The Story of Art Without Men

by Katy Hessel

For those reading this in North America, Burke might mean more to you than you realise – you could even be carrying one of her portraits around with you now. In 1943, she won a commission to sculpt a bronze relief sculpture of then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he didn’t survive to see the final version. As a result of his death, another engraving – this time by John Sinnock – was commissioned for the 1946 US dime, a version that was strikingly (some might say uncoincidentally) like Burke’s. Outraged at the similarity, she demanded the FBI investigate this case. Unsurprisingly, they did not, and Sinnock never credited her. I strongly agree with those who say Burke should be celebrated for this artwork, and his ‘JS’ initials should be replaced by her ‘SB’. The debate continues today.

O’Keeffe was a painter who I believe forged a more original artistic language for landscape than that of anyone else in America at the time. She was always fascinated by the natural world, and the subjects of her paintings in the early years were of natural forms (flowers, trees, shells) and cityscapes filled with electrically lit skyscrapers. In 1929, when she began to spend summers in the high desert of Northern New Mexico, O’Keeffe turned to adobe churches, animal skulls and the vastness of the American Southwest – opening a new vocabulary for American art.

Never afraid to enter into terrifying places, on the same day she left Dachau, Miller – along with her friend the Jewish photojournalist David E. Scherman – broke into Hitler’s Munich apartment. It was here that they famously photographed Miller sitting in Hitler’s bath, his muddied bathmat evidently stained by her military boots.

Miller eventually moved back to England in 1946, settling at Farley’s Farm in Sussex – which was no doubt an abrupt shift from her active, dramatic life. She attempted to adjust to normality, but struggled. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Miller channelled her great energy into becoming a chef, the only profession her son, Antony (born 1947), thought his mother had had. It was not until a year after Miller’s death in 1977, when Antony’s wife found ‘20,000 original photographs and 60,000 negatives’ in the family attic, that the truth of her life was revealed. Antony, and his daughter, Ami, have since dedicated themselves to uncovering the life and art of this exceptional photographer.

Never before has such a vast work dealt with so much immediate and traumatic imagery, which physically collapses as she tries to tell her stories: bodies falling vertically and horizontally, monstrous figures towering in tight hallways, the young Charlotte gazing up longingly to the angels in heaven expecting to receive a letter from her deceased mother. Exactly as titled, the barriers between life and theatre are indistinct, and despite the imagery of death throughout, there are scenes evoking the joy of life, with glimpses of beauty in luscious gardens, declarations of love, music, painting by lakes, with Salomon exclaiming at the end, ‘I will live for them all.’ The most confronting, intimate and powerful visual record of a life ever told, Salomon’s Life? Or Theatre? reveals a woman who used art to deal with her feelings of terror, love, passion, rage and survival. In 1943, Salomon’s life was cut short. Along with her new husband, she was rounded up in France and deported to the extermination camp at Auschwitz, where she died aged twenty-six, five months pregnant.

I think it’s important to acknowledge Moss’s queer identity when thinking about why they worked in a Constructivist language: a style devoid of external reference, which feels universal, and not necessarily tied to the binaries of gender. However, I also acknowledge that other artists, such as Mondrian, considered vertical and horizontal lines to stand in for masculine and feminine binaries.)

Dropping out of the Slade Art School in 1919 (recalling, ‘I destroyed my own personality and created a new one’), Moss went to Paris in 1927 to study, where they were brought to the attention of Piet Mondrian (who they are now recognised to have influenced). Taken by the recent technological advances of the early twentieth century, Moss developed their ‘Constructivist’ language in dialogue with Mondrian, inventing the ‘double-line’ (two thin black lines running in parallel with each other), often with block primary colours.

Prunella Clough (1919–99) was another prominent artist, whose visual language reflected the impact of industrialism and the degeneration of the urban landscape – she looked to paving stones and wire fences as if to accentuate the mundane marks in our everyday lives.

