More on Artemisia
The history of art is full of female masters. It's time they were taken seriously. A large part of why Gentileschi captivates is because she triumphed against patriarchy. Despite the many barriers that existed for women artists in her time - the 17th century - she was hugely famous. There is also her reclamation by feminist art historians after years of dismissal by the male art establishment (she can only be called an undiscovered genius if you are deliberately ignoring many decades of feminist writing and scholarship).
(Ooooh, BURN a certain critic of the male persuasion...)
Would also remark that she is not alone in being woman [artist/composer/poet] HUGELY famous in her day, as noted re Louise Farrenc, Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatoire, and acclaimed composer, and then dropped from sight...
(Russ category: There was only one of her and she was so unique and weird, essentially an outlier who didn't fit into our narrative, that we decided we'd better forget about her altogether?) (Except that usually it turns out that even when women did have the particular remarkable successes they were seldom the absolutely one and only doing whatever the thing was, they had the supportive father/husband/brother or whatever.)
Double standards in criticism: Artemisia’s features, in the guise of myriad saints and figures from myth and religion, are everywhere. As Laura Cumming wrote, she “seems to live inside every role she depicts”. I delighted in this, but other visitors did not. “Self-obsessed”, said one older man, and I laughed to myself because, really, his remark was just too perfect, too predictable, too tediously sexist for words.
Quite. Does anyone go round a Rembrandt exhibition muttering 'Not another bloody selfie? was he up himself or what?'
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