1_Women Artists’ In_Visibility—The Omnipresence of a Rather Old Phenomenon

When it comes to the representation of women artists either in art historical research, in the media, or in exhibitions, the viewer and reader cannot avoid observing the inflationary use of the terms visibility and invisibility. This fact is most certainly owed to the great and seemingly growing number of projects, especially exhibitions, which are specifically dedicated to women artists, and which consider themselves to be contributing to raising awareness thereof. In 2019, for example, the National Gallery in Berlin organized the exhibition Kampf um Sichtbarkeit. Künstlerinnen der Nationalgalerie vor 1919 (English title: Fighting for Visibility: Women Artists in the Nationalgalerie before 1919), which represented “the first extensive study dedicated to all the works in the Nationalgalerie produced by women painters and sculptors before 1919.” [1] Moreover, a special issue of the French cultural magazine Télérama, published in 2021 and entitled Femmes artistes–ni vues ni connues (Women Artists—Neither Visible nor Known), presented more than 20 international women artists from the 16th century until today. The issue featured their short biographies and discussed their professional situation and in_visibility in numerous essays, informing the reader about current exhibitions focusing on women artists, like Elle font l’abstraction (Centre Pompidou, Paris, English title: Women in Abstraction), Peintres femmes 1780–1830: Naissance d’un combat (Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, English title: Women Painters, 1780–1830: The Birth of a Battle), and She-Bam Pow Pop Wizz! Les Amazones du pop (MAMAC, Nice, English title: She-Bam Pow POP Wizz! The Amazons of Pop). [2] In 2021, Karl der Grosse—Das Debattierhaus, an institution in Zurich that organizes debates on current political and social issues, held a panel about Die Unsichtbarkeit der Künstlerinnen—Ein Podium zur Unterrepräsentation der Frauen in der Kunstwelt (The Invisibility of Women Artists—A Panel on the Under-Representation of Women in the Art World). [3]

These examples—drawn from exhibitions, magazines, and panels in Germany, France, and Switzerland—are only a few amongst numerous others that illustrate the recent international presence of the topic in public debate. However, the question of in_visibility of women artists is not a recent one but a central issue in feminist art history since its formation in the 1970s. In the following discussion, I will contextualize the question of women artists’ in_visibility within the discourse of art history and analyze some of the problems in the process of making women artists visible today. It becomes apparent that this process is a highly paradoxical one and therefore needs to be continuously reevaluated. On the one hand, there is—as demonstrated above—no shortage of initiatives to make women artists visible. Oftentimes, these projects (re-)discover forgotten women artists, and aim to analyze their contribution to art history and the reasons why they were forgotten or at least hitherto neglected. On the other hand, this is partially done in ways that result in another kind of invisibility, an invisibility caused by insufficient approaches to analyzing women artists, which lead to falsifying and one-dimensional representations of them. The paradox that certain popular ways of making women artists visible in some respects do manage to raise their actual visibility, yet in others engender other kinds of invisibility will be brought into focus in this _Perspective.

I myself am an art historian working on a PhD project on the professional identity and professionalization process of women artists in Paris around 1900. When reading academic literature, magazines, and exhibition catalogues, watching documentaries, and visiting exhibitions about women artists, I notice the keen and growing interest in women artists, which I welcome, of course, very much. At the same time, I am surprised and even irritated by the way women artists are often made visible. For example, the projects would emphasize their biographies while neglecting to analyze their art works. In other cases, subjective approaches are employed which lack the necessary critical distance or the artists are seen through male gendered lenses. I consider it fundamental to draw attention to these problems because, in the end, these biased approaches do not truly contribute to making women artists visible but perpetuate historical falsifications and gender-specific hierarchies. I am well aware of the fact that I was art historically educated and socialized in the very institutions and with the very literature which I will criticize and that the processes of making something or someone visible are complex, not linear, and at times necessarily lead to other kinds of invisibility. However, or precisely for this reason, it is important to analyze such processes and their structures accurately in order to recognize blind spots and to continuously reevaluate the results of these efforts.

