The Art of Women

This article was originally published in issue #1 of The HERstory Project Journal and has been shared online with permission of the author.

What does my MA dissertation and Katy Hessel’s 2022 The Story of Art Without Men have in common? A dedication to Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi and the words she wrote in a letter in 1649, “I’ll show you what a woman can do.” 

La Pittura, Artemisia Gentileschi, 1632

Now, to be clear, that’s where the similarities end, Hessel is an accomplished art historian whose corrective work gives a fairly thorough overview of women’s place in the art world. My MA dissertation was far more amateur (and subjectively great) and focuses heavily on my interpretation that Gentileschi’s work is unfairly defined within the context of her sexual trauma. They had very different scopes. Hessel’s work for women’s art history continues to impress and intimidate, her instagram and corresponding podcast, ‘The Great Women Artists’, do more for women’s art history than, well, pretty much anything else out there, and I’m both an avid follower and listener. So it’s quite surprising that it’s taken me so long to get myself to Tate Britain to experience Hessel’s latest project, Museums without Men.

Museums without Men is a multi museum and gallery project to showcase the women, or lack thereof in collections across the globe, and this is my review. I had three questions I wanted to be able to answer going into the gallery: 1. Does the audio tour reclaim women’s voices and artwork? 2. Is it engaging not only for a historian but for the public? 3. Have I learnt something?

The answer to these was actually somewhat complicated, for starters, I was surprised that the ‘guide’ as it was marketed was actually seven short talks on the Tate’s audio player webpage which referred to specific artwork without telling the listener actually where they were, or how to find them. Perhaps this is a criticism of the Tate’s audio guide system, but it was difficult to understand where and when I was meant to listen to Hessel’s talks. As someone who champions accessibility in the arts and historical education, this was frustrating. It was also somewhat annoying to see that seemingly at no point around the gallery was the Audio Guide marketed. At a simple level, how can it be engaging to anybody when it is poorly constructed and advertised? 

I did listen to each talk, whilst looking, in the end, at works from seventeenth century Europe. To give them and Hessel their due, each talk was engaging and informative. I would say that the talks themselves do successfully achieve all three of my questions: they reclaim (some) women’s voices and artwork; I would argue that they are engaging for both a historian and a member of the public; and I did learn something (many things!). 

However, the Tate also currently has an exhibition called ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920’. I visited this whilst I was there too, albeit with the primary focus of seeing Artemisia Gentileschi’s La Pittura. I was struck by just how much the displays in this exhibition undermined the efforts of the Museums Without Men project. ‘Now You See Us’ is a comprehensive overview of women’s work over a huge time period; even coming in with a pretty good knowledge of women’s art history I was blown away by what I learnt. 

Now, I don’t think that this is a criticism of the Museums without Men guide. The audio guide is intended to exist in the space of a permanent exhibition, something this temporary exhibition is not, so there are different struggles and parameters by which to judge the guide and the exhibition. Perhaps, it is best to ask why these works are in a temporary exhibition and not on the walls in the permanent galleries? Were many of these works introduced then Hessel’s guide might look a bit different, and rather more comprehensive. Perhaps the lack of content is really a criticism of the Tate’s permanent exhibition, which is itself, perhaps the point of Hessel’s work. 

In the days after visiting the Tate and writing this review, I decided to do some extra research, and I was struck that the second thing that came up after searching ‘Museums without Men’ was an article titled ‘The Story of Art without Men: and without brains?’ This article was written by art historian Mark Stocker, and at first glance I was simply fatigued by the apparent dismissal of women’s work. Then I read the article, and Stocker has picked up on something that I couldn’t quite articulate above. That the guide does not only feel incomplete because it only covers seven pieces of art work, but it also feels incomplete because without situating these women’s lives and work within the broader context that inevitably includes the men they knew, loved and hated, we cannot understand the full picture of the art itself. Now I want to clarify that this is, in my opinion, an overstatement, we do not insist on contextualising every male artist in the context of the women they know, so why does Stocker think that this guide is irrelevant because it may not discuss the women artists in relation to their male contemporaries? (He specifies in the article that he has not listened to the guide and judges his review on Hessel’s podcast series.) Stocker’s article is a good read, and he does make some interesting points regarding the validity and value of feminist art history, something I myself have written about and criticised over both my dissertations. Yet his final paragraph undermines his argument, and consequently his criticism, by describing the current popular focus with female artists as a ‘preoccupation’ which ‘ignores’ men. Considering how much art history has ignored women in favour of men, do these female artists not deserve a little bit of positive discrimination? I think so, and that’s why you should go and check out Hessel’s Museums without Men, and whilst you’re there, ‘Now you see us’ too.