960 --> 00:55:34.320
because she just couldn't survive on her own.
1161
00:55:34.320 --> 00:55:36.000
It was too tough.
1162
00:55:36.000 --> 00:55:38.910
And very sadly she died 18 days after giving birth
1163
00:55:38.910 --> 00:55:42.450
to her daughter, Matilda, who was her first child.
1164
00:55:42.450 --> 00:55:44.490
She only had two exhibitions during her lifetime.
1165
00:55:44.490 --> 00:55:47.910
The first one was widely panned, the second one was ignored.
1166
00:55:47.910 --> 00:55:50.190
She only sold a few paintings in her lifetime.
1167
00:55:50.190 --> 00:55:52.410
She left behind hundreds and hundreds of
1168
00:55:52.410 --> 00:55:54.120
really extraordinary paintings.
1169
00:55:54.120 --> 00:55:57.660
And she's on the cover of my book, her self-portrait.
1170
00:55:57.660 --> 00:55:59.490
And because also she was broke,
1171
00:55:59.490 --> 00:56:02.730
because she didn't have access, all the usual stories,
1172
00:56:02.730 --> 00:56:05.850
she painted so many self-portraits
1173
00:56:05.850 --> 00:56:09.390
and they're all absolutely amazing pictures.
1174
00:56:09.390 --> 00:56:11.310
And even though she had a rather tragic life,
1175
00:56:11.310 --> 00:56:13.590
I think it's important not to look at her life
1176
00:56:13.590 --> 00:56:15.570
through the lens of sort of misery
1177
00:56:15.570 --> 00:56:18.000
because actually she blazed with life
1178
00:56:18.000 --> 00:56:20.133
and she was a lot of fun as well.
1179
00:56:21.232 --> 00:56:25.353
And she, a woman who really lived her life to the full.
1180
00:56:26.400 --> 00:56:30.210
And we mentioned that both Rita Angus and Paula
1181
00:56:30.210 --> 00:56:32.670
ending their lives with lots and lots of work
1182
00:56:32.670 --> 00:56:35.250
still in their possession.
1183
00:56:35.250 --> 00:56:38.130
I wonder if you want to sort of comment on how
1184
00:56:38.130 --> 00:56:43.130
if their works have entered public collections
1185
00:56:43.560 --> 00:56:46.110
and that sort of time lag, I guess,
1186
00:56:46.110 --> 00:56:48.840
between the creation of these, like you say,
1187
00:56:48.840 --> 00:56:52.604
incredibly lively and fresh and powerful works,
1188
00:56:52.604 --> 00:56:56.220
and why it took art history so long, I suppose,
1189
00:56:56.220 --> 00:57:00.180
to actually start embracing their work?
1190
00:57:00.180 --> 00:57:03.210
Yeah, I mean, Paula Modersohn-Becker now
1191
00:57:03.210 --> 00:57:04.920
is in major collections.
1192
00:57:04.920 --> 00:57:08.940
There's a museum dedicated to her in Germany.
1193
00:57:08.940 --> 00:57:11.190
The painting on the cover of my book is owned
1194
00:57:11.190 --> 00:57:13.473
by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
1195
00:57:14.910 --> 00:57:18.300
And as to why women have been excluded from art history,
1196
00:57:18.300 --> 00:57:21.360
that's a very long conversation.
1197
00:57:21.360 --> 00:57:24.870
But essentially, art history reflects
1198
00:57:24.870 --> 00:57:27.060
or the way traditional art history was written
1199
00:57:27.060 --> 00:57:29.820
reflects the way history, traditional histories
1200
00:57:29.820 --> 00:57:34.080
were written, which was, it reflects a patriarchal
1201
00:57:34.080 --> 00:57:35.250
power structure.
1202
00:57:35.250 --> 00:57:36.750
It was a story of men about men
1203
00:57:36.750 --> 00:57:39.780
and mainly white men about white men.
