6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Are love and art incompatible?, April 28, 2001
This review is from: Stravinsky's Lunch (Hardcover)
Women artists were leaders in the Modernist movement in Australia between the two World Wars. This books looks at two, whose lives are like a mirror image of each other, Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith. More than a straightforward biography, it addresses the dilemma of love and art. Do women have to sacrifice one for the other?
Modjeska's motif is a story she first heard from a friend. She says: "It isn't much of a story, simply that when Stravinsky was in mid-composition, he insisted that his family ate lunch in silence. The slightest sound, a murmur, even a whisper, could ruin his concentration and destroy an entire work."
"It's not a particularly unusual story - great male artists have demanded more than that in the name of Art - and yet it has worked on me, and in me, in ways that it has taken me a long time to understand. What began, for me, as an argument has become taken into my life as a kind of meditation."
At the time Bowen and Smith were developing as artists, Virginia Woolf was writing that in order for a woman to succeed as an artist she needed A Room Of One's Own and 500 pounds a year - ie an income sufficient for self-support.
Stella Bowen was born in 1893, Grace Cossington Smith in 1892. They led extremely different lives. Bowen went to europe, met and fell in love with a writer, Ford Madox Ford, spent a decade keeping house for him, and raising their child (which she continued to do after they separated). She lived in England and France from the evee of WW1, and never returned to Australia. Smith, on the other hand, lived for most of her life in a (then) semi-rural, outer suburb of Sydeny, bucolicly middle-class. She had the financial support of her encouraging family, who facilitated her art. One sister remained unmarried, and for most of the time kept house.
Modjeska said in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald:
"It is very tough to be a woman and an artist. It has always been tough to be a woman and an artist. I have had a pretty good run as a writer, but even I have tasted enough of it to know what it has been like for women before. Life intrudes. Love intrudes. Women don't seem to be able to separate the two, women don't seem to be permitted to separate the two, like the blokes are able to do. And what is interesting, the more I explored this, the more I realised that women are complicit in the whole thing, too. The whole question became very complex."
The book is beautifully illustrated, with colour plates that are a pleasurable enhancement to the text. It is an engrossing and highly engaging read.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Is family life incompatible with great art?, July 5, 2001
This review is from: Stravinsky's Lunch (Hardcover)
"For somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. Help me, in saying it, to understand it." Rilke.
Stravinsky's lunch, and that of his wife and children, was taken in silence when he was composing. The slightest sound, it seems, "could destroy his concentration and ruin an entire work". Is family life, then, incompatible with great art? Is compromise impossible? Could Stravinsky not have taken his lunch on a tray in his room and left his wife and children free from such restraint?
And what about women artists? Can they possibly juggle family, love and art?
Questions of compromise lie behind all the lives in this book, including Modjeska's, but this does not make it a dry book of philosophy or polemic.
On the contrary, it is a rich and engrossing book about the lives of two Australian women artists, Stella Bowen (1893-19470) and Grace Cossington Smith (1892-1984) whose lives and art were very different and who dealt with this problem in very different ways. It is also a book which is richly illustrated. And Modjeska has a superb ability to describe paintings in such a way that the viewer/reader sees them anew with her, noticing subtle details and sharing the empathy she has developed with the artist through exploring that artist's life.
Unusually for a modern biographer, Modjeska is careful to distinguish between speculation and fact. Occasionally she does weave imaginary lives for her subjects but she makes it clear that these are her own fantasies and that myth is a dangerous indulgence. This is especially so in the case of Grace Cossington Smith, who "left little trace of herself. Her private personal self. There are few interviews, few letters, few photos, no diaries". All there is to work on is her art, which, in its directness and modernism is tantalizingly at odds with the description of Grace given at her memorial service as "a sweet Christian lady". "Sweet", Modjeska notes, "is never the word for an artist; or if it is, you can be sure it's not a compliment". Such pithy comment is typical of Modjeska's style.
Neither Stella Bowen nor Grace Cossington Smith are well known outside Australia, although Stella Bowen shared a decade of her life with Ford Maddox Ford, worked with him to establish and fund _transatlantic review_ in 1924 (Tristan Tzara, e.e.cummings and Havelock Ellis featured in it), and brought up their daughter Julie. At the same time, her own art was exhibited in Paris, she wrote a weekly column ('Round the Galleries' ) for the London News Chronicle and, after leaving Ford, took portrait commissions in America and, during World War II, was commissioned as a war artist by the War Memorial in Canberra. Altogether, she led a very full and independent life in which she successfully managed to juggle mundane work, love and family with her commitment to fine art.
