Monsieur Julian also realized that women artists were most likely to earn their living as portraitists, and indeed that is how most of them succeeded. In his studio they drew models and each other, and developed the ability to paint perceptive representations. Several of the finest works are even self-portraits, including mature examples by Marie Bashkirtseff, Anna Bilinska, Cecilia Beaux, Louise Breslau and Mina Bredberg-Carlson. The names alone, incidentally, can alert us to the international appeal of the Académie, since these artists came from, respectively, Ukraine, Poland, America, Switzerland and Sweden. Most of them returned to their native countries and established good careers and sometimes even comparable art schools. Cecilia Beaux, along with fellow students, Anna Klumpke and Elizabeth Gardner (later Mme. Bouguereau) became successful and highly renowned in America. However, the others are not so well known in this country and were, in fact, revelations to me.
 
Bashkirtseff had an all-too-short career-she was only twenty-six when she died. However, she kept a diary of her time at the Académie, which provided historians with good research material. She also wrote feminist articles in French journals, which provided Bashkirtseff a place in literature. Her artwork is less well known, and the exhibition was fortunate to have obtained the loan of her masterpiece, In the Studio, an 1881 painting of the interior of the Académie Julian with the artist herself at the far right. This fascinating work has been in the collection of the Dnipropetrovsk State Museum, Ukraine, since the 1930s and no one I have talked to has previously seen more than a poor reproduction of it. The painting depicts an active, crowded atelier with women drawing and painting a live model. (After an initial trial period of mixed classes, Monsieur Julian completely separated the men and women students.) Her marvelous, Self-Portrait with a Palette, is beautifully painted-austere and economical, but with splendid explosions of paint in her blouse and palette. Thus, documenting what she might have accomplished had she lived longer.
 
Anna Bilinska will undoubtedly be another major surprise to most visitors, since her work is rarely seen outside Polish collections. Her Self-Portrait with Apron and Brushes (1887) is a bold statement of her confidence in being an artist; it is surprisingly monumental in scale and unflinching in its honesty of representation. A later and even larger self-portrait in the exhibition is a poignant document of her early death in 1893, finished only in the face and upper body, and abandoned as her health declined. The range of works in the exhibition by Bilinska demonstrates that she could do anything, and with subjects as diverse as a fine male Académie (reproduced in the February 2000 issue of the California Art Club Newsletter), a fashionable female portrait, a cityscape of Berlin, a genre scene in the Dutch manner and a model … la Japonaise.
 
Many of the artists represented in the exhibition's section on student works remain obscure, despite the quality of their studies, although Käthe Kollwitz's elegant figure sketch once again testifies to the numerous famous artists who worked at Julian's (such as Louise Bourgeois in the 1930s). The curators of the exhibition, Professor Gabriel Weisberg and Dr. Jane R. Becker, had to eliminate some wonderful discoveries because of space limitations. And the museum is receiving information on yet more artists who studied at the Académie Julian in the late 19th century, but whose names have faded from conventional art history. We still have quite a lot to learn and welcome further information on this rich early period in the history of the Académie Julian.

Anna Bilinska Self-Portrait with Apron and Brushes, 1887 Oil on Canvas Collection: National Museum, Cracow

Notes:
Following the exhibition's closing at the Dahesh Museum on May 13, Overcoming All Obstacles will travel to Memphis where it will be shown at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, July 9-September 24, 2000. A fully illustrated catalogue, co-published with Rutgers University Press, with essays by Professor Weisberg, Dr. Becker, Professor Tamar Garb and Professor Catherine Fehrer is available from the museum for $35 plus $4 for postage and handling. Dahesh Museum, 601 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10017 or www.daheshmuseum.org
 
News on the Expansion of the Dahesh Museum
As the collection and popularity of the Dahesh Museum has grown, plans have been implemented for a larger facility. However, the museum has just learned that their bid for their preferred location at 2 Columbus Circle (formerly Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art) has been put off by the City of New York, which owns the structure. The original bid was submitted in October 1996. The City has now issued another call for bids with a clear emphasis on commercial development, which will undoubtedly mean destruction of this important Edward Durell stone building. The Dahesh Museum is the only bidding institution that will preserve 2 Columbus Circle and return it to its original cultural use. If anyone is interested in helping the Dahesh Museum in acquiring and saving this building, please write to: Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, City Hall, New York, NY 10007.
 
This article was originally published in the April/May, 2000 issue of the California Art Club newsletter.

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