If I asked you to name great five great artists from the 15th to the 20th century I suspect the majority of you would name men such as Michelangelo; Rembrandt; Turner; Whistler and Picasso. Now see if you can name five women from the corresponding periods? Are you having difficulty? I did when I posed the question why there has been a lack of great women artists. However, I had no problem when it came to a list of great women writers.
The question of greatness among women artists is one that has been asked by many over the years, including the feminist art historian Linda Nochlin in an essay written in 1971.
One of her conclusions was “The miracle is, in fact, that given the overwhelming odds against women, that so many of them have managed to achieve so much sheer excellence, in those bailiwicks of white masculine prerogative like science, politics, or the arts.”
One of the women who painted against overwhelming odds was Artemisia Gentileschi, the daughter of well-known Roman artist, Orazio Gentileschi. Born in Rome in 1593, she received her early training from her father but after the art academies rejected her she continued to study under Agostini Tassi, a friend of her father's, a man who cruelly raped her. He promised to marry her but went back on his word so that Artemisia's father was forced to take him to court. The trauma of the rape and the subsequent trial affected Artemisia's painting.
After her death, she drifted into obscurity and her works were often attributed to her father or other artists. Art historian and expert on Artemisia, Mary D. Garrard notes that Artemisia "has suffered a scholarly neglect that is unthinkable for an artist of her calibre." Interest in Artemisia in recent years has recognized her as one of the world's greatest female artists.
In the 1880s, women were not admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts or the painting ateliers, and they had to find private teachers in private studios. In the studios of Carolus-Duran, men paid only thirty francs per month, with discounts if they enrolled for one year, while women were charged one hundred francs per month for mornings only, with no discounts.
Berthe Morisot was taught by Corot and had some success when she became involved in the French Impressionist movement and their struggle for recognition. Morisot has been reclaimed as one of the forgotten women artists of the 19th century and as such has achieved greater fame in recent years than she did in her lifetime. Now she and American artist Mary Cassatt are generally considered the most important women painters of the later 19th century.
It was only in the 20th century that the mass of women became eligible (legally as well as culturally) to receive the highest levels of artistic training. Lee Krasner studied at The Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design Starting in 1937, she took classes with Hans Hofmann, who taught the principles of cubism, and his influence helped to direct Krasner's work toward neo-cubist abstraction. When commenting on her work, Hofmann stated, "This is so good you would not know it was painted by a woman."
In 1985 a group of disgruntled women artists calling themselves “The Guerrilla Girls” wearing gorilla masks dashed around in the dead of night pasting West Broadway with posters that accused the art world of sexism and racism. One of their most famous posters had the provocative title "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?" This poster was a response to the small number of women artists in New York's
Metropolitan Museum of Art. They found that a mere 5% of the artists were women but a staggering 85% of the nudes depicted were female. Their poster design was rejected by The Public Art Fund as a billboard so the Guerrilla Girls had it displayed in all the public buses in New York City.
The August 31, 2004 AskART magazine listing of the Top 100 American Auction Prices dating back to 1987 did not include one woman artist. However, in the autumn of 2006, the British art magazine Latest Art polled thirty experts to compose a list of the thirty greatest women artists ever. Artists on the list are both contemporary and historical, including Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Diane Arbus, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Paula Rego, Judy Chicago, Annie Leibovitz and twenty others.
No matter how far women have come over the centuries their work is still not fetching the remarkable sums reached by their male counterparts. Top American female artists in order of strength of high-dollars-at-auction are: Georgia O'Keeffe ($6,166,000), Mary Cassatt ($4,072,500), Agnes Martin($2,584,000) Eva Hesse ($2,202,000), Lee Krasner ($1,911,500) and Joan Mitchell ($1,463,500). However, women still have catching up to do with men in the marketplace if they are to compare with these figures: Mark Rothko($72,840,000), Andy Wharhol ($71,720,000), George Wesley Bellows( 27,702, 500), Willem de Kooning($27,120,000), Edward Hopper(26,896,000).
Do these figures mean that men are better artists than women? Desmond Morris, who enraged feminists with his book “The Naked Ape”, had this to say "For every one great woman artist, there are 100 men. There are more male geniuses than female geniuses, and there are more male idiots than female idiots. If you're a human female, you can't afford to be a risk-taker and you can't afford to be a dimwit. You have to be in between those two extremes." He believed that the artistic dominance of men cannot be explained by social conditioning or by better opportunities. Throughout evolution it is women who have produced the most art but it has tended to be traditional art. The 80 year old writer, now a surrealist painter himself, believes that it is men who have flouted the rules and produced most of the great, mould-breaking art. .
Do you?
