Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? - Linda Nochlin, 1971

Sophia Hayden Bennett She was the first woman to receive an architecture degree from MIT when she graduated in 1890. But she wasn’t able to find a job afterwards, and she ended up accepting a job teaching technical drawing in a Boston high School instead. Her first commission was to design the Women’s Building. Her friend told her about a competition for female architects only (something Daniel Burnham, the director of the project, objected to, but the Ladies' Board President, Bertha Palmer, insisted), and she won out of 13 submitted designs at only 21 years old. Bennett received $1000 for her design, when men usually got 10 x that amount. During the construction, she was under constant scrutiny, and was given unrealistic demands with little notice and time to change her design to suit the compromises the committee asked of her. In fact, so much stress was put on Bennett that she had a break-down and was put in a long term medical facility for ‘enforced rest’. This lead many (mainly men) at the time to highlight it as proof that women had no place in the world of architecture. Sadly, after the exhibition she never worked as an architect again.

Artemisia Gentileschi She was the daughter of the Italian baroque master Orazio Gentileschi and grew up among Caravaggio's followers and rivals in early 17 th-century Rome. Despite being a woman surrounded by talented male artists, she became a sought-after artist who worked in London for Charles I. It was in the later 20 th century that she was rediscovered by feminist art historians and her story got turned into a film. She was raped by Agostino Tassi when she was 18, and her violent paintings of women decapitating men seem like acts of revenge. Despite her popularity and obvious talent, the National Gallery still haven’t put on an Artemisia blockbuster exhibition, but it manages to make a great deal out of her father, Orazio, in its 17 th-century displays. His work has been called ‘cold, with a clinical sheen to it’, with ‘a creamy realism that totally fails to match the drama of his rival Caravaggio’. Whereas, Artemisia's are considered real successors to Caravaggio, with ‘a strong personality all their own. ’ Her achievements as an artist were long overshadowed by the fact that she was a woman painting in the seventeenth century, and that she was raped and participated in prosecuting the rapist. For years she was ‘regarded as a curiosity’, but now she’s seen as one of the most progressive and expressive painters of her generation. Judith and Holofernes, Gentileschi was recognized as having genius, but was seen Artemisia Gentileschi, 1611 -12 as monstrous because she was a woman with a creative Michelangelo Caravaggio, 1598 -99 talent thought to be exclusively male.

Susanna and the Elders is her first dated and signed work, and is so ‘remarkably mature’ for a seventeen-year-old that it was falsely considered her father’s work for a long time, but her signature can be found in the shadow cast by Susanna's legs. The painting shows anatomical accuracy and advanced colour and construction. Her father could’ve guided her with the design and execution of the painting, but her palette was influenced largely by Cravaggio. Gentileschi depicts the biblical story of Susanna, a young woman, sexually harassed by the elders of her community. The painting was completed before her rape by Tassi, so its more than likely that it reflects the sexual harassment she was subjected to by him and other artists when she started training at his studio. Instead of showing Susanna as coy or flirtatious (as many male artists had painted the scene), she took the female perspective and portrayed Susanna as vulnerable, frightened, and repulsed by their demands, while the men loom large and menacing, leering and whispering conspiratorially in her direction. The painting drew attention to her professional promise and willingness to experiment with psychological dynamics.

Baroness Elsa von Freytag- Loringhoven The Baroness was a well-known figure on the New York Avant Garde art scene, she was as a performance artist, poet, and sculptor. She wore cakes as hats, spoons as earrings, black lipstick and postage stamps as makeup. It is said that she lived in ‘abject poverty surrounded by her pet dogs and the mice and rats in her apartment, which she fed and encouraged’. She was regularly arrested for offences such as petty theft or public nudity. At a time when societal restrictions on female appearance were only starting to soften, she would shave her head, or dye her hair vermillion. Her work was considered too early for her time, but is now recognised as the first American Dadaist, it only took until the early 21 st century for her to get recognition. Fountain, 1917, Marcel Duchamp? She was good friends with Marcel Duchamp and it is thought that she could’ve been the one to come up with his most influential piece ‘Fountain’. The sculpture was entered into an exhibition under the false name R. Mutt, which could be a pun if Baroness Elsa was the artist because it’s the homophone of armut, meaning poverty in German or, in the context of the exhibition, intellectual poverty. America had just entered the First World War, and Elsa was angry about both the rise in anti-German sentiment and the lack of response to the conflict from the art world, specifically in New York, the urinal was her ‘declaration of war against man’s war’.

