This year-the centennial of women’s right to vote in the United States-the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego has designated 2020 “The Year of the Woman: The Ideal and the Real.” In alignment with this theme, the museum launches its first exhibition of the new decade, Captivating Women from the Dijkstra Collection from the collection of San Diego-based collectors Bram and Sandra Dijkstra. The exhibition, which runs through May 10, will include nine American and European works of art either by women or featuring women as inspiration. Among the American artists in the exhibition are Ella Ferris Pell, Gilbert Gaul, Eric Pape and Belle Baranceanu.
Gilbert Gaul (1855-1919), Waiting, 1876. Oil on canvas, 22 x 28 in.
“All three of our temporary exhibitions this year (spring, summer and fall) will highlight works by female artists or will feature women as subjects. Being the only ‘free admission’ fine art museum in San Diego county, the Timken may be the only opportunity that many visitors will have to view these significant works, particularly during this milestone year,” says Megan Pogue, executive director for the Timken Museum of Art. “Captivating Women...explores the variety of strategies used by artists in both Europe and the United States to depict women. Both mythological scenes and everyday life are portrayed in these paintings, all of which date from the late 19th through the early 20th century.”
Ella Ferris Pell (1846-1922), Salomé, 1890. Oil on canvas, 52 x 34 in.
Dr. Derrick Cartwright, director of curatorial affairs at the Timken Museum, curated the exhibition in conjunction with his university students. He discusses several of the American works in the exhibition: “Ella Ferris Pell’s Salomé is a brilliant painting by an artist who is not a household name. Pell went to Paris and received training, as did many American artists in the decades following the Civil War. She showed works at the Salon, and this is one of the paintings that she submitted to that important annual event.” Presumably, the 1890 painting is the story of Salomé, daughter of Herod Philip and Herodias, moments after she has called for the head of John the Baptist. “The empty platter under her arm suggests this much,” Cartwright continues. “Pell’s painting indulges the late 19th-century taste for drama but doesn’t give into stagey violence. The artist rarely, if ever again, equaled this compositional success.”
Eric Pape (1870-1938), Angel and the Book of Life, 1897. Oil on canvas, 76 x 41 in.
Lee, painted in 1928 by lesser-known artist Baranceanu, is a prime example of what the artist was able to accomplish in Southern California in the years prior to the widespread growth of modernism, Cartwright explains. “Lee depicts a female figure in an intimate situation. While nude, the subject is not erotic. Instead, Baranceanu’s subject goes about her daily life with poetic simplicity and a pictorial economy that still impresses us almost a century later.”
The Timken Museum of Art will continue its theme of celebrating women and women artists with several other exhibitions later in the year. —
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