Blog Category: Highlights

Cover of “Growing Older Female,” undated pamphlet, Unitarian Universalist Women’s Federation. Featuring an image by Käthe Kollwitz. UUWF Records collection, Meadville Lombard Theological School

In the United States March is Women’s History Month, a time to remember and celebrate women’s contributions to history, culture, and society. And thanks to our contributing partners, JSTOR has an abundance of women-focused primary source collections that are free for everyone to access and use.

Last year we compiled a selection of Artstor and JSTOR collections that mostly centered on the achievement  of individual women. This year we’re sharing collections that cover women’s group efforts in fighting for equal rights, making the workplace more fair, and advancing their roles in religion.

Women’s Rights

Edinburgh Ladies’ Debating Society
The complete runs of two journals, The Attempt (1865-74) and The Ladies’ Edinburgh Magazine (1875-80), featuring contributions from women who became prominent figures in education, suffrage, and welfare.

Alexis Irwin, Reproductive Rights, 2019. Poster. Image and data from Hope College: Beyond the Women’s & Gender Studies Classroom

Hope College: Beyond the Women’s & Gender Studies Classroom (Artstor Public Collection)
The work of students in Hope College’s Introduction to Women’s & Gender Studies class—including digital zines, pamphlets, posters, poetry, and art—addressing topics such as feminism’s definition and political goals, reproductive justice, women’s spirituality, sexual assault prevention and recovery, and body image.

Tee Corinne, cover of WOMANSPIRIT, Volume 5, Issue 19, 1979. From the Reveal Digital Independent Voices collection.

Reveal Digital Feminist Collection (Part of Independent Voices)
More than 75 magazines, newsletters, and newspapers created by activists and collectives that helped propel the second wave of feminism from the late sixties and early seventies through the end of the 20th century.

Eve Arnold on the set of Becket. 1963. Photograph by Robert Penn. © Eve Arnold / Magnum Photos.

“It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument. ” – Eve Arnold

In honor of Women’s History Month we are celebrating the brave sisterhood that influenced the early years of photojournalism, and its successors who have shaped the fields of social and environmental documentary photography. The journey begins in the mid-nineteenth century with the birth of photography, flourishes in the analog boom years of print, and rises again with digital technology. In the words of photojournalist Yunghi Kim, it is the spirit of “visual storytelling” that unites the mission.

Unknown. Beals standing on top of a ladder, holding her camera. 1904. Photograph. Image and data from The Schlesinger History of Women in America Collection.

Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother. 1936. Photograph. Image and data from Vincent Virga and the Library of Congress.

Margaret Bourke-White. Maiden Lane, Georgia. c. 1936. Photograph. Image and data from The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Women photographers were recognized for their work in the field long before the term photojournalism was coined at the University of Missouri in the 1940s. Jesse Beals Tarbox, shown here on assignment at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, perched on a ladder behind an outsized camera, was the first recognized woman in news photography. Dorothea Lange is acclaimed for her Farm Security Administration photographs, including the series Migrant Mother, 1936. She received a foundation in Pictorial photography from Arnold Genthe at the Clarence H. White School. She went on to work for the government in the 1940s and was later hired by Life, traveling to Asia, South America, and the Middle East. Professionally trained in the 1920s and a contemporary of Lange, Margaret Bourke-White was the first foreign photographer to work in the Soviet Union, the only westerner to document the German invasion of Moscow and one of the first photojournalists to be embedded with air crews and the liberators of the concentration camps in Germany during World War II. She is also known for images of the hardships of the Depression era, as seen in the double portrait shown here. The German photographer Gerda Taro died in the field in 1937 in an accident during the Spanish Civil War. At the age of 26, she was the first female photographer to die “in action,” underscoring the tragic association between photojournalism and war at mid century.

James Hampton. The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, detail. c.1950-1964, mixed media. Image and data from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Image and data from Society of Architectural Historians. Photograph © Dell Upton.

