Review by Tracey Foster of "Muse" by Ruth Millington

What came first, the artist or the muse?

Exploring this question is the very heart of this book, looking at artists who had complex relationships with their chosen muse. They were often supported, inspired and encouraged in their art by figures whose roles have fallen into obscurity, leaving us with only an image to construct a legend about: "The perception of the muse is that of a passive, powerless model at the mercy of an influential and older artist. But is this trope a romanticised myth?"

Rather than breaking the history of the myth into chronological sections, Millington explores the role of the muse in different guises. We delve into the muse as a message, performing muses, family albums and self-portraits which give delightful juxtapositions, framing Picasso’s Dora Maar alongside Awol Erizku's photograph of a pregnant Beyonce. Millington's background in TV and radio has helped to develop her direct conversational tone that keeps the content accessible to all and avoids the navel-gazing tendency of some art tomes. 

As easily evidenced on any gallery wall, females make up the bulk of the line-up, but Millington includes a few other examples such as George Dyer, the controversial muse and lover of Francis Bacon who, the story goes, fell through his skylight to the retort from Bacon: "You're not much of a burglar are you? Take off your clothes. Come to bed and you can take what you want."

Dyer's story is one often repeated throughout history; the legend is told by the victor to the spoil. Successful artists concoct a favourable narrative to add to their allure, but if we delve below the surface, we find the truth is often far more nuanced Bacon was able to create his own version about the forty-plus paintings he made of Dyer because his muse, unable to cope with Bacon's infidelity, committed suicide on the eve of a major retrospective. Bacon took many photographs of his muse and continued to use these to create some of his most famous works after he died, only admitting much later in his career that Dyer's tortured demise was his inspiration and the story behind the images. Working through his emotions on canvas he said, "I feel profoundly guilty about his death. If I hadn't gone out, if I'd simply stayed in and made sure he was alright, he might have been alive now."

Vermeer’s "Girl with a Pearl Earring" has long been the subject of speculation and led to the writer Tracy Chevalier's novel that attempted to fictionalise the gap. Recent research, however, has exposed Vermeer’s real intention. Religious allegories reimagined by the family who commissioned the paintings have been attributed to most of the works he painted in one household. The girl sitter could then be simply a young member of the family who fills in for a sequence of biblical representations.

Challenging our expectations of the role of artist and muse is Gentileschi - a talented painter who raised up to the highest levels of painting circles but who had been born a female in a time when her abilities were discouraged and frowned upon. Raped by her tutor at the age of 17 and banned from entering the art establishment, she used her own image to stare out at us and confront our ideals of the female narrative. Reimagining the classics, she retells the tales from the woman's stance in contrast to the male gaze. Her muse is never passive; her beauty is active. "I will show Your Illustrious Lordship what a woman can do," she wrote to a patron, defiant and proud of her work. Taking her former tutor to court at a time when women were disbelieved, she swore through torture in the court: "It is true, It is true." She won her case and her tutor was subsequently banished from Rome, but a cloud followed her for rape was considered the shame of the family and she was quickly married off. The work that followed depicted women wronged, such as Salome, and allowed her to exact revenge on the canvas and leave a legacy for us to interpret: "As long as I live, I will have control over my being."

Dora Maar, Picasso’s lover and sitter for over 60 paintings, was an artist in her own right when they met. A successful photographer with her own studio, she deliberately set out to attract this older man by using a knife to stab between her fingers, whilst sat at table in a cafe frequented by Picasso. This daring game worked and he moved her in with his current lover and their child. The ensuing battle that erupted was immaterial to Picasso. He walked out telling them to sort it out between themselves. Picasso's most famous portrait of Maar, entitled "The Weeping Woman," was in response to Dora's gradual deterioration into depression: "Dora for me, was always a weeping woman," he famously exclaimed. 

