January 6-12, 2005

art

Buried Treasure

Feminine Mystique: Curator Madeleine Viljoen's "Women on Exhibit" show at La Salle's museum explores roles of women in Western art. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

A show of women in art unearths the bounty in an underrated museum.

by Robin Rice

Even students and faculty who frequent Olney Hall may overlook the La Salle University Art Museum tucked away in the basement. Once you step off the elevator, though, a substantial entranceway of ancient oak announces in no uncertain terms that the past is formidably present in this workaday building.

Now they ornament what may be the city's most overlooked and underestimated art collection. Although no university museum can compete in size and comprehensiveness with a major repository like the PMA, the La Salle collection has significant range and depth. To be utterly practical, how much museum do you need? It costs $10 to see the PMA; La Salle is free and easily interesting enough to fill most of an afternoon. Two-dimensional works from Europe and America dominate the galleries, which are organized mostly by century, from the late medieval period to the present day. There are a number of important works. Among my favorites are Henry Ossawa Tanner's poignant and historically scrupulous 1898 representation of Mary seated beside the sleeping infant Jesus and Rembrandt Peale's lively self-portrait (1838).

Madeleine Viljoen, whose extensive curatorial experience includes the Princeton Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum, recently joined the La Salle Museum as one of two curators. She organized the current exhibition, which focuses on roles of women as they are represented in Western art, to "create a show that would speak to different constituencies on campus." To this end, she collaborated with professors to develop programming related to the show (including artists' talks and performance art pieces, though all public presentations are complete now).

Two works are on loan. The first vignette from Hogarth's A Harlot's Progress, in which the soon-to-be-corrupted country maiden is approached by a syphilis-blighted procuress, was lent by a private collection. The contemporary artist Sandra Camomile lent her process drawing Scrubbing, a record of staining and erasure as a metaphor for the cleaning activities of women. Otherwise, almost 60 pieces were drawn from La Salle's holdings of approximately 3,000 prints and 450 paintings.

A feminist sensibility informs the women's roles Viljoen explores; however, the source of her selections is not the objectifying male gaze. Rather, enduring characterizations from "Heroic and Virtuous Women" to "Bookish Women" interweave with changing sensibilities in art and society. Influenced by Zola's social commentary, Theophile-Alexandre Steinlen's color etching Laundresses (1898) has much in common with the 20th-century theme of Elizabeth Catlett's powerful woodcut Survivor (1983), of a stoic black worker. These "Working Stiffs" rub metaphorical elbows with James A. McNeill Whistler's La Marchande de Moutarde (The Vendor of Mustard, 1858), who was surely depicted for her picturesque charm.

Viljoen indulges in a bit of irony by including works like KŠthe Kollwitz's etching Self-Portrait at the Table (1893) in the category "Pretty Women." Kollwitz is not conventionally pretty, but Viljoen's choices make us consider what prettiness is.

The Susan Dunleavy Collection of Biblical Literature encompasses images of the best and worst of women. It includes one of Aubrey Beardsley's striking and still challenging illustrations for Oscar Wilde's Salomé, and its ideas extend into the "Wives and Mothers" series with Albrecht Dürer's The Holy Family with Butterfly (c. 1495), with its fussy but compelling convoluted draperies and a strangely stuporous St. Joseph.

Refreshingly, the postmodern period is solidly acknowledged in the La Salle collection and well-represented here. There's a Cindy Sherman photograph and a cleverly constructed three-dimensional Mop Dress (1995) by Sandra Camomile. Composed of various pieces of household equipment, including three oar-like mops, the work is designed to be used in performance.

One of the museum's recent acquisitions is Carol Leotta-Moore's artist's book, A Woman of a Certain Age (2004). Taking the form of a fan, an accessory traditionally employed for communication, one side of the book is imprinted with a poem by Leotta-Moore and the other with mourning sonnets by Italian Renaissance women: Victoria Colonna, Gaspara Stampa and others. In the completely contemporary art form of book arts, Leotta-Moore sensitively acknowledges her link with the grief of once vital, now long-vanished widowed poets. The circular design of the fan suggests the cycle of life, of many lives, and unites the present with the past. The fan book's radiating form is a suitable metaphor for this entire exhibition: an illuminating investigation of women as makers, muses, objects and subjects essential to art.

Women on Exhibit Through Jan. 23, La Salle University Art Museum, Lower level of Olney Hall, off 19th St. and Olney Ave., 215-951-1221