31 Women Stats, good and bad...

Thank you to all the readers of this blog!

I'm very pleased to notice that, of all the 31women I've blogged about, it's my posts on some of the most obscure artists who are getting the most hits  - hopefully this also means the most readers.

Xenia Kashevaroff Cage tops the bill, with Barbara Poe Levee, Meraud Guevara and Pegeen Vail forming the other 'qualifiers,' not sure what they qualify for, but if so many more people now know about them as artists than before, then I'm delighted.

Of course I'm well aware of the problems with taking these stats too seriously, for a start hits don't mean reads. Xenia Cage has twice as many hits as any of the others because, a. There are plenty of John Cage devotees and researchers looking for any tiny reference to him and b. There's very little researched and collated information about Xenia out there apart from what I've blogged.

Point b. also applies to Barbara and partly to Meraud, but neither of them had such highly famous and iconic husbands as Xenia.

Also there is so much information available about the better known artists such as Louise Nevelson and Frida Kahlo that my little blog appears well down on Google page umpteen. I'm pleased that Gypsy Rose Lee comes fifth in my stats and Anne Harvey and Sophie Taeuber Arp are also well up. This makes Sophie the highest rated of the better known artists, Leonora Carrington comes next.

My only disappointment is the low number of hits for one of my favourites, the totally fascinating Dada Baroness, Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven - but then she's become a bit of an obsession for me.

And I do love people's comments and the conversations they stimulate - keep them coming!

31 Women now on Pinterest

For anyone interested in seeing more about the 31 women Exhibition, there is now a Pinterest board devoted to it - called simply '31 women' - https://uk.pinterest.com/summerlok/31-women/

The board shows pictures of the 31 artists, some work by the artists and people and or other images linked to the artists.

Exhibition by 31 Women - Peggy Guggenheim.

EXHIBITION 

BY

31

W O M E N

ART OF THIS CENTURY

30 west 57 street, NYC                          Jan. 5-31 1943

 Welcome to Exhibition by 31 Women, at Peggy Guggenheim’s remarkable New York Gallery. Before we enter, it is necessary to correct a misconception of which authors of several tomes are guilty. Whatever they may imply, Art of This Century was not just an exhibition that introduced Jackson Pollock to the wider world. It was an art gallery in New York, run by Peggy Guggenheim, which held a new exhibition almost every month from 1942 to 1947 and introduced numerous new, and not so new artists to the New York public, Pollock was merely the loudest. The gallery itself, which was a triumph of modernist design, was as revolutionary as any of the exhibitions.

Peggy in her gallery, just to her left are 2 paintings
which appeared at the Exhibition by 31 Women.
Top, Leonor Fini's 'Shepherdess of the Sphinxes'
Below, Leonora Carrinton's 'Horses of Lord Candlestick' 

Peggy Guggenheim (b. 1898) has been called the ‘Mistress of Modernism’. She was a New Yorker and an heiress. Her biographies try to emphasise that she was a poor relation of the Guggenheim family; her father, having made some unwise investments, went down somewhat unintentionally with the Titanic. However, by the 1940’s, Peggy had an investment income of approximately $400,000 per annum, which is not really most peoples’ idea of a poor relation.

In 1941 she returned to New York after living in Europe for more than 15 years. Towards the end of this time she had found her vocation, as more than just a collector of modern art. She did not send out minions to purchase works for her, like her uncle Solomon of the Guggenheim Foundation. She had lived in England and France and gradually immersed herself within the artistic community that she championed. She had three husbands, (two artists and a writer) and numerous affairs with creative men including Samuel Becket and Yves Tanguy.

