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article url: http://www.oxfordartonline.com:80/subscriber/article/grove/art/T092072Women and art history.There is no lack of evidence of women’s participation in the history of arts of all forms, cultures and periods, fromancient traditions, such as pottery and carving or silk­weaving and painting in China (c. 3000 BC), to the presentand numerous forms of artistic expression. Yet traditional art history has kept us in systematic ignorance of the factthat women have always made art. It took the emergence of feminism in the late 20th century to redress the almostcomplete neglect of women artists by art history and to undermine the stereotyped views of art made by women.

I. Introduction.

When discussed, art by women was derogatively categorized as ‘women’s art’ in order to distinguish it from ‘art’,which, despite its lack of adjectival qualification, had come to be exclusively identified with a canon of white men.Since the 1960s many books have been published on the history of women in all areas of the visual arts in allperiods and many cultures. The evidence for women as artists is overwhelming, but the project of restoring womento the history of art has raised major historiographical, political and theoretical issues. It has been shown that it isonly in the 20th century, when art history was fully consolidated as an academic discipline, that women artists weresystematically effaced from the record of the history of art. This raises the question of why this has happened andproduces the second problem of whether art history as established can accommodate the different histories of artthat alone would account for women’s experiences as artists and make legible what they produced. It is necessary,therefore, to distinguish between the history of art as the field of historical artistic practice, and art history as theorganized discipline that has studied this field in selective ways. Art history tells a story of art incompatible withunderstanding the histories of women in the visual arts. It is a gendered discourse that participates in the sexualdivisions of society by celebrating the most highly valued creativity as the exclusive property of a select masculinity.Thus, questioning of why art by women has been neglected or, if mentioned, has been stereotyped as ‘women’sart’, that is, as ‘feminine’ and other, and placed always as the negative cipher to (masculine) art, has focusedattention on the ideological bases of the discourses of art history in this century. The redress of the neglect ofwomen by art history cannot be accomplished without a major reframing of the art­historical project, shiftingattention away from the idealization of the autonomous creative artist and the exclusively formal properties of artobjects. Feminist critiques of art history have been developed from new theoretical positions on theories of history(challenging typical periodizations and notions of stylistic development), theories of ideology (the social investmentin cultural meanings), theories of the image and text (semiotics, authorship), theories of society (the role of genderas well as class and race in social formations) and theories of the subject (challenging notions of individual agencythrough attention to the role of the unconscious, fantasy and psychically installed sexual difference; see §II, 4).New ways of ‘reading’ visual representation have been produced, while art is reconceived as a social practice,shaped by historically specific institutions, which is productive of images that are both determined within socialrelations of class, race, gender and sexuality and are effective in shaping social meanings and sexual identities.

II. Western world.

1. The historical record.

It has been possible to reclaim the history of women in the arts through surviving historical records and works, aswell as from the documentation of women artists’ work in the literature on Western art until the 19th century, when itwas interrupted, to a virtual erasure of such knowledge by some art historians in the 20th century.

(i) Ancient to medieval.

Grove Art OnlineWomen and art history

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Marcia Painting, tempera onvellum, miniature fromBoccaccio: Des cleres…

Sofonisba Anguissola: InfantaCataliña Micaela, oil on canvas,620×489 mm,…

Margaret Foley: Cleopatra,marble, 608×498×301 mm,1876 (Washington, DC,

The Roman historian Pliny (AD 23/24–79) included in Book XXXV of his NaturalHistory six women artists of antiquity: Timarete, Astarte and Olympia, Helen ofEgypt, Kalypso and Iaia or Lala of Cyzicus. Some of these names are also listedin De claris mulieribus (1370) by the Italian poet Boccaccio; with Thamyris, Eireneand Marcia (who is probably Iaia; see fig.), they reappeared in mostRenaissance commentaries as exemplars, however, of exceptional women.Women are recorded in medieval art production in both religious and secularinstitutions. Women’s names are attached to manuscripts from AD 800 onwards.A Spanish Romanesque manuscript known as the Beatus Apocalypse of Girona(Girona, Mus. Catedralicio) was illustrated in part and signed by ENDE (c. AD975). Forty­five books by the hand of Diemud of the cloister of Wessobrun areknown, while Guda of Westphalia, another 12th­century nun, wrote and painteda Homiliary of St Bartholomew. Herrad of Hohenbourg (d 1195) produced amassive folio called the Hortus deliciarum, and HILDEGARD OF BINGEN, who

was a composer as well as an illuminator and writer on natural history, created an illuminated volume of her mysticalvisions, Scivias (1142–52; Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek, fol. 1r); a volume of the official PatrologiaLatina is devoted entirely to her works. Women’s contribution to other areas of medieval art, such as secular andecclesiastical embroidery, is widely documented (Parker, 1984), and women are recorded as being active in manymedieval crafts, some of which were female monopolies. Sabina von Steinbach’s stone sculptures (14th century) onStrasbourg Cathedral are signed, and legend, recounted by Vachon (1893), suggests that she was given the taskof completion of the façade sculptures on the cathedral on the death of the master builder.

(ii) Renaissance to early modern.

Giorgio Vasari, the Renaissance artist whose Vite (1550; rev. 1568) became amodel for later art­historical writing, referred in this text to the women Pliny notedand in the edition of 1568 mentioned five Flemish women artists and addedsome contemporaries of the Italian school: Suor Plautilla Nelli; Lucretia Quistellidella Mirandola; Irene di Spilimbergo, a pupil of Titian; Barbara Longhi;Sofonisba Anguissola and her three sisters (see fig.); and the Bolognese artistsProperzia de’ Rossi, who was also renowned as a sculptor, and Lavinia Fontana.During the 17th and 18th centuries the works and careers of women artists werepublicly discussed and celebrated. Carlo Cesare Malvasia wrote an adulatorybiography of Elisabetta Sirani titled Felsina pittrice (1678), in which he alsomentioned Fontana, Sofonisba Anguissola and Fede Galicia (1578–1630).Arnold Houbraken’s book on the lives of Dutch painters De groote schouburghder Nederlandtsche konstschilders en schilderessen (1718–21) included womenartists in his title and named 11 of them within the book. Women had been active

in Flemish art since the late 15th century (e.g. Levinia Teerlinc, 1510/20–76, and Caterina van Hermessen, after1528–after 1587), and they were well represented in genre and still­life painting in 17th­century Holland (JudithLeyster, Clara Peeters, Rachel Ruysch).

Women were court artists, for example the Spanish sculptor Luisa Roldán, who worked for Charles II of Spain. Theinternational reputation achieved by the Venetian pastellist Rosalba Carriera was indicated by her admission to theAccademia di S Luca in Rome (1705) and the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris (1720).Women artists were among founder­members of the Royal Academy in London in 1768: Angelica Kauffman andMary Moser; while there were several women members of the Académie Royale in the late 18th century, includingAnne Vallayer­Coster, the Berlin artist Anna Dorothea Therbusch, Elisabeth­Louise Vigée Le Brun and AdélaïdeLabille­Guiard. Records of women sculptors are more intermittent for this period but include Anne Seymour Damerand Marie­Anne Collot, who worked with Falconet on the equestrian statue of Peter the Great (1766) in StPetersburg, modelling the Tsar’s head and making portrait busts for members of the court of Catherine the Great(Opperman, 1965).

(iii) Modern.

The historical record from antiquity to the 18th century was considerablyexpanded by the 19th century, when many women, professional and amateur,were active in the visual arts, exhibiting at salons and academies (see fig.), aswell as participating in new, independent art groups and taking up new mediasuch as photography. Artists in this field include Clementina, ViscountessHawarden, Julia Margaret Cameron, Frances Benjamin Johnson, Mary E. Flenoyand Elise Harleston. By the end of the 19th century, when the discipline of ARTHISTORY was becoming a recognized area of research and publication, aconstant but fluctuating record of women in the arts was consolidated into aseries of major surveys of women’s participation in all branches of the visual arts:Guhl (1858), Ellet (1859), Clayton (1876), Fidière (1885), Vachon (1893),Sparrow (1905), Hirsch (1905), Ragg (1907) and Scheffler (1908). In 1904 ClaraClement produced a massive compilation of over 1000 entries, and Lü Märtenproduced her study Die Künstlerin. The Künstlerlexikon begun by Thieme and

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Smithsonian…

Edmonia Lewis: Old IndianArrow­Maker and his Daughter,marble, 545×345×340…

Becker in 1907 lists over 6000 women in the areas of painting, sculpture andprintmaking.