“Pictures just come to my mind, and I tell my heart to go ahead” – Horace Pippin¹

We have gathered a selection of the works of African American self-taught artists to honor Black History Month. Through time, the output of Black creators in America has been labeled “primitive,” “naive,” “folk art,” “self-taught,” and more recently, “black vernacular.”² The common ground for all of these artists is that their work springs from lived experiences, filtered through highly personal lenses, and characterized by the innovative use of found or recycled materials. The lives of these individuals were shaped by a history that ingrained violence, poverty and racism, and excluded access to academic training: Slavery, the challenges of The Restoration, The Great Migration, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights period mark the works of these artists. The foil to the hardships was intense religious inspiration and the ability to mine the beauty from shared and singular experiences in the family and the community.

Philippe Halsman. Philippe and Yvonne HALSMAN New Years Card… c. 1960. Photograph. © Estate of Philippe Halsman / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Magnum Photos.

Winslow Homer. Adventures of a New Year’s Eve. Negative photostat. Image and data from Smith College Museum of Art.

The New Year is a perennial phenomenon that generates celebrations of varied traditions across the world and throughout the calendar. It is our sincere wish that you may partake of these festivities in good health and with hope for the coming year. Please join us in honoring these holidays of renewal for 2023.

Peter Paul Rubens. Consequences of War. 1637-38. Oil on canvas. Image and data from SCALA, Florence.

The power of art to revile and denounce war may be seen in works that cross cultures and centuries. Artstor is replete with examples from the dynastic courts of Europe, to the witnesses of the American Civil War, both World Wars, Vietnam, and beyond. The selection below, featuring monumental and intimate interpretations, provides persuasive evidence of the passion for peace among artists.

Artstor and JSTOR offer more than a million freely accessible images and other materials from library special collections, faculty research, and institutional history materials. The collections are constantly growing, and as we browsed for Latin American content in preparation for Hispanic Heritage Month, we were delighted by what we found. Here are some notable highlights:

Anthony Stevens Acevedo. Ruins of the Church and Convent building complex of San Francisco. 2011. CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, First Blacks in the Americas collection.

Leslie Jiménez. All for All. 2012. CCNY CUNY Dominican Studies Institute: Condition - My Place Our Longing / Condición: Mi Lugar Nuestro Anhelo collection. CUNY Dominican Studies Institute.

Doris Rodriguez. Les Delices des Quatre Saisons I. 2011. CUNY Dominican Studies Institute: Dominican Artists in the United States.

City College Dominican Library First Blacks in the Americas

(Artstor | JSTOR)
A history project devoted to disseminating research and rigorous information about the earliest people of Black African descent that arrived, resided, and stayed in the Americas from 1492 onwards, and whose continued presence in the New World ever since is clearly shown on historical records.

City College: Fighting for Democracy: Dominican Veterans from World War II

(Artstor | JSTOR)
A pioneering exhibit about courage, valor, and commitment consisting of 12 panels in which photographs, documents, correspondence, newspaper articles, and short biographies tell the stories of Dominicans that served in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II.

CCNY CUNY Dominican Studies Institute: Condition – My Place Our Longing / Condición: Mi Lugar Nuestro Anhelo

(Artstor)
The art exhibit Condition: My Place Our Longing / Condición: Mi Lugar Nuestro Anhelo highlights the work of Dominican artists Leslie Jiménez and Julianny Ariza. It showcases original pieces produced between 2011 and 2012 that explore the subject of living in between, in two worlds, and other conditions of living.

CCNY CUNY Dominican Studies Institute: Dominican Artists in the United States – Doris Rodríguez

(Artstor | JSTOR)
This collection focuses on the artist Doris Rodríguez, an artist and award-winning author and illustrator. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the US and her native Dominican Republic.

CCNY CUNY Dominican Studies Institute: Dominican Artists in the United States – Josefina Báez

(Artstor | JSTOR)
This collection focuses on the artist Josefina Baez, storyteller, performer, writer, theater director, educator, and devotee. She is the founder of the Ay Ombe Theater.