In March 1920, though, her life suddenly changed. Controlled by higher powers, in a ‘trance-like state’, Gill began embroidering and producing ink drawings at aggressive speed. Later admitted to hospital, where she was put under the care of Dr Helen Boyle, a progressive doctor who encouraged her automatic drawings and writings, Gill’s artistic practice thrived and was championed by her son, Laurie.

‘Painting is not separate from life. It is one. It is like asking – do I want to live? My answer is yes – and I paint’ — Lee Krasner, 1960

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) pioneered a ‘soak-stain’ technique that formed the basis of what became known as ‘Colour Field’ painting. Merging tradition with a new style of abstract painting, her work proved both instrumental and disruptive to the movement. Frankenthaler broke ground by removing her canvas from the easel and placing it on the floor, which, in her words, was an act of ‘dishonouring everything that painting had been about, assuming that you knew everything it was about’.

Frankenthaler later enrolled at Bennington College, where, a year after graduating, in 1950, when tasked with organising an exhibition of alumni, she invited the influential critic Clement Greenberg to visit – which he did (after she promised him ‘martinis and Manhattans’!).

Ono’s radical work Cut Piece, 1964/1965, took the world by storm. First performed in Kyoto and then New York, Cut Piece questioned the power of trust and was one of the earliest works to invite audience participation. It saw Ono kneel, still and silent, on a vast stage, initially dressed in a black suit, with a pair of scissors laid out in front of her. After inviting the viewer to contribute to the work – by giving them the licence to cut up her clothes (and keep them, as they wished) – Ono soon became more and more exposed. An act (or symbol) of violence, Cut Piece amplified and confronted the sexual aggression directed towards women, while also alluding to their constant vulnerability in an oppressive society.

Artists have been working with textiles for hundreds, if not thousands, of years: for function (clothes, blankets and even sound-proofing devices); as political tools (such as the banners made by the Suffragettes); for the purposes of storytelling and communication; or as a medium for self-expression. Using natural and synthetic fibres, ancient techniques and modern ones – stitching, quilting and weaving, bundling together old clothing or using found objects – artists have configured wall-hangings, three-dimensional sculptures, and giant, immersive installations.

Even in the twentieth century, schools such as the Bauhaus, which sought to diminish hierarchies between artforms, revealed its gender and form hierarchy by sending women off to the weaving workshop. And if you need any more convincing that it was Western patriarchal ideals that forced these associations slowly into existence, it might come as no surprise that Le Corbusier was once quoted as saying: ‘There is a hierarchy in the arts: decorative art at the bottom, and human forms at the top. Because we are men.’

In America, the self-taught Judith Scott (1943–2005) was using fibre in a completely different way. Her fluid and complex sculptures merge wheels, trolleys, locks and chairs with bundles of threads – some of these pieces she would work on for six hours straight, or months at a time. While Scott has often been positioned alongside those in ‘Art Beyond the Mainstream’, I believe she deserves to be placed among the greatest innovators of fibre. Her inventive methods and obsessively spun sculptures cocoon found objects and function as a form of communication – which is particularly extraordinary for someone who couldn’t hear or speak verbally. Born with Down’s syndrome and an undiagnosed deafness, from the age of seven Scott’s family placed her in a series of mental institutions. She endured horrific conditions for more than thirty-five years, until 1985,

Kelly’s aim was to communicate a mother’s psychological experience to the viewer – a subject matter previously unheard of in male-dominated Conceptual Art. Not only did she challenge representations of motherhood in art history, but she also deepened our contemporary understanding of a mother’s role and inner life. But when exhibited at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1976, the Post-Partum Document was met with some controversy; a few critics were outraged at the inclusion of stained nappy liners inside a pristine, white-walled gallery. Yet today it is embraced as a landmark moment in feminist and Conceptual Art, lauded for its candid exploration of motherhood and for its unconventional, non-figurative visualisation of a ‘mother and child’, one of the oldest and most traditional subjects in Western art history.

Of covering herself in tiny labial sculptures made from 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.’

I now wish to turn your attention to artists who took charge, upended and visually reinvented a medium so deeply ingrained with patriarchy: figurative painting. For centuries, figurative painting had been almost entirely dominated by men, with their images of objectified, idealised female nudes – ‘men look, and women appear’, as the art historian John Berger summarised in 1972.

