Art by Women

I can understand that being politically correct has gone much too far, but as we know, the pendulum swings. After slavery and Jim Crow, the country as a whole knew things needed to change. Then came John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and most importantly, Martin Luther King, pushing the pendulum the other way. After another 40 years, people started to push back again in the opposite direction.

In the 1940’s and 1950’s, our housekeeper, who was also my nanny, was known as Negro. Then it was found better to change from a word derived from Spanish and Portuguese, to the English word Black! Then came other terms such as Afro-American, and then African American, and now “people of color”!

But there are so many other groups whose members have not been recognized for their abilities, and I am going to pick one for this Missive: female artists. I just checked and understand that women artists are the preferred term.

Included in a Missive I sent out in 2023 was this observance: NPR reported in 2020 that, “Art by women and men is valued differently. Fine arts by women, on average, are valued much less than men's pieces, and are routinely left out of major museums. The assumption that men are the artists and women are the models has been supported by the preponderance of nudes with female subjects depicted by male artists.”

In my Old Master world, an artist I particularly admire is Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654). Her father, Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639), was also an important artist at the time, and though they worked independently at times, they worked together. Later on, however, when art historians thought one painting “better” than the other, they immediately attributed it to Orazio.

Artemisia "Birth of John the Baptist"
The Prado, Madrid

Orazio "The Finding of Moses"
National Gallery, London

In 2019, Chad M. Topaz, co-founder of the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity, a professor of complex systems at Williams College, did a large research project with his colleagues showing how many male versus female artists were in major museums. They collected data on over 45,000 works by 10,000 artists from 18 major U.S. museums and found that 87% of those artists were men. By the way, they also found that 85% of those artists were white.

The prejudice against women in the arts is not new. Although the first woman was accepted into the French Royal Academy in 1663, the number was restricted to four. Anti-feminist attitudes have been even stronger in the United States. Although the 19th Amendment, allowing women to vote, was introduced in Congress in 1878, it was finally ratified only in 1920! Slowly but surely, things have been changing in all fields, if not fast enough. Women artists were not actually banned from museums, but were never found to be of equal importance to men. (Image Labille, Caption: Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749–1803), Metropolitan Museum, New York)

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749–1803)
Metropolitan Museum, New York

Even 20th-century women artists who are now celebrated, like Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe, struggled for recognition over their careers. In the study of art history, a crusade begun 50 years ago by Linda Nochlin, and joined by other activist scholars, has broken the dam of prejudice. American institutions have recently focused on women artists and prioritized them in acquisitions. There have even been all-women artist exhibitions.

I have to admit, however, to a personal peeve. I believe art is art, and to separate the sexes or the ethnicities, for their own sake, makes no sense to me. When we go to a museum and see a work that interests us, do we need to read the label that emphasizes whether it was created by a man, a woman, a gay person, or someone of color? Of course, there are exceptions according to the context and subject matter, but should this be primary in our consideration of a work of art?

The Art Dealers’ Bad Rap

In 1974, the International Confederation of Art Dealers held an Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. This was an unprecedented event in this country since the art was on the secondary market and not contemporary. It is an amazing story, if I do say so myself, which you can read here, 

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2019/02/the-grand-gallery-revisited.html

I bring this up because I find it so surprising that my former profession, which I was very proud of, has had such a poor reputation. After all, how does art get into a museum? Either a curator purchases it from the market, or a collector donates it from their collection. That donor acquired it somewhere, most likely from a dealer, inheritance, or a purchase directly from the artist, being the exception.

Thinking about this issue, I guess it comes to the root of all evil – Money! As you probably have heard, “Money Makes the World Go Around” ... 

Some think the market is fixed because dealers don’t post prices. They assume that auctions are out in the open, but there, you do not know about hidden reserves, usually set by the owner, or at what figure a guarantee has been made by the auction house, usually backed by a would-be buyer. Not to mention fees and taxes. It is true that an art dealer can, in some sense, choose his client. When I was in business, I might have kept something for a curator or important collector if they had told me that I should find them a specific kind of artwork. Still, that work was acquired to sell, and unless there was a specific request to reserve something for a fixed amount of time, I wanted it paid for as quickly as possible so that I had the funds to buy more. This was true whether I owned the work or if I had it on consignment. Here is an image of the well-known art dealer Leo Castelli showing a picture to the artist Salvador Dali.

In the secondary art market, a trusted dealer may be sought for his discretion. Works change hands among collectors for various personal reasons, ranging from divorce, estates, or new ventures, which the collector may wish to keep private. One does not want to ask your friend or a member of your extended family to buy something directly from you. I remember when members of the Rothschild family found it unseemly to buy from each other. So, one Baron X might want Rosenberg & Stiebel to negotiate, or not, with Baron Y, whom Baron X knew wanted the work. In those cases, we did get an agreed-upon commission. All parties knew what the deal was.

In the contemporary art world, there are stereotypes: the starving artist, the scholarly museum curator, and the moneyed art dealer. No thought is given to the fact that the unknown artist would be given short shrift if he walked into the museum and tried to sell his work directly. If the curator had the time and inclination to even see the work and like it enough to show it to his Director, and if he could win his support, they would need to convince the Trustees that this was a worthy acquisition, even as a gift. It just does not happen.

The gallery has to “discover” the artist and try to convince private clients to buy. It may sound snobbish, but it is human nature not to want the risk of being “wrong” (there is no right or wrong when it comes to art), but there is a need to “look good” to fellow collectors.

I will leave you with this question: Is the art dealer or gallery a necessary evil, or are the dealers educators and explorers finding treasures and even discovering hidden treasures, i.e., works of art and artists, in the interests of collectors and museums?

