Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (in That Order)

by Bridget Quinn

The whole world narrowed to the pinprick of my professor on stage. The niggle squirmed, but as I tried to locate its source and meaning, the lights went down and up came two ravishing paintings. One by Pollock and one by someone named Lee Krasner. Who was his wife, my professor said, removing her glasses. This Lee was a woman, and she was a painter, and she was good. The niggle became sound, a roar in the brain so violent I missed most of the remaining lecture. When class was over, I marched my combat boots to the arts library and checked out three books on Jackson Pollock. There were no books dedicated to Lee Krasner, so I had to find out about her through her husband. About how she had attended the Art Students League before him, where she was so accomplished that her instructor, Hans Hofmann, paid her the ultimate compliment: “This is so good you would not know it was painted by a woman.”

My family owned a set of Time Life books dedicated to important artists, dozens of them on a shelf in my father’s study, each with the same gray cover, but each one dedicated to a different painter or sculptor. I loved these books for years, until about age ten, when I suddenly realized that not a single one was about a woman. Then I believed I’d uncovered yet another terrible adult truth: girls could not be great artists. After that, those books just made me sad. I went to my locker in the art library and took out our main text, a massive volume called History of Art by H. W. Janson, hoisted it onto a table, and started flipping through. At last, on page 500, the early seventeenth-century section on the Italian Baroque, it read: Artemisia Gentileschi, followed by, “We have not encountered a woman artist thus far.” I wrote down her name, then worked slowly, page by page, to the end. By the time I hit the back cover, I had a list of sixteen women, one of them Lee Krasner.1 In more than 800 pages, this was all “official” art history could offer. I mentioned the women artists in Janson’s book to my professor at her office hours. Except for Mary Cassatt and Georgia O’Keeffe, and now Krasner, I’d never heard of any of them. She gave a throaty, smoker’s chuckle. “You’ve got the new edition! Our version didn’t have a single woman in it with her clothes on.”

The two women work in dispassionate exertion. They could be Julia Child and Alice Waters deboning a turkey. Sure it’s bloody and sure it’s some work, but it must be done.

Artemisia Gentileschi. Judith Severing the Head of Holofernes. c. 1620.

Judith’s victim, writhing in death throes and shock, is naked. Judith and Abra are dressed. They stand while he is prone. Judith wields a deadly weapon; he has nothing. In short, the women have all the power here.

Judith in her plainness and her elegance, in her blood-letting calm and life-taking power, all of it, seems to beg the question: Is this a task appropriate to women? Is beheading? Is painting?

Note that I’ll refer to Artemisia by her first name, both to distinguish her from her painter-father and because first names are often standard for the Italian greats: Dante, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Madonna, and so on. It’s true that Caravaggio is known by the name of his birthplace, but that’s because Michelangelo was already taken.

“I’d like to kill you with this knife because you have dishonoured me.”

It’s crucial to point out here that what Tassi had done was not “rape” as we know it, but “defloration” or the “theft” of Artemisia’s father’s property. That is: his only daughter’s virginity.

The seven-month trial that followed was gruesome. To verify the truth of her rape account, Artemisia was subjected to torture in the form of the sibille, a kind of thumb-screw where chords are fastened to rings around the fingers of one hand and then tightened to excruciating degrees. It was the seventeenth-century version of a lie detector test, the legal gold standard for truthfulness of its time. In agreeing to the sibille, Artemisia not only accepted terrible pain but also risked damage to her hand, an unthinkable fate for an artist. But to be believed, she had to endure it.

Orazio won his case. This was due in no small part to his daughter’s fierce endurance, but also because in the course of the trial it came out that Tassi had contracted to have his wife murdered and had impregnated his sister-in-law. He was an exceptionally bad guy. It was a blessing that Artemisia could not marry him.

Tassi was “banished” from Rome, which was never enforced, and he even worked with Orazio again on a commission. Economics sometimes trump honor.

Even an anatomical master like Michelangelo had some trouble with the female form. Consider his tomb sculptures for the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo. There, the female personifications of Night and Dawn have distinctly male-looking chiseled torsos beneath wide-set breasts that are as bulbous and affixed looking as any inept plastic surgery. The lack of access to female models explains the odd female anatomy of many Renaissance and Baroque nudes. (No one can explain the plethora of strange babies.)

But Artemisia was hardly the first artist to depict the story of Judith. It was long a popular theme. Caravaggio has a famous version, with a more typical Judith as a lovely young thing (complete with erect nipples pushing through her blouse) and Abra as a Disneylike old crone. Less typical is that Caravaggio, like Artemisia, chose to illustrate the moment of decapitation.

“Ruskin [Joshua McGuire] appears as a pretentious carrot-topped nitwit with a voice like a posh Elmer Fudd.”

