Violet Oakley by Van Hook Bailey;

Author:Van Hook, Bailey; [Hook, Bailey Van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Published: 2016-02-16T19:54:58+00:00

Return

The Oakleys sailed home from Naples in late March. Violet was impatient to start work and soon after her return was ready for the governor and members of the Board of Public Grounds and Buildings to review her sketches. At the end of the first week of April, the title for Oakley’s series of panels, The Creation and Preservation of the Union, was announced, and the news that her sketches had been accepted was released. She bought a very fancy, large folio notebook, embossed with a coat of arms and leather straps. It was dated April 5, 1913, and started, “Here beginneth an attempt to record the order of the impressions received on this trip . . .”16

In stark contrast to Oakley’s embrace of tradition and history was the infamous Armory Show in New York that winter. The Armory Show has since been recognized as modernism’s warning bell in the United States. A friend told of “swirling brains” and the strange fascination with which she looked at the cubists and post-impressionists, and longed to know what Oakley thought of them. Elizabeth Shippen Green was delighted that both Jessie and Henrietta had seen the “extraordinary exhibition” in New York City. She went on about one of the most famous works in the show, Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, and wondered if it would be decipherable if not labeled.17

Oakley missed the show since she was still in Europe. After she returned, she was profiled in the Public Ledger, and a reporter asked her opinion of cubists and futurists, “but she would not speak sympathetically or disparagingly about them,” saying there were many schools of art, a response that could be read as either genuinely open-minded or a mask for her ignorance. In the article, Oakley appeared serious and professional (in her pressbook, someone labeled the article “very accurate”). The reporter pictured her studio as an “ideal place to live and work,“ full of books such as those by or on artists such as Giorgio Vasari, Leonardo da Vinci, Joshua Reynolds, and Benvenuto Cennini, and a history of Chinese and Japanese painting, and noted “she is a well read woman and lays great stress upon the value of scholarly culture” who has no sympathy for art for art’s sake but instead finds art a “vehicle for the transmission of ideas.” He recounted that she had found happiness in her work and seemed full of energy despite being silent alone all day in her studio. She did not believe in “sex distinctions” in art but in the equality of the sexes: “Miss Oakley speaks with feeling on everything that she touches on and then alternates by speaking very calmly. She resents any interest in her private life and wishes to speak to the public only through her art.”18

That summer, Violet took a break and vacationed with her mother at one of their favorite spots, Atlantic City. She wrote to Henrietta and Jessie that they “are happy and refreshed and thoroughly made over by the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.