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12 ART HISTORY Female Michelangelos Why feminism is back on the agenda In 1971, the art historian Linda Nochlin attempted to answer the frequently posed question “Why have there been no great women artists?” The result remains one of feminist art history’s founding texts. Nochlin argued that the notion of greatness is an entirely “male-oriented” one arising from historical power structures; it constitutes a standard against which women should not be judged. Retrospectively hunting for “female Michelangelos” was simply wrong-headed, resulting in what Griselda Pollock described as a dispiriting “no-win” game. Pollock later criticized Nochlin for not going far enough: while Nochlin was right to challenge the perceived neutrality of the word “great”, she had failed to place the ideas associated with the word “woman” under equal critical pressure, as themselves the product of a set of socially determined historical conditions. T. J. Clark pursued a similar argument in the pages of this paper (May 24, 1974), though his emphasis was on class, not gender, as the key to uncovering “the social conditions” of the work of art – a point on which Pollock subsequently held Clark to account. These debates are now enshrined in the art-historical canon, JO APPLIN G R E A T WOMEN A R T I S T S 464pp. Phaidon. £39.95. 978 0 7148 7877 5 C a r o l y n T r a n t V O Y A G I N G O U T British women artists from suffrage to the Sixties 304pp. Thames and Hudson. £24.95. 978 0 500 02182 8 familiar as part of most introductions to the discipline’s methods. Despite nearly fifty years of feminist art-historical scholarship, Nochlin’s original question has remained remarkably persistent. Astonishing and necessary as her intervention was, have we not moved on? Seeing Nochlin’s question paraded down the Paris catwalk in 2018, emblazoned across the front of a Christian Dior shirt, was both a novelty and a travesty. Perhaps it signalled that feminism was finally being accepted more broadly; but the cynics among us wondered whether we were simply witnessing the reduc- tion of feminist politics to a passing fad, the critical force of Nochlin’s text diminished in this context: all questions, no answers. Two recent and very different books name Nochlin as a touchstone. The first is a handsome coffeetable compendium entitled Great Women Artists. The second, Carolyn Trant’s Voyaging Out: British women artists from suffrage to the Sixties, is a survey of art by women who have largely been forgotten; their lives are cleverly interwoven in the book with those of their better-known contemporaries. Trant shows us their struggle for recognition, and to establish a balance between art and domestic life, as well as the sustaining relationships and friendships forged between women. Voyaging Out offers a powerful and important corrective to historical accounts that continue to draw on the same small pool of participants. Trant discusses fascinating artists drawn from across the spectrum of British modernism, including Gluck, Madge Gill, Marlow Moss, Laura Knight, Barbara Jones, Enid Marx, Ithell Colquhoun, Nina Hamnett, Doris Hatt, Helen Lessore and Barbara Hepworth. Her cast – a combination of familiar and not so familiar names, is extensive – although in the end too wide-ranging to do full justice to anyone. Great Women Artists casts its net even wider. It is a beautiful, richly illustrated volume containing 400 one-page entries on women artists – a valuable resource for students of art and art history as well as curious general readers. A small number of Trant’s artists also make the final cut here. The chronological span of the book is the past 500 years, but the focus is largely on art made in the past two centuries – understandable, perhaps, given the time it took for art to become a recognized profession for women. The title of the book is of course an acknowledgement, but importantly also a challenge, to Nochlin’s question, turned here into a statement; the word “women” is crossed out with a hot-pink line, as if pressure is being placed on the very idea of the “woman” artist. In an introductory essay, Rebecca Morrill tackles this issue directly, making clear that for many, the idea of hiving the “woman artist” off into a separate category is highly problematic. Upsetting its own premiss by having its cake and eating it in the title is a surprisingly successful opening gambit, and one that makes for an eye-catching book cover. Still, the book appears happier than it should be with the word “great”, especially given its explicit genuflection to Nochlin’s essay. The artists included represent a wide chronological and geographic range, and while readers may wonder about their favourite absent artists, the list is impressive. Seeing Greer Lankton’s papier-mâché doll “Rachel” (1986; named for the New York performance artist Rachel Rosenthal) facing Dorothea Lange’s classic photograph “Migrant Mother” (1936) is just one of the dynamic and unexpected juxtapositions produced by the book’s alphabetical organization. While Lange’s photo series documented life during the Great Depression in America, Lankton, who underwent gender reassignment surgery at the age of twenty-one, was a key countercultural figure on the East Village art scene in New York during the 1980s. Her soft sculpture dolls and effigies made from fabric and junk were a homage to, and a send-up of, her own alter egos, avatars and idols; a very different, yet no less significant representation of a powerful woman than Lange’s poignant image of a migrant mother. Other surprising and unintended correspondences emerge. “The Only Blonde in the World” (1963), the Pop painter Pauline Boty’s semi-abstract homage to Marilyn Monroe, appears just a page turn away from “Maman” (1999), Louise Bourgeois’s gigantic steel-and-marble spider. Another accident of alphabetical pairing, the near-ninety-yearold Bourgeois’s menacing monument to the maternal is paired with Boty’s seemingly jubilant love letter to Monroe, painted the year after she died. Both are subversive, critical feminist responses to the role of woman as mother and as object, despite being made nearly forty years apart. While “Maman” was made by an artist who was fully engaged with feminist politics, Boty’s painting was the product of a young woman working in the face of an art world for whom feminism had yet to figure at all. The decision to include Alice Neel’s wonderful portrait of a semi-naked Andy Warhol (1970) – a powerful image of male vulnerability – also feels slyly subversive, the tables turned on the great male artist, who poses here in knowing recognition of that fact. Trant’s book is tighter in focus. That said, it would have benefited from being even tighter: the stretch into the 1960s feels somewhat forced and, in the final telling, does no one any favours. Boty in particular is mentioned all too briefly on the book’s last page, with no discussion of her work, even though the final image in the book is Boty’s painting of Monica Vitti, the actor’s face caught within a bright red love heart. Here Vitti, like Monroe, becomes the subject of a specific kind of female gaze. (Boty’s is just one of the “tragic” deaths we learn of in the book). The ending is too brisk to TLS OCTOBER 1 8 2 0 1 9
page 13
