(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)