Art in the Women's Building

Intro

The 1893 Columbian Exposition marked the first World’s Fair in which women were given their own explicit building to display their accomplishments. The United States government appointed a Board of Lady Managers, a group of women who were given government funds to construct a “Woman’s Building” and select objects to exhibit female progress throughout history. Among the items on exhibit in the building were historical objects, a library filled with volumes written by women, and artworks by female artists.

Architecture of The Woman’s Building

The Board of Lady managers decided that they wanted a female architect to design the Woman's Building. In order to choose a designer, they held a competition that asked female architects from around the nation to submit their potential plans. After several weeks of debate, The Board of Lady Managers chose Sophia Hayden out of the thirteen competitors as the competition winner. Hayden was a recent graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, having been the first woman to graduate with an architecture degree from the institution.

Photograph of The Woman's Building
Glimpses of the World's Fair: Through a Camera. Black and White Photograph. Liard & Lee Publishers. Chicago: 1893.

The Woman’s Building itself was designed was in the Italian Renaissance style and the plan was actually based on Hayden’s senior thesis. The interior of the building housed a 7,000 volume library containing the written works of women, an assembly hall where women could give speeches and gather, headquarters for various organizations, and a large hall, called the “Gallery of Honor,” that served as a gallery for women’s art.

Art in the Woman's Building

Painting at the time, like most professions, was a career largely dominated by men. Women artists felt they needed to prove both their ability and skill as artists in order to be accepted by their male counterparts. The commission for a large scale painting at all was a feat at the time for female artists. Thus, women tended to play it safe in terms of the subject matter and style they used. Women were expected to paint allegorical, dainty, and feminine scenes, and to use pleasing colors and soft shapes. Many women stuck to these expectations, not wanting their skill to be criticized as a result of stepping outside these boundaries.

Six large murals inside the Woman’s Building suggested woman’s evolution from “primitive” to modern. The goal of these murals was to illustrate the progress made by women through history and their continued advancement in contemporary times.

These murals were placed in a cyclical pattern beginning on the north tympanum of the hall with Mary MacMonnies’ Primitive Woman, which showed women in their most undeveloped uncivilized state. On the East wall, Amanda Brewster Sewell’s mural Women in Arcadia, and Lucia Fairchild’s mural The Women of Plymouth, showed the advancement and skill of women made even in the past. On the south wall, was a controversial mural by Mary Cassatt, entitled, Modern Woman. And finally, on the west wall were two works by the sisters Lydia Emmet and Rosina Emmett Sherwood, titled Art, Science and Literature, and The Republic’s Welcome to Her Daughters, which represented women in contemporary times.

Of the murals, the two that received the most attention at the fair were MacMonnies’ Primitive Woman and Cassatt’s Modern Woman. The location of both works today is unknown, but black and white photograph images give a relatively good idea of how they would have looked. 

MacMonnies, Primitive Woman

Mary Macmonnies, Primitive Woman. 48 x 12 feet, 1893. Present Location Unkown

MacMonnie’s work was considered to be extremely successful and was praised by critics and fairgoers alike. MacMonnies was a little known American artist who specialized in landscapes and genre paintings. She was chosen in large part because of her marriage to the artist Frederick MacMonnies, who was designing a fountain for the fairgrounds and thus gave her easy access to workspace and materials at the fair.

Her mural showed a pleasing scene of uncivilized villagers, women and men both, working side by side. The imagery is described in the fair's official guidebook. Male hunters “clad in skins,” come back home having, “just returned from the chase,” while women hold children, “carry water jars,” and crush grapes to make wine.

The division of male and female labor is made clear in the piece; the role of men as providers and protectors is stressed, while women are shown as caregivers and nurturers. In her mural, MacMonnies thus strived to portray primitive women as necessary and useful to the development of mankind, yet still confined within the limited female sphere of the domestic maternal figure.

Critics at the time praised both MacMonnies skill and subject. The official guidebook declared that her work “shows a true decorative sense, a sure hand, and a fresh, joyous imagination.”  The colors of the mural were cool and soft, and her composition was pleasing to the eye. MacMonnies herself explained that she thought that a mural should be a “superior sort of wall-paper, which gives first and above all a charming and agreeable effect as a whole, but does not strike the eye or disturb attention.” (source)

Mary Cassatt, Modern Woman

Mary Cassatt, Central Panel of Modern Woman 48 x 12 feet, 1893. Present Location Unknown

Mary Cassat’s mural, on the other hand, was not so well received by critics; she dared to push the boundaries and to create an artwork that was not what fairgoers or contemporary reviewers expected.

