Vera Iliatova: Women in the studio, now and then

Contributed by Larissa Bates / Vera Iliatova’s solo show “The Drawing Lesson,” on view at Nathalie Karg Gallery, offers cinematic montages of female artists at work in a Brooklyn studio. The nine gestural oil paintings in warm greys and buttery mauves, with skirted figures moving indoors to backlit space, mark a departure from the haunted pastoral landscapes of Iliatova’s previous exhibitions. The dappled light, painterly marks, and muted pallet of the composite narrative interiors bring to mind Susan Lichtman as well as Manet. Gritty barges, a consistent motif of Iliatova’s, chug up the East River, glimpsed through single-paned industrial windows. These and concrete floors are reminders of the post-industrial spaces carved into the Brooklyn studios where Iliatova has spent decades working. As Dudley Andrew observes in the press release,¹ she renders the place of rendering, depicting young women as simultaneously busy and solitary.

A cinephile, Iliatova acts as a director, creating mise-en-scène through the silent language of carefully placed objects – a vase, a Watteau, a ribbon. She employs a sartorial style that is at once contemporary and reminiscent of times gone by, though exactly what times remains elusive. The delicacy of the wardrobe recalls Kurt Kauper’s investigation of nostalgia-laden objects. Like Kauper’s brushed nickel faucet, collared shirts, linen painting-smocks, and ballet flats are of both now and then. They make me think of Iliatova’s childhood in a family of the Soviet intelligentsia, with a rigorous practice of ballet, gymnastics, and piano lessons before her world was disrupted. In an interview in the Quantum Review,² Kauper explores his interest in the Russian Formalist concept of “estrangement,” noting “the idea that the role of art is to estrange reality so that perception doesn’t become automatized” and “paintings that occupy an indefinite place somewhere between the real and the artificial, the familiar and unfamiliar, the obvious and the oblique.” Iliatova has offered us just such a place.

The morning after seeing “The Drawing Lesson,” I visited the rehung European galleries of the Met, where the number of paintings by female artists has increased, perhaps in belated response to Linda Nochlin’s 1971 question, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” A few of the paintings focus on the studio, which is central to Iliatova’s show. Marie Victoire Lemoine’s The Interior of a Woman Painter’s Studio from 1798 depicts two women in a muted gray studio. They are at work on a history painting – at the time, the pinnacle of art and taboo for female artists due in part to the need for intimate familiarity with the human figure to compose them. Like Iliatova, Lemoine used herself, as well as her sister Marie Denise Viller, as a model. In a nearby gallery hangs Viller’s portrait of Marie Josephine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, famously misattributed to her teacher, Jacques Louis David, until the 1950s, which helped spur Nochlin’s query. And a collaborative painting by Rachel Ruysch and Michiel van Musscher depicts Ruysch with pallet and brush next to an exquisitely detailed painting of a floral arrangements by Ruysch herself. Floral painting, deemed “suitable” for female artists,³ became a discrete category in Western Art in the 1600s, and flowers, no doubt as a historical nod, have long been a subject of Iliatova’s.

If, as Diane Arbus said, “the world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories,” then Iliatova’s fictional narratives reflect our own stories back to us. A montage of women in the studio is at once familiar and unfamiliar. Painter Hilary Doyle has recently noted⁴ that the French painters Elisabeth Vigee Lebrun and Maria Sibylla “would have been sad that although both famous for their work in their lifetimes, both fell into obscurity later” and that “there has been an ice age for women” in art history. The artist’s studio has been a shrouded female space throughout history, but Iliatova revisits it with new purpose and vigor. Faith Ringgold declared, “You can’t sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it.” In “The Drawing Lesson,” Iliatova, like her forebears, heeds the call to say unabashedly who she is: an artist at work in her studio.

“Vera Iliatova: The Drawing Lesson,” Nathalie Karg Gallery, 127 Elizabeth Street, New York, NY. Through April 13, 2024.

About the author: Larissa Bates is a New York-based painter and writer. She is represented by Monya Rowe Gallery.

Notes:

[1] The Drawing Lesson by Dudley Andrew, press release from Nathalie Karg Gallery, February 2024

[2] Kauper, Kurt. “Kurt Kauper in Conversation with Jacob Hicks.” Quantumartreview.Com, Quantum Art Review, 22 Jan. 2017, quantumartreview.com/2017/01/14/kurt-kauper-in-conversation-with-jacob-hicks/

[3] van Suchtelen, Ariane. “17th-Century Flower Painting: The Female Artists of ‘in Full Bloom.’” Art Herstory, 23 Jan. 2024, artherstory.net/women-and-the-art-of-flower-painting/. 

[4] Doyle, Hilary. Instagram, 9 Mar. 2024, http://www.instagram.com/p/C4RFAq4RbO8/.