With the recent release of Katy Hessel’s The history of art without men (2023), I add to my library another survey of women in Western art history. It joins titles by Wendy Slatkin (Women artists in history2000), Whitney Chadwick (Women, art and society1990), Elsa Honig Fine (women and art, 1978), and a crop of similar projects from the golden age of gender-revisionist art history: the 1970s. Despite the continued proliferation of these texts – some revolutionary, others repetitive – the landscape of “women’s art history” (if such a category exists) is more varied than it has ever been.
The closest to a definitive survey text remains Chadwick’s, which has been revised and republished in its sixth edition in 2020. Although both The history of art without men And Women, art and society covers the same ground, Chadwick’s book is the more interesting and complex of the two, as it spends pages giving social and political context to the artists discussed later, in addition to including many minor characters that Hessel omits . A quick glance at the footnotes The history of art without men makes clear how much Hessel draws on Chadwick’s scholarship (as well as the work of key feminist art historians like Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock). Hessel’s book, however, is written in a more accessible and conversational way. If that’s his innovation, so be it. Undeniably presenting the work to an uninitiated audience, though I hesitate to suggest that a more nuanced interpretation of art history is beyond the reach of many readers.
by EH Gombrich art history (on which Hessel’s title riffs) was first published in 1950, and now in its 16th edition, remains a seminal art historical text. By publishing a new history of feminist art, Hessel’s publisher WW Norton & Company implicitly declares – despite almost identical books already existing on the market – that there is no equivalent for the women’s art history. While the absence of a universally regarded founding text seems to be proof that the mainstream art world remains disengaged from the subject, feminist art historians should seize this undefined ground as an opportunity to reshape the way we write about women’s art.
If the 1970s were a golden age in feminist art history, we are in its silver age. With new texts published every month, the time seems ripe to ask: what is the state of women’s art history? If Hessel is treading water, who is advancing scholarship?
A remarkable recent book, and certainly one of the most innovative in its form, is The story of women artists by Susie Hodge (2020). Organized into four sections, it highlights major movements, individual works, “breakthroughs” and “themes” that unite artists through time. This circularity (the pages include arrows that direct the reader to related artists and movements, disrupting the linearity of the book’s form) is feminist in its non-hierarchical approach, although this format appears to be largely accidental – the book is part of a series of pocket guides, which use a similar structure, whether it’s women artists, architecture or photography.
Yet Hodges’ book is an introduction and one whose chosen artists do not deviate from the accepted canon of female artists (yes, there is!). If I think of the works that have fascinated me over the past decade, those that most resemble progress boldly contradict the dominant structures of art history. I regard these authors collectively as a key turning in a lock – each book pushes a pin inside the mechanism, each one step closer to the revelatory revolution: an art history totally devoid of patriarchal value structures.
Some highlights, like that of Mary Gabriel Ninth Street Women (2018), simply construct a painstakingly researched and nuanced image, shifting the stories of artists whose names we know through footnotes to fill page after page. Others, like Paris Spies-Gans A revolution on canvas (2022), which explores the window of time after the French Revolution in which women had unprecedented artistic freedom, take a historical moment and examine how it transformed the arts, making it clear that the path to equal representation is not linear. Some flesh out still-marginalized stories into texts that uplift the marginalized, as Lisa E. Farrington does in Create your own image (2005), a survey of African-American female artists, only a handful of whom are mentioned in books like those by Chadwick and Hessel (not to mention Gombrich). Philip J. Deloria Becoming Mary Sully (2019), is refreshing in the way she complicates a history of modernism by exploring the work of her relative, Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully and her studies of abstraction through the lens of her native culture. It’s not just a book about a woman artist, but more so, it uses her work to expand our understanding of the major movement in 20th-century art history.
And then there is that of Nicole R. Fleetwood Marking time (2019), which defines a system of “prison aesthetics” in the art made by prisoners, by constructing a radically different evaluation grid of their work. While not specific to women artists, her framework for understanding what makes “good” art has the ability to radically reshape the value we place on the work of marginalized artists (whether incarcerated, self-taught, BIPOC or women).
It is sadly true, however, that the choices authors make about who will become the subject of their book are idiosyncratic and often personal in nature. Intrepid, almost always female historians can only delve into one subject at a time, and many female artists find champions in their loved ones (as in The surreal life of Leonora Carrington (2017), written by the painter’s niece). The result is a landscape sparsely and sporadically populated with serious scholarship on women artists and their contributions to art and culture. (There are two biographies of photographer Vivian Meier, for example, but none of Margaret Bourke-White, certainly a more influential photographer.) on the subject written by the artists themselves (such as Barbara Chase Riboud’s memories 2022 and Faith Ringgold We flew over the bridge).
The project that writers like Hessel have undertaken is to diligently fill in the holes in the historical picture of art. But when I think about what excites me about studying the work of women artists, why I’ve dedicated my career to thinking about and talking about their work, it’s the feeling that what’s out of frame is more interesting than what is inside. The canon of female art history was established in the 1970s. Fifty years later, it is now up to us to dismantle it.
