Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest is Noah Charney, he's an art historian who's written widely on art and history, including art crime. He's also a professor at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and he's here with me today because he has recently published a book titled, “Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art”. He's also the author of, “The 12-Hour Art Expert: Everything You Need to Know about Art in a Dozen Masterpieces” and, “The Devil in the Gallery: How Scandal, Shock, and Rivalry Shaped the Art World”. Professor Charney, welcome to the program.
Noah Charney: Thanks so much for having me.
GR: Well, it's great to have you on. Let me just start with a departure point for your book. And one of them is a famous essay by the late feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, titled, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” and your book argues two things about that. First, that there have indeed been a lot of great women artists throughout history, and also that women have had a great influence on the course of art. So I want to unpack those two things a little bit as we talk here today. And first, and maybe this is just an overly obvious question, but why have the contributions of women been overlooked in terms of art history and even overlooked more recently?
NC: Well, why women have been largely overlooked, it comes down to the patriarchal narrative of how history has been written. And you can see this in various different fields, and it's no different from others. The story of art is really one that involved, initially, artists who were part of studios who would be in the charge of a master. A master is someone who was licensed to run an artistic studio to produce art, to be commissioned for projects. And they were inevitably men, and they would fill their studio with assistants and apprentices who were also men or boys from age anywhere from 8 to 18. And it was a sort of locker room style atmosphere. And the board of people usually called the Guild of Saint Luke for painters, because Saint Lucas, the patron saint of painters in various towns in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, would have been run all by men. And so when it comes time for a young artist to submit their masterpiece, which is a term we use now for any great work of art, but originally was the work based on which you would be determined to be ready to be a master on your own, then it was men who were given the primary seat. The only women we had historically who created works of art that we know of were ones who had either a partner or a parent who essentially taught them, informally initially, before the age of academies. And that's really the reason why for the first many thousands of years, most artists with only a handful of exceptions have been men. I should say that probably the very first human artists were women. In fact, most of the cave painting hand imprints from tens of thousands of years ago are female hands.
GR: That's interesting. So I know that we could talk for the entire program just about you naming these people and explaining them. But briefly, if you could, who are some of the greatest women artists? Throw me out some greatest hits there.
NC: Well, there's some examples that are really household names, but almost all of them are contemporary or second half of the 20th century artists. And one of my goals is to highlight people from as many different periods historically, styles and media as I could. So the format I chose was, (the) first half of the book is a history of artistic movements in a very traditional sense in talking about the various “-isms” through history, focusing primarily on European art, but also stepping beyond it. But instead of choosing one of the cliché male artists who are appearing in all of the most famous art history 101 textbooks, I used a female artist as a representative.
GR: Okay.
NC: So there are going to be many that people likely won't have heard of, but there are many that people will have. For instance, Marina Abramović wrote the afterword for the book and is the representative of conceptual art. Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, Camille Claudel, there are lots of them in the second half of the 20th century, really, from the period of Modernism forward and after World War Two in particular, it no longer becomes a surprise or even noteworthy that there's a significant woman artist. But if we look back to historical periods dating back, including thousands of years, then there are a constellation of just a few that we can pick out, often through archival sources. And we don't necessarily have a work that we know is by them. But then later on, when we get particularly to the Renaissance and the early modern period, there are plenty of them who I would qualify as truly great.
GR: And so tell me about some of the ways that women have influenced the course of art over time and reveal some things to me about that.
