Art’s Gender Hustle
Any critic unable to tell great from good, passable from poor, is incompetent. The critic who refuses to do so for ideological reasons is compromised.
A review of The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel, 352 pages, Hutchinson Heinemann (March 2022)
Typical. You wait decades for an undiscovered genius, then hundreds appear at once. And by an astonishing coincidence, every one of them is female. After centuries of neglect and prejudice, these forgotten women are being ushered into the light by Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men, a cultural survey published last year to universal acclaim. Waterstones called it “as essential as it is enjoyable” and declared it Book of the Year. The Guardian (for whom Hessel writes a column) was particularly effusive: “this positive, beautifully written corrective,” wrote Bidisha Mamata, “… should become a founding text in the history of art by women.” No doubt it will.
Hessel’s revisionist history, spanning from the 1500s to 2020, sprang from her Instagram account, where she built a huge audience by posting daily about a different female artist. This and a few BBC Arts documentaries have established her as a more telegenic version of Simon Schama. “Art is for everyone,” she says. “It’s the most democratic subject in the world in a way.” That claim may surprise anyone who’s been to Art Basel, the exclusive annual art fair held in Switzerland. Still, Hessel’s take is a nice idea, and certainly a fashionable one.
Fashion is why Dior invited Hessel to preach to the converted on their Feminist Art podcast, why British Vogue tells its readers to follow her Instagram account, and why that champion of the working man, Harper’s Bazaar, approvingly observes that, “The democratisation of art is key to Hessel’s indefatigable vision.” Fashion is also why publishers Hutchinson Heinemann forked out for such a handsomely illustrated hardback. Publishing may be suffering, but this particular niche is booming.
Championing painters she invariably describes as “trailblazers,” Hessel is ploughing a crowded furrow. 50 Women Artists You Should Know was published by Prestel in 2017, the same year as Bridget Quinn’s Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History. In 2019, Phaidon gave the world Great Women Artists and Rachel Ignotofsky hit bookshops with Women in Art: 50 Fearless Creatives Who Inspired the World. If there was room left on your bookshelf in 2020, you might squeeze in Susie Hodge’s The Short Story of Women Artists. Venturing even further back, we find Nancy G. Heller’s Women Artists in 2003 and Women, Art, and Society by Whitney Chadwick appeared in 1990.
But so what if Katy Hessel is a little late to the party? The struggle needs every sister on the barricade. And even if publishing is finally on the right side of history, the galleries and auction houses are still outposts of patriarchal oppression, are they not? No, not really. Major exhibitions of two female painters have just closed in London and Paris: Eva Gonzalès at the National Gallery and Rosa Bonheur in the Musée d’Orsay. Here in Dublin, the Irish National Gallery’s show on the Italian mannerist Lavinia Fontana opens next month. If Modernism’s your jam, over 80 percent of the work in last year’s Venice Biennale—which Hessel describes as “the most prestigious art event in the world”—was by women artists according to curator Cecilia Aleman. This winter, Tate Britain is hosting Women in Revolt! a retrospective of a half-century of British feminist art.
All this could (I suppose) be dismissed as a fad were the patriarchy still calling the shots at important institutions. But as Hessel reports, “Women have taken the helm of the Tate, the Louvre, and the National Gallery of Art, DC, to name but a few.” The auction houses are all on board, too. Christie’s advertised its commitment “to principles of equality, diversity and inclusivity” by hosting Women at Auction in 2019—a lecture delivered by none other than Katy Hessel, the accompanying publicity for which made it sound like a disinterested scholarly survey:
Starting with the Old Masters—whose prices she will look at then and now—Katy will analyse trends and markets for women throughout time, ending with some of the biggest names in contemporary art known today. She will place particular emphasis on the past twenty years and chart the rise in the female art market that is becoming an ever increasingly popular subject.
It’s unclear, at first glance, what the hustle is here. Sure, nobody ever went broke telling people what they want to hear, but this looks like something more than pandering. Philip Hook, the waggish former director at both Sotheby’s and Christie’s, always cut through the cant. “Auction” said Hook, “is an ideal means of selling art, a commodity whose value has little intrinsic or objective value but is vastly inflatable by fantasy, aspiration and human rivalry.”
