Reading Letters in Paintings
In her book “Letters to Gwen John” (2022) painter Celia Paul addressed John who died in 1939 in thinking about parallels and differences in their lives and artistic practices in the form of letters: “Dearest Gwen, I know this letter to you is an artifice. I know you are dead and that I’m alive and that no usual communication is possible between us but, as my mother used to say, ‘Time is a strange substance’ and who knows really, with our time-bound comprehension of the world, whether there might be some channel by which we can speak to each other, if we only knew how.” Not only in epistolary practices but also in the depiction letters in paintings – often a white shaded area without legible letters – the absence of the addresses as well as the gap between the message sent and the message received plays a crucial role. Research so far focused on the depiction of women letter readers by male artists. However, women painters have employed the motif of the letter at least since the 18th century – prominent examples being Adélaïde de Labille-Guiards “Portrait de femme” (1787), “The Letter” (1894) by Helene Schjerfbeck or “Self-Portrait with Letter” (1907) by Gwen John. What stories do these paintings tell and how is our reading of them dependent on our situatedness?Do women artists undermine voyeuristic desires, or do they employ them differently? In what way does the depiction of a women reading a letter differ from a women reading a book?
This session brings together scholars whose work deals with the letter as motif in paintings by women. After the presentation of the papers, we’ll have a discussion open to the audience.
Session Convenor:
Isabel Mehl, Free University Berlin
Speakers:
Tricia Cusack, unaffiliated
Women with Letters: Images of Autonomy
My paper considers four paintings of women focused on reading or writing letters executed by women artists between the end of the nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. Educated women were prolific letter-writers and correspondence was one way in which women in patriarchal European societies could maintain friendships and provide mutual support. We may then perhaps imagine these depicted women as writing to other women. Two of the pictures depict the subject in profile, one frontally and another partly turned around. The paper analyses these images from two interrelated aspects: the peculiar features of the profile portrait, and the notion of ‘absorption’, each having implications for the representation of the subject and for the role of the fictive viewer. Michael Fried discusses the notion of ‘absorption’ in a study of eighteenth-century French painting. It refers to depicted figures that focus intently on an activity to the exclusion of any distraction, whether by other figures located in the painting, or the gaze of the fictive viewer. I argue that these images of women writers and readers are constructed to show women as active individuals absorbed in a private occupation. Unlike many visual representations of women over this period, these portrayals are not designed for an admiring male gaze, nor even addressed to an onlooker. Although located in a domestic environment the figures occupy a personal space, free to contemplate, and they are shown concerned solely with writing, reading or thinking about their letters, the contents of which remain opaque and personal.
Benjamin Brinton, independent scholar
Maria Vermeer and Johannes Vermeer: letters from and to my father
Johannes Vermeer’s paintings are renowned for their perfection, poetic naturalism, and empathetic observation of female interiority. His self-consciously modernist “paintings about painting” were based, scholars have intuited, on family members as models in rooms of his house, as with his wife reading his (love) letter in his „Letter Reader“ and—visibly aged and obviously pregnant—”Woman in Blue”. He subsequently turned, it seems, to his teenage daughters and returned to his mother-in-law and her maid as models, including for his so-called “Love Letter,” which likely portrayed financial or legal correspondence. Seven paintings currently assigned to Vermeer, some contested, appear to be based on the same models and rooms; yet lack his characteristically refined details and light-filled interiors; incoherently combine elements from his compositions; present bewildering contradictions; and are boldly experimental and expressionistic, emphasizing momentary subjectivity. The same model for Vermeer’s „Girl with a Pearl Earring“ in “Girl with a Flute” and “Girl in a Red Hat” could be explained as early self-portrait studies by his eldest daughter Maria Vermeer. She adapted their (figural) tapestry backgrounds in what was apparently her Frick Mistress and Maid, which was later painted over black, and after Vermeer’s death traded as his own painting against a debt to a baker, effectively a forgery, making Maria’s apprenticeship necessarily a family secret. This composition and presumably her Girl Interrupted nevertheless introduced provocative conceptions of letters. Responding to her father, Maria would have shifted her emphasis to expressing female interiority and subjectivity, in her models, and as artist.
Nadja Abt, University of Applied Arts
I wasn`t asked – some dialogues between figures in paintings
As an author and artist, I was once asked to write about Herman van der Mijn’s “The Tempation” (1711-1720) for a publication. I have always tried to address the question: How to keep an art historical research-based distance from another artist`s work when you are one yourself? Having also worked as a script writer for films, I had an idea for van der Mijn’s painting: I took the letter in the hand of the woman as a starting point to imagine myself being inside the picture, not looking at it from the outside. In this way the rigid figures become actors. Like the source of a film adaptation, the animation takes place in dialogues. How would the characters have spoken to each other in the 18th century and what would they say if they were alive today? The dialogue is an attempt to give the female character a voice of her own and thus elude the male gaze of desire and ultimately the painter’s brush. Eventually, the figure might escape the picture and go her own way. For the occasion of the conference I also picked the painting “The Letter Writer Suprised” (c. 1658-60) by Gabriel Metsu showing a woman writing a letter while being observed by a man standing behind her. The third dialogue is in reference to Lotte Laserstein’s “Self-portrait with palette, brush and cropped figure” (1962) where the artist herself seems accompanied by a woman reading a letter next to her.
Isabel Mehl, Free University Berlin
Triangle of Seeing – and the role of the letter in it
The motif of the letter in painting emphasises the dependence of art on its viewers: As a materialised object, it stands between the artist and the viewer and determines not only the dynamics within the painting, but also the relationship to the viewer. Through the letter, the artist has laid a trail to a content that is hidden in the letter – a secret. The viewers in turn recognise the letter as the key to the plot of the painting and from then on see their task in deciphering the painting, which is analogous to deciphering the content of the letter. What role does the female reader of the letter play within this constellation? Hardly any other object embodies the dependence on the recipient as strongly as a letter and at the same time only exists because it is addressed to someone. The hope of reaching another person is thus inscribed in it. How the viewers of the picture, ‘read’ the letter and relate it to the scene of the painting tells something about the patterns of interpretation and the narratives of the culture available to them. In this way, the letter – different from the pictorial motif of the book – offers a special opportunity to situate the act of viewing anew.