Trump & The Arts

I never imagined I'd see what is now happening in this country. These are the darkest times I've experienced in my lifetime. We cannot escape it, but I try, particularly here, to stick to the arts. Even though I wrote on this subject last March, it has gotten so much worse.

Some time ago, Trump installed himself as President of the Kennedy Center, saying the programming was ideologically driven and too woke! He then put his cronies on the board, and they decided that only board members selected by the President could vote. He then had his name added to the title of this National Institution named in honor of a fallen President. Now, subject to his hand-picked board’s vote, the President, without consulting Congress, has decided to close the Kennedy Center down for two years for renovation. He posted “Financing is completed, and fully in place! This important decision, based on input from many Highly Respected Experts, will take a tired, broken, and dilapidated Center … and turn it into a World Class Bastion of Arts, Music, and Entertainment, far better than it has ever been before.” Another scary thought is that he has given no details about his mention of reconstruction. Do you think that this closure could also be due to the fact that many top artists have cancelled their programming at the Center, audiences have dwindled along with revenue, and most recently, the Washington National Orchestra decided to part ways with its home venue?

Recently, alarms were sounded in the arts community with the discovery that a federal building constructed in 1940 to house the Social Security Department was on the General Services Administration list for “accelerated disposal”. More than 1,800 feet of federally funded art commissions fill the building, inspiring a nickname among experts and enthusiasts: the “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.” Ben Shahn and Philip Guston were among the artists hired as part of this project. Why did the current Administration focus on this building? One factor may be that Shan’s mural lining the central corridor illustrates the social ills in America that the new Social Security Administration was meant to address. The bill that approved this building for disposal was slipped through Congress, attached as an amendment to a water bill. With its desirable location across from the Mall, it is presumed that once sold, the building would be razed, fulfilling the cleansing of history with the destructive tactics the President favors.

Threats of the loss of funding are making museums do the government’s bidding. Under the Executive Order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” museums are being pressured to show only positive images of our country’s history, i.e. references to slavery and the mistreatment of Native Americans are not to be on view.

The Smithsonian has been told that Federal funds can only be used in compliance with the Executive Order to eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the institution. Having submitted the Institution’s anniversary plans, the Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch was sent a letter from the White House saying that this “fell far short of what was requested” and what was to be sent for review were, “current wall texts and didactics, exhibition proposals and budgets, object checklists for upcoming programming, internal governance manuals, and chain of command records for content approval are not obscure archival requests”!!! The Smithsonian includes 20 museums, mostly in Washington, D.C. Two of them are the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Do you think this administration might find any objectionable images there? (Image Objectionable Caption: Earle Richardson(1912-1935), Smithsonian American Art Museum)

    Earle Richardson (1912-1935),

Smithsonian American Art Museum

The art world is attempting to fight back. On Friday, January 30th, when people walked out of work, many art galleries around the country closed, including over 120 in New York. A number of museums also closed. A few examples are the Drawing Center and El Museo del Barrio in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. The Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Wisconsin, and the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Oregon. Needless to say, the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Museum of Art were also closed. These were mostly contemporary museums since they are defending the rights of artists to express themselves freely. All institutions are being pressured to show art that one man thinks is appropriate, with censorship being the hallmark of authoritarianism.

I know I have only scratched the surface, mentioning just a small portion of what has happened to the arts in the last year, and I am afraid it won’t get better before it gets worse!

Gargoyles

As I searched for a subject for this missive, the sound of rapidly melting snow streaming to the ground from our flat roof brought to mind the function of gargoyles. The stone buildings of medieval times also needed roof drainage systems, and stonemasons incorporated the function in projecting animal and fantastical forms.

Today, most houses have gutters with drainage pipes. In Santa Fe, however, houses follow the tradition of the original Spanish colonial and Pueblo adobe architecture, run off from the flat roof is provided by canales (pronounced cah-NAH-lays). These were originally wooden channels, but today sometimes made with more durable materials that project through the parapets for drainage.

Gargoyles are often confused with grotesques; the latter were merely architectural decorations that had no function. It seems appropriate to the water-spitting monsters that the term gargoyle comes from the French word "gargouille," meaning throat or gullet. Aside from being functional, they also served as symbols to ward off evil spirits and provide spiritual guardianship for churches and cathedrals. Here is an image of gargoyles, by Carol Di Rienzo Cornwel, on Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

A recent Associated Press article by Peter Smith is devoted to the two-year restoration of the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption in Covington, Kentucky. It earned the nickname Notre Dame, for the Paris landmark that was the model for its exterior. There is one difference, however: despite the fact that locals feel their gargoyles have looked after them and kept away evil spirits, the Kentucky versions are not true gargoyles since they are purely decorative and don't drain water.

In Washington, D.C., however, the Washington National Cathedral—begun in 1907 and completed in 1990—has 112 functional gargoyles as well as over 3,000 grotesques. No wonder it took so long to build! President Theodore Roosevelt helped lay the first cornerstone, and President George H.W. Bush oversaw the laying of the final stone atop the towers.

Even without religious significance, there's something exciting about these monstrous figures, whether they are functioning gargoyles or merely decorative grotesques or chimeras. They continued to be used decoratively on buildings in the 19th century and even early 20th-century high-rises. They are very expensive to make or repair, as the continuous water flow can make them structurally unstable, and they have even been known to fall due to deterioration from weathering. Of course, they make no sense on tall glass buildings or buildings of contemporary design.

Allow me to finish with a mansion in New York where the decorative “gargoyles” failed in keeping evil away … the one that belonged to Jeffrey Epstein!