Figure 1 Auguste Rodin, The Eternal Idol, c. 1905. Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resources, New York.
W hat is art? What is an artist? Each concept is defined in terms of the other: who counts as an artist partly depends on what is produced, and whether a product is a work of art partly depends on who produced it. Let us begin by considering the concept of the creator: the person who makes art, whether that art be poetry or painting or music, architecture or sculpture or dance. Of course, by listing these particular arts, I have already importantly prejudged the terms of discussion, for the answers would be different had I included the person who makes quilts or jigsaw puzzles or wedding cakes; or the person who spins, weaves, or throws pottery; or who blows glass or manufactures furniture or binds books. As we shall see in the course of this chapter, the identification of certain persons as artists changes through history with shifting categories of things that are considered works of art.
The contemporary notion of an artist is inseparable from ideas about self-expression, imagination, and creativity, all of which suggest a particular kind of freedom that artists are accorded. Today an artist is often considered to be a breed of free spirit, a nonconformist unbound by social convention or pedestrian rules. At best, this freedom may indicate genius, even though the originality of genius is often misunderstood until the passage of time delivers a verdict. Thus this vision of artists often pictures them as romantically isolated and lonely figures. This chapter will question the origin and conceptual framework that supports this popular image of the artist in order to determine why there are so few women in the lists of recognized artistic geniuses. Indeed, especially at certain periods of history, it has been difficult even to conceive of women fitting into the image of a fully autonomous artist who creates for the sake of creation alone. Why is this, and what does it indicate about the role of gender distinctions in concepts of creativity?
Historians have produced considerable scholarship about the patterns of exclusion that, at significant periods of the past, have all but barred women from entering fields such as painting or sculpture or musical composition, and that have hampered their advancement and recognition in other fields such as literature.1 Our focus now, however, is not chiefly on the history of exclusionary education or social barriers; these are contingent practices that change with the passage of time and the exigencies of situation. Rather, we are interested in the nature of the very concepts that shape philosophy of art and aesthetic norms, the theoretical frameworks that influence social practice. Here we also find gender distinctions and tenacious concepts of “femininity” and “masculinity” in play.
This investigation of the way that gender operates in aesthetics requires a preface: a review of foundational assumptions about human nature and of what makes possible the achievements of culture and civilization. Art is a phenomenon comprising significant components of culture, and the best of it is taken to present reflection and insight into human life and its meaning. Those people who produce art of profundity and lasting value, whether satirical, taxing, tragic, comic, uplifting, or beautiful, are accorded special honor and considered to embody a lofty and difficult level of human achievement. The concept of the artist-creator is founded on beliefs about what qualities of human beings give them the capacities for the highest levels of cultural accomplishment; according to venerable tradition, rationality is the essential mental capability that grounds human achievement in general. Feminist perspectives on reason and rationality are directed at all areas of philosophy, though they are cited in aesthetics less often than they might be, probably because art and aesthetic values are frequently and facilely associated with “non-rational” areas of endeavor, with intuition and imagination and feeling. But at the same time the governance of these mental activities, which separates inspiration from nonsense and aesthetic insight from mere eccentricity, requires a disciplined and tough mentality that is traditionally considered to be rooted in rational capabilities.
The concept of an independent rational faculty that separates man from beast and thereby describes essential human nature dominates western theories of knowledge, of morals, of politics, of human nature, of culture; indeed, there is no area of philosophy not under its long influence. It is also one of the most complexly marked of theoretical concepts, operating in different forms in various contexts, modifying not only gender but also the position of subordinated social groups in general. Though often not explicit, rationality has significance for the idea of creativity and the ability to be trained in artistic skills, as well as for the autonomy of mind that is requisite for inventiveness and originality.
First, some general observations: reason is traditionally designated the faculty of the mind that distinguishes human from nonhuman activity. This is both a descriptive and a normative generalization, for it is believed to be a fact that only human beings exercise rationality. To some extent they thereby escape the laws of nature and are capable of building cultures and civilizations, exercising a degree of choice over how they live that is not possible for other animals. Therefore reason also has a value-laden meaning: it is not only an essential human trait that virtually defines what it means to be a human being, but it is also our best quality, the one that permits artistic achievement, moral choice, scientific knowledge. These general claims about rationality pertain to all human beings—male, female, past, present, familiar, foreign.
And yet: different degrees of reason are frequently invoked to account for social difference and for what, in certain periods of history, is considered to be a “natural” superiority of some people over others, a superiority of mind and temperament that validates hierarchies of power, education, and rank. It is by no means restricted to the superiority of male over female; one can find such reasoning at work in accounts that try to justify slavery, for example, or in speculations about the persistence of class and economic differences in societies. Such rationales are consistently and systematically invoked to describe gender difference in social roles and abilities; for in numerous theoretical contexts reason is considered the chief trait that elevates male over female within our species. That is to say, while females possess reason, they exercise it less adeptly than do males, thus making them, in the opinion of many influential philosophical and religious systems, less capable of self-governance and therefore the natural subordinates of men in all circumstances from domestic life to politics.2 The dual role of reason—not only to mark the difference between human and nonhuman but also to distinguish among members of the human species—has resulted in a tangled set of conceptual counterparts that connect reason with “masculine” activities and traits, and nonreason with “feminine” correlates. Insofar as women are human, they are rational. Insofar as they are feminine, they are drawn into a system of symbols that represent the nonrational regions of mind and uncontrolled and inchoate nature. Note that this division of abilities and traits does not really separate males from females. It is more apt to separate what are extolled as human/male traits from symbols and concepts that are contrastingly labeled “feminine.” Further complicating the situation, in some circumstances characteristics that fall on the “feminine” side are appropriated by male subjects; this happens with values associated with artistic creativity and discerning taste, as we shall soon discover. Because both the sense and the reference of gendered terms can be ambiguous, understanding their import always requires careful attention to historical and social context.
