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Course: Modernisms 1900-1980 > Unit 8
Lesson 1: American ImpressionismWhen department stores were new: women in the American city
Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones' 1911 painting "Shoe Shop" captures the rise of department stores and the changing roles of women. The artwork showcases the shift from custom-made to ready-made goods, the new public activity of shopping, and the social mobility it offered to both shoppers and workers. The painting blends realism and impressionism, reflecting the artist's unique style. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- So is the woman buying shoes responsible for immigrant seamstresses being burned alive making waist shirts for the class-marginalized shop girls?
Or was it the patriarchy that forced women to compete for men's attention by sporting attractive shoes when they all should have been out on the streets demanding suffrage?(1 vote)- I believe the historical, political and social situations which you name were actually more complex than the stark choices you offer.(3 votes)
Video transcript
(soft piano music) - We're in the Art Institute of Chicago looking at a painting by
Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones called Shoe Shop that dates from 1911. This painting is so loosely brushed. - Sharhawk-Jones is deliberately leaving that brushiness in places
that gives us a sense that we're looking at a
moment that is passing us by. - While they're shopping
like this feels pretty ordinary to us here in
a modern American city, this was something that
was incredibly new. - Department stores begin their rise in the late 19th century. By the time we get to the early
years of the 20th century, there's still a sense of newness about its role in modern city life. - So we're talking about stores that have departments for
different kinds of goods, and so likely here we are
in the shoe department. This is the time when clothing and shoes are being made not to
order, not custom-made, but ready-made, manufactured according to certain standard sizes. You would go into a department store and items would be
arranged according to size and they would be clearly
labeled with their prices. This kind of shopping and this kind of displaying of goods was something new in the latter part of the 19th century. - It's a new kind of public activity, commercial activity, especially for women. We have no men depicted
here, it's all women. We have two women who don't have hats on, and you can see they're
wearing shirtwaists, or blouses, with black skirts, and these are the shop girls, as they were often time referred to. So there's the new kind of assistance that is generated around this new kind of commercial activity drawn
out of mass production. - And so we have a new kind of activity, the shopping, that takes place by upper and middle class women,
who have new freedom around the city because of shopping, because of the department store, but we also have mobility happening for working class women who can work in a respectable place,
like a department store, and hopefully in that
way, better themselves. - Sparhawk-Jones studied
at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Among the several department stores that had grown up in the city center of Philadelphia was Wanamaker's. In 1911, the same year that
this work was first exhibited, Wanamaker's opened a
grand new department store right in downtown Philadelphia, blocks from where
Sparhawk-Jones is studying. - As a woman artist,
there were historically very limited opportunities
for women to study art, but the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts was known to have a liberal curriculum and allow women artists into many courses that, for example, women couldn't get into in the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. - But by the time that Sparhawk-Jones is painting this in 1911, the field had opened up for women. - It does feel like we
have a controlled chaos that I do associate with the feeling and the experience of shopping. We have two figures on the left who look down at the black shoe that the woman in this
lovely dress is trying on, and pulling her skirt up to look at how that shoe looks. - And she's working with the shop girl who's seated on this stool, who has her head down
and her hands clasped. - And the same thing with
the two women on the right, where we have the shoes
coming out of the box, another shoe on its side, and
again looking at the shoe, is this fitting, is it not fitting? It feels very businesslike. But I do notice that
for the two shop girls, their heads are slightly lower than all of the women who are shopping, who are obviously of a
higher class than they are. And so there is somewhat of a feeling of subservience, of deference. And so although the city
and modern technology is enabling a social mobility, it is very different for these two women. A moment ago, you used
the word shirtwaist, and it's hard not to
think about the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire where more than a 140 women died because they were locked into a work room so that they didn't take
breaks that weren't allowed. They had nowhere to escape. So, what we're not seeing is the work that went into making ready-made clothing, the work that went into ready-made shoes, the factory labor, which
was often underpaid, had very long hours and was often, as we know from the Triangle
Shirtwaist fire, dangerous. - We're not seeing the
banks of sewing machines, where a foreman is working the young women or men to a strict schedule to create as many shoes as they can. We're seeing shoes presented in boxes. - And in this grand
environment that in some ways hides the realities of factory life. And we could also think about this decade of the teens as being a very important transitional decade for
the women suffrage movement and the 19th Amendment
which is passed in 1920, which finally gives
women the right to vote. - That movement began
in Seneca Falls in 1848, and it takes until 1920 for
the passage of the Amendment. But in the nineteen-teens,
these kind of cross-class interactions transpired with women coming together to fight
for women's suffrage. - Clearly Sparhawk-Jones is aware of the work of the impressionists, of Degas who is painting modern life, but here really creating a style that's very much her own. - Sparhawk-Jones has a personal style that blends realism and impressionism. - And so by impressionists, were thinking about the touches of paint,
the openness of the forms, the lack of very clear outlines. - And the realism has to do
with more of the sturdiness and the modeling of the
figures that she conveys with these rapid brushstrokes. It's still grounded in a readable space and a sense of forms that
are moving in that space. - What a fascinating
painting to explore here at the Art Institute of Chicago. (soft piano music)