Art books do receive awards — but most of us have never heard of them. Even the most popular of art titles is niche; they’re sold mainly in gallery shops, snooty boutiques and, as art historian Katy Hessel puts it, “on the third floor of the bookshop”.
So it’s a very big deal that recently her own title, The Story of Art Without Men, won the very mainstream Waterstones Book of the Year — automatically claiming a prominent place on half the high streets of Britain. Previous winners include Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, and The Book of Dust by Philip Pullman.
Hessel is, of course, delighted. “It’s a testament to all those people who have fought and fought for their place in art history,” she says.
Her work is about celebrating those who are typically left out of the canon; before the book, she was known for the Instagram account that she started in 2015, @thegreatwomenartists (it has more than 300,000 followers), and a related podcast.
The Story of Art Without Men, which was published in September, is based loosely on the highly respected The Story of Art by E H Gombrich, first published in 1950.
Hessel admires Gombrich’s work, but points out that “his first edition included no women artists, and the 16th edition included just one”. For balance, her version includes no men.
Hessel is 28 years old and grew up in London. She has a BA in Art History from UCL, but says she hardly studied any women at all. When this finally dawned on her at the age of 21, it was because she’d walked into an art fair and suddenly noticed that all the artists were male. “I hadn’t even thought about the gender disparity in the art world before, and it was completely shocking,” she says. “It’s half the world’s population.”
Even today, based on the work on display in major galleries, you might think that art is only created by men. Women artists make up just one per cent of the National Gallery collection, and 2023 will mark the first time the Royal Academy of Arts has ever hosted a solo, main-space exhibition by a woman (Marina AbramoviÄ). “Women have always made art,” says Hessel, “and not only that — they had to work doubly, triply, 10 times as hard as their male counterparts.”
If you’re sceptical about that, I’d urge you to pick up her book, which is an extraordinary eye-opener, and very readable. Leading us through from the early 16th century to the present day, it reveals hundreds of artists of astonishing talent — most of whom will be new to you — working in everything from wood-carving to oil painting to photography. Hessel’s intelligent narrative explains the hurdles they had to overcome to do that work: women weren’t allowed to study the nude body or enrol at art academies until the late 1800s, and weren’t given the freedom to wander unchaperoned in search of inspiring landscapes or churches. Many of those women who did manage to make art were born lucky — they had artist fathers.
Hessel quotes a comment by 20th-century artist Roland Penrose, husband of the famous photographer Lee Miller, which against this backdrop sounds particularly asinine. “Of course the women were important,” he said in the Eighties, “but it was because they were our muses. They weren’t artists.”
It’s because of this disempowering lie, which has been so pervasive, that we badly need books like Hessel’s.
You won’t read about women as muses within her pages. “When people discuss Dora Maar, so often Picasso is mentioned, because they dated for a brief while,” she says.
“I’m not going to mention Picasso, because it’s not relevant to her artwork.
“Why do we always have to mention Jackson Pollock when we talk about Lee Krasner? When we talk about him, we never mention her. So what I really wanted to do by rooting them in their social and political history, is forget this whole “wife of”, “muse of”, “daughter of” thing. These people should be there in their own right. They were pioneering, groundbreaking artists.”
Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625) is one such figure. She had the highly unusual opportunity to apprentice with a local painter, and went on to be an artist at the Spanish court, admired by Michelangelo. Her works are playfully subversive. Self-Portrait with Bernardino Campi shows her teacher, Campi, painting a portrait of her. An attentive viewer, however, will notice that she’s the dominant figure, not the teacher; in the 1990s, it was discovered that Anguissola had originally painted her own hand guiding Campi’s.
Elsewhere in the book is a 1612 still life by Clara Peeters (1594-c.1657). At first glance it’s just a couple of goblets and a vase of flowers; on further inspection, Peeters’ reflection is painted in every facet of one of the goblets. “So what might look like a still life is actually hiding 11 self-portraits,” says Hessel. “It’s almost like, let’s demand to be seen, and make sure that our work is not going to be misattributed to male artists.”
Hessel takes special delight in the work of Charlotte Salomon (1917-43), who painted Life? Or Theatre?, an autobiography in 784 gouache works. “I think it’s one of the most extraordinary pieces in the history of art,” says Hessel.
“It’s essentially a graphic novel about growing up in Berlin as a Jewish girl, falling in love, discovering music – and then when the Nazis come to power, everything changes. She died at 26, five months pregnant, in Auschwitz. Somehow this work survived.’
It’s disappointing that an artist like Salomon is not better known. ‘I think arts education in general is a huge problem in the UK, because our government don’t pay enough attention to it," says Hessel. "Obviously every school subject is important, but so is art. It gives people agency, because they feel like they can make things. No matter what business we go into, we all need that freedom."
Her conversations with students give her hope. ‘What’s amazing is that young people are driving change. They don’t want to learn a “definitive” art history — they understand that the canon is ongoing and global. We need to see history from a broad perspective.”
By writing the book, she may be playing her own part in shaping history both past and future. She hopes other scholars will dig deeper into the artists she’s researched; The Courtauld Institute of Art have put The Story of Art Without Men on their syllabus. To mark its publication, Hessel also curated an exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery of post-2000 art by women, which attracted long queues of visitors.
She wants to show the world, not only women, that art history is the story of us all. “There’s so much work to be done,” she says. “Everyone should feel welcome to enjoy and make art. If we’re not seeing art by a wide range of people, we’re not seeing society as a whole.
“My dream for this book is for a 13-year-old to stumble across it in the school library and think, actually, I see myself in this.”