By the mid­20th century, however, standard textbooks in use throughoutuniversity and college art history courses mentioned either very few womenartists or, more often, none at all (e.g. H. W. Janson’s The History of Art; E. H.Gombrich’s The Story of Art); women photographers were never as completelyerased as painters and sculptors. It is this fact that led women radically toreappraise modern art history and its hierarchies, which have ensured that themore highly valued the activity, the less women will be associated with it. Thisreflects a widespread cultural phenomenon studied by social anthropologists thatreveals that social acknowledgement of the performer of social actions relatesmore to social status than to the nature or extent of activity performed (Ortner,1974). In the few modern texts that do refer to women, comments are typicallydismissive, revealing the use of the feminine stereotype: Rudolf Wittkower in Artand Architecture in Italy, 1600–1750 (1965) described Rosalba Carriera’s workas ‘mellow, fragrant and sweet, typically feminine’; in referring to Vigée Le Brun,

the most highly paid portrait painter of her time, Michael Levey in Rococo to Revolution (1966) wrote: ‘By removingany suggestions of intelligence (naturally) as if it had been rouge, she created the limpid, fashionably artlessportrait’. Drawing on a tendency that can be traced to Boccaccio and Vasari to represent any woman artist as anexception to her natural sex, who would nonetheless always betray signs of her femininity in her art, Victoriancommentators on the arts erected a rigid division between the abilities, tastes and sensibilities of the sexes tocreate separate spheres for art by men and by women. The American critic John Jackson Jarves writing in 1871 ofthe group of neo­classical sculptors settled in Rome, named by Henry James ‘a white marmorean flock’, whichincluded Harriet Hosmer, Emma Stebbins and Edmonia Lewis (see fig.), said: ‘Women are by nature likewiseprompted in the treatment of sculpture to motives of fancy and sentiment rather than realistic portraiture or absolutecreative imagination’ (A. J., x, 1871, p. 7); Léon Legrange wrote: ‘Male genius has nothing to fear from femaletaste’ (Gaz. B.­A., viii, 1860, pp. 30–43). The doctrine of separate spheres functioned paradoxically. In the era ofhigh bourgeois culture, women artists were granted a degree of recognition for their special sensibilities, which wasreinforced by the formation of such women’s art organizations as the Society of Female Artists (later Lady Artists) inBritain (founded 1856) and the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs in France (founded 1881; see Garb,1994), and the many art circles for women, such as the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen (founded 1867). In thedifferent cultural regime of early 20th­century modernism, separation could and did easily become segregation, andin the atmosphere of a modernist culture that reacted against the oversexualization of 19th­century ideology by acomplete denial of any value for gender difference, the very discourses that had at least acknowledged women asartists, however belittlingly, became the justification for their total exclusion, so that Janson, author of one of themost widely read textbooks, The History of Art (1962), could state in 1979 that no women were included in his bookbecause no woman ‘had been important enough to go into a one­volume history of art’ (Salomon, 1991).

2. Women and the writing of art history.

Women have participated in the development of the discipline of art history since its emergence in the late 18thcentury. Their interests reflected aspects of women’s circumstances in the privileged classes, and although theywere never exclusively concerned with women artists, many of the first professional women art historiansaccommodated women artists in their historical surveys and guides to museums and collections. JohannaSchopenhauer (1766–1838) wrote Johann van Eyck und seine Nachfolge (1822), one of the first books on theartist and his school. Maria Dundas Graham, Lady Callcott, published the first monograph on Poussin in 1820 andin 1835 produced a Description of the Chapel of the Annunziata dell’ Arena. A biography of Salvatore Rosa waswritten by Lady Morgan in 1824, while Anna Brownell Jameson, considered the first professional woman arthistorian, initiated work on religious and secular iconography with her Sacred and Legendary Art (1848). FrenchGothic sculpture was researched by Félicie d’Ayzac; her Histoire de Saint­Denis appeared in 1860–61. MaryPhiladelphia Merrifield is still noted for her research and publication of treatises on painting and other art forms fromthe 12th and 13th centuries. She translated Cennino Cennini’s treatise on painting in 1844 and in 1846 wrote TheArt of Fresco Painting. Elizabeth Ellet, Ellen Clayton and Clara Clement wrote books on women artists, while AnnaJameson devoted part of her Visits and Sketches (1834) to an appraisal of women artists, while she planned athree­volume memoir on ‘celebrated female Artists’.

In Women as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820–1970 (1981) Claire Richter Sherman and Adele Holcombprovided detailed studies of major women art historians and critics, including critics Margaret Fuller and MarianaGriswold Van Rensselaer, Emilia Frances Pattison, Lady Dilke (17th­ to 18th­century French art), GeorgianaGoddard King (medieval Spanish art), Gisela Richter (Greek art), Erica Tietze­Conrat (Renaissance and Baroqueart) and Agnes Mongan (drawings). This research shows the relations between women’s work in the emergentdiscipline of art history and changing social and cultural attitudes towards women. While the field was still relativelyundefined in the 19th century, women made major contributions to the study of art in an atmosphere in whichindependent travel and freelance research and writing were respectable activities for middle­class women. Withgreater professionalization the distinction between trained academics or curators and amateur intellectualswidened, and, although in the USA women constituted almost 50% of the initial membership of the College ArtAssociation (founded 1917), there was growing inequality of status between men and women, as art history wasfirmly located in museums and universities and cultural attitudes began to dictate to women a rigid choice betweenwork and family. The contribution of women to the formation and development of the study of the history of art has

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Judy Chicago: platerepresenting Margaret Sanger,from The Dinner Party,…

been neglected in the histories of art history; Sherman and Holcomb made an important start in this necessary areaof research and reassessment of major women scholars in the field.

3. Historical recovery.

The re­emergence of the women’s movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s precipitated a reassessment of allbranches of organized knowledge. Initial recoveries of women artists made women art historians and artists begin tocritique the silences and stereotypes of art history with regard to women artists, producing a series of interventionsthat have since challenged the authority of the discipline and questioned its practices: for instance its focus on thegreat, individual artist; its isolation of art from other social practices as exemplified in its typical forms; themonograph and the catalogue raisonné; its preoccupation with stylistic evolution; its separation of iconography fromsocial meaning and ideology; its selectivity in preserving a white male canon.

(i) Redressing the neglect.

From the early 1970s a steady flow of exhibitions and publications began the retrieval of knowledge about womenartists that had been effaced in the 20th century, expanding that knowledge with both new research and adifferently orientated analysis of the culture produced by women. The most significant were the exhibitions OldMistresses (1972), Künstlerinnen international, 1877–1977 (1977) and Das verborgene Museum (1987), the last ofwhich documented the art by women in Berlin’s public collections, and the book Women Artists, 1550–1950 by AnnSutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin (1976). In 1975–6 a travelling exhibition Women of Photography: An HistoricalSurvey provided a basic historical record of women in this field, which has been supplemented by a growing numberof studies on selected photographers, such as Lady Hawarden, Julia Margaret Cameron, Frances BenjaminJohnson, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange and many others active in the 20th century (Fisher, 1987). JeanneMoutoussamy­Ashe has documented the history of African­American women photographers (1986, rev. 1993).Surveys of women in the arts published in English during the 1970s and 1980s (including Tufts, 1974; Petersonand Wilson, 1976; Honig Fine, 1978; Greer, 1979; Rubinstein, 1982; Slatkin, 1985; Heller, 1987) mainlyconcentrated on white European and American artists, although there was detailed study of women artists of Chinapublished as an appendix to Peterson and Wilson as early as 1976 (see §IV). Ora Williams produced AmericanBlack Women in the Arts and Social Sciences: A Bibliographic Survey in 1973, and in the same year many womenwere detailed in Afro­American Artists: A Bio­Bibliographical Directory by T. Cedar Holm. Women in Germany havepublished on women in art (Nabakowski, Sander and Gorsen, 1980; Berger, 1982; Krull, 1984).

By the 1980s white feminist art historians responded to critique of the racism in art history and joined with womenfrom all nations in research on women outside the West (see also §§III–IV below), particularly Lyle, Moore andNavaretta’s Women Artists of the World (1984), on those working in traditions derived from African, Asian,Amerindian, Australian or Canadian traditions, and those who were part of the post­colonial diasporas (Rubinstein,1982; Gouma­Peterson and Mathews, 1987, Sulter, 1990). A special exhibition was devoted to Japanese WomenArtists, 1600–1900 (1988; see §IV), and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington, DC, hasproduced exhibitions on women artists from Poland (Voices of Freedom: Polish Women Artists and the Avant­garde,1880–1990, 1991) and from the Arab nations (Forces of Change: Artists from the Arab World, 1994). In the late1990s work was in progress on women artists in South Africa, Korea, Japan (Shalala, 1994), India and Pakistan(1994 exh. cat. by Hashmi and Poomaya­Smith). Since it has been argued that the hierarchical division betweenarts and crafts echoed and reinforced a gender hierarchy, renewed attention was paid to women in design andtextiles (Callen, 1979; Anscombe, 1984; Parker, 1984). Less attention has been paid to the specific history ofwomen sculptors, although Mitchell (1989) began to work on women sculptors in France, particularly Camille Claudeland Jeanne Poupelet, and Rubenstein (1990) documented an American history. There are special case studies onVictorian women artists (Gerrish Nunn, 1986; Cherry, 1993) as well as a few major monographs (e.g. Garrard onGentileschi, 1989, and many more on women of the 19th and 20th centuries). Research into women artists isassisted by museums intending to collect and conserve women’s art, such as the National Museum of Women’s Artin Washington, DC, the Verborgene Museum project in Berlin and the Frauen Museum in Bonn.

