Hessel has contagious enthusiasm for this subject (a welcome antidote to an occasionally cold and incomprehensible art world),andThe Story of Art without Men is an obvious extension. It’s a vast,revisionist history of women’s art making,but it’s also a history of how women — against all the insurmountable odds — managed to make art (something that generally doesn’t need explaining for male artists).
Starting in the 1500s,the earliest records of professional female artists,Hessel chronologically writes on more than 300 women artists,traversing six centuries of art,from Baroque to Realism to the Black British artists of the 1990s.
Centring the lives of women artists,Hessel tells how from the 1500s to 1800s women were barred from academies and life-drawing rooms,relegated to the “inferior” yet socially acceptable forms of portraiture and still life (rather than masculine themes of religion and war) and were ideally born into wealth — and even more ideally had a father painter to pass down skills and resources.
It’s incredible to read the manoeuvring through this. Take Plautilla Nelli (1524-88),a self-taught artist and Dominican nun who established one of the first all-female workshops. Or Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614),the first woman artist to run her own studio. She learned from her painter father,bore 11 children (she had a supportive husband),had her paintings admired by the Pope and was one of the first women in Western art to paint female nudes. Then there’s the tremendous painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c.1656) who,as Hessel writes,“in her lifetime became an international celebrity”.
The fame of many historical women artists is astounding — Rosa Bonheur (1822-99) had people lining up around the block to see her art. Yet Hessel repeats the familiar story of early women artists ostracised by academies,lost to history,eventually unearthed in the late 20th century and given their first solo show more than 400 years later.