But Dora had a much heavier influence on his work. Deeply political and active in the left-wing struggle against fascism, she opened his eyes to the cause. Just a few weeks before he had painted "Guernica," his anti-war masterpiece. Posing for a figure of a mother holding her grieving child, photographing the whole production and helping him to mix paints, she was a huge part of its creation. Picasso was still inspired by the experience to go on to make "Weeping Woman" as a further response to the event. To dismiss it later and to attribute it to the emotional whims of a woman is to vastly diminish the part she played and add to his allure as a lover and leaver of women: "For years I gave her a tortured appearance, not out of Sadism, and without any pleasure on my part, but in obedience to a vision that had imposed itself on me." Maar was later to reply: "All Picasso portraits of me are lies. Not one is Dora Maar."

Millington happily gives the muse the last word. These sitters often play a large part in any artistic creation but often never get any credit. Their part is frozen to a moment and their voices muted. To get a fuller picture, we need to listen to their story. Here at last is that perspective: "This book will demonstrate the true power that muses have held. Without doubt, it's time that we reconsidered muses, reclaiming them from reductive stereotypes, to illuminate their real, involved and diverse roles throughout art history." 

About the reviewer
After a long career as an Art and Design teacher, Tracey Foster wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, The Haiku Foundation, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, Cold Moon Journal, Madswirl, Five Fleas, The Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site The Small Sublime found here.

Review by Tracey Foster of "Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects" by Glenn Adamson

Reading this book reminded me of the adage: "Poets, we get it. Some things remind us of other things." 

All very amusing, but it doesn't explain why we have such an obsession with the objects we keep about us. While I write this, most of the human race is presently hunched over, worshiping at the altar of the flat screen, including myself.

Adamson investigates our need to accumulate and collect things and vocalize our appreciation of the world around us. He highlights the classification method used by Susan Stewart in her book, On Longing, in four categories: "The gigantic, the miniature, the collection and the souvenir." We name and claim large objects to bring them into our reach: mountains, oceans, planets and galaxies. We dissect and scrutinize our world down to the smallest cell or microbe. Then there is our need to catalogue and collect every variant until there are no gaps, and our desire to hold items once connected to our loved ones or historical figures. All these aspects make us human.

Our language is haptic-infused. Manual, manufacture, manoeuvre, we feel our way through life and have an impulse to touch objects to inherently understand them. The sixteenth-century art historian Giorgio Vasari said, "It is necessary to have the compass in the eyes and not the hand, because the hand works and the eye judges." Touch was previously thought the lesser of the senses, linked intrinsically to manual work and the lower classes. Helen Keller redefined how intrinsic our hands are to being fully cognizant of the world around us. Her book was the first to delve deeply into the importance of our fifth sense to fully see. 

Adamson spent time at the V&A museum and was director of the Arts & Design Museum in New York whilst writing this book. He is an advocate of moderation, reducing our world of stuff to just the essential or aesthetic. He explores William Morris' mantra: "Have nothing in your house that you know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." 

This book fully explores our relationship with objects, whilst maintaining a plea for living a life less cluttered. This seems a valid call following on from the excess of Christmas, the frenzy of exchanging goods and the aftermath of stuffing our homes with even more items we don’t really need. Museums are often guilty of acquiring masses of objects that spend their whole life in storage. Adamson spends one chapter exploring our multifaceted response to antiquities in museums, including paintings: "Any painting is an embodied moment of truth."

We bring our experiences and expectations when we visit museums. This can skew our reactions and temper our responses. Galleries lay out a default blank slate; cabinets are clear and clutter-free to allow us personal interaction with each object. Visitors experience a unique reaction, dependent upon race, gender, age and class, transforming everyday items into "cultural icons."

This book pleads for restraint when amassing items around us, a quick calculation of the carbon footprint we contribute to and collate in our world of stuff. Adamson is a believer of mend and reuse or, like the Japanese art of Kintsugi, the need to learn to live with the broken, as a memento of our time here on earth. The book is a call for a resurgence of material intelligence: as our stuff gets more technical, we become more removed from its creation: "Skin should be understood a site of intelligence." We should be more discerning with it. 

