Celebrating women artists and forgetting feminist art histories


This seems to be an age of discovery. Many people are surprised to find out that ‘women artists’ or ‘artist-women’ exist. Apparently, they were long forgotten by art history until recently; only they were not. What has been forgotten in public discourse, or perhaps never even acknowledged, is the feminist art histories that started to rehabilitate the work of women artists over fifty years ago.

This year London alone offers much in the way of ‘discovery’: Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–70 at Whitechapel Gallery (9th February­–7th May 2023) FIG.1 celebrates the practices of the numerous international women artists working with gestural abstraction in the aftermath of the Second World War; Women in Revolt! Art, Activism and the Women’s Movement in the UK 1970–1990 at Tate Britain (8th November 2023–7th April 2024) FIG.2 will offer a major survey of work by over one hundred women artists across a variety of media; and the recent exhibition Making Modernism at the Royal Academy of Arts (12th November 2022–12th February 2023) was dedicated to a selection of women artists working in Germany in the early 1900s, namely Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907), Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) and Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938).¹ Mainstream publications have followed this trend, with Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men (2022), a take on Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1950) told only through women artists, and Phaidon’s second survey book on women artists, Great Women Painters (2022), a follow-up to Great Women Artists (2019).

The contemporary celebration of women artists is not new, but it has picked up speed over the past couple of years as the art world – that is, museums, galleries and the art market – has attempted to become more inclusive. Yet although this world has a current fascination with women artists, it has little time for the complexities of feminist art histories, when it could learn much from them. The alleged celebration of women artists still abides by a masculinist norm that treats them as curios commodified for a mass market. By contrast, this article returns to the emergence of feminist art histories, foregrounding the contemporary erasure of them and the ways that their demands are not being met by mainstream publications and exhibitions.

Feminist art histories

Women artists were first celebrated in an exhibition format in 1976 when Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris curated the survey show Women Artists: 1550–1950 at Los Angeles County Museum of Art FIG.3 FIG.4.² This landmark exhibition was staged five years after Nochlin’s groundbreaking essay ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’, which exploded the myth of male protean creativity and foregrounded the institutional and social obstacles encountered by generations of women artists in Europe and the United States. Nochlin’s work emerged from the women’s liberation movement and her essay appeared at critical moment in time, amid a movement against gender discrimination in museums and galleries ignited by Women Artists in Revolution (1969–71), which grew out of the male-dominated Art Workers Coalition and directed itself to feminist and Black liberation expression and representation.³

In 1986, ten years after Women Artists, Nochlin was invited by Tamar Garb (b.1956), then a PhD student at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, to participate in the first feminist panel at the Association of Art Historians conference in Brighton, with Griselda Pollock (b.1949) and Lisa Tickner (b.1944).⁴ Prior to this, Pollock co-wrote Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (1981) with Rozsika Parker (1945–2010). In Old Mistresses – a term borrowed from Elizabeth Broun and Ann Gabhart, who coined it in 1972 to expose the gendered lexicon of art history and the lack of a female equivalent for old master – Parker and Pollock challenged Nochlin’s 1971 essay, arguing that if the obstacles discussed by her had been successful, then there would be no women artists at all.⁵ On the contrary, women artists have always existed. The question, therefore, was how they worked despite these constraints. Alongside their contemporaries and successors, Garb, Pollock, Parker and Tickner would go on to lead the development of British feminist art history.⁶

In 1972 Parker joined the newly formed feminist magazine Spare Rib FIG.5 FIG.6, where she worked until 1980 before training as a psychotherapist. In 1973 she met Pollock and together they founded the Women’s Art History Collective.⁷ As evidenced by Spare Rib and the Women’s Art History Collective, the early years of feminist art history in the United Kingdom were largely self-directed and occurred outside the classroom.⁸ Many of these women were educated in the 1970s when a cultural femicide had been effected so completely that it could be said ‘woman’ served as the signifier of the non-artist.⁹ However, this was a fairly recent erasure of about seventy years. Writing about women artists and those in the visual arts had existed since Antiquity, albeit defined by a variety of ideologies.¹⁰ These included feminists seeking to show that women deserved emancipation through their contribution to culture, as well as zealots who relegated women to a special category distinct from mainstream cultural activity and ascribed notions of femininity to their work. In Old Mistresses, Parker and Pollock track these writings on women, art and artists to the beginning of the twentieth century, when they suddenly disappear.¹¹ Women artists were written out of the newly hegemonic forms of academic and museum art history when the discipline developed its own formal methods, departing from the biographical approach popularised by Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) in the sixteenth century.¹² Prior to this erasure, there were many anthologies, extensive dictionaries and archival documents that named women artists and documented their careers.¹³

