THE SILENCED FACE

They, the women who were erased from the Art History books

The Prado Museum was marked just a year ago (with decades of delay, let it be said) when it dedicated for the first time in its two centuries an exhibition dedicated exclusively to a woman. The baroque Flemish painter Clara Peeters was in charge of breaking the taboo of the artistic patriarchy. For example, a button: in the national gallery there is work by more than 5,000 men and only 53 women. Of the nearly 8,000 cataloged paintings (on display and in warehouses), only four by female artists are on display. The History of Art has been starred by countless women. They have been the models and muses. The protagonists of some of the most important paintings of all times. There are the young ladies of Avignon, the majas, the Mona Lisa, the Venus, the dancers of Degas or the prostitutes of Touluse-Lautrec. These are just some obvious examples because while women are seen on museum walls, very few sign the canvases that hang from them.

Manuel Jesús Roldán says in ‘That was not in my Art History book’ (Almuzara) that the nineteenth-century conception of most of the manuals on the subject excluded them even if there were women court portraitists, camera sculptors or religious painters. "They have been silenced and their rescue from oblivion, fortunately recovered in recent years, deserves all efforts," he writes in this work that compiles artistic 'anecdotes' such as those masterpieces of art that were rejected and censored at the time, the first Selfies made in oil, the most rugged facets of some creators and, above all, it recovers the name and history of several of the most important but still forgotten artists. "Their existence was certainly reduced in many eras, but there are a good number of women's names that, at each stage of history, achieved fame and public recognition that was subsequently silenced," writes Roldán. Women who do not appear in the Art books do not even sound in the collective imagination because, he points out, of the concept of Art History from the 19th century, “a century in which the creative independence of women was especially vetoed by the reigning bourgeois morality, relegated the female gender to an almost exclusive home condition, marking an almost exclusively masculine canon in the first publications dedicated to Art. ”A discrimination that, furthermore, was standardized when the great European museums were created. Nor did the vision of many great men of art who were dispatched with opinions similar to Renoir's: "the female artist is simply ridiculous."

'The game of chess', Sofonisba Anguissola (1555) (Poznan National Museum)
The result? An androcentric vision of art that has erased many pioneers who deserve a prominent place in our artistic consciousness. Starting with Ende, considered the first painter in history, a copyist in charge of illuminating codices in the 10th century who already signed "Ende pintrix et Dei aiutrix" (Ende, painter and servant of God) the manuscript of the 'Commentary on the Apocalypse of the Beato de Liébana 'or by Hildegarda de Bingen, a Benedictine nun who was a pioneer in the field of music, literature and painting and who was already silenced in her own time. Roldán collects the name of 14 essential women in the History of Art that does not remain in the best known such as Frida Kahlo or Camille Claudel. The name Sofonisba Anguissola is perhaps one of the most familiar because she is the only woman whose works can be seen in the Prado collections. This Renaissance painter was very successful in her time. Michelangelo praised her work, Giorgo Vasari included it in his dictionary with 133 artist biographies (all men except the sculptor Properzia de Rossi and her mention), she became famous in Italy, Van Dyck portrayed her and was a painter for the Court of Philip II (a portrait of the monarch is in the Prado), however, as she was a woman, she could not sign her works, which is why many were attributed to men. "The game of chess" is one of the few paintings that has his signature, but others such as "The lady with the ermine" today continue to generate debate about whether it is the work of his hand or that of El Greco.

'Self-portrait', Judith Leyster (National Gallery of Art, Washington)
Also in 16th century Italy, Lavinia Fontana was a sought-after portraitist, but not only because of her recognition, but she also became an official painter of the Court of Pope Clement VIII and also worked for the Royal Palace of Madrid. She is perhaps the most successful painter of the Renaissance and Baroque, a pioneer who made nude pictures of men and women (at the time anatomy studies were forbidden for women) and in conciliation: her husband left work to take care of the house and her 11 children while she supported the family economy with her paintings. While both were born into artistic settings, Judith Leyster's life was completely different. This seventeenth-century Dutch artist was the daughter of a brewer and painting appeared as a necessary trade to cope with the economic hardships of the family. Influenced by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, her teacher, and Caravaggist painting, there are barely fifty works of her preserved because she left art when she married, but today she continues to look us directly in the eyes from the National Gallery of Art in Washington while paints a violinist.

