2018
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/
Roberta Serra, « The reception of the Salon of the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs, between Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century France », HAL-SHS : études de genres, ID : 10670/1.bbqo6q
During the French Third Republic, the status of women artists confined them in a submissive position compared to men. They could not expose their creations in a professional perspective, nor access the official exhibitions circuits. For this reason, the creation of the first all-women exhibition—the Salon of the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs—erupted as an innovation in an immutable French artistic panorama. Serra’s presentation focuses on this Salon—the earliest in France with a proto-feminist goal—and studies its reception by critics, the public,and institutions, as one of the most interesting manifestations of UFPS impact on French society. Furthermore, Serra proposes an original analysis of the society’s official publication (the Journal des femmes artistes, then UFPS Bulletin), to enlighten the Union’s internal acceptance of the Salon, and contextualizes this debate in the diverse and emerging feminist press and the major art newspapers of those years.This presentation embraces the period between the creation of the UFPS and 1920, the last year of publication of the Bulletin. Finally, Serra studies the Salon’s catalogues, and the singular artists’ reception, to draw the portrait of the variegated feminine artistic world, between late 19th-and early 20th-century France.