Low interest rates over the last decade have made it hard for ordinary people to save; but for art dealers, they meant good times. The inflation we’ve seen recently, while it lasts, adds zeros to anything perceived as a store of value. All of which has attracted an influx of inexperienced buyers, innocent souls called “fish” in Las Vegas and “Sir” in Mayfair. But even the most uninformed investor has heard that new art (post-1960, say) devalues faster than overripe fruit. Although auctioneers and dealers still pretend in public that Modernism isn’t a busted flush, the smart money knows the older the better. You may struggle to name an Old Master but you know damn well they aren’t making more of them.
On the rare occasions that a Rembrandt or Raphael comes to market, they are out of reach to anyone who doesn’t have a few yachts in the Persian Gulf. But a small Rosetti? A minor Boldini? Yes, an investment banker having a good year could stretch to that. “Or perhaps Sir would be interested in this Gabriele Münter. She’s still criminally undervalued but certain to appreciate…” To auctioneers, Katy Hessel is an alchemist, turning unknown artists into reliable midlist sellers. She’s increasing supply to meet demand, and helping dealers look virtuous while they make a lot of money—no wonder they like her.
But—again—so what? Dead white males have hogged the spotlight for centuries. Isn’t it time to let women shine? It’s only fair. The problem is that history isn’t fair, and attempts to make it so stray quickly into fiction. The Story of Art Without Men is a story in which the primary actors have been eliminated for political reasons and replaced by wishful thinking. The new narrative goes something like this:
For centuries, misogyny kept women out of the art schools, studios, and galleries. Even so, women overcame prejudice to create art as great as that of their male peers. Everyone knows a few but that’s merely the tip of the iceberg. In the back rooms of the Louvre, dusty canvases by countless uncelebrated female geniuses are hidden. All that was lacking was an art historian brave enough to pull back the curtain.
Though exciting, this revisionist account is implausible. Before the 1850s, in the centuries when women were most excluded from studios, painting and sculpture were demanding professions that could not be practiced without formal training. Very few women had access to that training. Many men did. Excellence is, by definition, rare, and history judges most artists forgettable, so we should not be surprised to find that most masters were male. And if the sample group is small to begin with, as it was with women, we should expect to find few examples of female artistic excellence before the 1900s. And so we do: Artemisia Gentileschi, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Rosa Bonheur, Elizabeth Bouguereau, Mary Cassatt, Camille Claudel—any student of art history knew these names already. And that’s basically it. Is this fair? Not at all. But nor was the Black Death.
The Story of Art Without Men is divided into five generously illustrated parts. In part one almost all the art is impressive; after that it’s downhill. Women’s growing prominence as the 20th century progressed is not the happy ending Hessel imagines. Part two’s subtitle—“The Aftermath of the First World War”—is apt. The ensuing procession is a reminder that European high culture died in the fields of Flanders, choking on gas and drowning in wet mud. Women gained entry to the boys’ club just as the club lost its bearings—a pyrrhic victory.
The starkly sublime prints of Käthe Kollwitz—a mother bereaved by that war—only serves to emphasise the surrounding banality, and the narrative loses focus by the decade. And as the art gets worse so does the prose (perhaps in solidarity). Here’s Hessel on Joan Mitchell’s 12 Hawks at 3 O’Clock (c.1962): “It is as though she is conjuring (or tearing apart) centuries of painting in her tough, gritty, yet dazzling-toned canvases.” And here’s Hessel on Tracey Emin’s You Kept It Coming (2019): “It’s as though she is culminating decades worth of love, pain, death and desire into one canvas…” The reader can study these paintings and then contemplate the gulf between description and what is being described.
Repeatedly and unwittingly, Hessel shows that sex makes a poor prism through which to view art. She’s annoyed that the highest auction price for a painting by a living female, Jenny Saville’s Propped (1992), was 12 percent of the male record, $90.3 million for David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (1972). To Hessel, this absurd pay gap reveals how “we place monetary value on gender in society.” It annoys me too. Jenny Saville is one of Europe’s most skilled painters. Hockney, despite his ridiculously inflated reputation, is a clumsy draftsman. That this obvious comparison is not explored is a reminder that Hessel’s revisionism is shallow. Aside from the gimmick of using unfamiliar names, her history cleaves to the canonical modernist version—which holds that technical skill ceased to be a relevant metric in art after people started flying planes and doing the Charleston. Hessel aims to slaughter no holy cows. She only wants to enlarge the herd.
