At the end of last year, British art historian and curator Katy Hessel released The communicative of Art Without Men. This is not the first effort to describe in historical terms the work of women. It is adequate to mention an important, repeated and published in Polish book Whitney Chadwick "Women, Art and Society" (as part of the popular series "World of Art" by Thames & Hudson). However, prepared by the author known on Instagram profile @thegreatwomenartists tom provokes crucial questions about the presence of art created by the artist.
“Woman with a Dead Child”, Käthe KollwitzIn 1950, British art historian E. H. Gombrich, 1 of the most prominent in the past of this discipline, published Story of Art. The book with a short, concise title has received 16 editions in English (last in 2022) and translations into over 30 languages, including Polish. It became a global bestseller, influencing the thought of the art of subsequent generations. And there was only area for 1 artist: Käthe Kollwitz.
Meanwhile, the presence of women in the artistic circulation has been changing over the past fewer years, as is illustrated by major global events, headed by the Venice global Biennial of Art. Last year, for the first time in the 127-year past of this event, most of the participants of the main exhibition prepared by Italian curator Cecilia Alemani were women. A number of crucial exhibitions were besides held presenting key artists in the past of art from Sovonisby Anguissoli and the Gentileschi Artemisia to Alice Neel and Paula Rego who died in 2022. Finally, various actions took place, like # 5WomenArtists, which drew attention to the creativity of women. All of this has led to the discovery of the creations and works that have not yet been known. However, has there truly been specified a profound change that we can talk about breaking the existing status quo? Has the marginalized achievements begun to be duly present in the art circulation and in artistic institutions?
Interesting data brings another edition of the "Burns Halperin Report" prepared for the artnet.com portal (announced in December 2022). It turns out that between 2008 and 2020 only 11 percent of the acquisitions of American museums were women's works, of which only 0.5 percent were black artists. Equally negative is the statistic on exhibitions – only 14.9 percent were devoted to the work of women. The situation on the art marketplace is not much better, although in fresh years there have been greater changes. Between 2008 and 2020, women's art accounts for 3.3 percent of planet sales at art auctions. At the same time, the auction marketplace increased by about 30 percent (after inflation was taken into account). Meanwhile, sales of artists' works increased by almost 175 percent. However, it is worth remembering that women's work is just – 6.2 billion dollars with 187 billion turnovers of the full auction art marketplace during this period. The authors of the report, Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin, besides draw attention to the importance of social movements on the position of women in the art marketplace and their presence in cultural institutions. And so the increase of their importance occurred, among others, after the #MeToo movement in 2016 and 2017. Then there was the inheritance. So speaking of change, it is worth remembering what was the starting point, as well as the context in which it takes place.
In 2020 an individual exhibition of the Gentileschi Artemission was held at the London National Gallery. It was considered 1 of the most crucial events of fresh years. little attention was paid to the fact that it was the first retrospective exhibition of any artist in the past of the museum founded in 1824. Until now, only 1 percent of his collection is women's. This is 1 example of how hard it will be to change the image of art, especially created in the past centuries – this requires a revision of not only habits, but besides strategies for creating museum collections and presenting them. Another crucial London museum, Tate Britain, is an example. In May of this year, a fresh permanent exhibition of his collections will be presented, presenting art created from the 16th century to the present. It was the consequence of many years of action, including a change in purchasing policy.
An crucial part of the fresh exhibition is the creativity of women. It will feature works by well-known artists from the 17th to 19th century, including a image acquired in 2016 by Joan Carlile, considered the first female to be professionally engaged in painting in the UK. In the case of contemporary works, the artists will be half present at the exhibition. As Polly Staple, liable for the collections of British art at Tate, emphasised, the fresh exhibition will be a proposal to grow and further diversify her canon.
The canonical text “Why were there no large artists?” published by Linda Nochlin in 1971 is constantly recalled in discussions about the art created by women. In time, however, the question of the reasons for the deficiency of female counterparts of Michelangelo, Rembrandt or Picasso began to be supplemented by others: why did the artists, including those who valued them today, not have textbooks or in art history? They were asked to remove them from memory. Who were those who created the dominant canon of art and the hierarchy of values by which her past is judged?
Katy Hessel recalls that she was at the art fair in 2015. Suddenly, she realized that no of the thousands of works she saw were made by a woman. She watched the works created only by men. And as he emphasizes in The communicative of Art Without Men all statistic on exhibitions, public collections, private collections or attendance in art publications show that men inactive dominate. So she decided – simply referring to E. H. Gombrich's work – to compose her own past of art in which there are no men at all. due to the fact that only quieting “the roar of their voices” will make it possible to “hear the voice of others in our cultural history”.
