In 2015, the young historian Katy Hessel entered an art fair and realized that among the thousands of works before her eyes, not a single one was by a woman. The next thing she thought was: Would you be able to name 20 women artists? Ten before 1950? Any before 1850? The answer, as sad as predictable, was: no.
That day Hessel had a revelation similar to the one that Linda Nochlin unleashed more than 50 years ago when she asked herself in the revolutionary essay ‘Why haven’t there been great women artists?’. 37 years after the Guerrilla Girls stood in front of MoMA to criticize that the only way for a woman to enter a museum is to do it naked like Ingres’s ‘The Great Odalisque’, things have changed, but little and at an exasperatingly slow pace. 2023 will be the first year in which the Royal Academy of Arts in London dedicates a solo exhibition of a woman to her in its main space, Marina Abramovich. And according to a recent survey for YouGov prepared by Hessel herself, 30% of the British are unable to name more than three female artists.
Hessel’s epiphany led her to found a very popular Instagram account (@thegreatwomenartists, with more than 300,000 followers and the seed of a popular podcast) and write ‘History of art without men’ (Aticus of Books), an essay that covers the history of art in the manner of EH Gombrich’s genre bible. Its title is, in fact, an ironic nod to the canonical ‘The History of Art’, whose first edition in 1950 did not contain the name of any woman and the sixteenth only one.
From Elisabetta Sirani, unknown Renaissance artist, to Tracey Emin, the bad girl of the ‘young british artists’, ‘Art history’ has something of a healing recovery, just like other titles like ‘Pride and prejudice. Around the art of women’ (Three sisters) by Amparo Serran de Haro and África Cabanillas, ‘Differentiating the canon. Feminist desire and the writing of art histories’ (Exit) by Griselda Pollock or ‘Women, art and power’ (Paidós), which includes the famous essay by Nochlin, the spark that started the feminist revolution in art studios.
An architect in the Seicento
The truth is that bookstores are full of soap operasfictionalized essays and memoirs by women in the art world about whom little or nothing had been written to date and that they have finally found their moment. This is the case of the wonderful ‘The Architect’ (Anagram) by the Italian Melania G. Mazzucco, who novels the life of what is considered the first female architect in history, Plautilla Bricci, who lived in the Italian Seicento, in that Rome of the popes and the plague full of excess intrigues that lends itself so much to the literary.
Mazzucco has already demonstrated his talent for rebuilding lives from fiction in ‘Ella, so amada’ (Anagram), the novel about the photographer and writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach and now he immerses himself in the Italian baroque to tell the true story of the first woman to be a member of the Academy of Saint Luke and responsible (although not initially recognized) for Il Vascello, a spectacular boat-shaped villa built on one of Rome’s hills which was destroyed by French troops in the siege of 1849.
Where are the surrealists?
One of the many Spanish artists forgotten by the canon is the painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963), one of the first women to study at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, a sentimental partner of Benjamin Péret and a key figure in the surrealist circle. from Paris, where he took refuge after the outbreak of the Civil War. Varo coincided with Lorca and Dalí in Madrid, in Paris with Max Ernst, Picasso and André Breton, and after his exile in 1941 to Mexico fleeing from the Nazis, he formed an intense friendship with two other great ladies of surrealism, the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna and the English painter Leonora Carrington, with whom she explored the esoteric and the occult. The “three witches” called themselves.
It is no coincidence that Varo has been, together with Carrington, one of the artists buried by the official history of art that the Venice Biennale has vindicated this year with the intention of repairing decades of invisibility. And it is that until very recently in the manuals on surrealism no woman appeared next to Magritte, Dalí, Miró, Breton or Man Ray. Varo is the protagonist of ‘The red-haired painter returns to Paris’ (Alliance), written by the doctor in Art History Ara de Haro. The novel begins in the French capital in 1937, after the arrival of Varo with a suitcase full of books and pays special attention to the women of the circle of the surrealistsartists such as the photographer Dora Maar or the painter Jacqueline Lamba, Breton’s first wife.
To the rescue of the modernists
Other editorial novelties that dust off Catalan artists buried in oblivion is ‘Quan les dones havien de pintar flors’, edited by Salvatella. Its author, Consol Oltra Esteve, writes about the group of female painters that emerged at the end of the 19th century in Catalonia in the midst of modernism. Despite coming from well-to-do families, they were forbidden to study at La Llotja (how could they attend classes where there were nude models!) and most of them trained in private academies or workshops run by renowned painters. Far from being intimidated by limitations, many of them specialized in floral representationa very fashionable genre at the time.
Oltra structures his book by types of flowers (there are chapters dedicated to peonies, chrysanthemums or roses) and explains how pejorative the label “painters of flowers” was at the time, despite the fact that flowers were one of the great themes of the impressionism and it had been of the great Dutch masters in the 17th and 18th centuries. Names such as Antònia Ferreras, Maria Lluïsa Güell or Lluïsa Vidal appear in the book.
All of them also coincide (who would have thought) in ‘Cent dues artistes’ (published by Univers) by Elina Norandi, a volume that is quite an artistic-literary event: for the first time the names of 102 Catalan artists from 1850 to those born in 1982, who this year turned 40. “They will always seem less talented, less innovative, less amazing, less interesting, less cool… If we persist in making an egalitarian history, the artists will always lose out, because society was not”, reflects Norandi. For this reason, she points out, it is necessary to do everything possible to reverse the situation.