[MUSIC] I'm Caroline Wallace. I lecture in art history and gender studies at The University of Melbourne. Let's consider now what role the museum plays in the display of works of art, such as John Lavery's In Morocco. When we look around art museums we see a story, a cultural narrative. We see stories of technical, stylistic and formal development. We see a changing history with the move from religious arts to secular patronage to the individualism of modern art. Art historian Carol Duncan has described art museums as codified spaces for ritual, comparable to churches or cathedrals. This provides a useful way to think about how we engage with art in such spaces, in hushed tones, treading quietly, looking up to admire worshipfully great works of art. Artworks are presented in a way that is very different to how we engage with visual material in the outside real world. They are isolated and literally held aloft for our admiration and contemplation. What we are admiring is beauty, rather then the history of the objects or their context of production. This is due to the fact that museums as a concept emerge in late 18th century Europe and are a testament of the aesthetic ideas of the Enlightenment. In the room where John Lavery's In Morocco is hung at the NGV, we see a number of other works produced by British artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What these works share is the nationality of their artists, but grouping them together in a space, in a single line across the wall, draws out other shared qualities. The most overt shared characteristic is the subject matter. When we wander through galleries of 19th and early 20th century European art, we gaze up at the faces of beautiful women. Staged in interiors, cast in mythological stories, or portrayed as allegorical virtues. Women are a visual language. The beauty that museums invite us to contemplate is gendered. Positioned just above our eye level, these women never quite look back at us directly. Instead they look just past us, eyes averted, allowing us to look at them without reproach. These women are as decorative as the gild frames in which they're displayed. In this space, Lady Hazel Lavery, the central figure in In Morocco is just another face amongst the multitude. It is fitting that she is dressed in costume in this image, since she is performing the role of model for her husband John Lavery. She looks coyly at the viewer, who is placed in the position of the painter capturing the scene. There is a sense of the stage about this work, with the wall in the background enclosing the space and figures deliberately grouped in a triangular shape. The blue parasol which frames Hazel's head draws our attention, and echoes the blue sky around her daughter's head, creating a connection between the two women, which is reaffirmed in the colour of their dress. However, there is a difference between the direct stare of Alice, mounted on the elaborately decorated horse, and Hazel's sideways glance. The difference between girl and woman is spelled out. The lack of sexual awareness versus seductive femininity. Hazel's face, half hidden in shadow, reveals little. She is a symbol for women and beauty in this work, as she is in many of Lavery's paintings for which she was a recurrent model. In Morocco, like the other women's faces hanging nearby in the gallery, she's merely a decorative figure. We can pass over her face without much curiosity as easily as we look at the decorative embellishments on the horse's saddle. However, if we saw this work surrounded by different objects, we might read it slightly differently. What if instead of reading this as a beautiful work of technical skill by John Lavery, we read it as portrait of the artist Hazel Lavery? Born in America in 1880, the then Hazel Martin had already studied etching in Paris before she met John Lavery while on a sketching holiday in Brittany in 1904. He praised not only her beauty, but also her artistic skill. Although Hazel entered into a marriage in America after this first meeting, the two married a few years later in 1909, after Hazel was widowed and the mother of the young Alice. One of the first paintings John Lavery produced of her was Mrs. Lavery Sketching in 1910. In this work, the formally dressed Hazel is presented dominating the canvas as she sketches en plein air. The presence of her artistic tools gives her agency and identity which differs to In Morocco, and her gaze is far more direct. Would we read In Morocco differently if Mrs. Lavery's sketching was hanging next to it? What would happen if Hazel's Portrait of John, painted in 1921 was also part of this narrative? This work is one of Hazel's few surviving paintings and shows her not inconsiderable skill as an artist. If it were hanging next to In Morocco, we would see a reciprocal view, each artist painting the other. And Hazel's gaze might be read differently. Instead of a coy flirtation, it could be an artistic eyeing up. However, it was John, not Hazel, who became the renowned artist, and whose work entered the NGV collection. Hazel all but retired from art making in favour of the role of society hostess, artistic muse and studio model. So Hazel's face recurs throughout John's paintings, in various different settings, but always as a slightly distant, seductive beauty. Hazel's career as an artist folded for the same reason that so many women's did through the European art history. The difficulties of facing a system where women were outsiders in the world of art, to be looked at but not expected to do the looking. It is a structural difficulty women faced in pursuing careers as artists that was subject of Linda Nochlin's 1971 article, Why Have There Been No Great Female Artists? In this influential article, which marked the beginnings of the feminist art history, Nochlin pointed out the difficulties facing women who wanted to be artists throughout history. For example, she asked whether Picasso, had he been born a girl, would have had access to the kind of early training which set him on the road to success. Looking again at Hazel Lavery we can see that she faced obstacles of expectation, access and acceptability in undertaking her career as an artist. Difficulties that saw her instead play the far more socially acceptable role of model to her artist husband. In this she was not alone. This path from early artistic ambition to model wife is one taken by a number of women throughout art history. When we know their stories, see their work, and hear their voices, we see them very differently to the anonymous beauties who decorate the galleries and museums. Hazel Lavery's face looks down on us at the NGV. We can see her knowingly playing the role, actively participating in the way she is seen. What is crucial is to understand that our reading of artworks can change depending on the environment we see them in and the information we are presented with. The way we read gender in such spaces is a product of the space, which works we are shown and how they are presented. [MUSIC]