ART HISTORY 13 be fully satisfying; in the final lines we learn that Feminism “with a capital F” was “on the rise”, and that a “much noisier sort of art” by women was on the way. In fact, the word “feminism” crops up regularly in both volumes, although its presence is rather more sotto voce in Trant’s (we read that the pacifist painter Gladys Hynes “always seems to be commenting on gender”; such comments are often as far as the analysis goes). It was a pleasure to discover for the first time so many women artists overdue serious attention, and this book is an important trigger to further research and investigation into the work of Hamnett, Moss, Dot Proctor and Elsi Eldridge, to name just a few of Trant’s examples of forgotten and overlooked women. But as a work of art history, and certainly as a work of feminist art history, Voyaging Out will strike some readers as a missed opportunity. Packed with names, places and a vast web of artists’ groups, galleries and personal and professional connections, the book at times resembles a list. That is a pity, especially given the range of work in different media we encounter – needlework, printmaking, book illustration, puppetry; this is an incredibly rich gathering of objects, which leaves us eager to learn much more than is presented here. It feels like a boiled-down version of a longer book. Trant turns too frequently to biographical anecdote, in spite of her introductory caution that women’s life stories often “start to overwhelm the art works”, as if this were something she hoped to mitigate. A case in point is that of the Sitwells, who occupy a single paragraph in which we glean nothing of who they were or what they did. Of Dame Edith – esteemed poet, eccentric and intellectual – we learn only the (admittedly striking) tidbit that she liked to drink in bed while knitting and listening to a wind-up gramophone to fight off bouts of despair. Readers are repeatedly introduced to tragedy, suicide or alcoholism as though this were simply the woman artist’s lot in life. That may well have been the case for some – unsurprising, given the many constraints and barriers so many women artists struggled to overcome, and which Trant discusses in the chapter “A Room of One’s Own” – but such information is presented to us at the expense of sustained discussion of the works themselves. Subject matter trumps sustained visual analysis, so we learn the “what” but not so much the “why” or “how” of the individual works’ making and meaning. For instance, while we read that Hamnett was “a good painter” and that Edith Tudor-Hart’s photographs “speak for themselves”, there is no formal interpretation – or even description – to back these claims up. Great Women Artists makes clear its debts from the start, the opening line boldly (and perhaps a touch too hopefully) announcing that any book of women artists is likely to be seen as “a direct descendant of feminist art history”. The texts on each artist are astute and thoughtful. Formal analyses are intertwined with introductions to key art-historical, social and political themes. The book offers a panoramic sweep, taking readers from the appliqué quilts of the American artist Harriet Powers, born into slavery in 1837, to the collage paintings of the Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu (b.1972). Its diverse line-up is organized alphabetically rather than chronologically so that lesser-known artists rub shoulders with established superstars. “Medallion” by Gluck, 1937 Less fortunately, the publishers of Great Women Artists have made it nearly impossible to work out who wrote each of its texts. Only the introduction is attributed to an author. Given its careful plotting of the power dynamics of a feminist movement, it seems a shame not to give a more visible platform to its twenty or so contributors, who are named only at the very back, with no further biographical information. One contributor, Katy Hessel, has been instrumental in recent years in promoting work by women artists from an explicitly feminist perspective to a wide audience through her Instagram account @thegreatwomenartists – her handle a playful nod to Nochlin that strikes the right balance between popular and scholarly. (At last look the account had more than 70,000 followers.) It’s a small point, perhaps, but who speaks – who writes – matters; Nochlin knew that, and so for that matter does Trant. Yet while Trant’s book is about women artists, it has no obvious stake in deciding what a feminist art history of this period might look like, despite impressively charting the social and economic conditions under which these women worked. The closest we get is in the concluding lines of the book’s introduction, where we learn that Nochlin was “possibly right” in her assertion that that there is a “different kind of ‘greatness’” for women’s art (although that is not quite what Nochlin was arguing). This is one of very few references to feminist art-historical scholarship, which has not – it bears repeating – been preserved in aspic since 1971. In their own very different ways these two books attest to a current problem for feminist art history and its wider reach beyond the academy. One addresses head-on the central role of feminist politics in shaping the conversation not only around women artists, but the discipline of art history in general. Feminism doesn’t belong in a list of “isms” to be wheeled out in undergraduate “methods” courses. Rather, it lies at the heart of how we learn to think in intersectional ways about absences and margins, about who comes to count and who doesn’t in the construction of art’s histories. Books about women artists are not de facto feminist, any more than feminist arthistorical writing is only aimed at those already invested in learning about feminist artists or artists who are women (again these are not the same thing). It is worth pausing, however, over the hold Nochlin’s initial question continues to exert, in spite of the many revisions and rejections of its claims by feminist art historians – not least by Nochlin herself, who offered her own critical reflection on the essay some thirty years later (she died in 2017). Nochlin noted how at the time “there were no women’s studies, no feminist theory, no African-American studies, no queer theory, no postcolonial studies”. She recognized, too, that “there has been a change in what counts” as innovation and provocation came to replace earlier notions of male artistic greatness. To an extent of course, Nochlin was right, and in many ways things appear better now than then in terms of what is taught, and discussed, and written about within the academy. But of course, violence against women, institutional sexism and harassment of women, people of colour, and LGBTQ+ people continues to rise. And while museum shows dedicated to women artists continue to open apace, the old adage that artists who are women need to be nearing their eighties to finally receive the recognition their male peers have been basking in for decades still holds true. Not unconnected is the fact that the market value of older women artists is currently riding high, their estates snapped up by commercial galleries who remain instrumental in ensuring those exhibitions happen. Earlier calls by feminist art historians for the wholesale dismantling of the art-historical canon ultimately resulted in careful revision not revolution. The insights of queer theory, critical race theory, and feminist theory and politics may continue to shape the field of art history in significant and profound ways, yet too often this has not been acknowledged in the more public, visible spaces of the museum and commercial art publishing. TLS OCTOBER 1 8 2 0 1 9