CCNY CUNY Dominican Studies Institute: Dominican Artists in the United States – Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful

(Artstor | JSTOR)
This collection focuses on the artist Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful, whose works gain permanence through audios, photographs, props, drawings, rumors, embodied memories, costumes, websites, videos and publications.

Larry Towell. Canada, London. June 7, 2020. Peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in response to the police killing of George Floyd… Photograph. © Larry Towell / Magnum Photos. © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SAIF, Paris.

I UNDERSTAND THAT I WILL NEVER
UNDERSTAND.
HOWEVER, I STAND.¹

Arkhip Kuindzhi. The Rainbow. 1900-1905. Oil on canvas. State Russian Museum. Image and data from SCALA, Florence.

In 2018-2019 the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow hosted an acclaimed exhibition of the nineteenth-century realist landscape painter Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi (c. 1842-1910). The show included about 180 works and was seen by more than 385,000 viewers during its four-month run. One of the paintings, a Crimean mountainscape, was even lifted off the wall and stolen, but happily it was soon recovered. Kuindzhi was born in the Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire) in the city of Mariupol, a name now familiar to all of us because of the current Russian invasion and devastation. While he studied, practiced, and taught painting in St. Petersburg, he also lived on a large property in Crimea with his wife in relative seclusion. In Mariupol, where a museum named after the artist was established in 2010, he is considered Ukrainian, while in Russia he is claimed as part of their artistic heritage.

Ilya Repin. Portrait of the Painter Arkhip Kuinji. 1877. Oil on canvas. State Russian Museum. Image and data from SCALA, Florence.

In March, the Mariupol museum was largely destroyed by an airstrike. The three important works by Kuindzhi had been removed—it’s unclear whether it was for safekeeping or they had been stolen—but the work of other artists was destroyed, the cultural casualty of war. Other artistic losses during the conflict include treasures of Scythian gold, the precious paintings of the naive painter Maria Pryimachenko, and dozens of historic buildings and monuments, among other works and sites.

Arkhip Kuindzhi. Ladoga Lake. 1873. Oil on canvas. State Russian Museum. Image and data from University of California, San Diego.

Arkhip Kuindzhi. On the Island of Valaam. 1873. Oil on canvas. Tretyakov Gallery. Image and data from SCALA, Florence.

Arkhip Kuindzhi. Evening in the Ukraine. 1878, partly repainted in 1901. Oil on canvas. State Russian Museum. Image and data from SCALA, Florence.

Arkhip Kuindzhi. 1879. Birch Grove. Oil on canvas. 1879. Tretyakov Gallery. Image and data from SCALA, Florence.

Arkhip Kuindzhi. Moonlit Night on the Dnieper. 1882. Oil on canvas. Tretyakov Gallery. Image and data from SCALA, Florence.

A search on Artstor provides a stirring selection of Kuindzhi’s paintings, a virtual exhibition to celebrate his sublime output. His dramatic personal appearance is well known from portraits, including the one by his friend Ilya Repin, highlighting the painter’s brooding countenance of Greek and Tatar origin. An early work by Kuindzhi, Ladoga Lake, 1873, completed soon after his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, portrays the majestic Russian landscape in precise, clean brushstrokes with a clarity that looks back to traditional seascapes. On the Island of Valaam from the same year and on the same lake, also presents meticulous detail and a pellucid atmosphere. Evening in the Ukraine displays the painter’s affection for his native landscape and his growing interest in light effects, particularly dusk and the full darkness of night. His alliance with the scientific community of St. Petersburg fuelled his interest in optical flourishes and theories of perception. Birch Grove, nearly six feet wide and painted when the artist was about 40, and Moonlit Night on the Dnieper, 1882, caused a sensation when they were exhibited for a month in Moscow during the winter of 1882 along with a third work; more than 9,000 viewers visited. The Emperor’s grandson Grand Duke Konstantinovich purchased the nocturne for 5,000 rubles, and it was later displayed at the gallery of the Parisian art dealer Charles Sedelmeyer. The painter also attracted the patronage of Pavel Tretyakov, who was amassing an unprecedented collection of Russian art, today known as the Tretyakov Gallery. At the height of this success, Kuindzhi mysteriously withdrew from public life and never held another exhibition, leaving no explanation behind. He taught at the Academy in St. Petersburg and died in the city in 1910.

