Abstract
These two books offer narrative analyses of women artists’ (auto)biographical writings and paintings, drawing upon journals, letters, diaries, biographies, and memoirs, as well as formal and informal histories, literary and philosophical texts, academic texts, reviews and critiques, in order to construct feminist genealogies. Both books rewrite stories around women artists, their lives and work, while at the same time challenge perceptions and clichés in the genre of artists’ biographies and women artists in particular. They are informed by Deleuze’s and Guattari’s writings on assemblages and by Foucault’s concept of genealogy, helping the author trace discontinuities and recurrences in her archival research. The overall argument is that the analysis of these materials exemplifies how (auto)biographical narratives and paintings by women artists are vehicles for the constitution of a female self in art. These books thus engage with the debate as to how to write women’s (auto)biographical narratives in ways that challenge conventional biographies, those which just rewrite and reorder selected information into linear narratives of development.
I will refer now in some more detail to the specific contribution each book makes to this line of analysis, starting with In the Fold between Power and Desire (2010a). This book offers a compilation of analyses of the auto(biographical) narratives of six women artists: Rosa Bonheur, Anna Klumpke, Sofia Laskaridou, Gwen John, Dora Carrington and Mary Bradish Titcomb. For Tambokou, these women share a ‘passion for artistic creation which transcending the boundaries of their art motivates them to live an unconventional and beautiful life’ (2010a: 1); in the last chapter of the book the author comes back to the issue of choice. The books’ introduction sets out the theoretical and analytical framework for the author’s form of narrative analysis. These women’s narratives are assemblages of moments of being, stories in becoming where time is seen as duration. The main aim, and this applies to both books, is to illustrate how these narratives enable women artists to follow specific ‘lines of flight’; they become other, moving away from ‘established and rigidly codified systems of representation’ (2010a). The analysis of women artists’ narratives fulfills a twofold purpose: they illustrate stories, events, the effects of specific historical and cultural milieus, but they are also ‘forces creating meanings, constituting subjects and shaping particular perceptions of history and the social’ (2010a: 3). In other words, they are both constituted by and also constitutive of the social; a social in which the female subject constitutes herself as a political subject, transgressing power boundaries and limitations. This is why these women’s narratives are ‘nomadic’ as they embody multiplicities of meanings. Deploying this multiplicity as a research tool the author is able to highlight how the texts make connections and create oppositions with the ‘polyvalent fin-de-siecle discourses around creativity, femininity and gender relations’ (2010a: 7).
In her analyses of women artists’ paintings Tamboukou resorts again to the nomadic, but this time as a way of seeing. Drawing upon Deleuze’s and Guattari’s work on ‘faciality’, the human face is seen as constituent of social configurations of language practices and social relations. Moreover, the author addresses the problem of ‘painting forces’, an attempt to render visible forces that are not themselves visible (2010: 9). The reminder of the introduction offers a brief summary of each of the women artists selected. The sub-headings are those of each of the five individual chapters devoted to narrative analyses: ‘Auto/biography and the Portrait: Rosa Bonheur and Anna Klumpke’ (Chapter 1); ‘The art of Moving: Narrative Technologies in the Memoir of Sofia Laskaridou’ (Chapter 2); ‘Epistolary Geographies and Smooth Spaces: Unfolding Gwen John (Chapter 3); ‘Landscapes for the Self: Carrington’s Letters, Drawings and Paintings’ (Chapter 4); and ‘Narratives as Assemblages: Mary Bradish Titcomb’ (Chapter 5). Given the limited space to write a review of both books, I will focus here on Chapter 1.
This chapter traces the documentation of the life of French animalist painter Rosa Bonheur’s life by her companion and American portraitist Anna Klumpke. The memoir she wrote, Rosa Bonheur: her life and work (1908) [2003], to document Bonheur’s life after death and her portrait of Bonheur constitute the main analytical material used in this chapter. The narrative combines Bonheur’s story with Klumpke’s own autobiography and diary writing. Klumpke’s diary writing conveys the immediacy of lived experience, and thus sidesteps the need for narrative closure. Her document ends with Bonheur’s death and the execution of her will, but this open end is being re-enacted in a community of memory that she set to maintain even after Bonheur’s death. Their house is still open to the public today, and the memory of Boneheur’s live is susceptible to being re-enacted every time one visits their house (2010a: 78). The painting analysed in this chapter is Klumpke’s portrait of Bonheur, Rosa Bonheur (1898), which shows the painter at her easel with one of her most celebrated painting of horses. Following Brockmeier’s analysis of the relationship between portrait and auto-biography, Tamboukou argues that this portrait exemplifies how portraits, in general, are not simply mimetic representations of an external reality because they also reveal something psychological, a deeper degree of understanding the sitter in question.
