The show seems to ask: how do these twenty-five white, female artists, primarily of means, firmly situated in the Edwardian era of the United Kingdom, secure and amplify their status? Is it primarily armed conflict that eases their way? Let’s start with the end—the final canvases before the visitor exits the Clark’s galleries, which skew the premise enough to redeem the show. These are paintings commissioned in the 1940s by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, a British government body established to create a visual record of World War II, and in 1918 by the Munitions Committee of the Imperial War Museum. Anna Airy’s sprawling pair of paintings An Aircraft Assembly Shop, Hendon and Shop for Machining 15-Inch Shells: Singer Manufacturing Company, Clydebank, Glasgow (both 1918) portray the epic buzz of mass production (of weapons of mass destruction) at a painterly remove. Note that Airy’s “open factory” work shucks the titular “Room of Her Own” for the “munitions factory of one’s own.”
The Clark Art Institute, itself a Cold War artifact, opened in May 1955. Its founders, Francine and Robert Sterling Clark, had been seeking a remote, rural location that might spare their art collection from any nuclear blasts targeting east coast cities. Nowadays, Massachusetts is the epicenter of the New England Military Defense Cluster; local manufacturers include Raytheon, L3Harris, GE Aerospace, QinetiQ and General Dynamics. Extended labels note that prior to its munitions conversion, the US-based, anti-union, multinational Singer Corporation was the source of Robert Sterling Clark’s wealth.
The exhibition catalog includes the detail that workers in the 1911 strike at his Glasgow factory bandied the Industrial Workers of the World phrase “An injury to one is an injury to all.” (The strike was instigated by twelve women, but it was smashed after the highest paid male workers caved first.) There, on the site depicted by Airy, the ratio of workers to tasks and the Taylorist pace incubated an unsafe and extractive environment; it generated the profit that houses this show. Seen from a certain angle, the terminus of this exhibit demands a contemporary revival: painters swapping their studios for the open interiors of factories (or plein air, from the properties’ borders, if they are barred from entry) in order to document the local production in Massachusetts factories of materials used to pulverize Gaza, Yemen, Iran.
The front half of the exhibition peels back the interior of artists’ property (estate and workshop), as rendered in an extraordinary watercolor, Anna Alma-Tadema’s The Garden Studio (1886–87). These artists seem nestled among sumptuous things: skilled embroidery (May Morris), clever dishware (Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant), and subtle book cover designs (Bell). Deeper in, two paintings signal the strained inclusion of Gluck, a person who did not tolerate pronouns, only participated in “one-man shows” and wore masculine clothes designed in consultation with designers including Elsa Schiaparelli. If the curator had retained Virginia Woolf’s literary title unmodified—“A Room of One’s Own” rather than “A Room of Her Own”, perhaps Gluck’s inclusion would not feel so awkward. Later, I read Gluck’s application to patent a particular style of frame, which might serve as an explication of Gluck’s gender, describing the “stepped formation” that “comprises a plurality of surfaces each lying substantially at right angles to an adjacent surface.”
This is a chance to stand in the odd light cast by an unsettling 1930s reprisal of the neoclassical—a calcification of whiteness, purity, and hygiene. But Medallion (You/We) (1936), the seminal queer double portrait of the Jewish Gluck and gentile lover, Nesta, was intended as an unofficial wedding portrait. Gluck’s hope, stated in love letters but not adhered to, is that it would be hung beside Noël (1937), a still life that illuminates the remains of a Christmas celebration in a heavenly glow. Omitting the injunction to pair the canvases subtracts the core imagery, the messianic mess, and the class key. The center of that painting is a thick, sweet, cut cake. It is only because of cake that Gluck had the time to eat, fuck, and paint: Gluck was an heir to family wealth flowing in large part from J. Lyons & Co., a nationwide chain of tea shops in which waitresses clocked a seventy-four-hour workweek.
At the end of the exhibition, A Balloon Site, Coventry (1943) by Dame Laura Knight radiates a stiff sparkle and pop now associated with AI’s color and content. All war propaganda requires the sort of automatic glow-up that encourages recruits, if no longer to a Women’s Land Army. Here a crew hoists an anti-aircraft kite balloon. Steel cables tether the nearly animate war-thing, made of rubber-coated cotton in a toxic silver paint. Its geometries manage to be both sagging and tense.
In 1946, Knight requested that the War Artists’ Advisory Committee send her to the Nuremberg war tribunals to make a singular painting, The Dock—Nuremberg. This one isn’t included in this exhibit. Woolf’s near-platitude is spring-loaded for yet another go: one more room of her own? In the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, Knight secured the American press room as a temporary painting studio. It provided a bird’s eye view of the twenty-one high ranking Nazis seated in the dock. For three months, wrapped in a blanket, alone in that box, she sketched the bodies of war criminals listening. Fresh tribunals are imminent; artists prepare.