A wrong turning made me realise how good it is to be alive.

We had finished our lunch of pizza and salads at the streetside restaurant. It was around 2pm and our intention had been to then visit the Museum of Genocide* - an itinerary which both appalled and appealed to our tourist instincts. But back in 2013, none of us had GPs or Google maps on our then rather basic phones and relied on getting from A to B using a tourist map and from directions from accosted passers-by.
On a short educational visit to Vilnius, Lithuania, through the Erasmus Student Network, an international student organisation, the five of us were from very different backgrounds and studying for degrees at Bradford School of Art in West Yorkshire. Three on a graphics design course, one studying drama, and myself on a textile degree course. We comprised two Polish students, a BMX fanatic, a born-again Christian and myself, at 50, the oldest in the group by 30 years. Yet we had gelled and thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company while exploring the city, leaving our three accompanying college lecturers to promote Bradford College to various academic institutions.
We had eaten at outside tables of a small restaurant on Gediminas Avenue in Vilnius, Lithuania. Maya consulted her map and announced that she knew which way to go. She had taken on the mantle of leader and, tall and forthright, no-one cared to challenge her so we obediently gathered our things and set off to walk to the museum which appeared to be nearby. 
Only, we went left instead of right. 
After walking for half an hour or so and realising we had no idea where to go next, we asked for help. The woman responded with some vague instructions and off we set again, turning off the main thoroughfare onto Jogailos Street, reassured that we were not far from our intended destination. The road led us to a park area and we found ourselves climbing high above the city, taking in views of the Neris River. We had somehow walked to Aurochs mountain park and garden by the Tauro Kalnas - and still we had no idea how to get to the museum. Time was marching on - it was now nearly 3.30pm and the museum closed in an hour.
Finally we found the right area and got to the museum with half an hour to go. The woman at the ticket kiosk looked most unhappy to see us and declined our request to use our student cards to obtain a discount. We tried to explain that we had got lost but she couldn’t care less.

Half an hour was not enough to spend there and it felt utterly disrespectful to even stay. But we were leaving the next day and we had all very much wanted to visit this former KGB headquarters to learn more about the country’s past. It was horrific. With little time to stop, we glanced at the prison cells and torture rooms, read and absorbed what we could from the information boards, and spent mere minutes in the basement area where executions were carried out. Here, thousands of members of the Lithuanian resistance had been shot or stabbed in the head. Displayed under the glass floor, right under our feet - as we stood and tried numbly to take in the utter dreadfulness -  were pairs of spectacles and other personal effects which had been found with the victims, who were buried in mass graves outside Vilnius. 
We stayed until we were ushered out at closing time. Silently we trooped out, lost in our own thoughts. 
As we rounded the corner we discovered that the museum was on the same street where we had eaten lunch some hours earlier - only a few hundred yards away. We had simply gone the wrong way, turning left instead of right. We knew we could always return another time to spend longer at the museum, and to have the chance to pay our respects to those brave people who had been abused, tortured, murdered yet who had shown an indomitable human spirit in the face of absolute evil. 
But we were nonetheless, in the cold light of fading day, very much aware that we were alive.
* The Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights, previously the Museum of Genocide Victims, in Vilnius, Lithuania was established in 1992 by order of the Minister of Culture and Education and the President of the Lithuanian Union of Political Prisoners and Deportees.This former headquarters of the KGB (and before them the Gestapo, Polish occupiers and Tsarist judiciary) houses a museum dedicated to thousands of members of the Lithuanian resistance who were murdered, imprisoned or deported by the Soviet Union from WWII until the 1960s. (Wikipedia)

Chipping away - to find an invisible woman

Otley, the town adjacent to where I live, is celebrating the 300th birthday of its famous son Thomas Chippendale. There's loads of stuff going on to mark the furniture maker's life - tours, talks, events - even an ale has been named in his honour: Chippend'Ale.
While I have no issue with Otley parading its pride in Tom, there are two significant others who, in my opinion, stand out due to their apparent insignificance. His wives.

Thomas married Catherine Redshaw in 1748 and Wikipedia states "and they had five boys and four girls." Catherine died in 1772; in 1777 he married Elizabeth Davis and "fathered three more children". There is plenty of information on Thomas Chippendale on the 'net; unsurprisingly not so much - in fact virtually nothing - on the women who popped out his offspring. Catherine is mentioned on www.geni.com, as being a wife and mother, listing the names of her nine children. Elizabeth can also be found on the same site where her life is also reduced to a summary consisting of her birth date, death date and names of children.

