Jane Goldman's paper, delivered on Sunday morning, captured perfectly the interweaving of "centenary reflections and contemporary debates" that the conference as a whole aimed for.
Responding to Makiko Minow-Pinkney's 'invitation "to write a short statement exploring personal and/or scholarly meanings of Woolf's December 1910 remark"', Jane's paper charted a beautifully elegiac trail through the 'Suffragette Century', from 1910 to 2010. For me, the paper produced the same effect as reading did for the 21 year-old Virginia Stephen in 1903: '"I read some history: it is suddenly all alive, branching forwards and backwards and connected with every kind of thing that seemed entirely remote before"'.
Following the 'more personal meanings, which nevertheless have always and already underpinned my researches', Jane traced how the 'influence of 1910' has 'threaded' and sparked through her career and thinking.
Starting with George Dangerfield's note that 1910 is 'a landmark in English history', standing out 'against a peculiar background of flame' (2010 doesn't seem too far away, with students on the streets of London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and other cities, and burning barracades in Rome), Jane remarked on the impossibility of 'properly' understanding 'the formalist aspects of modernist aesthetics as occuring in a political vacuum'. She laid out the relationships between political and aesthetic actions and ideas, before moving on to the 'personal degrees of separation'.
Vanessa Bell, having already exhibited in the second Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1912, exhibited in 1922 at London's Independent Gallery with Othon Friesz, the Fauvist. As Jane reminded us, Friesz had exhibited alongside Matisse and Braque, was a friend of Raoul Dufy, and had once had a conversation with Cézanne (of which more later). He gave a painting to Clive Bell, and a couple of his canvases can now be found at Charleston.
John McNairn was born in September 1910. A long-time friend of Jane's and a resident of Hawick in the Scottish Borders, he came from a line of artists rooted in the town. Both his father and his grandfather were painters, and both called John. As a student at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1927, McNairn's 'own staple reading' was Roger Fry; he also saw Picasso's sets for the Diaghilev ballet when it visited Edinburgh. He travelled in the 1930s to Paris, moving in Surrealist circles, balancing out his conservative training in Edinburgh. Upon his arrival, the dismissal of his work by Friesz ('"seulement illustration!"') spurred him on enough for Friesz to credit his effort with the sage-like '"You have searched the form"'. McNairn, Jane recalled, 'enjoyed pointing out that Friesz, his revered mentor in Paris, "as a young man had a conversation with Cézanne. So I can claim to have spoken with someone who has spoken with Cézanne."'
In addition to his artistic connections, Jane traced McNairn's relationship with the Suffragettes, noting the 1909 Gude Cause pageant in Edinburgh (gloriously re-staged in 2009) and the alleged burning of churches in Whitekirk near Eyemouth ('a McNairn holiday destination') in 1914 and Yarrow Kirk, near Hawick itself, in 1922. John's wife Stella was the first to introduce a young Jane to Simone de Beauvoir, and their daughter Caroline was known as Ca, in reference to 'the Bloomsbury 'Neo-Pagan' and lover of Rupert Brooke' Ka Cox, 'for whom Stella had a passion'.
Caroline herself became a painter, continuing the McNairn line, exhibiting in New York in the 1980s to the admiration of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and working in the Soviet Union in 1990, having a painting bought by the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (the first since the Revolution), it being exhibited alongside Cézanne, Gauguin and Matisse. Her paintings interweave the figure and the abstract, themselves re-weaving 'post-impressionist threads', whilst her 'gleefully subversive occupation of the tank in which the war-mongering Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once posed for triumphal publicity shots' revealed her suffragette sparks.
Jane's paper ended on a sad note, relaying how Caroline died of cancer on the 29th September 2010, 'three days after the centenary of her father's birth and four days before the opening of the centenary exhibition in Hawick museum'. In creating out of these sparks and threads of radical art and feminist politics a beautiful memoir of lives dedicated to a "gude cause", Jane gave us a melancholic-yet-affirmative testament to the power, potential and importance of art and politics; and, in December 2010, with an ever-more uncertain future for the arts and humanities, a compelling demonstration of their necessity.
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