The life of Grace Cossington Smith took quite a different course. Apart from two years spent with family in England and Germany as a young girl, and a later visit to Europe in 1949-50, Grace spent all her life in Australia. She was supported by her family. Even domestic duties did not impinge on her time: a younger sister took on this role for the family and Grace "managed never to master" the kitchen arts (the position of that 'never' is subtle and telling).
Grace was artistic and talented. She won art prizes at school; and her father built a studio for her in their suburban garden and paid for her to attend the Sydney art school run by Italian artist Dattilo-Rubbo. Unlike Stella Bowen, she had "No husband. No babies. No affairs. No scandals. No cafes in Paris.". Yet Grace Cossington Smith was one of the first and best modernist artists in Australia, and she achieved this in spite of the critical antagonism of the powerful male art-establishment: "the buggers' union" as Naomi Mitchison, an Australian friend of Stella Bowen, called them. She achieved it, too, in spite of the fact that the work of artists like Picasso, Cezanne, Gaugin, Matisse, Van Gogh and Watteau (all of whose work seems to have influenced her own) was unavailable to her in Australia, except as reproductions. This was true, too, of the work of masters like Fra Angelica, whose work she first saw and loved on her visit to Italy when she was fifty-seven.
It is shocking to be reminded that Australian artists were so cut off from the art of Europe for so long. In 1936 the director of the National Gallery of Victoria still spoke of "modernist filth"; and the first exhibition of 'French and British Contemporary Art' was seen in Australia in 1939 - although none of it was bought by Australian public galleries, two of which refused even to host the show.
Grace Cossington Smith succeeded by dedication as much as by talent. Many other artists felt the need to leave Australia in order to succeed: this, too, is a question Modjeska ponders.
Other artists, literary and figurative, appear in this book. Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker set the scene. Ford Maddox Ford, Edith Sitwell, Virginia Wolf, Vanessa Bell, Sinclair Lewis and (in Australia) Dattilo-Rubbo, Ethel Anderson, Julian Ashton, Margaret Preston and others become part of Modjeska's investigation of the relationship between art and life. She is erudite and intelligent but she wears her knowledge lightly. Above all she brings her two main subjects to life and shows their importance as artists and, particularly, as women artists who succeeded in the male-dominated art world in which they lived and worked. Their stories are inspiring, fascinating and thought-provoking and Modjeska tells them wonderfully well. ...
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Inside the artist's mind, April 2, 2003
This review is from: Stravinsky's Lunch (Hardcover)
To say I enjoyed the reading experience of "Starvinsky's Lunch" would be a gross disservice to the achievement of the writer. I felt that the artists' minds (both Stella Bowen¡¯s and Grace Cossington Smith¡¯s) were uniquely explored - not exposed with a terminal completion, but explored and searched with a satisfyingly partial understanding.
The majority of Modjeska's understanding of her two subjects comes from their art - and not from letters, diaries or interviews with contemporaries - although these also figure large in the total insight. By making the majority revolve on their art means that the two things can be said about the understandings offered - (1) they are highly personal and interpretive to the writer, and (2) force us to see and think of these women artists through their art rather than through any other window of our view of them.
On the first point - that the insights are personal to the biographist - this is a delight in the hands of such a gifted writer and observer, but it also leaves the reader with the privilege of sharing a more emotively insightful understanding of the subjects. It is like having a biography written by a lover/spouse/parent ¨C it leaves us with two impressions ¨C both an understanding of the person and the relationship between them and the biographer. Of course we achieve this at the expense of objectivity, but with the benefit of a more intimate, more contextual, more sympathetic view. For me Drusilla Modjeska¡¯s sharing of her interpretations and impressions of her two subjects - based mainly on looking at their art - has given me an unforgettably intimate insight into the hearts and minds of two fine artists. And her interpretations ¨C nearly always matched by illustrations of the art under discussion ¨C are convincing to me. I believe her interpretations.
On the second point, I have been left with an action plan out of reading this biography ¨C I want to look at the paintings. I think that is a very positive outcome after reading biography of artists!! Yesterday I saw Grace Cossington Smith¡¯s ¡°Harbour Bridge¡± at NGV in Melbourne. Stella Bowen¡¯s work is harder to see ¨C but there is a traveling exhibition in Australia at the moment. It¡¯s not so unique for a biography of an artist to send us to look at the paintings ¨C but in this case my thirst is to find the two women in their paintings ¨C not paintings that illustrate events in their lives.
To return to my original observation. Stravinsky¡¯s Lunch is a marvelous reading experience. It communicates an incomplete understanding of its subjects and therein lies one great strength. It is intriguing, up-lifting but not didactically complete. But it sets us off the want to know the subjects better ¨C by looking at what they must have seen as the heritage they wanted to leave ¨C their art.
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