Warpaint - Alicia Foster

As any regular reader here will know I don't read much new fiction at all, less that could come under the 

heading of historical fiction, and even less that's set in the twentieth century. For the most part I feel that there were plenty of perfectly good novels written at the time which cover the things I'm interested in and which don't have the distracting element of somebody trying to get the period details right or drawing my attention to the details to show how spot on they are. Sometimes though a book comes along that throws something new into the mix, generally things that couldn't, or wouldn't have been openly discussed, and with 'Warpaint' those are more things I'm interested in.

Alicia Foster has a history of art PhD, published works on Gwen John and catalogued theTate's collection of work by women artists 'Warpaint' is an offshoot of some of that research - an intriguing mix of actual and imagined events. 'Warpaint' deals specifically with 4 female artists - the real Dame Laura Knight and 3 fictionalised characters - Faith Farr, Cecily Browne, and Vivienne Thayer (based reasonably closely on the actual artists Grace Golden, Evelyn Dunbar, and Isabel Delmar). It takes place over the winter of 1942/43 and opens with a courier delivering something highly secret to a discreet gothic villa somewhere in the vicinity of Bletchley park before heading off to the London office of Sir Kenneth Clark in his capacity as head of the War Artists Advisory Committee...

A repellent young man (Aubrey Smith) has been given the unwelcome job of trying to get some work out of Dame Laura, Faith, and Cecily none of whom seem to be as grateful or fawning as he would like. For Dame Laura this is the chance to paint something important and she'll be damned if she lets the ministries desire for wholesome and uplifting pictures get in the way of that. Faith is embroiled in her own drama and traumatised by what she's seen and experienced - she wants to record the world she sees and isn't very interested in producing propaganda. Cecily, from the WAAC point of view is the least troublesome - she's happy to produce uplifting pieces showing women doing their best in difficult circumstances - even if the women she meets aren't behaving quite as she's like them too. Vivienne works for her husband at 'Black' - based in that discreet villa. It's her job to turn out postcard images designed to play on the paranoia of enemy servicemen.  

Foster uses these different women 'to explore the efforts of those in power to create and control representation, in both it's official and wholesome, and it's covert and more sinister, aspects' she also has a bit of fun with a spy story and a love affair. I think the book really comes alive when talking about the art - it's a nice touch that Foster describes paintings by the real life counterparts of her fictional creations; I had a very nice time tracking down images, the visual element added something special. Beyond the fun of it Foster uses these images really effectively to make her point, she also picks up on imagery from films - the stiff upper lip, brave little woman stuff that we all know and which has become our memory of that collective past - and keeps prodding at it, pointing out how unrealistic those representations of women are. 

Initially I felt that the misogyny was overdone but actually it isn't. Looking at old posters is a stark reminder of how things were. I really liked this book, it's not all perfect, but it's got me thoroughly interested in it's issues and sent me off looking for all sorts of things and any book that does that is a gem.     

On knowing art

A month or so ago Stuck-in-a-Book wrote a piece about not knowing much about art, there are a number of interesting comments at the end of it with some excellent recommendations for places to discover more. I particularly rate the BBC Your Paintings site which has catalogued over 210,000 of the nations oil paintings - this is a brilliant project (if you don't already know it) that has set out to catalogue all the paintings (oil, acrylic, and tempura only - to add watercolours and drawings would push the numbers unmanageably high) in public collections. So far the project has turned up a couple of old masters that had been miss-attributed, which has been nice publicity, but is in no way the most exciting thing about this catalogue - I'll come on to that in a bit. 

Why Simon's post stuck in my mind is this - I commented that analysing a painting was as valid as analysing a book - a position that Simon was unconvinced by, he felt that 'it would be a bizarre coincidence if they were equally analysable forms' because he believes that words offer more scope for analysis than images. My feeling is that he's entirely wrong, but then my degree is in History of Art, whereas Simon is on the last leg of his doctorate and reads Virginia Woolf for fun so it's an understandable difference of opinion. Still, it was one of those differences that stopped me short for a moment and it's been at the back of my mind ever since.

Evelyn Dunbar - A Canning Demonstration

At the Penguin bloggers do last week I had a brief conversation with Alicia Foster about her book 'Warpaint' and about art, and history of art generally. Both book and conversation gave me plenty to think about and also took me back to that earlier conversation with Simon. I accept that one of the wonderful things about the visual arts is that you can just look at them and enjoy them - on one level it's immediately accessible - but, and this matters, the more you know about what you're looking at the more you get from it. A little bit of context is a wonderful thing, and that's obviously true for books as well. I also think it's easy to take images for granted, after all what book is as well known as the Mona Lisa, or what icon more potent than the statue of liberty? These are images that have been used and manipulated so many times that they have as many layers of meaning as an onion has skins.  

When I went off to university roughly 20 years ago women weren't a big part of either the literary of artistic canon and it wasn't unusual to meet the opinion that there were no great women artists in either field because they just didn't have the talent (mostly met it should be said in undergraduate boys). It's the sort of statement that you obviously know is rubbish but is very hard to counter when you don't have the works to back you up. When it comes to literature the success of publishers like Virago and Persephone, the current cult for Jane Austen, and the high profile of writers like Hilary Mantel amongst others have changed that conversation. I think what the likes of Virago and Persephone have done is particularly important because they've made the point that quietly domestic fiction matters too. 

With art it doesn't feel like we've come as far, which is all the more curious when I think that in my day at least 90% of the students were female - though 80% of the lecturers were male. Art schools throughout the twentieth century were full of women, women have been making a living with a paintbrush for much longer than that, but they're not easy to find. One benefit of the Your Paintings project is that they should now be easier to track down and that's a very good thing, if we don't get the balance right then we don't really understand what our history looks like.