1204
00:57:39.780 --> 00:57:42.150
But of course, the 20th century and the 21st century,
1205
00:57:42.150 --> 00:57:45.510
there's been a lot of very important revisionism happening
1206
00:57:45.510 --> 00:57:47.820
with feminist art historians,
1207
00:57:47.820 --> 00:57:50.970
such as Griselda Pollock, Rozsika Parker,
1208
00:57:50.970 --> 00:57:52.740
Germaine Greer, Linda Nochlin,
1209
00:57:52.740 --> 00:57:55.680
a lot of brilliant women exploring the role of women
1210
00:57:55.680 --> 00:57:58.200
and why they were excluded and also casting light
1211
00:57:58.200 --> 00:58:00.720
on the achievements of so many of these women.
1212
00:58:00.720 --> 00:58:02.070
There have been great initiatives now,
1213
00:58:02.070 --> 00:58:05.370
such as just across from the National Portrait Gallery,
1214
00:58:05.370 --> 00:58:06.720
the National Gallery of Australia's
1215
00:58:06.720 --> 00:58:07.830
Know My Name Initiative,
1216
00:58:07.830 --> 00:58:10.530
which was not only two amazing exhibitions,
1217
00:58:10.530 --> 00:58:13.860
but implemented also gender equity plan.
1218
00:58:13.860 --> 00:58:16.740
And a lot of museums across the world are implementing
1219
00:58:16.740 --> 00:58:19.650
gender equity plans and looking at their collections,
1220
00:58:19.650 --> 00:58:21.153
looking at the emissions,
1221
00:58:22.110 --> 00:58:25.140
proactively buying art work by women artists.
1222
00:58:25.140 --> 00:58:28.800
And they're being written into art history in a way
1223
00:58:28.800 --> 00:58:30.840
that should have happened a long time ago.
1224
00:58:30.840 --> 00:58:34.650
I mean, remarkably, Giorgio Vasari was talking about,
1225
00:58:34.650 --> 00:58:36.840
he talked about 13 women artists in his
1226
00:58:36.840 --> 00:58:38.100
Lives of the Artists,
1227
00:58:38.100 --> 00:58:40.110
but in two of the main 20th-century
1228
00:58:40.110 --> 00:58:43.983
art history books by, for example, by Gombrich,
1229
00:58:45.390 --> 00:58:47.040
no women are mentioned at all.
1230
00:58:47.040 --> 00:58:48.990
I remember in the art history books I learned
1231
00:58:48.990 --> 00:58:50.220
when I was at art school.
1232
00:58:50.220 --> 00:58:52.590
And women were entirely written out of history
1233
00:58:52.590 --> 00:58:54.603
until the 20th century.
1234
00:58:55.958 --> 00:58:59.070
So, it's exciting, I think, that finally women are
1235
00:58:59.070 --> 00:59:01.830
being discussed and included in the narrative,
1236
00:59:01.830 --> 00:59:02.880
and it's that bloody.
1237
00:59:04.980 --> 00:59:07.560
And hopefully we'll no longer have that situation.
1238
00:59:07.560 --> 00:59:10.290
I mean, so many of the artists that we've discussed
1239
00:59:10.290 --> 00:59:12.270
this evening, people like Nora Heysen,
1240
00:59:12.270 --> 00:59:15.600
I'm thinking of Australia here, Grace Cossington Smith,
1241
00:59:15.600 --> 00:59:20.100
all women artists who didn't really get sort of
1242
00:59:20.100 --> 00:59:24.720
major retrospective or major kind of state or public gallery
1243
00:59:24.720 --> 00:59:27.150
recognition until they were elderly ladies.
1244
00:59:27.150 --> 00:59:31.140
I mean, we know that Nora Heysen had very successful
1245
00:59:31.140 --> 00:59:32.880
exhibitions just before,
1246
00:59:32.880 --> 00:59:36.000
actually the success of her exhibitions in the early 1930s
1247
00:59:36.000 --> 00:59:38.850
enabled her to go to London to study.
1248
00:59:38.850 --> 00:59:42.270
But apart from that, she was sort of like, I'll say,
1249
00:59:42.270 --> 00:59:45.150
an elderly lady before she got a survey
1250
00:59:45.150 --> 00:59:47.340
or a retrospective exhibition in Australia.
