If you haven’t heard of Susan Watkins before seeing the Dixon Gallery & Garden’s latest exhibition, that’s okay, says Julie Pierotti, Martha R. Robinson curator.
Watkins (1875–1913) is the central figure in “Susan Watkins and Women Artists of the Progressive Era,” but as Pierotti says, she’s not a household name. “There’s a few reasons for that. One, she’s a woman artist, and a lot of them have been sort of erased from art history. Two, she died young. She died in her thirties. And the third reason is, when she died, she lived in Norfolk, Virginia, and her husband gave the contents of her studio to what is now the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk. So almost all of her work is in one location, in one museum. It very rarely comes on the market. And there’s not a lot of museums around the country that own her work.”
Yet during Watkins’ life, at the turn of the 20th century, she was quite successful, having studied in Paris, regularly exhibited at the Paris Salon, and earned accolades from the American art press. As opportunities for women in art education progressed, more so in Europe than in America, she sought financial independence through art as a woman when that wasn’t the norm. Her commissioned portraits, which offered that financial stability, straddled the influences of academicism and aestheticism, demonstrating her unique vision and artistic prowess. “In a lot of her work, she’s focused on the female form in her works,” Pierotti says. “Then there’s some of her later sketches, plein air sketches that she made around Paris that are in the exhibition, and those are really charming, too. There’s a lot who think of Susan Watkins as just a figure painter, but there’s a lot of variety in the exhibition.”
Her story, Pierotti adds, is similar to other American women artists who went to Paris to study art, women who embraced traditional styles and frequently focused on the female form and interior, domestic spaces. They, too, have been left out of histories, but in this exhibit, some finally have the chance to have their work positioned as belonging in the canon.
“We think that this moment of rediscovering forgotten women artists has been around a long time. It really hasn’t,” Pierotti says. “There’s a lot of work left to be done. And what this exhibition shows is, there’s a lot of artists in this show who really need what the Chrysler has done for Susan Watkins, who need their own major exhibition.”
“Susan Watkins and Women Artists of the Progressive Era,” Dixon Gallery & Gardens, 4339 Park Avenue, Through September 28.