Where were the female artists? Eight books claim their role in history

That day, Hessel said, “Why aren’t there great female artists?” 37 years after the Guerrilla Girls stood in front of MoMA criticizing that the only way for a woman to enter the museum was to go nude, like Ingres’ ‘The Great Odalisque’, things have changed but very little and at an exasperatingly slow pace. 2023 will be the first year that a woman dedicates a solo exhibition to him at Marina Abramovich, the main venue of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. According to a recent survey by Hessel for YouGov, 30% of Britons cannot name more than three female artists.

Hessel’s enlightenment led him to find a very popular Instagram account (@thegreatwomenartists, 300,000+ followers and the seed of a popular podcast) and Write ‘manless art history’ (Aticus of Books) is an article on art history in EH Gombrich’s genre bible style. Her name is, in fact, an ironic nod to the canonical ‘History of Art’, whose first edition in 1950 did not include the name of any woman and only the sixteenth edition of a woman.

From the unrecognized Renaissance artist Elisabetta Sirani to the ‘young British artists’ bad girl Tracey Emin, ‘Art history’ has a healing recovery just like other titles like ‘Pride and Prejudice’. Around women’s art’ (Three sisters), Amparo Serran de Haro and África Cabanillas, ‘Differentiating the canon. Feminist desire and art historiography’ (Exit), ‘Women, art and power’ (Paidós), featuring the famous essay by Griselda Pollock or Nochlin, the spark that started the feminist revolution in art studios.

An architect at Seicento

The truth is bookstores are full novelsfictionalized essays and memoirs of women in the art world about whom little or nothing is written until now and that they have finally found their moment. This is the case of Plautilla Bricci’s wonderful work called ‘The Architect’ (Anagram) by Italian Melania G. Mazzucco, who lived in the Italian Seicento in Rome. about popes and the plague, full of extreme intrigues that add so much to literature.

Mazzucco has already demonstrated his ability to reconstruct lives from fiction in his novel ‘Ella, so amada’ (Anagram), about photographer and writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach. now immersed in the Italian baroque To tell the true story of a member of the Academy of Saint Luke, the first woman (although not initially recognized) responsible for Il Vascello, a magnificent boat-shaped villa built on one of the hills of Rome and destroyed by French troops. 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 Royal Academy of Fine Arts in San Fernando, an emotional partner of Benjamin Péret, and an important figure. The surrealist environment is from Paris, where he took refuge after the outbreak of the Civil War. Varo coincided with Lorca and Dalí in Madrid, Max Ernst, Picasso and André Breton in Paris, and became intensely friends with Hungarian photographer Kati, the other two great ladies of surrealism after fleeing the Nazis in exile in Mexico in 1941. founded. Horna and the British painter Leonora Carrington, with whom she co-discovered the esoteric and the occult. The “three witches” called themselves.

It is no accident that Varo, along with Carrington, is one of the artists buried in official art history, which the Venice Biennale justified this year to restore decades of invisibility. And until very recently, no women appeared in surrealism manuals alongside 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 Varo arrives with a suitcase full of books. Surrealists pay special attention to the women of their circle.artists such as photographer Dora Maar or Breton’s first wife, painter Jacqueline Lamba.

To the rescue of modernists

Other editorial innovations dust off the forgotten Catalan artists ‘Quan les dones havien de pintar flors’ edited by Salvatella. Its author, Consol Oltra Esteve, writes about the group of female painters that emerged in the middle of modernism in Catalonia at the end of the 19th century. Although they came from wealthy families, they were forbidden to study at La Llotja (how could they attend classes with nude models!), and many were educated at private academies or workshops of famous painters. Far from being afraid of limitations, many specialized in flower representationvery fashionable at the time.

Oltra structures her book by types of flowers (there are sections dedicated to peonies, chrysanthemums, or roses) and explains how derogatory the label “floral painters” was at the time, despite the fact that flowers were one of the major themes of impressionism. and belonged to the great Dutch masters in the 17th and 18th centuries. Names such as Antònia Ferreras, Maria Lluïsa Güell or Lluïsa Vidal are mentioned in the book.

And (who would’ve thought) in Elina Norandi’s highly artistic-literary event ‘Cent dues artistes’ (published by Univers) it all coincides: for the first time, the names of 102 Catalan artists from 1850, born in 1982, turn 40 this year. “They will always appear less talented, less innovative, less surprising, less interesting, less cool… If we keep creating an egalitarian story, artists always lose because that’s not how society was,” explains Norandi. Therefore, he points out that it is necessary to do everything possible to reverse the situation.