When analyzing some of the problems in making women artists visible, I deliberately refer to examples of the 20th and 21st century drawn from art historical research conducted in academia as well as at museums. Furthermore, I address the actual presentation of women artists in exhibitions and rather popular academic literature about art. Thereby it will become clear that the problems to be discussed are apparent in different media, which reach various target groups. The women artists I focus on lived and worked in the 19th and 20th centuries and are mainly French, Swiss, and German. An exception makes the women artists presented in the exhibition Fantastische Frauen who come from various geographical backgrounds. However, when examining this exhibition, I rather analyze its general approach without going into detail about the different women artists.

The aforementioned examples of projects trying to raise awareness of women artists show that the notion of invisibility with regard to women artists points to how their contribution to art history is disregarded and how they are still not taken into account to the same extent and examined under the same light as their male peers when it comes to research, media, and exhibition practice. In the following section, I want to further explain these problems and their historical dimensions. It becomes apparent how the omission of women artists by modern art historians and the degradation of their works as inferior to those of men are problems which have been addressed by art historians for five decades now. Projects today mostly try to raise awareness of women artists and challenge the current structures of power and knowledge. However, they often criticize past and current conditions without recognizing how they perpetuate misogynistic stereotypes themselves. Interestingly, this is not a new problem either. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock recognized as early as 1981 that feminists “have tended only to exchange one set of stereotypes for another” as one of the major problems of feminist approaches. [4] In the third and fourth sections I give concrete examples of how women artists are made visible in problematic ways perpetuating stereotypical perceptions of them. Thereby, it becomes clear that the project of “making women artists visible” is far from completed. On the contrary, what emerges is the need for new concepts, approaches, and methodologies in order to further advance the recognition and visibility of women artists.

2_Women Artists’ (Missing) Presence in the Arts in the Context of Feminist Art History—Two Important Positions

Linda Nochlin’s pioneering essay Why Have There Been no Great Women Artists?, originally published in 1971, is still widely and controversially discussed. The question posed by the essay’s title already indicates Nochlin’s basic assumption:

The fact of the matter is that there have been no supremely great women artists, as far as we know, although there have been many interesting and very good ones who remain insufficiently investigated or appreciated; nor have there been any great Lithuanian jazz pianists, nor Eskimo tennis players, no matter how much we might wish there had been. [5]

In her analysis of women artists from the Renaissance until the late 19th century, Nochlin bases her argument on the fact that women could not receive sufficient art education. Amongst other things, they could not study after the nude model and were thus not able to succeed in the most reputed field of art—history painting. Even though Nochlin concentrates on the impossibility for women artists of the past to study the nude model, she clarifies that women artists were excluded from educational structures to a much larger extent. [6]

In their book Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock firmly oppose Nochlin’s explanations and assert that, if Nochlin’s thesis about the non-existence of great women artists because of institutional exclusion was true, “the only logical conclusions one could draw would be that there should have been no women artists at all.” [7] Parker and Pollock point out that there have always been women artists who established themselves despite their difficult situation, but that they have been omitted by art history writing. Moreover, they explain how the discipline of art history constructs women artists as less skilled than their male peers and historically meaningless. Parker and Pollock rather relate to the canon of art history as the central issue and criticize feminist art history for not analyzing “why modern art history ignores the existence of women artists, why it has become silent about them, why it has consistently dismissed as insignificant those it did acknowledge.” [8]

Certainly, both approaches are equally important and are not as mutually exclusive as the authors would have us believe. There were barriers which led to there being much fewer working women artists than men. However, there have always been women artists, and the patriarchal discipline of art history has long been neglecting their presence. Linda Nochlin’s essay sparked multiple changes: Art historical gender studies have been established as an academic field, and extensive research on women artists has been done since. In the last 50 years, this type of research has achieved wide critical acclaim. Structural problems like institutional exclusion, exclusion from the canon, and degradation of women’s art as inferior to men’s by art history writing have been analyzed, and a great number of women artists have been (re-)discovered. In the course of this extensive research on women artists, several problems concerning content and structure of this research occurred. In the following I want to address some of these problems and support my hypotheses by various examples selected from research and exhibition practice.