Describing herself as a ‘collector of souls’, Neel painted every sitter in her distinctively thick, dry, blue outlines – lines that, to me, enhance expression. Capturing the conversation or encounter she had with her sitters beyond the surfaces they projected, Neel challenges how both men and women had previously been idealised in painting. She reveals their tensions and imperfections, but mostly their vulnerability. For me, her most striking portrait is the eponymously titled Andy Warhol, 1970. Painted one year after his attempted assassination, she depicted him as gaunt, faded and fragile. It’s as if he is sinking into the canvas towards death, with his closed eyes, exposed scars, yellow flesh and bony hands; his context reduced to a muddy amber line making up his seat, worlds away from the glamorous superficiality of his own paintings and prints.

I wanted to end this section with what I like to think of as the ‘icon’ of the decade: The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago: a monumental installation honouring thirty-nine Western historical and mythological women in the form of place settings. Collectively worked on by more than 100 women between 1974 and 1979, The Dinner Party stretches across a colossal, purposefully non-hierarchical, ‘Minimalist’ triangle, as if to finally award women a ‘seat at the table’. Each place incorporates a yonic-shaped ceramic plate and hand-embroidered cloth (materials traditionally dismissed as ‘feminine’ and ‘decorative’) emblazoned with the name of a notable woman: from artists Artemisia Gentileschi and Georgia O’Keeffe, writer Virginia Woolf and poet Emily Dickinson, women’s suffrage activist Susan B. Anthony and abolitionist Sojourner Truth. Housed in the centre on shiny, porcelain tiles are the names of a further 999 notable women. Theatrical and vast, visiting The Dinner Party is like embarking on a pilgrimage, complete with medievalesque flags drenched in rich, regal colours. Although undoubtedly significant, in recent times this work has been criticised for its severe non-white representation: only one woman of colour has been ‘invited’. Critically responding to the work in 2019, artist and activist Patricia Kaersenhout constructed Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Too? to lionise women of colour, such as activist and drag queen Marsha P. Johnson and Haitian revolutionary Sanité Bélair.

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974–9

saw this brooklyn museum 2013

Exposing the reality of New York institutions, by using humorous graphics and tag lines (When Racism & Sexism Are No Longer Fashionable, What Will Your Art Collection Be Worth?), the Guerrilla Girls brought public attention to the inequalities and systematic discriminations in the art world, and ultimately asked just how did museums get away with celebrating the history of patriarchy instead of the history of art?

Guerrilla Girls, Do Women Have to be Naked to get into the Met. Museum?, 1989

Made up of seventy small black-and-white images of unnervingly familiar (and disturbing) filmic characters, as if trapped under a dominant gaze of a male director, Sherman plays the blonde pin-up, the perfect housewife and the secretarial graduate about to take on the big city. At other times she is stranded alone on a wide-open road, or bruised, beaten, emotionally tense and in tears. Although we know Sherman’s works are imaginary constructs, I find they present us with versions of the truth.

Probing ideas of theatricality, contradiction (power v. vulnerability, truth v. fiction, history v. the contemporary, presence v. absence), and the use of self as both model and photographer, Francesca Woodman (1958–81) created in her short life over 800 photographs. Raised between Denver and Tuscany in an artistic family (her mother was the famed ceramicist Betty Woodman), Woodman first picked up a camera aged thirteen. Although that’s nothing these days, her Self-Portrait at 13, 1972, feels so sophisticated and technically advanced, while also evocative of her later style: a visibly shielded face, bodies dissolving and evolving in and out of focus, and employing what became her signature small-scale, square, black-and-white format. Studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, with a highly influential year abroad in Italy, Woodman used everything from scientific laboratories to derelict-looking interiors (with exposed floorboards and peeling wallpapers) as sets for her atmospheric photographs. Distorting her semi-nude or nude body using a long shutter speed for movement, and shards of shattered glass or mirrors for harsh lines and light, Woodman pushed the limits of photography and built a space, much like her contemporaries, between the real and surreal. When Woodman moved to New York in 1979, though, she struggled to find work and exhibited very little. Many records remain of her brilliant, but unsuccessful, grant applications. We don’t know why, but in January 1981,...

