In 1917, a reporter for the New York Evening Sun declared that ‘women were the cause of modernism, whatever that is’. The sociable, intellectually curious, and sexually available modern woman permeated discourse around the emergence of contemporary art in the US. Women’s entanglement in a male-dominated art world played upon the stereotype of the hostess, or salonnière: at once a provider of maternal hospitality and a cunning administrator of art world alliances. The salon constituted a highly socialized form of consensus-building, gatekeeping, and exclusion.
Radicals and Rogues chronicles the tensions faced by female artists at the turn of the century who were at once feminine, feminist but often deferential to the male actors from within their network. The salon – defined by Whalen as the ‘crucible through which experimentations in loving, living and art-making are forged’ – acts as a clever vehicle to both situate and critique the culturally emmeshed lives of modernist men and women. Mabel Dodge, an itinerant European, leveraged these connections in joining the committee of the 1913 Armory Show, the first large-scale exhibition of modern art in the US. Friendship was instrumental in the organization and curation of what was to become the first international exhibition of modern art in New York.