In Europe she built up an important collection of modernist art, initially with advice from Andre Breton, Herbert Reid and Marcel Duchamp, but gradually relying more on her own judgement. She bought work by everyone from Malevich & Mondrian to Salvador Dali & Leonora Carrington, though not much of the work she bought was by women. At one stage she deliberately set out to purchase one work of art every day. She left Paris a bare two days before the German army arrived. Had they caught her they would probably have destroyed both her collection (of degenerate art) and herself (a Jew). 
Peggy seems to have had remarkably little idea of the danger she was in, hiding behind her American passport. This said, she gave 500,000 francs to the Emergency Rescue Committee, which organised the escape from France of vulnerable persons, and she personally subsidised the escape to the USA of artists including Andre Breton and Jacqueline Lamba. She left Europe in 1941 with the Bretons, her own family, her collection and Max Ernst, who would soon become her third husband.

Never Again! - Starting my new Goodreads shelf

From Potter's Field (Kay Scarpetta, #6) By Patricia Cornwell  

My rating: one out of five stars

This is the first of the Kay Scarpetta novels that I've read myself, I've heard another serialised (and heavily abridged) on the radio. Apparently this was the third about a sadistic killer named Temple Brooks Gault, but it didn't really matter that I hadn't read the others.

I feel disappointed and almost guilty about hating a really gritty novel by a woman author, but from Potter's Field is unremittingly tense and bleak, full of not very rounded and mostly depressed characters. There are no peaks and troughs, the tension is constant so the 'shocks', when they come, are almost anti-climactic. I made myself finish the book and was relieved once it was over.

I shall go back to reading Ian Rankin's Rebus novels, which are just as gruesome in places but as well as plenty of splashes of blood they are relieved by splashes of dark humour, which this novel totally lacks.

Rankin also rounds his characters out better. Here the only character whose speech was even distinguishable from the others was the rather caricatured detective Marino. This novel left me feeling stressed, tense and slightly miserable, I shan't read any more.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6980565-from-potter-s-field">From Potter's Field</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1025097.Patricia_Cornwell">Patricia Cornwell</a><br/>

Leonora - a Novel by Elena Poniatowska (review)

This novel, expertly translated by Amanda Hopkinson, seems to me to capture the essence of this fascinating and sometimes troubled artist in a way that no straight biography ever could. Leonora Carrington was a true surrealist, though she rejected their political and sexist ideology; Surrealism was fundamentally about plumbing the depths of the human psyche and her depths were greater than most. So were her heights; she was the anarchic, ambidextrous child, the White Mare, the rebellious hyena and the Giantess.

Leonora’s imagery is extraordinary in its density, its obscurity and Elena Poniatowska, who knew the artist well in the last decades of her life, comes close to explaining Leonora’s meanings by divining the origins of her thinking. The author’s writing is densely descriptive, like the artist’s painting. It takes the reader on a journey beginning just below the surface of family life in Crookhey Hall, Leonora’s childhood home, where the infant Leonora is convinced she is a horse and ends with Leonora communing with dolphins in Mexico. That necessity for a journey is the novelist’s prerogative, there are no pictorial illustrations but why should there be when the writing is so vivid?

I have studied Leonora Carrington over a number of years and seen as many of her paintings as is possible in Europe; my knowledge of the subject has not been challenged by this novelization of her life. I picked up a single minor inaccuracy in the title of a painting, which faced with the sweep of the story is insignificant. I won’t read a straight biography of Leonora Carrington again, the basic facts are already known and for the rest, this remarkable, imaginative account by Elena Poniatowska will do for me.

Blanket - writing exercise

Blanket

Pink, quilted, brushed nylon with thin polyester wadding inside – brushed nylon was all the rage, my grandmother bought brushed nylon sheets to use instead of flannelette.

This blanket is double size, although it was bought for my brother when he had asthma and couldn't tolerate the feathers in the eiderdown. The blanket had to be folded to fit a child’s bed. As my brother is now forty-seven, this blanket which nestles in the bottom of my airing cupboard has been around for a while.

 

My brother developed asthma when he was seven. He got lost, after leaving the swimming baths in Chichester. Mother couldn't find him, she arrived home in a complete panic. She’d been to the police, they’d asked her for a description of the missing child. That was easy.