While our focus is on aesthetics, it is worth bearing in mind the widespread influence of these ideas in virtually all fields of philosophy, and relatedly in those areas of science, politics, psychology, and religion that historically justify their scope and methods by reference to philosophical foundations. All of these areas are tied together, so constraints in one field reverberate in others.3 In brief: in epistemology—the study of the nature of perception and the formation of knowledge—the paradigmatic knower is modeled on a concept of male nature which is capable of exercising reasoning abilities to their fullest extent, while to female nature is ascribed a contrasting emotional and intuitive temperament. Because emotions are standardly regarded as unreliable and idiosyncratic, this description has both theoretical and practical consequences not only for female educational and scientific achievement, but also for the idea of female moral reliability. In ethics and moral philosophy, the model of the person who exercises responsibility, possesses just principles, and executes free choice and clear decision-making is the male agent. By comparison, the image of femininity is merciful and kind but also vacillating, swayed by particular circumstances and practical exigencies, and apt therefore to be inconsistent and irresponsible. This female moral sensibility may be seen in wicked or good lights. Hamlet railed, “Frailty, thy name is woman!” when he worried that his mother had succumbed to sinful sexual desire; but the Victorian sentimental image of the “angel in the house” pictured the chaste mother of the home as imbued with natural kindness and goodness, the all-forgiving source of love. Neither the flattering nor the unflattering characterization, however, equips women to exercise public power. The public sphere of policy and law-giving is conceived as both masculine and the purview of males, for political life requires that one be capable of formulating dispassionate general laws to govern society with disinterested justice. The domestic sphere is conceived as a female domain, where matters of particular concern and quotidian remedies for the ups and downs of personal life are addressed.
Generally speaking, the world of male values is abstract and associated with the “mind,” that of the female, concrete and particular and associated with the “body.” It has seemed to follow in philosophies from Aristotle onward that cognitive abilities and natural proclivities have been unequally distributed in males and females.4 In what has become a rather infamous series of binary oppositions often analyzed from feminist perspectives, human traits and activities are paired in conceptual hierarchies that systematically place women and “feminine” traits and activities in subordinate positions. Reason and the mind, justice, activity, and public responsibility are all identified as masculine domains where males best function, while emotion and the body, whim, passivity, and domesticity are assigned to the feminine realm.5 In short, no matter what activity we examine, the conceptual framework that organizes ideas about who is best equipped to do what, tends to place the male function as the most important for all but domestic roles (and even here, it is the male head who is supposed to govern the household).
As we shall see, this hierarchy has deep implications for notions of creativity and the idea of the artist. Even though the image of the artist changes and develops in different historical contexts, one detects in both theoretical and practical dimensions assumptions about the differential capacities of male and female artists. Notably, this occurs in spite of the fact that when theorists investigate the creative power of the artist, reason often does not take center stage but gives way to imagination, inspiration, intuition, or emotion. If these are contrasted with the rational faculties, and if the rational faculties are gendered as masculine, then why do we not see female characteristics clustering around ideas of artistic creativity? This question will be addressed in more detail later, where we shall see how the split between femaleness and the exercise of the highest, most strenuous, and difficult human capabilities promotes an image of women as closer to nature and more distant from the construction of civilized achievement. Although metaphors of labor, midwifery, and birth are prevalent in discourse about artistic creativity, women are associated with procreativity—a natural function that ties them to their bodies and to “animal” reproduction; it is men who are assigned the role of artistic creativity free from biological destiny. All of this has a very long history, and a review of this history can help us see the depth and extent of the gendering of the concept of the artist.
This chapter will lead up to some modern concepts regarding the artist that are the immediate precursors to our own times. These include ideas about creativity, imagination, and skill that have gradually emerged since the Renaissance, attaining systematic theoretical justification in the eighteenth century. Not only is this period formative of the ideas about creative artists that, by and large, still hold sway today (despite the fact that they were shaped some time ago), but also the ideas developing in this era combine with reigning concepts of human nature and womanhood to imbue the idea of the artist with an especially virulent gender prejudice. But before tackling these more recent influences over our concept of the artist, it will be useful to consider the older historical backdrop against which modern concepts of the arts emerged.
When we discuss the classical Greek and Roman roots of concepts of art and art-making, we also have to be specific about which art forms are to be considered, reminding us once again that the notion of “artist” is inseparable from ideas about what counts as “art.” Today the general term “art” chiefly refers to the fine arts, such as painting or literature or music or theater. But this itself is a modern development, one that, as we shall see, had especially important consequences for the idea of the gender of the artist. However, no generic term that encompasses all of the genres of art was in use at the time that early philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle wrote about the subject we now designate “philosophy of art.” When ancient writers discuss artists, they distinguish among sculptors, painters, poets, musicians, orators, and so on. The Greek term that is often translated “art” in English is techne, which is better translated as “skill in making or doing” and can be applied to any kind of purposeful human activity. Although we now use the term “art” in contrast with non-artistic artifacts such as manufactured objects, older senses of this term employed it in general contrast with nature—i.e. to that which is not a product of human endeavor.6
While there is continuity between ancient theories of art and our own, the concepts employed have a history of development; we cannot simply match term for term and obtain an accurate picture. One important thing that the absence of a generic term “art” signals is that the distinction between fine and applied arts was not yet in use. So rather than singling out artists from (say) engineers or craftspeople, the term we translate “art” denoted particular activities of doing or making something which contributed to the welfare of society, including not only what we now call the arts but also what we would designate sciences and crafts.7 Because we often read the history of philosophy for clues about our own intellectual heritage, we tend to select comments about painting or sculpture or poetry or music, of which there are many in the ancient texts. In so doing we ignore oratory and recitation, not to mention metallurgy, shipbuilding, and other activities that the Greeks would have considered “arts” as well. Our modern distinction between fine art and craft or applied art is also culture-specific. It is not found in traditions such as those that arose in Japan, China, or India, for example, although those civilizations produced huge numbers of finely-wrought artifacts that now reside in art museums, as well as a large literature on art and standards for aesthetic evaluation.8 This is yet another indication that the products that count as art also have a history that shifts in tandem alongside the changing idea of the artist.
