History is unkind to women, and art history in particular. Swiss artist Angelica Kauffman was a hugely popular eighteenth century painter and one of the two female founding members of the Royal Academy, but she’s been largely forgotten. This show is an attempt to correct that oversight.
It does so by trying to reframe Kauffman’s work in a modern light, reimagining her self-portraiture as a tool she used to formulate, manipulate and craft her own identity. She’s quietly confrontational in traditional Austrian garb, she’s poised and soft with a stylus, she’s young and fresh, being pulled in two different directions by figures representing art and music. In self portraits, she could define who she was to the world, project an image, shape an identity.
It’s not all me me me though. Her approach to history paintings sees her foreground female characters and narratives. Cleopatra lovingly adorns Mark Antony’s tomb in a dark, brooding work, Penelope sits wistfully at her loom, Eleanora sucks venom out of King Edward I’s wound. Women are centred, celebrated. This is neoclassicism from a feminine perspective, a view that we’re so rarely given, and that is so rarely made the main attraction. That’s the appeal here.
But some of the painting here is incredibly dodgy. Her portrait of Martina Cocks twists the sitter’s head into lopsided bulbosity, Penelopoe has been given a face that’s 80 percent schnoz and the figure on the left of that afore-mentioned music and art self-portrait is so vast, flat and featureless she looks like a thumb.
Kauffman’s not the greatest painter of her era. But the RA’s shown plenty of pretty mediocre male painters in its time, so it’s only right that they redress the balance a bit.
