GLR May-June 2025

for women during this period. Beginning in 1876, private fine arts academies in Paris began to accept applications from women. The Académie Julian, for one, opened workshops re served exclusively for women. Until then, women had had little access to the study of anatomy. The struggle for equal education gained momentum when in 1897 a lengthy feminist campaign paid off, compelling the national fine-arts academy to admit qualified women applicants. In the same upswing of reforms, two women graduates of the Académie Julian, Martha Stettler and Alice Dannenberg (a lesbian couple), assumed directorship of the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where for forty years they encouraged women applicants. A photographic portrait of Stettler and Dan nenberg, taken while they were still students at the Académie Julian, evokes the supportive ambiance of the all-women’s stu dio for women (Figure 3). It shows the two artists shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, turned momentarily away from their easels to make eye contact, affirming their intimate complicity. Although educational barriers were falling, French women, particularly married women, still had to reckon with the dis criminatory terms of the French Civil Code of 1804. The Code subsumed married women into a hierarchical family structure ruled by the male head of household. It was the husband’s right to authorize or deny his wife permission to enroll in school, seek employment, spend a salary or an inheritance, sign a contract, or apply for a business license or passport, among other ad ministrative procedures that made professional artistic practice possible. The same rules did not apply to foreigners or unmarried women (lesbians among them), who account for most of the successful artistic careers in turn-of-the-century France. Stet tler and Dannenberg were Swiss as well as unmarried, and they benefited from these loopholes. By moving away from their

family homes (thus, family oversight) and by forming support networks with like-minded colleagues in Paris, women expats such as Stettler and Dannenberg were able to exercise new free doms. As artists, they enjoyed greater leeway with respect to conventions of dress and behavior than many of their peers. The arts protected women who did not conform to gender norms. Art schools incubated lifelong friendships, and the all-women workshops fostered lasting support networks. The Swiss artist Louise Catherine Breslau, herself a gradu ate of the Académie Julian, constructed a career as an artist on the basis her art-school training and her art-school connections. Her portraits are set in the home and give us a sense of the so cial and professional life she shared with friends and lovers over the decades as she was establishing her artistic practice in Paris. The theme of domesticity in Breslau’s œuvre accentuates the close relations among the women in her circle and also the con ditions of their creative lives. The home for Breslau and her housemates served not only as the locus of domestic life but also as the workplace—a home-studio. A sense of intimacy permeates the atmosphere of Breslau’s paintings. La vie pensive (“The pensive life”) of 1908, for ex ample, represents the artist seated at the table with her red headed lover Madeleine Zillhardt (whom she met at the Académie Julian) (Figure 4). Zillhardt absentmindedly strokes the head of the couple’s Borzoi, a protective yet calming pres ence. The Borzoi was a gift from Élisabeth de Gramont, a life long supporter of the couple (who was also intimately allied with Natalie Barney). Breslau belonged to the first cohort of women to receive professional training in the visual arts. In Paris’ academies, Breslau and the members of her cohort were able to study art at an advanced level, to work from live (nude) models, and to ben efit from all-female workshops, where they received critical input from other women artists and learned from their work. The opening of academies in the late 19th century lent impetus to a paradigm shift for women in the arts. By the turn of the cen tury, the population of professional women artists practicing in France had grown incrementally, and women had begun to achieve high visibility in official salons and international exhi bitions. Women from countries around the world came to France to study and launch their careers. Some remained. Others re turned to their homelands. § N OT ALL WOMEN artists credentialed by the academy committed themselves to careers as painters or sculptors. Some went on to embrace photography, a new technology rapidly becoming com mercially available and widely accessible by the mid-1800s. In Europe and the U.S., the evolution of photography coincided with the feminist challenge to the prevailing gender system. As innovations streamlined the technology and made it affordable, women entered the photographic arena in escalating numbers. This burgeoning professional sector offered women certain advantages. Although academic training versed women in æs thetic theory and representational conventions, advanced stud ies in art were not a prerequisite for achieving proficiency in the new medium of photography. Instruction manuals, trial and error, exchanges within the context of a local camera club, or perhaps a short apprenticeship in a professional studio provided

Fig 4: Louise Breslau, La vie pensive, 1908. Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts Lausanne.

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