Telling Her Story: Female Creators, Collaborators, and Collectors

For centuries, art history was a male province. The past three decades, however, have witnessed the steady growth of research into the role of women in art history. Essays and books published in the 1970s by authors such as Linda Nochlin (“Why have there been no great women artists?” 1971) and Germaine Greer (The Obstacle Race, 1979) did much to create a context for discussions of women’s art and women in the art world. Greer said what mattered was not so much why women had not produced more “great” art, but what they had contributed to art — and what deterred other women from pursuing careers in this field.

Museums were quite slow to start displaying works by female Old Masters. There was one conspicuous trailblazer: the exhibition “Elck syn Waerom”: Female Artists in Belgium and the Netherlands, 1500-1950, at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp and the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem in 1999-2000, curated by Professor Katlijne Van der Stichelen and curator Mirjam Westen. At the time, a show featuring exclusively female artists from the Low Countries was virtually unheard of. However, the exhibition did not immediately serve as a catalyst prompting museums to place more women’s art on view. In Flanders, two decades would elapse before another exhibition with a similar focus was organized: the Michaelina Wautier retrospective at the MAS Antwerp in 2018. The #MeToo movement greatly boosted research in the field of women’s studies. Thanks to this impetus, there is now a proliferation of publications and exhibitions about female creators, assistants, and collectors.

Judith Leyster’s The Serenade (1629) is included in a selection of paintings by women artists in the Rijksmuseum’s Gallery of Honor.

Nowadays, more and more museums are trying to achieve a more structural focus on gender diversity and inclusion in exhibitions of their permanent collections by displaying more female artists. In 2021, the Rijksmuseum added works by three female artists to its gallery of honor, thus placing art by women on a par with work by their male colleagues. This is only possible, of course, in collections that include works by women artists, or where the gap can easily be remedied through loans.

That last point may be the heart of the problem. Comparatively little work by female artists from the early modern period has been preserved or collected in museum collections. A museum may occasionally acquire a work by a female artist, but this is becoming more difficult. The downside of the growing attention is a rapid increase in market value: works by female artists are gradually becoming unaffordable for most museum acquisition budgets. Then we come to the “elephant in the room”: the esthetic appreciation of art by women. Reviewing her earlier article in 2008 (in “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? Thirty Years After”), Linda Nochlin wrote that much had changed in that regard since her groundbreaking essay in 1971: “Today, I believe it is safe to say that most members of the art world are far less ready to worry about what is great and what is not, nor do they assert as often the necessary connection of important art with virility or the phallus. No longer is it the case that the boys are the important artists, the girls positioned as appreciative muses or groupies.” In that context, it is interesting to see how quality is interpreted differently depending on whether the artwork was made by a man or a woman. However, the bandwidth allocated to women should never be expanded to an airy: “it’s by a woman, so it doesn’t matter whether it’s good or not.”

Anna Roemers Visscher (1583-1651), Berkemeyer with inscription ‘Genoech is meer als veel’, 1642, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg

Creating a more gender-diverse picture of art history in museums is not solely about displaying more work by female artists, however. It is also important to reflect on the role of women throughout the entire art chain, from commissioning to studio and from collection to museum valorization. Women and female entrepreneurship contribute a great deal to the production of all kinds of artworks that are not specifically sculptures or paintings. Examples include goldsmiths, embroiderers, illustrators, miniaturists, designers, and art dealers, and wives or daughters who may have wielded influence within studios or publishing houses. Different art disciplines are often judged according to different criteria: in painting, the emphasis is on authorship, while in the applied arts it is rather on craftsmanship and virtuosity.

Making Her Mark exhibition gallery featuring an English eighteenth-century gown designed by Anna Maria Garthwaite (1688-1763) among other objects made by women artists.

How do you incorporate an alternative art history into the storytelling of a museum exhibition and convey it to the public? Is it about adopting a different focus to the existing collections, viewing them through a feminist lens, or searching for female stories in your depot and encouraging research into those stories? The 2024 exhibition Making her Mark in Toronto and Baltimore was an interesting example in this regard, showcasing an alternative, multidisciplinary European art history. The Rijksmuseum’s annual symposia on women in art and the research project “The Female Impact” are also much-needed initiatives that look beyond the role of women in production to encompass other aspects such as taste and patronage. After all, many works created by men have a female or gender-related connection, whether through the subject, the person portrayed, the client, or the collector. The impact of women in patronage, the creation of collections, and the design of houses and grand residences should not be underestimated and are deserving of even more attention from researchers and curators.

The key question, of course, remains whether these female stories that we tell our visitors in the picture galleries or through other tools and media have a real impact on them. Do all these initiatives enable us to achieve a broader social goal that includes recognition for female artists, but also inspires – and kindles enthusiasm in – younger generations?  How do we ensure that all these efforts do not become shallow trends or fads, but actually lead to a more enduring and structurally equal, gender-diverse approach to art history — within or despite the unequal opportunities that women have had in the course of history?

CODART 27 aims to explore how our museum and curatorial practices can help to write a female art history of the Low Countries and explore opportunities to tell stories about the impact of women in the art world.