1251
00:59:47.340 --> 00:59:49.890
And Cossington Smith, of course, was the same.
1252
00:59:49.890 --> 00:59:54.273
So hopefully that situation's been reversed.
1253
00:59:55.320 --> 00:59:58.170
And we can, I thought we might finish this afternoon
1254
00:59:58.170 --> 00:59:59.430
or this evening's discussion
1255
00:59:59.430 --> 01:00:03.210
with this wonderful self-portrait by Alice Neel,
1256
01:00:03.210 --> 01:00:08.161
fabulous American painter who's also the painter
1257
01:00:08.161 --> 01:00:11.433
who brings your book to a close.
1258
01:00:12.780 --> 01:00:13.740
Yeah, absolutely.
1259
01:00:13.740 --> 01:00:16.650
Alice Neel was born in 1900.
1260
01:00:16.650 --> 01:00:19.860
So her life sort of spanned the 20th century.
1261
01:00:19.860 --> 01:00:22.260
She led a very turbulent life.
1262
01:00:22.260 --> 01:00:25.230
She didn't achieve fame really until she was well into
1263
01:00:25.230 --> 01:00:26.063
her seventies.
1264
01:00:27.120 --> 01:00:31.980
She spent decades painting, painting the people who,
1265
01:00:31.980 --> 01:00:32.813
her neighbours.
1266
01:00:32.813 --> 01:00:34.560
She lived in quite poor areas in New York.
1267
01:00:34.560 --> 01:00:37.080
She painted people on the street, her neighbours,
1268
01:00:37.080 --> 01:00:41.280
mothers, artists, people from the queer community,
1269
01:00:41.280 --> 01:00:43.893
pregnant women, children.
1270
01:00:44.820 --> 01:00:47.658
She was an incredibly passionate and perceptive
1271
01:00:47.658 --> 01:00:51.690
portrait artist, but she very, very rarely painted herself.
1272
01:00:51.690 --> 01:00:53.910
She painted a few sort of sketchy pictures
1273
01:00:53.910 --> 01:00:55.890
when she was very young, but then never really
1274
01:00:55.890 --> 01:00:59.730
turned her lens on herself until she was 80.
1275
01:00:59.730 --> 01:01:02.820
And she's painted this picture, took her five years
1276
01:01:02.820 --> 01:01:04.620
to paint, she kept revising it.
1277
01:01:04.620 --> 01:01:07.110
She's painting herself in the chair
1278
01:01:07.110 --> 01:01:10.113
that she often put her sitters into in her studio.
1279
01:01:10.950 --> 01:01:13.290
And as you can see, she paints herself naked.
1280
01:01:13.290 --> 01:01:15.030
You know, she's 80 years old.
1281
01:01:15.030 --> 01:01:19.290
There's absolutely no shame about her ageing, sagging body.
1282
01:01:19.290 --> 01:01:23.310
She depicts herself holding her paint brush full of power,
1283
01:01:23.310 --> 01:01:25.050
full of energy, unabashed.
1284
01:01:25.050 --> 01:01:27.810
This is my body, I live in it, it's great.
1285
01:01:27.810 --> 01:01:32.130
And so I think it's a wonderfully empowering and empowered
1286
01:01:32.130 --> 01:01:33.150
self-portrait.
1287
01:01:33.150 --> 01:01:34.470
I love it.
1288
01:01:34.470 --> 01:01:36.360
Well, thanks so much for your time, Jennifer,
1289
01:01:36.360 --> 01:01:39.120
and for your insights and your knowledge.
1290
01:01:39.120 --> 01:01:42.970
It's been absolutely wonderful to have you
1291
01:01:44.220 --> 01:01:48.090
in the National Portrait Gallery via Zoom this evening,
1292
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and to hear about your wonderful research
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and your fabulous book.
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So thank you so much.
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Oh, thank you so much for having me.
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I really appreciate it.
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And congratulations on your brilliant show.
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Thank you.