Katy Hessel, The Story of Art Without Men, WW Norton, 2023, 152pp., $45

In 1979, Eleanor Dickinson interviewed H.W. Janson, whose History of Art (1962) had become the academic standard, and questioned why his tome did not include women artists. “The works that I have put in the book are representative of achievements of the imagination … that have one way or another changed the history of art,” Janson responded. His point was clear; although it can be argued whether or not certain women artists have helped change the history of art, Janson’s litmus test did not concern gender, race, or even mere talent, but the merit of innovative imagination.

Dickinson’s interview was one of many landmarks in the relatively new Feminist Art Movement unfolding in the 1970s. Starting with Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” scholars such as Rosalind Kraus, Griselda Pollack, and Nancy Heller criticized patriarchal societies and institutional obstacles that prohibited women’s participation in the arts and argued that a handful of great female artists, previously overlooked or ignored, deserve a seat at the canonical table.

But feminism didn’t stop there; it turned segregationist. Whereas traditional art histories from Heinrich Wolfflin, Ernst Gombrich, and Jansen may have overlooked women in support of an established canon, feminist art historians began cutting men out of the story for reactionary vengeance. Thus, to borrow Frank Kermode’s categorical prefixes, the paleo-feminist seeks to buttress the existing canon with egalitarian merit, while the neo-feminist seeks to dismantle the existing canon for a new narrative segregated by gender and race. 

Upon this foundation, twenty-four-year-old British art historian Katy Hessel built her Instagram page @thegreatwomenartists and crafted her recent book The Story of Art Without Men. With a title parodying Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1950), the book has been described by critic Tiana Reid as “part revisionist history, part coffee-table book, part collective portrait, part archival treasure hunt.” 

Hessel’s book is no doubt impressive; full of insightful biographies and analysis of artworks from various women artists spanning the early Renaissance to the present day. According to the author, the book aims “to appeal to anyone of any art-historical level interested in learning the stories of these mostly overshadowed artists … so often excluded from the history books.” But flipping through the pages, I had the feeling this had all been done before. And it had. Jordi Vigué gave us the insightful Great Women Masters of Art (Watson-Guptill, 2003), and in 2019 Phaidon published two comprehensive, multi-contributor volumes, Great Women Painters and Great Women Artists. Hessel, who contributed to the Phaidon publications, for the most part, rebranded the scope and content of these previous books under her own title. 

The themes underlying much of Hessel’s introductory texts for each chapter also appeared to be writing today’s radical views of gender politics back into history. During the Renaissance, for example, Hessel recalled how women artists “fought back” against those “who referred to them as the ‘passive sex’” and “taught younger generations of female artists to eschew the men who would try to stifle their creativity.” Referring to women collectively in the Renaissance as a “passive sex” appears contradictory considering Catherine de Medici, Isabella d’Este, Isabella of Castille, and Queen Elizabeth I, to name only a few, were some of the most powerful and ruthless figures of the era. Likewise, assuming that all women of all eras took up the neo-feminist battle cry of liberation from men leads to gross misunderstandings of history. I’m reminded of the time when a young neo-feminist queried Nicholas Fox Weber as to whether Anni Albers ever felt oppressed in the shadow of her husband, Josef Albers. Weber simply replied (and I’m paraphrasing): “One thing Anni loved to do was fold Josef’s socks.” His point was clear; in addition to being an incredible artist, Anni enjoyed the traditional role of a housewife. Writing today’s radical feminism back into Anni’s life would be a moot point.

Aside from its lack of novelty and subjective revision, Hassel’s underlying mission—to “break down the canon I have so often been confronted by in the culture in which I grew up”—seemed problematic, especially when faced with her solution to reconstruct the canon based on gender and race alone. “It’s not that I believe there to be anything inherently ‘different’ about works created by artists of any particular gender,” the author noted, “it’s more that society and its gatekeepers have always prioritized one group in history.”

But isn’t difference the litmus between great, mediocre, and poor? The reason Properzia de’Rossi, Plautilla Nelli, Frida Kahlo, Sonia Delaunay, Leonora Carrington, and many other great women artists (the list goes on) have already received due recognition in textbooks and by institutions—long before Hessel—is that their work embodies a quality inherently different from contemporaries. Surrendering this essential criterion to the demands of gender and race effectively dismantles the protective boundary wall separating artists of meritable innovative imagination from those without. The results are revisionist histories, like Hessel’s, where artists are awarded feminist, woke, and multicultural participation prizes.

To Hessel’s credit, however, a society controlled by elite gatekeepers is no pleasant society. History is unfair and filled with fallacies. For centuries women were unjustly restricted from participating in art, denied education and professions, and thought to be incapable of intellectual and creative agency, all of which Hessel is quick to point out. “Being an artist and a woman has never been easy,” she rightly noted. But if we could ask Thomas More, Isaac Babel, Dmitri Shostakovich, Franz Marc, Antonio Sant’Elia, and others who have been martyred, censored, incarcerated, drafted, and buried in trenches, they would tell us that history has not been particularly amicable to men either. Perhaps the gatekeepers of history are not solely patriarchal, sexist, and racist but equally oligarchic, autocratic, and theocratic.

The Story of Art Without Men is an engaging survey of women artists throughout the past five centuries, but it comes at the unfortunate cost of deconstructing the criterion of merit and reconstructing a segregationist perspective of history.