Telling the story of art—without men

Telling the story of art—without men Telling the story of art—without men prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/telling-the-story-of-art-without-men September 8, 2022 Turning the tables: a self-portrait by Dutch Golden Age painter Judith Leyster from 1630. Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington Turning the tables: a self-portrait by Dutch Golden Age painter Judith Leyster from 1630. Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington “How did museums get away with celebrating the history of patriarchy instead of the history of art?” asks the curator and art historian Katy Hessel. It’s a question worthy of the feminist art collective Guerrilla Girls, who plagued New York’s art institutions in the 1980s with posters attacking the woeful way that the art world treated women: fewer “than 5 per cent of the artists” in the Met were women, “but 85 per cent of the nudes are female,” read one poster. Over 30 years later you might think that things have changed: for the first time ever, Great Britain is represented by a black woman—Sonia Boyce—at the Venice Biennale, and female artists from Paula Rego to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye have recently been the subjects of major institutional exhibitions. But do not be lulled into a false sense of progress. The statistics are damning: women artists make up just 1 per cent of the National Gallery’s collection—a museum that only staged its first solo show of a historic female artist (Artemisia Gentileschi) in 2020. The Royal Academy is yet to host a solo exhibition by a woman in its main space: its first is next year, with works by the Serbian conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramovi. When I meet Katy Hessel—the author of a new book, The Story of Art Without Men, and host of the Great Women Artists podcast—she has recently spoken to Abramovi. The artist is famous for her work exploring the limits of pain and endurance (in one work, Rhythm 5, she lay inside a burning star-shaped wooden frame; the fire sucked up the oxygen until she lost consciousness and had to be rescued). Yet her podcast discussion with Hessel is surprisingly light, open and revelatory. The pair drink Yorkshire Gold tea in the artist’s New York apartment as they discuss everything from the limits of performance art to how Abramovi can withstand so much suffering in the name of her work. This mixture of accessible conversation and informed art history is the hallmark of Hessel’s style. She launched a “Great Women Artists” Instagram account in 2015, after attending an art fair in which “out of the thousands of artworks,” there was “not a single one” by a woman. The podcast—on which Hessel has spoken to artists Cecily Brown, Maggi Hambling and Howardena Pindell, and art lovers including Deborah Levy and Ali Smith—was the next step. Her book has a similar origin story. Hessel was using EH Gombrich’s seminal 1950 book, The Story of Art, to construct a timeline in the Tate Modern. There was only one problem: even in its most recent 16th edition, which came out in 2007, “there was not a single woman other than Käthe Kollwitz [the early 20th-century German artist] mentioned.” In Hessel’s book, she writes about over 300 female artists—and reconstructs a female-only timeline of the history of art from the Renaissance to the present day. But why have women been excluded from art history for so long? In her groundbreaking 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, Linda Nochlin did not spare the blushes of her fellow feminists. “The fact, dear sisters, is that there are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse,” she wrote. For Nochlin, this was the fault of institutional difficulties: women often lacked education, were prevented from studying nude figures, and traditional art history did not value their achievements. Though Hessel says she “stands on the shoulders” of Nochlin and other feminist scholars, her book is in part a riposte to the claim that there have been no “women equivalents” to the great male artists. “We’re in a completely different world. We know about so many more female artists,” says Hessel. Hessel writes about artists that have been overshadowed by their male relatives, partners and friends (Lee Krasner, Yoko Ono, Berthe Morisot), those who have been forgotten through the passage of time (the Renaissance artist Sofonisba Anguissola, and the Impressionist Marie Bracquemond), and those who used “non-traditional” materials and techniques like quilt-making, pottery and embroidery. One of Hessel’s favourite subjects is the German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, who died in Auschwitz at the age of 26. She painted her autobiographical work Life? Or Theatre? when she was on the run from the Nazis between 1941 and 1943. For Hessel, the immediacy of Salomon’s “graphic novel style” reflects the awful circumstances of her life, and makes her subsequent erasure from art history all the more emotional. Hessel admits that it is difficult to write a traditional history of art split up into movements—“buzzwords that everyone knows”— when women were so often “sidelined” from them. Many women’s artistic careers were “much more fluid, much more experimental.” Hessel cites Louise Bourgeois: the artist “didn’t get any attention until 