Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?
ARTnews, January 1971
While the recent upsurge of feminist activity in this country has indeed been a liberating one, its force has been chiefly emotionalâpersonal, psychological and subjective-centered, like the other radical movements to which it is related, on the present and its immediate needs, rather than on historical analysis of the basic intellectual issues which the feminist attack on the status quo automatically raises.1 Like any revolution, however, the feminist one ultimately must come to grips with the intellectual and ideological basis of the various intellectual or scholarly disciplinesâhistory, philosophy, sociology, psychology, etc.âin the same way that it questions the ideologies of present social institutions. If, as John Stuart Mill suggested, we tend to accept whatever is as natural, this is just as true in the realm of academic investigation as it is in our social arrangements. In the former, too, ânaturalâ assumptions must be questioned and the mythic basis of much so-called âfactâ brought to light. And it is here that the very position of woman as an acknowledged outsider, the maverick âsheâ instead of the presumably neutral âoneââin reality the white-male-position-accepted-as-natural, or the hidden âheâ as the subject of all scholarly predicatesâis a decided advantage, rather than merely a hindrance or a subjective distortion.
In the field of art history, the white Western male viewpoint, unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian, mayâand doesâprove to be inadequate, not merely on moral and ethical grounds, or because it is elitist, but on purely intellectual ones. In revealing the failure of much academic art history, and a great deal of history in general, to take account of the unacknowledged value system, the very presence of an intruding subject in historical investigation, the feminist critique at the same time lays bare its conceptual smugness, its meta-historical naĂŻvetĂ©. At a moment when all disciplines are becoming more self-conscious, more aware of the nature of their presuppositions as exhibited in the very languages and structures of the various fields of scholarship, such uncritical acceptance of âwhat isâ as ânaturalâ may be intellectually fatal. Just as Mill saw male domination as one of a long series of social injustices that had to be overcome if a truly just social order were to be created, so we may see the unstated domination of white male subjectivity as one in a series of intellectual distortions which must be corrected in order to achieve a more adequate and accurate view of historical situations.
It is the engaged feminist intellect (like John Stuart Millâs) that can pierce through the culturalâideological limitations of the time and its specific âprofessionalismâ to reveal biases and inadequacies not merely in dealing with the question of women, but in the very way of formulating the crucial questions of the discipline as a whole. Thus, the so-called woman question, far from being a minor, peripheral and laughably provincial sub-issue grafted onto a serious, established discipline, can become a catalyst, an intellectual instrument, probing basic and ânaturalâ assumptions, providing a paradigm for other kinds of internal questioning, and in turn providing links with paradigms established by radical approaches in other fields. Even a simple question like âWhy have there been no great women artists?â can, if answered adequately, create a sort of chain reaction, expanding not merely to encompass the accepted assumptions of the single field, but outward to embrace history and the social sciences, or even psychology and literature, and thereby, from the outset, to challenge the assumption that the traditional divisions of intellectual inquiry are still adequate to deal with the meaningful questions of our time, rather than the merely convenient or self-generated ones.
Let us, for example, examine the implications of that perennial question (one can, of course, substitute almost any field of human endeavor, with appropriate changes in phrasing): âWell, if women really are equal to men, why have there never been any great women artists (or composers, or mathematicians, or philosophers, or so few of the same)?â
âWhy have there been no great women artists?â The question tolls reproachfully in the background of most discussions of the so-called woman problem. But like so many other so-called questions involved in the feminist âcontroversy,â it falsifies the nature of the issue at the same time that it insidiously supplies its own answer: âThere are no great women artists because women are incapable of greatness.â
The assumptions behind such a question are varied in range and sophistication, running anywhere from âscientifically provenâ demonstrations of the inability of human beings with wombs rather than penises to create anything significant, to relatively open-minded wonderment that women, despite so many years of near-equalityâand after all, a lot of men have had their disadvantages tooâhave still not achieved anything of exceptional significance in the visual arts.
The feministâs first reaction is to swallow the bait, hook, line and sinker, and to attempt to answer the question as it is put: i.e., to dig up examples of worthy or insufficiently appreciated women artists throughout history; to rehabilitate rather modest, if interesting and productive careers; to âre-discoverâ forgotten flower-painters or David-followers and make out a case for them; to demonstrate that Berthe Morisot was really less dependent upon Manet than one had been led to thinkâin other words, to engage in the normal activity of the specialist scholar who makes a case for the importance of his very own neglected or minor master. Such attempts, whether undertaken from a feminist point of view, like the ambitious article on women artists which appeared in the 1858 Westminster Review,2 or more recent scholarly studies on such artists as Angelica Kauffmann and Artemisia Gentileschi,3 are certainly worth the effort, both in adding to our knowledge of womenâs achievement and of art history generally. But they do nothing to question the assumptions lying behind the question âWhy have there been no great women artists?â On the contrary, by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications.
Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, c.1614â20.
Oil on canvas, 78â
Ă 63â
in. (199 Ă 162 cm)
Another attempt to answer the question involves shifting the ground slightly and asserting, as some contemporary feminists do, that there is a different kind of âgreatnessâ for womenâs art than for menâs, thereby postulating the existence of a distinctive and recognizable feminine style, different both in its formal and its expressive qualities and based on the special character of womenâs situation and experience.
This, on the surface of it, seems reasonable enough: in general, womenâs experience and situation in society, and hence as artists, is different from menâs, and certainly the art produced by a group of consciously united and purposefully articulate women intent on bodying forth a group consciousness of feminine experience might indeed be stylistically identifiable as feminist, if not feminine, art. Unfortunately, though this remains within the realm of possibility it has so far not occurred. While the members of the Danube School, the followers of Caravaggio, the painters gathered around Gauguin at Pont-Aven, the Blue Rider, or the Cubists may be recognized by certain clearly defined stylistic or expressive qualities, no such common qualities of âfemininityâ would seem to link the styles of women artists generally, any more than such qualities can be said to link women writers, a case brilliantly argued, against the most devastating, and mutually contradictory, masculine critical clichĂ©s, by Mary Ellmann in her Thinking about Women.4 No subtle essence of femininity would seem to link the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, Mme. VigĂ©e Le Brun, Angelica Kauffmann, Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morisot, Suzanne Valadon, KĂ€the Kollwitz, Barbara Hepworth, Georgia OâKeeffe, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Helen Frankenthaler, Bridget Riley, Lee Bontecou or Louise Nevelson, any more than that of Sappho, Marie de France, Jane Austen, Emily BrontĂ«, George Sand, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, AnaĂŻs Nin, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Susan Sontag. In every instance, women artists and writers would seem to be closer to other artists and writers of their own period and outlook than they are to each other.
Women artists are more inward-looking, more delicate and nuanced in their treatment of their medium, it may be asserted. But which of the women artists cited above is more inward-turning than Redon, more subtle and nuanced in the handling of pigment than Corot? Is Fragonard more or less feminine than Mme. VigĂ©e Le Brun? Or is it not more a question of the whole Rococo style of 18th-century France being âfeminine,â if judged in terms of a two-valued scale of âmasculinityâ vs âfemininityâ? Certainly, though, if daintiness, delicacy and preciousness are to be counted as earmarks of a feminine style, there is nothing fragile about Rosa Bonheurâs Horse Fair [p. 77], nor dainty and introverted about Helen Frankenthalerâs giant canvases. If women have turned to scenes of domestic life, or of children, so did Jan Steen, Chardin and the ImpressionistsâRenoir and Monet as well as Morisot and Cassatt. In any case, the mere choice of a certain realm of subject matter, or the restriction to certain subjects, is not to be equated with a style, much less with some sort of quintessentially feminine style.
The problem lies not so much with the feministsâ concept of what femininity is, but rather with their misconceptionâshared with the public at largeâof what art is: with the naĂŻve idea that art is the direct, personal expression of individual emotional experience, a translation of personal life into visual terms. Art is almost never that, great art never is. The making of art involves a self-consistent language of form, more or less dependent upon, or free from, given temporally-defined conventions, schemata or systems of notation, which have to be learned or worked out, either through teaching, apprenticeship or a long period of individual experimentation. The language of art is, more materially, embodied in paint and line on canvas or paper, in stone or clay or plastic or metalâit is neither a sob-story nor a confidential whisper.
The fact of the matter is that there have been no supremely great women artists, as far as we know, although there have been many interesting and very good ones who remain insufficiently investigated or appreciated; nor have there been any great Lithuanian jazz pianists, nor Eskimo tennis players, no matter how much we might wish there had been. That this should be the case is regrettable, but no amount of manipulating the historical or critical evidence will alter the situation; nor will accusations of male-chauvinist distortion of history. The fact, dear sisters, is that there are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or CĂ©zanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even, in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than there are Black American equivalents for the same. If there actually were large numbers of âhiddenâ great women artists, or if there really should be different standards for womenâs art as opposed to menâsâand one canât have it both waysâthen what are the feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is.
Elisabeth VigĂ©e-Lebrun, Julie Le Brun (1780â1819) Looking in a Mirror, 1787.
Oil on canvas, 28Ÿ Ă 23â
in. (73 Ă 59.4 cm)
But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and, above all, male. The fault, dear brothers, lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our educationâeducation understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs and signals. The miracle is, in fact, that given the overwhelming odds against women, or blacks, that so many of both have managed to achieve so much sheer excellence, in those bailiwicks of white masculine prerogative like science, politics or the arts.
It is when one really starts thinking about the implic...