Women's Histories — Mariana Leme

Women’s Histories: Artists Before 1900
text for the exhibition catalog MASP, 2019

ARTICLE 1

Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. Social distinctions can be based only on the common utility.[1]

Women’s Histories is an exhibition that presents, chronologically, works by artists of different nationalities, in a long perspective, up until the latenineteenth century. As the title indicates, this is not about a single history, but about many of them, represented by artworks produced in Europe, the United States, Latin America (before and after colonization), India, the former Ottoman Empire, two countries of Mediterranean Africa (Morocco and Egypt), and Asia (Philippines and present-day Uzbekistan). But what are the exhibition’s criteria, beyond chronology and gender? Couldn’tit be just a random selection of artworks produced by women across anextended period of time?[2]

According to art historians Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard,“the coherent identity of the category of ‘woman’ is a theoreticalimpossibility,”[3] as it is impossible to merge such diversity into a singleword. Each woman is made of a personal combination of belonging—to a community, culture, territory, class, race, etc.—that informs a uniquepoint of view and experience of the world. However, there is a “political usefulness of thinking of women as a group”[4] as an effort to reevaluate social inequalities and historical distortions between men and women, as argued by Broude and Garrard, and proposed in the current exhibition.

The aesthetic, thematic, and technical diversity of the exhibited artworks demonstrates that the artists were part of a myriad different groups that constitute the narratives of art history.[5] Furthermore, it is evident that, in fact, there is no common feature, or “feminine way,” of creating or understanding the surrounding world—despite what some historians and critics insist on asserting when it comes to artworks produced by women.[6] The diffculty in ﬁnding connections between the works might turn into strength, if it challenges relevant issuessurrounding two key criteria in art history: the difference in value betweenmen and women artists and between art and craft (which have cometo be considered equivalent categories, as we shall see below). Linda Nochlin (1931–2017), art historian and critic who played a fundamentalrole in historically repositioning female artists, approaches the issueas follows:

A feminist critique of the discipline of art history is needed which can pierce cultural-ideological limitations to reveal biases and inadequacies not only in regard to the question of women artists, but the formulation of crucial questions of the discipline as a whole. Thus the so-called woman question, far from being a peripheral sub-issue, can become a catalyst, a potent intellectual instrument probing the most basic and “natural” assumptions, providing a paradigm for other kinds of internal questioning, and providing links with paradigmsin other ﬁelds.[7]

The analysis of the categories of male and female unfolds into more complex issues that concern not only the access of men and women to the art circuit or to education in general, but also the way that symbolic value differences can alter the perception of an artwork. For art historian John Berger (1926–2017), this means that “the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.”[8] Therefore, in order tounderstand the several women’s histories, we must consider the following question: in which ways do the categories of symbolic classiﬁcationthat comprise the canonic narrative of Western art—white, male, and Eurocentric—affect our interpretation of the artworks? Addressing this issue, art historian, critic, and activist Lucy Lippard argues:

The most valid objection to the notion of a “women’s art” is the basic fear that an individual’s art will not be seen with a free eye, or seen with equal concentration, or seen as one intended it, or seen at all, if preconceptions and categorizations overwhelm it. But it would benaive not to realize the extent to which this is already true in today’sart world. I wince when I hear all the lovely variety of women’s artlumped together as a single entity. Nor do I think all art by womenor all feminist art is good art. At the moment that’s not even the point,because I’m questioning what good art is anyway.[9]

What does “good art” or simply “art” means in relation to other practices considered minor, both within and outside the canon? What are the evaluation methods and criteria used and what do they represent? As mentioned before, as well as a number of categories that inform arthistory (such as beauty, truth, genius, civilization), criteria such as art/craft and male/female inform the way we see artworks, through the dissimulation of their actual purposes or meanings. The symbolic values that underpin classiﬁcation criteria—which are perceived as objective—conceal the politics behind the images and their interpretations. Berger concludes: “In the end, the art of the past is being mystiﬁed because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes.”[10]

From a desire for change and reparation for historical inequalities, these issues have taken center stage in this exhibition as an attempt topresent multiple and possible Women’s Histories. Only then will women artists from the past be seen in their full complexity and not as the footnotes of traditional history, or even as examples that illustrate the historical subaltern position of women in society. In a few words: why is a male artist simply an “artist” when female artists are still referred to as “women artists”?[11] If an artist’s gender inﬂuences value judgements, we must dismantle the hierarchy based on biased symbolic criteria that compromise the way we interpret artworks and that have real impacton social groups identifying as female.

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ARTICLE 4

Liberty and justice consist of restoring all that belongs to others; thus, the only limits on the exercise of the natural rights of woman are perpetual male tyranny: these limits are to be reformed by the laws of nature and reason.