1982,” but had been working for 30 years prior. The breadth of her work is astounding: “she did painting, she did tassels, she did sewing, she did textile sculpture, everything.” Hessel is at heart a curator, and the book coincides with an exhibition she is putting on at Victoria Miro in London, The Story of Art as it’s Still Being Written (opening 8th September). In the show is a painting that Celia Paul made in response to a work Hessel showed her: Anguissola’s Self-Portrait with Bernardino Campi (1550). Anguissola’s painting shows her as Campi’s muse; but she has subtly hinted that it is she who is in charge: she appears to be guiding his hand. In Paul’s version—“a tribute to Anguissola”—Paul is painting “a shadow of Lucian Freud,” a lover for whom she often modelled. Hessel’s opening up of this forgotten tradition is inspiring new works by women. No doubt she will soon have enough material for a sequel. Francesca Peacock Francesca Peacock is an arts journalist currently working on her first book More stories by Francesca Peacock Conversation Fred White September 17th, 2022 The truth of the history of art is that far, far fewer women attempted to be artists than men, for all sorts of obvious sociological reasons. So there's no way to know whether if an equal number of women had been able to pursue art, women artists would have been as good as men. But it's absurd to pretend that there are any women artists until quite recently who have been anywhere near as good as the greatest male artists of their era. Anyone who believes that Judith Leyster is as good as Frans Hals, or Berthe Morisot is as good as Manet, or Lee Krasner is as good as DeKooning, or Yoko Ono is as good as John Lennon, etc., is free to have their opinion of course. But there is no logical way to support such beliefs by any criteria other than feminist wishful thinking. The best way to train future women artists is to focus their attention on the greatest artists judged purely on aesthetic grounds. Such training will thus overwhelmingly, necessarily emphasize art made by men. Fortunately, there has been no glass ceiling for women in Western Art for some time now. From here on out, if women are as talented as, or more so than,men, they should be free to demonstrate that the only way that counts, aesthetically. Report this comment John J Serembe September 16th, 2022 Someone has commented, in effect saying "women did not try hard enough". This is a statement of simplicity that blindly ignores the big picture. Those with power and privilege will always have the edge. If one decides to take into account the patriarchal culture both in the past and the present, they might be able to swing past their limited viewpoint and see that - were female artists of the period (and now) allowed to be and indeed expected to be as free as men to "be obsessed," they might have had far more representation in the arts. But they have, and had, many additional hurdles. There will always be aggressors (and "biological differences") that may win battles for supremacy. This is nothing about art. It is more a case for those of us with an abundance of testosterone to take the time to actually look and see women's (and men's) art on it own merit - and not because we simply peed on the territory. Report this comment Lynette Charters September 16th, 2022 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/gender-discrimination-art-study-2171375/amp-page Report this comment Lynette Charters September 16th, 2022 Thank you so much for telling this story for future women and girls to know that we did and do exist, that our genius and accomplishments are not fabricated or imagined, but have summarily been erased by lack of documentation. This is a much appreciated step to correct the lie through the centuries of pretending that we did nothing. Please check out my series which supports the highlighting of this issue: @lynettecharters Report this comment Saksin September 15th, 2022 "But why have women been excluded from art history for so long?" Perhaps they have not been excluded, but failed to make their way into it, in the sense that men on average have tried harder, been more obsessed, even fanatical about their ambitions, as Steven Goldberg suggested in his 1973 "The Inevitability of Patriarchy: Why the Biological Difference Between Men and Women Always Produces Male Domination", and as Germaine Greer, a feminist who asked the question about women in art years ago, obliquesly concurred, when after examining the lives of the famous male artists, concluded: "Who wants that?"... ... as the article says: "Many women’s artistic careers were “much more fluid, much more experimental.” [...] Louise Bourgeois: [...] The breadth of her work is astounding: “she did painting, she did tassels, she did sewing, she did textile sculpture, everything.”" Another way of putting which might be to say, in Bourgeois's case, that it lacked the laser focus needed to make it into art history until feminist politics lent a helping hand. Report this comment John Mountfort September 15th, 2022 There's nothing wrong with telling a purpose-driven story of art if you just name it as such. Calling it a story of Art, on the other hand, would be a deliberate subordination of the integrity of the subject matter to propaganda. Report this comment Have your say Join the conversation on Prospect.