Women Can't Paint

Gender, the Glass Ceiling and Values in Contemporary Art

Helen Gørrill

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501352751
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Kunst
• Thema: Kunst Allgemein

In 2013 Georg Baselitz declared that 'women don't paint very well'. Whilst shocking, his comments reveal what Helen Gørrill argues is prolific discrimination in the artworld. In a groundbreaking study of gender and value, Gørrill proves that there are few aesthetic differences in men and women's painting, but that men's art is valued at up to 80 per cent more than women's. Indeed, the power of masculinity is such that when men sign their work it goes up in value, yet when women sign their work it goes down. Museums, the author attests, are also complicit in this vicious cycle as they collect tokenist female artwork which impinges upon its artists' market value. An essential text for students and teachers, Gørrill's book is provocative and challenges existing methodologies whilst introducing shocking evidence. She proves how the price of being a woman impacts upon all forms of artistic currency, be it social, cultural or economic and in the vanguard of the 'Me Too' movement calls for the artworld to take action.

1

Masculinities and femininities in painting: The new androgynous aesthetics in contemporary art

In this chapter, I will reflect upon the masculinities and femininities in contemporary art. I refer specifically to painting, although many of the arguments could equally be applied to other traditionally masculine mediums or art forms. I will occasionally step in and out of the discipline of the visual arts in order to draw from external perspectives and provide alternative viewpoints. The chapter will introduce and reveal the first of the results from the initial intensive painting aesthetic survey, based firstly on a case study of 1,200 contemporary British paintings. Throughout the book I also refer to data from other markets: those elsewhere in Europe, and in the Middle East and the United States. I weave snippets of conversations and interviews held with established and respected international artists from all over the world, many of whom are renowned both in and out of the artworld, not only for their art but also for their teaching of fine art in key institutions. It has been a privilege to listen to the stories and experiences of those who have achieved acclaim, and I am grateful for permission to share their stories here. Some have kindly agreed to have their names revealed, and others have asked for first-name-only pseudonyms to be used. The artworld is well known for its lack of morality and lawlessness, and this is eloquently dealt with in High Price by Isabelle Graw who notes, ‘The art market knows only unwritten laws and is rife with murky goings on. The picture of a close knit secretive community reluctant to reveal its practices is regularly evoked.’¹ Rather than being unwilling to reveal its practices, it has become clear that had some artists exposed themselves by name, it is possible they may have been cast out by their galleries or museums for breaking the unwritten code of silence, at least according to several of the artists interviewed. In this first paragraph, it already appears that the world of visual arts is not perhaps the ‘progressive and liberal community’ many perceive it to be, but as American curator Helen Molesworth argues, ‘that doesn’t set us apart from the larger cultural forces at play’.² Much of this is of course entwined with gender, and the very masculinities and femininities of our heritage and herstories, as we shall see.

In order to carry out a gendered evaluation of the sociology of our women artists, it has been necessary to binarize the genders into the categories of ‘woman’ ‘man’. Many of our key theorists in the realm of gender and the arts are highly critical of gender-based readings, including Griselda Pollock, who states:

Gender based readings mean limiting the artist to what is projected onto her as her female gender on which derive circumscribed meanings to the artwork. … The work of feminist interventions becomes that of differencing the canon, not reifying the difference of women as the other gender, but allowing a desire for difference … we must offer differencing stories, more stories that aim to resist all ghettoization, separation and categorisation.³

Additionally, Judith Butler argues that when gender is independent of sex, ‘gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one’.⁴ Within this research, it has, however, been necessary to revert to the basis of biology and binary of the genders in order to carry out a data mine. Although this was an ambitious task, I wanted to challenge Pollock and Butler’s denial of the genders as I perceived the refusal to sex or genderize was potentially holding back gender and arts research which could lead to the generation of new methodologies and theories. While the basis of biology is a key consideration of the book’s research, through the use of initially categorizing female artists into a unified group separate from that of men, an accurate picture of the state of equality does start to emerge. This is a contentious issue within the arena of gender studies, because Butler argues that if men and women are seen as fundamentally different and separate, then equality becomes impossible. This means that in order to accept a quantifiable feminist methodology, a feminist framework has to embrace an essentialist or binary rather than anti-essentialist standpoint, which is based on biological difference. The contentious issue here is that it is arguable that an essentialist standpoint aligns itself with a supposed masculinist approach to gender, in other words, that one is born either female or male, and gender may not have the fluidity claimed by such theorists as Judith Butler.

Here the paradoxical battle between Griselda Pollock’s feminism and the quantitative emerges clearly, because in order to carry out a feminist intervention into the gendered differences in paintings made by female and male artists, and to establish if there are any significant exclusive ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ qualities in contemporary painting, it has been necessary to adopt a quasi-quantitative methodology which depends upon categorization. With due respect, I wish to argue that in polarizing the quantitative and qualitative as binary gendered positions, anti-essentialist feminists may fall into their own trap of binarification, which other feminists oppose and fight against in their research propaganda. Therefore while Pollock and other feminists remain advocators of sexual difference being socially constructed rather than biologically formed, this book has taken a combination of both approaches: categorized biological difference or gender binaries have been analysed in order to investigate discrimination through the quantitative, alongside an additional analysis of socially constructed sexual differences and stereotyping through the qualitative.

