Women Artists Ascending

Why don’t we know more about women artists throughout history?

Paris Spies-Gans, an art historian and author focusing on women, gender, and the politics of artistic expression, is making this question her life’s work. And her discoveries challenge ingrained assumptions about women’s roles in art history.

Spies-Gans will give a talk, “Breaking Barriers: Sophie Fremiet and the Rise of Women Artists in Europe,” at the Getty Center on May 4. In advance of the lecture, she reflected on the shifting legacy of women artists.

What inspired your focus on women, gender, and the politics of artistic expression?

Paris Spies-Gans: It was gradual, but I can root it directly back to my mom. In fifth grade, my class was assigned a report with a list of explorers we could write about. The list had 10 or 20 men on it, and my mom noticed there were no women. She said, “I’m sure if we look, we can find one.” She found a British woman named Mary Kingsley who had gone to Africa in the late 19th century and had climbed Mount Cameroon, which was considered remarkable for a woman at that time. Today, we would certainly see Kingsley through many more lenses than I did as a fifth grader. Still, this project showed me that when you look, you can find women. In college I did that more and more, taking classes where I could focus on women from history in research papers. Whenever I saw women in footnotes or asides in a paragraph, they became my projects. And my findings often surprised people.

How did these early examinations of women’s inclusion in history intersect with art?

PSG: I grew up painting and loved art and museums. I volunteered at the Getty Museum in high school, researching education programs in classical art. My Getty mentors appreciated that I was a live case study, trying to find what appealed to me. In my last year of high school, Calliope [a now discontinued magazine for kids] came out with a special issue for the Getty Villa, and I wrote an article about how an object is installed from beginning to end. I got to see every part of the process and meet every person involved—the preparators, the conservators, the curators. It was incredible. The experience led me to start student engagement programs in college, to create similar opportunities.

When I went to get my PhD at Princeton, I asked myself: “What is driving you, and what is worth devoting six to eight years to learning about? Where can you find meaning in your search into the past?” For me, that ended up being the women in the European art world in the 18th and 19th centuries. For my dissertation—the project that became my first book—I initially wasn’t sure that there were enough women painters from that time to write about. Once I started looking at exhibition catalogues, the numbers blew my mind. I had absolutely no idea that there were thousands of women creating and exhibiting their art in almost all the same ways as men—or at least in ways that resembled what men were doing so much more than we’ve been told.

I ended up looking at every exhibition catalogue from Paris’s Louvre Salon—the most important exhibition in France and Europe at the time—and then the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Ultimately, I found more than 1,300 women who exhibited from 1760 to 1830. I also looked at a few other exhibitions in those cities. Ultimately, I found that women had exhibited more than 7,000 works of art—across genres, and not always the flower works or still lifes we’ve been told they predominantly painted. There were also portraits and narrative and classical history scenes. After the French Revolutionary Wars, in the 1790s, the number of these artists and works skyrocketed.

Drawing from your research, what are some of the most surprising stories about underappreciated women artists?

PSG: We should all know a lot more about Marie-Guillemine Benoist. Her Portrait of Madeleine (formerly Portrait of a Black Woman), in the Louvre’s collection since 1818, was exhibited at the Salon in 1800. It shows a Black woman in a white headscarf with a half-bare chest, wrapped in a white dress with a red tie around it. The portrait recently appeared at the end of Beyonce and Jay-Z’s Apeshit video, filmed at the Louvre: a commentary on the whiteness of the art historical canon and the presence of Black bodies throughout. Yet the artists don’t directly interact with Benoist’s painting in the video.

Benoist, a student of Jacques-Louis David, exhibited the painting during a narrow period when slavery was banned in France (1794-1802). Originally from Guadeloupe, Madeleine worked as a servant in the household of Benoist’s brother-in-law; she may have been enslaved before 1794. The canvas demands we consider questions of race and agency, making it a complicated and important piece.

Another one of my favorite figures is Mary Moser, one of two female founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, along with Angelica Kauffman. Moser has been called a flower painter. But looking at the exhibition catalogues, you find so much more. From 1769 to 1802, she exhibited 36 works—and less than half of those were flowers. She exhibited narrative scenes from mythology, poetry, British history, and contemporary women’s literature—specifically the Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe. Very few non-floral works by Moser survive, but those that do are wonderful. There’s a self-portrait in the Museum zu Allerheiligen in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. At one point, she earned a £900 commission to paint a room in Frogmore House, a royal property. Moser also did a female nude figure study with her subject standing in contrapposto, demonstrating a proficiency of skills we typically associate exclusively with men. Moser received votes to be the Academy’s president in both 1794 and 1803—some think these were possibly jokes—but that tells of her prominence.

When Moser didn’t exhibit flowers, reviewers often degraded her works. But such canvases of hers that survive have nothing obvious to critique. Have we always taken her critics’ words too seriously? There is a huge gap between her prominence at the time and what we know about her today. Her story symbolizes how much can get lost, even when it is in plain sight.

How did women form support networks to foster their careers, given societal hindrances?

PSG: Especially from the mid-19th century on, we have clear examples of women forming partnerships with other women. Rosa Bonheur had Anna Klumpke. Hilma af Klint had Anna Cassel. Still much earlier, Maria Cosway made connections with influential women—she painted the duchess of Devonshire as a character from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

One of Cosway’s first teachers was an Italian woman artist named Violante Siries Cerroti who gained them access to the Uffizi in some of the earliest years you could do that. When she ultimately came to London, she had letters in hand for several artists. One was Joshua Reynolds, who was the first president of the Royal Academy. Two others were Italian artists, and another was Kauffman. In an autobiographical letter that survives, Cosway writes about how Anne Seymour Damer, a rare female sculptor, was also one of her friends.

