Reproducing Woman as "Primitive" Sign: Mela Muter, Alice Bailly, and the Gendering of Modernist Primitivism
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Authors
Ryan, Laura
Date
2025-10-31
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
primitivism , women artists , modernism , France , Poland , Switzerland , transnationalism , avant-garde , printmaking
Alternative Title
Abstract
Through case studies of two lesser-known women emigrant artists Mela Muter (Warsaw, 1876–Paris, 1967) and Alice Bailly (Geneva, 1872–Lausanne, 1938), this dissertation argues that primitivism remains a necessary critical lens for interpreting modern art; that the discourse of primitivism, widely understood to be racialized, is also profoundly gendered; and that women artists actively participated in constructing the fecund female figure as a “primitive” sign.
While modernist primitivism has been considered the purview of the white, European man, women consistently engaged with this reductive framing of Woman as closer to nature and essentialized to her biological reproduction. Given the overlap of Muter’s and Bailly’s specific, intersectional identities with that designated “primitive,” (i.e. Woman, “foreign”), I argue that women who primitivized women were aware of critical and market interest in this stereotyped subject and self-fashioned through their own difference, creating a self-primitivism that was both currency and compromising in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Parisian avant-gardes.
In “Denaturalizing Maternity: Mela Muter’s Anti/Primitivism,” I assess Polish, Jewish artist Mela Muter’s primitivizing paintings of Breton women and children. These maintain the hierarchical nature of primitivism and elevate a woman artist/viewer by eliding the adult woman, showing children as poor, sick, and/or disabled—in need of care. Muter’s painting of Fécondité (1907–10), already scandalous as a pregnant nude with Christian symbolism, comingles the erotic/maternal, primitivizing/classical, and parent/child, revealing and undermining social and aesthetic hierarchies of primitivism.
In “Queer Commodities: Alice Bailly’s Self-Primitivizing Woodcut Print Series, Scènes Valaisannes,” I show Swiss artist Bailly’s prints depicting women and girls engaged in gendered labours in the rural, Catholic, mountainous areas of the Valais, Switzerland, to have been made in conscious collaboration with picture postcards. As Bailly visited the Valais and, I imagine, purchased these cards, which mythologize the Valais as “primitive” through gender, stasis, reproduction, and elision of tourist contact, she was positioned to see modernist primitivism as a commodity for urbanite spectators. I offer that Bailly’s gender and sexual identity, perceived as different by her Parisian colleagues, may have brought her to work between primitivism’s binaries and to use printmaking as a queer process.
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International