Scoville Library talk navigates changes to publishing industry
Stephanie Koven
Photo by Patrick L. Sullivan
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Travel league baseball came to Torrington Thursday, June 26, when the Berkshire Bears Select Team played the Connecticut Moose 18U squad. The Moose won 6-4 in a back-and-forth game. Two players on the Bears play varsity ball at Housatonic Valley Regional High School: shortstop Anthony Foley and first baseman Wes Allyn. Foley went 1-for-3 at bat with an RBI in the game at Fuessenich Park.
Anthony Foley, rising senior at Housatonic Valley Regional High School, went 1-for-3 at bat for the Bears June 26.Photo by Riley Klein
Gluck, Medallion (You/We), 1936, oil on canvas. Ömer Koç Collection.
© 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London
Provided
Much of the art on display consists of weavings, fabrics, or decorative designs — forms that, until the 1970s, were dismissed in the art world as “domestic arts.” By giving them the same amount of attention as the “high art” of painting (which women were traditionally excluded from), the exhibition demonstrates that women knew how to fit art-making into their domestic lives.
Some artists, such as Mary Lowndes (1857-1929), made successful businesses for themselves. In 1897, after attending the Slade School of Art in London, she became an assistant to a stained-glass designer. She then co-founded Lowndes and Drury, a stained-glass studio and workshop, made her own windows for various churches, and became influential in the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain.
In 1907, Lowndes became a founding member of the Artist’s Suffrage League. Along with such artists as the embroiderer and fabric designer May Morris (daughter of Willliam Morris, who was associated with the Arts and Crafts movement) and Marianne Stokes (a German-born artist whose painting Polishing Pans, c. 1887 is a tour-de-force), made banners and posters for women’s suffrage protests.
The boldest and most independent woman in the show is the lesbian artist Gluck, who shortened her name from Hannah Gluckstein. Coming from a wealthy family that financially supported her art career, she was able to build her own large studio. She cut her hair as short as a man’s, wore men’s clothing, and led an intense romantic life of many loves and losses. “Medallion (You/We)” (1936) offers a self-portrait in profile that crisply overlaps a similar profile portrait of Nesta Obermer, a married socialite who was Gluck’s romantic partner at the time.
Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia Wolfe and a founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, also shrugged off societal norms. Married to a straight man with whom she had two sons, she openly had another child with a homosexual friend.Her “Self-Portrait” (c. 1915), along with the watercolor and gouache “Design for Omega Workshop Fabric” (1913), are the most modern works in the exhibition.
My own favorite work is Winifred Knights’s “The Deluge” (1920), painted while she was still a student at the Slade School of Art. It portrays the biblical flood, but makes the arc almost an afterthought, and instead focuses on the doomed human beings frantically trying to run away from death. It’s an action-packed painting by a gifted artist who, by the time she died in 1947, had been almost completely forgotten.
Dame Laura Knight, A Balloon Site, Coventry, 1943, oil on canvas. IWM (Imperial War Museums), Art. IWM ART LD 2750 © Imperial War Museums / © Estate of Dame Laura Knight. All rights reserved 2024 / Bridgeman ImagesProvided
Painters Anna Airy and Dame Laura Knight each had long, strong careers. Airy’s two pictures from 1918, rendered in multiple shades of brown, silvery whites, and bits of red, include busy male and female workers inside the vast interiors of war-time factories. The astonishingly prolific Dame Laura Knight persisted in trying to get the all-male Royal Academy of Arts to recognize her achievements, and in 1936, she was finally elected the first woman full member since its founding in 1768. “Take Off” (1943), with four men in a cockpit packed together like sardines, and “A Balloon Site, Coventry” (1943), with a line of women and men pulling hard on the ropes controlling a humungous air balloon floating above their heads, use inventive compositions to convey the nerve-wracking physicality of the moment.
Breaking into the male-dominated art world was — and still is — a job in itself. To the women who managed it, we owe at least this belated recognition.
“A Room of Her Own: Women Artist-Activists in Britain, 1875-1945” is on view through Sep. 14.
Laurie Fendrich is a painter and writer living in Lakeville, CT. She is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and is represented by Louis Stern Fine Arts in Los Angeles.
