Chair
Véronique Chagnon-Burke (Co-Founder of Women Art Dealers Digital Archives & Co-Chair TIAMSA) and Christopher R. Marshall (University of Melbourne)
Panellists
Véronique Chagnon-Burke (Co-Founder of Women Art Dealers Digital Archives & Co-Chair TIAMSA) and Sylvie Tersen (Independent scholar), Christopher R. Marshall (University of Melbourne), Adelina Modesti (University of Melbourne), Anne Rothfeld (Independent scholar)
La Galerie Jeanne Bucher: Building Bridges between Contemporary Art and International Collectors
Véronique Chagnon-Burke (Co-Founder of Women Art Dealers Digital Archives & Co-Chair TIAMSA) & Sylvie Tersen (Independent scholar)
Originally from the Alsace region, Jeanne Bucher came to Paris in 1921 to open the Bibliothèque étrangère, which will become an art gallery-bookstore in 1925, located in the shop of the architect and designer Pierre Chareau. In 1929, she finally opened her own gallery rue du Cherche Midi, at a time where being a working woman was not yet the norm. From the beginning of her professional life, her vision was marked by her Franco-German bi-culturalism and her keen interest in supporting the international community of artists who had settled in Paris between the two world wars. More importantly, Jeanne Bucher’s understanding of her practice went beyond selling and promoting the work of living artists. She was at the heart of the Parisian art ecosystem. She contributed to save the art journal, Les Cahiers Art, while advocating for the support of contemporary art by French museums. She was also one of the major art publishers of the period, publishing 28 books from 1925 to 1943.
This paper seeks to develop a better understanding of her international network to bring visibility to her role as promoter of a transnational vision of the avant-garde from 1925 to her death in 1946. This is part of a large project which seek to study the contribution to women art dealers in the institutionalization of modern art.
“The rest is easy”: Problems of attribution and workshop organisation in the late Neapolitan paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi
Christopher R. Marshall (University of Melbourne)
The recent influx of new attributions to Artemisia Gentileschi has led to a major shake-up of her oeuvre. In 1991, the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to her was able to include only three tentatively attributed paintings datable to her later Neapolitan career. In 2022-23, by contrast, no fewer than two major exhibitions were devoted to her late Neapolitan oeuvre, with scores of new and recently advanced attributions featured in their catalogues. The works that make up this new and continuously evolving picture of her later Neapolitan output manifest an unusually high degree of stylistic variation that has proven challenging for many commentators. Thus Mary Garrard - author of a landmark monograph of 1989 and another from 2020 – has observed that: “The market has brought forth many more paintings unconvincingly ascribed to Artemisia… But Artemisia’s name cannot be a wastebasket into which we dump images of women that do not remotely resemble those she painted, or even one another. Surely it is possible to set some standards for a more coherent oeuvre.”
This paper proposes to address this problem by firstly underscoring the importance of Gentileschi’s apprenticeship under her father, Orazio, for establishing workshop procedures that she then built on in Naples. In Rome, from ca. 1606 prior to her 1613 departure for Florence to set herself up as an independent artist, Artemisia was taught first to copy and then to progressively modify her father’s compositions into more independently modulated variations of standard compositions – a process that can be traced in the early evolution of the Judith and Her Maidservant subject in versions today at Oslo, Bilbao and Florence. Unlike her father, however, Gentileschi was not able to gradually train teenaged male apprentices while they resided in her home and learned to paint in her style – a professional handicap that derived both from her gender as well as from her previously itinerant lifestyle. Instead, Gentileschi was required to establish in Naples a series of ‘pop-up’ workshops that she then filled with an overlapping sequence of fully matriculated artists – ‘hired guns’ in effect – who were brought in to assist her with particular compositions, according to need.