If the category of “woman” is a theoretical impossibility, there is certainly a biological sense of sexual differentiation—the woman as the “female human,” according to philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986).[12] There is also another sense that is simultaneously social, cultural, andsymbolic—a space of value assignment that operates through opposingpairs, as explained by historians Arlette Farge and Natalie Zemon Davis:

The differences between the sexes is a space: a place where inequality is rationalized in order to be transcended, a place where events shape reality, an imaginary and imagined place that pictures, ﬁctions, and documents describe in very different ways.[13]

Disclosing women’s histories must begin by acknowledging this rationalization of inequalities in theoretical terms. In art history, we can cite many debates, treatises, and theories that draw on pairs: order/chaos,drawing/color, development/crisis, ﬁgurative/abstract, male/female,objective/subjective, universal/conditional, etc.[14] There is, therefore, a perceived equivalence, on the one hand, between objectivity, reason, and masculinity, and on the other, between subjectivity, emotion, and femininity, even though these are, as argued by curator, art historian, and critic Abigail Solomon-Godeau, unequal parallels[15] “permeated witha violence that both underpins and ratiﬁes their hierarchy.”[16]

In his essay “Reﬂections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Paintingand Sculpture” (1755), the inﬂuential archeologist Johann JoachimWinckelmann (1717–1768) argues that the beauty and nobility of classic statues transcend the “usual form of matter.” They are an intellectual overpowering of its conditional aspect. Winckelmann concludes that:

The general and most distinctive characteristics of the Greek masterpieces are, ﬁnally, a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur, bothin posture and expression. Just as the depths of the sea always remain calm however much the surface may rage, so does the expressionof the ﬁgures of the Greeks reveal a great and composed soul evenin the midst of passion.[17]

Further on, Winckelmann refers to a letter from Italian painter Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520) to demonstrate that beauty and idealization are corresponding concepts, which in turn are opposed to femininity. Raphael explains his methods for making the frescoThe Triumph of Galatea and summarizes this philosophical tradition of art in a few words: “As beauty is rare among women, I make use of a certain image provided by my imagination.”[18] The painter transcends the material reality personiﬁed by women and uses his imagination to reach beauty, which is a male ideal. (It is interesting to note that the two female ﬁgures in his fresco have masculine bodies.) Conversely, we might postulate that if art is conjured through beauty, intellect, and imagination, women not only lack beauty, as argued by the painter, but also are fundamentally incapable of creating something as exceptional as art.[19]

The perceived equivalence between the “inferiority” of a conditional world and women is so widespread that we can collate three very distant sources that practically repeat the same argument. In 1374, Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) published De claris mulieribus [On Famous Women] and explained his reasons for writing the book: “I thoughtthat these achievements merited some praise because the art of paintingis mostly alien to the feminine mind.”[20] In his “Theory of the Natural Progress of Human Society” from 1839, French sociologist Auguste Comte (1798–1857) argues, “It is indisputable that women are, in general, superior to men in a spontaneous expansion of sympathy and sociability, as they are inferior to men in understanding and reason.”[21] Another French art critic, who has now faded into obscurity, stated in 1905, “So long as a woman refrains from unsexing herself by acquiring genius, let her dabblein anything. The woman of genius does not exist, but when she does she is a man.”[22]

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ARTICLE 6

The law must be the expression of the general will; all female and male citizens must contribute either personally or through their representatives to its formation; it must be the same for all: male and female citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, must be equally admitted to all honors, positions, and public employment according to their capacity and without other distinctions besides those of their virtues and talents.

If, on one hand, we must recognize the symbolic structures of sexual difference, on the other, we must acknowledge that even though pairs of concepts are crucial discursive tools, they are not ﬁxed. There certainly are inequality and unevenness between male and female, but this theoretical space of difference is “also a moving and tense space where women, who neither are inevitably victims or exceptional heroines, strivein many different ways to be historical subjects.”[23] That is, more than a position attributed to the female in relation to the male, the concept ofthe several histories of women reﬂects the idea of position and agency, so their artworks can be seen from a difference place, more ﬂuidly, with the understanding of women as active participants in their histories. As it was often argued, “women could not create art […] only children; women were thought to be incapable of divine artistic genius”; however:

When artists such as Sofonisba Anguissola [1532–1625], Artemisia Gentileschi [1593–1653], and Elisabetta Sirani [1638–1665] opposed the socially constituted deﬁnitions of their sex, producing paintings that reversed normative female models, they set in motion cultural resistance to their agency. It is important to see that a dynamicis involved: the artistic agendas of these painters were formed in part by their personal responses to existing gender structures.[24]

