Tuesday 31st October 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls' College

Abel Delattre (Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne): 'Daughters, Sisters, and Partners: The Filiation of Women Artists in the Musée national d'art moderne (Paris)'

In 1989, New York’s Public Art Fund commissioned advertising posters to the Guerrilla Girls, a group of feminist women artists’ known for their fight against sexism and racism in the art world. Their posters and slogans are now famous: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?”, “Less than 3% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 83% of the nudes are female.” Another question that they could have asked is: do women artists need to have a filiation to a male artist to be acquired and exposed in museums? This question of filiation is one that arises in my study of women artists’ artworks in the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne (Paris). Does filiation – by blood, marriage, or simple partnership – of a woman artist to a male artist affect her being acquired? Is she showcased the same way as her male counterpart? Can a male artist’s name give more value to a woman artist’s, to her work? Or, on the contrary, does his name completely erase hers, her work, and her status as an artist? This paper dwells on all theses questions and tries to answer them by focusing on several examples of acquisitions and exhibitions of women artists’ in the Musée national d’art moderne, some of them well-known (Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber and Suzanne Valadon), others less-known (Juliette Roché, Françoise Gilot, Alice Halicka). 

Megan Williams (Surrey): '"Je ne sais d'autre bombe qu'un livre": French Anarchism in English Literature'

On the 17 February 1894, The Times reported “take me home” as the final words of Martial Bourdin, the French anarchist who had died two days earlier as a result of the accidental detonation of the bomb he was carrying in Greenwich Park, close to the Observatory. ‘Home’ is ambiguous: Bourdin provided no indication of context. He could have been talking about his home in London (a room in Fitzroy Street) or perhaps he meant to be taken back to Tours, where he was born. There is something deeply elusive about the spatiality of exiled anarchists, whose belief that anarchism ‘must be realised immediately’, in the words of Errico Malatesta, impacted how they thought about borders and boundaries. Eve Sedwick’s spatial metaphor of peri-performativity provides a vital point of analysis from which to consider these disorienting ideals. Where performative language requires the ‘presumption of consensus’, anarchists displace this consensus through alternative ways of conceiving and living in space. In this paper, I look at the reverberations of Bourdin’s death in the language that was used to explain it - xenophobic representations in the media, obituaries in the anarchist press, and revealing details in diary accounts of the time. I then look at literary responses including Joseph Conrad’s short story ‘The Informer’ (1906) and ending with TS Eliot’s poem Animula (1929).