The Story of Art Without Men

by Katy Hessel

If we aren’t seeing art by a wide range of people, we aren’t really seeing society, history or culture as a whole,

During the Victorian age, women, with their ‘smaller’, less ‘creative’ brains, were considered incapable of becoming professional artists and were often restricted to ‘craft’ or ‘design’ (genres not considered ‘fine art’ by the establishment). This perception made it very difficult not only for women to be taken seriously as artists, but for their (and their female predecessors’) work to be sold.

Having accepted only a few women since its inception, in 1770 the Académie Royale capped the number of female artists admitted to just four at any one time. Even more outrageous, following the deaths of two of its female founders in the early 1800s, the London Royal Academy failed to admit any more women for over a century.

‘Although the model is portrayed as emblematic of liberty, she can be assumed to have had little or no ability to influence the manner of her portrait’; confirming that Black people were regularly utilised as symbols rather than individuals, as Murrell notes, ‘which would have been the case if they had been European’.

The Roll Call depicted the soldiers’ suffering, agony and sorrow, illustrating Butler’s stated intent of 1922: ‘I never paint for the glory of war, but to portray its pathos and heroism.’

abolitionist which earned her enough money to travel to Europe – a decision made in part to escape the racial prejudice of America. She later told The New York Times in 1878: ‘The land of liberty had no room for a coloured sculptor.’ Arriving by boat in 1865, Lewis soon made her way to Rome. Here, inspired by the triumphant character of the Eternal City, she established a studio, experimented with marble, and developed her distinct Neoclassical style.

Following the death of her father, Ōi’s life fell into obscurity – not even her death was recorded. Perhaps she was always dependent on him, but another, unsurprising reason might be that she was the daughter of the most important Japanese ukiyo-e artist in history, Hokusai, famed for his remarkable print design Under the Wave off Kanagawa, 1831, nicknamed ‘The Great Wave’: she was being viewed in his shadow. Ōi was Hokusai’s foremost collaborator and assistant (he greatly admired her). Nevertheless, observing the masterful control of line and fineness of pigment that continued to characterise Hokusai’s later paintings (which became enormously influential for European artists from 1870 onwards), scholars are now debating just how much help she did provide towards the end of his life.

But the greatest changes were the growing freedoms for women, who protested for their rightful access to art education and won. This was challenging male and female roles, especially among the bourgeoisie, all the more since the most prominent art critic, John Ruskin, had proclaimed: ‘The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, creator, the discoverer. His intellect is for invention and speculation. But the woman’s intellect is not for invention or creation.’ Such an attitude made it difficult for British women to be taken seriously as professional artists. Taking matters into their own hands, they founded organisations, and at the dawn of the suffrage movement, slowly began to transform women’s role in British society.

‘Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that suits me’ — Claude Cahun, 1930

Male homosexuality had historically been the subject of much debate and legal scrutiny in Britain: until 1861 sodomy was punishable by death, and afterwards male homosexuality, even when acts were carried out in private, was a criminal offence. Female homosexuality, by contrast, was hardly ever mentioned. In 1921, when a Conservative MP suggested in Parliament that all ‘acts of gross indecency by females’ should be made illegal, the idea was swiftly dismissed for fear the very mention of such acts should lead women astray.

In the aftermath of the First World War, Europe was scarred by political chaos and the horrors that had been witnessed by so many. Millions had been killed, even more wounded, and artists turned to the imagination and the absurd for relief. So ‘Dada’ was born, an art that refused to define itself (and in the words of its founder, Tristan Tzara, meant ‘nothing’).

Responding to the era’s catastrophic events, the women of Dada were fearless, unafraid to poke fun at political leaders and caricature their male contemporaries.

but the Baroness’s exclusion from art history strikes me as utterly unjust (considering she was making ‘junk sculptures’ before Duchamp). No wonder she called him ‘Marcel Dushit’.

Labelled ‘degenerate’ by Hitler for not conforming to his German nationalistic ideology and instead embracing expression and modernity, modernist art was banned and sometimes even destroyed.

in the wake of the political crises and traumas of the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the fear of encroaching fascism across Europe, the artists, writers and thinkers of the Surrealist movement rejected ideas of conventionality and were drawn to the subconscious. They placed emphasis on the power of dreams and the dislocated imagery found in their fantasies or nightmares, engaging in the brutality of the body, in part influenced by the return of missing-limbed veterans from the front lines.

‘Men put me down as the best woman painter. I think I’m one of the best painters’ — Georgia O’Keeffe

she was given a major solo exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1955, despite this being a time of intense segregation. (As an African American woman, Hunter wasn’t officially allowed into the museum, but a friend smuggled her in nonetheless.) Painting until her old age, by the time of her death aged 102 she had created over 5,000 works.

According to Gail Levin, Lee Krasner’s biographer, ‘Pollock, too, employed astronomical themes in titles of the immediately succeeding years.’ His breakthrough ‘drip-paintings’ were introduced to the world in 1947. Surely, with the information we have, Sobel should be rightly credited as an influence on Pollock. Yet where is her name when his is so ubiquitous?

Leaving an incredible legacy and a formidable energy, Krasner, in my view, embodied the liberal woman: ‘I was a woman, Jewish, a widow, a damn good painter, thank you, and a little too independent …’

Running alongside the rise of mass culture, the role of women in society became increasingly complex: many were forced to renounce their wartime working roles in favour of the men returning from military service, and once more live a life of domesticity.

It fascinates me that ‘Body Art’ or ‘Performance Art’ is a genre dominated – and pioneered – by women. The female form has been commodified in art for centuries, so it seems apt that women would upend the very same tool and use it as a symbol of protest.

chewing gum (for me, a symbol of Americanisation), she said in 1980: ‘I chose gum because it’s the perfect metaphor for the American woman – chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out and pop in a new piece.’

The artists of the 1980s were radical. They responded to the social and political issues of the era by giving voice to their own personal histories, the climate crisis and under-represented communities, by attacking misogynistic institutions and making visible society’s treatment of women. Seeking new ways of using graphic media (the camera, video, projections, advertisements), they changed how museums thought about fine art subjects and ultimately paved the way for the 1990s, when institutions finally gave recognition to activism and art.

Zoe Leonard (born 1961) made one of the most moving works of the era, I want a president, 1992. Typed up as a statement originally intended for a queer magazine, and inspired by the great poet Eileen Myles, who had mounted their own presidential bid, I want a president combines progressive, empathetic sentences about Leonard’s hope for a new leader. Questioning the corruption of authorities, and leaders’ lack of humanity and openness to gender, race and class, today the work remains just as effective and, sadly, relevant (having been blown up on New York’s The High Line in the lead-up to Trump’s win in the 2016 US presidential election).

So, despite the urgency of all of these matters, perhaps we can expect people – including artists – to come together again. Artists in the West are living in the era of protest: Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Extinction Rebellion, change, progression. They are awake to fight issues of inclusivity and justice, hungry to learn and unlearn what they have been taught, examining and reinventing the representations of monuments, statues or artworks, ready to break down Eurocentric, white, male-focused curriculums and dominating patriarchal systems. No longer interested in one linear, single-minded view of the world, the future of art is in opening up a world without hierarchy. Right now, these issues are more present than ever in the work of contemporary artists.

Overlooked artists are not a trend. Women artists are not a trend. Queer artists are not a trend. Artists of colour are not a trend.