In the first century AD the Roman historian Pliny the Elder wrote his encyclopedic Natural History, which includes many chapters on artists of the ancient world. Pliny is our chief source of information about these ancient artists because he compiled his work by consulting the earlier literature that was still extant in his time but which has since been lost or destroyed; by his own reckoning he used over 2,000 sources.9 (He died at Pompeii during the most famous and destructive eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79.) Today we have editions of his work that select the portions on art and group them together, but Pliny’s own organization proceeds differently. He deals with bronze sculpture in the context of discussing metals, with painting as a subdivision of the manufacture of pigments, and with clay modeling and marble carving in the treatment of those natural elements and the way they are shaped and used. Not all of his approach is unfamiliar, however. Although he organizes his discussion of sculptors, painters, and architects by medium, at the same time it is clear that he also believes they represent shared concerns, such as rendering nature accurately, commemorating important personages, and making objects of skill and beauty. In other words, despite a method of grouping these arts that we would not replicate today, Pliny singles out the artists of his own past with familiar admiration as he notes the esteem in which they were held, the innovations they introduced, and sometimes quite precisely the monetary value their works were assigned. (In a criticism of what he considered the degenerate work of his own time, he extolls the artists of the past, “when the noblest of their nation thought art one of the paths to glory, and ascribed it even to the gods.”10)
Pliny makes several observations about women and the arts that prefigure patterns of thought that we shall see repeated in later times. First of all, because his goal is completeness, he notes the several women artists, particularly painters, for whom there is an ancient record. It doesn’t take very long: “Women too have been painters,” he notes, and goes on to name seven. He seems to consider it unusual but not outlandish that women should paint and engage in other mimetic arts; indeed, he records an ancient story according to which the first portrait modeler was a girl who drew the shadow of her lover’s profile on the wall:
The maiden invented the art of modelling figures in relief. She was in love with a youth, and while he lay asleep she sketched the outline of his shadow on the wall. Delighted with the perfection of the likeness, her father, who was a potter, cut out the shape and filled in the outline with clay; the figure is still preserved at Corinth.11
From such accounts alone one might conclude that women artists were simply in the minority in the ancient Mediterranean world. But other observations complicate the picture considerably. Pliny describes the erection of statues in cities, a practice that was chiefly for the purpose of commemorating and honoring the deed of some citizen. A few were erected to women, but the Roman senator Cato objected to the practice of setting up statues to honor Roman women. Apparently the presentation of female images in public, standing in for their real counterparts, represented something less than appropriate to conservative Romans.
This is the heyday of the mimetic or “imitation” theory of art, which regarded many types of “making,” including painting, sculpture, poetry, and music, as essentially representations or imitations of reality. What counts as an “imitation” is loosely construed and does not mean slavish copying. The mimetic relationship between art and reality varies with medium: painting and sculpture reproduce the look of persons and objects; music can represent not only sounds of nature and voices, but also moods and feelings; the plots of tragic poetry (as Aristotle maintains) imitate action and life. Imitation theory judges art not only for beauty and virtuosity, but also for insightful representation which enlightens audiences about complicated or painful themes. The Roman poet Horace (65–8 BC) summed up the combination of aesthetic and cognitive value credited to mimetic art when he asserted that the best poetry instructs while pleasing. The mimetic theory of art received its first theoretical examination several centuries before Pliny with Plato’s highly critical analysis in the Republic. Skillfully mimetic visual products such as sculptures and paintings are capable of such realistic renderings that they can actually fool the eye of the beholder. The artist who could make something visually indistinguishable from nature—or even superior to nature—was held in especially high esteem by most Greeks, though not by Plato, who mistrusted such tricks played on the senses and feared their effects on the intellect, for by deceiving vision they replace truth with illusion. In contrast, Aristotle considered poetic mimesis to be an important means by which one can come to understand difficult truths of living.12 Aristotle considered poetry to be more philosophical than history because its rendering of what could happen to a person has more universal resonance than a chronicle of particular facts that actually did happen.
Pliny himself praises artistic visual illusion and the skill of painters who could actually deceive viewers into believing that painted objects were real. The most well-known of his tales features a contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasios over who could paint most realistically. Zeuxis drew a picture of grapes so lifelike that the birds flew down to peck them. When Parrhasios presented his painting, Zeuxis reached to remove the cloth that covered it and discovered that his fingers touched only the painted surface. He conceded that Parrhasios had won the contest, for while Zeuxis had fooled birds, Parrhasios had deceived another man. More intriguing illusions for considering gender are recounted in the several tales of artists and patrons becoming enamored of the images of women they created. When paintings depicted human beings, one of the pitfalls of wonderful mimesis was that the image was so lovely and lifelike that it actually inspired desire—a longing to possess the painted image that was as strong as if the subject were alive. The story of Pygmalion is the most famous of these: the sculptor Pygmalion carved a statue of a woman so beautiful that he fell hopelessly in love; in pity, the gods granted her life. In the absence of divine intervention, artists have to settle for the original model, but even in these cases the role of woman is regarded as both object of desire and work of art. Here is an anecdote from Pliny about the painter Apelles, so praised for his skill that Alexander the Great permitted no one else to render his likeness in paint.
