Through her narrative form and focus on representation, Hessel’s lineage of milestones obscures both the political history behind women’s exclusion from the canon and the possibility of struggle against it.
The result is an engaging but necessarily clipped perspective. The book’s chronological and compendium-like structure allows for an abundance of “firsts”: Lavinia Fontana is “thought to be one of the first women in Western art to paint female nudes,” in 1595 Alma Thomas is “the first African American woman to achieve a solo exhibition at the Whitney,” in 1972 “A Lesbian Show” was “the first all-lesbian art show in the U.S.,” in New York City in 1978 the 20th-century Mexican artist Aurora Reyes Flores is considered “the first female Muralist” and so on.
In this 500-page tome, Hessel, who cites her Instagram account as part of the book’s origin, efficiently introduces us to a mosaic of artists, from the well-known Artemisia Gentileschi, Frida Kahlo, Hilma af Klint, Tracey Emin and Kara Walker to the lesser-known Elisabetta Sirani, Marie Denise Villers and Lady Butler, and even gestures toward the multitude of names that we might never know. But despite her best efforts, men can’t help appearing throughout, as rich husbands, abusive boyfriends, artist fathers, needy sons, muse-hungry painters, institutions and even that supreme male gaze, God’s. Part revisionist history, part coffee-table book, part collective portrait, part archival treasure hunt, Hessel’s treatise covers the 1500s to the present in an attempt to make good on its title. “I think I’m one of the best painters.” That famous quote by the American modernist serves as an epigraph in Part 2 of the Guardian columnist Katy Hessel’s sweeping first book, “The Story of Art Without Men.” “Women artists are not a trend,” Hessel maintains and yet the contested category persists, not as a meaningful distinction but rather as a repercussion of patriarchy, a category that the male-dominated art world consistently, in O’Keeffe’s terms, diminishes. “Men put me down as the best woman painter,” Georgia O’Keeffe once said.
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