Arkhip Kuindzhi. Pasture at Night (Night-watch). 1905-08. Oil on canvas. State Russian Museum. Image and data from SCALA, Florence.

Kuindzhi’s fascination with ephemeral atmospheric effects achieves a lyrical balance in his Rainbow, 1900-1905 (top), an homage to the steppe and the sky. Two of his final works, Night-Watch and Sunset on the Dnieper, both painted around 1905-1908, display his enduring passion for nocturnes. The overwhelming Sunset, more than six feet wide, is a window onto the painter’s cherished Dnieper and his brilliance at seizing the light.

Arkhip Kuindzhi. Red Sunset on the Dnieper. 1905-1908. Oil on canvas, Paintings. Image and data from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Free reuse CC0 1.0.

Many of Kuindzhi’s paintings and drawings are held at the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. May his work endure as a mesmerizing expression of his rich cultural heritage – Greek, Tatar, Ukrainian, and Russian.

— Nancy Minty, collections editor

J.E. Bowlt. A Russian Luminist School? Arkhip Kuindzhi’s “Red Sunset on the Dnepr.” Metropolitan Museum Journal, 10, 1975, 119–129.

Viktoria Paranyuk. Painting Light Scientifically: Arkhip Kuindzhi’s Intermedial Environment. Slavic Review, 2019.

Michael Prodger. How the Ukrainian painter Arkhip Kuindzhi laid out the spirituality in nature before Russian eyes, The New Statesman, 20 April 2022.

Ami Vitale. A field of blue… 2008. Photograph. © Ami Vitale / Panos Pictures.

In homage to Earth Day we have gathered a list of resources on the Artstor and JSTOR platforms, from licensed to freely available community-generated collections. We encourage you to explore this content — it combines art and science, enriching the study of the environment and the biosphere across the globe: photography from the microscopic to the panoramic, scientific and anatomical illustrations, evidence from surveys and studies, models, artists’ interpretations in varied media, the vision and work of conservationists, and the effects of our existence on this planet from millennia of cultivation and development to the threats of climate change.

Artemisia Gentileschi. Esther before Ahasuerus. Oil on canvas. Image and data from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Once upon a time–not so long ago–it seems that we believed that all the great pre-modern western painters were men! If not, why did we call them the Old Masters? The honorific derives from the masculine latin term magister meaning teacher, master, chief, coming from magis–more or greater. By definition and origin, the concept excludes women. Since the late 1900s the term has become so pervasive that a title search for old masters returns 74,000 + hits on WorldCat. Notwithstanding false results and the many auction catalogs, a lot of ink has been spilled on the Old Masters.

Seriously though, there have been many scholars, notably women, who have labored to dispel this myth. Beginning with the trailblazers Linda Nochlin’s “Why have there been no great women Artists?” and Old Mistresses, women art and ideology by Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, the pendulum started to swing back and women artists began to take their rightful places. Women’s History Month provides an opportunity to revisit some of these “rediscovered” creators and their accomplishments. We already know their names: Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Leyster, Rosa Bonheur… Thankfully, they are celebrated today, and it’s always worth taking another look; after all, how many times have we lauded their counterparts the Old Masters? Of course, the current small selection under-represents women painters, but it is intended here as a temporal counterpart to the Old Masters and as an indication of far greater numbers. Apologies to the many artists unmentioned, particularly to contemporary figures.