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Authorship and the Woman Painter, Part I: General Overview

© Jessica Cresseveur

The artist occupies a high place of importance in the traditional art historical canon. College and university slide libraries often categorise their collections according to artists' surnames. Museum exhibitions are often monographic, named for the artists whose work they feature (e.g., Constable to Delacroix), although thematic exhibitions are gradually increasing in frequency. Auction houses price the works of art that they sell based on the identity of the artist. For example, Georgia O'Keefe's Black Iris would bear a higher price tag than a similar painting produced by a lesser-known artist, even if the latter work were of equal or better quality.

Through time, the author--a term that can be used interchangeably with the term "artist"--has acquired a god-like quality due to the association of "author" with "creator." This notion was mostly unquestioned until 1968, when French post-structuralist philosopher Roland Barthes published his essay "The Death of the Author," which aims to de-mystify the "author-creator-god" paradigm by shifting the importance to the audience, without which the author's work is not completely understood.(1)

How does this relate to the issue of the woman painter? Christine Battersby notes that as the importance of the artist's identity grew, artistic opportunities for women decreased. She cites the relatively high number of women producing fibre arts and illuminated manuscripts during the Middle Ages. These women shared equal anonymity with the men who produced the same products.(2) During the Italian Renaissance, with the dawn of capitalism and the artist-patron relationship, the identity of the artist became increasingly important. Simultaneously the present divisions between private and public spheres began to take shape. Seen as "domestic," fibre arts remained the productions of (still) anonymous women. However, "public" arts commissioned by wealthy patrons became primarily the productions of identifiable men. The women who did succeed as public artists were eventually marginalised by the traditional canon. Despite some progress made by the introduction of the "new" art history* in recent decades, this marginalisation remains the norm.

Many feminist theorists, such as Battersby, approve of Barthe's "death of the author," arguing that, if adopted by the mainstream, it would once again level the playing field between male and female artists, as the insignificance of identity is the insignificance of sex. Furthermore, traditional scholars and critics would no longer look for "feminine" qualities in paintings produced by women, nor would they use excessive flattery when discussing them. (For example, during a 1989 conference, Denis Coekelberghs and Pierre Loze referred to Sophie Frémiet's La Belle Anthia as a "charming composition,"(3) a phrase that most likely would not appear in a discussion of a man's production.) What would matter with the adoption of the Barthesian paradigm would be the content of the oeuvre and the spectators' reactions to and comprehension of it.