As mentioned earlier, Nomadic Narrative, Visual Forces: Gwen John’s Letters and Paintings (2010b) offers a similar conceptual framework, this time to discuss the letters and paintings of Welsh artist Gwen John, with seven chapters devoted to this analysis. The book starts by explaining why Tamboukou has chosen Gwen John as one of the woman artists in her genealogy project. As she notes, ‘In the beginning she was not even included in my genealogical archive’ (2010b: 1). However, Janet Wolff’s essay ‘Rodin, Rilke and Gwen John in Paris’ (1994) coupled with a desire to redress some of the stereotypes running through biographies of the artist, (portraying her as a recluse who escaped the bohemian circles of London only to submit herself to a torturous, unconditional love for the famous sculptor Auguste Rodin), have influenced the author to devote a whole book to this rather misunderstood woman artist. Similar concerns and arguments in Tamboukou’s previous book can be found here: for example, how John’s letters created oppositions ‘with find-de-siecle polyvalent discourses around femininity and gender relations’ (2010b: 3). This book, drawing upon Foucault’s notion of genealogy and DeleuzoGuattarian assemblages, is a feminist project designed to re-imagine women as historical subjects. Narratives are thus treated as representing ‘multiplicities of meanings’, whilst the aim is that of tracing connections amongst stories, discourses and practices, and how these contribute to the constitution of the subject herself (2010b: 3).
The book includes seven chapters each of which is devoted to the analysis of a specific domain of John’s autobiographical materials, her letters, love letters to Rodin, self-portraits, her paintings of cats, paintings of her room and studio in Paris. Even though it is impossible to summarize here all the chapters, I will refer to some of the contributions she makes, especially in her chapter on epistolary narratives and the nomadic self (Chapter 2) and in her chapter on John’s self-portraits (Chapter 3).
All chapters follow a similar format, a discussion of the analytical concepts informing the analysis vis-à-vis an illustration of the narratives/paintings under examination. Chapter 2, for example, addresses the notion of narratable subjects, which attends to processes of self-emergence within the act of narration. In other words, it is through narration that ‘we perceive ourselves and others as unique beings whose identity is narratable in a life-story’ (2010b: 31). This narratable self is a nomadic, narratable self, always provisional, taking up various subject positions but not in permanent ways. Tamboukou’s analysis of John’s correspondence to her friend Ursula Tyrwhitt and Rodin reveals how these letters enable the process of John’s nomadic constitution as a woman and as an artist. One aspect of John’s letters discussed in this chapter is their openness. John was consistently having difficulty in choosing words in English, and also with the French language, which she used in her correspondence to Rodin. These letters were thus ‘always incomplete’; John was constantly drafting them, even when they were sent, ‘there were always oscillations, ambiguities and regrets’ (2010b: 37). However, openness is not seen here as a problem, which still besets narrative theory, but a characteristic of how they express John’s ‘narratibility and create meaning for her life by turning it into a story or rather a series of novellas or short stories’ (2010b: 40). But the issue of openness is not only relevant to this example of John’s letter, it is one that besets the social and human sciences where, for some, narrative research has been driven by the principles of sequence, coherence and closure. What Tamboukou is trying to demonstrate, and I think she does so successfully, is how the question for narrative research should be one of process, and not of sequence. That is, John’s letters are narratives not because they follow a sequential structure, but precisely because they defy this form of representation and constitute ‘multiplicities’, they create intense fields of narrative forces that ‘deterritorialize meaning from what can be textually inscribed or represented’ (2010b: 47).
In her chapter ‘Beyond Figuration and Narration’ Tamboukou discusses further the issue of deterritorialization of the face in John’s paintings of portraits of women and girls. Rather than seeing John’s portraits as examples of feminine gentleness, delicacy and refinement, as suggested by early appraisals of her work, she argues that John’s portraits, in their total indifference to the identity of the character of the sitter, defy conventions of portraiture. They are at the margins of these conventions, and it is precisely the imperceptibility and elusiveness of the sitters that makes possible John’s response to being ‘pinned down as a stratified and recognizable identity’ (2010b: 78). This leads Tamboukou to argue that these portraits are a testimony to John’s reticence to be pinned down as a character. Liberating lines and colors on her canvas from their representative function, John’s portraits, her representations of facial expressions, are examples of deterritorialization. In approaching the sensory, the invisible and the virtual, rather than the perceptual realm of painting, Tamboukou is able to address the issue of how an artist can move beyond figuration while painting portraits (2010b: 83).
Overall, I have enjoyed reading these two books immensely. The wealth of analytical material combined with the detailed exploration of women artists’ narratives, including both texts and paintings, makes these two books an ideal read for those interested not only in narrative research, but also on the sociology of art, art history, and the philosophy of art. The analysis is well supported with theoretical discussions of relevant topics for the chapter at hand, which are furthered and expanded as the chapters go along. From this point of view, it is much more enjoyable to read the whole book than one single chapter which I would argue would make a reader feel somehow disconnected from the overall line of argument, as theories, concepts and arguments keep being re-evaluated and re-assessed as the books progress.
If there is something I would like to have seen in these books is further contextualization of the book within socio-scientific approaches to art analysis, especially to the sociology of the arts to which it can make an outstanding contribution. Even though the books discuss both texts and paintings, what is clear from both texts is the inter-relation of both forms of narrative as a means to understand processes of the constitution of a female self. All in all, the books are doing something the sociology of the arts has been struggling with, to move away from the analysis of the socio-cultural and political context of art production and consumption, and to attempt to develop strategies that bring in the art object into sociological analyses. The art object, in all its materiality and sensuality is positioned in these books at the centre of narrative analysis. It is a medium through which women artists engage in processes of self-constitution and agency.