Cassatt was an American painter who had come from a wealthy family. She attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1860 and eventually went to Paris where she found a place with the Impressionist painters. She was an active member of the Impressionist group from about 1879 to 1886 and was involved in the Parisian intellectual and cultural circles, a rare feat for an American at the time. Her subjects focused mostly on Parisian and family life. Today, she is best known for her paintings of mothers and children. At the time, she was relatively well known in Paris and New York.

Mary Cassatt, Self Portrait c. 1878

Cassatt chose as her subject for the mural “women picking fruit from the tree of knowledge.” The mural depicts a group of young women in contemporary dress gathering apples in an orchard. Twelve women in total are represented in four groups of three, and no male figures are shown. The women interact with one another and play instruments and dance in a bright pastoral scene.

Critics criticized Cassat’s use of bright colors and flat figures; they felt that this bold use of color was somehow unfeminine and out of line for a female painter. Henry Fuller in the Chicago Record wrote that “the impudent greens and brutal blues of Miss Cassatt seem to indicate an aggressive personality with which compromise and cooperation would be impossible,” he continued, “Miss Cassatt has a reputation for being strong and daring; she works with men in Paris on their own ground.”

 The official guidebook to the fair was clearly no different than the critics in its opinion of Cassatt’s piece. While the booklet spends an entire page extolling the beauty of the lesser known MacMonnies work, it devotes a few curt sentences to Cassatt’s mural, and refers only to her decoration of the border, which it notes is “quite charming.” 

In stepping outside of the accepted norms and boundaries expected of female painters, Cassatt was rejected as an unskilled artist.

However, while at the time the subject matter and symbolism of Cassatt’s image seemed strange and unacceptable, recent art historians have re-examined her work and found that Cassatt’s mural is actually a declaration of feminine intelligence and capability. In his journal article, “Picking Fruit: Mary Cassatt’s Modern Woman and the Woman’s Building of 1893," art historian John Hutton points out that Cassatt actually attempts to transform the biblical narrative of Adam and Eve into a call for female empowerment. Throughout history, the role of Eve in the garden of Eden had been used to disparage the female role. Eve, in taking fruit from the snake, introduced sin to humanity and was the cause of mankind’s exile from the Garden of Eden. However, Hutton points out, that several feminist groups at the time had slowly been working towards inverting this narrative.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Page from the Woman's Bible

A few years before the Chicago Exposition, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a well known feminine activist, had put together “The Woman’s Bible,” a document which rethought biblical narratives in order to give women a empowering role in the text. Stanton argued that Eve represented, not the woman who led to fall of man, but the figure who led the human race out of ignorance and into truth. In The Woman’s Bible she argues,“If…we accept the Darwinian theory, that the race has been a gradual growth from a lower to a higher form of life, and that the story of the fall is a myth, we can exonerate the snake, emancipate the woman, and reconstruct a more rational religion for the nine-teeth century.”

Thus, in depicting modern women in contemporary dress laboring in a field by picking apples, Cassatt may have actually been asking contemporary viewers to rethink their conception of women through history. Women were not gradually making their way forward from primitive times to become more enlightened beings, but were actually always the keepers of knowledge, and were only now able to realize their full potential in society.

That contemporary critics and viewers were unable to grasp the symbolism of the image spoke, not to Cassatt’s inability as an artist, but to societies inability to change the fundamental way in which women were viewed.

Resources

Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The Woman’s Bible: A Classic Feminist Perspective. New York: European Pub. Co., 1895.

MacMonnies, Mary. Primitive Woman, 1893.

Cassatt, Mary. The Modern Woman, 1893.

Mary Cassatt. Self Portrait. Watercolor, gouache on wove paper, 1878.

Hutton, John. "Picking Fruit: Mary Cassatt's Modern Woman and the Woman's Building of 1893." Feminist Studies:Women's Agency: Empowerment and the Limits of Resistance, Vol. 20, No.2 (1994): 318-348.

Waldheim, Charles and Katerina Ray, Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives. London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Wels, Susan. "Spheres of Influence: The Role of Women at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the San Francisco Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915." PhD. diss., San Francisco State University, 2015.

The Decoration of the Woman’s Building at the Columbian Exposition. Vol. 23 No. 6 (mar. 1894)

Gaze, Delia. Concise Encyclopedia of Women Artists. Taylor and Francis, 2001.