Advertising works. I kept seeing this book everywhere—on social media, in the news, on the shelves at my local bookstore. I like art. I’m an advocate for feminism, to use bell hooks’s preferred phrase. Surely, I’d get on well with this book. I bought it and started reading.
Unfortunately, the problems start on pretty much the first page. A short introduction sets out the book’s aims and models and both are questionable. There’s a nod to Linda Nochlin’s famous 1971 essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, but then we come to what seems to be the real inspiration for this book: E.H. Gombrich’s 1950 The Story of Art. ‘It’s a wonderful book but for one flaw’, author Katy Hessel writes. The flaw being that Gombrich didn’t give a damn about women artists: in the first edition, there were no women and even in editions as late as the sixteenth, that figure only ever tipped to one. Yet rather than reject Gombrich’s ‘flawed approach’, Hessel seems to want to recreate it, only this time ‘break down the canon’ and include the women. Wait. What? The canon. As in that outdated and sexist idea of a list of the most important works of art or literature or whatever, usually made up of 100% dead white dudes. I mean, I love (some, but not all) dead white dudes. But that’s not the kind of feminism I’m interested in. The fact that Hessel’s project takes for its centre of gravity a concept so deeply rooted in white supremacy and patriarchy speaks to a lack of critical engagement with feminist histories and historiography. For art historian Maura Reilly, ‘revising the canon to address the neglect of women and/or minority artists is fundamentally an impossible project because such revision does not grapple with the terms that created that neglect in the first place’.
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