The Portrait of Marco Dei Vescovi in Metropoliean Mueseam of Art
The following, published in ARTnews in January 1971, is a companion editorial to Linda Nochlin'due south "Why Accept There Been No Great Women Artists?" It is reproduced in connection with our coverage of Women in the Art World today.
The vexing question "Why Have At that place Been No Not bad Women Artists?" is largely answered in this special result by Prof. Linda Nochlin (see pp. 22-39); she shows that the question itself is a symptom of male prejudices and stereotypes whose irrelevance distorts much appreciation of art and undermines many scholarly assumptions in art history.
Only the illustrations accompanying Prof. Nochlin'south essay in these pages suggest that a clause could exist added to her question which makes information technology even more equivocal. It could be phrased: "Why Accept In that location Been No Great Women Artists even though women have produced great works of fine art?"
Accept the famous portrait of Mlle. Charlotte du Val d'Ognes which was ancestral to the Metropolitan Museum by Isaac Dudley Fletcher in 1917 (meet embrace detail and p. v). ARTnews' files preserve the press-release issued on the occasion; it states that:
"As one of the masterpieces of this artist, the Fletcher picture show will henceforth be known in the art world as 'the New York David,' just equally we speak of the Man with a Fur Cap of the Hermitage, or the Sistine Madonna of Dresden…Mr. Fletcher is said to have paid $200,000 for this great David."
(Every bit the press-release was prepared in collaboration with the gallery that sold the portrait, there is no reason to doubtfulness the quoted toll, nor that the Fletchers paid the gimmicky equivalent of most $2 1000000.)
The painting was unanimously accepted by a consensus of experts equally 1 of the great masterpieces by Jacques-Louis David, who founded the dominant 19th-century style of Neo-Classicism—until about ten years ago when Prof. Charles Sterling published in the Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum an essay proving (as conclusively every bit such matters ever can be proved) that the portrait is non by J.-Fifty. David and that it is probably past Constance-Marie Charpentier. She had been one of David's pupils, and her boggling ability and originality was proclaimed, all unawares, by iv generations of male-chauvinist fine art experts.
(Is Mr. Fletcher's $ii 1000000, one wonders, a tape toll for a woman artist?)
Nor is the portrait of Mlle. Charlotte an exceptional instance. The jolly toper in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (reproduced p. 27), for years was a favorite, world-famous Frans Hals—until mod cleaning revealed the characteristic initial "J*" which identified information technology equally by Judith Leyster, one of Hals' about brilliant followers. Too uncovered was a engagement, 1629, making it the earliest known work past Leyster, whose natural gifts (what Prof. Nochlin calls the "golden asset of genius") enabled her to rival the greatest master of the brushstroke at the age of xix!
Or accept the Tintoretto portrait of Marco dei Vescovi, the artist's father-in-police, for years a beloved and praised masterwork in the Vienna museum—but not and then pleasing to scholars after 1920, when Venturi, noting that it is signed with an "M," attributed it to Jacopo Tintoretto'due south daughter Marietta. Documents betoken that Marietta was a well-known painter with a fluent production, but our museums claim near no works from her mitt—which indicates, of course, that three centuries of dealers and curators have "promoted" her pictures into her father's oeuvre and have heaped extravagant analyses and eulogies on her piece of work, while effacing her name.
We must grant, therefore, that women take produced works of art in the aforementioned league as the major masters, simply as nosotros do and so the question shifts to the singularly ambiguous, modern issue of Originality. For if Constance-Marie Charpentier, Judith Leyster and Marietta Tintoretto were, respectively, equally good every bit Jacques-Louis David, Frans Hals and Jacopo Tintoretto at their ain games, they were not innovators of style. They stayed close to tradition and case. However, once the event of Originality is raised, it becomes apparent that Prof. Nochlin's argument effectually the question "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" is largely concerned with the last 500 years of fine art history, that is with art since the Renaissance, when originality and individuality were honored above all other qualities as the prerequisites of Genius.
Just the history of art is some five,000 years erstwhile. Who is to say that a adult female did not design the pyramids of Egypt or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Furthermore, every bit research in the Middle Ages progresses, individuals artists' names are beginning to exist identified. In that location is Nicholas of Verdun, super-star in last year'south magnificent exhibition of "The Yr 1200" at the Metropolitan Museum. And at that place is Giselbertus of Autun, artist-hero of André Malraux's characteristically swashbuckling excursion into the Romanesque. But there is also the nun Ende who, with her collaborator, the monk Emeterius, painted the illustrations in the Beatus Apocalypse of Gerona (encounter p. 23), and in its hundred pictures created some of the supreme masterpieces of the tenth century—certainly on the level of accomplishment demanded of women past Prof. Nochlin in her Michelangelo-Cézanne line-up. And what virtually Sabina von Steinbach, sculptor-daughter of sculptor Erwin von Steinbach? When her male parent died in the middle of his work on the Strasbourg Cathedral, Sabina took over the entrada, and on its S Portal carved the statues of The Synagogue and of The Christian Church (1230-40) which for many connoisseurs, including Focilion, surpass her father's work in originality of concept too as in depth of feeling and esthetic rigor.
One of the swell masterpieces of the Middle Ages is the Bayeux embroidery, which celebrates the Norman's conquest of England; scholars believe that information technology probably was designed by a adult female, as well as executed past nuns. And the celebrated Opus Anglicanum, England's greatest contribution to the international arts of the 13th and 14th centuries, was the product of women—of embroiderers who perfected their craft to a high art and who, it is idea, also were responsible for the designs that made these vestments amidst the most prized treasures of the Christian world.
And so every bit one takes a longer view of history, one tin can suggest a categorical answer to Prof. Nochlin'southward question—Yes, there have been smashing women artists. And one tin add the astonishing corollary—Women, or at to the lowest degree exceptionally gifted women, were freer and less subject to institutional and social pressures in the Middle Ages than they have been nether the rule of the individual which was promulgated with the Renaissance.
In another connection, I take suggested that late 20th-century civilization is rushing full-tilt backwards to the Gothic. There is evidence in the verticality of our cities (Houston has the silhouette of Chartres), in our children's crusades, our complexity of bureaucracies and hierarchies which operate through the credence of a Higher Authorization (usually worshipped under the sign "Top-Underground Classified Data"), in the reversion of arts to crafts (or technologies), the longing of individuals to merge into a collective, the breaking-down of the country into communities. Perhaps Women'southward Lib is some other symptom of the development (or re-volution?).
Dorsum to sister Ende and Sabina von Steinbach?
Possibly it's not a bad thing? T.B.H .
Source: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/editorial-is-womens-lib-medieval-4249/
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