3_Long Live Biography!—Criticism of the Biography-Focused Approach to Women Artists

The first aspect I want to discuss is the biography-focused approach to women artists. In art historical writing as well as in exhibitions about women artists, the reader/visitor is often confronted with much biographical information while explanations of the art works are neglected. Biographically centered presentations are, of course, not limited to women artists; their male colleagues are affected as well. Besides, a general interest in biographical details is certainly legitimate. Particularly when referring to groups which have been marginalized and discriminated against over a long period of time, like in this case women artists, one is naturally interested in the facts of how they managed to produce art works and be accepted despite the constraints they experienced. Nevertheless, biographical information cannot serve to replace a profound analysis of the actual objects of investigation: the works of art. The imbalance in question between biographical information and the analysis of works of art is much more severe when it comes to women artists. In literature and exhibitions, women artists are often described via their biographies and made visible in this way; all the while, their works of art are only superficially discussed, as I will show in the next paragraphs. Such emphases have a deleterious effect on the awareness of women’s art, and their artistic contribution remains invisible or at least marginalized. Furthermore, such approaches can perpetuate old misogynistic stereotypes which raise male artists to inspired and inventive geniuses whose art works are exhibited and discussed at length, and implicitly affirm an inferiority of female creativity by not sufficiently examining their works. [9]

In 2020, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt organized the exhibition Fantastische Frauen (English title: Fantastic Women). In the exhibition’s section within the institution’s homepage, the art enthusiast is directly welcomed by the exhibition’s goal: “The SCHIRN presents the female contribution to Surrealism for the first time in a major thematic exhibition.” [10] The art historian and renowned curator of the exhibition, Ingrid Pfeiffer, explains in the accompanying catalogue that women artists who contributed to surrealism are still widely ignored in publications about surrealism and refers to the aforementioned exclusion from the canon. The exhibition and the catalogue tried to show the female contribution to surrealism and therefore include 36 women artists from eleven countries. The artists were connected by the fact that, on the biographical and artistic level, they had ties to surrealism, at least for some time. [11] It cannot be denied that these kinds of exhibitions and the extensive research done in advance have a share in (re-)discovering women artists and making them visible (again). Nonetheless, when visiting Fantastische Frauen, the visitor would also be confronted with typical problems of such exhibitions. The exhibition introduced each artist by means of a biographical text, presented some of their art works, and explained these partly by accompanying descriptions. On the narrative level, the exhibition remained fairly vague, which is not surprising considering the large number of included artists and the quite broad common feature of having some sort of connection to surrealism. [12] Due to this structure, to some extent the visitor would gain the impression of visiting 36 small biographically focused individual exhibitions. The significant emphasis on biographical information and the very generic approach to these women artists led to a blurring in discussing their works and consequently to a reduction in their visibility.

Another problem of projects geared at higher visibility of women artists is that certain art historians  project their own feminist ideals onto the lives of women artists in their research. [13] When reading Renate Berger’s statements about the artist couple Charlotte Berend-Corinth and Lovis Corinth, this kind of subjective, judgmental style becomes apparent. Berger explains that Berend-Corinth edited her husband’s catalogue raisonné, “der mehr als zehn Jahre ihrer produktivsten Zeit verschlang” (“which swallowed up more than ten years of her most productive time”). Furthermore, she criticizes Berend-Corinth’s “verengtes Gesichtsfeld als Malerin, Autorin und Herausgeberin” (“constricted field of vision as painter, author, and editor”) and analyzed her psychologically by asserting that she compensated for her husband’s derogatory attitude towards her by referring to him as a genius and thereby disencumbering him. [14]

Such psychologizing approaches to women artists, which aim to describe their character, are not uncommon. Anne-Catherine Krüger wrote about the painter Louise Catherine Breslau:

Der frühe Verlust des Vaters und die oft als freudlos empfundene Kindheit prägten Breslau sehr. Diese schwierigen Lebensumstände in ihren jungen Jahren machten sie jedoch nur stärker und widerstandsfähiger. Zeitgenossen beschrieben sie als diszipliniert, autoritär, willensstark und zielstrebig. Auch war sie dominierend, charismatisch, belesen und wortgewandt. [15]

(The early loss of her father and her childhood, often considered as joyless, shaped Breslau a lot. However, these difficult life circumstances in her early years made her only stronger and more resilient. Contemporaries described her as disciplined, authoritarian, strong-willed, and determined. She was dominant, charismatic, well-read, and eloquent, too.)