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12

ART HISTORY

Female Michelangelos

Why feminism is back on the agenda

In 1971, the art historian Linda Nochlin attempted to answer the frequently posed question “Why have there been no great women artists?” The result remains one of feminist art history’s founding texts. Nochlin argued that the notion of greatness is an entirely “male-oriented” one arising from historical power structures; it constitutes a standard against which women should not be judged. Retrospectively hunting for “female Michelangelos” was simply wrong-headed, resulting in what Griselda Pollock described as a dispiriting “no-win” game.

Pollock later criticized Nochlin for not going far enough: while Nochlin was right to challenge the perceived neutrality of the word “great”, she had failed to place the ideas associated with the word “woman” under equal critical pressure, as themselves the product of a set of socially determined historical conditions. T. J. Clark pursued a similar argument in the pages of this paper (May 24, 1974), though his emphasis was on class, not gender, as the key to uncovering “the social conditions” of the work of art – a point on which Pollock subsequently held Clark to account. These debates are now enshrined in the art-historical canon,

JO APPLIN

G R E A T WOMEN A R T I S T S

464pp. Phaidon. £39.95.

978 0 7148 7877 5

C a r o l y n T r a n t V O Y A G I N G O U T British women artists from suffrage to the Sixties

304pp. Thames and Hudson. £24.95.

978 0 500 02182 8

familiar as part of most introductions to the discipline’s methods. Despite nearly fifty years of feminist art-historical scholarship, Nochlin’s original question has remained remarkably persistent. Astonishing and necessary as her intervention was, have we not moved on?