Over the course of several decades, feminist art historians on both sides of the Atlantic would engage in this work of rehabilitation and expose the terms of women’s exclusion from modernist writings of art history.¹⁴ Together and individually, Parker and Pollock examined the gendered hierarchy that separated art and craft and served to marginalise women artists.¹⁵ In 1987 they co-wrote another book, Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement, 1970–1985, an edited collection of texts by various feminist writers.¹⁶ Nochlin, Pollock and Garb additionally unearthed the work of female Impressionists in the late nineteenth century, such as Berthe Morisot (1841–95), Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), Marie Bracquemond (1840–1916) and Eva Gonzalès (1848–83), who were appreciated by their male contemporaries and critics and subsequently erased from histories of the movement.¹⁷ Similar studies emerged on modern, Renaissance and Victorian artists, as well as more broad challenges to the gendered nature of the discipline itself.¹⁸

Whereas second-wave feminism in the United States was largely led by white liberal middle-class women, the British Women’s Liberation Movement spanned classes, as it had emerged from the British New Left, specifically socialist and Marxist groups in which women’s issues were dismissed.¹⁹ Race and racism were not ignored by either movement, but they were treated as subordinate to gender oppression, leading Black feminists to address the interplay between racism and sexism. In the United Kingdom these decades of feminist art-historical research were coterminous with the British Black Arts Movement. In London the British artist and curator Lubaina Himid (b.1954) organised several groundbreaking exhibitions, including Five Black Women at the Africa Centre (1983), Black Woman Time Now at Battersea Arts Centre (1983) and The Thin Black Line at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (1985) FIG.7, which presented the work of Black and Asian women artists.²⁰ Together with the writer and photographer Maud Sulter (1960–2008), Himid set up Urban Fox Press, and published Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity (1990), which is dedicated to the work of Black women artists and makers.²¹ In 1993 the painter and art historian Freida High Wasikhongo Tesfagiorgis (b.1946) challenged the white Euro-American frame of early feminist art historiography, calling for a ‘Black feminist art history discourse’ that would ‘prioritise the lives and concerns of Black women artists’.²² Her contemporaries included Tritobia Hayes Benjamin (1944–2014), Sharon F. Patton (b.1944) and Judith Wilson-Pates (b.1952), who, like Tesfagiorgis, worked to reclaim the significance of African American women’s artistic contributions.²³

Many of the university departments that these feminist art historians joined had slide collections that featured only the work of white male artists. In vogue was a masculinist, Marxist style of analysis and, although feminist art histories were indebted to Marxism, there was an omission of considerations of gender, among other concerns, from even the most progressive discourses of the time.²⁴ In 1974 T.J. Clark famously called for a social history of art that would dismiss feminism as a ‘cheerful diversification’, the methodology of which he categorised as ‘hot-foot in the pursuit of the new’.²⁵ Today it is impossible to study art history at a tertiary level in the United Kingdom and not engage with the work of women artists. Certainly, the public agendas pushed by museums and galleries have come from somewhere. 

Forgotten women

Returning to Nochlin and Sutherland Harris’s exhibition in 1976, Women Artists offered the model of exhibition-as-corrective, which spurred endless shows produced in its image. It set up the following structure: women artists are forgotten and then, by virtue of being exhibited, are saved from obscurity. Following in its wake, survey shows on women artists continued the same premise, expanding, rather than breaking with, its proposition.²⁶ A much-cited example is the exhibition Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum (2007), which sought to redress the blind spots of Nochlin’s original enquiry in terms of queerness and race, and update it through the expansion of artistic production beyond the West.²⁷

