Anna Rigg

PhD Student in Art History

‘The Mute Who Speaks’: Women on Art in Prerevolutionary France

Supervisors: David Maskill & Dr Raymond Spiteri

ABSTRACT

In 1781, an art critic imagined the perfect woman to accompany him to that year’s Paris Salon: a young beauty with the miraculous ability not to speak except ‘when the occasion merited it’.

Given a voice and silenced in the same gesture, the fictional ‘mute who speaks’ is emblematic of the ambiguous place of women in the history of art criticism. Women are ubiquitous in visual depictions of the prerevolutionary art scene and make frequent appearances in written art criticism. Yet their presence in both has been overlooked. Equated with a lack of substance, with ornament or entertainment, they have been passed over as ephemera that must be sifted through to get to the nuggets of ‘real’ art criticism within. I argue that these representations of women are not incidental but integral to the substance of art criticism.

This thesis searches marginal literatures for traces of women’s voices on art, analysing the selective muting of women’s voices both in eighteenth-century texts and in subsequent histories of them. Bringing together a range of neglected sources—the comic and experimental Salon pamphlets of the 1770s and 1780s, anecdotes circulating in legal and illegal newspapers, the work of a minor female poet—I wish to give a sense of the true breadth of artistic discourse during the Enlightenment. Art was not only a specialised discourse but also a subject of general interest, a part of the social and intellectual life of Paris. Questioning the value judgements that have shaped the elevation of some sources over others, this thesis explores how women’s voices worked in a range of genres to shape perceptions of both art and women.

BIOGRAPHY

Anna Rigg is a third-year doctoral student fascinated with the variety of eighteenth-century French literature. Her research interests include art criticism, anecdote, and the visual arts, particularly as they relate to the history of gender. She completed her BA (Hons) in Art History and French at Victoria University of Wellington.