Alexander gave him a signal mark of his regard: he commissioned Apelles to paint a nude figure of his favourite mistress Pankaspe, so much did he admire her wondrous form, but perceiving that Apelles had fallen in love with her, with great magnanimity and still greater self-control he gave her to him as a present, winning by the action as great a glory as by any of his victories. He conquered himself and sacrificed to the artist not only his mistress but his love, and was not even restrained by consideration for the woman he loved, who, once a king’s mistress, was now a painter’s.13
The conflation between the painted image of Pankaspe and the actual woman (or at least the body of the actual woman, for Pankaspe’s own point of view is quite absent in this story) is profound—not to mention the fact that she was treated as chattel, however dear chattel, and given away in the manner in which her painting might be passed from hand to hand. In one form or another this switch between being an active subject and being a painted and admired image reappears throughout the history of representational art, well into our own times. It is a role that especially afflicts women, more particularly, women of a certain type—young, beautiful, possessible, sometimes exotic. Look for it in future stories.
It is in the theories of antiquity that we discover the germs of ideas about genius and artistic inspiration that have had profoundly different import for male and female creators. For it is also an ancient idea that the creative power of poets and musicians comes from a divine source, the poet himself being a conduit between external inspiration and artistic product. In myth the sources of inspiration are personified in the figures of the Muses. The number of Muses and the arts with which they were associated vary with time and place and were not fixed until relatively late antiquity, though today we picture them as nine female figures who embody the spirit of some art form and figuratively inspire a (male) human creator. Considering the Muses shifts focus away from graphic and sculptural arts, for they are the founts of poetry and music. The Greek cultures that engendered the myth of the Muse held poetry in all its forms in especially high esteem and considered this form of artistic creativity the one most likely to be divinely inspired.
Calliope, often considered the chief among the Muses, presided over epic poetry and eloquence. Erato’s domain was love poetry, Euterpe’s was music, Melpomene’s, tragedy; Thalia: comedy; Polyhymnia: sacred and heroic songs; Terpsichore: dance and lyric poetry. Two of the Muses oversaw areas we would not classify today as arts: Clio was the Muse of history, Urania of astronomy. (This is a reminder that poetry was long considered a source of historical record, and that astronomy—and mathematics—were and still are associated with music.) The Muses are represented as young, lovely women, associated with the musician god Apollo. They initiate what becomes a long tradition of attributing to some feminine force the inspiration a man needs to create. Their original role as figures for music and poetry suggests that they take the form of voices whispering in the ear, perhaps even maddening the poet into flights of creativity that ordinary mental capacities such as reason cannot accomplish. Indeed, this picture of the inspired creator led Plato in the Ion to discount poets as sources of wisdom, for they create when out of their heads rather than with the guidance of the intellect. While most of the recorded poets of ancient times are men, Sappho of Lesbos (c. 620– c. 565 BC) was extolled in her own time and for centuries to come as the most brilliant of lyric poets. For the most part, however, the personification of creative impulses in a feminine form does not record or honor actual female creativity. Quite the contrary, mythologizing feminine creativity by ascribing it to nonhuman beings pushes actual women to the margins of artistic activity—in deceptively complimentary terms—and assigns to men the social role of actually creating art.14 Because of the long influence of classical and classicist ideals over European traditions, such images have persisted well into modern times. For example, Auguste Rodin suggests the auxiliary role of women to male artists in his eroticized portrayal of The Poet and the Muse (c. 1905), a composition repeated in The Eternal Idol.
We can find an extremely subtle and complicated gendering of a theory of creativity in Plato’s Symposium, which is a dialogue dedicated to speeches about love that is set during a drinking party celebrating the winner of Athens’ annual prize for tragic poetry. It features Diotima, the one and only female speaker in all of Plato’s work, though she “speaks” by means of an account related by Socrates, and she is not literally present since he is telling a story of her tutelage when he was a young man. Socrates relates how this wise priestess demonstrated to him the true nature of love and the objects of love. All of us seek immortality, argues Diotima, both the prolongation of ourselves that children represent, and the more abstract, lasting creations of our minds that artistic or intellectual work produces. The true lover pursues
Figure 1 Auguste Rodin, The Eternal Idol, c. 1905. Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resources, New York.
“giving birth in beauty,” an enigmatic (and much debated) phrase that links both actual procreation and cultural production, whether in the form of art, poetry, law, learning, or philosophy.15 This speech is directed to the male guests at the banquet, and there is little reason to think that Socrates has female creators in mind when he relates the story. Nonetheless, the language of this part of the dialogue relies heavily on the imagery of pregnancy and birth to analyze artistic creativity. This is an example of the detachment of feminine concepts from real women and their appropriation by men to describe the creative process, an instance of the complexity of gendered meanings and their mixed and complex correlation with the gender of persons and social roles. We shall see more examples of this phenomenon below when we consider the extended history of artistic genius.
Though the significance of the birth-metaphors in the Symposium is debated by scholars, it is clear that Plato does not place procreation and reproduction of the species on a par with artistic or intellectual creativity. His most extended discussion of art occurs in the Republic, where he acknowledges the tremendous power of the arts over the soul and the polis, concluding that the just state ought to control or outright ban the most beautiful poetry and music because of the dangers they pose to society. The mimesis of art—the fact that it merely imitates things and events—is a barrier to understanding what is true about reality. Moreover, it gives us many pleasures, including pleasures of the senses, and such pleasures are apt to numb the critical faculties. Mimesis substitutes illusion for truth, and it arouses emotions that war with the intellect and further hinder the philosophic quest for truth.16 The importance of Plato’s philosophy for gendered ideas about art is indirect, for he mistrusts mimesis generally, no matter who its maker. But his influential metaphysical distinction between the eternal, abstract, intellectual world of ideal Forms—the truly real world—and the transient, particular, sensuous world of physical objects feeds the dualism between mind and body that has such disparate significance for both male and female and for masculine and feminine concepts. In the course of this study we shall see how the deep gender of mind–body dualism plays out in aesthetic concepts, including the distinction between beauty and sublimity, the disparity of evaluation of women’s and men’s products, and even the exclusion of foods from among objects counted as art.