In such cases, the art historian slips into the role of a psychologist and sometimes even tries to make use of character traits for art historical analysis. Women artists are then often described in terms of being ambitious, diligent, disciplined, resilient, etc., descriptions which are rather subjective and rarely provable, which do not contribute to an art historical analysis, and are seldom used to describe their male counterparts (because they contradict the idea of the great artist). Who could after all imagine reading an article about Michelangelo Buonarroti, Vincent van Gogh, or Paul Gauguin presenting them as busy and diligent bees? Concerning women artists, however, such improper analytical categories are used frequently.

Subjective, judgmental, and psychologizing analyses as well as improper analytical categories are, as demonstrated above, still virulent problems in research and exhibition practice. They prevent an objective, historically correct discussion of women artists and their work and thereby undermine the process of making women artists visible. In the context of improper categorization, another problem often arises: that of artistic influence.

4_The Concept of Influence in the Analysis of Women Artists’ Work

To a much greater extent than their male peers, it seems to me, women artists are analyzed through their artistic environment and are often considered as being influenced. The term influence is a much-contested one in art historical research because of its uncritical, anachronistic, one-dimensional, and metaphorical nature. Not only does it imply a unilateral power hierarchy between a superior and active subject/part and an inferior and passive object, but it also constructs hierarchies that cannot be proven historically. It is crucial that we do not deprive artists of their artistic independence and construct them as passively influenced artistic beings, but perceive and treat them as actively and intentionally operating agents. [16] To illustrate this problem, I provide several examples below.

In the French book Les femmes artistes sont dangereuses (Women Artists are Dangerous), published in 2018, the reader discovers, for example, that the Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1652) is “[m]arquée par l’influence caravagesque” (“shaped by caravagesque influence”). Moreover, concerning the French painter Eva Gonzalès (1847–1883), the authors Laure Adler and Camille Viéville assert that “l’influence de ce dernier [Manet] sur son œuvre est grande” (“the influence of the latter [Manet] on her oeuvre is great”). The French painter Marie Laurencin (1883–1956) is, according to the authors, under the “influence du fauvisme et du cubisme” (“influence of Fauvism and Cubism”), while the German artist Marianne Brandt (1893–1983) is “influencée par le mouvement expressionniste” (“influenced by the expressionist movement”). [17] In her contribution to the Swiss exhibition catalogue Berufswunsch Malerin! Elf Wegbereiterinnen Schweizer Kunst aus 100 Jahren (Desired Career: Woman Painter! Eleven Pioneers of Swiss Art from the Last One Hundred Years), published in 2020, Anne-Catherine Krüger spoke with regard to the artist Sophie Schaeppi, about the “Einfluss zeitgenössischer französischer Kunst” (“influence of contemporary French Art”) and the “Einfluss des Naturalisten Jules Bastien-Lepage” (“influence of the naturalistic painter Jules Bastien-Lepage”). [18] According to Daniel Studer, who wrote for the same exhibition catalogue, the painter Marie-Louise Bion was “[u]nter dem Einfluss der französischen Pleinairmalerei” (“under the influence of French plein air painting”). [19] In her short biography about Ithell Colquhoun, featured in the exhibition catalogue to Fantastische Frauen from 2020, Rebecca Herlemann stated that “[i]nsbesondere die Werke von Salvador Dalí und André Breton beeinflussen sie” (“especially the works of Salvador Dalí and André Breton influence her”). [20]

These are just a few among an abundance of examples, drawn from French, Swiss, and German publications, which convey the omnipresence of the term influence, at least in western and central European art history writing. Moreover, the examples above demonstrate that, depending on the respective author, one can be influenced by another person, by a whole movement, a concrete style, or the art of a certain period. It is not only women artists that are affected by this kind of reductive and misleading thinking, but it seems that they are described to a much greater extent in terms of artistic influences. With this kind of categorization, authors certainly intend to help contextualizing artists and to make them visible, but the effect is quite the opposite. The concept of influence—as opposed to active reception—degrades (women) artists to passive objects and deprives them of their independency. [21] In this way, the women’s artistic works are reduced to epigonism, the women artists degraded to mere copyists and their actual contributions made invisible. Thus, the idea of influence supports the above-mentioned misogynistic stereotypes according to which only male artists are capable of creative innovation and female artists remain in the realm of epigonism.

