A quiz. What do the names Laura Knight, Elizabeth Butler, Angela Kauffman or Mary Beale mean to you? Maybe the names Gwen John or Artemisia Gentileschi ring a faint bell? Apart from the last two, I’ll admit to never having heard of any of these names before last weekend when I went to a wonderful exhibition at Tate Britain featuring the works of over 150 female artists spanning 400 years from Tudor times to the First World War called ‘Now You See Us.’.
Most of the female artists showcased were denigrated as ‘amateurs’ by their male counterparts, yet, without labels, I would defy anyone looking at these beautiful and accomplished art works to be able to tell the sex of the person who painted them.
As you may know I have recently started to do a few watercolour daubings myself. I was brought up in an era when children were pigeon-holed at a youngish age. Labels such as ‘sporty’, ‘arty’, ‘good/bad at Maths or English or History’ followed you around and, once attached, were hard to shake off. I was always deemed good at arts-based subjects and languages (French and Latin - O Levels I was entered for and passed at 14) but pretty hopeless at anything to do with numbers or science subjects and I was also seen as bad at sport of all forms and pathetically bad at drawing or painting. What a world away from my grandsons’ school at which they are encouraged to say ‘I can’t do that - yet.’
For me the ‘yet’ had to wait until I was 69 in the case of picking up a paintbrush and, to my amazement and delight I’m not totally without talent, whilst accepting that my efforts are never going to be shown at any kind of exhibition beyond the ones that are held at the end of the Flavours painting holidays in Italy that I so love to attend. There were two things that struck me very powerfully at the Tate exhibition. One was the hundreds, if not thousands of wonderful artworks of which the world has been deprived due to the patriarchal society in which women lived for so long, and the downright misogyny that women artists encountered. And the other thing that struck me was how we must cherish, guard and fight to keep our hard-won freedoms as women in a world in which they are increasingly under threat.
At the exhibition my friend and I concentrated on the nineteenth and early twentieth century as there was so much to see and admire, and I think it’s fair to say that my blood boiled several times when I read the notes for each of the rooms showing the various paintings and drawings. The first barrier to these gifted women was the belief that ‘the fairer sex’ was not intellectually capable of great art. Their brains were just not up to the job. This allowed all the leading schools of art at that time to forbid women to join their ranks. This gradually changed over the course of the Victorian era and when the prestigious Slade School of Art was opened in 1871, it admitted women on equal terms to men, which meant that female students could study, draw and paint nude life models, a privilege that was not extended to female students at the Royal Academy until 1894.
As drawing the human form from life was seen as essential to the creation of all serious artworks, this prohibition on the grounds of prudery was a significant barrier, but exclusion from education wasn’t the only problem faced by female artists. These women were also wives and mothers which was seen as their principal role in life. There was one small, perfect oil painting of the head of an angel by a thirty year old artist who died not long afterwards in childbirth. And then there was the attitude of the men in their lives to the works that they were producing which might rival their own. A beautiful oil called ‘Always Welcome’ depicting a child at her mother’s sick-bed by Laura Alma-Tadema was poignant for the accompanying notes that said that both her husband, famous Victorian artist Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema and her father Dr. Epps discouraged Laura’s painting, for what can only have been misogynistic reasons, presumably believing it to be inferior to their own.
Some artists like Elizabeth Thompson (later Lady Butler) defied convention by pursuing epic history painting, seen as the highest form of art at that time. In 1874 when her painting ‘The Roll Call’ with its realistic depictions of exhausted, wounded Grenadier Guards after battle, was displayed at the Royal Academy it was so popular an officer was stationed by the painting to manage the crowds. But, despite being seen as the leading female artist of her time, Butler was consistently denied membership of the Royal Academy, missing out in 1879 by just two votes. The frustration of this was brilliantly captured in the painting ‘Nameless and Friendless’ by Emily Osborn, in which a sad looking woman with a child at her side is presenting one of her canvases to the caustic gaze of an art dealer who is definitely going to refuse to take her painting.
The final room of the exhibition concluded with some powerful early twentieth century works. The most arresting was Ethel Wright’s fabulous 1912 portrait of the suffragette Una Dugdale Duval in an acid green dress beneath a wallpaper of ludicrous fighting cocks, a picture which confronts the viewer with the power and intent of this striking woman who is more than equal to the task of challenging the status quo. One of the final oils shows a munitions factory in which women are working to produce bombs for the First World War. So we can leave the exhibition secure in the knowledge that in the near future women will get the vote, eventually achieve mastery over their bodies via the contraceptive pill and abortion, and be granted various equal rights to men under the law.
Job done, we women of today might say, and I will admit to a feeling that, as a female born in 1947, I have enjoyed the best of what the Women’s Liberation Movement, starting with the Suffragettes around thirty years before my birth, has been able to accomplish. Naively I have always believed that progress for women in every sphere of our personal and professional lives would progress in a linear fashion so that there would be fewer and fewer constraints or restraints on what women would be able to do with their lives. Now I fear that it might be cyclical and that we women are about to find ourselves circling round to a place that those nineteenth century artists might recognise.
Why? Because there are powerful forces at play in whose interests it is to propose a world in which women should be encouraged to once again embrace the notion of ‘Kinder Küche, Kirche’. If the birth rate is in freefall, then encouraging women to have many more children can be presented as a kind of moral imperative for any society. And then there is the issue of women’s reproductive rights and their access to contraception and, when that fails, their rights to terminate any unwanted pregnancies. Am I alone in being alarmed by some of the rhetoric I hear from various quarters and the ways in which these ideas might impact on what women are allowed to do, not only with their bodies but also their lives?
Perhaps I am being overly pessimistic, but the stories of all those brilliantly creative women in the Tate exhibition who had to fight so hard for their work to be seen and accepted, should remind us that vigilance is key, for what has been gained after protracted struggle, can just as quickly be overturned and taken away.
Tricia x
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