In this sampling of comments from ancient sources I have selected those that describe the individual maker of art, for example the single poet infused with inspiration from the presiding Muse. However, this model is not appropriate for all art forms. Many of the artifacts that we value for their aesthetic quality and their artistry are not the products of a single artist to whom any special creative vision could be ascribed. For much of recorded history, objects for various purposes were produced in workshops where numerous skilled artisans were trained to execute commissions for the noble and the wealthy, and for secular, religious, or private ends, and there are numerous examples of arts where teams of people contribute to producing either an extensive body of work or works of particular size or complexity. This is true of some art forms at any period of history, such as architecture and theater production; and it was notably the case with the arts with which medieval Europe is most associated, such as the giant gothic cathedrals whose construction spanned many years and required the talents and efforts of several generations, or the illuminated manuscripts and tapestries which were produced in monasteries. Some of the latter were enormous (the Bayeux Tapestry, which is actually an immense embroidery, is over 200 feet long) and were not the projects of one individual. It was the job of monasteries, the repositories of scholarship, to preserve learning by copying important texts both scriptural and philosophical, many of which were beautified with margin drawings and elaborate lettering. This shared creative work was conceived as a service to God. This kind of artistic production, no matter how wonderful the product, simply does not lend itself to inspired diversion or expressions of individual imagination. Teams of women and men together may have produced some of these works, and we have only a few records of their identities. They were not always anonymous, however; indeed one Claricia included not only her signature but her self-portrait in the tail of a “Q” in a twelfth-century psalter. It would be unfounded, however, to conclude that some universal drive for individual artistic self-expression burst forth in this letter, as enthusiasts of the expression theory of art might venture to claim. In fact, Claricia may have just been a bit bored at the time, indulging in a piece of doodling that turned out well. While we do have some records of those who worked on them, manuscript illuminations by and large are not the kind of works that invite individual signature. They are produced in a context that does not single out the artist for particular honor,
Figure 2 Illuminated letter Q, signed Claricia. German psalter from Augsberg, late twelfth century. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
even though the great illuminations manifest obvious skill, care, and inventiveness. But the point is that the concept of the artist as a lone individual genius expressing his ideas in the free exercise of imagination is appropriate for only a limited sort of art-making. If we restrict our concept of the artist to this figure alone, then not only will we overlook a good deal of work by women but the efforts of lots of men as well. And although it is getting ahead of the game to mention film in this historical review, the problem of fitting “teamwork” creativity into the concept of “the” artist continues with many arts today, including the complex endeavors of film-making and television production.
There are also entire bodies of cultural products that are made within societies where this concept of the artist does not obtain, including the arts of many tribal and traditional cultures, the products of which are variously classified “art” or “craft,” and the makers of which can rarely be identified as specific individuals.17 Both philosophers of art and museum curators confront similar difficulties in deciding how to present objects of different cultures in the frameworks of our contemporary art theories and institutions. The distinction drawn between art and craft leads us to the modern idea of the artist, which focuses almost exclusively on the maker of what we now call “fine art,” a concept to which we now turn.
As we can already see with this brief review of ideas concerning the arts in earlier times, up until recently there was no commonly utilized category that unified all of the different genres of art. Artifacts were more often classified according to their media or even their functions, though the media themselves were sometimes hierarchically ranked. The material manipulations of sculpture and painting placed these arts in a lower, more physically-bound category than the inspired works of the poets, for example. Works in all media were admired if they performed their assigned functions with grace and elegance, and those who made them were praised for their skill and artistry. The categories of art have always been, and no doubt always will be, somewhat fluid.
However, in the early modern period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there arose a conceptual and practical division that exerted particular power over the idea of the artist and brought into sharp relief presumptions about his gender: the concept of fine art. Fine art is contrasted with practical or applied arts, crafts, and popular entertainment. It singles out works that are produced for their aesthetic value alone, in contrast to works that are made also for some practical function (such as eating utensils, clothing, and cushions). With this distinction, the term “artist” came properly to apply to the creator of one of the fine arts, whereas “craftsman”or “artisan” designated the maker of a functional object designed not only for beauty but for use.
