Women in Europe in the Middle Ages take in part of the most aspect of public life, they became writer, artists, nuns, and also some of them became the saviour of their kingdom. As the changes in the economic and political situation, the status and roles of women changes as well. In Renaissance, even though most women are illiterate, they helped those male artists reach their achievement, even though in some of the cases the honoured works are misattributed. During the 17th to 18th century, European expansion, colonized the Americas, Africa, Asia. Intellectual movement, the prevalence of Neoclassicism and academic art, women were pushed to stay at home, and also stay away from pursuing art as a profession; In the 19th century, Industrial Revolution, the beginning of the fight for women equality, some of the women stood out and became established painter at the time.
Renaissance: Properzie de Rossi one and the only sculptor who had sculpted in marble in her time. She has endured the torture of rumour for she is a spinster. Her fate failed to match with her talent.
Rossi is not the only woman who was buried unknown in this heroic white male artists dominated history.
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Judith Leyster
A Woman Sewing by Candlelight
1633
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In 17th -18th, art was under the academy’s control, “Education and aesthetics were also dictated by academies. They chose the professors at Paris’s prestigious(and male-only) Ecole des Beaux-Arts. When classicism was worshipped anew in the 18th century, hierarchies of subject matter were created that declared history and mythology more important than portrait, genre, landscape, or flower painting…Women are excluded from the top category, history painting.”(p42 Guerrilla girls)Women under such constrain that they can only stay at home and paint domestic subjects. There is an exception, Angelica Kauggmann, grand, historical themes, even though she is highlighted as an exception among those women, her “privilege” derived from her father, who is a Swiss painter. Also suffered from the rumour. In this patriarchal society, women shoulder more social responsibilities than men, and society demands more from women than from men.
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| Angelica Kauggmann, The Vendor of Lover c.1780 |
Her works were attributed to Frans.
It is almost impossible to make themselves successful in the art world without the help of males, which normally either their father, who gives them chance to enter the art field, or their husbands who offer the major support after their father however always take their works for granted, and sign their name on their wives’ paintings.
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| Mary Cassatt A Cup of Tea 1880 |
In 19th. Mary Cassatt was born in high social class, which cancel out the disadvantage of her gender. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, gave her a chance to led her life as a professional painter. Her contribution to the American Collections. The subject painted in her works is usually the women, however, they are quite different from those of male artists in the same time period. Women in her painting are not objectified for the male gaze, they have their own personality. As John Berger claimed in The Way of Seeing, “Few exceptional nudes in the European traditional oil painting… they are no longer nudes- they break the norms of the art-form; they are paintings of loved women…The spectator can witness their relationship but he can do no more: he is forced to recognize himself as the outsider he is. He cannot deceive himself into believing that she is naked for him. He cannot turn her into nude. The way the painter has painted her includes her will and her intentions in the very structure of the image, in the very expression of her body and her face.” Mary Cassatt as a woman’s point of view, she painted the women with clothes, with dignity, she respected the subject she painted just as respected herself.
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| Harriet Power Pictorial Quilt 1895 |
Harriet Powers, she is not as lucky as mary. Being born in slavery, she is not allowed to be educated to read or write. However, being slavery and illiterate, she used what she has to the fullest. The subjects of the quilt are from the memorization of what she heard from the church, the biblical story, folktales, and astronomical phenomena, she learned how to sew in plantation workshop.
Women in art history, no matter she was born in noble or slavery, are deserved to be treated with respect, and care, because it is women who gave birth to those grant artists honoured in art history, who have taken so many responsibilities to put culture forward.
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will add the links and more information
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