“Oh! Women simply don’t pass the test,” exclaimed the distinctly infuriating German painter Georg Baselitz back in 2013. He was mid-tirade against the upstart phenomenon of women daring to paint and, having claimed that art was anathema to women’s naturally “feminine“ spirit (painting demands a “brutality” that women apparently lack), he finished his diatribe with the verdict that their work doesn’t pass the “market test”. “The market doesn’t lie”, he repeated, in an opinion that is shockingly, or perhaps understandably, pro-capitalism for someone who grew up in East Germany.
Baselitz’s comments have been at the forefront of my mind recently. Women’s art – that is, art by women rather than any other school of supposedly “feminine” work – is having something of a moment in the popular consciousness. The “Old Mistress” Artemisia Gentileschi had a blockbuster show – the first for an historical women artist – at the National Gallery in 2020; the magnificent female impressionist Berthe Morisot is the subject of a forthcoming exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery; the Royal Academy is hosting its first ever solo exhibition by a woman artist, Marina Abramoviç, in their main space in 2023. Alongside these exhibitions is a wealth of podcasts, books and articles about women’s art. If it annoys Baselitz that much, he probably should avoid all social media and bookshops for a while.
It is into this market that Phaidon have published their latest art book, Great Women Painters, a sister volume to their Great Women Artists of 2019. Initially, it might seem hard to understand why a second volume is required at all: many of the artists in the earlier book were painters, and painting already dominates so much of the art scene. After her famous 1973 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” the art historian Linda Nochlin curated an exhibition called Women Artists: 1550-1950. There was only one problem: every single artist in the show was a painter.
It is anecdotes like these, and the fact that there are so many wonderful women artists working in media beyond a brush and canvas, that makes the volume seem rather redundant. What about a book about woman sculptors? I can already see an interesting and groundbreaking volume shaping up, with entries on Barbara Hepworth, Ruth Asawa and the far lesser-known Luisa Roldán who created religious sculptures for churches in Spain during the 17th century.
But in her introduction to Great Women Painters, the curator Alison M. Gingeras (who formerly held positions at the Guggenheim and the Pompidou), explains why a focus on painting is still necessary. It is precisely because “painting has almost always occupied the pinnacle of social cachet, economic power and cerebral heft, above other art forms in Western culture” that it is so important to assess women’s contributions and inclusion within the tradition. An art history which ignores painting is not a complete art history at all.
Nor is the metric for inclusion in the volume as narrow or as traditional as the focus on painting might suggest. Gingeras eschews Baselitz’s money-orientated focus (it is a fact that art by women does, on average, sell for less than art by men), in favour of something far more radical. “The feminist measure of art-historical value is not a pass/fail assessment,” she writes, but instead an understanding of “historical context, intellectual context” and “the singularity and difference” of women artists: they cannot “conform to masculinist litmus tests of so-called greatness”.
But what about the women in the volume themselves? There is an admirable reach beyond just Western artists, with entries as diverse as those on the contemporary Egyptian artist Souad Abdelrasoul to the 18th-century Japanese artist Ike Gyokuran, who worked with pen and ink on materials such as doors, fans, and scrolls. Only one work is selected for each artist, but the breadth of artists featured allows links and similarities to be noticed. Abdelrasoul’s 2021 work Nile Crocodiles has distinctly surreal elements and, by a quirk of the alphabet, it is on the facing page to Gertrude Abercrombie’s Self Portrait of My Sister (1941). The similarity of the dark tones and menacing, surreal air is an historical link that is unlikely to have occurred otherwise.
The renowned Old Mistresses are all present, from Lavinia Fontana – the Renaissance court Mannerist painter who worked at the court of Pope Paul V – with her preternaturally-modern Portrait of Bianca Degli Utili Maselli With Six of Her Children (1603-4), to the Baroque brilliance of Elisabetta Sirani. Sirani’s La Liberalità (c. 1657) is the picture included, rather than any of her wonderfully affecting religious paintings of the Madonna and Child, but the strength of her talent still shines through.
When it comes to Artemisia Gentileschi, the editors haven’t chosen her most famous work, Judith Slaying Holofernes, but have instead plumped for Jael and Sisera (1620). It is undeniably still a violent picture – Jael, the “defender of Israel” is painted as she is about to drive a tent peg through the head of the sleeping Canaanite commander – but its inclusion introduces a new side to Gentileschi’s work to readers: here, again, are the biblical themes and an image of female power, but there is also something quieter, and, as a result, more disconcerting, about this work.
There are too many painters (316 in total) to comment on all the works chosen. From Dorothea Tanning’s Un Tableau Très Heureux (1947) to Tracey Emin’s In the Dead Dark of Night I Wanted You (2018), the editors must be praised for not picking the paintings that readers would expect to see, and for not being afraid to include very recent work. But all the same, there are some issues with the curation.
Many of the female impressionists – Berthe Morisot, Marie Bracque-mond, Mary Cassatt – get an entry, but Eva Gonzalès, the painter of inti-mate, uneasily domestic scenes and one-time student of Manet, has been left out. Of course, the book could not include every female artist ever, but given that this is only a compendium of painters the admission feels rather galling. Perhaps I am nit-picking according to personal tastes at this point, but there seem to be other “great” women painters missing: what about Winifred Nicholson or the Bloomsbury Group’s Nina Hamnett and Ethel Sands?
These complaints, however, are quibbles in the face of something that is an achievement to be valued: a guide to the most prominent discipline in art history, without a man in sight. Baselitz once exclaimed of Paula Modersohn-Becker that she was “no Picasso!” She wasn’t, but with this volume at your side, who needs the lecherous “libidinous, exploitative” male artist? Not me.
Francesca Peacock is an arts journalist, and is working on her first book. Great Women Painters, ed. Rebecca Morrill, Simon Hunegs and Maia Murphy, Phaidon, pp. 347, £49.95
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