Katherine Keenum

Exhibition alert: I've just learned about Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939 from an article in the Autumn 2024 issue of American Scholar: Reborn in the City of Light. The show, which is up through February 23, 2025, is built around portraits of American women who found freedom to explore their art, beliefs, and sexuality in Paris in the early 20th C. They didn't necessarily know each other; but together they illustrate a time and place. Naturally, for this post, I chose a painting from my magic year of 1908. Ethel Mars, moreover, is new to me and I hope to explore her life and work in future—possibly in the exhibition catalogue if it becomes available in our library system!

Exhibition alert: An upcoming exhibition, Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (at which viewers can elect to release odors that correspond to the imagery in a painting) set me thinking about how hard it is to evoke smells in words. A Simplified Guide to Using the Fragrance Wheel provides some vocabulary to set you thinking. But if colors are hard, how much harder are aromas to put into words!
 
For more about the Pre-Raphaelite show and other museum olfactory explorations, click here. And for another article on the evocation of smells in art, click here.

Exhibition alert: A show opening at Mass MoCa on August 25, 2024—Osman Khan: Road to Hybridabad— combines folklore from Southeast Asia and the Middle East with the immigrant experience and modern technology to explore how people form new identities these days. Flying carpets? Drones. Storytelling Scheherzade? AI. Djinn? A robot. The exhibition spreads out through several galleries so that viewers will experience a kind of narrative as they move through. I'm in the old-fashioned school of fantasy writers who rely on Northern European traditions for inspiration, but I'm eager to come at new stories and new thoughts viscerally in three dimensions.

Exhibition alert: Shopping and the big Paris department stores are a motif in Where the Light Falls. The emergence of such stores really did have a big impact on 19th and 20th C life. And if you're lucky enough to be in Paris (well, maybe better after crowds for the Olympics clear out), check out the new show at the Musée des Arts decoratifs, La Naissance des grands magasins: Mode, design, jouets, publicité, 1852–1925. It runs through October 13, 2024. The French website has lots of images and also awordless  video that gives a quick glimpse at the sort of objects on display. A short article in Apollo Magazine and a long one in the Guardian provide information in English.

Exhibition alert: A review in the Guardian of Mary Cassatt at Work, a new retrospective now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, sent me to the museum's holdings of her work, where I found The Banjo Player shown here. Cassatt was as innovative as her male contemporaries, and it's good to see her career presented in depth. For those of us who can't get to Philadelphia this summer or to San Francisco in the fall for the exhibition, there's always the catalogue. Nothing beats seeing actual works for their colors texture, brushstrokes, and so forth; but the leisure to read about works and methods has its own rewards, not only for viewers, but also for writers of historical fiction.

Exhibition alert: In Where the Light Falls, I had one of my characters report briefly on an excursion to the Cirque Fernando, where his party saw Miss La La hang by her teeth from a trapeze. The incident was, of course, inspired by Degas' painting, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando. I didn't actually dramatize the visit, and I'm glad now that I didn't; for it was only this spring that I learned from Denise Murrell that the performer in Degas' painting was biracial. If I could, I would now go to the new exhibition, Discover Degas and Miss La La at the National Gallery in London! The whole matter of Black people's experience in Paris in the 19th C is a rich area for exploration by historians in many fields and fiction writers alike.

Exhibition alert: Oh, what an idea! A small portrait is hidden behind another as part of a diptych that closes. Or it slides from a behind a panel with a different picture. Or a jeweled pendant twirls to reveal a portrait on the reverse. Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance will be up at the MetMuseum through July 7, 2024. I can't get down to New York to see it, but a selection of objects from the show appears on the website, enough to set off the imagination. And catalogue, of course, provides more.

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Exhibition alert: You still have time to visit Paper Cities, March 9–June 23, 2024 at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Each of its prints and photographs is worth a good look, and the museum has thoughtfully provided magnifying glasses so that you can view details closely. I was captivated, for instance, by the town Dürer has depicted at the feet of an allegorical figure. Miniature on the page, but full of exquisite details to supply the imagination.

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Website alert: An article in the Guardian, Tate Britain acquires first painting by pioneering English female artist overlooked for a century, brought to my attention Louise Jopling again. As an artist and suffragist, she is definitely someone my Palmer characters, Jeanette and Mattie, would know about! And wouldn't the show at the Tate gratify them? For more of Jopling's work, click here.

Image in the Public Domain via Wikipedia

Exhibition alert: An upcoming exhibition at the British Library—Medieval Women: In Their Own Words—has been announced by the British Library for October 2024. It will cover the lives of aristocrats and peasants and the craftwomen in between. Even one picture supplies information. Just look at the tether on the hen's leg, the little water trough with a chick perched on it, the distaff tucked under the farm woman's arm, and her bare feet. Looks like a great show for historians and historical fiction writers alike—if you have the good luck to be in London.