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

by Bridget Quinn

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.”