Historians found out that Duchamp had written to his sister about the exhibition saying, "One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; since there was nothing indecent about it, there was no reason to reject it. " And the Baroness had been finding objects in the street and declaring them to be works of art way before Duchamp came up with his ‘Readymades’. One of her earliest pieces that can be dated with certainty was Enduring Ornament, a rusted metal ring around 4 inches in diameter, that she found on her way to her wedding to Baron Leopold on 19 November 1913. She didn’t only claim that found objects were her sculptures, she often gave them religious, spiritual or archetypal names. For example, a piece of wood called Cathedral (1918), and a cast-iron plumber's trap attached to a wooden box, which she called God, is another. God, 1917, Baroness Elsa von Freytag. Loringhoven

Beatrice Wood She was given the nickname “Mama of dada” as her work got more and more popular and her career went further. She was known for her ceramic artworks, paintings, drawings, outspoken persona, outlandish style and long list of famed lovers. She worked at the potter’s wheel until she was 103 years old and passed away at 105. She credited her long lasting health to “chocolate and young men. ” For the last four decades of her life, she dressed exclusively in bright Indian saris and wore large amounts of silver-and turquoise jewellery, even when throwing pots, with her thick, hip-length grey hair twisted into braids or a bun. Wood studied art in Paris when she was 18, but moved to New York soon after and took up with an avant-garde crowd that included Man Ray, Mina Loy and Marcel Duchamp. She collaborated with Duchamp (and writer Henri-Pierre Roche) on a dada journal titled The Blind Man. In one issue, Wood defended Duchamp’s “Fountain” when he was facing rejection and criticism, saying ‘’The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges. ’’ The line is often falsely attributed to Duchamp. She had worked mainly I drawing until the 1930’s, when she took up ceramics. Her pieces have been described as ‘whimsical and shimmering’, they incorporated metallic colours into the glaze itself, instead of on top. She made chalices, bowls and vases, it is considered that her best works were made when she was in her 90’s. Wood tells her story in an autobiography entitled I Shock Myself. James Cameron was one of its readers and based his character, 101 -year-old Rose, from the Titanic, on her personality.

Janet Sobel “The woman who dripped paint before Pollock. ” Sobel was a Ukrainian artist and a mother of four, she only began painting at the age of 43 in 1937. She is considered the ‘mother’ of drip painting because of her all-over compositions and her painting techniques. She often mixed materials like sand enamel into her work to experiment and because she liked the textures. Peggy Guggenheim made sure to include her work in The Art of This Century Gallery in 1945, an exhibition Jackson Pollock visited. He said that he was greatly influenced by her work and she left a great impression o him. Despite this, she has often been disregarded as a ‘housewife’ or amateur, and her influence was discarded. Milky Way, 1945 By 1948 she had developed an allergy to paint, but continued to work in crayon because of her passion for art. She later moved to New Jersey from New York so her work lost a lot of its popularity because of how far away she was and how inaccessible her work became. Illusion of Solidity, 1945

Sophie Taeuber-Arp She met her future husband dada artist Hans Arp at a gallery when she was 26, they would go on to be artistic collaborators. Her salary as a professor kept the artists afloat while they struggled for artistic recognition. Taeuber-Arp taught weaving and textile arts in Zurich, making her own abstract, geometric works that played with the relationship between shape and form. Hilton Kramer, an American art critic, wrote about her in the New York times, saying “The hallmark of Miss Taeuber-Arp’s art, then and later, was an extreme simplicity of design most often achieved through the use of pure geometrical forms. ” When she was alive, she fought for her less figurative style of art to be recognised as fine art, now she is considered one of the key figures in the Dada movement.