More myopia is revealed when she praises Amy Sherald for “re-evaluating the American portrait”—which apparently means only painting black people. Hessel finds Sherald’s 2018 portrait of Michelle Obama “psychologically intense.” The former First Lady, we are told, is “depicted as both triumphant and approachable” with a “gaze full of wisdom and optimism.” Be that as it may, the painting is laughably amateurish, and one waits in vain for Hessel to mention this obvious fact.
The mystery of Amy Sherald’s Portrait of Michelle Obama (via: @newyorker): https://t.co/4GIfQ0GQbQ pic.twitter.com/DhIYdPtr8g
— Artsy (@artsy) February 15, 2018
I don’t know if everyone who attended Westminster School is as upset by privilege as Hessel seems to be, but her triumphant publishing debut is part of an evangelical movement in contemporary academia that aims to make history conform to contemporary progressive values and the prevailing obsession with equity. If the past is another country, that country has been invaded by zealots bent on regime change.
Their weapon of choice is exaggeration. Hyperbole now obscures the truth about Katy Hessel’s favourite artist, Artemisia Gentileschi. Like Frida Kahlo, Gentileschi had a tragic backstory that is deeply appealing to feminists. Unlike Kahlo, Gentileschi was an incredibly talented artist.
Part of a generation of Baroque painters inspired by Caravaggio, Gentileschi was certainly one of his most adept disciples—up there with Ribera though less consistent. Nevertheless, a 2020 exhibition of Gentileschi’s works in London’s National Gallery produced an absurdly reverential critical consensus. “Has there ever been a better, bolder painter of human drama?” asked BBC arts editor Will Gompertz. To which the obvious answer is: “Yes, Caravaggio.”
That such witless questions are posed in public demonstrates that there’s now a receptive audience for Hessel’s schtick. Indeed, the Guardian’s only reservation with The Story of Art Without Men was that it “will take many more feats of scholarship and advocacy before the centre of gravity of the white, male, western, imperial canon is exploded and women are fully written into global art history.”
That casual pairing of scholarship and advocacy is revealing. It was once understood that scholars should strive to be neutral, and to follow facts wherever they led. A good advocate, in contrast, is a mercenary, marshalling only the evidence that supports their argument. Today, this distinction sounds quaint. History without a cause? What’s the point? Jonathan Sumption, medieval historian and legal scholar, finds this trend dangerous:
Most historical scholarship involves judicious selection from a vast and usually incomplete body of material. It is possible to create an entirely false narrative without actually lying, by exaggeration and tendentious selection. The major threat to historical integrity comes when the criteria of selection are derived from a modern ideological agenda.
Hessel’s admirers compare her to Ernst Gombrich. A better comparison is Graham Hancock, the British writer and pseudoscientist who turns up on The Joe Rogan Experience every now and then to discuss his cranky theories about the history of human civilisation. Like Hancock, Hessel generally writes well and is eloquent enough to make dubious claims sounds plausible. Like Hancock, this works best when the audience knows next to nothing about the topic at hand: “I want people to be able to inhale this information,” she says, “even if they have no prior knowledge of the subject.” And like Hancock, Hessel means well. Ignore the Atlantis stuff and Hancock is telling an ecological mortality tale. Likewise, Hessel values gender equity so much that she wishes it had trended during the Renaissance.
The riddle is why critics swallow Hessel’s dodgy history whole while Hancock’s gets mauled. Ancient Apocalypse, a 2022 documentary about Hancock and his kooky ideas, was described as “the most dangerous show on Netflix” by the Guardian. “It seems to exist solely for conspiracy theorists,” their baffled reviewer lamented, “Why has this been allowed?” This apparent inconsistency is not hard to explain—Atlantis theories are garden-variety crankery while belief in a continuing oppressive Western patriarchy is an elite conspiracy theory signalling a sophisticated awareness of social injustice.
After a wobbly start, archaeology is now a relatively rigorous science. Art history today is, well, whatever the opposite of that is. Anyone can be an art critic (and I ought to know), but contrary to what you may have heard, the world needs more discrimination. Any critic unable to tell great from good, passable from poor, is incompetent. The critic who refuses to do so for ideological reasons is compromised. There’s good money in identity politics these days but it is far too small a frame in which to confine great artists, male or female.
