Tag: art-history-tag/features

Cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths were aged 16 and nine when they took the first photos. Many years later, in the 1980s, they admitted it was a hoax, explaining that they kept up the pretence that the fairies were real a because they felt sorry for the middle-aged men, like Conan Doyle, that so wanted to believe. There was, at the time, a serious resurgence in spiritualism in the UK, with seances and attempts to contact the dead proving understandably tempting for the bereaved. Conan Doyle himself became interested in a spirit world after his son died in the war. And for believers, this wasn’t “woo-woo” nonsense – it was supposedly based in science. After all, scientific advances were genuinely explaining hitherto unknown and invisible aspects of our world.

“For Conan Doyle, it was all about a search for another realm of being that related to life after death, vibrations, telepathy, telekinesis – this fascinating world on the edge of the limits of human perception,” says Sage. “And obviously that’s connected to the loss of his son in World War One.”

Like the Flower Fairies, the Cottingley photographs further reinforced the association between children and fairies, as well as cementing what a fairy looked like in the public consciousness. Yet aside from Tinkerbell, Flower Fairies are probably the only image from the fairy-fever era still instantly recognisable today. Why, of all the fairy content out there, have Barker’s images endured so strongly over the past 100 years?

“They were [originally published] in full colour, and a lot of books were published in black and white,” begins Sage. What looked novel at the time, now seems charmingly period – but the delicacy, intricacy, and imagination of Barker’s pictures can still cast a spell. “It’s like dolls houses – things that are very miniaturised, but very detailed and realistic, scratch a certain itch,” suggests Sage. “They are absolutely beautiful, which helps.”

“It’s a real celebration of nature – there is a strong educational aspect to her work,” puts forward Slattery Clark, emphasising the botanical accuracy of Barker’s drawings. The educational argument might sound absurd given we’re discussing fairy art, but as a child who was obsessed with Flower Fairies, I can attest to the truth of it: all the wildflowers I know the names of I learned from these books.

In some ways, the works were a form of socially acceptable erotica, sold to bourgeois men who didn’t dare participate in the lurid night life of Montmartre themselves, but were titillated by scenes of it. Made by men for men, the artworks inevitably reflected the same obsessions.

Fauvism, with its brash colours and vigorous brush work, might seem rebellious and anti-establishment, but the male artists’ portrayal of women perpetuated the same old stereotypes. “They are not the crazy anarchists that we tend to believe they are,” says Fink. “They were all petit-bourgeois, they had families, and they were members of the art committees of the time.” And since it was predominantly men both creating and buying the art, he explains, a patriarchal perspective pervaded.

There’s the trope of the female as closer to nature, for example, with pieces such as The Dance by Derain (1906) and Dance by Matisse (1909-10) ascribing women with a primitive, naïve quality. In her 1973 essay Virility and Domination in Early 20th-Century Vanguard Painting, feminist art historian Carol Duncan describes “the absoluteness with which women were pushed back to the extremity of the nature side of the dichotomy, and the insistence with which they were ranked in total opposition to all that is civilised and human”. The “beastliness” of Fauvism clearly extended to the representation of women. “A young woman has young claws, well sharpened,” Matisse once said.

But, says Fink, there’s “a clear distinction” in the way Fauves represented different women. “They depict their wives in an idolised way, in a way, morally superior. They’re dignified in their presence. Whereas, informed by late 19th-Century discourses, there’s this other extreme, where many of the portraits of the Fauves that are sexual, focus not on the face of the woman, but really on the flesh, on the genitals, on the breasts. There’s this depiction of a sexual appetite, of virility, that is not present at all in the family portraits.”

In contrast to his dressed models, Matisse’s nudes − such as Pastoral (1905) and Nude in a Forest (1906) − tend to be turned away, faceless and objectified, lacking in personality and relegated to lines and curves. Even a still life, such as Goldfish and Sculpture (1911), is a case in point. “It’s quite extreme,” agrees Fink. “The buttocks of the woman are enlarged quite significantly.” The Fauves, aware of the taboo, argued that they had a “formal” interest in women, he says. “But obviously it goes beyond that.”