What I can’t remember is why I hadn’t gone swimming that day. I’m certain I wouldn’t have let him get lost. I was used to having to keep an eye on him. I was his big sister, he was the baby. The small, delicate baby, with a heavy, dark birthmark. On his face. By the time he was seven he had had three operations, to remove the mark.

I’m sure they’d do it better today but plastic surgery was a bit more hit and miss then. They left him with scars, shining skin grafts on his forehead, cheek and eyelid. And a strange black tuft of an eyebrow.  I was used to it, we all were, this boy was just our little brother, he was okay. We didn’t even notice, but other people did, they stared in the street. Pointed. Whispered behind their hands.

So there he is, this small, timid boy, lost in a big town. Where’s Mum? Gone, without him. He’s cold, his hair is wet. All the strangers around, they won’t talk to him. Won’t ask him what’s wrong, why he’s crying, scared. Because he looks funny. And they’re English, it’s not done to notice people who look funny. No wonder he has a panic attack. Wheezing, fainting. The police are called when the funny looking child collapses. Nobody tries to help the child. They might catch something. Compassion, perhaps.

 

*

 

The blanket is almost an international symbol of compassion.

This is a writing exercise based on a particular household object.

 

 

 

Why That Title?

What makes writers decide on a particular title?  What makes a big movie producer choose a particular title? In the latter case, it has as much to do with what won’t interfere with the visualisation of the movie poster. Unless the film is based on a well-known story, the title is seldom chosen by the script-writer.
 

This isn’t intended to be an academic discussion on the titles of the classics, it’s just my thoughts on what makes a good title. I’m interested in what makes writers choose their titles, but I wonder if some writers think about the important role the title serves. A title is the first thing the potential reader will see. If it doesn’t grab their attention, they will look at the next title in the bookshop, library, Goodreads, etc.. A freelance writer has a bit more freedom to use their imagination than a scriptwriting hack does.

Using the first line of a poem for the poem's title is fine, if that first line is good enough! If the first line isn’t good enough to be the title, it probably isn’t good enough to be the first line. Poems, unless they are epic length, need to be tightly wrought and a sloppy first line is the worst possible start – unless there’s a sloppy title too. It’s much the same with short stores, unless the writer has a very specific reason for a meandering title, they need a snappy one to draw the reader’s eye.

Finding the title for a novel or a full length play/film script is the hardest, some work brilliantly, others are more to do with era or current fashions. 'Persuasion' was fine for Jane Austen to use, it suited the slow, persuasive style of the writing and it hadn't been used before, but today it would just look lame on a book-jacket by anyone who isn't Jane Austen. I've heard that using the word 'love' in a title immediately reduces a book or film's chance of attracting a male audience, or conversely of increasing the female audience - I'd like to think this is untrue and just an idea based on outdated stereotyping. The novel 'Enduring Love' is a very un-typical book, by Ian McEwan, which is about a stalker and not what the stereotype would indicate.

To attract me as a reader, a title has to conjure an image in my mind, or it has to relate to the significant words and names in the story/poem. Hopefully the title has a ring to it as well – this ring is a difficult thing to define, I know it when I see it, the words sound in my head and I want to speak them aloud. My Cretan poem title, ‘Take the Road to Omalos,’ has that ring, looking at titles on many writing websites, some definitely don’t ring.  I’m not going to diss other people’s titles, I’ll stick to my own; my bit of Yorkshire Surrealism  called ‘Pie in the Sky,’ doesn’t ring, it’s just a cliché and clichés are unoriginal and usually worth avoiding, unless they perform a specific function or are used ironically. And every cliché you can think of has already been used as a title, often far too many times!

Personally I don’t like titles which generalise, to me they seem a cop-out and one word titles in particular are too often just generalisations. They seldom work unless they’re names; even then they probably aren’t original unless they are ‘Ozymandias’ and written by P.B.Shelley! Maybe that’s what I’m trying to get at, I have this idea that titles should be original. Probably impossible I know - as language has been written down since the Sumerians, most combinations of words have already been used somewhere along the line.

As I said, this is just my opinion.  Are there any actual rules? What do other people think?