Published in The Guardian, Friday 27 May 2011
By Jonatahan Jones
By Jonatahan Jones
Pre-modernist art excluded women from its academies –
so it's no wonder there are so few great female artists before 1900
The death of the surrealist Leonora Carrington is a reminder that the 20th century was the first in which women began to win equality in the world of art. Before 1900, women artists were incredibly few. In the Renaissance and Baroque periods a woman who became an artist was likely to be part of a family of artists, like Artemisia Gentileschi, the brilliant daughter of painter Orazio Gentileschi, because that was the most likely way she could get a training otherwise closed to women.
The death of the surrealist Leonora Carrington is a reminder that the 20th century was the first in which women began to win equality in the world of art. Before 1900, women artists were incredibly few. In the Renaissance and Baroque periods a woman who became an artist was likely to be part of a family of artists, like Artemisia Gentileschi, the brilliant daughter of painter Orazio Gentileschi, because that was the most likely way she could get a training otherwise closed to women.
In fact, there is a link between the
craft traditions of art and the dominance of men. Male critics who still,
today, think it is clever todenigrate women
artists ignore the social history of painting andsculpture. These
skilled arts were taught according to the guild system, and then through academies that
started to appear in 16th-century Europe. They were subject to rigid social
controls that imagined the relationship between master and apprentice, teacher
and pupil, as one of father and son. It was only when the idea of well-crafted
art was attacked by a variety of movements (not just Duchamp)
in the 20th century that women started to get a look-in.
This is one of the reasons why, by
the end of the 20th century, these ancient crafts in art were disparaged and
why today the freedoms modern art bequeathed seem infinitely more liberating.
It is true that pre-modernist art excluded those without access to its training
system.
Contrast the story of art with the
story of writing. In literature all you really need is pen, paper and literacy,
and so women writers were more effectively able to defy male prejudice, and
make their voices heard, from Heloise in
medieval France to Mary Shelley in
the Romantic age. There are great female voices throughout the history of
western literature. It is far harder to find great women artists before 1900.
It is worth remembering that when you
look at old paintings you are looking through the eyes of men, by and large.
This is frustrating. The art of, say, the Dutch golden age gives the powerful
sense that we are spying on a real world: but we are spying with male eyes,
except for those exceptional women who defied their culture. The Dutch
17th-century painter Judith Leyster is
one of these women and Rachel Ruysch is
another.
One of the great themes of European painting, that
of Susanna and the
Elders, is all about the male gaze. This Biblical story, in which a
young woman is spied on by old men, was painted by many Renaissance and Baroque
artists because it was an opportunity to depict naked flesh. Yet Artemisia
Gentileschi turned the tables and painted it from her point of
view, making the woman who is being spied on the central character,
and showing her anxiety. Sometimes a male artist also seems to recognise the
woman's vulnerability in this story, as Tintoretto does in his richly
ambiguous version of Susanna and the Elders. As it happen she had a
daughter – and she became an artist.