NC: So one of the things that we have is a bias towards the top let's say 1% most influential and revolutionary artists in history and those are the ones we tend to study over and over. And we forget that that represents, you know, a few hundred big names if we're really casting a large net. But that's not the vast majority of artists. And so those are the ones that tend to be in our headlights, the ones that we tend to remember and the ones that are written up in history books as being turning points. And there are fewer women on that list than one might like, but they're not entirely absent. So one of the things that I tried to do is look at the way women have influenced the course of art from a variety of different angles, artists being only one of them. There are some very good other books about women artists, but mine also touches on women as influencers in terms of being critics and scholars, patrons, professors, there's a whole wide array. In terms of female artists, we can just look through some small examples that I'll pull out, small in terms of the quantity, but not in terms of the influence. If we look to drip painting or all around painting, which is credited to Jackson Pollock with his, “Galaxy” painting in 1947, it was actually invented by a Ukrainian grandmother who was living in Brooklyn named Janet Sobel, that was her Americanized name. In 1945 she created a drip painting in her apartment called, “Milky Way” and Jackson Pollock actually later admitted that he saw that work and was influenced to try drip painting himself. Now this is an example of someone developing a new technique that no one had seen before, and so she needs to get credit for the invention of it. But we also do have to credit Pollock with the promotion of it. He really became the front man because he was everyone's idea of the macho male artist who can't even sit still long enough to paint something naturalistic but is dancing around the canvas and it made for a great story and he's the one who was on the cover of Life magazine. But we have to give credit where it's due and that's just one example. We also have people, I might mention Properzia de’ Rossi who was a very influential sculptor who is described by Giorgio Vasari in his book, “Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects”, which was the bestselling book on art history, the first true book on art history back in 1550. He mentions Properzia among a handful of female artists who are featured in a way that some artists that you might think would be, are not at all. People like Jan van Eyck and Albrecht Dürer get no mention at all, whereas we have a chapter on influential female artists. We have others like Artemisia Gentileschi, who perhaps is another household name, one of the relatively few in this book who started painting in a Caravaggio-esque style, if you're familiar with Caravaggio, very dramatic dynamic chiaroscuro, that's the play of light emerging from darkness. And he has a very famous painting of Judith beheading Holofernes with blood splattering everywhere. And there's a version that, if you ask me, is better, of the same theme by Artemisia, inspired by his, but I think she did him one better. And she became a hugely influential female painter in Naples, primarily at the end of her life during the Baroque period. And yet we tend to gloss over these people because we have this patriarchal focus which is unfortunate.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Noah Charney. He's a professor of art history at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, and he's the author of, “Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art”. Well, I noticed that about your book, too, that you get into, I'm going to talk about something you said just a few minutes ago, but women as critics and their influence there and then as patrons and collectors. So tell me a bit about those kinds of influences, either through money or social and cultural influence or through writing.
NC: So there are various ways that people can influence art beyond creating it, writing about it. We have people like Gertrude Stein, who is one of the great proponents of Picasso in particular, but she had a world class art collection at her home in Paris, and she was the center of a lively group of artists who would meet regularly and develop ideas, bouncing them off of each other. So that's one perspective we have. Hugely influential scholar Susan Sontag, whose book on photography is probably the most influential book ever written about photography as an artistic medium and how to look at photographs. And then we can go back to periods where a lot of the influential patrons of the arts were, in fact, patronesses, and we can go back in time to Roxelana, who was originally a concubine to the Turkish sultan, but who wound up being hugely influential as a commissioner of works of art. We have people who were in the New York arts scene, founding some of the most important art museums in New York. For example, MoMA was founded largely by three women, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. Among the New York museums, we actually see that most of them were initially founded by society women who were at the forefront of an interest in contemporary art. Whereas the fuddy-duddy conservative men were stuck with the old masters. And I love old masters, but we have to tip our hat to the forward thinking female patrons whose influence and wealth and really their openness to new styles and avant-garde movements helped bring modern art to America.
GR: That's interesting. So changing the subject a bit, the female body as a subject for male artists, I guess a critic might say objectified, it's been a staple for centuries, whether that person is clothed or unclothed. And I was wondering whether either women artists or some of the kinds of people that you just talked about, patronesses and art critics, writers, have helped to reinterpret the female as a subject in important ways in art.
