Where are the women in art?
May 18 2014
Picture: BBC
I mentioned earlier Amanda Vickery's new series on women in art. I haven't been able to see it yet. But I did see in The Guardian an article by Prof. Vickery (who is a historian) on the difficulties she had finding pictures to film from before the 19th Century. In seeking to find out why so few works by professional female artists were available to film, Prof. Vickery leans not towards the reason that, for good or ill, there weren't that many of them, but that an anti-female artists conspiracy still exists:
I was prepared for a hunt, but nevertheless the near invisibility of women's art was shocking: I was forced into storage facilities and basements. The Advancing Women Artists Foundation estimates that 1,500 works by women are currently stored in Florence's various deposits, most of which have not been on public view for centuries. To the question "Are all of these works of a high artistic standard?" Jane Fortune, head of the foundation, answers: "We'll never know unless they are seen."
Public galleries seem tacitly to endorse the conservative view, exemplified by Brian Sewell's assertion that "only men are capable of aesthetic greatness". But painters and sculptors were artisans working within family-based workshops, just like tailors, locksmiths, goldsmiths and cabinetmakers. Art was a trade. Few paintings were the product of a single hand – only the face and hands might be the work of the "master". The male artist's brand was a fiction. Marietta Tintoretto worked alongside her father in Venice, Barbara Longhi beside her brother in Ravenna, their labour a vital constituent of the family economy, but unrecognised outside the workshop.
A deep belief in the impossibility of female genius is at work. Many of Leyster's sunny canvases celebrating the social life of the Dutch golden age were so skilful they were attributed to Frans Hals, despite her signature.
Meanwhile, Neil Jeffares notes with some surprise that Vickery omitted to look at pastel painting, where female artists abounded in far larger numbers:
In fact, as you can see throughout my Dictionary of pastellists before 1800, pastel was a field offering women far greater opportunity than most areas of the arts. There were a number of reasons for this. From a purely practical point of view, pastel portraiture is an essentially solo activity requiring no large studio with an army of assistants to manage the large canvases used in history painting. It could be practised without lengthy training in life drawing (all but impossible under the prudish restrictions imposed in the eighteenth century).
Some 17% of known pastellists (i.e. those recorded in my Dictionary) were female overall, but this figure also varies considerably among different cohorts. Women made up less than 10% of the “significant” artists (chose with a surviving œuvre in at least double digits), while accounting for 45% of amateurs. They represented half the recorded Spanish artists but only an eighth of the Dutch and just over a fifth of the English and French schools. There are of course inevitable biases in such data, which reflect varying cultural traditions, for example, in relation to the admission and recording of honorary members in academies.
You can catch the series here on iPlayer.