The story goes that Judith was a beautiful Jewish widow living in the village of Bethulia. Like all of Israel, her village was threatened by King Nebuchadnezzar, who sent his Assyrian general Holofernes to destroy it. The Assyrians were unspeakably bad. The kind of conquerors who would flay an entire army, then paste the human skins outside their palaces like wallpaper advertising how badass they were. No one messed with Assyrians if they could help it. The Jews of Bethulia are rightly terrified, but their fear annoys Judith, so she sneaks into the enemy camp with her maidservant Abra and becomes friendly with the general, if you know what I mean. Her beauty inflames Holofernes, who goes about seducing her. Pretending to be willing, she gets him drunk. When he reclines on his bed, a come-hither or a nodding-off moment, Judith leaps upon him with a sword. Judith and Abra escape the enemy camp, bringing the head of Holofernes with them as evidence of their triumph. Head in hand, they inspire their people to victory.

Powerful, but in the sense of real power—physical, artistic—not sexually manipulative.

Artemisia Gentileschi. Self-Portrait as La Pittura. 1638–1639.

But it is her face that tells everything. Here, Artemisia does omit one key aspect of La Pittura’s depiction that is called for by the Iconologia: the Allegory of Painting should be depicted with a gag around her mouth, because painting is mute. Virtually all depictions of La Pittura include this device. Artemisia refuses the gag.

When I was a teenager, there was a bar my father liked called The Quiet Woman. Hanging in front was a wooden pub sign, of the kind found outside Ye Olde England–type alehouses. The sign consisted of the carved and painted outline of a woman’s body outfitted in seventeenth-century dress, with no head. There was the stump of a neck, but then nothing after. The Quiet Woman. Get it?

Artemisia Gentileschi was never quiet. She was instead the heroic center of her own art, fashioning a new language of womanhood, in action and in form. Her heroic women are not man-eaters, but man-beaters. That’s one reason why her Judith Severing the Head of Holofernes appalled so many for so long. Not only is a woman depicted performing a heinous act on a man, but also it’s a woman daring to depict it. Artemisia refused the gag. And from four hundred years away she speaks to us still, saying: Dare to be great.

“one of the finest he ever painted.”

“At no time did anyone throw his cap in the air and rejoice that another painter, capable of equaling Hals at his best, had been discovered.”

Sewing—the old in and out—can easily be construed as a sexual metaphor. In fact (thanks again, Dr. Trowbridge), the medieval Dutch word for sewing was slang for “making carnal union.” In modern Dutch, sewing is still used the same way, though probably now better translated as a single word starting with f.

Judith Leyster. The Proposition. c. 1631.

Regardless, in seventeenth-century Holland, needlework was something all proper women, highborn or low, should do well. Something a well-brought-up woman took pride in. It’s Leyster’s innovation to insert this virtuous activity into a scene of seduction that would usually take place in a brothel or bar. There, the come-on is depicted as welcome, a lark, some fun. But in Leyster’s scene it is unwanted, unacknowledged, and, as the dark shadow implies, sinister. In other words: this scene is from the woman’s point of view.

Not long after her resurrection from a historical black hole, people began concocting all kinds of liaisons for Leyster. She was Rembrandt’s lover. Or no, she was Hals’s lover. There is in fact no more evidence that she was romantically involved with either man than there is of a love affair between Hals and Rembrandt themselves. It is a wholesale fantasy based on the fact that she was a woman, they were men, alive in the same nation in the same century. They must have had sex.

He was one of two professors there (Kirk Varnedoe the other) who was both hallowed-be-thy-name art historian and pop-culture cool.

I sensed she recognized me, the way you might feel if you paid regular visits to an animal in the zoo. There was a flicker of living intelligence behind those painted eyes. In all of New York, standing before her portrait was where I felt most seen.

(big-ass canvases with a story to tell).

There was an eighteenth-century version of trolling that supported an entire economy of the most vicious satire.

For women artists the leap from intimacy with a man to being an untalented slut has, in the public eye, never been a big one.

The history of accusing women artists of sleeping with their sitters is a long one, as is the charge that some man has done a woman’s art for her.

On May 31, 1783, Labille-Guiard was voted into the Royal Academy. Just the twelfth woman member since its inception, she was admitted on the same day as her “rival,” Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. For as long as both women had exhibited they’d been compared. One was mostly given good criticism only at the expense of the other, a practice not restricted to art. Personal appearance was fair game, to Labille-Guiard’s disadvantage. Vigée-Lebrun was pretty (verified by her self-portraits), wealthy, successful, and court painter to the queen. And she was the wife of an art dealer. She was originally denied Academy membership on the grounds that being in the “art business” was forbidden (a woman was identified with her husband’s profession). But this was the Royal Academy and what Queen Marie-Antoinette wanted, she generally got. And what she wanted was her painter in the Academy. One can imagine how little the Academy liked being forced to admit a woman, by a woman. They let Vigée-Lebrun (and her patron) know this by admitting Labille-Guiard on the very same day. Academy minutes specify that Vigée-Lebrun was admitted par ordre (“by order”), while after Labille-Guiard’s name it says, les voix prises a l’ordinaire (“vote taken in the usual manner”). Labille-Guiard gleefully signed the register that day as Adélaïde des Vertus. Adélaïde of the Virtues. Take that, gossips. Unfortunately, the Academy’s pleasure in their spiteful gesture was short-lived, and they quickly established a quota o...

