When the world’s women artists answered – new book from Advancing Women Artists
This has been a busy week for AWA – the way the Italians describe this group dedicated to Advancing Women Artists – holding three separate events to promote the latest book from Jane Fortune and Linda Falcone – and all the work by women artists that is still hidden all over Florence.
These ladies have set themselves a hard task – to keep the works of the invisible women artists of Florence alive is in itself not easy and to do so they have to keep finding innovative and interesting ways of keeping the general public interested – and this is particularly hard given that probably half of their audience – the male half – have been guilty , consciously or unconsciously, of wanting to dismiss this “stuff” from the beginning!
But the good news is that they have an army of highly visible – and vocal – women on their side and they came in force out to applaud and appreciate their hard work this week.
The first presentation that I attended was at the newly opened NoveCento Museum of Modern Art in the south of the Piazza Santa Maria Novella 10.
Abouth eighty percent of the guests were Italian so appropriately eighty percent of the talks were in Italian too – including the presentation by half-Italian Linda Falcone, who explained that she and Jane Fortune were already hard at work on a different book when the then Curator of the museum came to them with a list of over 100 works by women artists that had been donated to Florence after a plea from art historian Carlo Ludivico Ragghianti to all artists that they donate a work to replace the many masterpieces that had been destroyed forever by the water – and worse, the unused winter heating oil – that had wreaked such havoc across Florence on November 4th 1966.
Ragghianti declared intention was to collect work for an “Uffizi of Modern Art” for Florence and his ambition has finally been achieved, nearly 48 years later ,when the NoveCento opened in June 2014
Part of the new exhibition consists of works collected when the world answered and artists contributed their works to the next re-birth of Florence.
Our next opportunity to learn about the still unknown artworks was another presentation in the prestigious Accademia del Disegno in Via Orsanmichele 4 – and here , in front of a work by one of her favourite artists, Pontormo, Jane Fortune explained that since her first momentous visit to Florence in 1962 she had always vowed to try and give back something special to the city that had given her so much.
I am sure that no-one could deny that she has done that – Jane Fortune, through the medium of her Advancing Women artist Organisation has sponsored and arranged for the restoration of 16 important art works by 9 key women artists who have worked in the city of Florence.
The Organisation has also worked to ensure that these works are now on display in appropriate places across Florence.
My thanks and compliments too to artist Susan McCreight, for her permission to show this portrait of Jane Fortune done whilst she was sitting next to me sketching during the talks – I think she has captured Jane’s watchful expression extremely well.
