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?