Cover image © W. W. Norton & Company
I think it’s very telling that when I came to research my blog post on Anni Albers, I went to my library to look her up and, more often than not, found her husband listed in the index instead, despite, Anni arguably having a greater impact on her medium than Josef had on his.
Because of this, I’ve chosen Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men as my Book of the Month. This book seeks to turn the entire art canon on its head, focusing exclusively on the work and stories of women artists.
The traditional canon of art history is a story written about men by men. When I began my studies in History of Art, we were given The Story of Art to read by Gombrich, the so-called ‘bible’ of art history. It traces the incredible journey of art from the Acropolis to the Metropolis, recounting the names of every artist one ought to know. Yet, somehow, in over two thousand years of history, in Gombrich’s first edition he mentions no women. In the 16th edition, he mentions one, Käthe Kollwitz.
And of course, it is not just Gombrich, throughout the whole art history, women have been excluded, dismissed, forgotten and misattributed. Hessel’s book seeks to rectify this.
We do, of course, have fewer recorded women artists but that’s hardly surprising. Women were rarely trained or given access to formal artistic education. To become an artist, a woman usually had to be wealthy, often the daughter of an artist, and supported by a liberal family willing to let her pursue training.
Even then, she needed patrons to sustain her work. And if she was fortunate enough to have all these advantages and achieve success, art history itself was still likely to leave her out, her paintings misattributed to men, her name forgotten, her legacy erased.
Hessel’s book is a glorious exploration of female artists and their path to creativity from Renaissance sculptor Properzia de’ Rossi all the way to the newest generation of artists she introduces us to the painter Somaya Critchlow born in just 1993.
An important book that reframes the history of art as we know it.
You can purchase The Story of Art Without Men HERE
Author: Annushka Cleminson