Rediscovered—Women Painters
"Women have never been lacking in intellect," wrote a 17th century art chronicler named G.B. Passeri, by way of preamble to some notes on women artists, "and it is well known that, when they are instructed in some subject, they are capable of mastering what they are taught. Nevertheless it is true that the Lord did not endow them properly with the faculty of judgment, and this he did in order to keep them restrained within the boundaries of obedience to men, to establish men as supreme and superior."
There it was, in a nutshell. Granted, not every art historian has been as nobly certain of the natural order as that unruffled Italian phallocrat; yet the fact remains that until quite recently, the work of women artists did not have a history. For several hundred years, women who painted (or, more rarely still, sculpted) were apt to be seen as inconsequential strays, more or less talented, in a man's profession. Men did not make the Bayeux tapestry, or embroider the gold-worked opus Anglicanum chasubles that were among the supreme glories of medieval art. By the late 15th century one artist in every four on the rolls of the painters' guild of Bruges was a woman. But names, patchy attributions and lost works do not make up a history. That had to wait until the 1960s, when a scattered interest in the subject was crystallized by the feminist movement. Here, beneath the surface of existing reference books, was a lost culture awaiting excavation.
Hence the great interest of an exhibition that opened just before Christmas at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and will travel in 1977 to Austin, Pittsburgh and New York City. Entitled "Women Artists: 1550-1950," it is the first full-dress historical survey of its subject ever made. The organizers are two distinguished scholars, Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin. Their catalogue is the fundamental text on its subject. Professor Nochlin's essay alone, with its dense research and propulsive common sense, provides the right antidote to the tendentious stomp-the-pigs puffery of more militant feminist critics.
The show includes more than 150 works by 85 painters. Some of them, like American Impressionist Mary Cassatt and her French counterpart Berthe Morisot, are already embedded in the history of modern art. Others, just as famous in their day, now seem more like footnotes than culture heroines: Rosa
Bonheur, for instance, who died in 1899 at the age of 77, was one of the most popular animal painters in Europe; with her mannish working dress and Légion d'honneur, she was considered a walking proof that "genius has no sex." Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and Angelica Kauffmann were bright stars in the 18th century, Kauffmann in England for her history paintings, Vigee-Lebrun in France for her sparkling and elegant society portraits, like that of Varvara Ivanovna Narishkine (1800). By her 35th year, Vigee-Lebrun reckoned, she had earned more than a million francs with her brush, a prodigious income for a painter, and her husband spent every sou on whores and gambling.