De la déportation à l’expression : 
la femme et le témoignage dans les dessins de 
Violette Rougier-Lecoq et Jeannette L’Herminier
My analysis of the drawings of the French Resistance fighters Violette Rougier-Lecoq and Jeanette L’Herminier, who were interned at the concentration camp of Ravensbrück between 1943 and 1945, endeavours to move beyond traditional modes of thinking about visual works produced in Nazi detention facilities. I situate these images at the heart of the historic, artistic and testimonial dynamics whence they emerged, enabling me to better understand the formal and stylistic processes by which their makers became artist-witnesses who were capable of interpreting their concentrationary experiences through the works. I analyse both the creation and reception of the drawings. Using a comparative analysis of graphic art linked to the internment of women prisoners, I explore gender issues relating to their captivity. By challenging the iconographic conventions that usually frame interpretations of my corpus, I offer nuanced readings of the sketches that are better able to convey the ways in which these representations of women are significant. Focussing on their narrative dimensions, I suggest the drawings emerge at the intersection of the space of the camp and pictorial space and of the community of imprisoned women and the individual personality of each artist-witness. These themes have so far seldom been discussed in the existing literature. In order to grasp the network of meanings that traverse representations of the women and also to explore the representational constraints they simultaneously embody, I attend to the human and social consequences of captivity upon the inmates. I then consider the roles of perception and of the gestures of the artist in the production of these concentrationary works and the formal qualities that derive from these. Finally, by bringing extratextual knowledge to bear upon them, I provide new readings of the drawings as narrative testimonies.
Ravensbrück French Resistance Art of the Holocaust Drawings Gendered spaces Materiality