By including Capet and de Rosemond in her composition, Labille-Guiard has brazenly defied the Academy’s quota on female artists. Two more women painters now hang on the walls of the Academy’s official Salon.

It’s a painting that says, in effect: Screw you. Followed by the emoticon of the painter’s own visage: Smiley face.

Meanwhile, the frieze running above Madame Adélaïde depicts a bedridden King Louis XV dying of virulent smallpox. But what is this? Just as the king has sent away his sons to save them from his cruel fate, his daughters rush to his bedside.

The frieze might be interpreted two ways: One, princesses are more expendable than princes. Or two, princesses are more badass than princes.

Because this is the only groom without facial hair and the only figure to lock eyes with us as viewers—always a knowing gesture on the part of a subject—Saslow convincingly argues that it is the artist herself who meets our gaze. It seems Bonheur has created a secret self-portrait, saying, in effect, This is who I am. A bit masculine, in total control, and in the white-hot center of things.

By 1850, Bonheur had received a Permission de Travestissement—cross-dressing permit—from the police. Cross-dressing (a.k.a. wearing pants) was illegal, so to evade arrest, Bonheur needed the official document. It allowed her to wear men’s clothing in public, with certain restrictions against male attire at “spectacles, balls or other public meeting places.” The permit was renewable every six months and required the signature of her doctor.

There sat Edmonia Lewis’s The Death of Cleopatra, a regal monarch limp on her marble throne. Tragic, moving . . . and, noted Richardson, “surrounded by holiday decorations and papier-mâché turkeys and Christmas lights and Christmas elves.”

Her will identifies her as “spinster and sculptor.”

It goes without saying that being black and Indian wouldn’t make Lewis’s future path any easier.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose wife Sophia was herself a painter, wrote a popular novel called The Marble Faun that treated women artists as mere copyists, doomed to tragedy. (Hawthorne had even less respect for women writers, telling his publisher, “All women as authors are feeble and tiresome. I wish they were forbidden to write on pain of having their faces deeply scarified with an oyster shell.”

To which, if I might interject, the only possible response is, Screw you, Nate.)

It’s equally true that Modersohn-Becker is mother to an alternative strand of Modernism: psychologically probing, personally brave, flagrantly and unrepentantly female. Think Frida Kahlo and Alice Neel, Ana Mendieta, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero, Cindy Sherman, Catherine Opie, and countless more. The list is eminent and long.

Modersohn-Becker painted the first female nude self-portrait in Western history. It is true that Artemisia Gentileschi likely used her own body as the model for her Old Testament heroine in Susanna and the Elders, but that’s not the same thing. In Self-Portrait, Age 30, Modersohn-Becker is her own heroine. She is artist, subject, object, metaphor, nature, and actor. Compare the not-pregnant, but pregnant-looking artist, here, to her flourishing forebearers in paint: Botticelli’s famous curving Venus in La Primavera, for example. The goddess is not with child, but is part of a (nearly) baffling allegory pertaining to the fertility of all creation. Or consider the female half of The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait by Jan van Eyck. On seeing it (if you have not, trust me), the inevitable first question is, “Why is the bride pregnant?” She’s not. Round-bellied women, believe it or not, were considered the most beautiful. Though revolutionary, Modersohn-Becker is more than aware of the past. She is Botticelli and his Venus, Jan and his full-bellied bride, in a cold Parisian garret in spring, procreative as all hell.

Unlike every other nude we’d seen in the course, she was sensual but not sexual, brimming with health and strength. So unlike her Nordic and Germanic peers, slashing, sultry nudes as she-wolves and sex objects, devourers and meat.

Her last words: What a pity.

IN SOME EARLYISH MONTH OF 1912, two sisters—Vanessa Bell (née Stephen) and Virginia Stephen (soon to be Woolf)—worked together quietly indoors. It’s convenient to imagine a fire roaring nearby. England in late winter or early spring calls to mind chill, dampness, probable rain. Yes, there must have been a fire. The younger, Virginia (yes, that Virginia Woolf), knit or crocheted while listing left in an enveloping orange armchair. Vanessa, older by just two and a half years, propped her modest canvas nearby and captured something there of her sister’s writerly focus, her weaving together of threads to create pattern, beauty, something useful and of value. Crochet as corollary to writing. Women, the painting declares, at work. Painting, writing, crocheting. Women’s work, all of it.