Of course this is no surprise. Throughout history, the roles of women have been belittled, ignored and erased. Women have always been 50% of the population, but only feature in around 0.5% of recorded history. Dr Bettany Hughes, award-winning historian, author and broadcaster, puts this down to the expansion of civilisations. "At the birth of civilised society, you have these very highly productive and sophisticated, settlements, with women having great status; they are high priestesses, they have property rights and own land, they write poetry- but these new civilisations want to expand. So – broadly speaking – when that happens, what you need is muscle power, and society becomes more militarised. The balance of power shifts."

(http://blog.english-heritage.org.uk/women-written-history-interview-bettany-hughes/)

So while men leave their wives and children at home to go off to battle, to fight other men who have left their wives and children at home, military power and macho posturing muscle in on the lives of women, diminishing their roles and enforcing the rules of patriarchy.

For at least 3,500 years, the stories of women have been written out of history. In art, business, politics, architecture, medicine and so on, it's the men who are remembered in books and on Wikipedia. 18th century British statesman Lord George Lyttelton, in his poem Advice the a Lady, 1773 advised:

Seek to be good, but aim not to be great;
A woman's noblest station is retreat.

Behind every great man there's a great woman was adopted as a slogan for the 1960/70s feminist movement, first having been used in the 1940s. Less used in more recent years as the imagery of women being behind men is open to misinterpretation. 

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/60500.html

"A woman's place is in the home."
"Men make houses, women make homes."

Catherine and Elizabeth were real people. They were living, breathing women whose gender imprisoned them, for better or for worse, into a life of domestic chores, breeding and child rearing. While Thomas was out showing off his posh furniture, they were most probably stuck at home up to their arms in laundry, food preparation and dirty nappies (or whatever the alternative was at the time).

We only ever hear about the women in the lives of famous men due to their sprogging abilities; they fade into the background as their husbands enjoy the limelight.

As an artist and researcher, I have taken the example of Catherine to create an 'invisible woman' out of Perspex. Catherine is part of my MA graduation show.

My work combines Perspex creations of women in iconic artworks and theoretical research into the implied sexism written by curators for art gallery wall labels for paintings of women artists and sitters.

Taking notice of sexism in art galleries

Written in 2018. One day I'll get round to updating this.

On a personal research visit to the National Portrait Gallery for my study for a BA in fine art, I started to notice a style of labelling of women which appeared to me to be rampant and unnecessary. Over the course of a few years and subsequent visits to art galleries and museums, I started to document these examples of the wording on labels for women artists and sitters where they differentiated from those of male counterparts. They included 'wife', 'mother', 'sister', 'daughter'' and 'muse' - and the more salacious ‘prostitute’, ‘chambermaid’, ‘mistress’ and ‘lover.’  Along with these labels were terms such as 'association with'  and references to a subject's 'gaze' and attire; some curators felt the need to point out that the woman was 'naked' or 'nude'. The men are rarely referred to with regard to familial or relationship labels. Attire is referenced by the man's status; on the woman by the material and adornments. 

I first became aware of this systematic categorisation on a visit to the National Portrait Gallery, London, some years ago. Ostensibly it was to see Grayson Perry's wonderful display of ceramics, tapestries, silkscreen prints and embroideries, on display to coincide with his Channel 4 show on identity, called 'Who Are You?' 

Now ... Grayson is an artist who has an alter-ego in Claire. A more modern, forward-thinking white middle-class male it would be hard to find. And his pots, sculptures, tapestries and screenprints - which nestle in between colonial paintings and royal portraits in the gallery - reflect 'modern society'. Two men as parents to an adopted child on a vase; an X-factor Z-list celebrity on a pendant; a young British woman who has become a Muslim depicted on a scarf/hijab.

So it was a shock to go from the all-encompassing to the blatant sexism which I went on to read in the gallery descriptions beside the portraits in the permanent collection. Many of the paintings of women were described in reference to who they had married, had an affair with, been in love with and so on. (I have taken the descriptions from the NPG website) The language used included 'wife', 'lover', and 'affair'. Women were also referred to as property, as in 'his lover' and 'his wife'.

Women have been objectively viewed since - well, whenever. So what's new.



According to an article in The Guardian just a year ago, in the UK female artists account for just 4% of the National Gallery of Scotland’s collection; 20% of the Whitworth Manchester’s and 35% of Tate Modern’s collections. Only 33% of the artists representing Britain at the Venice Biennale over the past decade have been women.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/feb/06/how-the-art-world-airbrushed-female-artists-from-history


So, what's new.

The Guerrilla Girls have done a great job of calling out sexism in various spheres of the art world.