Among the normative models, one of the frameworks of gender difference draws on the opposition between public and private. The most obvious distinction is to link men to the public sphere—which is effectively occupied by them, in politics, courts, universities, and art academies—and womento the private sphere, either symbolically or within the reality of middle-and upper-class women.[25] In this sense, Anguissola, Gentileschi, and Sirani subverted female norms while transgressing rules, questioning values, and establishing their position. Writer and theorist of feminism and visual policies bell hooks makes us question the body, something perceived as a material constraint that becomes a valuable resource:

To transgress I must move past boundaries, I must push againstto go forward. Nothing changes in the world if no one is willing to make this movement. [...] The fact that the word transgress appears most often in discussions of the sexual is an indication that the body is the fundamental boundary of self. To transgress we must return to the body.[26]

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ARTICLE 13
For the support of the public force and the expenses of administration, the contributions of woman and man are equal; she shares all the duties and all the painful tasks; therefore, she must have the same share in the distribution of positions, employment, offices, honors, and jobs.

The body is contingent: existing within the real world, it suffers from its consequences; it deforms with the passing of time; it is subject to death. Therefore, the body is an antithesis to the idea of a transcendental, ideal, beautiful world (all of them esteemed ideas within the Western canon) and is, as such, associated with the female—to the intimacy of domestic space and to the so-called minor arts.

Since the work of pioneering art critics Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) and Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), the “ﬁne arts” have been those within the public sphere: monumental sculptures and paintings that narrate historical events and architectural designs, that is, works that are symbolically male and ideally produced by men. And this is when thevalue of individual authorship is established. As explained by art historianWhitney Chadwick:

The origins of art history’s focus on the personalities and work of exceptional individuals can be traced back to the early Renaissance desire to celebrate Italian cities and the achievements of their more remarkable male citizens. The new ideal of the artist as a learned man and the work of art as the unique expression of a gifted individual ﬁrst appear in Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise, On Painting, published in 1435.[27]

Such value criteria contained a desire for geopolitical affirmation of rich Italian cities over other territories with which they maintained commercialand cultural ties in the Mediterranean. The original discourse contained the assumption that the artifacts produced by Italian citizens were“art,” that is, superior to objects produced by other peoples and nations, regardless of their sophistication and precision. One could argue that these geopolitical value criteria in art expanded and solidiﬁed with thecolonization of American, African, and Asian territories.

As we know, colonial discourse tends to show contempt for the cultural production of subjugated populations, even though the quality of some “overseas” objects was acknowledged. For instance, on July 10, 1519, Hernán Cortés (1485–1547), the “conqueror” heading the expedition incharge of destroying the Aztecs, wrote to the Spanish king reporting that “the so-called Monteczuma offered me some clothes that could not have been better woven anywhere else in the world,”[28] and some samples weresent to the king. In 1568, in the region of Chucuito, present-day Peru, thereare records showing that around one thousand Incan garments were donated to Spanish administrators.[29] In 1689, the Danish king acquired for his collection a Tupinambá cloak made of red feathers, which currently belongs to the ethnographic collection of the National Museum of Copenhagen. In the late 1800s, Dominique Vivant-Denon (1747–1825), the ﬁrst director of the Louvre, traveled to the French colonies of North Africa to collect the most sophisticated local objects and artifacts to bringback to France.[30]

Therefore, gender differences, in the scope of Western art history, were established via interwoven power relations that involved not only men and women, but also political disputes and colonial investments. This space, which marked the rationalization of difference and has been crystallized throughout the centuries, is strongly founded on the narrativeof difference: Renaissance men—particularly those linked to Florence—were more “truthful” than the “others.” In this sense the “others” couldbe many others: Native Americans, Africans, Asians, women—and even the Europeans who preceded them—whose art production was based on corporations rather than on individual authorship.

As well as paintings, Women’s Histories also presents artworks outside the canon of the ﬁne arts—or, rather, that do not derive from it: textiles whose manufacture is traditionally linked to women. It is widely knownthat the production of textiles—in many cultures but not all of them—is attributed to one or many women, albeit anonymous. The evidence of women’s creation is the weaving tools that have been recurrently foundin female graves, the iconography of women weaving or sewing (depictedon vases and papyri, and captured in photographs), as well as the many accounts and traditions that survive to this day. Even though speciﬁc creator names have been lost (which makes cataloguing and researching difficult), looking at the astonishing complexity of these textiles next to the paintings helps us rethink the value criteria of the Western canon—starting with gender difference.