NC: Absolutely that's the case. So, there are a lot of examples of this, but I actually have a, I'm going to call it, because it sounds exciting, a lost chapter of this book that I didn't have the word count for to include, I sliced it out. I should have like a director's cut version on what women have represented in art, whether they were representing themselves as in a portrait, but very often they were idealized or they were allegorical personifications. For example, Justitia, or Justice, we have this concept because we've seen her on every courthouse in America as a blindfolded woman with a sword in one hand and scales in the other. Women were often included, and we have to be frank about this, as an object of the male gaze and especially nudes often couched as Venuses, but it was, in fact, an excuse to have a naked lady on your wall. And sometimes we have to be a little bit crass like that. But women have also tuned the tides a bit. And one example that I would highlight is Käthe Kollwitz’s, “Dead Child” (*Woman with Dead Child) is one of the most moving works of art I've ever seen. It's hard to look at, actually. And it shows this almost beastial sadness of a woman engulfing the body of her dead child. And it's something that you need to see and it's difficult to do so, but it's a level of emotional in-touchiness that I'm not sure a man would be capable of, especially that dynamic between a woman and their child. Another example of one of the most influential artists, both in terms of art and policy was Angelica Kauffman, who is a Swiss female painter and she was a real prodigy. And she also became one of the founders of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1768, one of only two women. And she was making statements about the policy of the Royal Academy, even as a member of it. For a very long time at salons and academies, women were not permitted to paint nude figures, and that prevented them from having access to accurate training for representing the body. And it was considered untoward for them to paint a naked man. And naked women models were often prostitutes before really the 19th century where professional modeling came in, and they simply weren't permitted to do so. And she played little games with this. She painted some murals for the Royal Academy and she joked that the only woman allowed in the nude painting studio was the one that she had painted on the ceiling. And then we also have the female gaze and we need to also be frank that women are allowed to have a sexualized dynamic to their gaze as much as men are. And there's a painting of a woman looking at the front of the famous Belvedere torso, which is a nude, hugely muscular torso that is all that remains of a statue of Hercules. And we can imagine that the woman is enjoying looking at the front of it with the naughty bits and all the muscles, but we only see it from the back. But, so sometimes you can slip in these subversive elements and shift the power towards the female gaze and empower women through creating art by women, understanding women's perspective.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with art history professor Noah Charney. He's the author of a new book titled, “Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art” and we've been discussing this book. So before the break, you were talking about how women have influenced the way that female bodies are portrayed or female subjects are portrayed. And I had some other questions related that. Would you say that there's such a thing as, for example, a woman's or a female view of the natural world or of a landscape?
NC: That's a very good question, and I'm not sure I thought about it yet in those terms. That's why I love doing interviews like these, because you just get my brain bubbling.
GR: (laughter)
NC: You know, it's too easy, I think it's too facile to say that women are better in touch with their emotions. And so emotional themes, particularly to do with parenting, are likely to be created differently from a woman's perspective. I want to say that's not the case, but I think it sometimes is and you have paintings by like Berthe Morisot or Mary Cassatt, two female impressionists, and they are particularly renowned for their paintings of women with their babies. And it's a subject matter that men would be less likely to turn to and also less likely to handle in a sensitive way. We also have, you know, landscape paintings are paintings of animals by Rose Bonhur, who was a very influential female French painter who created huge large scale paintings of landscapes with animals in them, including of horses or cattle. So part of it may be a willingness on the part of women to look at subject matter that wasn't considered as, I want to say, cool, for lack of a better term, to paint. Men were more focused on, you know, of course, you have historically religious paintings and mythology or history painting, which is battle scenes and kings and what not, and the quieter, more thoughtful pieces, genre painting would have perhaps appealed less and you have very rarely women doing this. What was considered the most desirable commissions which were history, paintings, religious and mythological, and focusing more on things like domestic scenes, which I think they're better empowered to paint. That might be one example. So I try to avoid the clichés, but I do think that there's nothing wrong with women being able to handle subject matters related to women in a more sensitive way than perhaps more interestingly than men would.
GR: You may have just spoken to this, but I was also wondering whether you could say the same things about representations of the social world. And I think that you just alluded to that was talking about what kinds of scenes might be painted. Do you have any brief further thoughts on that aspect, the social world?
NC: Sure. Yeah, the social world, a lot of it depends on whether a work was commissioned or whether it was made on spec by the artist out of passion or with the idea to sell it. So historically, nothing was created, sculptures or paintings that were not commissioned because the raw materials were prohibitively expensive. Then when you get to the 19th century in particular, starting in the 18th, but in the 19th, you start to get artists who are creating works with the expectation that they'll find a market for it, but they haven't been specifically commissioned to do so. And you get some social commentary that's quite sensitive. Some of it's sardonic, like Hogarth’s, “The Rakes Progress” or Jan Steen paintings of people parting outside a country inn. You get (Henri de) Toulouse-Lautrec painting prostitutes, but with a very sensitive approach, not objectifying them, seeing them as humans. Maybe one that I would mention that I think is incredibly strong and maybe the first great work of what we would call identity art today, at the time it would not have been called as such, is the 1923 self-portrait by Romaine Brooks. It shows her wearing men's clothing, a top hat, a walking stick, a white collared shirt, dressed as if she's a gentleman about to go out on the town. And this may not seem like much today, but back in 1923 that was really making a bold statement and it's showcasing herself and saying, this is who I am, toying with gender roles and sort of confronting the viewer who in almost all cases would be a male viewer with questions about gender identity, sexuality and all these things. So I think hats off to someone who really founded a concept that we only really started to talk about in the last few years.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Noah Charney. He’s the author of, “Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art”. So maybe I should have started my interview with this, but there's a big obvious question about this project, and you address it head on in a preliminary note at the beginning of your book. And I'm just going to read from your note here. “When I first proposed this book to my longtime editor, I admitted to feeling somewhat sheepish, being a Caucasian middle class male, writing a book about women in art.” Well, I'm less sure about how you being white middle class creates an issue for this topic that's probably for another program. But certainly being male raises some questions about this. So how does that question get resolved for you?