But what doesn't appear to have been addressed, in my opinion, and has gone unnoticed despite being right in front of us when we visit art galleries, are the artist descriptions which are placed next to a significant artwork. The language used in such information notices is often blatantly sexist, as I shall endeavour to argue.

I first became aware of this systematic categorisation on a visit to the National Portrait Gallery, London, some years ago. Ostensibly it was to see Grayson Perry's wonderful display of ceramics, tapestries, silkscreen prints and embroideries, on display to coincide with his Channel 4 show on identity, called 'Who Are You?' 

Now ... Grayson is an artist who has an alter-ego in Claire. A more modern, forward-thinking white middle-class male it would be hard to find. And his pots, sculptures, tapestries and screenprints - which nestle in between colonial paintings and royal portraits in the gallery - reflect 'modern society'. Two men as parents to an adopted child on a vase; an X-factor Z-list celebrity on a pendant; a young British woman who has become a Muslim depicted on a scarf/hijab.

So it was a shock to go from the all-encompassing to the blatant sexism which I went on to read in the gallery descriptions beside the portraits in the permanent collection. Many of the paintings of women were described in reference to who they had married, had an affair with, been in love with and so on. (I have taken the descriptions from the NPG website) The language used included 'wife', 'lover', and 'affair'. Women were also referred to as property, as in 'his lover' and 'his wife'.

Compare and contrast these examples, in room 31 : (I have bolded certain words in red.)
Stanislawa Bevan (née de Karlowska)
by Robert Polhill Bevan
"(1876-1952), Painter; wife of Robert Polhill Bevan."

Vanessa Bell (née Stephen)
Vanessa Bell (nee Stephen)
by Duncan Grant
(1879-1961), Painter; sister of Virginia Woolf.

The description tells us: "Bell began to work with Grant, a younger painter, whose work she admired, from around 1913 and they subsequently fell in love." I have absolutely no need to be told this. If I wanted to find out more about Bell's personal life, I could research myself. It is, in my opinion, not relevant to the portrait of Bell.

Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873-1938), Patron of the arts; half-sister of 6th Duke of Portland; wife of Philip Edward Morrell.

"Lady Ottoline Morrell, the chatelaine of Garsington Manor outside Oxford, was a ferocious socialite, friend and lover of artists and writers, including Augustus John, whom she first met in 1906 and with whom she had a brief affair in 1908. "

Even aside from the fact that the male portraits outnumber the females by a large amount, I personally feel there is no need to label a woman as to her personal life. This does not appear to be the case with the men. Even in room 24, where Elisabeth Barrett Browning hangs next to Robert Browning, it seems that their relationship has to be pointed out via Elisabeth. The description states that Elisabeth was married to Robert; his description simply states that he was a poet.

Portraits of women who were only famous by association were labelled as to their indiscretions (my word):

Emma, Lady Hamilton (1765-1815), Mistress of Lord Nelson
by George Romney
The daughter of a Cheshire blacksmith, Emma Hamilton became the mistress of Charles Greville, and later the wife of his uncle, Sir William Hamilton"

Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of Brunswick (1768-1821), Queen of George IV.
by Sir Thomas Lawrence
"This portrait of Caroline of Brunswick was painted after her separation from the Prince of Wales. Thomas Lawrence - rumoured to be among her lovers - depicts her here in defiant mood, her left hand and wedding ring deep in shadow.

*****

On a visit to see the John Piper show at the Tate Liverpool, I ventured into a the paired exhibition on "Surrealism in Egypt: Art Et Liberté 1938–1948".

The Tate’s website stages that ‘The Art and Liberty Group emerged out of travel, correspondence and conversation, with international artists such as André Breton or photographer Lee Miller playing an important role in introducing surrealism to the Cairo art scene and influencing its development.’
Knowing nothing about the artist featured, I read the descriptions to get more of an insight on their work. Again, it appeared to me that the prose used to reflect the life and work of a male artist was treated differently to that of a female.
In Roland Penrose’s description, Lee Miller - an established artist in her own right - is referred to as ‘his lover’, ie, she belongs to him, she is ‘his’ 

Also in the exhibition is Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar. Notice there is nothing in his description to describe any significant other in his life.




The description for Lee Miller, however, goes right in with referring to her as ‘his muse’ (Man Ray) ‘and lover’. Then apparently she married some bloke, but she had been having an affair with Roland Penrose.






Now I did ask an assistant while I was there what her thoughts were. She said she could see my point but argued that people who had not heard of Lee Miller needed to be informed of how and why she was being featured in the exhibition. I still fail to see what need there is to be told of her affair. It could have just read that she introduced him to the group.

