Rediscovered--Women Painters

Rediscovered--Women Painters

"Women have never been lacking in intellect," wrote a 17th century art chronicler named G.B. Passeri, by way of preamble to some notes on women artists, "and it is well known that, when they are instructed in some subject, they are capable of mastering what they are taught. Nevertheless it is true that the Lord did not endow them properly with the faculty of judgment, and this he did in order to keep them restrained within the boundaries of obedience to men, to establish men as supreme and superior."

There it was, in a nutshell. Granted, not every art historian has been as nobly certain of the natural order as that unruffled Italian phallocrat; yet the fact remains that until quite recently, the work of women artists did not have a history. For several hundred years, women who painted (or, more rarely still, sculpted) were apt to be seen as inconsequential strays, more or less talented, in a man's profession. Men did not make the Bayeux tapestry, or embroider the gold-worked opus Anglicanum chasubles that were among the supreme glories of medieval art. By the late 15th century one artist in every four on the rolls of the painters' guild of Bruges was a woman. But names, patchy attributions and lost works do not make up a history. That had to wait until the 1960s, when a scattered interest in the subject was crystallized by the feminist movement. Here, beneath the surface of existing reference books, was a lost culture awaiting excavation.

Hence the great interest of an exhibition that opened just before Christmas at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and will travel in 1977 to Austin, Pittsburgh and New York City. Entitled "Women Artists: 1550-1950," it is the first full-dress historical survey of its subject ever made. The organizers are two distinguished scholars, Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin. Their catalogue is the fundamental text on its subject. Professor Nochlin's essay alone, with its dense research and propulsive common sense, provides the right antidote to the tendentious stomp-the-pigs puffery of more militant feminist critics.

The show includes more than 150 works by 85 painters. Some of them, like American Impressionist Mary Cassatt and her French counterpart Berthe Morisot, are already embedded in the history of modern art. Others, just as famous in their day, now seem more like footnotes than culture heroines: Rosa

Bonheur, for instance, who died in 1899 at the age of 77, was one of the most popular animal painters in Europe; with her mannish working dress and Legion d'honneur, she was considered a walking proof that "genius has no sex." Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and Angelica Kauffmann were bright stars in the 18th century, Kauffmann in England for her history paintings, Vigee-Lebrun in France for her sparkling and elegant society portraits, like that of Varvara Ivanovna Narishkine (1800). By her 35th year, Vigee-Lebrun reckoned, she had earned more than a million francs with her brush, a prodigious income for a painter, and her husband spent every sou on whores and gambling.

Then there were dozens of painters who, through changes of fashion, dispersal of their work or simply the fact of being women, fell into the oubliette. Nothing is more fragile than an artist's reputation. Names like Anne Vallayer-Coster, Sofonisba Anguissola, Judith Leyster or Louise Moillon are scarcely commonplace. Yet the quality of their work is incontestable: Vallayer-Coster's The White Soup Bowl (1771), with its beautifully rendered planes and rotundities of steaming tureen and crinkled napkin, comes close to Chardin in reverent and cadenced description of commonplace things. To see such works resurrected in this show--however few the samples--gives a shock of belated recognition: How can such talent have nearly disappeared?

Harris and Nochlin, in fascinating detail, show exactly how it could--and did: the social conditions that militated against women's becoming "fine" artists during the Renaissance, the restrictions on literacy, training, access to professional company and guilds, the peculiar moral shibboleths, the stereotype of the cultured woman as accomplished dabbler, engaged in what George Eliot called "small tinkling and smearing." "Let men busy themselves with all that has to do with great art," trumpeted one French critic in 1860. "Let women occupy themselves with those types of art that they have always preferred, such as pastels, portraits and the painting of flowers..."

The corollary was the myth of feminine sensibility. This, like anatomy, was declared to be destiny. Mary Cassatt's" Young Woman in Black (1883) is the kind of painting that used to be cited, with 20/20 hindsight, as the product of an "essentially feminine" sensibility, a painting as full of style and chic as an egg is of albumin. But is the kind of sensibility in its design--the springy black silhouette of blouse and tunic relieved by one dash of white, the brisk notation of the face smeared and flecked by the black lace veil, the emphatic circumflex of the painted fan behind the girl's head--essentially different from that of Degas, Cassatt's mentor? Stylishness does not go by gender; perhaps it never did. Cecilia Beaux's Sita and Sarita (1921) looks "feminine" when you know that it is the work of a once very popular American female portraitist, a gifted conservative with a relaxed, unemphatic and slightly languid style--but not until then. And with more abstract art, division by gender becomes meaningless. What sex is Alice Trumbull Mason's painting L'Hasard (1948)? One might answer: platonic.

But if the idea of a feminine sensibility--fluffy, vaporous, pink-and-white--retreats before most of the work in this show, the sense of female experience does not. That theme is announced almost at once, in the work of Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652), the daughter of a well-known Tuscan painter, who became, as Nochlin puts it, "the first woman in the history of Western art to make a significant and undeniably important contribution to the art of her time." Gentileschi's Susanna and the Elders (1610) is a work of staggering precocity, painted when she was 17. Beauty spied on and plotted against by randy, intrusive old men--this biblical incident was a hot and obvious favorite with late-Renaissance patrons, but Gentileschi turned it into an image of sexual fear in a way that, one suspects, no man could readily have imagined. The stocky, naked Susanna writhes as if in pain from the oppressive, whispering conclave above her; the picture is about impending rape, a common subject, but unique in being perceived from the woman's eyeline. Heavily influenced by Caravaggio, Gentileschi's paintings were determinedly "unfeminine," full of darkness, gore and gesticulation: witness the candlelit hand and shadowed face of Judith, like a waning moon, in Judith and Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (circa 1625). A few other late-Renaissance women, like Sofonisba Anguissola, got more commissions than the forthright Artemisia; they moved with more ease at court and could play society better. But there is good reason to regard Artemisia Gentileschi as the most distinguished woman painter to have worked between the 16th century and the end of the 19th, when Sonia Delaunay and Georgia O'Keeffe were born.

The show does not so much advance toward the 20th century as peter out in it--a curious evolution, owing perhaps to the difficulty of getting the right pictures lent--and the last section, spanning about 1900 to 1950, makes the contribution of women to modern art seem less than it actually was. Painters of large and unquestionable talent, like Lee Krasner, are not seen at their best. One could hardly guess from her work on display here that Germany's Hanna Hoech--now 87 and the last surviving artist-member of the Berlin Dada group--was in the 1920s one of the most brilliant and acerbic collagists ever to wield scissors. On the other hand, quite trivial artists are included; probably one cannot have a historical show of women's art without the boring and insipid fribbles of Marie Laurencin, but why include a third-rate vendeuse of exotic surrealist tack like Leonor Fini? In such company, artists like Georgia O'Keeffe, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kathe Kollwitz, Nataliia Goncharova and Sonia Delaunay look extraordinary; one's eye goes with relief to Goncharova's crude, provincial but raucously vital cubist portrait of her husband Mikhail Larionov (1913), the face kippered flat and streaked with voracious slashes of color; it luxuriates in the shimmer of rosy light, circle on circle, that fills the surface of Delaunay's masterpiece of 1916, The Flamenco Singer. Moreover, if the exhibition does seem to end on a dying fall, it hardly matters. What counts is that an area of great consequence for art history has now been opened up. "Women Artists: 1550-1950" is one of the most significant theme shows to come along in years. Robert Hughes

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