Woman Artists and the Spirit of Virginia Woolf in Chichester

It's perhaps the portraits that provide some of the most memorable images in Virginia Woolf: an exhibition inspired by her writings at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.

There are 80 women artists featured in this show aiming to build on Woolf's perspectives on feminism and creaticity -- quite a contrast from Chichester's last, testosterone-laden Pop Art exhibition. Considering how tough it was for many of them to make their way in a male-dominated environment, there's a remarkable self-assurance about the way painters like Dod Procter and Ethel Walker committed themselves to canvas.

The theme running through this show is one of pioneering women defying convention, as Woolf did, and not just in the 20th century. In 1877, Louise Jopling is looking you straight in the eye. She's from Manchester. Bet you blink first.

Coincidentally, Laura Knight was born in 1877, and in the 1930s, by now a dame, she became the first woman artist elected to full membership of the Royal Academy. In her late 70s, she depicted another trailblazer: Joan Rhodes, celebrated as Britain's first strongwoman, a serial tearer-up of telephone directories as well as a stuntwoman and wrestler. Rhodes is wearing an off-the-shoulder pink number, naturally.

Another work by Knight, The Dark Pool, is the poster image for this show, and it comes early in the first section, devoted to Landscape and Place. It takes us back very directly to Woolf, who spent every summer of her formative childhood years in St Ives and wrote of "lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery" there and of "hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two.''

Knight lived and worked in Cornwall, in common with many of the artists featured here. Another picture, A Green Sea, has a similar theme of women looking enigmatically out towards the ocean. We were reminded of Caspar David Friedrich.

Also memorable in this section of the show are a couple of landscapes by Gluck, with their really low horizons. Gluck was the androgynous name adopted, along with men's clothes, by the rebellious Hannah Gluckstein, born in 1895. A perhaps less contented cross-dressing rebel was Romaine Brooks, who honed what she called an "endless gamut of greys," to be seen in her Port of St Ives. Brooks died in 1970 at the age of 96, leaving an autobiography entitled No Pleasant Memories.

One of the most striking paintings early on is Rocks, St Mary's, Scilly Isles by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, whose work often straddled the boundary of abstract and representational art.

From the sea and the sky, we move indoors, to the home and A Room of One's Own, to quote the title of a Woolf essay. There's a slightly unengaging room with pottery and fabrics, including some by Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell, but things perk up again noticeably with a fine series of paintings of interiors, in each of which the women artists are also looking at the world outside. 

Winifred Nicholson sees a View Through a Window with Blue Curtains and a Chair, while Gwen John painted A Corner of the Artist's Room in Paris. Bell has three works in this section, including this View of the Pond at Charleston, East Sussex.

Then it's on to the Self in Public: the portraits, and the chance for the artists whose work we've looked at so far to show themselves and others as they wanted to be seen. Bell's late Self Portrait from Charleston is a more familiar image than many of the others. Gluck painted Miss EM Craig, with whom she had moved to Cornwall, apparently incurring her mother's ire, in sinister black. Romaine Brooks' The White Bird, a full-length portrait that has an echo of John Singer Sargent, even manages a splash of red among the greys.

It's an engrossing and enjoyable exhibition up to this point. However, we found the remaining section -- the Self in Private, intended as an exploration of the subconscious and the internal psyche -- a lot less enthralling. Artists represented include Ithell Colqohoun and Penny Slinger. But go and see Laura Knight, Vanessa Bell, Gwen John and Gluck and a host of others. You certainly don't need to be a Virginia Woolf fan.

Practicalities

Virginia Woolf: an exhibition inspired by her writings is on at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until September 16. It's open 1000 to 1700 Tuesdays to Saturdays (late until 2000 on Thursdays) and 1100 to 1700 on Sundays. Admission to the gallery including the show costs a standard £11, or a bargain £5.50 all day on Tuesdays and on Thursdays after 1700. 

The gallery is less than 10 minutes' walk from Chichester station, to which there's a train every half an hour from London Victoria on weekdays. The journey takes about 90 minutes.

If you can't make it to Chichester, the show moves on to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge from October 2 to December 9.

Images

Louise Jopling, Self Portrait, 1877, Manchester Art Gallery
Dame Laura Knight, The Dark Pool, 1908-1918, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle. (c) Reproduced with permission of The Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA 2018. All rights reserved
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Rocks, St Marys, Scilly Isles, 1953, City Art Centre, City of Edinburgh Museums and Galleries. (c) Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust
Vanessa Bell, View of the Pond at Charleston, East Sussex, c. 1919, Museums Sheffield. (c) Estate of Vanessa Bell/Henrietta Garnett