Interestingly, Lee Miller is one of only two names mentioned on the Tate’s website regarding the exhibition:  ‘The Art and Liberty Group emerged out of travel, correspondence and conversation, with international artists such as André Breton or photographer Lee Miller playing an important role in introducing surrealism to the Cairo art scene and influencing its development.’

At least here, Lee Miller shares equal footing with Andre Breton.




Ida Kar is also featured at the exhibition - here again she is categorised as having married someone, divorced him and married someone else.

But Robert Medley’s personal life? Who knows!





Armed with my initial discoveries, I have continued to nitpick the descriptions at other art galleries whenever I am able to visit. Here are some findings from this year so far:

The recently revamped and reopened Leeds Art Gallery  has a collection of works from the 19th century. There are around 30 paintings in the collection, of which one was by a woman. No surprise there, of course - women had far more important things to do than paint, such as being a child-bearer and subservient domestic worker (ie housewife). The one painting is called Scotland for Ever by Lady Elizabeth Butler (1846-1933), painted in 1881. Now why would a woman have painted this picture, I hear you ask - after all, that is the question foremost on your mind. Fortunately the curator's description is there to enlighten us - Lady Elizabeth was married to a sergeant in the horse guards and was permitted to watch her husband's regiment during training manoeuvres, positioning herself in front of charging horses in order to observe their movement. Ah, good, now I can understand why a lowly female would have had the opportunity to paint a picture which, incidentally, was used as an inspiration for the depiction of the same charge in the film Waterloo ... information which I find far more interesting (and which I discovered on Google) than the reference in the notice as to whom she was married.





Fortunately for Leeds Art Gallery, this was the only example I could find - none of the modern work on display had labelling which singled out the gender of an artist by assigning it to a reason for their being male or female. However, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool was a completely different kettle of fish and I found so many examples of involuntary sexism in the curators' notices that I almost forgot to look at the artworks themselves.

Where to begin.
The first room I came to had two pictures next to each other -  of Napoleon crossing the Alps and Genevieve Wilson. I don't know why these two portraits have been placed together but the descriptions are vastly different in their use of language.
Napoleon = victory, leader, momentous historic events, legend.
Genevieve = wife, daughter, married, posture, pregnant.
The description of Genevieve's portrait refers extensively to her attire and her posture. There is no description of Napoleon's attire and posture. Napoleon is a historical legend, Genevieve is a wife.




Ok so maybe this is only minor and I am literally reading too much into these descriptions. But lo, what do we have here?




This quartet of paintings comprises of one man and three women. Let's have a look at what the descriptions say:
The man is William Clayton, was a friend of a Duke and was made a Lord and then a Baron. Below him is Mrs Frances Hesketh. The first word in the description is 'Mrs'! Why not 'Mr' William Clayton? We learn who Frances was married to, and whose daughter she was.
Lady Cunliffe is top right. She was married, and in her mid-40s when this portrait was painted. Last but not least is Emily, Countess of Kildare was a third daughter, and married an Earl when she was 15. Hey curators, thanks for the information but I want to know - did William Clayton marry? Was he a son? Who was his father? Why are the women described according to their social status and clothing?



Here we have another two portraits placed next to each other. Anne, Duchess of Chandos was 'a chambermaid' with a 'clandestine marriage' but her social rank was secured when the marriage was made public (but caused a sensation at the time). Apparently this image "stresses her newly acquired social rank, emphasising her Duchess's robes and and coronet and the sheen of her dress."
Three sentences in a short paragraph, followed by a paragraph about the artist. Below, Richard Gildart, gets about seven sentences about his achievements, none of which refer to his marital status , attire or personal life.

Ah, how lovely - the gallery has hung two works by a man and woman, who were a married couple, together. But it is through Elizabeth Forbes that we are informed they were married. Stanhope's description is short and to the point, explaining where and why the painting was done. Elisabeth's description tells us more about her than the painting, and even adds another paragraph again to reinforce that SHE was married to HIM.