The emergence of a fine-art tradition has a long, complex, and somewhat debatable history. Some theorists place the development of a “modern system of the arts” as late as the eighteenth century.18 Others consider it more or less in place by the end of the Renaissance. While perhaps it was not until the modern period that the idea of fine art was fully framed, certainly during the Renaissance, especially in Italy, there was a self-conscious and concerted effort on the part of workers in certain media to raise the status of their efforts by means of reconceptualizing their products. Those who worked with materials that demand a degree of manual labor—painters and sculptors and architects—desired to raise their social station, and this required a revision of the category designating their specialized art forms. They sought to be recognized as contributors to the liberal rather than to the mechanical arts, that is, to the arts that further human understanding. The early Renaissance followed a late classical categorization of “liberal” arts (including rhetoric, poetry, mathematics, among other disciplines) and the “servile” or “vulgar” arts that involve physical labor or entertainment and are produced for some utilitarian end.19 Painting, carving, casting, and hewing involve physical effort and a degree of dirt and messiness, and for some time the physicality of these activities was considered a barrier to classifying them as liberal, free, “intellectual” endeavors serving the higher calling of the mind. Artists in these media strove to be considered creators along the lines of the cleaner disciplines of music and poetry, where little physical effort is required. Advocates on behalf of architecture separated the intellectual demands of the engineering and design of complex structures from their actual physical building, which involves the undeniably physical labor of carpentry, masonry, and so on. The talent and skill required of the designer, it was argued, elevates this utilitarian art form above mere physical labor. Relatedly, the art of painting was linked by figures such as Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci with the kind of learning obtained through the sense of vision and with the science of optics, especially as techniques of rendering space by means of linear perspective developed.20 Thus one element in separating what would eventually become known as beaux arts or fine arts from labor and craft involved a deliberate reconceptualization of the efforts of painters, sculptors, and architects. This they accomplished not only by the magnificence of their products during this impressively productive period of art history, but also by arguing on behalf of the cognitive, scientific achievement represented by such accomplishments. The more an art form requires the intellectual arts of mathematics and science, they maintained, the greater its claim to be a liberal—a “free”– endeavor.
The changes to the concept of art and of the artist that went into the separation of decorative craft or utilitarian artisanship from fine art were gradual and uneven, and they took several centuries to accomplish. By the eighteenth century, it was generally agreed that there are five major fine arts: music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture. This period saw a burgeoning critical literature on the nature of the arts, comparing them to one another according to common principles. Other arts such as gardening, prose literature, dance, or theater were sometimes added to the list, but these five make up an established core. The identification of specific forms of creativity as fine arts is one prominent example of how theory and practice go hand in hand, in this case arguably with practice actually trailing theory.
One of the most important factors that eventually sealed the separation of fine art, or art proper, from other kinds of making, concerns the kind of value assigned to works of art, for to fine art came to be ascribed values that are chiefly aesthetic rather than functional or utilitarian. Since many of the arts that women typically produced include artifacts such as needlework made for decoration and domestic uses, the division between art and craft had the effect of eliminating from the concept of art proper a number of genres where women had a prominent presence.21 As the idea of fine art gradually developed in the modern period, the arts came to be considered products produced chiefly for their beauty or sublimity or other aesthetic virtue; and relatedly, the role of the true artist was seen as producing works for aesthetic appreciation independent of any particular practical function. This is what chiefly distinguishes the work of fine art from craft. A craft object, which may be finely made and beautiful, is not a proper artwork because it is made to serve some function, a function which limits the free creativity of the artist-maker. As Victor Cousin asserted in his 1818 lectures at the Sorbonne, “utility has nothing to do with beauty.”22 The end of art is beauty, though in Cousin’s formulation this aesthetic value still connotes the indirect presence of moral and spiritual value in art as well.
The artist is before all things an artist; what animates him is the sentiment of the beautiful; what he wishes to make pass into the soul of the spectator is the same sentiment that fills his own … This pure and disinterested sentiment is a noble ally of the moral and religious sentiments; it awakens, preserves, and develops them, but it is a distinct and special sentiment. So art, which is founded on this sentiment, which is inspired by it, which expands it, is in its turn an independent power. It is naturally associated with all that ennobles the soul, with morals and religion; but it springs only from itself.23
By these standards, crafts would be doubly disqualified from these aesthetic concepts, both because of their utility and because they lack the spiritual and moral dimension that true beauty possesses.
The concept of the aesthetic will be treated at greater length in the next chapter, but it is important to note at this point how the idea of the aesthetic entered into the shaping of a tradition of fine art. The notion of aesthetic value emerged from new approaches to pleasure and to the receptivity and appreciation that were summed up in the idea of “taste.” Purely aesthetic pleasure was singled out for its contrast with other sources of pleasure, such as practical use, economic value, social meaning, or the satisfaction of sexual desire (though this latter separation is especially complex and arguably compromised when one considers the gendered meaning of aesthetic pleasure. This will be discussed at a later point.) As the notion of fine art, in contrast with utilitarian arts, began to develop, more and more theorists maintained that the true value of art is purely aesthetic, that art is for beauty and for the aesthetic pleasure it furnishes. Reinforcing these values, certain artistic institutions arose in the modern period that provided venues for pure aesthetic enjoyment, most particularly concert halls for listening to music and art museums where paintings were made available to the public to appreciate the efforts of artists past and present, who were now conceived to be persons who create for beauty and aesthetic insight. In the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, beauty and moral value were still closely linked, a connection evident in Cousin’s statement above. As more and more attention was directed to articulating what is distinctive about beauty and other aesthetic qualities, moral philosophy and aesthetics parted company. In its most extreme form this separation engendered an “art for art’s sake” mentality popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that justified artistic expression purely on aesthetic grounds, sometimes even flouting moral standards. (The separation of beauty and moral goodness is a theme of some of the works of the poet Charles Baudelaire and the novelist and playwright Oscar Wilde, for example.) But even in less pure versions the idea of art created just for the consideration and enjoyment of its aesthetic value widened the gulf between fine art and those artifacts made for use, no matter now elegant or beautiful they might be. This gulf is also evident in theories about the artist, especially the idea that the best creator is an artistic genius.
