Women's art
John McEwen
The Obstacle Race Germaine Greer (Seeker £9.95) What to do for an encore, that is the great problem for writers with a bestseller to their credit. There are two alternatives. Try to write another or very obviously do not. Germaine Greer has plumped for the second of these options. She has decided ,to write a dull book and succeeded while, as she gaily concludes her notice of acknowledgments, having the time of her life in the process. As solutions go it could hardly he bettered.
The subject to which she has devoted the last eight years and on which she has amassed no less than 758 footnotes is a bit of a footnote itself: 'The fortunes of [past] women painters and their work'. Confined to Western painting as here (u ii apologetically and doubtless correctly) the smallness of the female contribution has long been a source of male pride and condescension. There are no women painters, at least none that has really mattered, and that is that. The complacency of this kind of assessment is what the book seeks to disturb. Unwisely, as it turns out, the author makes her intentions clear at the start. It is not for her a question of 'Why were there no great female painters?' but 'What is the contribution of women to the visual arts?', 'If we can find one good painting by a woman, where is the rest of her work?', 'How good were the women who earned a living by painting?'
The most blatant weakness of her subsequent investigation is that the first and last of these questions are never adequately answered. In the first instance it would be pedantic to pursue the ramifications of what does or does not constitute a 'female contribution' (the impressionists, for example, owed their glorification as much to Mary Cassatt's business sense as their talent), but, in such a specialist context, 'visual arts' can never be allowed as a synonym for 'painting'; especially as Germaine Greer makes much play throughout the book of the prejudice and philistinism of those 'notions of great art entertained by the "layman".' In confin ing herself to the subject of painting she no less disdainfully, in a visual arts sense, neglects the whole female-dominated history of needlework and embroidery at a stroke. Presumably she considers them 'minor arts' (another phrase of hers), though just where she draws this prejudicial boundary is confused by chapters on manuscript-illumination and, discordantly placed in the text, primitivism. Continually, in fact, her sweeping assessments and intemperate language condemn her as exactly the sort of 'layman' — and 'man' is apposite — she most deplores. Her frequent invocation of 'great' and 'genius' (those resounding pompiers Rosa Bonheur and Lady Butler both qualify) may be a sign of understandable anxiety — if there were no distinguishable women painters there would after all be no cause for a book — but the gaff is really blown by her analyses of pictures in the particular. It is difficult to imagine anyone confusing the 18th-century work of Madame Vigee-Lebrun with that of Raphael, even when the picture in question does depict the sitter in renaissance dress, but harder still to imagine such a phenomenon being enlightened by the following: 'The picture is unmistakably not Raphael, for all its effects are self-conscious and distanced by the careful intervention of depth and negative space within the picture frame, the rhythmic composition throbs with a life of its own'. Regrettably, but very understandably in view of the above, she funks discussion of contemporary art, the most interesting period of her subject, altogether.
In short Germaine Greer is not qualified to make a case for a history of women's painting, whether there is one or not, and accordingly the sociological questions which really interest her — the obstacles — tend to be posed and answered in a void.
Though her own position with regard to women as painters remains unclear, her evidence supporting the restrictive prac tices of male painters seems irrefutable. Women painters have had their moments of freedom and encouragement — in Bologna in the 17th century, in Weimar under Goethe, in the academies, particularly of the 18th and 19th centuriesIfor the aristocracy all the time — but what sticks in the memory is the way Reynolds brutally discouraged his talented sister, the vicious gossip that dogged the successes of Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffman and Elizabeth Vig6e-Lebrun. In the end, however, it is not so much the limited interest of the subject which makes this book a weary read but the dismal quality of its prose. 'Husband and wife teams' come and go, unless 'wiped out' by plagues. Intellectuals are 'battered by the sex-in-the-head of the Bloomsbury Group'. People have 'life-styles' and enjoy 'wedded bliss'. ArlY one of the 360 pages will offer much more of the same. As for the following sentence (p 78), an extreme example but symptomatic nonetheless of the pervading sloppiness, the most charitable interpretation is to conclude that the author neither wrote nor read it: The royal patroness par excellence was probably Queen Victoria, who gave dozens of commissions to women, most of them insignificant, being to copy her Winterhalters and chores of that kind meant to encourage young women, but many of them lucrative.' The book must make Germaine Greer favourite for the scrambled egg-head of the year award.
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