The Story of Art Without Men
(Norton, $45)
If you had asked me 30 years ago, “I would never have believed this book would be necessary in 2023,” said Margot Mifflin in the Los Angeles Times. But the world of art has been surprisingly slow to fold women from the past into its canon, or its museum collections, or its high-end auctions, and Katy Hessel has made it her mission to correct the unfair omissions. In her cheekily titled survey of 500 years of art, “what Hessel achieves is extraordinary,” covering “huge swaths of history” in “lively, lucid” prose. The young British journalist, historian, and podcast host focuses on female artists we all should know, the work these women created, and the obstacles they overcame. “Almost every piece Hessel references appears in a photo, some in luscious, two-page spreads.” Whatever progress is otherwise being made to increase women’s representation in art, “it will surely happen faster with the force of this spellbinding book behind it.”
The book packs in “an abundance of ‘firsts,’” said Tiana Reid in The New York Times. Among the hundreds of artists profiled, you’ll meet Lavinia Fontana, the first female painter to run her own studio. Fontana completed 24 commissions in the 16th century and also raised 11 children. Florine Stettheimer painted the first fully nude self-portrait in 1915. New York
City artist Carmen Herrera had her first major retrospective at a New York City museum in 2016, when she was 101. But by focusing on such benchmarks, Hessel reinforces the very system for valuing art that wound up excluding women, including that system’s emphasis on market success, sharply defined genre boundaries, and a concept of history as a linear progression. Many female artists of the past “died poor, depressed, institutionalized, or simply unknown,” and Hessel can only champion the ones who left a visible trace.
“It will take many more feats of scholarship and advocacy before the center of gravity of the white, male, Western, imperial canon is exploded,” said Bidisha Mamata in The Guardian. “But Hessel has gone further than anyone else in attempting to make a global survey,” and she shows “an extraordinary ability” to describe the distinctive style of each artist she profiles. When I saw the book’s title, “my first instinct was to be wary, if not downright hostile,” said Laura Freeman in The Times (U.K.). But the book isn’t a harangue about the many wrongs done to women. It’s a “spirited, inspiring history of female artistic endeavor” and it “should be on the front table of every museum shop.”