(ii) Facing theoretical issues.

While it has been important to turn back the tide of ignorance by publishingsurveys and monographs on women artists to ensure their inclusion in academicsyllabi and culture’s general knowledge (the most complete of which by the late20th century was Chadwick’s Women, Art and Society, 1990), the study ofwomen artists is not well served by a focus on the artist in biographical isolationor by a mere replication of the standard formats and interests of mainstream arthistories. The feminist intervention in art history immediately confronts problemsabout text, author and sexual difference that transcend the field, to beconsidered also in such other areas of cultural production as film and literature:does gender make a difference? If so, is it social, cultural, psychological,biological? Is it a transhistorical fact about men or women, or is it historically andculturally variable? The position that attributes to women a given quality sharedby all of the sex led certain artists and art historians to examine art made bywomen for a female iconography, for example the work of Judy Chicago (see

fig.; see also FEMINISM AND ART). Others argued that women’s artistic production was shaped historically by

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social forces resulting from such facts as women’s limited access to formal training in the period of the academiesand their official exclusion from study from the nude model, and the general cultural ideologies about women’snature and sensibility (Nochlin, 1971). Another position is that psychological factors arising from the general positionof women in social and personal life affected their art, which was made in conditions that repressed their sexualitiesand broke their energies against a series of obstacles, such as family, illusion of success, love and so forth (Greer,1979). The anthology Significant Others (1993) by Chadwick and de Courtivron has re­examined women artists inrelationships with men artists, while Rogoff (1992) has provided a more theorized analysis of how to examinewomen artists in relation to both male culture and women’s networks.

A different approach that can be loosely defined as post­structuralist located the issue in language, and thediscourses of culture that institutionalized masculinity as the norm and defined femininity as deviance andinsufficiency. In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, such oppositions as high/low, serious/trivial, art/craft wouldalways echo the sexual hierarchy. Thus women art historians could not begin to discuss the cultural practices ofwomen without deconstructing the very premises of the systemic sexism written into and performed by languageand reproduced in art history’s own special forms and particular discourses. A major example of the radicaltransformation is Tickner’s The Spectacle of Women (1987), which analysed the visual history of the campaigns forwomen’s suffrage, identifying the suffragists’ use of visual spectacle, banners, postcards, posters, massdemonstrations in order to develop a visual rhetoric that challenged, while using the existing terms of, Edwardianfemininity. The analysis of the war of images unleashed when women took on the bourgeois state to demand civilstatus was a contest about definitions of sexual difference as much as civil rights. Tickner’s work revealed theimportance of visual representation in society defined as a battlefield of representations. This book necessarilyabolished the curatorial and art­historical distinctions between painting and posters, between performance andpolitics in order to establish the importance of this moment in the history of women, society and representation.Feminist art historians have, therefore, stressed the need for a social­structural analysis of the conditions of bothartistic production and gender relations in order not only to situate and comprehend the forces that shapedwomen’s lives, actions and cultural productions but also to undermine the false claims to suprasocial universalitythat is made for canonized white male art (see FEMINISM AND ART). Thus the issue of sexual difference isintroduced to change the whole history of art, and not merely to reconfirm women’s abnormal status within it.

4. Feminist critiques.

(i) Interventions.

When Linda Nochlin published the article: ‘Why Are There No Great Women Artists?’ (1971), her object was not toanswer the question but to expose its dangers, since it took for granted the idea of ‘greatness’ that is central to thecanon (see also Duncan, 1975). She revealed the social and cultural pressures that determine who can and cannotmake art and be acknowledged as a ‘great’ artist by showing the importance of extra­aesthetic factors, such aseducation, art institutions and prevailing cultural ideologies. Nochlin posed feminism as a catalyst for re­evaluatingthe discipline as a whole, because it raised such fundamental questions about the way art history obscures thesocial character of artistic practice and value systems. In 1981 Parker and Pollock published Old Mistresses:Women, Art and Ideology, borrowing the title from Gabhart and Broun’s exhibition of 1972. They took up thequestion posed by the exhibition’s authors of why there is no female equivalent for the reverential term old master.Pointing out a consistent pattern in the language used of women by art historians and critics since the 18thcentury, which they named ‘the feminine stereotype’, they argued that art history was not indifferent to women buthad actively produced the terms of women’s exclusion by creating a negative category against which a selectivecreativity, unacknowledged as masculine, was erected as the sole representative of Western culture. Furthermore,they examined the ideological bases of the division between the arts and crafts, analysed the varying history of theidentity of the artist, and defined the historical moment of the revolutionary emergence of bourgeois society as thatat which the terms ‘woman’ and ‘artist’ became socially and ideologically antagonistic. They argued that womenwere positioned differentially in relation to dominant structures of artistic practice and definitions of artistic identity,but that they produced art as much because of as despite these conditions. Refuting a merely negativeexplanation, they stressed the ways in which women artists negotiated both institutions and representationaltraditions to produce works that require readings attuned to recognition of specificity rather than absolutedifference. Finally, they explored the production relations between women artists and certain modernist movements—Surrealism (see also Vergine, 1980; Chadwick, 1985), Abstract Expressionism and conceptual art—leading up tothe decisive challenge to modernism posed by the emergence of feminist practices in the visual arts in the 1970s.They established the necessity to erase the boundary between historical and contemporary art. Two anthologiesedited by Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (1982 and 1992) bring together representative samples of theinterventions women have made using these models and others into all periods from ancient Greece to the present.In 1987 Gouma­Peterson and Mathews provided a historical overview of the varying positions and debatesproduced by ‘The Feminist Critique of Art and Art History’ (responded to by Pollock, 1993). Lisa Tickner (1988)systematically evaluated the challenge of feminism to art history through analysis of several theorizations of themeaning of sexual difference.

(ii) The nude.

One of the key areas of feminist intervention has been the portrayal of the female nude in Western art, which posesdirectly the question of sexuality and representation and reveals that there has been a politics of vision in the

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Käthe Kollwitz: Self­portrait,lithograph, 1920; © 2007 ArtistsRights Society…

privileged field of art. Nochlin co­edited a series of papers on the theme of Woman as Sex Object in 1972. Duncan(1993) wrote extensively on the function of the modernist nude both in its early 20th­century context and then as amajor element of the narratives of the modernist museum. Tickner’s study of how contemporary artists negotiatedthe historical legacy of the art’s appropriation of the female body in ‘The Body Politic’ appeared in the first volume ofthe Association of Art Historians’ journal Art History (1972), creating considerable debate as the first major article topresent feminist challenges to the field of representation of sexuality and the female body. Nead’s The FemaleNude (1992) explores the ambivalent status of the ‘nude’, which has become synonymous with ‘art’ in so far as therepresentation of the female body can be managed to figure containment and aesthetic conquest of the potentiallyunruly and obscene. Thus she breached the boundaries between high art and pornography, traditional culture andcontemporary feminist practice in order to trace the complex web of relations around the female body, sexuality,obscenity and the discourses of aesthetics. Pollock (1993) provided a case­study of the relations between sex andrace, between colonialism and modernism in the analysis of a single painting of the nude by Gauguin. AbigailSolomon­Godeau’s study of the 19th­century photographic archive (1986) of images of the Countess of Castiglioneproduced a searching analysis of the representation of the female nude in particular and the female body ingeneral in the formation of photographic practices within commodity culture, with its dual fetishization of goods andsexuality.

(iii) Questioning the canon.

In 1982 Nochlin posed another key question, ‘Why Have There Been Great MaleOnes [Artists]?’, in an article analysing the social and political construction ofGustave Courbet’s reputation as the ‘father’ of modern art. She showed thatquestions about the absence of women artists from art history required acomplementary analysis of the ways in which the reputations of those artists whoare canonized are secured. Pollock (1980) similarly identified the process bywhich van Gogh became the paradigmatic modern artist, articulating ancientmyths about creativity, madness and genius, one key aspect of which ismasculinity (see also Lipton on Picasso, and Zemel on van Gogh). Rogoff (inBroude and Garrard, 1992) applied a complementary analysis to the visualconstruction of artistic identity in German Expressionist self­portraiture. Salomon(1991) provided a thorough analysis of the formation of a masculinized canon bydiscerning in the genealogy of art­historical writing (from Vasari to 20th­centurykeepers of the canon such as Janson) a structure of masculine identification with

heroic male creators. This idea is also proposed in Kofman’s study of Freud’s aesthetics (1988). Feminist work onthe canon itself has led to re­readings of the works of van Gogh and Toulouse­Lautrec (Pollock, 1995); Degas(Lipton, 1986; Kendall and Pollock, 1992; Callen, 1995); Courbet (Nochlin, 1988 exh. cat.); and Rembrandt (Bal,1991). Bringing semiotics, psychoanalysis and literary theory to break down the word/image opposition, Balprovided critical readings of the representation of gender in the work of Rembrandt and also produced a model ofreading against the grain, ‘reading for the woman’, bringing to visibility overlooked and repressed possibilities in thefigurative and narrative texts of a Baroque painter. Similar kinds of revisioning of canonical moments occur in thework of Simons on the representation of women in early Renaissance profile portraits (‘Women in Frames’, 1988)which elaborate issues of the gaze and its politics in representation based in the social exchange of women by menin contemporary marriage and property rituals. If the identity of the artist as masculine was increasingly establishedfrom the 19th century, women artists have had to negotiate a way to represent to themselves and to society theirown creative identity. This has generated a series of studies of women’s self­representation using diary materials,such as those by Mariga Bashkirtseva (Marie Bashkirtseff), Käthe Kollwitz (see fig.), Paula Modersohn­Becker, or bylooking at self­portraiture and photographic representation, as in the case of American Abstract Expressionist LeeKrasner (Wagner, 1988).