Despite potential feminist oppositions, the use of quantitative methods enables the precise pinpointing of inequalities such as artworld gender pay gaps within this research. We could also align with Judith Butler, who argues that we must adopt our own gender performance (in this case through a new hybrid methodology), and by choosing to think differently about it we might work to change gender norms and the binary understandings of femininity and masculinity. My own reflections are that we need to be aware not only of our society’s achievements in equality but also of the difficulties and inequalities we are still faced with. If it takes an essentialist and ‘masculinist’ approach to identify those difficulties and inequalities, then perhaps we need to re-adapt and redefine a feminist fluidity of gender to establish an androgynous research territory in order to make new ground and explore and generate new knowledge for the benefit of future generations. In addition, there can be no harm in introducing new methodologies to the field, as Griselda Pollock herself notes how her own interventions have conflicted with much feminist literature in art history.⁵ Pollock therefore had to take a similar calculated risk and break the established rules in order to attempt to effect a paradigm shift in the field. Moreover, and referring to Judith Butler’s dictum, the fluidity of research methods is perhaps as relevant here as the proposed fluidity of gender itself.

On the masculinities and femininities of paint: ‘IT’S NOT FOR GIRLS!’

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 education – education understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs and signals.⁶

Griselda Pollock

Coventry Patmore’s poem ‘The Angel in the House’ was first published in 1854: ‘Inspired by his wife, Emily, the poem charts their traditional courtship and marriage. Today it is known for the way in which it idealised women as devoted, docile wives and mothers; paragons of domesticity, virtue and humility.’⁷ In her paper ‘Professions for Women’, Virginia Woolf urged ‘fighting off the spectre of Victorian respectability named after the poem’.⁸ The statement ‘Women can’t paint, women can’t write’ has long been considered a Victorian prejudice, reflecting on the standpoint of Woolf’s parents who believed women should focus instead on their presided domestic and social roles.⁹ This Victorian narrative has prevailed into the twenty-first century, and it was as recently as 2008 that the art critic Brian Sewell declared, ‘Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness’, stating the British artist Bridget Riley was a ‘second rate’ painter.¹⁰ Again, Georg Baselitz also suggested that painting was a masculine occupation by declaring, ‘Women don’t paint very well, it’s a fact’, an opinion he later reasserted in a 2015 press interview.¹¹ It is clear that the likes of Baselitz and Sewell believe there are no great women artists simply ‘because women are incapable of greatness’.¹² It is therefore necessary to question the assumptions made behind such statements relating to women artists.

In response to Georg Baselitz’s statement that ‘women can’t paint’, Griselda Pollock noted that women are held back by several factors, ‘but principally the “myth of the painter,” the image in the West of a lonely, tortured white man’.¹³ During discussions with many internationally recognized artists and household names, it became clear that the respondents believed the masculinity of painting had a historical basis, instilled initially in artist’s early training within schools and art schools, and via institutions.

Femininity lives elsewhere

Margaret Harrison (b.1940) is a British artist and one of the 1970 founders of the London Women’s Liberation Art Group. In 2013, she won the Northern Art Prize and was the recipient of a prestigious Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists.¹⁴ Margaret discussed her struggles at art school in the 1960s when she perceived painting was seen by the institutions as masculine – the crafts, or textiles as feminine – and observed that female art students were actively discouraged from attending painting classes:

There were very, very few women [that] went into the painting area or the sculpture area, there was only the two areas then, and everybody recognised me as the best draughtsperson, guys did – everybody – but they tried to persuade me to go into dress and fashion and textiles which would have been fine, but I didn’t want to do that.

Margaret Harrison’s statement is supported by the research of Angela McRobbie in British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? ¹⁵ who argues that the 1960s/1970s art school was institutionally sexist and highlighted ‘the exclusion or marginalisation of girls from the fine art culture which still prevailed’.¹⁶ In Gender and Popular Culture, Katie Milestone and Anneke Meyer state that ‘women were shunted away from fine art and towards fashion design’.¹⁷ Margaret Harrison’s perception is also supported across the Atlantic by Judy Chicago in Institutional Time: A Critique of Studio Art Education, a text that discusses the notion of women being ‘steered away from fine art’ into such ‘feminine’ areas as textiles.¹⁸ Margaret described how two female colleagues were forced into the textile area, and simply accepted the art school’s guidelines, despite the women’s wishes to be in sculpture and painting respectively. She believes it was her own personal strength and determination that enabled her, as a woman, to cross that barrier of masculinity and enter the realm of the painting studio. It is striking that strength and determination are two qualities also traditionally associated with positive male attributes, and pertinent that it was Margaret who questioned with intended irony that perhaps one may have to ‘become a man’ in order to paint well. In Differencing the Canon, Griselda Pollock defines the canon as ‘fundamentally a mode for the worship of the [male] artist, which is in turn a form of masculine narcissism’.¹⁹ The canon is problematic for women artists and for those writing a differential art history. Pollock argues, ‘There can … be no way of, and no point in, adding women to the canon’ and wishes to move beyond the concept of binary gender difference in order to explore differential methods of the female canon.²⁰ However, this approach seeks to claim that there is a different kind of greatness for women artists, and this again is potentially problematic because it makes the assumption that there are differences in the qualities of artwork made by women and by men.

Looking through the transcripts of the artist interviews for Women Can’t Paint it became clear that art students may be indirectly taught that...