The History of Art without Men

‘The Story of Art without Men.’ Katy Hessel. 2022 

 

Ambitiously, Katy Hessel attempts a new worldwide overview of women artists. It’s over 450 pages and bound with very heavy covers as if to lend it weight symbolically as well as literally. There are good quality coloured illustrations close by the text that discusses them. 

Is it clever or a bit too cautious to make the words on the cover, ‘without men’ so nearly invisible in their slight white outline on yellow? 

What can be added to the other books that have covered this territory to fill the scandalous gap left by Gombrich’s exclusion of women in his 1950 ‘The History of Art’? 

Katy Hessel begins in 1500 in Bologna, frustratingly abandoning all speculation on previous centuries. She then proceeds to reiterate a lot of now accepted knowledge but adding new names from various countries and references new to me, for example that Vanessa Bell collaborated with Duncan Grant to make ‘The famous women dinner service’ 1932-34 nearly fifty years before Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party’. 

Hessel points out the Duchamp’s Urinal was in fact made by Baroness Elsa Avon Freytag-Loringhoven. 

In a survey there can only be a tiny amount about each artist, leaving the reader to do back up online searches. I was pleased the importance of writing is acknowledged, such as ‘The Subversive Stitch’ by Rozsika Parker and Linda Nochlin’s essay, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?'

I regretted no mention of Brixton Womens’Work and the group for Black Women in Brixton, ‘Mirror Reflecting Darkly’. 

It’s a good survey - putting movements in context and bringing in many examples new to me. Rather indigestible as a whole but useful if taken as a gradual progress and with a useful timeline to remind us of all the names. 

Katy Hessel ends by coming up to the present, a time of bewilderingly multiple approaches and less media coverage than hitherto, by choosing to focus on young figurative artists, the last three all British.