A powerful new book by Drusilla Modjeska shines a light on the forgotten stories of female modernist artists who shaped 20th-century European art but received little recognition in their lifetimes. "A Woman's Eye, Her Art" explores the lives and struggles of pioneering women artists, challenging traditional male-dominated narratives of art history.
The book opens with a vivid scene from 1899: a young German woman named Paula Becker screaming "Let it be. There is no other way" at her mother from an omnibus. This woman, later known as Paula Modersohn-Becker, serves as the inspiration for Modjeska's work and the focus of the book's first section. Modersohn-Becker, an artist from Bremen who "saw so much and was so little seen," died tragically young at just 31 in 1907. Only after more than a century has she been acclaimed as "the first modern woman artist," according to Modjeska.
Modjeska's approach differs significantly from traditional art history's "great man" version. Rather than attempting to sort and rank artists, she situates Modersohn-Becker and other female artists within their own time and place, paying close attention to their female friendships, artistic circles, marriages, and personal struggles. Her focus encompasses both social and inner worlds, keeping both perspectives always in view.
The inspiration for writing this book came from an unexpected source: Google's commemoration of Modersohn-Becker's birth in February 2018. When Google featured a doodle based on one of the artist's 1906 self-portraits on its search page, Modjeska experienced what she calls a "synchronicity." Although she had long known she would "write of her one day," it was on that day that she "went home, cleared my desk and began this book."
This latest work continues Modjeska's lifelong exploration of how women create within patriarchal structures. Throughout her writing career, she has examined how and why women pursue creative lives, the female friendships and networks that sustain them, and the gendered social structures that shape and limit their public recognition. Her previous works include "Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925-45" (1981), "The Orchard" (1994), and "Stravinsky's Lunch" (1999).
"A Woman's Eye, Her Art" expands beyond Modersohn-Becker to include the lives and work of Dora Maar, Lee Miller, and the lesser-known Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob), along with their artistic circles. The book's second part focuses on surrealism, though Modjeska acknowledges the difficulty of keeping male-dominated stories at bay - figures like Picasso keep "muscling in" despite her efforts to critique masculinist European art history.
The author appears particularly aware of the challenges her binary gendered framing presents, especially when discussing the non-binary, non-conforming Claude Cahun. While the book introduces readers to Schwob/Cahun's work and the efforts of the Jersey historical society that preserved the artist's archive, Modjeska recognizes that Cahun deserves more than her overarching framework can provide. She recalls a conversation with friend and interlocutor Julie Rrap about Google's commemoration: "How would we have reacted if it'd been Claude Cahun on Google doodle?" Their amused reply: "If it had, we said, laughing as we waved goodbye, we'd have been celebrating. For then the world might have really changed."
Modjeska employs prosopography as her method, creating a biographical approach well-suited to exploring the entanglements between personal and political, inner and social worlds. The result is a "peopled, biographically intense" account that reveals these artists through details of their friendships and falling-outs, their marriages (adopting Anna Funder's term "wifedom"), their loyalties, infidelities, and separations, alongside succinct interpretations of their artistic works.
The book is richly illustrated and demonstrates Modjeska's writerly skills in showing readers "how to look and how to see." Set against the backdrop of a Europe wracked by two world wars, the work combines qualities of erudite art history, social commentary, and intimate personal details. It's presented like a visual montage or artist's book, with diamond icons signaling shifts in focus.
Rather than offering a sustained historical narrative or fully resolved theoretical argument, the text reflects Modjeska's "questing and reflexive response" to the central question of what it meant to live as both woman and artist. It accumulates details and observations, filled with snippets, digressions, and anecdotes, enhanced by thoughts from conversations with friends, curators, and artists, plus well-chosen scholarly quotes.
The collaborative nature of the project is evident throughout. Julie Rrap serves as a significant voice in the book, while Helen Mueller's contribution proves particularly valuable - she and Modjeska worked side by side translating Modersohn-Becker's writings from German to English and back to German to see how earlier translations had skewed their meanings. This work makes a significant contribution to Modersohn-Becker scholarship.
For some of the other featured artists, their stories have become more familiar in recent years, with projects to rehabilitate their reputations already underway. Lee Miller and Dora Maar have recently been subjects of memoirs, films, and exhibitions. Miller's war photography has gained new attention through Kate Winslet's portrayal in the 2023 film "Lee," while exhibitions devoted to Dora Maar have sought to release her from being known only as Picasso's muse.
The book's development and publication coincided with major revisionist projects examining Australian women's place in modern art history, including the National Gallery of Australia's "Know Her Name" exhibition and the current "Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890-1940" at the Art Gallery of NSW. These exhibitions have brought female artists back into view while raising questions about how they were overlooked for so long.
"A Woman's Eye, Her Art" serves as a timely complement to this broader field of work. Unlike the representational and analytical work that films and exhibitions can provide, Modjeska's "luscious text" offers a more expansive view of the intricacies of these artist-women's lives and struggles across 20th-century Europe. Driven by her curiosity about women's creative lives, Modjeska draws readers into their work and lives "with unstinting generosity," providing both scholarly insight and deeply human understanding of these remarkable but long-overlooked artists.