A sense of Gentileschi’s position on the issue of how to maintain consistency and quality control over the high levels of workshop variance that this model naturally resulted in can be gauged from her letters to her clients. In 1649, for example, she stressed the primacy of her drawings as a means of preserving the foundational invenzione or underlying conception of her creative process. In justifying a decision not to send a drawing to a prospective client, she thus stressed that “when the concept has been realised and defined with lights and darks, and established with means of planes [in drawings], the rest is easy.” This emphasis on ideation over execution was matched with a corresponding insistence on her ability to maintain her originality by modifying her most popular subjects into continuously evolving variations on a theme. The same letter thus concludes with her assertion that “never has anyone found in my pictures any repetition of invention, not even of one hand.” In making such a strikingly independent pronouncement on artistic creativity and originality, Gentileschi was, in fact, harking back to her early training while simultaneously pointing the way forward to the new and innovative modes of workshop practice that she was just then evolving in response to the constantly challenging Neapolitan artworld of the day.
The Market for Art and Luxury Goods at the Medici Court of Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere
Adelina Modesti (University of Melbourne)
Vittoria della Rovere de' Medici, Grand Duchess of Tuscany from 1637, and Dowager from 1670 to her death in 1694, was a committed patron of the arts and avid collector of luxury goods, employing a team of international agents to source and procure the items she so desired from many parts of the old and new world. Moreover, she facilitated the purchase of works of art, books, luxury clothing and textiles amongst other things for her family and members of the Medici court and entourage. Some of this the Grand Duchess acquired for herself or as personal gifts for her ladies-in-waiting and friends, whilst it also appears she acted as cultural broker for her son Grand Prince Cosimo III, brother-in-law Prince Leopoldo de' Medici and Medici court diplomats and associates. Documents in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze reveal that they mediated their cultural requests through the Grand Duchess's court and treasury via her personal secretary. Thus Vittoria paid for these imported items herself, though it remains unclear if she was reimbursed for such expenses. Through an examination of the Grand Duchess's court records, accounts, and correspondence this paper will identify the main actors involved in this system of transnational cultural exchange and the range of artworks and diverse objects and items which were procured, highlighting Vittoria della Rovere's key role at the centre of this extended diplomatic and commercial network of agents, consultants, mediators, suppliers, transporters and consumers.
Eve Tucker versus Restitution Policy in U.S. occupied Austria
Anne Rothfeld (Independent scholar)
From 1947 to 1949, Evelyn Tucker, a Museum, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFA&A) Representative, worked in U.S. military occupied Austria, recovering, investigating, and restituting Nazi plundered Austrian-owned cultural property. My study of Tucker will explore several themes regarding her involvement in returning stolen loot to Austria, and her influence upon restitution policies during her two years in U.S. Army occupied Austria.
Tucker encountered numerous difficulties, which led to her mounting frustration with the U.S. military. She observed how U.S. Army troops illegally used recovered cultural property from the Zone warehouse in their villas and offices. She attempted to openly criticize the U.S. Army for the thefts by blaming the Army’s appalling behavior on its lack of understanding U.S. restitution efforts. Soon, she created tensions between herself and her Army supervisors. She struggled with ethical issues over recovering and restituting stolen cultural property and used her field reports as a forum for venting her opinions. However, she was incapable of stopping this gross negligence. Her condemnation of the U.S. Army officers led to her discredit and her dismissal.
The U.S. restitution program in occupied Austria lacked guidance from civilian and military agencies in Washington. Tucker’s opinionated and colorful field reports detail the U.S. Army officials’ general disinterest in restitution; only wanting to quickly liquidate the property so that they could leave Europe. The lack of coherent policy directives was analogous to structural problems within the U.S. military occupation government. Moreover, restitution of artworks remains today a subtle and complicated issue for the international museum community and government agencies.
Tucker positioned herself as honoring a transcendent cause of Austrian national sovereignty by protecting the Austrian-owned artworks recovered within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army. By combining her observations with the lack of decisive decision-making, we can easily observe how government agencies fought for their respective programs and over their responsibilities which only obstructed Tuckers’ restitution work.