(iv) New art­historical parameters.

Women artists and the issues raised by feminist studies cannot be accommodated within existing narratives of arthistory, particularly periodizations defined exclusively through stylistic change or epochal shifts that reflect unequallyhistorical changes in the field of gender relations of importance for women. ‘Did women have a Renaissance?’ wasa question posed and answered in the negative by the feminist historian Kelly (1984), provoking a relatedreconsideration of the major benchmarks in the history of art: such questions as ‘Was the French Revolution ahistorical defeat for women?’ and ‘How did women—both bourgeois and working class—experience modernity andmetropolitan life?’ were also posed (Pollock, 1988). If social relations are taken to be more determinant than simplystylistic shifts, the history of women in the arts will produce a different pattern of significant moments (asdemonstrated by Tickner).

In an unpublished Masters degree thesis of 1980 Shirley Moreno focused her research on the emergence of thevisual rhetoric of the erotic nude in 16th­century Venetian art, in relation to the redefinitions of concupiscence andtemptation ordained by the Council of Trent and the Counter­Reformation, as well as to practices aroundprostitution and anxieties raised by venereal diseases, the emergence of illicit erotica and pornography, as well astraditional imagery for celebrations of marriage, and the regulation of marital alliances in changing class formationsin both Venice (where such paintings were made by Titian) and Spain (by whose king they had beencommissioned). Moreno concluded that the representation of woman in this form as a central category of westernEuropean painting should be understood in terms of a major shift in the organization and official definitions of

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sexuality represented by the cross­related institutions of the militant Roman Catholic Church and the Spanishmonarchy. She utilized the concept of ‘woman as sign’ developed by Cowie (1978) to argue against perceiving thevisual image as mere reflection of social processes. Drawing on structuralist analysis of society as a languagesystem, Cowie argued that practices of visual representation are constitutive of meanings, and that in patriarchalcultures woman becomes the sign of the exchange by which men are constituted as the key representatives ofsociety itself. Visual systems, such as film and painting, use woman as a sign, not of womanhood or any socialaspect of actual women, but to signify relations between men within a patriarchal structure. Thus feminist arthistorians would argue that there are no images of women, but rather that the history of art, as a privileged site ofproducing meaning for culture, should be analysed in terms of the varying formations of sexual difference andsocial power in which representation is a semiotic field, that is where signs produce meanings in relation to eachother for specific and positioned users (Pollock in Kendall and Pollock, 1992).

Using the concept of ‘woman as sign’, Cherry and Pollock (1984) focused on British culture during the 19th century,another key moment of change in the regimes of representation around sexual difference. Studying theconstruction of working­class model and artist Elizabeth Siddal as Rossetti’s muse, ‘Siddal’, in both Rossetti’sdrawings and the contemporary literature that manufactured the artist as a great master, they argued that theobject of feminist analysis should be the discursive construction of meanings for the term ‘woman’ and ‘artist’, thusshowing that they are historical and variable, while also revealing the intertextuality between verbal and visualdiscourses as part of a complex social totality. Not only social structures have to be considered. Visual imagesappeal to the viewer by offering visual pleasure, luring the spectator’s gaze and arousing desire, itself the trace offormative memories. Feminists have begun to use psychoanalytical theory in the analysis of visual representation.Reconsidering Freud’s essay on Leonardo da Vinci in the light of late 20th­century Lacanian revisions ofpsychoanalysis, Kristeva proposed an analysis of the representation of the Virgin in the work of Giovanni Bellini(1980), that used a single case study to explain the attraction and the variations of treatment of a topic ofRenaissance art whose recurrence is not solely due to Christian theology but rather overdetermined by infantilememories of and psychic investment in the image of the mother. Kristeva’s work on abjection (Pouvoirs de l’horreur,1980) has been widely used in the analysis of representations of the maternal feminine in art and photography.

Although feminism has the potential to challenge and rewrite the entire history of art, not only to restore women’scultural contributions to the historical record, but also to allow us to read visual representations and artistic practicesas distinct but necessary parts of the complex of social practices that collectively constitute society, its class,gender, sexual and race relations, the process has only just begun. There are areas more thoroughly investigatedthan others; modernism and Post­modernism have received considerable feminist analysis, whereas feministinterventions into Renaissance and Baroque periods are less numerous. Seventeenth­century Dutch art is agrowing field, as is Classical antiquity. The study of women as painters has predominated over research intosculpture and printmaking, although areas such as embroidery and other textile forms have been reclaimed as‘women’s true cultural heritage’ (Mainardi, 1973). Western art is more consistently documented and researched thanart by women in the rest of the world. A possible danger exists of constituting a new feminist canon, which privilegeswhite women artists and neglects both women of colour in the West and women artists across the world. Feministart histories of the 1970s were criticized for an unacknowledged racism; in the 1990s this challenge was beingfaced, stimulated by the activities of black women artists and art historians equally recovering a doubly repressedheritage of creativity. In terms of American art history, the token reference to the sculptor Edmonia Lewis is beingamplified by research on sculptors Augusta Savage and Meta Vaux Fuller, while painters Alma Thomas (b 1895)and Georgia Jessup (b 1926) and multi­media artist Faith Ringgold are represented in the National Museum ofWomen’s Art, which has also devoted a retrospective to photographer Carrie Mae Weems (1994). Hagewara (1990)has published a book in Japanese on black women artists in Britain in order to challenge the hegemony of Westernideas of art, which not only refuses acknowledgement of creativity to its own women but equally denies it to womenof colour. Issues of racism in representation have been debated in contemporary art by women (Phillippi, 1987) andfeminist analyses of orientalism (Nochlin, 1982, and Pollock, 1992) have pointed the way for feminism to be thecatalyst by means of which issues not only of gender and sexual difference but also of social and cultural differenceare consistently considered in the analysis of the history of art. In this way the interventions of women into arthistory can radically expand the perspectives, theories, methods and concerns of art history to produce morecomprehensive and critical histories of art.

Bibliography

Early sources

C. C. Malvasia: Felsina pittrice (1678); ed. G. Zattori (1841)

A. Houbraken: De groote schouburgh (1718–21)

E. Guhl: Die Frauen in der Kunstgeschichte (Berlin, 1858)

E. Ellet: Women Artists in All Ages and Countries (New York, 1859)

E. C. Clayton: English Female Artists (London, 1876)

O. Fidière: Les Femmes artistes à l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (Paris, 1885)

M. Vachon: La Femme dans l’art (Paris, 1893)

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C. Clement: Women in the Fine Arts from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. (Boston, 1904/RNew York, 1974)

A. Hirsch: Die bildenden Künstlerinnen der Neuzeit (Stuttgart, 1905)

A. Hirsch: Die Frauen in der bildenden Kunst (Stuttgart, 1905)

W. Shaw Sparrow: Women Painters of the World (London, 1905)

L. M. Ragg: Women Artists of Bologna (London, 1907)

K. Scheffler: Die Frau in der Kunstgeschichte (Berlin, 1908)

L. Märten: Die Künstlerin (Munich, 1914)

General

L. Nochlin: ‘Why Are There No Great Women Artists?’ (1971); repr. in Art & Sexual Politics, ed. E. Baker and T.Hess (New York and London, 1973)

Old Mistresses: Women Artists from the Past (exh. cat. by Gabhart and E. Broun, Baltimore, MD, Walters A.G.,1972)

D. Miner: Anastasie and her Sisters: Women Artists of the Middle Ages (Baltimore, 1974)

S. B. Ortner: ‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’, Women, Culture and Society, ed. M. Z. Rosaldo and L.Lamphere (Stamford, 1974)

E. Tufts: Our Hidden Heritage: Five Centuries of Women Artists (New York and London, 1974)

C. Duncan: ‘When Greatness Is a Box of Wheaties’, Artforum (Oct 1975), pp. 60–64; repr. in Aesthetics andPower: Essays in Critical Art History (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 121–32

