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| William A. Bouguereau and his Women's Class, late 1890s |
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| Women's Life Class at the Chase School of Art, New York, 1896 |
What happened to all those women who studied art at the
academies in Europe and America
in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries? It seems that many just faded out of
sight for one reason or another; their art legacies sealed in a trunk and stashed
away in a relative’s attic for many years before finally being excavated.
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| Edith Lake Wilkinson |
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| Edith Lake Wilkinson |
Such was the case with Edith Lake Wilkinson, a gifted artist
who was born in Wheeling, West
Virginia in 1868 and died in a mental hospital in
1957 at the age of 89, having spent the last 32 years of her life incarcerated for
“depression.” Seven years before she
died, she was evaluated by one W.B. Rogers, M.D., in the following manner: “Patient is quiet on the ward. Makes her own
bed. Talks to herself and has numerous unusual ideas. In fact, everything she
says is unusual. She is very talkative and imagines everything. Her physical
condition is good but there is no improvement in her mental condition.” That sounds an awful lot like me on one of
my better days. Back then, a little
depression exhibited by women was cause for great alarm among family members,
and often meant hospitalization and shock treatments that caused far more harm
than good, as they did in my own sensitive mother’s case.
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| Edith Lake Wilkinson |
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| Edith Lake Wilkinson |
Edith Wilkinson studied with Kenyon Cox, J. Carroll Beckwith
and William Merritt Chase at The Art Students League in the 1890s and returned
later in the early 20th Century to study with Kenneth Hayes Miller at the
League and Charles Webster Hawthorne in Provincetown, where she adopted elements
of her mentor’s fresh, high-key style before she evidently stopped painting
after landing in a mental institution for the rest of her life. She clearly learned quite a bit about
painting from all those great instructors.
Belying her presumed mental condition, her highly accomplished,
modernist works are filled with light and life.
They are bright and cheerful across a wide range of genres -- figures,
landscapes, townscapes and still lifes.
Edith’s story is chronicled in fascinating detail by Jane
Anderson, an Emmy award-winning writer and filmmaker, who created a website to
honor her great-aunt: http://www.edithlakewilkinson.com. It was Anderson’s mother who had opened a
couple of trunks in her brother-in-law’s attic in the 1960s to unearth their
talented relative, whose last years seem to have been such a pathetic waste of
a joyful, creative spirit. Anderson
grew up with her great-aunt’s work on the walls and was inspired to make art
herself. Following Edith’s example, she
took classes at the Art Students League and always carries a sketchbook with
her on her travels. Her sketches seem to have the spirit of her great-aunt’s
sketches.
Like a lot of single women artists in those days, Edith Lake
Wilkinson had a long relationship with another woman. It’s often not clear whether all those
relationships that women artists forged with other women were sexual in nature
or just a result of the natural human desire for companionship to weather
life’s ups and downs. No doubt for some
serious women artists, it was a way to stay on course without having men around
to muck things up.
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| Elizabeth Shippen Green |
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| Jessie Willcox Smith |
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Violet Oakley, Penn's Vision is part of the series of
thirteen murals Oakley painted for the Governor's Reception Room in the
Pennsylvania State Capitol.
|
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| Elizabeth Shippen Green, Violet Oakley, Jessie Willcox Smith and Henrietta Cozens in their Chestnut Street studio, ca. 1901 |
Historical data and the way things were back then tell us it
was pretty tough for women to juggle both a painting career and the demands
placed on them by society to be housewives and mothers. In those days, you couldn’t just copy a
photograph while sitting at a kitchen table, sell it on the Internet and call
yourself an artist. You had to undergo rigorous
academic training first to be taken seriously as a professional artist. It was hard sledding for those women who kept
at it.
Every state in the union probably had a handful of strong-willed
women artists who returned home after their academic studies to persevere
against all odds and take a vital role in shaping the cultural life of their
communities.
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| Elsa Jemne, The Chinese Screen, ca. 1924 |
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| Daniel Garber (1880-1958), Portrait of Elsa Laubach, ca.1912, Charcoal on Paper, 21 1/2 x 15 ¼ in. |
Elsa Laubach Jemne, for example, was one of eight newly celebrated
women artists who blazed a trail for art and culture in their home state of Minnesota
in the early 20th Century. Only four of
the artists married and only Jemne and the portrait artist Frances Cranmer
Greenman (1890-1981) had children.
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Frances Cranmer Greenman and Mary Pickford in front of Greenman’s
Portrait of the Actress, 1935, eBay, Hyee Auctions
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All
eight artists supported themselves, often with art-related jobs they hated, but
which they stuck with out of necessity. While in art school, Elsa did
commercial art, which she described in her diary as "stupid, uncongenial,
& maddening in its monotony."
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| Elsa Laubach Jemne at her Easel, 1922 |
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1888, Elsa studied out East with two
of my favorite painters, the still life painter Soren Emil Carlson at The Art
Students League and Daniel Garber at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
where she was enrolled from 1912 to 1915.
Said to be one of Garber’s favorite students, she was a recipient of the
Academy’s Emlin T. Cresson Award, which enabled her to travel to Italy
in 1914, where she chose to focus her studies on fresco painting. World War I
erupted and she had to return to America. She went on to a successful career as a
portraitist, landscape painter, muralist and illustrator in her home state
under her married name, Elsa Jemne. She
achieved her greatest recognition for her many New Deal murals, which were
executed in places such as the Hutchinson Post Office, the Stearns County
Courthouse, and the Minneapolis Armory.
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| Elsa Jemne, Iron-Ore Mines Mural, Tempera, Ely, MN Post Office |
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| Elsa Jemne, Wilderness Mural, Tempera, Ely, MN Post Office |
Rejecting commercial art work, Elsa toted her painting supplies
on Greyhound buses all over the Iron Range of Northern Minnesota during the
Great Depression to create murals depicting local or regional themes. Sometimes she had to wait for the plaster to
dry on the wall before she could begin her murals in tempera. She occupied her down
time painting watercolors of the wilderness surrounding the communities. She loved creating those murals and took
great pride in them. And her work must have
been a lifesaver for her family, as well, because her husband’s architecture
practice had dried up during the 1930s.
As an important Minnesota
artist, Elsa Jemne was an inspiration to other women, and helped found the St.
Paul Women's City Club to promote women's rights. She died in St.
Paul in 1974 at the age of 86.
There is a wonderful account of Jemne’s work on a mural for
the Post Office in Ely, Minnesota
in 1940 written by Irene Grahek for The Ely Echo weekly newspaper: http://bit.ly/190YiWJ. Grahek’s niece is married to Jemne’s grandson,
and they provided details for her story.
When the Post Office mural was finished and the scaffolding came down,
Elsa finally saw what she had accomplished and said, “I think it is good.”
Of all those unrecognized women art students in days gone
by, the two who abducted this little ramble of mine, Elsa Laubach Jemne and
Edith Lake Wilkinson, had nothing in common, it seems, other than very similar
academic art backgrounds. Elsa was
determined to make a living as an artist, and she succeeded. We’re not sure about Edith's
motivation. Some artists are just more
interested in making art than selling it.
I think Edith was like that. But
if you don’t sell your art, what’s the point of making it? Thinking like that
can be pretty depressing for any serious artist, let me tell you.