While the concept of genius has classical origins, it has undergone many twists and turns in the history of art and philosophy. The eighteenth century and the Romantic movement promoted a particularly powerful role for genius and fostered the cult of the individual man of exceptional capacities who gives less gifted artists the tools to create. In Kant’s famous words: “Genius is the talent that gives the rule to art.”24 During this period, moreover, genius was ferociously guarded as a male preserve.25
Genius does not describe males in general contrast to females, because the world produces few geniuses at all. This term is reserved for the select number of creators who have not only produced superior artworks, but whose vision has altered the direction of the field altogether. As Kant put it, the genius opens paths for artists of lesser accomplishment to follow, whether they be male or female. The gender of genius is founded on special capacities of these few extraordinary persons, capacities that are grounded in overall differences in the abilities of men and women. While artistic creativity is not merely a function of superior reason, it is a feature of a superior mind; and the model superior mind is a male mind: one that is strong and capable of independence from tradition and social norms, and that rises above the quotidian concerns that shape ordinary activities. In the latter feature alone, we can see that any person who is largely defined by domestic roles will be precluded from the concept of a genius.
Social role is but one impediment to female genius; anatomy can be another, especially in the earlier versions of the theory. Renaissance notions of genius pictured a great artist as one who can create by a controlled kind of madness (the madness of the Muse, for example, harkening back to the classical image of inspiration). Such flights of creativity break away temporarily from ordinary human limitations, transcending even reason. According to prevalent conceptions of the human constitution, females could not participate in this rare event. The theory of humors that governed understanding of character for centuries characterized males as “hot and dry” but females as “cold and moist,” and the vapors that arise from the uterus, it was held, cloud the mind and dim the ability to apprehend Truth, thus restraining the female artist from ascending to the insight of genius.26
By the time that Kant wrote about genius in the powerfully influential Critique of Judgment (1790), the semi-divine connotations associated with genius, signaled for example in the ancient idea that the poet is a conduit for divinely inspired lyric, had receded. In their place was the artist himself: the genius who creates from the reserves of his own imagination. Genius signals a powerfully original mind that vaults over tradition and rules of art to discover entirely new ways of conceiving and enacting creativity. Kant himself carefully restricted the innovations of art to safeguard the work of genius from the perhaps equally unprecedented work of the lunatic: even nonsense may be original, he noted; the genius who masters an art form must be thoroughly schooled in that form in order to shape his inspirations.
Speculations about artistic imagination that flourished in nineteenth-century Europe could reach some extremes, sometimes extolling the inspirational value of anti-social and amoral behavior, and even insanity—all rumored to cling to such darkly glamorous figures as the popular English poet Lord Byron. This approach to genius bordered on a (highly romantic) view of madness that dovetails with ideas about inspiration and persists well into our own times.27 The value placed on dangerously fanciful imaginative activity pushed ideas about creative methods to a limit, as many contended that true artistic imagination stems from an inborn spark that is antithetical to the plodding rules of reason, a position that represents a brand of resistance to the dominion of rationality so prevalent in philosophy. However, none of this was especially welcoming to female creativity, and not because women were always considered sane. But the version of madness that was most ascribed to women was the type named “hysteria,” a label that derives from the Greek word for “uterus.” Hysterics represent a kind of biological disturbance rendered in psychological form, not the profound depth of spirit that artistic madness supposedly taps in the course of artistic creation. Although this version of the imaginative genius is founded on an understanding of creativity that is anti-rationalist, it still describes a male domain.
As Christine Battersby has argued, we can see in the Romantic idea of genius a dramatic instance of how traditionally “feminine” traits involving emotion and other “nonrational” mental characteristics are appropriated for male creators and actually removed from females. Metaphors of labor and birth popularly describe artistic inspiration and creation, for example. Both masculine traits (toughness, courage) and feminine ones (emotional sensitivity) are interpreted as having special creative powers and are assigned to the best minds of an age, minds with virtually exclusively male exemplars. Kant grumped that a woman who even attempts profound learning or creativity might as well wear a beard, and when Balzac praised the novelist George Sand (the pen name of the prolific writer Aurore Dupin [1804–76]), he credited her with the character of a man.28 Gender presumptions are less explicit in Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1793). Schiller advocates the cultivation of sensibility and feeling, which he argues are necessary to complete the rational individual. The balance Schiller champions seems at first to invite a unity of “feminine” and “masculine” traits in the notion of the aesthetic. However, the point of view throughout his work is uniformly male, an impression made explicit when he refers to “woman” as an object of beauty, whether real or painted, and when he discusses family life.29 This influential writer, who sincerely endorsed aspects of mind that are sometimes taken to be “subjective” and “feminine,” is not thereby acknowledging the sensibilities of actual women. He is rather recommending an amplified description of a complete man.
The eighteenth century saw so much writing on the subject of art and beauty that in retrospect contemporary scholars tend to date the beginning of the separate discipline of aesthetics at this time. Among the many ideas about art and creativity that emerged from these debates was a particularly enduring one that extolled the role of the artist for creating from his unique imagination through an act of “expression.” The distinction between fine art and other kinds of making achieves particular theoretical rigor in expression theory, one of the most influential and popular movements in the history of aesthetics. Indeed, the idea that the purpose of art is expression is still widely taken for granted.
“Expression theory” does not denote one particular view of art but a robust and varied approach to the nature of art, of creativity, and of artists; it has enjoyed advocates for more than two centuries.30 Concepts of expression are quite various, and many proponents of this notion do not even share basic definitions of what it means to express. Some theorists focus on the controlled display of individual thoughts and feelings that the disciplined imagination is able to externalize in a work of art, such that others gain an understanding of the artist’s unique insights. Other versions of the theory permit “expression” to refer broadly to the manifestation of style and values of a historical period—a fallback position that is more elastic than the former, since one often does not know the identity of an artist to whom thoughts and intentions can be ascribed.
Nothing explicitly precludes women artists from inclusion in concepts of artistic expression. With this set of theories, it is the range that expression is apt to exhibit that betrays a gender skew. In order to plumb their creative imaginations, artists require considerable freedom—freedom from tradition, from the fetters of social expectation and constraint, perhaps even from family and other responsibilities. Quite apart from the fact that in many social regions women are accorded less freedom than are men, especially if that freedom includes unfettered movement in public places, this requirement deepens the divide between fine art and crafts. If fine art is regarded as an intrinsically valuable product that expresses an artistic vision, then arts that have an inescapable practical dimension are poorly accommodated. Craft, for example, whether it be needlework, carpentry, potting, sewing, or whatever, is always subject to the requirements of what is being made. A blanket is no good unless it is warm and large enough for a bed; a cup is useless if it doesn’t hold liquid. These are not merely incidental necessities; according to some dedicated expression theorists, they are impediments that prevent such products from ever achieving the status of art.
This is especially clear in the work of an influential twentieth-century expression theorist, R. G. Collingwood. Considering art of modern times in particular, Collingwood distinguishes several types of products that he believes are often confused with art proper, including entertainment and craft.31 Craft is not the product of expression, he argues, because its ends are known before the maker begins. That is to say, if one sets out to make a basket, one knows in advance what the basket should do and how its design can satisfy its purpose. The design is in service to that practical end. By comparison, true artistic expression is the very act of becoming clear about some idea that begins as an inchoate restlessness in the mind of the artist. With art proper, no foreordained purpose—whether utilitarian, religious, or civic— interferes with free, creative expression. This stipulation is not intended to discriminate by type of artifact, for Collingwood recognizes art by the mental activity of the artist rather than by the medium he or she employs. Nonetheless, his focus on a special act of expression precludes from the concept of the true artist anyone whose primary ends, by necessity or interest, are practical. Real artistic creativity simply cannot be conducted in the process of working with objects or activities that are chiefly made to serve another goal. Another class of products he distinguishes from art proper includes events or artifacts that are produced for amusement, for their goal is the arousal of enjoyment or emotive states in the audience rather than the expression of an idea.
These restrictions also eliminate from the concept of art proper traditional community arts, such as stories and songs, and the entertainment that affords diversion from the rigors of labor or servitude. They probably rule out the products of many traditional non-European cultures, collections of which move unstably between art museums and museums of natural history. In other words, the distinction that separates fine art from craft or entertainment has as many implications for the class, social position, or even nationality of the maker as it does for his or her gender.32 What is noteworthy about the implications for the presumed gender of the artist, is that everything that is included in the elevated category of fine art has a typical maker who is masculine, to the point that for some art forms women were actually considered unfit to participate fully, and were diverted to lesser, adjunct roles. (Some examples of this will be discussed in Chapter 3.) And the things that have come to be designated “women’s work,” such as domestic decorations and needlework, are all included under the craft label.
To be sure, there were a number of influential writers who resisted the distinction between fine art and craft or applied art, both in theory and in practice. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on both sides of the Atlantic there were vigorous arts and crafts movements that produced carefully wrought, hand-made objects both for use and for aesthetic delight. (The most famous of these was led by the English artist and theorist William Morris.) Both the objects produced and the writings that articulated the philosophy behind this movement sought to close the divide between art and craft, as well as to combat the disappearance of hand-made artifacts, which were being replaced by products of factory manufacture. An even more extreme critique from the point of view of an expression theorist was articulated by Leo Tolstoy, who became disgusted with the nineteenth-century European cult of beauty and fine art and promoted the arts of Russian peasant culture, which he considered the purest, least corrupted form of artistic communication.33 This sort of opposition notwithstanding, the divide between fine art and craft and between true artists and artisans by and large became firmly fixed in modern aesthetics and philosophy of art.
In sum, the concept of the artist is a combination of theoretical movements and historical practice, both partly a consequence of the way that artists are conceptualized in the discourse of western culture. In this context the term “discourse” sums up the complex and deep system of thought that surrounds paradigms of artists and their endeavors. These elements are evident in philosophical disquisitions, critical commentary, and historical writings, all of which both inform our understanding of the past and are adopted in current conceptual maps. Although there are women artists in the historical record, not only are they a small minority but, more importantly, their presence has little effect on discourse about the artist. As one commentator puts it, “the artist is always gendered male unless called ‘the woman artist’.”34 The traditional roles of women, who are more confined by social restrictions than are men in all social classes, do not suit the image of the artist as a free and independent creative spirit—neither conceptually nor, for most of history, empirically.
A survey of historical attitudes may seem simply a collection of empirical facts about times gone by that were brought about by social conditions that have since changed so radically that the past tells us little about the present state of culture. I have been arguing for a deeper cause and a more extensive set of consequences for gendered meanings within which ideas about art and aesthetics are framed: for the hypothesis that gender is a systematic and occasionally insidious phenomenon that can impart to concepts considerable power to shape the ways we think and see the world. Subsequent chapters will bring the ideas surrounding art and artists into our own times; I shall argue that despite radical changes both in the worlds of art and in the status of women in society in general, the conceptual foundations framed in centuries past possess vigorous tenacity. It is true that ideas about men and women and the organization of social relations have changed dramatically, and we should not exaggerate the power of older ideas. At the same time, gendered expectations about what qualifies as art and who qualifies as an artist often persist well beyond our self-conscious reflection and expectations, and this can mean that the weight even of remote historical periods may be heavier than we anticipate.
Perhaps I can illustrate what I mean with an anecdote: when I was a college student, more or less oblivious to feminist matters, I took my first trip to Europe. In Amsterdam, at the Rijksmuseum, I admired the paintings from the period of Dutch baroque art, lingering especially over a small picture of a lute player. The lighting was warm and intense, the face of the musician wore a provocative smile, his hands were finely drawn … I peered more closely at the caption to find out who painted the canvas: it said Judith Leyster: 1609–1660. “Oh that’s interesting,” I thought. “In Dutch ‘Judith’ must be a man’s name.”
