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Art history and women's role in it
Jan. 27th, 2006 05:07 pmI'm such a geek. My neck is sore today because I spent all last night bent over a book of Renaissance art. But it was one of those huge ones with giant full-page reproductions of the paintings, and how can one do anything but sit drooling over them for hours? ;-D
One thing that seriously pisses me off though, is that in a 500 page book covering the span of 200 years of art history, they couldn't bring themselves to include even one female artist. Not even ONE. It still amazes me how most people, even people with degrees in art history, haven't even heard of painters like Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana or Artimisia Gentileschi, and they're giants of the field. And yet they get treated like minor painters, who most mainstream art books don't even mention. You know it took me years of fruitless searching for information about Sofonisba Anguissola before I finally found an article about her in Renaissance magazine? The only art book I've ever found that mentions her or Fontana or Gentileschi is a book specifically about women artists, as if they were some sort of esoteric sub-catergory of art, and not part of the whole pantheon up there with Raphael and Titian and every other male painter ever. I actually read a novel about Lavinia Fontana a little while ago that was written by a woman who had a degree in art history, and yet she hadn't even heard of her until years after she'd graduated. Why?
I just don't understand why female painters are so routinely ignored. It has nothing to do with the quality of their work, so I'm forced to conclude it has something to do with the idiot scholars who write the books. They're the reason people don't realize that there were professional, even world-famous female painters around before Mary Cassatt. They just choose not to talk about them, but they know they're there.
Berthe Morisot is the perfect example, and the one that mystifies and pisses me off more than any of the others. The Impressionists are all so well known, their lives so well documented, their works so beloved, that the fact that one of the founding members (not to mention one of the most daring practioners) of the movement is completely unknown to the general public. Degas, Renoir, Monet, they're all household names. Why not Morisot? Why is she always in the back of books about Impressionism if she's mentioned at all? Why the big deal about Mary Cassatt being 'the' female impressionist, when Berthe Morisot was there too, and BEFORE Mary Cassatt joined the group to boot? I just don't understand. Berthe Morisot's works are more important to the study of impressionism than Cezanne or Pissaro, and certianly more important than Sisley or Bazille (even though I really like Bazille's painings!), but yet they get huge chapters about their lives and works, wheras Morisot, and most times even Cassatt, get three pages each in the very back of the book. Why???
There is no godly reason why. None at all.
Their works aren't any less varied, any less skillful, or any less beautiful. It's not them, it's that they're women in a world controlled by men. And even though that couldn't stop them during their lifetimes, it sure can stop them afterward. The only way you can be famous after you're dead is if people continue to talk about you, and considering the sexist world most of these painters lived in, the chances of men giving their fair share to women who they could just as easily ignore were pretty slim. So that explains how the situation developed, but not why it continues. Surely we live in a different world now, where we appreciate people for their abilities regardless of their gender, or any other factor. We do know of these artists, so now we should include them. It's not logical and certainly not okay to exclude them just because they've been excluded before. It can only be to the benefit of everybody to spread as wide a spectrum of art before us as we can get. It can't take anything away from what we already know, and it can only enrich our understanding and appreciation of art history.
So what the heck are we waiting for? Why not now?
One thing that seriously pisses me off though, is that in a 500 page book covering the span of 200 years of art history, they couldn't bring themselves to include even one female artist. Not even ONE. It still amazes me how most people, even people with degrees in art history, haven't even heard of painters like Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana or Artimisia Gentileschi, and they're giants of the field. And yet they get treated like minor painters, who most mainstream art books don't even mention. You know it took me years of fruitless searching for information about Sofonisba Anguissola before I finally found an article about her in Renaissance magazine? The only art book I've ever found that mentions her or Fontana or Gentileschi is a book specifically about women artists, as if they were some sort of esoteric sub-catergory of art, and not part of the whole pantheon up there with Raphael and Titian and every other male painter ever. I actually read a novel about Lavinia Fontana a little while ago that was written by a woman who had a degree in art history, and yet she hadn't even heard of her until years after she'd graduated. Why?
I just don't understand why female painters are so routinely ignored. It has nothing to do with the quality of their work, so I'm forced to conclude it has something to do with the idiot scholars who write the books. They're the reason people don't realize that there were professional, even world-famous female painters around before Mary Cassatt. They just choose not to talk about them, but they know they're there.
Berthe Morisot is the perfect example, and the one that mystifies and pisses me off more than any of the others. The Impressionists are all so well known, their lives so well documented, their works so beloved, that the fact that one of the founding members (not to mention one of the most daring practioners) of the movement is completely unknown to the general public. Degas, Renoir, Monet, they're all household names. Why not Morisot? Why is she always in the back of books about Impressionism if she's mentioned at all? Why the big deal about Mary Cassatt being 'the' female impressionist, when Berthe Morisot was there too, and BEFORE Mary Cassatt joined the group to boot? I just don't understand. Berthe Morisot's works are more important to the study of impressionism than Cezanne or Pissaro, and certianly more important than Sisley or Bazille (even though I really like Bazille's painings!), but yet they get huge chapters about their lives and works, wheras Morisot, and most times even Cassatt, get three pages each in the very back of the book. Why???
There is no godly reason why. None at all.
Their works aren't any less varied, any less skillful, or any less beautiful. It's not them, it's that they're women in a world controlled by men. And even though that couldn't stop them during their lifetimes, it sure can stop them afterward. The only way you can be famous after you're dead is if people continue to talk about you, and considering the sexist world most of these painters lived in, the chances of men giving their fair share to women who they could just as easily ignore were pretty slim. So that explains how the situation developed, but not why it continues. Surely we live in a different world now, where we appreciate people for their abilities regardless of their gender, or any other factor. We do know of these artists, so now we should include them. It's not logical and certainly not okay to exclude them just because they've been excluded before. It can only be to the benefit of everybody to spread as wide a spectrum of art before us as we can get. It can't take anything away from what we already know, and it can only enrich our understanding and appreciation of art history.
So what the heck are we waiting for? Why not now?
