Abstract
Respected and revered in her day, Elizabeth Robins Pennell is today most commonly known for her biography of the artist James McNeill Whistler, cowritten with her husband Joseph, and for her writings on travel and food, published in both book and periodical format. She was also a prolific art critic, contributing numerous articles to many publications in Britain and the United States between 1883 and 1919. Pennell’s art criticism, unlike her other writings, was largely anonymous. Adopting a variety of cryptic, gender-neutral pseudonyms allowed Pennell to engage in an intellectual, male-dominated discourse on art. In contrast to other female art critics who can be considered generalists, Pennell was amongst a new breed of professional art critics who possessed critical expertise. She strategically utilized her journalistic platform to encourage her readership to change their view of art, by considering form above content, thus becoming a significant advocate for what was deemed the ‘New Art Criticism’. Her various ‘signatures’ gave her a voice, albeit disembodied, which when united with those of other New Art Critics disseminated a fledgling modernist agenda. Pennell’s career in art criticism therefore revolved not around self-promotion, but rather around the promotion of a specific ideology. The primary beneficiary of Pennell’s championing was Whistler. This chapter will examine Pennell’s journalistic strategies within the wider context of women and art criticism at the fin de siècle, and the way in which these strategies promoted the principles of New Art Criticism, exemplified by Whistler, but denied Pennell herself due recognition.
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Notes
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Jad Adam, Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 55.
See Kimberly Morse Jones, ‘The “Philistine” and the New Art Critic: A New Perspective on the L’Absinthe Debate of 1893,’ British Art Journal 11 (Fall 2008), 50–61.
For other analyses of the debate over Degas’s L’Absinthe see Ronald Pickvance, ‘“L’Absinthe” in England,’ Apollo 77 (May 1963), 395–98;
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John Ruskin, Selections from the Writings of John Ruskin (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1863), 93.
Agnes Repplier, Our Convent Days (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1905), vii.
Elizabeth Robins Pennell, The Whistler Journal (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1921), vi.
Joseph Pennell, ‘The Triumph of Whistler,’ Bookman 36 (1913), 158–64: 163. Elizabeth’s personal writings indicate that she too contributed to the article.
Edward Larocque, Tinker, The Pennells (London: n.p., 1951), 17.
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© 2012 Kimberly Morse Jones
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Jones, K.M. (2012). ‘Making a name for Whistler’: Elizabeth Robins Pennell as a New Art Critic. In: Gray, F.E. (eds) Women in Journalism at the Fin de Siècle. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001306_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001306_8
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