Cosway was also involved in several print projects with an engraver named Caroline Watson and a poet named Mary Robinson. And when she was in France in 1802, she took a British family to many different artists’ studios in the Louvre, both women’s and men’s. So, we know that organic, intentional communities existed, which included women and men, and women were navigating these systems and aware of each other’s works.

But didn’t such access have to do with affluence?

PSG: Affluence could mean better connections, but if you were too affluent, you couldn’t exhibit as a professional because that was seen as challenging class boundaries. The artists of that time, the ones I discuss in my book, generally benefited from a more middle-class positioning. Benoist, the woman who did the portrait of Madeleine, became part of Napoleon’s visual propaganda machine. She painted many portraits of him for different towns in France and also painted his family members. But in the Restoration government, once the monarchy came back to France, her husband received a very high-ranking position, and she had to give up being a professional exhibitor. She was in too high a class; she wasn’t supposed to put herself on public display. A letter survives where it’s clear that Benoist and her husband had just had a big argument. She writes: “But so much study, so many efforts, a life of hard work, and after that long time of testing— successes; and then to see them almost an object of humiliation—I could not bear that idea. All right, don’t let’s talk about it anymore.”

In May, you’ll be returning to Getty for a talk on Sophie Fremiet’s Portrait of a Woman (1818). How did she and this painting relate to the artistic and cultural state of the time?

PSG: It’s a great example of what I’m trying to demonstrate in my work. Fremiet studied with Jacques-Louis David, who has been portrayed as a masculine artist in a masculine teaching system. But he taught many women who exhibited—his first students were probably women. In Portrait of a Woman, which Fremiet painted when she was 21, you can see that she’s absorbing his lessons completely but also making them her own. It’s a Davidian portrait, but Fremiet has claimed it for herself with the level of detail, individualization, and whimsicality.

Speaking of that, it has been suggested that Fremiet was overshadowed by her husband, François Rude. Do you believe this is true?

PSG: She was certainly overshadowed in art historical writings just after the time she thrived. I think the degree to which he has been more acknowledged than her is very symptomatic of the biased ways women are treated more broadly.

Early on, Rude likely benefited from Fremiet’s visual knowledge and certainly benefited from her association with David. But they went to France together, where they both exhibited. She had students. He had students. Her face is on the Arc de Triomphe as a figure of genius, because he modeled it based on her. And so, as with artist couples today, many would say they are a huge part of each other’s work. Also, he was a sculptor, and there were fewer successful sculptors than painters, which creates its own mythology.

All that said, much more work needs to be done on her.

Fremiet’s La Belle Anthia didn’t win the coveted prize for history painting at the 1820 Ghent Salon—Joseph Paelinck won—but a fellow artist described her as “a woman only in clothing but a man by her merit.” While it might be seen as derogatory today, this remark legitimized her among male colleagues. Do you find it pejorative?

PSG: Throughout history, women artists have been described in terms that make them stand out, like “vigorous;” we find similar concepts in phrases such as, “It looks like a man could have made it” or “the boldness of her brushstrokes.” We often read this as negative, which in a way it is. But we also need to look at the context of the time. One of the ways I like to talk about this is through Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, an early biography of painters from Italy seen as a founding work of art history. By Vasari’s second edition, he included 13 women alongside hundreds of men. Often, this is treated as only 13 women. But I often think, “Wow, there were 13 women who had risen to that level at this point—so much so that he felt he had to include them.” Ultimately, both are true: that it’s a small number, and an important number to recognize. I see many of these gendered historical attitudes toward women as unfortunate, but I also see Paelinck’s comment as more triumphant, because it’s meant in a positive way. This was the highest praise he felt he could give—that he didn’t know the artist was a woman.

Do you think she would have won in a blind competition based purely on merit?

PSG: I don’t think we know enough to say that she lost because of her gender, though she would’ve encountered fewer obstacles and her reputation might have lasted more vigorously if she had been a man. But, the idea of a blind competition is really interesting because it helped one woman later in the century. In 1860, Laura Herford became the first woman admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in London by submitting a drawing signed “L. Herford,” leading the Academy to assume she was a man. That’s how that barrier was ultimately broken. They still didn’t let women into figure drawing classes for several decades. But after Herford, they started letting women into the schools.

How do we keep breaking barriers and changing the narrative?

PSG: We need to do this now more than ever. Women often outnumber men in the early stages of the artistic profession. There are more female MFAs than male MFAs. But when you rise higher and higher, you get to the upper echelons of gallery representation, and men are still dominating. So, even with fewer obvious barriers, it would be perilous to suggest that gendered barriers don’t exist. And when they’re less visible, that can make them even more insidious—we often assume they’re not there.

In my work, I hope showing that women have always been doing these things helps correct some of our current narratives and the ways we present them. Well-trafficked institutions like Getty buying works by women and putting them on display makes a huge difference. Who makes it onto a wall and fetches a high auction price tells a story of who can be an artist. This is especially important for the artists I study, who were discussed and treated in ways that show they mattered in their own places and times.

Museums are also crucial because so many kids go to them. My biggest hope is that the children going to museums today and in the near future become people who simply think women artists always existed, because that is the story museums have finally decided to tell on their walls.

Besides attending your talk, are there other resources you would recommend for people who would like to learn more about this topic?

PSG: The blog Art Herstory is fantastic. It’s run by Erika Gaffney, who is also one of the heads of the Illuminating Women Artists book series, which highlights women artists across history. They’re great, and they’re peer-reviewed. There is also an organization called Less Than Half, which advocates for women navigating the art world. And I also recommend the National Museum of Women in the Arts. You can get on their email list. These are all people and places that are moving the needle.