Seeing Nochlin’s question paraded down the Paris catwalk in 2018, emblazoned across the front of a Christian Dior shirt, was both a novelty and a travesty. Perhaps it signalled that feminism was finally being accepted more broadly; but the cynics among us wondered whether we were simply witnessing the reduc- tion of feminist politics to a passing fad, the critical force of Nochlin’s text diminished in this context: all questions, no answers. Two recent and very different books name Nochlin as a touchstone. The first is a handsome coffeetable compendium entitled Great Women Artists. The second, Carolyn Trant’s Voyaging Out: British women artists from suffrage to the Sixties, is a survey of art by women who have largely been forgotten; their lives are cleverly interwoven in the book with those of their better-known contemporaries. Trant shows us their struggle for recognition, and to establish a balance between art and domestic life, as well as the sustaining relationships and friendships forged between women. Voyaging Out offers a powerful and important corrective to historical accounts that continue to draw on the same small pool of participants. Trant discusses fascinating artists drawn from across the spectrum of British modernism, including Gluck, Madge Gill, Marlow Moss, Laura Knight, Barbara Jones, Enid Marx, Ithell Colquhoun, Nina Hamnett, Doris Hatt, Helen Lessore and Barbara Hepworth. Her cast – a combination of familiar and not so familiar names, is extensive – although in the end too wide-ranging to do full justice to anyone.

Great Women Artists casts its net even wider. It is a beautiful, richly illustrated volume containing 400 one-page entries on women artists – a valuable resource for students of art and art history as well as curious general readers. A small number of Trant’s artists also make the final cut here. The chronological span of the book is the past 500 years, but the focus is largely on art made in the past two centuries – understandable, perhaps, given the time it took for art to become a recognized profession for women. The title of the book is of course an acknowledgement, but importantly also a challenge, to Nochlin’s question, turned here into a statement; the word “women” is crossed out with a hot-pink line, as if pressure is being placed on the very idea of the “woman” artist. In an introductory essay, Rebecca Morrill tackles this issue directly, making clear that for many, the idea of hiving the “woman artist” off into a separate category is highly problematic. Upsetting its own premiss by having its cake and eating it in the title is a surprisingly successful opening gambit, and one that makes for an eye-catching book cover. Still, the book appears happier than it should be with the word “great”, especially given its explicit genuflection to Nochlin’s essay.

The artists included represent a wide chronological and geographic range, and while readers may wonder about their favourite absent artists, the list is impressive. Seeing Greer Lankton’s papier-mâché doll “Rachel” (1986; named for the New York performance artist Rachel Rosenthal) facing Dorothea Lange’s classic photograph “Migrant Mother” (1936) is just one of the dynamic and unexpected juxtapositions produced by the book’s alphabetical organization. While Lange’s photo series documented life during the Great Depression in America, Lankton, who underwent gender reassignment surgery at the age of twenty-one, was a key countercultural figure on the East Village art scene in New York during the 1980s. Her soft sculpture dolls and effigies made from fabric and junk were a homage to, and a send-up of, her own alter egos, avatars and idols; a very different, yet no less significant representation of a powerful woman than Lange’s poignant image of a migrant mother.

Other surprising and unintended correspondences emerge. “The Only Blonde in the World” (1963), the Pop painter Pauline Boty’s semi-abstract homage to Marilyn Monroe, appears just a page turn away from “Maman” (1999), Louise Bourgeois’s gigantic steel-and-marble spider. Another accident of alphabetical pairing, the near-ninety-yearold Bourgeois’s menacing monument to the maternal is paired with Boty’s seemingly jubilant love letter to Monroe, painted the year after she died. Both are subversive, critical feminist responses to the role of woman as mother and as object, despite being made nearly forty years apart. While “Maman” was made by an artist who was fully engaged with feminist politics, Boty’s painting was the product of a young woman working in the face of an art world for whom feminism had yet to figure at all. The decision to include Alice Neel’s wonderful portrait of a semi-naked Andy Warhol (1970) – a powerful image of male vulnerability – also feels slyly subversive, the tables turned on the great male artist, who poses here in knowing recognition of that fact.

Trant’s book is tighter in focus. That said, it would have benefited from being even tighter: the stretch into the 1960s feels somewhat forced and, in the final telling, does no one any favours. Boty in particular is mentioned all too briefly on the book’s last page, with no discussion of her work, even though the final image in the book is Boty’s painting of Monica Vitti, the actor’s face caught within a bright red love heart. Here Vitti, like Monroe, becomes the subject of a specific kind of female gaze. (Boty’s is just one of the “tragic” deaths we learn of in the book). The ending is too brisk to

TLS OCTOBER 1 8 2 0 1 9

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