Venus, Vanishing: A Guest Post from Rebecca Birrell

Read on for an exclusive essay from art historian, Rebecca Birrell, on the origins her debut novel,Venus, Vanishing.

There were several different starting points for Venus, Vanishing. In the summer of 2022, I was working at a museum in Cambridge when dramatic new information came to light about the provenance of a painting in the collection. La Ronde Enfantine, painted in 1862 by French artist Gustave Courbet had, it transpired, been stolen from the home of a Jewish man living in Paris in the early 1940s during the Nazi occupation of the city. It had then entered a large collection of looted artworks assembled by the Third Reich; eventually it re-entered the art market, and when it arrived at the museum neither the donor nor the curators had any idea about the traumatic events that had brought it there. I was fascinated by this story.

I had been working with art collections for a decade, and my Jewishness had rarely come into contact with my research in such a confronting way. The Courbet painting suddenly assumed a new energy—another layer of history. What had it borne witness to in Paris during those terrifying years? As I followed its journey across Europe, I became interested in the tastes of the regime: what they judged valuable and canonical; what they wanted in their own collections. Joachim von Ribbentrop, for instance, loved French nineteenth century realism, and had a penchant for Courbet in particular. Ribbentrop’s affection for these paintings seemed to me like a violence against Courbet’s legacy. I began to wonder whether any artists found themselves inadvertently in favour with the regime. What would it feel like, I wondered, to struggle for professional success only to have your work spotlit and celebrated for all the wrong reasons by people you knew were morally depraved?

Venus, Vanishing is the result of years of thinking about art by women and art made in moments of crisis. Hannah is a composite figure drawn from research into European Jewish women artists who were murdered by the regime or had their careers ended by exile and trauma. At the center of the novel is a commission to paint a series of nude portraits. I had become obsessed with the history of women artists painting the nude, from Lavinia Fontana, the first woman to paint another woman nude in the sixteenth century through to daring examples in the twentieth century by artists like Florine Stettheimer, Gwen John and Amrita Sher-Girl (to name just a few). I was especially interested in German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, who painted sensual, intimate, emotionally charged nudes that defied the one-dimensional objectification typical of the genre. She died aged 31 in 1907, but through exhibitions and the publication of her diaries, she rose, posthumously, to national renown. I wanted to imagine how liberating and exciting it must have been as a young German woman artist in the 1920s having Modersohn-Becker and her remarkable work as an imaginative springboard, a sign of what might be possible. This feeling of potential and excitement—channeled through Hannah’s love of Becker—is where Venus, Vanishing begins.