Last month, the Observer published an interview with the art critic Brian Sewell, which included this exchange:
In the past, you've stated that there are no great female artists. Do you honestly believe that?
Well, how many can you think of? None of them is the originator of anything. My argument about Frida Kahlo is that, had she been Fred Kahlo, she'd have been forgotten.
Are there great women in other fields?
Where is the female Mozart? Where's Mrs Shakespeare?
Perhaps she's raising William Shakespeare to be brilliant…
That may be the answer. But when you look at ministers – that poor, floundering home secretary! She is the necessary woman in the cabinet to keep the feminists quiet. She isn't any good.
However, there are another couple of perspectives.
First, in many ways representational art has not developed significantly since the paintings, figurines, and decorations of the prehistoric era.
And we have no idea as to the gender of those true originators.
Second, just think of the inherent advantages men have had in recent human history in terms of access to capital and income to support an artistic career; in terms of access to technical training such as apprenticeships and peer groups such as guilds; and in terms of access to commercial and other outlets for their work so to make the whole artisitic enterprise viable.
Think about how, until recently, it would have been almost impossible for a woman to follow any similar artistic vocation: to make a living from her work and creativity in the recognised fine arts.
And it becomes clear that the real question is not why there have been so few genuinely great women artists or creators, but instead why - with all these advantages - there have actually been so few male ones.
COMMENTS MODERATION
No purely anonymous comments will be published; always use a name for ease of reference by other commenters.
Saturday, 31 December 2011
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
10 comments:
good points, have you read the Linda Nochlin's seminal essay 'Why have there been no great women artists?'
http://www.miracosta.edu/home/gfloren/nochlin.htm
One of the main problems is the way the history of art has been written. There's high emphasis on the artist-genius eg. Picasso which side-lines or completely ignores women artists (or indeed anything outside the white, male paradigm). Indeed, it has often been men like Sewell that have written *the* history of art, which is slowly being chipped away at revealing histories of art.
Yes indeed, I agree with Catriona about how the teaching of art history ignores women artists - (but then the teaching of history generally ignores anybody who wasn't a monarch or a warrior).
Another consideration is the marketing of ("high level") art, with very much an old boys club feel to dealerships and auction houses, and dynastic protectors of authentication (internationally).
I suspect the reasons are similar to why there are hardly any Deaf or disabled well-known artists, politicians, lawyers, etc.
They are kept down by the suppression, oppression, prejudice and bad attitudes of the white, middle or upper-class Tory gentleman, with his rampant and perverse sense of self-entitlement. Like Sewell, for example.
Literature is a huge exception here, of course. Even the DWEM view of art has to admit of Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, etc.
Hildegard of Bingen comes to mind. Of course, culturally women had other concerns, but the effect of a very male-oriented culture in more recent times has probably influenced what we remember as important.
I think there is a trap here that some have fallen into: We should not belittle genius such as Picasso because women of similar stature are not known, rather we should celebrate genius where we find it and seek out the forgotten and ignored to see how they compare.
Richard Gadsden said...
Literature is a huge exception here, of course. Even the DWEM view of art has to admit of Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, etc.
Jane Austen was a bit cagey about her authorship - although admitting to being "A Lady" for her first novel, the subsequent ones merely referenced the previous... All 3 Brontes and George Eliot used masculine pseudonyms (as did many others of their time) and Virginia Woolf just went and bought a printing press and published her own stuff! So not such a huge exception really, I reckon...
Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Rosalind Franklin, ...
Curie and Franklin OK (certainly, I'm in no position to dispute them) but definitely not Lovelace (I'm a mathematician). For whatever reason, there have not yet been any women to rival Archimedes, Newton, Gauss, Riemann, Poincare, ...
Women just have different priorities. That also explains why they still earn less on average: http://andreasmoser.wordpress.com/2011/02/19/gender-pay-gap/
Xerxes: Indeed, people have heard of Lovelace, but she was a capable mathematician rather than a great one. The canonical example of a great mathematician who was a woman is Emma Noether. More recently, Julia Robinson was among the outstanding mathematicians of her generation.
"Who's Julia Robinson?", you might very well say, but I think there's something about the way maths research (or the reporting of it) works, which means it's very difficult now for any great mathematician to become famous for their genius. The most astounding mathematician of the 20th century is Alexandre Grothendieck, and the general public have never heard of him either. They've heard of Turing, von Neumann, and maybe Gödel, so at least there's a chance.
It's not so different in art. In the last 50 years, who has popular art history canonized as truly great? Warhol, Pollock. Hockney? Moore? Hepworth? Annie Liebowitz? (I don't know whether or not Sewell would consider her medium for portraiture as worthy as Rembrandt's oils). We're not talking here about people who developed as artists during periods where many women had a lot of opportunity to develop as artists.
The fact that Sewell raises "Mrs Shakespeare" as an example suggests that either he's utterly devoid of any effort to understand his own question, or else he's aware of the issues but choosing to state them in the most obviously provocative manner. Virgina Woolf addressed that exact example in 1928/1929, in "A Room of One's Own", in the person of "Shakespeare's sister" (so Miss Shakespeare rather than Mrs Shakespeare). Which anyone would be well advised to read who actually has any interest at all in why there may or may not be great women in this field or that.
I don't think the argument has changed at all since then. For all but a handful of cases, part of the qualification for being a "great genius" at anything is to have been born more than 100 years ago. Very few of the people born more than 100 years ago, who had much of opportunity to develop great genius in any field that lets them go down in history, were women.
A far more interesting question, I think, is where the future great women artists are coming from. What would a modern woman, or for that matter a modern man, have to do in order for Brian Sewell to place her alongside Leonardo, Mozart or Shakespeare?
Post a Comment