About the reviewer

Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Haiku Foundation, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, The Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site, The Small Sublime, found here.

Review by Tracey Foster of "The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience" by Jennifer Higgie

The act of self-reflection is an indulgence and one that women throughout history have seldom had the opportunity to do, more often being the object of scrutiny and worship by the male gaze. Women who flew contra to convention, female artists who rebelled against stereotype and chose introspection over objectification, have their unique stories told in this book: "A painting is a pause in life's cacophony. It does not demand conversation or justification. It does not hector her. She has stilled herself for it. It cannot and will not tell her what to do. She controls it. She concentrates, her paintbrush in hand, the mirror close by. She is defiantly, splendidly, bravely, heartbreakingly, joyously alone."

Higgie takes us on a tour of time, place, social expectations and gender battles to uncover the lives of women who dared to paint, despite objections and difficult circumstances. Reading from our present perspective, it is hard to imagine women artists being rejected from academies, refused from attending life classes or painting their own bodies, their work spurned and excluded from galleries. They often worked in secret, hoarding their work and making a record of their life for themselves only. Painting was a deeply personal act, which involved recording every stage of an aging process and for some their downfall into obscurity. Very few women made it to recognition and success. Many of these names are not known to the public and Higgie takes time to give them their due: "She looks at herself in order to study what she's made of, to understand herself anew and, from time to time, to rage against the very thing that confines and defines her."

Recent technologies have enabled wrongly-attributed works to be recognised as works by women painters. The catalogue of once-unknown artists is expanding and allowing us a better understanding of the challenges they overcame and the prejudices they faced. History is told in words and more often written by men allowing this gap in our knowledge to happen. Many of our well-known masters had patrons who bought, displayed and championed their careers. This was highly unlikely to happen if the painter was female; she was more likely to be derided for shunning marriage, motherhood and domesticity. Only two of the artists explored in this book have found recent recognition: Frida Kahlo and Artemisia Gentileschi. The rest are ours to discover. 

Most of us have some knowledge of the pain and suffering that Kahlo had to overcome after a serious accident on tram as a young girl, the endless operations, miscarriages and consequent body-disfiguring impacts on her female from. These experiences are embedded into her visceral paintings, blunt self-portraits and graphic imagery. Gentileschi too had to overcome the horrific experience of repeated rape by her art tutor and endure a seven-month trial where she was tortured to prove her innocence. This manifested in her allegory paintings of religious scenes, often reinterpreted from the female perspective. To view these artworks without prior knowledge of the life experiences of the painter is to only half see them. With this book we begin to peel back the layers of each image and understand it better: "A painting will always reveal something about the life of its creator, even if it’s the last thing the artist intended. A self–portrait isn’t simply a rendering of an artist’s external appearance: it’s also an evocation of who she is and the times she lives in, how she sees herself and what she understands about the world."

In her chapter aptly named "The Liberating Looking Glass," Higgie explores the development of self-reflection. A relatively modern invention, mirrors were a luxury item; made from highly polished volcanic glass, they were like gazing into black water. Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed with mirrors, both as objects and metaphors and said: "The mind of the painter should be like a mirror which always takes the colour of the thing it reflects." What such an object meant for a female artist was freedom; the ability to paint in isolation, have an ever-ready muse and to take time to become proficient: "A self-portrait is not only a description of concrete reality, it is also an expression of an inner world."

These stories are fascinating; 500 years of decadence and revolution, nobility and poverty, art movements and politics. You do not need to be an art lover or an art connoisseur to appreciate tales of women battling against the odds to create a realistic image of their own identity. In a time of the ubiquitous shared selfie, we need to understand the huge challenges these women overcame, in capturing a single expression that was often hidden from the public for decades. As Alice Neel writes, "When you're an artist, you're searching for freedom. You never find it because there ain't any freedom. But at least you search for it. In fact, art should be, could be called 'the search.'"

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, The Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site The Small Sublime found here.