Barbara Morgan Martha Graham: Letter to the World - ("The Kick"), 1940 Morgan loved photography because she was able to combine several of her interests together - this included dance, the power of gesture and the simultaneity of visual stimuli. She practised techniques like light drawing and photomontage, and the subjects of her work raged from ice melting and forming in her apartment to moments with modern dancers and choreographers caught in motion. She aimed to free the figure within the space, focusing on singular movements and sometimes using double-exposures to create a slow motion effect. Even though Morgan is best known for energy she manages to capture in her dance photos, another notable talent of hers is how she’s able to capture fleeting gestures. After husband’s death in 1967, the human figure started to disappear from her work, and instead abstract photograms, photomontages, and landscape images became her main focus. They are very similar to her experiments from the 1930 s when she made a set of Russian Constructivism inspired photographs. This abstract style set her apart from the majority of American documentary photographers. With friends like Ansel Adams and Minor White, she was able to become a co-founder of Pure Energy and Neurotic Man, 1940 the photography magazine Aperture, and its current issue is all about feminism.

Clara Tice loved to draw, but it wasn’t until 1915 that her career started to flourish. She was holding an exhibition of her provocative nude drawings, and it was quickly shut down by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. The disruption of her exhibition and negative reaction towards her work captured the attention of Vanity Fair’s editor, and before long, Tice’s sleek drawings graced the pages of the magazine. Her illustrations were characterized by movement — awkward yet Three Leaping Dancers, 1915 natural, jarring yet flowing. Tice was an avid animal lover, but especially adored horses and dogs. One of her most popular and prized illustrated books, ABC Dogs, pairs each letter of the alphabet with a respective breed of canine. Mary Ash, 1916

Georgia O’Keeffe In 2014 one of her works became the most expensive painting by a female artist ever sold at auction. Grey Lines with Black, Blue O’Keefe spent a lot of time during her career rallying against the persistent gender divide in the avant-garde art world. Men were considered better artists, or at least more and Yellow, 1926 profitable, and despite being considered one of the most prominent modernists of her peer group now, at the time there wasn’t much she could do to change peoples’ minds. This could be why she started dressing like a man and taking on a more masculine aesthetic with tailored suits, a bowler hat, tennis shoes and brogues. Morwenna Ferrier wrote about an O’Keefe exhibition in June 2016, saying, “A Tate Modern exhibition aims to exorcise the Freudian (and frankly entry-level) readings of her flower paintings (flowers painted by women are vaginas) pushed by male critics and, it seems, at the behest of her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz. ” In 1976, towards the end of her career, she refused to be part of an exhibition celebrating women in art in Los Angeles because she didn’t want to be seen through a gendered lens. Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills, 1935

Guerrilla Girls The Guerrilla Girls have been working to expose gender and racial discrimination in the art world since 1984. They focus primarily on New York and how artists are treated there, but raise awareness of inequality in other cities and countries (like Iceland its film funding). The group’s members hide their identities by wearing gorilla masks in public and using pseudonyms from deceased famous female figures, such as the writer Gertrude Stein, and the artist Frida Kahlo. They formed in response to the International Survey of Painting and Sculpture held in 1984 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition included the work of 169 artists, less than 10% of whom were women.

Annie Kevans’ newest exhibition centres on women in art history who were once part of the art world and whose history and significance have been gradually eroded so they are ultimately forgotten to a modern audience. Before she starts a portrait she does extensive research into the person she’ll be painting, she has said that she needs to have a vague sense of the women and their personalities, otherwise she doesn’t think she’ll be able to paint them accurately enough. She has over thirty paintings of successful female artists, and hopes that her exhibition will open up a dialogue about their importance and significance. Kathe Kollwitz She decided to paint artists who were just as successful, if not more so, than male artists from the same time period or movement. She brings attention to artists and their achievements, instead of the love lives. Like Suzanne Valadon, who was the first female painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, but is more famous for her romantic relationships with Renoir, Erik Satie and Degas. Just like Victorine Meurent is more famous for being the subject of Manet’s paintings than she is for being an artist herself. Her paintings were selected for the famous Salon several times, including in 1876, a year Manet failed to get any of work accepted. Like many of her fellow female artists, her name doesn’t ring any bells to the general public or to many female artists working today. Sofonisba Anguissola