Women of Photography: An Historical Survey (exh. cat. by M. Mann and A. Noggle, San Francisco, CA, MOMA;Santa Fé, Mus. NM; New York, Sidney Janis Gal.; Milwaukee, U. WI; and elsewhere; 1975–6)

L. Nochlin and A. Sutherland Harris: Women Artists, 1550–1950 (Los Angeles and New York, 1976)

K. Peterson and J. J. Wilson: Women Artists: Recognition and Reappraisal from the Early Middle Ages to theTwentieth Century (New York, 1976)

E. Honig Fine: Women and Art: A History of Women Painters and Sculptors from the Renaissance to the 20thCentury (London and Montclair, 1978)

G. Greer: The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and their Work (London, 1979)

J. Collins and G. B. Optiz, eds: Women Artists in America: 18th Century to the Present, 1790–1980 (New York,1980)

G. Nabokowski, G. Sander and P. Gorsen: Frauen in der Kunst (Frankfurt am Main, 1980)

R. Parker and G. Pollock: Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London and New York, 1981)

C. Richter Sherman with A. M. Holcomb: Women as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820–1970 (Westport, CT, andLondon, 1981)

R. Berger: Malerinnen auf dem Weg in 20. Jahrhundert: Kunstgeschichte als Sozialgeschichte (Cologne, 1982)

C. S. Rubinstein: American Women Artists: From Early Indian Times to the Present (New York, 1982)

I. Anscombe: A Woman’s Touch: Women in Design from 1860 to the Present Day (London, 1984)

C. Lyle, S. Moore and C. Navaretta: Women Artists of the World (New York, 1984)

W. Chadwick: Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (London and Boston, 1985)

C. Petteys: Dictionary of Women Artists Born before 1900 (Boston, 1985)

W. Slatkin: Women Artists in History: From Antiquity to the 20th Century (Englewood Cliffs, 1985)

E. Krull: Frauen in der Kunst (Leipzig, 1986; Eng. trans., London, 1989)

J. Moutoussamy­Ashe: Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers (New York, 1986, rev. 1993)

P. Gerrish Nunn: Canvassing: Recollections by Six Victorian Women Artists (London, 1986)

N. Heller: Women Artists: An Illustrated History (London, 1987)

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P. Gerrish Nunn: Victorian Women Artists (London, 1987)

R. Parker and G. Pollock: Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement, 1970–1985 (London, 1987)

D. Phillippi: ‘The Conjuncture of Race and Gender in Anthropology and Art History: A Critical Study of NancySpero’s Work’, Third Text, i (1987), pp. 34–54

Das verborgene Museum: Dokumentation der Kunst von Frauen in Berliner öffentlichen Sammlungen (exh. cat.,ed. G. Breitling and others, Berlin, 1987)

S. Kofman: The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud’s Aesthetics (New York, 1988)

G. Pollock: Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (London, 1988)

P. Simons: ‘Women in Frames: The Eye, the Gaze and the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture’, Hist. Workshop J.,xxv (1988), pp. 4–30; repr. in N. Broude and M. Garrard: The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History(New York, 1992)

L. Tickner: ‘Feminism, Art History and Sexual Difference’, Genders, 3 (1988); repr. in Generations andGeographies, ed. G. Pollock (London, 1995)

P. Gerrish Nunn and J. Marsh: Women Artists and the Pre­Raphaelite Movement (London, 1989)

A. Wagner: ‘Lee Krasner as L. K.’, Representations, xxv (1989); repr. in N. Broude and M. Garrard: The ExpandingDiscourse: Feminism and Art History (New York, 1992), pp. 425–35

W. Chadwick: Women, Art and Society (London, 1990)

P. Dunford: A Biographical Dictionary of Women Artists in Europe and America since 1850 (London and New York,1990)

H. Hagewara: Kone mune no arashi [This storm raging in my heart] (Tokyo, 1990) [Black women artists in Britain]

C. S. Rubinstein: American Women Sculptors: A History of Women Working in Three Dimensions (New York, 1990)

N. Broude and M. Garrard: The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (New York, 1992)

D. Cherry: Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London and New York, 1993)

C. Duncan: Aesthetics and Power: Essays in Critical Art History (Cambridge, 1993)

G. Pollock: ‘The Politics of Theory: Generations and Geographies: Feminist Histories and the Histories of ArtHistories’, Genders, 17 (1993), pp. 97–120

N. Shalala: ‘Creating towards Recognition: Japanese Women Artists’, Asian Art News, iv/4 (1994), pp. 16–18

Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World (exh. cat. by S. Mikdadi Nashashibi, Washington, DC, N. Mus. WomenA., 1994)

An Intelligent Rebellion: Women Artists of Pakisthan (exh. cat. by S. Hashmi and N. Poomaya­Smith, Bradford,Cartwright Hall, 1994)

G. Pollock: Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s History (London, 1995)

Specialist studies

H. Opperman: ‘Marie­Anne Collot in Russia: Two Portraits’, Burl. Mag., cvii (1965), pp. 408–10

L. Nochlin and T. B. Hess, eds: ‘Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art, 1730–1970’, Art News Annu., xxxviii(1972)

C. Duncan: ‘Virility and Male Domination in Early Twentieth Century Vanguard Art’, Artforum (Dec 1973); repr. inFeminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, ed. N. Broude and M. D. Garrard (New York, 1982)

P. Mainardi: ‘Quilts: The Great American Art’, Feminist A.J., ii/1 (1973); repr. in Feminism and Art History:Questioning the Litany, ed. N. Broude and M. D. Garrard (New York, 1982), pp. 331–46

L. Nochlin and T. B. Hess, eds: Woman as Sex Object (London, 1973)

E. Lipton: Picasso Criticism, 1901–1939: The Making of an Artist Hero (New York and London, 1976)

Künstlerinnen international, 1877–1977 (exh. cat., W. Berlin, Schloss Charlottenburg, 1977)

E. Cowie: ‘Woman as Sign’, M/f, 1 (1978); repr. in M/f Reader, ed. P. Adams and E. Cowie (London, 1992)

L. Tickner: ‘The Body Politic: Female Sexuality and Women Artists since 1970’, A. Hist, i/2 (1978), pp. 239–49,263–76; repr. in R. Parker and G. Pollock: Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement, 1970–1985(London, 1987), pp. 263–76, 336–9

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A. Callen: The Angel in the Studio: Women in the Arts and Crafts Movement, 1870–1914 (London, 1979)

C. M. Zemel: The Formation of a Legend: Van Gogh Criticism, 1890–1920 (Ann Arbor, 1979, 2/1980)

P. Gorson: Kunst und Krankheit: Metamorphosen der aesthetischen Einbildungskraft (Frankfurt am Main, 1980)

J. Kristeva: ‘Motherhood according to Bellini’, Desire in Language (New York, 1980), pp. 237–70

J. Kristeva: Pouvoirs de l’horreur (Paris, 1980); Eng. trans. by L. S. Roudiez as Powers of Horror: An Essay onAbjection (New York, 1982)

G. Pollock: ‘Artists, Media and Mythologies: Genius, Madness and Art History’, Screen, xxi/2 (1980), pp. 57–96

L. Vergine: L’altra metà dell’avanguardia, 1910–1940 (Milan, 1980, Fr. trans., 1982)

R. Berger: Malerinnen auf dem Weg im 20. Jahrhundert: Kunstgeschichte als Sozialgeschichte (Cologne, 1982,2/1987)

N. Broude and M. D. Garrard, eds: Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (New York, 1982)

L. Nochlin: ‘The De­politicization of Gustave Courbet: Transformation and Rehabilitation under the Third Republic’,October, 22 (1982), pp. 65–78

D. Cherry and G. Pollock: ‘Woman as Sign in Pre­Raphaelite Literature: A Study of the Representation ofElizabeth Siddall’, A. Hist., vii/2 (1984), pp. 206–27; repr. in G. Pollock: Vision and Difference: Feminism,Femininity and Histories of Art (London, 1988)

M. Kelly: ‘Reviewing Modernist Criticism’, Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. B. Wallis (New York,1984), pp. 87–103

L. Nead: ‘The Magdalen in Modern Time: The Mythology of the Fallen Women in Pre­Raphaelite Painting’, OxfordA. J., vii/1 (1984), pp. 26–37

R. Parker: The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London, 1984)

M. Blind: The Journals of Marie Bashkirtseff, intro. by R. Parker and G. Pollock (London, 1985)

E. Lipton: Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life (Berkeley and London, 1986)

A. Solomon­Godeau: ‘The Legs of the Countess’, October, 39 (Winter 1986), pp. 65–108

H. Dawkins: ‘The Diaries and Photographs of Hannah Cullwick’, A. Hist., x/2 (1987), pp. 154–87

T. Gouma­Peterson: ‘Faith Ringgold’s Narrative Quilts’, Faith Ringgold, Change: Painter Story Quilts (New York,1987), pp. 9–16

