The Brooklyn Rail

Curator William Corwin has organized an exhibition of three preeminent female artists from the sixties in Ribérac's eleventh-century abbey church, in Dordogne County. If you have never been to this beautiful region of the southwest of France, imagine landscapes similar to that of Tuscany: hilly, soft, round, and myriad shades of green. It feels quite far from the places where Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop art emerged and flourished. Showing the work of the French painter Marguerite Louppe, American painter Perle Fine, and the British-American sculptor Jann Haworth may feel like fitting circles into squares, but the exhibition makes sense—apart from the laid-back, good life of the surroundings.

Live hidden, live happy: that could summarize the art of Marguerite Louppe, a true Parisian, wife of the also-famous painter Maurice Brianchon. Louppe lived mainly in Paris until 1960 when she established a studio in Grand-Brassac, Dordogne, more precisely in the hamlet of Truffières (“truffière” in this case means water source). For the artist it was also a source of inspiration, observing the day-to-day passage of rural life. She was part of the Purist and Cubist movements, but she never totally submitted to abstraction, allowing her former love for Post-Impressionism to linger in her still life and landscapes as one can observe in the twelve paintings of hers in the exhibition.

Perle Fine was a founding figure of the American Abstract Expressionist scene in New York, along with Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Mark Rothko. Meanwhile, British-American Jann Haworth was a pioneer of British Pop art and of feminism with her sewn and stuffed soft sculpture, diverting traditionally female “craft” into high art, a revolutionary gesture at the time.

All the three artists belonged to the “schools” of their time, but also managed to escape from them, partly because there was little critical expectation—or even regard—for women’s work. If the reader will allow a somewhat daring comparison: their situation is a bit like Dordogne itself. Dordogne used to be a county of peasants, invisible compared to the very wealthy nearby county of Charente, the land of cognac. There is much more still to discover in Dordogne: unspoiled, with castles at every corner, beautiful stone villages, each with different and strong identities.

I can see some similarity in the art of Louppe, Fine, and Haworth—the same unspoiled beauty of the unexpected, the same under-the-radar freedom. They belonged to their time; classical but with a twist, offering views outside the mainstream.

The magnificent XIIth century gothic church of Ribérac, in which the exhibition has been organized with the support of the mayor Nicolas Platon and David Hirsh, adds to this feeling. The church’s wooden ceiling—like a reverse galleon hull—and its sober streamlined Romanesque style are understated yet so powerful. I sense that having the three women artists who never met each other is also an appeal for women as a kind of post-feminism: beyond rivalry, overcoming the male gaze, towards fostering a positive sense of emulation. Or is it—as is suggested by the recent work of some paleolithic French/American research teams studying art in caves in the Vézère valley in Dordogne—that the visibility of women artists is simply returning? Out of thirty-two images of hands in parietal paintings in the ancient caves using a stencil technique, twenty-four definitely belonged to women. This implies that they were the artists, and not men, as it was long believed. There is no way you should miss this return of a vanished line of women artists in the Dordogne in Sixties Synchronicities in Ribérac.