Q&A with Janell Strube

 

 

 

Janell Strube is the author of the new novel Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write a novel based on the life of artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749-1803)?

 

A: There are two answers to this question. The first would be that I was researching the life of another artist from the era to write about her, and I came across this phrase that went something like this, “By that time her works had long gone up to flames.” How could I not solve this crime against art? I had to find out what happened.

The longer answer might be the universe calling. In 1985 I asked an art history professor why he wasn’t teaching us about female artists, and he said, “No woman has contributed meaningfully to the arts.” That was the last art history class I took in college; I decided not to double major in English and Art History and graduated from college a year early.

 

Ironically, this was said about female artists in the fierce fight to keep Adélaïde and Élisabeth Vigée Lebrun out of the Royal Academy.

 

I think these women called me to tell their story.

 

Q: What did you see as the right balance between history and fiction as you wrote the book?

 

A: In my first drafts, I stayed true to history, or history as I could find and research it. A Hollywood producer at a writers’ festival advised me not to be a slave to history. Once I knew what my themes were, that is where I used fiction to support my story.

 

I used the historical words and actions of the real people I included in the story to drive their characters, but I used fictional characters and scenes to elucidate the anger, fear, danger, and losses that the women of this time experienced.

 

I think that the most important lesson I had to learn (or show I had learned), was to realize I was not writing a biography, but rather that I was dramatizing an era and a woman whose work and legacy had been forgotten. I put myself in her head and lived her life within the lens of my own experience – that is where the fiction really comes in.

 

Q: How did you research the novel, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: I read A LOT of art history textbooks and books about the ancient regime and the French revolution (perhaps 40 books in all), even books on architecture, plumbing and central heat and the things that people left behind in their wills. There was only one book about the art of Adélaïde at that time, although she appeared throughout the other books.

 

I visited art museums with her work, the work of others, and I walked the streets of Paris where buildings that she would have visited still existed and studied many paintings that reflected life of that time.

 

I’m an accountant, so I prepared a giant spreadsheet of timelines of the people involved and when I found intersections – like a grand party or some other event, I would go looking in biographies to confirm who was there. This was really fun and gave me great insight.

 

Q: What do you see as Labille-Guiard's legacy today?

 

A: I think she gets a new legacy today because there is a new spotlight on her.

 

In her time, after the revolution, she was not even allowed to paint under her own name. As a person, she fought hard for what she believed was right and it may have cost her her health, her all. In one of my versions, I write about her heart breaking.

 

She left a legacy in her studio of amazing female artists, yet they did not get the privileges she fought for them to have. It would take another century for women to take their place again in French art.

 

Today she stands as a thoroughly modern woman who looks to show us the effort that women have made and must continue to make to take their rightful place in arts, letters, science, math, business, global leadership.

 

She also points us back to Greek times where philosophers worried about the same issue, and she points us to the future and what is possible for women to achieve when they don’t listen to the narrative society feeds them.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I have two ongoing projects – one a memoir about growing up biracial and adopted into a white family in the 1960s, and I am beginning my second historical novel about two of the characters that appears in Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution. And then, because I am a poet, I get “distracted” into poetry all the time – but that’s a good thing.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution comes out just before the 250th anniversary of France closing the guilds. This one act cost the 130 female artists of Paris the ability to work in their profession.

 

A lot of events in the French Revolution have their parallels today. Adélaïde Labille Guiard and her achievements were deliberately erased in her time, and we see the same happening now with women and people of color.

 

I think that historical fiction has a place to illuminate the issues of today through the microscope applied to the efforts of people of yesterday. Not only does it preserve their history, but it can reveal something about our own time.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb