10. Art & Equality (Art His-Story)

If you haven't yet heard of the many times people were oppressed in the past, then it pains me to be the bearer of bad news. Up until the 20th century, few people had basic rights except for upper-class, landowning, white men. This was true for the US, Europe, and much of the colonial world. The results of this were tragic for many reasons. Good people were enslaved, deprived of their rights, in many cases killed and treated brutally. People were exploited to make money on plantation farms and in mines. Entire populations of people were wiped out. History is important but it can be a real bummer to learn.

Yet, for some reason, that's not how most texts treat art history. All the doom and gloom is cut in favor of a cheery list of great masters who helped develop and evolve what we call "art" up into the modern era. And they did this, almost as though they were working in a vacuum, like it happened on some other planet where nothing bad ever happens. These artists are generally called the Great Masters, or Old Masters, and we treat them as heroes, as we should. Their work is a testament to human achievement. Thanks guys! And they are all guys, and (what we in the present would consider to be) all white. And that strange fact usually doesn't come up in most art history lessons.

But it is worth examining. So, this will be primarily a history lesson, hopefully a corrective one, to discuss and explain all the information one should know before going into specific periods of art history. So, what's the problem with all this?

1. Art History offers a skewed, Eurocentric perspective.

The entire story of art is often told as a series of developments, discoveries, and improvements accomplished by a small set of men, who happened to all live and coexist on one continent, namely Europe. It's quite a coincidence, really. And, you hear a lot of "firsts" in this story - the first artist to create a free standing sculpture, a cast bronze sculpture, a free-standing cast bronze - the first since antiquity! The first blank canvas, the first collage. You get the idea. And then, any art created elsewhere that counters this narrative, is simply ignored (or relegated to a different book specializing in that particular culture):

brass head, Wunmonije Compound, Ife, Nigeria, c. 1300-1425

This trend offends our basic desire for fairness and honesty. We want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

2. Far too many ingenious, talented, and spirited, passionate people were never afforded the chance to make any art.

To truly appreciate the scope of this tragedy, consider all the greatest musicians and song writers who died young: John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Tupac Shakur, Kurt Cobain. Not to mention Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, and others. Imagine what great music they could've made if they had been able to live long, full lives. Consider what the world has lost in their early passing. Consider poets like John Keats, Percy Shelley, Silvia Plath. Or painters like Van Gogh, Gericault, Raphael. Now multiply all that by hundreds, even thousands of people. And, we did it to ourselves. With simple bigotry.

Now, to be fair, bigotry was not the only factor in limiting artistic voices. Remember from previous lessons, for most of human history people lived in poverty - most struggled simply to eat (still an problem today). We learned that even great artists like Rembrandt and Michelangelo were treated poorly at various times in their lives. Concept artist Nathan Fowkes has a great lecture discussing how artists are still mistreated today:

Comedian Hasan Minhaj also has a great episode on this topic:

But, this is apples and oranges. At least artists like Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Da Vinci, Raphael and others were recognized as children for their talents, and allowed to study in an atelier under a master artist, to learn and improve their skills - to get the chance to work with expensive artist materials, out of reach to most day laborers of their time. In the hundreds of years art developed in Europe, only a handful of women and other minorities were ever permitted to even hold a brush, and the way they were mistreated in guild systems, academies, and by critics is deplorable. It led art historian Linda Nochlin to compare the lack of great women artists as being akin to a lack of great Lithuanian jazz musicians, or Innuit tennis players. What else would you expect, given the lack of opportunity? So, I hope you can appreciate the enormous losses we incurred in what could have been a much greater treasury of art, and I must emphasize this was a self-inflicted wound.

3. Those minorities who beat the odds and made great art were largely ignored at the time, and remain in obscurity today.

