When I first studied art history in the late 1960s, all artists were men. It seemed, back then, that the act of rendering an image in line and colour, or visualising pure emotion, was confined to the gender that controlled society at the time.
The one woman artist I remember from my undergraduate years was Paula Modersohn-Becker, whose portrait of Rilke was reproduced in Waldemar George’s Expressionism, translated from French. He wrote that her “naïve vision concealed a skilful technique”. But she died young and none of the men who wrote in English noticed her.