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ARTICLE 16
No society has a constitution without the guarantee of rights and the separation of powers; the constitution is null if the majority of individuals comprising the nation have not cooperated in drafting it.

Women’s Histories is informed and inspired by accumulated knowledge. For instance, as early as the nineteenth century, the Union of Women Painters and Sculptors in Paris organized a number of salons dedicatedto the work of women artists. Their ﬁrst exhibition in 1882 brought together thirty artists, and seven years later, over 400. In 1905, the book Women Painters of the World: From the Time of Caterina Vigri, 1413–1463, to Rosa Bonheur and the Present Day was published in England.[31] In Brazil, between 1960 and 1961, the Museu de Arte Moderna, in São Paulo, hosted the exhibition Contribuição das mulheres às artes plásticas no país Women Artists, which covered a wide temporal arc: from 1550 to1950.[32] More recently in Brazil, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo hosted Mulheres pintoras: a casa e o mundo [Women Painters: The House andthe World], curated by Ruth Sprung Tarasantchi in 2004, and Mulheres artistas: as pioneiras [Women Artists: The Pioneers], curated by Ana Paula Cavalcanti Simioni and Elaine Dias in 2015.

As I have sought to argue, to reclaim the work of “forgotten” women artists is a powerful exercise in destabilizing the criteria of value and difference that conjure Western art history. Furthermore, if the idea of art was invented in Italy between the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries, it seems that we, Latin Americans, are well aware that “artistic” objects—that is, complex objects in terms of aesthetics, technique, and their relationship with society—are much older than that. Civilizations of great cultural relevance emerged in our territory much earlier than the arrival of colonizers (including a number of civilizations that still exist), without mentioning the ancestral cultures that were brought by enslaved African men and women who were forced to migrate to the American continent. Thus, perhaps Latin America is in a privileged position to reﬂect on the different women’s histories and the art history canon.[33] Departing from a desire to reevaluate an unequal, distorted, and racist narrative, perhaps we could argue that the debate about the place of women artists in art history challenges us to carry out a critical and de-colonialized review of subaltern material cultures. Such is the power and potential of the work of women artists.