Now I mentioned this as an example to my son who is brilliant at playing devil's advocate. "But which one was more famous?" He asked. "Why does that matter?" I responded. "Surely the descriptions should be about the painting, not the painter's marital status and gender." He argued that if Elisabeth Forbes was more famous than Stanhope Forbes, then ok, fair enough, I might have a point. According to blogger Jim Lane:

"It's not often I find artists who are a married couple; and even less often are they more or less equally famous. That would be the case with Mr. and Mrs. Stanhope Forbes, except for the fact that Elizabeth Adela (Armstrong) Forbes, born in 1859, died of cancer in 1912 at the age of 52 while her husband, Stanhope Alexander Forbes, born in 1857, lived to be 89 years old. Naturally, the longer you live, the more famous you're likely to be. "

http://art-now-and-then.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/stanhope-and-elizabeth-forbes.html

I referred earlier to Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Robert, a struggling young poet, wrote a fan letter to the much better-known Elizabeth Barrett, a housebound invalid. He began a passionate correspondence with her, they got married in secret and eloped to Italy. Until Elizabeth's death in 1861 they enjoyed a life of married bliss and increasing professional success as expatriate celebrities. The "much-better known" Elizabeth still has to be referred to in the National Portrait Gallery as Robert's wife, though.

Brother and sister painters Augustus and Gwen John both enjoyed relatively equal fame, although the Gwen is invariably mentioned in the same breath as Rodin because she had an affair with him. Well, that's the most important thing about her, of course.

The Walker Art Gallery's 20th Century and contemporary paintings collection of works has a few little nuggets of, in my opinion, irrelevant references to a female artist's gender. Mary Martin was apparently "the first woman" to win the John Moores' Painting Prize.

It is apparently necessary to tell us where Rose Wylie met her husband, 'the painter Roy Oxlade'. Note the word 'the', giving him a raised status of importance. I hope one day to find a painting by him with a description next to it saying that he was married to 'the painter Rose Wylie'. Somehow I doubt such a description exists.




Manchester's Art Gallery recently removed one of its artworks (below) to "encourage debate" about how such images should be displayed. After critics accused curators of being puritanical and politically correct, Hylas and the Nymphs by JW Waterhouse was returned to its wall. The 1896 painting was removed in an attempt to rethink the "very old-fashioned" way images of women's bodies were exhibited as "either as passive beautiful objects or femmes fatales". Curator Clare Gannaway said: "It's not about saying these things can't exist in a public gallery - it's about saying, maybe we just need to challenge the way these paintings have been read and enable them to speak in a different way."









Contrast and compare to this work 'A summer night' by Alfred Joseph Moore at the Walker Art Gallery. To me the reasons for painting these scenes are obvious - they were painted by pervy men for other pervy men to look at. The soft porn of their day. The curator's description states: 

"By the 1880s, Moore had established a reputation as a painter of abstract beauty devoid of literary content, obvious subject matter of symbolic meaning. The four carefully arranged women in subtly-contrasted but related poses might suggest this is an academic study of the female figure resulting from Moore's admiration for Greek sculpture. However, as the girls are actually going to bed, it is also clearly erotic and suggestive. The flesh painting is very realistic for Moore, but the colour tones lack his usual subtlety and restraint."

Excuse me while I snort in derision.
In other words ... Moore was a perv who liked painting naked women and he was turned on by Greek sculpture.
And excuse me, curator person, why call them 'women' and then refer to them as 'girls'? If they are girls, are they all aged over 18?


It's now accepted that women artists have been undervalued over the centuries, shadows having been cast upon them by the men who took all the opportunities for themselves. Now, in a time almost of enlightenment, when the #MeToo movement, questions of BBC pay discrepancies, and the Hollywood producer etc scandals are suddenly at the top of the agenda and women are actually being taken seriously and listened to (YES!) ... it's about time that art institutions rethought the language used to categorise and denigrate women for their gender. 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/21/44-million-georgia-okeeffe-how-little-women-artists-valued

Gross or not

Check out 'George Gross', advised my tutor, and I dutifully obliged.
We had been discussing my next academic essay, a 5000 word synopsis of Dada, the YBAs and MAVA. *  I had also talked about my lastest creative work using photoshop.
Typing into my pc at home, I discovered George Gross - a pulp fiction artist who lived from 1909 to 2003. Hmm, I wonder what this has to do with Dada etc I thought as my screen filled with images not unlike the saucy postcards I recalled seeing on seaside holidays. Nonplussed, I was however inspired by this artwork that I don't think I had come across before and thus created:

After having a bit of fun, I went back to find out more about George only to discover that there was actually another artist called ... George Grosz. This George lived from 1893 to 1959  was the one my tutor had meant as he had connections to Dada. His paintings appeared to me to have elements of collage and anti-art, which appealed.

Coincidentally, it looks as if both Georges enjoyed objectifying the women/the female body in their works so I've decided to do a bit of role play and swap them around to redress the balance.

Here's to George and George.



 MAVA. * For more information see www.uniquearts.co.uk