T. Gouma­Peterson and P. Mathews: ‘The Feminist Critique of Art History’, A. Bull., lxix/3 (1987), pp. 326–57

L. Tickner: The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–14 (London, 1987)

P. Simons: Gender and Sexuality in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (Sydney, 1988)

L. Nochlin: ‘Courbet’s Real Allegory: Rereading The Painter’s Studio’, Courbet Reconsidered (exh. cat., ed. S.Faunce and L. Nochlin; New York, Brooklyn Mus., 1988)

M. Garrard: Artemisia Gentileschi: The Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton, 1989)

C. Mitchell: ‘Intellectuality and Sexuality: Camille Claudel, the Fin de Siècle Sculptress’, A. Hist., xxii/4 (1989), pp.419–47

M. Sulter: Passion: Discourses of Black Women’s Creativity (London, 1990)

M. Bal: Reading Rembrandt (New York and Cambridge, 1991)

S. Godeau: Photography in the Dock (Minneapolis, 1991)

N. Salomon: ‘The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission’, (En)gendering Knowledge, ed. J. Hartmann and E.Messer­Davidow (Knoxville, 1991)

R. Kendall and G. Pollock: Dealing with Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision (London,1992)

L. Nead: The Female Nude (London and New York, 1992)

G. Pollock: Avant­garde Gambits: Gender and the Colour of Art History (London, 1992)

I. Rogoff: ‘Tiny Anguishes: Reflections on Nagging, Scholastic Embarrassment, and Feminist Art History’,Differences, iv/3 (1992)

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Marisol: The Family, paintedwood and other materials,overall, 2.10×1.66×0.39…

W. Chadwick and I. de Courtivron: Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership (London, 1993)

T. Garb: Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth­century Paris (London and New Haven,1994)

A. Callen: The Spectacular Body: Science, Method and Meaning in the Work of Degas (New Haven and London,1995)

Bibliographies

T. Cedar Holm: Afro­American Artists: A Bio­bibliographical Directory (Boston, 1973)

O. Williams: American Black Women in the Arts and Social Sciences: A Bibliographic Survey (New Jersey andLondon, 1973)

D. Bachmann and S. Piland: Women Artists: An Historical, Contemporary and Feminist Bibliography (Metuchen,NJ, and London, 1978)

E. Tufts: American Women Artists, Past and Present: A Selected Bibliographical Guide (New York, 1984)

Griselda Pollock

III. South and Central America.

Little mainstream South and Central American art history has dealt specificallywith the role of the woman artist. Individual artists such as the Colombian BeatrizGonzalez (b 1936) or MARISOL in Venezuela are dominant figures in theirrespective contexts (see fig.). Certain artists, such as the Colombian DÉBORAARANGO or the Cuban Amelia Peláez (1897–1968), have been re­appraised inlight of feminist writings, but the problematic relationship of ‘Latin American art’ tothat of ‘international’ art (see Richard) has in general taken precedence overdiscussions of gender divisions. The two issues have merged, however, in oneinstance. Late 20th­century perceptions of the art of South and Central Americahave been dominated by the enormous popularity of a woman artist, theMexican FRIDA KAHLO. Kahlo has become not only the most famous and highlypriced ‘woman’ artist but has also come to represent the perceived characteristicsof an art produced outside the mainstream of European and North Americanculture (Baddeley, 1991).

The elision of these two strands of marginality within contemporary art history, the non­European and the ‘feminine’,has served to highlight rather than hide the role of the woman artist within Latin America. To some extent the workof the women artists of South and Central America has found a wider international audience than that of many oftheir male compatriots. In this sense the categorization ‘woman artist’, despite its intrinsic claims to represent amarginalized culture, is a more empowering category than ‘Latin American’, which denies an international relevanceto the art it describes. Many of the stereotypes of Latin American art—decorative, naive, emotional, exotic—relateto the international stereotypes of femininity so attacked by late 20th­century feminism. Kahlo’s reputation by the1980s had grown from a recognition of these shared characteristics (see 1982 exh. cat.; Herrera, 1983). In additionto this, the traditional divisions between the arts, the high art–low art debate (which assigns a hierarchical value toparticular forms of creativity), has great relevance within the context of South and Central America (Baddeley andFraser, 1989). The culture of this region has been recognized abroad primarily via its popular art, usuallyanonymously produced manifestations of Latin America’s complex racial and cultural mix. As with many popular crafttraditions, women have played a key role in initiating and perpetuating these forms of creativity. Within the area offine art, many of the more renowned female practitioners have manifested an awareness of such popular traditions.

In Mexico, Kahlo is an archetype for such a position, but this is also found in the work of her contemporaries MaríaIzquierdo, Olga Costa, ROCÍO MALDONADO and Amalia Mesa­Bains (b 1943). The formal languages of all theseartists draw heavily on the traditions of popular religious imagery and lay claim to an art of highly charged emotion.The scale and materials of Kahlo’s works (e.g. My Grandparents, My Parents and I (Family Tree), 1936) echo thesmall votive images on tin found in many Mexican churches. Izquierdo’s brightly coloured Virgins of Sorrows (e.g.Altar of Sorrows, 1943; Mexico City, Gal. A. Mex.) show the same mix of the aesthetic and the violent intrinsic to theCatholic tradition. These same references are found in the work of Costa (e.g. The Fruitseller, 1951; Mexico City,Mus. A. Mod.), with the added claim to the carefree beauty of the Mexican marketplace, with its riot of colour andcarefully composed objects and produce. Maldonado and Mesa­Bains have added to this appropriation of thelanguages of popular art, with its evocation of the ‘woman’s world’ of church and marketplace, a more knowingfeminist aesthetic that transfers the traditions of earlier women artists to the large canvases and installations of thelate 20th century; this is exemplified by, for example, Maldonado’s The Virgin (1985; Mexico City, Cent. Cult. A.Contemp.) and Mesa­Bains’s installation Queen of the Waters (1992) for the Arte America exhibition (Bogotá, Bib.Luis­Angel Arango).

However, the Latin American artist’s fascination with the traditions of the popular have not been the only strand of

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Lygia Clark: Grub, corrugatedrubber, dimensions variable,1964; image courtesy…

practice to produce important women artists. In Brazil the beginnings of modernist experimentation were dominatedby the work of TARSILA and Anita Malfatti (1889–1964). The negative critical response to an exhibition in 1917 ofMalfatti’s ‘fauvist’­style paintings (e.g. the Yellow Man, 1915–16; São Paulo, U. São Paulo, Mus. A. Contemp.)made her a figurehead for the Brazilian avant­garde. In 1922 both women participated in the groundbreakingSEMANA DE ARTE MODERNA, which was to be instrumental in introducing the Brazilian art world to the debates ofEuropean modernism. In conjunction with the poet Oswald de Andrade, Tarsila transformed the modernist aestheticinto a more specifically Latin American and anti­colonialist movement, outlined in Andrade’s Anthropophagitemanifesto (1928) and made visual in Tarsila’s Anthropophagy (1929; Fund. José e Paulina Nemirovsky).

The naturalization and reworking of the prevailing international avant­garde aesthetic, initiated by Tarsila, wascontinued by a younger generation of artists including Iona Saldanha (b 1921). In her minimalist sculptures, suchas Bamboo Installation (1969; artist’s col.), she used traditional materials and ritualized compositions to create anart that links the concerns of colour field painting of the 1960s with anthropology. In Bolivia, MARÍA LUISAPACHECO and in Peru, Tilsa Tsuchiya also created a visual language that synthesized the specifics of theircultures, as both women and Latin Americans, with the demands of modernity. In both these women’s works thepurity of painterly abstraction is undermined: in Pacheco’s subtle canvases by the fleeting glimmer of an Andeanlandscape, and more obviously in Tsuchiya’s references to Quechua mythology, as in Machu Picchu (1974; Lima,priv. col., see Baddeley and Fraser, p. 114).

A harder edged abstraction has been manifested in the work of some womenartists, such as Gego and Mercedes Pardo in Venezuela, but probably mostnotably in the work of the Brazilian LYGIA CLARK (see fig.). In 1959 Clark(along with Lygia Pape (b 1929)) was one of the founder­members of theBrazilian Neo­Concrete group and through her articulated sculptures (e.g.Machine Animal (Bicho), 1962; São Paulo, Fulvio and Adolpho Leirner priv. col.,see 1989 exh. cat., p. 265) gained an international reputation. Clark’s highlycerebral work subverts traditional expectations of the ‘irrational’ nature of LatinAmerican culture and denies expectations of a greater physicality and emotion inthe work of women artists. The changing expectations of the 1980s and 1990s,in the wake of the Post­modernist rejection of a single monolithic culture, have

led to the international recognition of contemporary Latin American art. Within this category the role of the womanartist has been central, an intrinsic part of a wider exploration of cultural identity.

