Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850-1970

RETHINKING PROFESSIONALISM: WOMEN AND ART IN CANADA, 1850-1970 Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson, Eds. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2012 Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850-1970 is, surprisingly, the first collection of scholarly essays to focus on women, art, and history in Canada from multiple vantage points. Especially noteworthy is the volume's focus on historical work produced by women working in a variety of disciplines ranging from painting and photography to architecture and traditional handicrafts. As the editors Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson note in their preface, in Canada there is a gap in scholarship when it comes to critically engaged studies of women's cultural production. This is the context for this publication, organized by the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative, a collaborative endeavour based at Concordia University involving a wide range of scholars. This volume, which is the outcome of the Initiative's inaugural conference held in 2008, attests to the importance of a collaborative ethos that has yielded the rich variety of perspectives showcased here. The other framing device employed by both editors and authors is the issue of professionalism. While the editors acknowledge professionalism as a synthetic art historical framework, it is an atypical one used here to explore new understandings and perspectives stemming from the study of women as cultural producers. Organized into four sections that cover professionalization in the arts, careers for women, and the limits of professionalism for women, the volume opens with an introductory essay by Kristina Huneault that explores the relationship and limitations between women, art, and professionalism. She draws attention to the idea of professionalism itself and interrogates its role as a critical concept. Noting the pitfalls of privileging professional practice that can further marginalize women in the writing of art's histories, Huneault's study addresses the historiographical and methodological implications of professionalism as an analytic device and also poses the question of the possibility of a distinctly feminine professionalism. While the authors in Rethinking Professionalism engage with the central issue of professionalism to varying degrees, what does emerge is a collection of scholarly essays focused largely on lesser-known practitioners working primarily in the early 20th century. Canada's great woman Emily Carr does not feature as subject for discussion in any of the chapters, and when more recognized artists are discussed it is their more obscure accomplishments that are highlighted. That is the case with Anne Savage (1896-1971) who was a painter and founding member of Montreal's Beaver Hall Group--erroneously often viewed as a collective of women artists--and contemporary of the Group of Seven. Alena Buis' chapter focuses on Savage's work as a teacher and broadcaster, critically analyzing Savage's CBC programme The Development of Art in Canada (1939). Buis explores how Savage's lectures on art in Canada were written to address a broad public while furthering a nationalistic narrative that had previously been constructed by Canadian cultural elites. …

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