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.

The 1990s are often viewed to be flanked by two major political events: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the September 11 attacks on New York City in 2001. Within that space of time the world felt the effects of globalisation, with increased travel, mass communication and new economic structures, but also experienced political, cultural and economic shifts that transmuted art. Politically, it saw the rise of New Labour in Britain, the election of Bill Clinton as President of America, and the end of apartheid in South Africa. The battle against the AIDS epidemic persisted, continued racial injustice triggered the LA riots, and the growth of the internet saw the acceleration of the technological revolution, and the rise of celebrity culture.

But they also emanate a brutal honesty: the woman silently screaming in animalistic-like form, unable to escape the confines of her frame (Dog Woman, 1994), or those undergoing unsafe abortions (the Untitled series, 1998–9). The latter, a series documenting women’s weighty bodies with psychological and physical anguish, was created in the wake of Portugal’s failed 1998 referendum to legalise abortion, raising awareness for these dangerous procedures. These images were used as propaganda during the successful campaign in 2007 to allow women access to safe abortions, and were credited by the then-president as having contributed to the successful outcome.

With rising unemployment rates, the destruction of the unions, the premiership of Margaret Thatcher and a growing right-wing conservatism, a group of young, defiant artists exploded onto the British art scene who would collectively come to be known as the Black Arts Movement. Born out of the active political energy of the radical West Midlands-based Blk Art Group (spearheaded by Claudette Johnson and Marlene Smith) who united in 1979, their mandate was to disrupt, discuss and debate what was deemed ‘British Art’. Claiming a Black British identity with their bold, powerful and explicitly political work, the artists worked in a variety of materials, styles and subjects to fight the discrimination of the British art world. (Note: it wasn’t until 1987 that a work by a Black British female artist, Sonia Boyce, even entered the Tate’s collection.)

Interpolating poetry with theatre, painting with collage, these exhibitions signified the advent of a group who championed the presence and preservation of Black artists. Fighting injustices and addressing urgent, anti-racist issues through their work – subjects so visibly present in today’s art – they are, in my opinion, the reason for the relevance of British art today. As proven by Lubaina Himid’s triumphant 2017 Turner Prize win (as the first woman of colour), and Boyce’s representation for Britain at the 2022 Venice Biennale.

What does art look like today? Well, it’s never looked more varied or, to me, more powerful. Artists of the new millennium are tackling complex themes cleverly, explicitly and on such grand scales. They are rewriting lost pasts and exposing historical truths, decolonising art history, challenging and reinventing what we think of as ‘monuments’, and employing utopian and dystopian themes or returning to figurative painting to make sense of our time. Women and people of colour have achieved senior institutional roles. Technology has shifted the way we consume, educate and physically view and experience art, and there’s no denying that the rise in equality within this creative sphere has been aided by democratic internet-based platforms. Political events have also been a driving force for artistic change: the September 11 attacks and the war on Iraq, the Obama administration and the dark years of Trump in the US, the refugee crisis, the looming climate crisis, and the rise of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements around the world. It is through a vast range of visual forms that artists reflect our ever-developing, contradictory world.

‘I feel like I see paint as a living thing in itself. And I envy it because it just holds so much character’ — Jadé Fadojutimi, 2020

Today, the world seems to be moving faster than it is turning: consumed by social media, with news stories released and forgotten at an unsettlingly rapid pace; more economically, politically and socially divided than in the lifetimes of previous generations; a deafeningly threatening climate crisis; major cuts to the arts; and an awareness that we will be dealing with the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and Putin’s warmongering for decades to come. Where does the world stand in the 2020s, and what is the role of art, and the artist? In previous historical crises art changed drastically: following the Second World War artists turned to abstraction and performance – perhaps to make sense of the events witnessed – and at other times, such as the AIDS epidemic, artists came together to campaign for the visibility of neglected and disregarded communities.

As the world resets, so must art history.