The Memory Factory: The Forgotten Women Artists of Vienna 1900 by Julie M. Johnson

The Memory Factory: The Forgotten Women Artists of Vienna 1900 by Julie M. Johnson

Author:Julie M. Johnson [Johnson, Julie M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612492032
Publisher: Purdue University Press
Published: 2012-05-17T07:00:00+00:00


Fig. 99. Josef Engelhart, Adam and Eve Fireplace, 1898. Illustrated in Ver Sacrum 2, no. 4 (1899): 21. Now in Museum für Angewandte Kunst (MAK). ÖNB/Vienna 289170E.

Ries responded to Hevesi’s claims that she had copied Rodin much later in her memoirs. She wrote at length about precursors in the form of a conversation with a visitor (Dr. F—er) who said,

“Your Lucifer was influenced by Rodin’s Thinker.” . . . ”That has often been proposed to me,“ I responded, ”That is often the first impression of lay people, somewhat in the way that for Europeans, all blacks look alike. I will admit that Rodin and I have similar temperaments, and the temperament is what reminds you of Rodin in my Lucifer. But—to put to rest your opinion, that the man is necessarily the inseminator, also in art, I would call your attention to the year in which my Lucifer and the Thinker were created. My Lucifer was already shown at the Vienna exhibition in 1897, while Rodin’s Thinker was first created after 1898!—Furthermore, note for example that my Invincibles was shown at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900. A few years later one could see in the Paris Salon a work that depended strongly on my worker group. Here you have the proof. I handed Dr. F—er a clipping from the Critical Review of November 1903, which read “Another allegory. The human effort of Mr. James Vibert recalls . . . a strong composition of a young Moscow sculptress, the Invincibles of Mlle. Ries . . . noted at the exposition of 1900.”79

Yet we cannot really say that Ries had the last word, despite her infallible logic (Rodin, indeed, first cast the Thinker in 1902). Because my concern here is with memory and the silencing of historical documentation, I should mention first that Ries’s book is extremely rare and most definitely not in circulation, while Hevesi’s reprinted reviews are relatively easy to find in a research library. Second, when Ries showed her Invincibles to great acclaim at the 1900 exposition, right outside was a pavilion that Rodin had built at his own expense to show his Gates of Hell and collected works (Courbet had been the first to build a separate pavilion for his art at the 1855 exposition in Paris). Rodin quickly became Europe’s most famous sculptor, and he has never been subject to cycles of forgetting and rediscovery. The same, of course, cannot be said for Ries. Rodin’s influence is unparalleled and a Paris museum now enshrines his studio and sculptures. By contrast, Ries, like many of the women artists I cover, including Conrat, lost her studio to the Nazis (see chapter 8).

The insistence on originality (or “insemination,” as Ries would have it) has everything to do with Modernism and its myths. Rosalind Krauss pointed out that Rodin’s works are still being cast in the present day, long after his death, and are still considered authentic “originals.”80 He also did not carve his own marble—that was done for him after he modeled his works in clay.



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