'Judith beheading Holofernes', Artemis Gentileschi (1612-1613) (Uffizi Gallery)
Another of the great names of the Baroque was that of Artemisia Gentileschi, a painter who "came to enjoy a notable reputation in the Italy of the 17th century although her fame decreased after her death, reaching the deepest oblivion of her work a century later" partly because of dispersion, loss and bad attributions. She was the first woman to be admitted to the select Florentine Academy of Disegno, where she obtained the patronage of the Medici. The Uffizi Gallery shows one of his works, with a clear Caravaggist influence, most recognized: 'Judith beheading Holofernes'. In it he represented himself in the features of Judith and took revenge on his artistic tutor and sexual aggressor, Agostino Tassi, portraying him as Holofernes. He brought her to trial for rape and, although he was exiled, she suffered torture and a humiliating gynecological examination to prove her innocence. She is, for many, the first feminist painter in history and this year Rome has dedicated a great exhibition to her. In the same century in Spain the Sevillian Luisa Roldán stands out, daughter of the best sculptor of the second half of the seventeenth of the Seville capital and better known as La Roldana. She dominated the wood and clay carving, she was a chamber sculptor of Carlos II and Felipe V and hers are carvings such as "Entierro de Cristo", which is exhibited at the Met in New York, or the great "San Miguel Arcángel" del Escorial. Despite his profuse activity, he faced many financial difficulties and his name also fell into oblivion upon his death. The woman who put a face to Goethe or Reynolds was Angelica Kauffman, a neoclassical Swiss painter who achieved great fame in the 18th century as did the French Marie Loise Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, one of the most sought-after portraitists of the time. "It will not appear in the Art History books but it will appear in the Universal History books: a portrait of an entire court of characters whose heads would end up being cut off by the guillotine of the French Revolution," explains Roldán. He painted, for example, Lord Byaron or Marie Antoinette up to 35 times. The first portrait was made when he was only 23 years old.

A woman observes 'The eye is the firt Circle', by Lee Krasner, in the exhibition 'Abstract Expressionism' at the Guggenheim in Bilbao (Efe)
In the misogynistic nineteenth century there are already more recognizable proper names such as those of Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassat and Marie Bracquemond, the three first-rate women who were part of Impressionism, as well as the sculptor Camille Claudel. The avant-gardes of the twentieth century did not treat their creators better either. Although Frida Khalo, Georgia O'Keefe, Berthe Moristot, Sonia Delaunay (of which an exhibition can currently be seen in the Thyssen Museum in Madrid) or Tamara de Lempicka are better known, numerous names have remained in ostracism, such as those of Sophie Taeuber Arp, Lenora Carrington, Lee Krasner, a true reference of abstract expressionism always in the shadow of Pollock, her husband, or Florine Stettheimer, the woman who made the first nude self-portrait in the history of art. Nor can it be missing among pioneer women and to rescue from the History of Art the name of the Spanish Maruja Mallo. Banished from books, she was one of the great surrealists - Dalí himself described her as "half angel, half shellfish" - as well as a woman politically committed to the dissemination of art. He was part of the Generation of '27, he collaborated with the Republican Pedagogical Missions and had to go into exile to the US and Argentina during the Civil War and the dictatorship. “She is one of the creators whose anecdote is perhaps better known (her rebellion against the use of the hat, her anticlerical provocations or the use of borrowed pants, 'I'm the first transvestite', to access a religious building) than own work ”, explains the author of the book. She made, as María Zambrano defined her, "one of the most destructive and unforgivable mistakes: being free." The same as all these women determined to deny those words of Bocaccio that said that "art is alien to the spirit of women."