Bibliography

J. Franco: Modern Culture of Latin America: Society & the Artist (Harmondsworth, 1970)

Frida Kahlo & Tina Modotti (exh. cat., London, Whitechapel A.G., 1982)

H. Herrera: Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (New York, 1983)

N. Richard: ‘Post­Modernism and Perifery’, Third Text, ii (Winter 1987–8)

J. Franco: Plotting Women: Gender & Representation in Mexico (London, 1989)

O. Baddeley and V. Fraser: Drawing the Line: Art & Cultural Identity in Contemporary Latin America (London,1989)

Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820–1980 (exh. cat. by D. Ades and others, London, Hayward Gal., 1989)

La mujer en México/Women in Mexico (exh. cat., New York, N. Acad. Des.; Mexico City, Cent. Cult. A. Contemp.;Monterrey, Mus.; 1990–1)

O. Baddeley: ‘Her Dress Hangs Here: De­Frocking the Kahlo Cult’, Oxford A. J., xiv/1 (1991)

Six Latin American Women Artists (exh. cat., Lewisburg, PA, Bucknell U., 1992)

E. Lucie­Smith: Latin American Art of the Twentieth Century (London, 1993)

Regards de femmes (exh. cat., Liège, Mus. A. Mod., 1993)

Latin American Women Artists, 1915–1995 (exh. cat. by G. Biller and others, Milwaukee, WI, A. Mus., 1995)

Tarsila do Amaral, Frida Kahlo and Amelia Peláez (exh. cat. by L. Montreal Agusí and others, Barcelona, Cent.Cult. Fund. Caixa Pensions, 1997)

M. Agoisín: A Woman’s Gaze: Latin American Women Artists (New York, c.1998)

Oriana Baddeley

IV. East Asia.

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The visual arts in which Chinese and Japanese women engaged were primarily painting, calligraphy and textiledecoration. Needlework was the premier feminine art in China, where the invention of silk is credited to a legendaryempress of remote antiquity, and silk production was traditionally regarded as women’s work. Among the Chinesewomen celebrated for their textile decoration are Zhu Kerou, a 12th­century specialist in the tapestry techniqueknown as kesi (slit silk), and Han Ximeng, an embroiderer active in the early 17th century. This article, however,focuses on women’s contributions to the history of painting and calligraphy, the most highly esteemed and criticallyevaluated visual arts in China and Japan. Brief references are also made to the allied arts of print design andpottery decoration.

1. Role of women and professional artists.

In early times the societies of China and Japan were very different, and, despite Japan’s subsequent adoption ofmany aspects of Chinese culture, they remained distinct into the modern period. The status of women in the twocountries became similar, but it was never entirely the same. Unlike Chinese women, Japanese women did not bindtheir feet and at certain times, such as the Heian period (794–1185), they played active roles in the formation ofélite culture. Before the Heian, many women held religious and political authority in Japan: between AD 592 and770 the country had six female rulers. As Japan embraced Confucian ideals in an attempt to re­create itself inChina’s image, however, the power and position of women steadily declined. In the Confucian view, an orderlysociety is based on hierarchical relationships, including the subordination of women to men. This social systemexcluded women from the halls of power and defined their proper sphere of activity as the family. Some womenmanaged to subvert this system and take the reins of government, but most followed Confucian dictates andcultivated their various talents at home.

Socially restricted, women in both countries had few points of entry into the public art arena where professionalartists, often organized in workshops, produced functional and decorative images for the Court, religiousestablishments and the general market. By the 1990s evidence had yet to be found that women were employed inthe painting, printing or sculpture workshops of China. The few recorded Chinese women painters from theprofessional class belonged to its more élite ranks. They were usually the daughters of leading professional artistsand probably worked at home. Daughters of Dai Jin and Qiu Ying, for instance, were known as painters. ‘Miss’ Qiu(personal name ?Zhu) treated figurative subjects, especially beautiful women, in a style based on her father’s. Sheaccepted commissions similar to those he received and succeeded as he did, by catering to the taste of the gentryfor refined images in antique manners.

Opportunities for women to paint professionally seem to have been greater, or at least more diverse, in Japan.Some court ladies of the Heian period, notably Lady Tosa and Lady Kii, served as semi­professional painters atcourt, carrying out public commissions. A small number of women were affiliated with the Kanō school, the premierpainting academy in Japan from the 16th to the 19th century. Kanō Yukinobu was the daughter of a pupil of KanōTan’yū and may also have studied with this master. Yukinobu employed a range of traditional styles, Chinese andJapanese, in depicting figures, birds and flowers, and landscapes for portable formats, usually hanging scrolls.Apparently she did not join the teams of Kanō artists who carried out large­scale decorations of castle and templeinteriors. The majority of women active as professional artists in the Edo period (1600–1868) produced ukiyoe,pictures of the ‘floating world’ of the theatre and brothels. Best known in the 18th century were Yamazaki Ryū­joand Inagaki Tsuru­jo, both of whom painted courtesans. In the 19th century women contributed to ukiyoe not onlyas painters, but also as print designers. The daughter of Katsushika Hokusai, who called herself Ōi, assisted herfather in his workshop; her own works included paintings and book illustrations. The eldest daughter of UtagawaKuniyoshi, Acho (who used the signature Yoshitori), collaborated with her father on a famous series of 70 or moreprints, under the general title Sankai medetai zue (‘Excellencies of mountain and sea illustrated’; 1852; U.Manchester, Whitworth A.G.), for which she designed the background scenes and he did the main figures.

2. Women as patrons.

The achievements of such female artists notwithstanding, women mainly contributed to the public art arena aspatrons (see WOMEN AS PATRONS AND COLLECTORS). Religious establishments especially benefited from theirsupport. Many women were drawn to Buddhism, which entered China around the time of Christ, and which wasofficially introduced into Japan in AD 552. Although originally no less patriarchal than Confucianism, Buddhism wasmore flexible and capable of adapting itself to different audiences, male and female. To Chinese and Japanesewomen it offered a socially acceptable sphere of activity and venue for personal expression outside of the family.The women in the best position to leave impressive legacies of Buddhist art were members of imperial families.Empress Wu (reg 690–705), the only female to rule China in her own right, used Buddhism to sanction her highlyunorthodox assumption of the throne, and sponsored Buddhist art and architecture on a grand scale. She repairedthe famous White Horse Monastery at Luoyang at great expense, had a five­storey pagoda housing a hugewooden image of the Buddha built on the palace grounds, and commissioned the colossal figures of theVairochana Buddha assembly at the rock­cut Buddhist sanctuary at Longmen. The much later Empress­dowagerCisheng (1546–1614), a more representative imperial woman, provided funds for the celebrated monk–architectFudeng to erect a bronze hall and gilt statue of the bodhisattva Guanyin at the Longchang Monastery, south­eastof Nanjing, and also commissioned him to build the main hall of the Xiantong Monastery on Mt Wutai in ShanxiProvince. In Japan two empresses of the Nara period (710–94), Kōmyō and Shōtoku, both sponsored colossaltemples in the ancient capital of Nara. The former had built the Shinyakushiji, dedicated to the Buddha of medicine,when her husband, Emperor Shōmu, fell ill in 747. In 765 Empress Shōtoku ordered the construction of the Saidaiji

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Admonitions of the Instructressto the Court Ladies (Nüshi jian…

(‘western great temple’) to rival her father’s Tōdaiji (‘eastern great temple’) located in the eastern part of the city.

3. Influence of women on subject and style.

As audiences as well as patrons, women popularized certain subjects and sometimes influenced the manner inwhich they were represented. Chinese women, for instance, embraced the bodhisattva of compassion, Guanyin, towhom they prayed for children, usually for males essential to the continuation of the patriarchal family line. Guanyinbecame a patron deity of women and acquired various feminine or female guises. Images of Guanyin holding achild, reminiscent of Western portrayals of the Madonna and Child, were produced in a variety of media, includingpainting, embroidery and porcelain, in late imperial China.

A telling example of a narrative tailored to a Japanese female audience is found in the Tales of Gishō and Gangyō(or Biographies of the Six Patriarchs of the Kegon Sect; Jap. Kegonshū sōshi eden or Kegon engi), a set ofhandscrolls given to the Kōzanji in Kyoto c. 1219–25. In the scrolls illustrating the tale of the monk Gishō, the roleof the female protagonist Zenmyō is enlarged to appeal more directly to the scrolls’ probable patron, Lady Sanmi,and to other women associated with the Kōzanji in the first half of the 13th century.

Within the corpus of secular literary themes shared by China and Japan weresome created specifically for the education of upper­class women. Opinions onfemale education were always mixed, with conservatives maintaining that it wasat best a waste of time. Given the Confucian emphasis on learning from history,however, it was more widely held that women could benefit from studying suchedifying texts as the Lie nü zhuan (‘Biographies of eminent women’) by Liu Xiang(77–76 CE) and the Nü xiaojing (‘Ladies’ classic of filial piety’) credited to a certainMadam Zheng of the Tang period (618–907). Illustrations of these and similarbooks served the same purpose. Early designs based on the biographies arepreserved in the Lie nü tu (‘Pictures of eminent women’), a handscroll attributedto the old master GU KAIZHI in the Palace Museum in Beijing . Gu’s name is alsoassociated with the most famous extant Chinese didactic painting for women, thehandscroll Admonitions of the Court Instructress to the Ladies Palace.