NC: Well, for me, it was really a question of whether there was a book that hadn't been written yet on this subject that I felt very strongly about. And if it hadn't been written yet, then I might as well be the one to try for it. So when I started to research this, many years ago now, there were almost no books that you could find about women and their influence in the story of art. There were some encyclopedic books about women artists. There are individual monographs about female artists like Frida Kahlo or Georgia O'Keeffe, but there were relatively few books about women in general and their role in the story of art. Since the book came out, or rather about a year before the book came out, there started to be more of them and I like that this is a trend that other people are hopping on. But most of the books that are available now are about female artists, and that's great and very important. My goal is to create something that's sort of a one stop shop to cover all aspects, a 360 degree look about how women have influenced the story of art. And I haven't seen that in any of the books available. There are some very important ones about aspects of it, like, “The Story of Art Without Men” by Kate Hessel is about great female artists. We have Whitney Chadwick's seminal book, which has been published in many editions about, “Women, Art and Society” (book title). But essentially taking those two, putting them together and looking at the other ways that women could influence art beyond picking up a chisel or paintbrush, that's something that I hadn't seen. So I figured, you know, I'd rather do it, even if maybe theoretically it would be better if a woman had taken it up. But you know, what you left out of that quote that my editor said to me is that you don't have to be Egyptian to write about Egyptology. And my goal is, I'm hugely sympathetic, I’m trying to be empowering in the writing and I hope that empowered feeling is what comes across when you finish reading it.
GR: We've got about 3 minutes left, and I want to try to squeeze a couple, just two questions in if I can before we have to stop. And the first one is, and this is where I may know enough to be a little dangerous, I don't know, but I've got, I've got one 1,000th of your expertize in art, but it is an interest of mine and I took several art history courses in college. And one of the things that I've always puzzled over is the relationship between art and politics. And I tended to see sort of politics influencing art. And one of my art history professors tended to see it more in terms of art influencing politics. I mean, that's a huge question, but, you know, in a minute or so, do you have any thoughts about that?
NC: Well, I mean, whether or not you're dealing with women, art can influence politics, but it's often doing one of two things. If it's institutional, commissioned by, you know, the man, the people who are running the show, whether that's the clergy or aristocracy, then it's promoting whatever their message is and it has a propagandistic aspect. But it is still influential because it's visual, not written. So you don't even have to be literate to be able to be confronted with it and engage with it. And it's a propaganda machine. Then we also have subversive element, where rarely is the artist the first one to come up with a subversive idea but the artwork can pass on that idea in a way that makes people think about it more deeply. So I would say that the artists themselves are rarely the ones leading the charge, but they can often have the enduring relic of the idea whether that's in favor of the powers that be, and that’s propaganda, or whether it's something subversive.
GR: I love that phrase, the enduring relic of the idea.
NC: I should write that down.
GR: Yeah, I'm going to too, and I will give you credit for it (laughter). So my last question, we just have a few seconds left, has this book that you've just done led you to consider telling the story of other historically disadvantaged or less seen kinds of artists?
NC: It actually has, but it led me to tell the story for, I just started working on one that is historically advantaged but nobody's told the story yet. The next book I'm working on is called, “The Art of Fatherhood”, and it's about how fathers have been depicted in various art forms from literature to the Bible to film to paintings and sculptures. And that's the patriarchy, literally, but there's no book about that specifically, so that's the next one I'm turning to.
GR: That sounds fascinating. We’re going to have to have you back on when that one comes out, looking forward to it.
NC: I’d love that.
GR: Unfortunately, that's all the time we have, I could speak to you for hours. That was Noah Charney and again, his new book is titled, “Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art”. Professor Charney, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me, really enjoyed this.
NC: Thanks so much, Grant.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