Translated from the Portuguese by Adriana Francisco

Notes
[1] Olympe de Gouges (pseudonym of Marie Gouze, 1748–1793), “Déclarationdes droits de la femme et de la citoyenne” [Declaration of the Rights of Women and of the Female Citizen], Paris, 1791. Excerpts from the legal text are used in this essay’s epigraphs. Gouges was a writer, playwright, and abolitionist. She is considered one of the ﬁrst feminists in France. Because of her political activities, she was sentenced to the guillotine at forty-ﬁve years of age. The original text is available here: https://gallica.bnf.fr/essentiels/anthologie/declaration-droits-femme-citoyenne-0, last accessed April 12, 2019. The English translation canbe found here: https://csivc.csi.cuny.edu/americanstudies/ﬁles/lavender/decwom2.html, last accessed June 24, 2019.
[2] Group shows with women artists have been happening for more than 100 years. Some researchers even suggest that it constitutes an autonomous research ﬁeld, independent from museum studies. See Hanna Alkema and Catherine Dossin, eds.,“WAS—Women Artists Shows.Salons.Societies—Group Exhibitions of WomenArtists 1876–1976,” Artl@s Bulletin 8, no. 1 (2019), published on the occasion of aseminar that took place in Paris in December2017. Presentations are available at: https://awarewomenartists.com/en/nos_evenements/was-women-artists-shows-salons-societies-expositions-collectives-de-femmes-artistes-1876–1976/, last accessed May 23, 2019.
[3] Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds., Reclaiming Female Agency: FeministArt History after Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 2.
[4] Broude and Garrard, 2.
[5] We see similar diversity among male artists in the MASP collection exhibited on the museum’s second ﬂoor. The works that are exhibited or have been exhibited inAcervo em transformação [Picture Galleryin Transformation] are an interesting reﬂection in relation toWomen’s Histories. If we use the same temporal criteria (artists up until 1900), we have a composition that is almost entirely male, with few exceptions: a self-portrait by Alcipe and four anonymous Marajoara urns.
[6] The case of Dutch painter Judith Leyster (1609–1660) is emblematic. “Forgotten” shortly after her death, she was “rediscovered” when in 1893, the Louvre bought a work attributed to Frans Hals (1582–1666). After a round of cleaning, a different signature, in the shape of a star, was found. Subsequently, several documents were uncovered, revealing the artist’s identity. Leyster was a member of the prestigious Guild of St Luke. She also sued her colleague Hals for a money debt. Once the painter’s identity was rectiﬁed, art critics and historians started to note “delicate” and “feminine” traces that were not there before. See James A. Weluand Pieter Biesboer, Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World (Haarlem/Massachusetts: Frans Halsmuseum/Worcester Art Museum, 1993), particularly Frima Fox Hofrichter’s essay, “The Eclipse of a Leading Star,” pp. 115–21.
[7] Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Art and Sexual Politics, eds. Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth C. Baker (New York: Collier, 1971), p. 2.
[8] John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 8.
[9] Lucy Lippard, “Projecting a Feminist Criticism,” Art Journal, no. 35 (1976), p. 338.
[10] Berger, 11.
[11] Permanently deﬁning an artist as a woman is something that happens explicitly—with the use of the words womanor female —or via more subtle strategies, such as the repetitive use of their ﬁrst names. Men are usually referred to by their surnames—Botticelli, Caravaggio, Chardin, Gauguin, etc.—while women carry their gender denominator: Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Leyster,Angelica Kauffmann, Mary Cassatt, etc. Another difficulty faced by scholars is the fact that women often change their surname after marriage.
[12] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Random House, 2014), 31–65. “Woman? Very simple, say those who like simple answers: she is a womb, an ovary, she is a female: this word is enough to deﬁne her.”
[13] Arlette Farge and Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women and Historical Actors,” in A History of Women in the West: Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes, ed. Michelle Perrot (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 4.
[14] Heinrich Wölfflin, Conceitos fundamentais da história da arte (São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2015).
[15] Beauvoir, The Second Sex: “It would never occur to a man to write a book on the singular situation of males in humanity. If I want to deﬁne myself, I ﬁrst have to say ‘I ama woman’; […] the man represents both the positive and the neuter to such an extent that in French hommes designates human beings […] Woman is the negative, to such a point that any determination is imputed to her as a limitation, without reciprocity.”
[16] Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Mistaken Identities (Santa Barbara: University of California Press, 1993), p. 21.
[17] Johann Joachim Winckelmann, “Reﬂections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, eds. Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2007), p. 592.
[18] Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006), p. 816.
[19] Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the argument gained scientiﬁc authority: “Amongst the latter [men], the central lobes—where it is agreed that the organ of intellectual operations and superior psychic functions is situated—are dominant; they are much more beautiful and voluminous amongst the most civilized races. With women, it is the occipital lobes which are the most developed and have more importance and it is in them that physiology situates the emotive and sensitive centers. This, moreover, corresponds well with the psychological character of the two sexes, the masculine sex having more intelligence whilst women are gifted witha great sensibility.” J. Lourbet, Le problème des sexes (Paris, 1900), 44, cited in Tamar Garb “L’art féminin,” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), p. 217.
[20] Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 251.
[21] Auguste Comte, cited in Broude and Garrard, eds., The Expanding Discourse, op. cit., p. 218.
[22] Octave Uzanne, La femme moderne (Paris, 1912), in Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 8.
[23] Farge and Zemon Davis, 14–15. In the original, the authors use a play on words to feminize the word sujet into sujette (which does not exist in the French dictionary).
[24] Broude and Garrard, eds., The Expanding Discourse, p. 4.
[25] As demonstrated by philosopher Angela Davis, the myth of the woman linked to domestic chores is a powerful ideological discourse, which was never used when the female workforce was made necessary for the economy, both within the slavery system and the industrial capitalist system. See Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Random House, 2011), particularly Chapter 9. Unfortunately, this discussion goes beyond the scope of this essay, which deals with theidea of the feminine rather than the reality of women.
[26] bell hooks, “Being the Subject of Art,” in Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New York: The New Press, 1995), p. 133.
[27] Whitney Chadwick, “Art History and the Woman Artist,” in Women, Art, and Society (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2007), p. 17.
[28] Elena Philips, “The Iberian Globe.Textile Traditions and Trade in LatinAmerica,” in Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800, ed. Amelia Peck (New York: The MetropolitanMuseum of Art, 2014), pp. 30–32.
[29] Silvio Arturo Zavala, El Servicio personal de los indios en Perú: Extractos del siglo XVI–XVIII (Ciudad de México: El Colégio de México, 1978), cited in Philips, 312, note 12.
[30] I would like to thank Helouise Costa for this information.
[31] Walter Shaw Sparrow, ed., Women Painters of the World (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1905), available at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39000?msg=welcome_stranger, last accessed April 24, 2019.
[32] Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists, 1550–1950 (Los Angeles/New York: LACMA/Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).
[33] On the topic of a feminism of “differences” as opposed to a feminism of “binary difference” from the perspective of Latin American, see Nelly Richard, “Feminismo, experiência e representação,” in Histórias das mulheres, histórias feministas: antologia (São Paulo: MASP, 2019).