'Une fleur que ses yeux éteints ne peuvent plus contempler': women's sculpture for the dead

From the moment that women sculptors emerged, they have been creating sculptures for the dead, in multiple forms. Many of them specialized in the art of portraying, which was in high demand for wax figures, statues and funeral monuments. The fact that those, along with war memorials, often played on the area of emotions –which was traditionally viewed as ‘female’– apparently made the choice for a woman sculptor even more acceptable. The commissions for funeral monuments and war memorials more often came through unofficial rather than official channels, creating better opportunities for female artists

Remembering Edith and Gabrielle: picture postcards of monuments as portable lieux de mémoire

Picture postcards quickly gained popularity in Western Europe around 1900. The photographs on these postcards represent a wide variety of topics. From the start, the monument was one of the most popular themes. In this article we would like to focus on picture postcards of three Brussels monuments erected in the late 1910s and early 1920s to commemorate two Great War heroines, namely the British-born nurse Edith Cavell (1865-1915) and the Belgian spy Gabrielle Petit (1893-1916). After briefly discussing the monuments and picture postcards in their specific commemorative context, we will argue that these picture postcards, thanks to the use of specific photographic strategies, can be read as what the French cultural historian Pierre Nora coined ‘portable realms of memory’