This is an extract from Anita Selzer’s The Female Gaze: Volume 2 – out now.
Men precluding women from the art practice and the educational training deemed essential to achieving the creation of ‘great’ art, namely the study of a live nude model, was a significant institutional barrier. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries women were barred from studying a live nude model in art academies run and controlled by men. Nochlin describes this as institutional discrimination against women: ‘The formal academic program normally proceeded from copying from drawings and engravings to drawing from casts of famous works of sculpture, to drawing from the living model. To be deprived of this stage of training meant in effect, to be deprived of creating major works.’
The art academies closed their doors to women wishing to learn art professionally in Europe largely until the end of the nineteenth century. Effectively, this denied women the opportunity to becoming a professional artist. Professor of Art History Nanette Salomon says, ‘The art academy [was] a historical safeguard against women entering the canon and a rationale for their exclusion, an exclusion that historically predated the institutionalized academy.’ Sweden, however, was one of the few European countries to allow women to study in the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Art earlier, from 1864, and learn from nude life models.
Other exclusions that prevented women artists from achieving included not even being allowed to study the male or female nude model in private art classes run between an artist and their pupils. As Nochlin points out, in the nineteenth century, women were also ‘virtually excluded from the state commissions such as the coveted Prix de Rome, a prestigious scholarship offered to history painters for continued study at the French Academy in Rome’.
‘VASARI INTRODUCED A STRUCTURE OR DISCURSIVE FORM THAT, IN ITS INCESSANT REPETITION, PRODUCED AND PERPETUATED THE DOMINANCE OF A PARTICULAR GENDER, CLASS AND RACE, AS THE PURVEYORS OF ART AND CULTURE.’ NANETTE SALOMON
Nochlin identified other institutional structures that served as barriers to women succeeding in ‘great’ art, such as monographs written in art history that focused on art created by male artists, in art discourses like Giorgio Vasari’s textbook The Lives of the Most Eminent Sculptors, Painters and Architects. The book was published in 1550 and Pollock says it was, as Salomon writes, ‘credited with being the first modern exposition of history of western European art. Vasari’s book became the model for histories of male artists to come, an unchallenged influence, the orthodox source.’
Pollock also says that Vasari did comment and assess some women’s work, like sculptor Properzia de’Rossi (c. 1490–1530) and painters Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532–1625) and Plautilla Nelli (1524–1588); however, she says, he focused on a feminine stereotype in his analysis. Pollock affirms that in the twentieth century the discipline of art history was still largely ‘women free’ in the production of art images and artists.
Salomon says that a ‘ubiquitous standard college text by H.W. Janson, The History of Art, was first written in 1962 and reprinted at regular intervals ever since … the art historical canon in Janson (and in others who follow him with unembarrassed exactitude) ultimately is derived from Vasari.’ She continues: ‘Vasari introduced a structure or discursive form that, in its incessant repetition, produced and perpetuated the dominance of a particu-lar gender, class and race, as the purveyors of art and culture.’ The artist is ‘a white upper-class male’, and ‘that great art is the expression of individual genius explicated through biography’.
Pollock describes this on YouTube as the ‘myth of the great artist’ built since Vasari, on the notion that there is an artist biography, a typology of the brilliant child, the prodigy, the genius who becomes the great artist.