Unseen Modernities: Re-imagining the Visionary “Real” in the Art of Marianne Stokes, 1900-1910s
The art of the Austrian-born Marianne Stokes (née Preindlsberger; 1855–1927) remains extraordinarily neglected by scholars of modern art and visual culture. As with so many artistic partnerships, her distinctive contributions to this period’s art are eclipsed by those of her to-date better known and anthologized artist and critic husband, Adrian Stokes. That omission, despite efforts to rehabilitate the Stokes’ work as an intertwined creative vision, has done little to redress the overlooked vision of Marianne Stokes’s work, her questioning and transformation of the naturalist basis of late nineteenth-century cultural modernity in ways that were to emerge as pivotal in the contexts of an increasing fascination with the unseen and uncanny ‘real’. This paper explores Stokes’s artistic experimentalism and transnationalism as a border-crossing vision and practice. It interrogates Stokes’s shifting artistic evolution working between the scientific ‘natural’ and the oneiric-spiritual and visionary as a negotiation of alternative and fluid ‘realities’ that positions her art as central to new ways of imagining and projecting multi-layered identities of ‘nature’, ‘self’ and gender at the twentieth-century’s turn. My particular focus is to shed light on Stokes’s paintings of the late 1890s and early 1900s that mark a move away from naturalistic ‘plein-airisme’ to more spiritualized themes and their treatment, deeply engaged with medieval Gothic art. Yet Stokes’s works exploit this earlier source not in terms of ‘revivalism’, rather as a creative vehicle for alterity and new artistic expression. Indeed, such innovations are demonstrable and potently developed in Stokes’s series of works created between 1900s-1910s, notably, Candlemas Day (1901), Madonna and Child (1907-08) and Death and the Maiden (1908). As this paper goes on to examine, in these and her related works from this period, Stokes draws on her Catholicism and pre-modern visual culture as complex vehicles for projecting an uncanny spirituality of subject, mood and difference. She introduces iconographical novelties and discontinuities of nature-artifice; eros and thanatos – that point to a Decadent Gothic treatment of her spiritualized themes to problematize legacies and constructs of the domestic, maternal-natural and rituals of faith and belief. The paper’s final part considers Stokes’s developed artistic vision as pivotal within a nexus of a border-crossing uncanny ‘Gothic modernity’ in early twentieth-century art, in the context of Stokes’s extended contacts with experimental groups in Nordic and Central Europe (notably in the High Tatras: early 1900s), and especially in relation to her close relations with the Finnish artist, Helene Schjerfbeck. As the conclusions argue, it is via these interconnected, transnational networks and practices, operating at the interstices of geo-cultural and artistic borders that brings Stokes’s art into new significance and potency in its recreation of powerful new symbols and projections of belief, sacred and sanctified ‘nature’. In these ways, Stokes re-envisions the iconicity of the ‘Maternité’, ‘Maiden’ and treatments of her female subjects, as sites of complex difference and challenge: of multiple modernities of art, expression and identity.