One day, while I
was at home working on a painting, I decided to try to learn through osmosis
and put a documentary on. I usually listen to music or have the TV on while I
paint or draw, and I don’t really pay close attention since I am focused on my
work. But instead of absentmindedly
trying to figure out who the real murderer was on some British mystery, I
thought - maybe I could learn something! I always mean to watch more
documentaries or read more about the topics I am interested in, but there just
aren’t enough hours in the day. So I
picked a topic, Female artists, and selected a documentary on someone I’d never
heard of.
The documentary
was “Le fabuleux destin de Elisabeth
Vigée Le Brun” (Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun: The Queen’s Painter.) Truthfully, 18th
Century court painting is really not an interest of mine. I’m more of a contemporary art kind of
gal. But I do try to broaden my horizons
and thought I could sit through an hour and a half of the documentary to learn
about something I might not otherwise learn.
After a few
minutes, I started to get really into my work and wasn’t paying much attention
until I heard something about a school.
A school for female artists in 18th century France.
Huh? Surely that
was wrong - women were not permitted to study at an art school at that time,
right? In my art history classes, we
heard how there were very few famous female artists in our textbooks due to a
combination of backward societal ideas (women were not thought to be
intelligent enough,) laws (women were not permitted to study at Universities or
as apprentices,) and familial obligations (who else would have those babies and
keep the house?) Sure, there are exceptions to every rule, and those exceptions
were usually wealthy and had a father or family member who was an artist to
learn from. But that lead to what I thought was maybe a handful of female
artists every hundred years or so, right?
What was this
documentary talking about?
I went back to
this part to hear exactly what the historian had said. Yes, this woman was a
famous, professional portrait artist, personal artist to Marie Antoinette, and
among other things, had started a school of art for young women.
Amazing! Why had
I not heard of her! Shouldn’t she be in every art history book as the first woman
to start an art school for women?
I immediately
stopped what I was doing and googled this.
Who was this lady? What school? Why did I not know about it?
And I discovered
something amazing and infuriating: she was not alone. There have been many female artists
throughout history who started schools, usually within their own homes, to
teach art to their sisters, family members, or other female members of their
community. Women may not have been permitted to attend schools with men, but
that didn’t stop them from starting their own.
So then, if there
were many female artists, why do we not hear more about them?
Women were not
allowed to be in art schools, and they were not allowed to join professional
organizations. Take, for instance, the French Royal Academy of Painting and
Sculpture that decreed in 1770 that they would allow no more than 4 women
members at any time. This was for the
lifetime of an artist! Institutions like these controlled what got put into
galleries and what people were able to view. If the art was not available for
view, it was not talked about, written about, and was essentially lost to
history. Another well documented problem was that art dealers and collectors
routinely changed the name of an artist from the unknown female artist, to
either a male family member or a male artist to maximize prestige and perceived
value. Women that did prosper also had the problem of changed names due to
marriage, making it difficult to properly assign multiple works to the same
person, and showing an evolution of an artist’s life work.
This lead me to
the question, who was the first female artist? I knew that is an impossible
question but I wanted to run with it. Google led me to an article from 2013 in
National Geographic called “Were the First Artists Mostly Women?” This article
cited a study that claimed of the artist hand stencils analyzed from various
cave walls across the globe (thought to be the ‘signatures’ of the wall
painters) 75% were women! Another article stated that the women of Mithila,
India have been famous for painting domestic scenes on the walls of their homes
to mark important life events since the 14th century.
In the book,
“Women Artists” by Nancy Heller, she talks about how the historians of ancient
Greece spoke of female artists, and how in some work that has survived
antiquity, artists depict women working alongside men in artistic pursuits.
There are records of women in ancient Egypt, women working during the
Renaissance, and across almost every time period there are records for.
So if they there
are records, why are they not in our canonical texts? Thanks to better
education for women and more demands for inclusion in all areas of society, we
are finally re-discovering the art and stories of so many women long forgotten.
For more on this
topic:
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun: The Queen’s Painter (Le fabuleux destin de
Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun)
Women Artists: An Illustrated history by Nancy Heller
Women Artists : The Linda Nochlin
Reader
Broad Strokes by Bridget Quinn
The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the
History of Western Art
