WASHINGTON — The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) announces the 2013 award of the Suzanne and James Mellor prize for distinguished scholarship on women artists. In its fifth year, the Mellor Prize is given annually to the best proposal that disseminates the highest quality of groundbreaking research on women artists from any time period and country of origin. The winner of the $50,000 grant is Carole Blumenfeld, Ph.D., for her proposed monograph on the 18th- and 19th-century French painter Marguerite Gérard.
Blumenfeld is a research fellow at the Palais Fesch-Musée des Beaux-arts d’Ajaccio. Her book Une facétie de Fragonard: Les révélations d’un dessin retrouvé about artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Gérard’s brother-in-law, is widely known and respected among experts in the field. She received a master’s degree at the École Pratique des Hautes Études before completing her doctorate in 2011 at the Université de Lille. Blumenfeld’s thesis and dissertation both focused on Marguerite Gérard and the evolution of genre painting during this time period. She has served in a curatorial capacity for exhibitions, including Marguerite Gérard artiste en 1789 at the Musée Cognacq-Jay (2009) and Petits théâtres de l’intime. La peinture de genre entre Révolution et Restauration at the Musée des Augustins (2011–12). Blumenfeld has held several distinguished fellowships, including appointments at the Frick Collection Center for the History of Collecting in New York and the French Academy (Villa Medici) in Rome.
Very little has been written about women artists in this period of French art. Blumenfeld’s book on Gérard will be the first scholarly monograph of this prominent female artist. Gérard exhibited regularly once the Salons were opened to women in the 1790s and won three medals for her work. Her pictures were acquired by luminaries such as Napoleon and King Louis XVIII, and she acquired considerable wealth and real estate during her lifetime. Among many contributions of this scholarship, the selection committee notes that Blumenfeld “successfully moves Gérard beyond the ‘victim narrative’ still so prevalent in studies on women artists to provide an alternative narrative focusing on studio practice, contributions to genre painting and the ways in which a woman negotiated artistic professional identity in a successful 50-year career that spanned turbulent political and social history.” Blumenfeld’s research also encompasses an analysis of art market operations outside the academy and a well-conceptualized analysis of collaboration within Fragonard’s atelier, which should make a disciplinary contribution beyond the author’s sub-field.
The selection committee consisted of Kim Butler Wingfield, associate professor of Italian Renaissance Art, American University (Chair); Cristelle Baskins, associate professor of Italian Renaissance Art, Tufts University; Melissa Hyde, professor of 18th- and 19th-century European Art, University of Florida; and Katherine Manthorne, professor of art of the United States, Latin America and their Cross-Currents 1750–1950, The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Founded in 1981 and opened in 1987, NMWA is the only museum solely dedicated to celebrating the achievements of women in the visual, performing and literary arts. The museum’s collection features 4,500 works from the 16th century to the present created by more than 1,000 artists, including Mary Cassatt, Frida Kahlo, Alma Thomas, Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois, Chakaia Booker and Nan Goldin, along with special collections of 18th-century silver tableware and botanical prints. NMWA is located at 1250 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C., in a landmark building near the White House. It is open Monday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. and Sunday, noon–5 p.m. For information, call 202-783-5000 or visit nmwa.org. Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for visitors 65 and over and students, and free for NMWA members and youths 18 and under. Free Community Days take place on the first Sunday of each month. For more information about NMWA, visit nmwa.org, Broad Strokes Blog, Facebook or Twitter.
Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center
The Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center at NMWA collects material, provides access to information, assists research and creates new avenues for exploring the topic of women artists from all time periods and nationalities. The library is open to the public, and library staff members provide research and reference services in person, over the phone and through email. The library has a foundational collection of nearly 16,000 books on women artists, an Archives of Women Artists with artist files and artists’ personal papers, and an institutional archive dedicated to preserving the museum’s history. Archival collections include correspondence from Frida Kahlo, drawings by Doris Lee, and the palette and brush of Eulabee Dix. The library creates rotating exhibitions that make the library a destination for museum visitors. These exhibitions showcase the library’s special collections material and provide visitors the opportunity to discover and interpret primary-source research material. In order to strengthen the amount of quality research on women artists, the library also manages the Mellor Prize.
