Dr. Forqan Uddin Ahmed :
Women have a lot in common with art. In the history of art, women have often been portrayed as pretty pictures that excite men to brilliance or as statues whose motionless grace arouses the male genius and compels it to create. Elizabeth Ellet asserts in her Women Artists (1859) that “woman is the type of the ornamental part of our life, and lends to existence the charm which inspires the artist.” Women, we infer, are archetypes, rather than makers, of art. In the history of women, moreover, women’s status has frequently been treated as a fine gauge of cultural sophistication, a role commonly assigned to painting and sculpture. As Eileen Power once observed, ‘”the position of women has been called the test point by which the civilization of a country or of an age may be judged.”2 In much historical thought, women and art do indeed have a lot in common: both are static sources of inspiration; both are luxuries cultivated by the truly civilized. How have medievalists responded, then, to women who produced art, to allegedly passive, beautiful, nonessential objects that fashioned others and thus created the stuff of civilization? In what ways, for example, have historians tried to determine the extent to which medieval European women participated in artistic production? How have they conceptualized the effects of gender on what (and how) female artists painted, sculpted, or embroidered? How, furthermore, have they interpreted the relationships of women’s artistic activities to medieval economics, religion, politics, and other domains of power?
During the prehistoric period, women were seen in different roles during different civilizations. For example, in Egypt, women have been portrayed in the political role, as Pharaoh’s queen. Their presentation was elegant, well-honored and prestigious. The only exception to this is the subdivision statue of Queen Hotsepot, where her upper body is naked. But this nudity is not an aphrodisiac, but a complement of beauty, which can be seen by sight. It is not conceivable that an artist would create a sculpture of a powerful queen like her in a contemptuous way to arouse male desire. So the question of how the queen was shown or presented was not raised here. In the Egyptian assembly, ordinary human beings were also shown in wall paintings or carved sculptures. For example, in the case of women who are seen in the character of the maid or companion, the portraits of women inside the mausoleum also do not suffer from modesty. All these ordinary men and women have been used for religious purposes, not political considerations, though the scenes are of social life.
In medieval Europe, women were predominantly religious in the arts. The statue of Mother Mary Goddess and saint has been erected in the church. In the mythology, women are represented equally with equal importance. The idols of ordinary women are also seen in these works of art, where for religious reasons their representations picturesque are dignified. It was not the society in which all women of all classes had a dignified role, but in the art form, the reflection of that class-based society was not abrogated by ordinary women using double standards. In the Byzantine Empire of the East, the Roman Empire was regarded as an honor for women, but in Byzantine art the influence of Oriental art has limited the use of nudity. This has happened, especially after the anti-pagan movement ended. But not in Byzantium (Constantinople), nude women statues have been erected in various places in Antique, Alexandria, and Asia Minor. In the Middle Ages, the inhabitants of northern Europe, such as Germany, France, Britain, and Scandinavia, the inhabitants of ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire, were called ‘barbarians’, though they had their own artistic ideals. After being baptized into Christianity, they came to the southern countries to participate in painting churches and monasteries and painting scriptures. As they blend their own artistic styles in these works, new types of art have been created. In the Beaux Tapestry, portraits of some of the women who appear to be of the ordinary class are tastefully decorated with costumes and ornaments. This type of pornography shows that apart from religious issues, images of warfare have been made during this time and women have been shown as one of the main characters. There is no doubt about the role of artists from the ‘barbaric’ country of the north. In the Middle Ages, at least one of the female artist’s self-portraits has also been the subject of girls at least in painting.
Throughout the centuries, women have been involved in making art, whether as creators and innovators of new forms of artistic expression, patrons, collectors, sources of inspiration, or significant contributors as art historians and critics. Women have been and continue to be integral to the institution of art, but despite being engaged with the art world in every way, many women artists have found opposition in the traditional narrative of art history. They have faced challenges due to gender biases, from finding difficulty in training to selling their work and gaining recognition. So how have women come forward as such strong voices in art and art history today, and how do we go about telling the stories of those who were forgotten by history?
Women have always been artists, and there always have been glimpses of women’s art within male-driven societies. Even when it comes to the earliest works of art known to us, like the voluptuous Venus of Willendorf from 25000 B.C.E. and other small stone carvings, no one is certain if these works of art were created by women or men. On the other hand, objects like weavings and clothing have always been associated with women’s craft, from the story of Penelope’s courageous weaving in Homer’s epic tale The Odyssey, from 800 B.C.E., to the 11th century Bayeaux Tapestry, a 270-foot long fabric document telling the story of medieval Britain, likely woven and embroidered by women. Still, women artists faced difficulty in the centuries that followed when trying to engage with the art world and canon.
But beginning in the 20th century, things began to change not only for women artists, but for women across the domestic and public spheres. A new women’s movement, with an emphasis on the advocacy of equal rights, organizations devoted to women’s interests, and a new generation of female professionals and artists transformed the traditionally male-driving social structure around the world. These social shifts, which began to emerge at the beginning of the century, developed further with the advent of World War I and expanding global unrest, propelling more women into the workforce and exposing them to social, professional, and political situations that had previously been limited to men.
Despite being marginalized and sidelined by the male members of the group, artists like Helen Saunders and Jessica Dismorr pushed to be card-carrying members of the Vorticist movement. French painter Francoise Gilot forged a visual style and identity entirely her own despite being known mainly as Pablo Picasso’s lover and working in close proximity to major artists like Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger in the 1940s. Surrealist women painters and sculptors like Eileen Agar and Louise Bourgeois were iconoclasts in their explorations of mind and body, developing fluid, intimate, and openly sexual subject matter.
The job of interpreting women as artists has been enriched by recent insights into women’s prominent role as cultural patrons in the middle Ages. The work of women as creators of rich and significant artifacts takes its place within the broader rediscovery of women as arbiters of medieval culture.
Inevitably the search for medieval women artists depends to a fair extent upon the search for signed works. But signatures are notoriously slippery in medieval art. Although medieval works are more often signed than we generally imagine, names do not necessarily appear in the same context or carry the same messages as they do in more modern arts, and they lead less often to the agnostic heroes or self-expression whom groups in search of a history hunger to own.
(Dr. Forqan Uddin Ahmed, writer, researcher & columnist)
