{"id":1912,"date":"2021-01-13T10:46:18","date_gmt":"2021-01-13T10:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1912"},"modified":"2021-01-13T18:19:13","modified_gmt":"2021-01-13T18:19:13","slug":"laura-gascoigne-battle-of-the-sexes-march-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1912","title":{"rendered":"Laura Gascoigne: Battle of the Sexes – March 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Laura Gascoigne
March\/April 2020<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Large woman to much smaller man at a party: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I love the idea of there being two sexes, don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t you?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d James Thurber was the Thucydides of the gender war, dissecting its battlegrounds, victories and reversals with his pen: the fight in the grocery, the battle on the stairs; the rout where the men have the women briefly on the run and the surrender where their leader capitulates to a baseball bat-wielding Boadicea; the female capture of three physics professors and the female spy reporting back on crutches. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a nasty business, and judging from the eruption of hostilities in the pages of The Jackdaw it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not over yet.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alexander Adams\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Women in Art Today survey in September set out to demonstrate that women are now equally, if not over-generously, represented in the visual arts and consequently have no axes left to grind. The statistics he gathered from 2018 to 2019 showed more female appointments to administrative and curatorial positions, more female winners of fine art prizes and more female-only art events. He didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t measure representation in public gallery shows, though a glance through the current exhibition schedules certainly seems to confirm a bias in favour of women. The Tate is devoting five solo shows to women artists \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Paula Rego, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Maria Martuszov\u00c3\u00a1 and Haegue Yang \u00e2\u20ac\u201c over the next two years, and this year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s headline-grabber at the National Gallery is Artemisia Gentileschi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Truly, a sexual revolution is upon us. The trouble, as Adams was too courteous to point out, is that the women chosen to represent their sex are not always that great. This is not because Brian Sewell was right and women artists are just not as good as men; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because historically they have tended to be saved from artistic oblivion by their association with male artists rather than their talent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Check out the women artists given solo shows at Tate Modern over the past few years: Sonia Delaunay, wife of Robert (2015); Georgia O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Keeffe, wife of Alfred Stieglitz (2016); Dorothea Tanning, wife of Max Ernst (2019); Dora Maar, muse of Picasso. This does not necessarily reflect on the quality of the work \u00c2\u00ad I enjoyed the Tanning and the Maar exhibitions \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but it is noticeable that Agnes Martin (2015) is the only singleton (she preferred women) to have been so honoured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Men are better than women at getting themselves noticed by clubbing together in art movements-cum-drinking schools. They understand the principle of critical mass. Lazy critics love an art movement; they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re less likely to miss a group of like-painting people than a lone original. Originality, although theoretically prized in art, is in practice often missed because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s isolated. Women artists are less clubbable than men. They may club together over children but, perhaps because confined to quarters by said children, they tend to work in professional isolation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Susan Wilson once wrote an article for the Guardian titled \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcI didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know you had a baby\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 after a remark made by a male art teaching colleague when she joined the lads in the pub after work \u00e2\u20ac\u201c something she felt she had to do to be taken seriously. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not surprising that some of the most dedicated women artists \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Gwen John, Joan Eardley, Agnes Martin \u00e2\u20ac\u201c have been childless, but they too were never really part of any movements; they were artistic dead-ends. Ironically, it may have been Gwen John\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s association with a more famous male artist, her brother Augustus \u00e2\u20ac\u201c who recognised that she was the greater painter \u00e2\u20ac\u201c that saved her from falling through the cracks like so many of her female peers. There are, of course, also male artists who have been dead-ends, most of them mummy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s boys like Morandi and Lowry. It would be interesting to conduct a survey measuring how much testosterone contributes to artistic success. Can it be linked to that distinctly masculine attribute \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcgenius\u00e2\u20ac\u2122? I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never heard the term applied to a woman. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anne Desmet answered Adams\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 points pretty comprehensively in her November letter, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got nothing to add. All I will say is that for a campaigner against identitarianism and its culture of victimhood, Adams\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 whole project had a whiff of male victimhood about it. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m also unconvinced that feminism, in the broad sense of the term, can be defined as identitarian. Being female is not an identity \u00e2\u20ac\u201c not yet at least \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a gender. You can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t lump women together as \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcvictims\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 with ethnic or sexual minorities when you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re talking about half the population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t deny that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s tough being a white male artist today; I have every sympathy for any non-ethnic minority man trying to make his way in the art world as currently constituted. I know of one white mid-career male artist who recently had a show at a regional gallery cancelled because the organisers felt they couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t justify spending public money on an artist from such a historically privileged group, and confessed as much. Adams is right to campaign against arts funding being devoted to social engineering. But although the constant liberal checking of white male privilege grates, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s arguable that a correction is overdue. Plus the alternative is not an appealing prospect. Who knows what the fate of arts funding will be under the regency of Demonic Cummings, when he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s finished with the BBC? So far the visual arts have been beneath his liberal-tracking radar. Be careful what you wish for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Time to call a truce? Imbalances naturally tend to level out. At the present rate of consumption galleries will run out of dead women artists unless curators do some serious research to dig out new ones. Those so far unearthed have been of uneven quality. The Baroque painter Michaelina Wautier, dusted off by the Rubens House in Antwerp in 2018, looks a serious contender, but the Renaissance nun Plautilla Nelli being promoted \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and expensively restored \u00e2\u20ac\u201c by a bunch of bien-pensante Americans in Florence marching under the banner of Advancing Women Artists is an obvious dud. The pages of Germaine Greer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Obstacle Race are sprinkled with muzzy monochrome photographs of paintings by forgotten women, some of whom \u00e2\u20ac\u201c like Giovanna Garzoni with her exquisite Dish of Broad Beans \u00e2\u20ac\u201c clearly merit further investigation, and maybe the funding will now be forthcoming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of living women artists there is obviously no shortage. But, as Anne Desmet points out, despite increasing parity in public gallery exposure women remain poorly represented by top-end dealers, who find it a fag to get their prices up \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a difficulty that will persist until there are equal numbers of women collectors. Women may represent half the population, but the moneyed half doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t always want to buy what they choose to represent. One reason why women abstract artists like Bridget Riley and Gillian Ayres fare better in a male-dominated market than their figurative peers is that their work does not reflect female experience. The truth, and I may be trolled for telling it \u00e2\u20ac\u201c except that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not on social media, tee-hee \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is that men\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s art tends to appeal to men and women\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s art to women. What woman collector would want a late period Picasso?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If this is a problem, it will only be solved when the idea of there being two sexes loses its appeal. Call me old-fashioned, but I hope it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Laura Gascoigne March\/April 2020 Large woman to much smaller man at a party: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I love the idea of there being two sexes, don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t you?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d James Thurber was the Thucydides of the gender war, dissecting its battlegrounds, victories and reversals with his pen: the fight in the grocery, the battle on the stairs; the rout where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[745,742,75],"class_list":["post-1912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","tag-archive","tag-comment","tag-laura-gascoigne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1912"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1913,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1912\/revisions\/1913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}