Illustrated scrolls of the Nü xiaojing were popular in the Song dynasty, and several versions datable to the SouthernSong period (1127–1279) survive. Although the paintings in these scrolls are ascribed to famous male artists, theywere directed to female viewers, and the accompanying textual passages may have been transcribed by palacewomen skilled in calligraphy.

4. ‘Amateur’ artists.

While restrictions on women’s activities outside the home kept most Chinese and Japanese women from becomingprofessional artists, the private sphere of ‘amateur’ art provided an alternative. Many women took up the brush athome and painted as amateurs, or at least within a tradition defined as amateur even if some participants werecompensated for their works. In both China and Japan painting came to be accepted as a suitable leisure pursuitfor cultivated individuals, men and women. As one of the polite arts, it was closely allied with calligraphy andliterature, especially poetry. This alliance fostered the development of distinctive painting styles and preferences forcertain categories of subject­matter.

In Heian­period Japan, aristocratic women and ladies­in­waiting at the court were expected to compose poetry, writean elegant hand, paint and appreciate all of these arts. They were closely involved with the distinctively Japanesepictorial genres developed at this time in connection with the vernacular literature in which women excelled. Thewell­known 12th­century handscroll illustrations of the Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, c. 1005), the great novel byLady Murasaki Shikibu, represent the type of small­scale pictures created to amuse Heian aristocrats, particularlywomen. Women also painted pictures of this type, and they are thought to have developed the highly stylized,static, colourful style they display. This style was also employed by male professional painters but, because of itsclose association with the Heian women’s quarters, some scholars refer to it as onnae, or ‘women’s painting’.

In China, where painting was a relative latecomer to the constellation of arts known as the ‘three perfections’(painting, poetry and calligraphy), the earliest known great female artist was a calligrapher known as Wei Furen(Madam Wei) or Wei Shuo (272–349 CE). She is remembered as the teacher of Wang Xizhi, the most celebratedand influential of all Chinese calligraphers. Although Wei Furen’s works have been lost, a glimpse of her art mayperhaps be caught in the fluid grace of her famous pupil’s hand. Later men, apparently perceiving the feminineelegance underlying this classical tradition, promoted more masculine styles of writing to compete with that of WangXizhi.

The theoretical foundations for the Chinese tradition of scholarly ‘amateur’ painting, known as literati (wenren)painting, were laid in the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) by the famous scholar–official Su Shi (1036–1101)and members of his circle. Scholarly stylistic traditions associated with certain genres, notably landscape and plantsubjects, such as bamboo and flowering plum, developed through the Yuan (1279–1368) and Ming (1368–1644)periods. In the late Ming, stylistic lineages were defined, and a literati canon was established, engendering anorthodox tradition handed down to the modern period. Works produced within this tradition were held to reveal thecharacter of their makers, but more importantly their subjects and styles signified literati values and thus classidentity. The most influential critics held this type of art to be inherently superior to the work of professionals,

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denigrated as mere craftsmen.

During the Song period women in some of the leading literati families joined their fathers, brothers and husbands insketching subjects such as plum blossoms and bamboo. At the Song courts women emulated officials and malemembers of the imperial family in practising calligraphy and painting for pleasure. Unfortunately, no paintingssecurely attributable to women of this time seem to have survived; our knowledge of their achievements comeswholly from such textual sources as those cited in the Yutai huashi compiled by Tang Souyu.

The earliest Chinese female painter whose artistic personality can be defined on the basis of both written recordsand extant works is Guan Daosheng (1262–1319). Wife of the renowned scholar–official and artist Zhao Mengfu,Guan Daosheng is also the most famous female painter in Chinese history. She is said to have depicted a range ofsubjects, including Buddhist figures, but to have excelled in monochrome ink­bamboo (mozhu). She reportedlycreated a distinctive type of bamboo painting featuring new­growth bamboo groves after rain. A composition of thistype dated 1308, now mounted with other Yuan paintings in a handscroll belonging to the National Palace Museumin Taipei, may best represent her work. Guan Daosheng was also admired for her calligraphy. According to herepitaph, Emperor Renzong (reg 1312–21) collected an example of her writing, along with pieces by her husbandand their son Zhao Yong, for the imperial archives, and remarked: ‘[This] will let later generations know that myreign not only had an expert female calligrapher, but a whole family capable in calligraphy, which is an extraordinarycircumstance!’ (Weidner and others).

A few other female artists are known from the Yuan, but only in the late years of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644),toward the end of the 16th century, do women begin to appear on the Chinese art­historical stage in significantnumbers. This increase in the number and prominence of female artists is usually explained in terms of broaderchanges taking place in Chinese society in the late Ming: the growth of the market economy and merchant class,resulting in a wider dissemination of the material and intellectual aspects of élite culture. With the expansion ofprinting and popular literature, general literacy increased, and by the 16th century female literacy was widespread.In open­minded, affluent families of the later imperial period, literary and artistic talent could increase a youngwoman’s chances for a good marriage to an educated gentleman. Meanwhile, in the thriving pleasure districts ofNanjing, Hangzhou and elsewhere, the number of courtesans increased. These women used the arts to entertain,as they had for centuries, but now increasingly included painting in their repertories.

Representative of the social range of female painters active in the late Ming are ‘Miss’ Qiu ( fl mid–late 16thcentury), who was discussed above as a professional painter, the gentry woman Wen Shu (1595–1634) and thecourtesan Ma Shouzhen (1548–1604). Wen Shu was born into a distinguished and artistic family in the south­eastern city of Suzhou. She was related to the painter Wen Zhengming, one of the ‘Four Masters of the Ming’ andthe very model of the scholarly artist. Her husband was a son of another old Suzhou family, a gentleman who lived,in Ellen Laing’s words, ‘a life of unhurried scholarship’ (see Weidner and others). The couple’s straitened financialcircumstances apparently led Wen Shu to sell her paintings. She was one of many well­educated women and menwho, despite their allegiance to the amateur ideal, relied on their writing and painting skills as sources of income.Wen Shu specialized in finely drawn, delicately coloured depictions of plants, flowers and butterflies. A typicalcomposition offers a close­up view of flowers, often lilies, growing by an eroded garden rock. Wen Shu’s art becameso well known that it inspired forgery. She was also sought out by upper­class women as a painting tutor, and likeWei Furen and Guan Daosheng, became a model for later women painters of the gentry. Her immediate followersinclude her daughter, Zhao Zhao, and the sisters Zhou Xi and Zhou Hu (fl later 17th century).

So many courtesans took up the brush in the late Ming that the period might be regarded as the age of thecourtesan in the history of Chinese women painters. Ma Shouzhen shared the stage with such other paintingcourtesans as Xue Susu (fl late 16th–mid­17th century), Lin Xue ( fl first half 17th century), Gu Mei (1619–64),Dong Bai (1625–51) and Liu Shi (1618–64). All are known because of their alliances with leading literati. To winupper­class admirers, these women cultivated skills in poetry, calligraphy, painting and music, the same pastimesenjoyed by their clients. With some exceptions, such as Lin Xue, who specialized in landscape, the courtesansgenerally painted simple floral and plant subjects that could be easily mastered and spontaneously executed forthe amusement of a gentleman caller. The orchid, a metaphor for a beauty living in pure seclusion, was a favouritesubject. Ma Shouzhen painted orchids in ink, or in ink and light colours, with a delicate touch and calculatedrefinement.

If the late Ming was the age of the courtesans, then the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) belonged to the daughters ofthe gentry, such as Chen Shu (1660–1736), Yun Bing (fl 18th century) and Ma Quan (fl first half 18th century). Aswas often the case with gentry women painters, Yun Bing and Ma Quan were born into artistic families. Yun Bingwas a descendant of Yun Shouping, one of the so­called Six Masters of the Early Qing. Yun Bing took up herillustrious forebear’s methods of flower painting and, of his many descendants who painted, was the mostsuccessful. People of the southern region called Yun Bing and Ma Quan ‘a pair of incomparables’, with the formeracclaimed for her ‘boneless’ (unoutlined wash) method of painting flowers and the latter known for her outlinetechnique. This conventional observation notwithstanding, the two women belonged to the same stream of Qingflower painting. Ma Quan’s father, Ma Yuanyu (1669–1722), reportedly studied ‘sketching from life’ with YunShouping. Like Yun Shouping and Yun Bing, Ma Quan observed her floral and insect subjects closely, favoured alight touch and fresh colours, and made frequent reference to the art of the old masters, a standard practice in thescholarly painting tradit