The men of Women's Art History

We're on day three of Summer session I, Women in the Visual Arts, wherein I teach 17 people everything I can think of that falls into the category of women in the visual arts.  I decided to mix it up this summer session and teach each week by media.  So this week, week one, we have an intro to art history and we cover some Painters.  We looked at some famous paintings with women in them (Manet's Luncheon on the Grass, and Olympia; Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews) and talked about who the women were in real life, and how they were portrayed.  Then we began to look at some women painters - I start in the 20th century, because, well, I only liked Modern to Contemporary in art history when I was in college and have no authority to talk about the oldies like Judith Leister or Artemesia G.  Not that I don't toss their names in the mix now and then...but we start with Georgia O'Keeffe.  She's a good counterpoint to an essay I assign from Old Mistresses, which is called Crafty Women and the hierarchy of the Arts.  The essay talks about how it was seen as okay for young ladies to paint flowers,  since they themselves should be so like flowers, in an ideal world.  So then I hit them with Georgia, and how shockingly unladylike everyone felt her flowers were.  Today we talked about Frida Kahlo and self-portraiture, the whole idea of women's art as autobiography and so forth.  Tomorrow we'll head on into the mid-century and talk Krasner and Frankenthaler.  So: those husbands. They're important but as I was walking back to my office I started to think on what a bunch of schmucks these women painters wound up with!  Steiglitz: old, probably dirty old man, big time sexist.  Diego Rivera: old, fat, drunk, philanderer - he slept with her sister! - with giant ego, probably let Frida stay in prison a wee bit too long after Trotsky got shot.  Pollock: well, we all saw the movie; nothing's going to change the historical fact that he got wasted and drove a car into a tree killing himself and his girlfriend's buddy while his wife was in Europe trying to restart her own career.  Is it my imagination or do Lee Krasner's paintings start to feel  like huge sighs of abstract expressionist relief around 1956?  Well, they're not the first or last women to fall for men of power but not much moral fiber.  Strangely enough...the sculptors of the same time period who we study next week (Louise and Louise) don't have anything near this kind of passionate destructive taste in men. Their husbands are quiet types who have their own separate lives (Nevelson leaves hers, a dull sort of businessman; Bourgeois' was art historian Robert Goldwater, who specialized in African Art)...the more contemporary ones have absolutely nothing interesting going on in their love lives (I don't even know if they're married! It's not addressed in their Art 21 clips.) But, we swing back into talking husbands when we return to two dimensions with the photographers in week three - to be fair they do share time with performance and video artists so we have to talk about Yoko Ono, who is impossible to examine without her husband inching into the frame. (Granted, many would switch that - if only we could talk about John without Yoko. I'm not one of those, though.) Week four is this mishmash of other women that have influenced art from behind the scenes, or in a more abstract way, like Schiaparelli, champion of Surrealism-to-wear, Peggy Guggenheim, and Edith Halpert (who was Edith Halpert? The woman who sold folk art to Rockefeller for Colonial Williamsburg, curated the art of Rockefeller Center, and who also dealt Jacob Lawrence when no one dealt in art by black Americans, among other things.) But we also in this week address Gala, the front half of Gala Dali: guess who she married?  Topping the tale of Dante Gabriel Rossetti digging up his wife, artist Elizabeth Siddal, to get his poems back, the best story of surrealism is perhaps what happened to Gala when she died, inconveniently, in the wrong house, in the wrong country.  They dressed her, sat her up in the back of her limo, and drove her home, over the border, to avoid the legal difficulties she'd caused by not expiring in the proper location.  I'm sorry, but I'd have to advise anyone looking for a husband to avoid marrying an artist. And my apologies to those of you who get this memo too late.