This phenomenon may have especially far-reaching consequences in art education, in particular in the relationships between male teachers and female students. The reception of Eva Gonzalès regarding her relationship to her teacher Édouard Manet is a particularly apt illustration of the problem’s gravity. The catalogue raisonné of Eva Gonzalès proves the stylistic variety of her rather small oeuvre. Gonzalès worked primarily as a portrait painter; in some of her paintings she makes use of a naturalistic style, while in others she engages a more abstract one, which renders the brushstroke visible. The level of abstraction varies considerably within her oeuvre. [22] In spite of this stylistic diversity and all the differences in Eva Gonzalès’ and Édouard Manet’s works, Gonzalès is, even in the more recent literature, degraded to an epigone of her teacher Manet. Earlier in the paper, I quoted Laure Adler and Camille Viéville, who described Gonzalès as artistically influenced by Manet. [23] The author Maurice Sérullaz affirmed: “Ihr ganzes Leben lang ist sie der ersten Manier ihres Lehrers Manet treu geblieben.” [24] (“Her whole life she remained true to the first manner of her teacher Manet.”). Dominique Bona shares Maurice Sérullaz’ opinion about Eva Gonzalès by claiming that she “sera toujours fidèle à la peinture de Manet dans sa première manière” (“will always remain true to Manet in his first manner”). [25] Even Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin—who wanted to draw attention to women artists with their exhibition Women Artists: 1550–1950 and the accompanying catalogue, and thereby make women artists more visible—did not pay sufficiently close attention to Eva Gonzalès’ works: “Gonzalès’ style, closely allied to that of Manet’s Spanish period, changed little through the years.” [26] Until today, Eva Gonzalès oftentimes remains unanalyzed in a proper way, i.e. in a way that objectively takes stock of her art works and other historical sources. Instead, she is reduced to a painter who remained too close to her teacher and even copied him. A glimpse into the catalogue raisonné is enough to disprove these false conclusions. It is obvious that such incorrect analyses make the actual contributions of women artists invisible and reinforce existing prejudices.

5_Conclusion

In this _Perspective I showed that the process of making women artists visible is highly paradoxical. On the one hand, a great number of women artists have been extensively analyzed in research and exhibitions. Within this process, exhibitions have particularly contributed to making women artists visible as they have had the potential of reaching a large audience. On the other hand, women artists have been made visible in a way that has resulted in a different kind of invisibility: an invisibility as artists in their own right caused by subjective, judgmental, and psychologizing analyses as well as a lack of analytical parameters. Furthermore, this has been an invisibility caused by approaches that focus on biographical information while neglecting the analysis of art works, by structures of influence, or by the fact that women artists are still often seen through male gendered lenses. These aspects do not meet state-of-the-art art historical standards but falsify historical realities and force women artists back into the realm of invisibility.

In my _Perspective I pointed out that these problems in making women artists visible do not only originate from conventional art historical writing, which still has not managed to liberate itself adequately from the “white Western male viewpoint,” described as such by Linda Nochlin as many as 50 years ago. [27] Even specifically feminist and gender-focused approaches, which criticize the still dominant patriarchal structures of art history and decidedly oppose the inherent ideologies, partially employ methods and concepts which do not contribute to the intended visibility of women artists but unintentionally generate stereotypical ways of viewing them. Thereby, it becomes evident that the necessary ways and methods to raise awareness and address exclusion mechanisms are highly complex and ought to be permanently reevaluated. I mainly analyzed feminist approaches in making women artists visible—which is owed to my specific research field—but, of course, there are exclusion mechanisms concerning women artists which can only be examined properly when combining feminist perspectives with other field-specific angles, e.g. queer, transgender, or postcolonial perspectives.

_How to Cite

Lisa Pregitzer. “Women Artists—Still Invisible Today? A Critical Approach to Strategies of Making Women Artists Visible.” On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture 13 (2022). <https://doi.org/10.22029/oc.2022.1279>.