SUFFRAGISTS? POLISH FEMALE ARTISTS IN PARIS BETWEEN THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURY

Abstract

The author analyses the question of professional strategies of about 160 Polish female artists who came to Paris from 1890 to 1918 to study and/or to begin or continue their artistic careers. Paris was in full intellectual and economic flowering and could offer them much more than provincial centres of partitioned Poland. A historical and quantitative analysis shows female’s involvement in Parisian system of artistic education, salons and official artistic purchase by the Republic of France. The case studies of the careers of two most distinguished Polish female artists in Paris: Olga Boznańska and Mela Muter serve as examples of two different ways leading to a success, both for females, and for emigrants.