In 1993, the reviews for Georgia O’Keeffe’s exhibition at London’s Hayward gallery came in. In the Independent, Andrew Graham-Dixon likened the American artist to a “commercial illustrator” who had “limited talents … but the ambition to be remembered as a Rembrandt”. The Evening Standard’s Brian Sewell said her works were “irredeemably amateur”. William Feaver of the Observer proclaimed that her paintings “made good monthly images on calendars”, while Hilton Kramer’s review in the Sunday Telegraph called her “grossly overrated”, adding that “her great personal beauty played a major role in the myth that now attaches to her name”.
Many of these comments are quoted in an article by Beatrix Campbell, published in the Independent in 1993, with the headline: A Woman’s Art That Men Refuse to See. Campbell argued for a more intellectual reading of O’Keeffe – complaining that “national newspaper art critics do not think it necessary to explain or empathise with … or to locate her in the history of American modernism”. This made me think about how so much art criticism is written from a male point of view, and the exceedingly wide gender imbalance that still exists within it.
Last week on social media I shared the title page of EH Gombrich’s The Story of Art. His first version in 1950 included no female artists at all, and the most recent edition includes just one (Käthe Kollwitz), so I scribbled on my copy, “without women”. Some comments said that Gombrich had a “blind spot”, others stated that my gesture was “no cancellation” but “added information”. However, most commented that the lack of representation of non-male artists had made art history feel irrelevant to them.
Why did women like O’Keeffe get such bad reviews? “Everything critics – often male – didn’t dare to say about Picasso or Matisse was thrown at women,” the writer Julia Voss told me. “Female artists often didn’t have a lobby or any powerful supporters. Women have been easy targets for the longest time, not only in the art world.”
Voss is the biographer of Hilma af Klint – an artist whose oeuvre has shifted ideas about the beginnings of “abstraction” in the western canon more than any other in the last decade. Her paintings were first seen in 1987 at the exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 at LACMA in the US, and were scathingly received by critics. Kramer wrote: “Hilma af Klint’s paintings are essentially coloured diagrams. To accord them a place of honour alongside the work of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich … is absurd. Af Klint is simply not an artist in their class and – dare one say it? – would never have been given this inflated treatment if she had not been a woman.” A comment that, to me, appears more flippant than it is factual.
Though the O’Keeffe reviews date from a mere 30 years ago (as opposed to the 19th century, when women weren’t even allowed the vote) one might argue that they are products of their time. Yet I can’t help but notice how they speak to the way sexism is still ingrained – and seemingly acceptable – within the narratives of art history.
It’s a question I ask myself daily: was it a conscious decision to remove women from the story of art? Women have been making art for millennia, so it’s not as if they didn’t exist. But as Voss says, women have lacked “powerful supporters”. I have no doubt that women art critics existed, but where was their platform on a par with their male counterparts? Who would give them the chance to counter the dominance of the white male narrative – and the sexism with which it was expressed?
In recent years, institutions and scholars have been working hard to change the so-called canon by dedicating major touring exhibitions to women and other overlooked groups of people. The public are clearly hungry for them, as the first major exhibition of Af Klint in the US broke the Guggenheim’s attendance record, with over 600,000 people going to see it.
Despite this, art criticism remains largely white and male. This is not to say that the critics we do have should renounce their roles; it’s more that we should have additional powerful voices – of different ages and backgrounds. Because if a wide range of people aren’t telling the story of art, then we are not getting the full picture. And the ways in which we think about art, despite progress elsewhere, will very much stay the same.
