“I don’t write the headlines,” is the cry of the journalist who has seen their balanced, on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-hand-that column traduced by a clickbait screamer. There’s a little of that to the art historian Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men (on the cover, the “Without Men” bit is faded to a barely-there outline).
Already, I was enraged. Ready to take to Twitter to vent my fury at this preposterous concept. How can you have a history of art without men? Behind every successful woman artist is an encouraging father, an enlightened tutor or an open-eyed dealer. Huff, humph, hashtag.
Then I read the book. Don’t believe the headlines. This is a spirited, inspiring, brilliantly illustrated history of female artistic endeavor from Properzia de’ Rossi in the early 16th century to Tracey Emin, Lubaina Himid and Cornelia Parker today.
My first instinct was to be wary, if not downright hostile. Last year, I reviewed in The Spectator two books by female art historians celebrating women artists. Except they weren’t celebrations. They were dirges, harangues, and — dare I say it? — extended nags. Men were baddies, women victims. No male disparagement of female artists could pass without an editorial intervention pointing out that what had been said was pompous, obnoxious and out of the ark. Just quote the bastard. Let him be hoisted on his own petard.
Hessel is subtler and funnier than that. She gives the example of the Berlin Dada artist Hannah Höch who, in 1920, wrote The Painter, a short story about a tormented male artist whose wife “thwarted the boundless flights of his genius” by forcing him to wash the dishes four times in four years. The put-upon painter is forced to concede: “The first time, actually, there had been a pressing reason. She was giving birth to a baby.” Amusing — and with more than a grain of truth.
Hessel gives credit where credit is due. Many of the female artists mentioned here had artist fathers who taught their daughters in their own studios. After a childhood accident that left the Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck bedbound, her father gave her a set of drawing pencils. She later said: “When you give a child a pencil, you give her an entire world.” Let’s hear it for the dads.
Reading Hessel is a pleasure and a spur. The tone is without gloom or grievance; less “get thee to a nunnery”, more “you go, girl”. The book’s epigraph is Artemisia Gentileschi’s rousing: “I’ll show you what a woman can do.”
Hessel writes that the Dutch Golden Age artist Judith Leyster’s Self-Portrait (1630) “brims with ease and merriment”. So, too, this book. Her focus is not on oppression, but on obstacles triumphantly overcome. On reaching the last chapter, I could imagine the many women mentioned here raising their paint brushes, chisels and needles in an arched saber salute to their champion.
The tone is without gloom or grievance; less “get thee to a nunnery,” more “you go, girl.”
The book was born out of Hessel’s Instagram account @thegreatwomenartists (284,000 followers) and podcast of the same name (89 episodes and counting). She is an enthusiastic, if occasionally breathless host. (An editor could happily have removed every exclamation mark from the book.) But I come here to praise. The Story of Art Without Men should be on the reading list of every A-level and university art history course and on the front table of every museum and gallery shop.
The title is a tease on Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art. “It’s a wonderful book,” Hessel writes, “but for one flaw: his first edition (1950) included zero women artists and even the 16th edition includes only one. I hope this book will create a new guide, to supplement what we already know.”
Hessel begins with a question. After visiting an art fair in October 2015 and finding that among the thousands of works on display not one was by a woman, she asked herself: “Could I name 20 women artists off the top of my head? Ten pre-1950? Any pre-1850?” Could you? (Could I?) After reading this book, you’ll reel off several hundred. Not just painters, but sculptors, engravers, weavers, quilters, paper-cutters, ceramicists and artists who made their bodies and costumes their canvas. The Dada artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven used to wander the streets of New York wearing a blanket, tomato cans tied together with string, hats garnished with gilded carrots and stamps on her cheeks.
I knew of the Flemish-born Clara Peeters, a painter of still lifes, but it was Hessel who drew my attention to the carousel of tiny self-portraits Peeters painted in the reflective surface of one of the goblets in Still Life with a Vase of Flowers, Goblets and Shells (1612). Take that, Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait and Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas. I want to know more about the Amsterdam-based Joanna Koerten and her paper silhouettes as intricate as carved ivories, and Mary Delany who started on her “paper mosaicks” and floral collages at the age of 72 after spotting the similarity between a loose geranium petal and a red piece of paper. Delany was doing papier collé 140 years before Braque and Picasso.
Children are a challenge, but not a barrier. Ruth Asawa’s six children didn’t stop her making gorgeous, looped and lobed suspended sculptures. Barbara Hepworth brought up triplets and a further son during the Second World War when artists’ materials were vanishingly scarce. Sonia Delaunay saw the possibilities of “cubist conceptions” while piecing together a patchwork blanket for her newborn son.
“Could I name 20 women artists off the top of my head? Ten pre-1950? Any pre-1850?” Could you?
Ellen Harding Baker’s Solar System Quilt (1876) might be the most beautiful image in the book and Anna Atkins’s botanical cyanotypes, made by placing ferns and seaweeds on chemically treated paper before exposing them to the sun, sent me off on an Internet hunt.
I know Gombrich is a fossil, a fogey, an art historical dinosaur, but, by God, the man could write. Open The Story of Art at almost any page and the prose is precise and illuminating, with a rhythm like poetry. Hessel writes well — each chapter is engaging, her examples are judicious, her anecdotes juicy — but the great women artists are still waiting for their Ernestina.
There’s another problem. Hessel is right to avoid the woman artist as muse, mistress and helpmeet. She never writes “an artist in her own right”. (I still feel a fool for using the cliché of Dora Maar in a review of John Richardson’s Picasso biography on the day that The Times ran an interview with the painter Celia Paul in which she said how much she hated the phrase. Wrist slapped.)
While Hessel doesn’t bash the men in her story, she does fade them almost to phantoms. It is perverse to have Dora Maar without Picasso, Lee Miller with only a glance at Roland Penrose and Hepworth with the merest nod to her “then husband” Ben Nicholson. “Don’t forget,” goes the quote, that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but “backwards and in high heels”. Here, our great women artists dance with daring, grace and flair. In defiance of society and the art establishment, they do it backwards and in high heels, but it is as if their hands are resting in mid-air, their feet keeping time with no partner. How much better if men and women artists could go out together dancing cheek to cheek.
Laura Freeman is chief art critic of The Times of London