Drusilla Modjeska looks small in her favourite leather chair, sitting beneath a photographic self-portrait of her friend, the artist Julie Rrap. A recent gift from the artist, the poster-size image shows Rrap’s face and bare shoulders, topped by the back of her own head and shoulders worn as a surreal hat. Her eyes meet ours – confident, amused and slightly challenging.
Rrap, who reversed her patronymic name Parr as an act of feminist subversion, was one of Modjeska’s companions and guides to the early 20th-century female artists she brings to the fore in her new book, A Woman’s Eye, Her Art, a group biography that weaves art history with world wars and social change through contemporary eyes. It is a work of passion and scholarship about “seeing and being seen”, Modjeska says.