There have been almost fifty years of feminist research and teaching since Women Artists was staged, and yet its model endures today. Action, Gesture, Paint at Whitechapel Gallery is said to exhibit ‘an overlooked generation of 81 international women artists’, but many of these artists were shown and written about during their lifetime or recovered by feminist art histories.²⁸ The American modernists Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) and Lee Krasner (1908–84) have both been the subject of major exhibitions in recent years, and Krasner had a retrospective at Whitechapel in 1965.²⁹ Moreover, these artists were already being taught and studied by the 1980s.³⁰ The Lebanese-American artist Etel Adnan (1925–2021) FIG.8 has attracted widespread attention since being included in the thirteenth edition of documenta (2012), including a recent travelling retrospective at Lenbachhaus, Munich FIG.9, and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.³¹ The Mozambican artist Bertina Lopes (1924–2012) was also the subject of two major exhibitions in Portugal in 1973 and 1979.³² Even the auction industry suggests that these women are not ‘unknown’, with works by Frankenthaler and Krasner selling for millions of pounds in 2020 and those by Adnan for almost half a million in 2022.³³ Meanwhile, Making Modernism at the Royal Academy offered visitors the chance to ‘discover the trailblazing women hidden from the history of 20th-century Modernism’, but Kollwitz has long been admired by critics and the public in both Germany and abroad.³⁴ A new monograph on her work was published just last year.³⁵ Finally, Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt! will ‘celebrate the work of women who, frequently working outside mainstream art institutions, were largely left out of artistic narratives of the time’.³⁶ The latter is an extraordinary claim given that the timeframe of the exhibition, 1970–90, is coterminous with second-wave feminism and the establishment of feminist art histories, which themselves emerged outside institutional frameworks.

There is a crisis in the way women artists are presented to the public. Why must they always be sold to audiences as forgotten, erased and rediscovered, even if that is not the case? In 1981 Parker and Pollock challenged Nochlin’s term ‘great women artists’, asking by whom this ‘true greatness’ is defined and with what criteria – the implication being that it abides by a white masculinist norm.³⁷ The very same questions can be asked regarding the trope of the forgotten woman artist. For this narrative conceives of women artists solely in relation to men and always as their disadvantaged Other. In reality, there are more interesting stories to be told.

As this article has sought to suggest, the current celebration of women artists has a problem with forgetting – or, more specifically, with forgetting the work of feminist art histories that have already salvaged many of these artists. In the introduction to The Story of Art Without Men, Hessel states that there is a ‘lack of historians […] (bar some excellent feminist scholars, including Griselda Pollock and Whitney Chadwick)’ championing the work of women artists.³⁸ This alleged absence is simply not true. The author’s notes and bibliography are indebted to much feminist art-historical research, and yet she continues to claim its absence. There is even a chapter on ‘The Era of Feminism’ that makes no mention of feminist art histories.³⁹ Moreover, Hessel’s note of exception plays down the significance of such histories in terms of their complete transformation of the wider discipline of art history. In 1990 Pollock asked, ‘Can art history survive feminism?’, suggesting that the discipline’s classed, raced, gendered and heteronormative representation of art had been fundamentally challenged by the movement.⁴⁰ In the book’s conclusion, Hessel writes that as the world resets in the wake of COVID-19 and global protest movements, ‘so must art history’ – yet it has done so since the 1970s.⁴¹ This is not to say that the work of feminist art histories is complete, but rather that they have been under way and influential for some time.

If feminist art historians in the 1970s could look back to the late nineteenth century and find other feminists writing on women artists, then why is the current era so dogged by forgetfulness? There is today an increasingly financialised and market-led idea of feminism premised on the neoliberal individual. Although second-wave feminism emerged as a critique of capitalism and its dependence on the unwaged work of women, neoliberal feminism has abandoned these collective demands for equal rights and liberation in favour of the pursuit of capital accumulation.⁴² The Marxist philosopher Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) conceived of capital accumulation as being based on the discovery of ‘virgin lands’; that is, non-capitalist societies into which capitalism could expand. Luxemburg argued that capitalism would collapse once all ‘virgin lands’ were conquered and assimilated into the same system. Capitalism has already reached its global dimension, but instead of collapsing apropos Luxemburg, it has now started to produce its own ‘virgin lands’ whereby everything can be commodified. Neoliberal feminism and its celebration of women artists is similarly premised on that which is allegedly novel, and, in order to make these claims of novelty or its pretence, the work of other women must be erased, thus creating its own ‘virgin islands’.⁴³

A feminist methodology

In 1988 Pollock asked: ‘Is adding women to art history the same as producing feminist art history?’.⁴⁴ In the 1970s a selection of books were published on women artists, including Eleanor Tufts’s Our Hidden Heritage: Five Centuries of Women Artists (1974) and Karen Peterson’s and J.J. Wilson’s Women Artists: Recognition and Reappraisal from the Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (1976).⁴⁵ These studies were defined by an overemphasis on the individual biographies of women artists at the expense of a serious consideration of their work and an integration of these artists into mainstream styles.⁴⁶ On the contrary, Parker and Pollock argued that a feminist methodology must situate women artists in history, specifically the gender-defined differences that they navigated, and engage a visual analysis of art by women in relation to their historical period.⁴⁷ Rather than integrating women artists into art history, a feminist methodology allows art by women to not only transform conceptions of visual art and the methods of the discipline, but also to alter understandings of the past and present.⁴⁸

