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Art Overlooked: The Neglected Art of Women
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11709 |
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THE ARTS
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4 / 1987 |
2,052 Words |
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Louise Sheldon
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With a good deal of panache and fanfare, a new museum of a kind unknown anywhere in the world opens its doors to the public on April 7 in Washington, D.C. The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) is the first museum devoted entirely to art by women, housing a collection largely ignored by other institutions.
At last, the oft-raised question of why there have been no great women artists will be replaced by another: Why is so little known about great women artists of the past? The truth is that many fine works by women have been ignored, suppressed, or attributed to men. The museum's collection contains excellent examples of such historic works, and a wide range of modern and contemporary pieces by women artists from the United States and many other countries.
It was not until the end of the Renaissance, 250 years after Giotto, that any women artists achieved fame. A number of European women enjoyed successful careers and widespread esteem; yet strikingly, in almost every case, the artist was able to study and develop her talent only because her father was an established painter. During the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment afforded opportunities for women to study outside the home, but such expansion of the horizon was limited to women of means. Only in our century have substantial numbers of women found the opportunity to become professional artists.
Biographical material concerning these historically important women is often difficult to obtain. Again and again, one finds oversights and omissions of information. In seventeenth-century Holland, Judith Leyster's Jolly Toper was attributed to Frans Hals; in the eighteenth century, Marguerite Gerard was listed as Fragonard's sister-in-law, and Adelaide Labille-Guiard was forced to paint as series of portraits of academicians to counter rumors that her paintings were executed by her husband. More recently, the poet Rilke introduced German expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker as "the wife of a distinguished painter," and sculptress Germaine Richier was told by her father that "women aren't made for art."
It was precisely this neglect of women artists that led to the founding of a museum for the purpose of bringing their finest works before the public and preserving them. Washington resident Wilhelmina Cole Holladay was travelling in Europe twenty years ago when she became interested in the paintings of seventeenth-century Dutch still-life artist Clara Peeters. On her return to the United States, she was amazed to find no mention of Peeters in any major art reference book. Even more dismaying was her subsequent discovery that the art-history text universally used in American colleges failed to list a single woman artist. Holladay and her husband, Wallace, knew then what would be the focus of their future art collection. They set about acquiring paintings, prints, drawings, and sculpture by significant women artists. As the collection grew in size and importance, Nancy Hanks, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, convinced the Holladays that their collection could serve most usefully as the core of a new museum specifically devoted to women artists. A vast and far-reaching project was launched.
The National Museum of Women in the Arts opening this month has a permanent collection of over 500 works of art dating from the Renaissance and spanning four centuries. Nineteen countries are represented by the works of 190 artists. The museum's
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