The Resurrection of Lazarus, by Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1896

Starting in the 19th century, education was finally accepted as crucial to a free, democratic society, and some of the first free schools were created. As middle classes grew and flourished, more and more families began searching for and demanding educational opportunities for their sons and daughters. Women began attending schools for the first time, and fine art was considered a safe and acceptable pursuit. Some even allowed people of color to attend, although this was often quite controversial, leading to frequent conflict. Many of these artists showed incredible skill, creativity and vision. So, why haven't we heard of them? Why don't art history texts focus more on Henry Ossawa Tanner? Or Eleanor Fortesque-Brickdale? Or Harriet Hosmer? Mary Edmonia Lewis? Ellen Emmet Rand? 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by Ellen Emmet Rand, 1933

How many artists get hired to paint the official portrait of the POTUS and then fall into obscurity?

These are artists whose excellence is indisputable and breath-taking. And so we come to the sad realization that the art we are typically shown is not simply chosen according to excellence, but because it fits a simplistic narrative (which happens to favor a view of art as the product of great old masters who happen to be white men). It's a problem that continues all the way into modern art, where minorities supposedly have made great strides on the quest to equal opportunity. Yet, as the Gorilla Girls point out, even at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, only about 5% of the permanent collection was created by women.

4. Far too much art was and is made purposefully to satisfy the white, male gaze. 

This can be difficult to explain without demeaning the centuries of incredible artwork that mankind has made. I intend not to denigrate the works of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, or any of the other great masters whose work I so much admire. There is so much to appreciate and learn from, for all viewers, regardless of gender or ethnicity. But, we have to face the reality that some artworks have fallen short of telling the whole story. For instance, much of art history has been devoted to depictions of the Holy Family: Mary and the baby Jesus. They usually appear something like this:

The Alba Madonna, by Raphael Sanzio, c. 1510 

This is one of the greatest paintings ever made, but, at the same time, if you go to Bethlehem people tend to look more like this:

Palestinian girls in traditional dress, celebrating Christmas in Bethlehem, in 2014.

When minorities are represented as "other", or as side characters, like npc's in a videogame, it often relegates them to one-dimensional stereotypes: the noble savage, the ignoble savage, the barbarian, the victim, and so on. We have to consider what truths we lose when minorities are not permitted to represent themselves.

And it's still a problem today. As one dad explains in this article, "What Taking My Daughter to a Comic Book Store Taught Me", when too much of an artform is made by one set of people, it can limit the audience to only those people, alienating everyone else. When his daughter asked, "Where are the real comics? These can’t be for kids, and comic books are for kids, and kids aren’t supposed to see that.  That Wonder Woman looks like she’s in a video, and I don’t know who that is, but it’s not Harley Quinn.  Harley Quinn wears clothes,” - that's a major problem. And, I'm not saying every artist has to think about inclusivity in every work that they make. But, when no one does, then what?

And it's not just a problem at the comic book store, or at the big museums. Options online have been pretty limited online as well. At this point in time, we need to recognize that search engines like Google are the new card catalog to the world; it's where everyone goes to look up information. Actual libraries and printed encyclopedias have become antiquated. So this matters. I first tested this problem back in 2015. First I searched "greatest artists in history":

The Art Wolf (now defunct) had a list of 101 greatest painters - only two were women, Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keeffe (and they misspelled her name!). Rollingstone Magazine had a top 100 artists list - only 7 were women, 36 bands were people of color, and they listed both John Lennon and Eric Clapton twice (both as solo artists and in a band). All the other lists of greatest artists were solely white men.

When I tried "greatest women artists" there wasn't a single list anywhere. This is what I found:

Since then, there has been some progress. Phaidon published a compendium of 50 women artists in 2019, you can see it here. Harper's Bazaar published a top 20 list of women artists in 2020. In 2021, My Modern Met published a top 15 list of painters which includes 5 women. That same year they also posted a list of 12 women artists everyone should know. Art Historian Katy Hessel has made a project out of promoting women artists, and, in 2022, she published a book you can see here. Then, there's my blog, 100 Greatest Women Artists, which I put together in 2020.

So, there are things we can do to rectify the situation, it's primarily a question of content, finding the truth and promoting it, especially online. And it's something I intend to do on this site, with your help and advice.