Undisciplining Art Sisterhood

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• Undisciplining Art Sisterhood
• Michele Martinez (bio)

When asked to contribute to “Whither Victorian Poetry?” in 2003, I was fortunate to benefit from feminist scholarship that sought to understand the networks of support and collaboration between Romantic and Victorian women poets and visual artists.¹ Additionally, cultural studies on word-and-image history and interpretation brought attention to the gender, class, and political dynamics that shaped the theory and reception of the fine arts in Britain as well as the creation of national art institutions.² My essay addressed ways that women poets and art critics capitalized on the gender and genre hierarchies of sister arts discourse to celebrate the reality of women’s professional success.³ My current research continues to investigate ways that poets and artists created sisterhood and contributed to Britain’s expansive arts culture.⁴ It is exciting to report that we can add new art sisters—engraving and photography—to the family of poetry, painting, and sculpture.⁵ Thora Brylowe’s attention to the engraver’s struggle against the classism of antiquarians parallels my interest in the print media ecologies that promoted and reviewed British art.⁶ In the 1860s and 1870s, photography critics debated the artistic merits of the medium and regarded any kind of experimentation as sloppy, deviant, or worst of all, effeminate. Julia Margaret Cameron recognized that joining sisterly forces with the poet laureate Tennyson would lend much needed authority to her boldly expressive prints.⁷

The recognition of class and gender bias in sister arts discourse is important and necessary. However, it is also essential to expand our understanding of “sisterhood,” which is often a trope of solidarity among women that must be scrutinized and questioned in context. The call to “undiscipline” Victorian studies prompts me to ask whether sisterhood might constitute a form of ally-ship between poets and visual artists and include an array of gender, sexual, and racial identities within a transimperial context.⁸ Romantic and Victorian art sisters typically found solidarity within local media ecologies and familial networks close to home. However, I want to suggest thinking about sister arts allyship in the broader context of nineteenth-century immigration and colonialism. Doing so allows us to explore ways in which Victorian artists offer [End Page 475] allyship to minoritized artists today and to consider that contemporary poets might extend sisterhood to the nineteenth-century artists who found few allies in their lifetime.

In pushing disciplinary boundaries and drawing on new critical frameworks, I will address examples of art sisterhood in Britain, India, and the United States. I begin by revisiting the Bluestocking subject of my original essay to consider how the Royal Academician Angelica Kauffman responded to print media’s allegorical representation of the poet-painter relationship. Kauffman seems to rely on the muse-like role of poetry at a time when women poets were being represented as important contributors to British culture. The line between muse and artist is also present in the friends-and-family media ecology of Pre-Raphaelite artists. “Sisterhood” abounds in titles of books about Pre-Raphaelite women artists, poets, and models. My discussion investigates the extent to which models collaborated with painters to fashion devotional and discrete portrait identities. Such self-fashioning extends to the context of art photography, and I explore the way desire motivates the sisterly relationship between Tennyson’s poetry and his photographic interpreters. For Julia Margaret Cameron, maternal desire occurs in the context of British coloniality and orientalism, which finds expression in Tennyson’s poetry and translates into her photographic illustrations. Tennyson’s “Mariana” introduces women’s openly sexual desire to Pre-Raphaelite art and finds transmedial life in Sunil Gupta’s activist project The New Pre-Raphaelites (2008). In a short discussion of Gupta’s version of “Mariana,” I hope to show the continuity of sisterhood between poetry and photography, as well as the possibility of “Mariana” as a queer, Indian subject.

Gupta’s explicitly political project reminds us that progressive art sister-hood affirms the humanity and creativity of people imperiled by colonization, enslavement, and their aftermath. Art historians writing about the sculptor Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907) emphasize the artist’s reliance on abolitionist women...