The thought of art past without men seems surprising, risky, even provocative. However, it is worth recalling that, for example, the Paris Centre Pompidou decided more than a decade ago to devote the full permanent exhibition to women alone. The works of the loudest artists went to magazines, which did not diminish the attractiveness of the Paris museum – the exhibition “elles@centreppompidou” presented between 2009 and 2011 saw over 2 million people.
The exhibition at Centre Pompidou covered only the 20th century and the beginning of the present century, that is, the period during which women could already freely undertake artistic studies ( formal restrictions were removed, although they remained social and cultural). This contributed to a extremist increase in the number of artists. Katy Hessel faced a much harder task. The communicative of Art Without Men tells about the art created since the Renaissance, the works of Plautilla Nella and another artists, through the Baroque and the Enlightenment Period. It is yet the 19th century – a work associated with academia, but besides with artists who co-create Impressionism. However, it besides devoted almost 2 thirds of its books to the last century and modernity (disproportion between ancient and contemporary art in the case of women's works is most likely no longer to be overcome). Presents avant-garde search for artists, surrealism and expressive abstraction by them created, minimalism and Body art. A work that has been politically active in fresh decades, but besides a return to painting figures.
The book shows that the art of the last 5 centuries can only be convincingly described on the basis of women's works. However, it is not the same communicative as E. H. Gombrich and many another authors. And it's not about gender. Katy Hessel speaks with art about crucial social and cultural phenomena specified as feminism, decolonization, equality between women and another minorities. Moreover, in The communicative of Art Without Men These are not marginal topics, but they occupy 1 of the most crucial places. This is simply a communicative in which the central place inactive traditionally occupies the work of the widely understood West, but it is besides a place for creators from South America. Black people's work takes an crucial place. Finally, what is very important, Katy Hessel's book draws attention to another types of creativity, inactive treated in conventional art past as an intermediate, specified as weaving or ceramics. All these are issues in mainstream art past inactive present on margins.
The communicative of Art Without Men Finally, it is simply a good chance to rise the key question of whether it is essential to look for another than the prevailing valuation criteria set by the art market. The adherence to them perryifies the current canon, makes it hard to see the art not only created by women, but besides to see its specificity and distinctness. It can besides lead to duplication of existing designs and operating systems in the artistic circulation, 1 example being the art market, in which works of a reasonably narrow group of creators make a crucial share of auction turnover. This mechanics is besides reproduced in the case of artists. According to the "Burns Halperin Report", nearly $2.4 billion of the already mentioned 6.2 billion were the works of 5 creators, including 946 million were paid for the works of Yaoya Kusama.
Of course, there are exhibitions or publications that offer a different look at the art of women. 1 fresh exhibition is “Making Modernism” prepared by the Royal Academy of Arts in London. It was the first specified an extended exhibition in the UK of artists related to expressionism in Germany and Switzerland. But her uniqueness wasn't just about that. Her curators sought common threads, including the interaction of the exhibition's heroines: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin. They showed how they saw their place in society (and how they were designated), how they defined their roles as women, and how they built and maintained artistic networks allowing them to function as artists. Moreover, as the contemporary British painting Chantal Joffe emphasizes in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, femininity was considered the first step towards self-fulfillment. Being an artist – Chantal Joffe points out – in the fullest sense of the word, it is not about suppressing oneself and its identity, but about ruthlessly utilizing them as the basis of their own representation. The subjects addressed by these painters, specified as home, body (also own), motherhood, are so not an escape into safe, feminine areas. On the contrary, they are a form of public affirmation, extracting what was silenced or pushed into a private sphere.
How, based on these and another micro-history, do you make a comprehensive communicative about the art created by women? The communicative of Art Without Men – as her author emphasizes – she presents only a fraction of the artists who created her. He adds that the past of art “is and will be constantly, day after day written again.” And possibly the top skill would be to make an open communicative about women's art (and not only) that could be constantly completed and besides undermined. Avoiding the creation of another canon, which would have been hard to overthrow. Only, is it possible to break out of patterns that have functioned for decades? Moreover, the very presence even in specified an illegitimate book as written by Katy Hessel, and even the selection of a peculiar work, makes it possible to formulate a canon of art created by women.
