Mary Swanzy was an artist who participated in the exchange of artistic concerns and modernist aesthetic idioms from the turn of the twentieth century until her death in 1978. She and her artwork journeyed between Dublin, London, and Paris, all pivotal locations of international, pan-European artistic exchange. However, the specifics of these journeys and their impact on her career have remained frustratingly vague or even inaccurate. Swanzy’s place in Irish visual art, as with her place in wider continental European modernism, has always been subjected to the discourses surrounding the topics of gender, religion, social class, colonialism, and national identity.
The two questions at the heart of this thesis are, firstly, how does a woman artist, with unsteady and shifting identities, position herself as a working professional artist? And, secondly, how does her artwork, shown in a range of locations and entangled with global knowledge production, cultural exchanges, and artistic practices, act as manifestations of pan-European modernisms? The later leads to theorising Swanzy and her career as a specific case study in the ‘uneven, geo-historical distribution of modernisms’ (Brooker and Thacker, 2005: 3). A prolific and peripatetic artist, scholarship concerning Swanzy’s career and exhibition history between 1900 and 1947 has hitherto remained fragmented. Thus, this thesis also accounts for the neglected specificities of both, contextualising them as part of the network and geography of pan-European modernisms to demonstrate the porous borders and transnational exchange of modernist aesthetic idioms.
Research interests:
- Pan-European modernisms
- Geographies of art
- Feminist art history
- Mobilities and travel
- Postcolonial theory
- Irish art history
- Irish visual culture
- Professionalism
- Twentieth-century art
- Twentieth-century visual culture