As it has been over forty years since the publication of Old Mistresses, it seems necessary to incite this discussion again given the newfound attention on women artists. The calls of feminist art histories have not been heeded. The problem with studies like those by Tufts and Peterson and Wilson is that they left art history intact, with the simple addition of examples of women artists. This phenomenon continues today with Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men, which adopts the same biographical method as Vasari’s Lives of The Artists (1550).⁴⁹ Given that feminist art histories had sought to implode the discipline, it seems strange to deploy an emergent and now antiquated form of art history as a way to discuss women artists. Feminism also challenged the idea of a single story told from any one perspective apropos Gombrich’s The Story of Art, and yet Hessel reproduces that exactly, from a Western viewpoint and at a time when calls to decentre art history are being answered.⁵⁰ On the rare occasion that the author mentions women artists beyond a Eurocentric matrix, their work simply feeds into a Western art history rather than fundamentally altering it as a decolonial approach would demand.

Finally, the issue with the biographical method is that it treats works of art as evidence of the artist and – inadvertently – the contemporary concerns of the author. No case is made for the work itself. Discussing the Japanese artist Katsushika Ōi (c.1800–66), one of the few non-Euro-American artists in the book, Hessel writes that ‘her bold subject matter also reveals a great skill for storytelling and, in particular, women-led narratives shown through a distinctly female lens’.⁵¹ Deprived of any context in the Edo period (1603–1867), the latter is an ahistorical claim given that courtesans were a popular subject-matter at this time for Japanese artists in general. Here, the difference between art by women and politically feminist art is collapsed. Beyond the artist’s gender, what exactly about Ōi’s work is so ‘distinctly female’ provided that feminists did not take this construct as a given? Discussing Ōi’s Girl composing a poem under cherry tree blossoms in the night (c.1850), Hessel writes: ‘the work reminds me of the limitations faced by women writers and artists, not just in Japan, but across the globe’.⁵² This comment does not come from the image itself, which has been silenced, but rather the author’s own twenty-first century projections. Writing about women artists does not a feminist methodology make.

The Whitechapel exhibition offers another opportunity to test out these concerns. Staged in the wake of the Royal Academy’s 2016 exhibition Abstract Expressionism, which conceived of the movement largely through male artists, Action, Gesture, Paint foregrounds the significance of women artists in the making of abstraction. The exhibition’s central claim is emphasised by the sheer quantity of work included in the show – 150 paintings by eighty-one artists – but it does not venture beyond this thesis.⁵³ The works are grouped thematically by formal concerns. History has been completely evacuated. The selected artists were dispersed around the globe, each with their own unique set of considerations. Bearing this in mind, the exhibition does not elaborate on why any of them turned to abstraction. In a show of spectacular work, they are made immemorable by this lack of critical context, keeping ‘forgotten’ women forgotten.

A key example of this mode of forgetting in the exhibition is the artist Bertina Lopes, who left Mozambique in 1964 to study in Lisbon and subsequently Rome, where she lived out the majority of her life. Her work is situated in a corner upstairs FIG.10 between that of the Scottish artist Margaret Mellis (1914–2009), who lived mostly in Cornwall, and the Chinese-American artist Chinyee (b. 1929), who left Nanjing in 1974 to study in New York. Nancy Dantas has written on Lopes’s abstraction in the context of the oppression and violence of Portuguese colonial rule in the 1960s, whereas the juxtapositions set up by the exhibition do not provide any contextualisation.⁵⁴ The only historical event acknowledged by Action, Gesture, Paint is the Second World War.⁵⁵ The exhibition opens with a large-scale work by Frankenthaler FIG.11, creating the narrative that the work of these global women stems from American models of abstraction, but, wherever women artists learnt abstraction, they made this language into their own. Art for Lopes, Dantas argues, was part of identity formation, combining both African and European iconography.⁵⁶ If feminism is an intervention against art history, then why must an exhibition coined in its name perpetuate the Eurocentric norms of the discipline?

Nochlin once wrote, ‘Feminist art history is there to make trouble’.⁵⁷ If feminist art histories are the condition of possibility for the current upsurge in mainstream publications and exhibitions celebrating women artists, then one must know where they come from in order to know where they are going. Let trouble be made.