Dorothy Richardson on Women in the Arts

 

As Miriam Henderson begins her work as a writer in the later volumes of Pilgrimage, she often considers how to deal with the demands that draw her time and energy away from writing. In the following article, which appeared in the American magazine Vanity Fair in May 1925, she argues that the scales are tipped in favor of men when it comes to attaining — and having respected by the rest of the world — what she considers “the absolute conditions of artistic achievement”: “Quiet, and solitude in the sense of freedom from preoccupations.”

---

Women in the Arts

Some Notes on the Eternally Conflicting Demands of Humanity and Art

It is only lately that the failure of women in the fine arts has achieved pre-eminence in the cause celebre, Man versus Woman, as a witness for the prosecution. In the old days, not only was art not demanded of women, but the smallest sign of genuine ability in a female would put a man in the state of mind of the lady who said when she saw the giraffe: “I don’t believe it.”

Thus Albrecht Durer, travelling through the Netherlands in 1521 and happening upon the paintings of Susanne Horebout, makes appreciative notes in his diary, but is constrained to add: “Amazing that a she-creature should accomplish so much.” And some three hundred years later, Gustave Flaubert, standing at the easel of Madame Commanville, smiles indulgently and murmurs: “Yes, she has talent; it is odd.”

But today, under pressure of the idea that women in asserting equality have also asserted identity with men, the demand for art as a supporting credential has become the parrot-cry of the masculinists of both sexes. A cry that grows both strident and hoarse. For this pre-eminent witness for the prosecution is, poor fellow, shockingly over-worked. And not only over-worked but also a little uneasy. Feeling no doubt, since most of his fellows have been hustled away in disgrace and those that remain are apt to wilt in the hands of defending counsel, that his own turn may be at hand.

But though towering a little insecurely still he towers, at once the last refuge of all who are frightened by anything that disturbs their vision of man as the dominant sex, and the despair of those feminists who believe fine art to be the highest human achievement.

There are of course many, an increasing band, who flatly deny that art is the highest human achievement and place ahead of it all that is called science, which they are inclined to regard as the work of humanity’s post adolescence. Rut it is a curious and notable fact, a fact quite as curious and notable as the absence of first-class feminine art, that all these people, whenever they want to enlighten the layman on the subject of the scientific imagination, are at pains to explain that the scientific imagination, at its best, is the imagination of the artist. It is not less odd that the man of science if he is masculinist, will, when hard-pressed, seize, to belabour his opponent, not the test-tube, but the mahlstick. (It is of course to be remembered that while the mahlstick is solid and persists unchanging, the test-tube is hollow and its contents variable.) And the rush for the mahlstick goes on in spite of the fact that the witness for science does not, on the whole, have a bad time. He has perhaps lost a little of his complacency. Rut he can still, when counsel for the defense reminds the jury how recently women have had access to scientific material and education, point to the meagre, uninstructed beginnings of some of the world’s foremost men of science.

Side by side with the devotees of science we find those who count religion the highest human achievement. They are a house divided. In so far as they set in the van the mystic—the religious genius who uses not marble or pigment or the written word, but his own life as the medium of his art—they supply a witness for the defense who points to Catherine and Teresa walking abreast with Francis and Boehme. But their witness is always asked what he makes of the fact that Jesus, Mahomed, and Buddha are all of the sex male. His prompt answer: that he looks not backward but ahead, leaves things, even after he has pointed to Mrs. Eddy and Mrs. Besant, a little in the air. For Catholic feminists there is always the Mother of God. But they are rare, and as it were under an editorial ban. Privately they must draw much comfort from the fact that the Church which, since the days of its formal organization has excluded woman from its ultimate sanctities, is yet constrained to set her above it, crowned Queen of Heaven.

Last, but from the feminist point of view by no means least of those who challenge the security of the one solidly remaining hope of the prosecution, are the many who believe, some of them having arrived at feminism via their belief, that the finest flowers of the human spirit arc the social arts including the art of dress. In vain is their witness reminded of the man modiste, the pub and the club. He slays opposition with lyrics, with idylls of the Primitive Mother forming, with her children, society, while father slew beasts and ate and slept. And side by side with the pub at its best he places the salon at its best, and over against Watt and his dreamy contemplation of the way the light steam plays with the heavy lid of the kettle—a phenomenon, thunders the prosecution, that for centuries countless women have witnessed daily in animal stupidity—he sets Watt’s mother, seeing the lifting lid as tea for several weary ones.

But in all this there is no comfort for the large company of feminists who sincerely see the fine arts as humanity’s most godlike achievement. For them the case, though still it winds its interminable way, is settled. There is no escape from the verdict of woman’s essential inferiority. The arraignment is the more flawless because just here, in the field of art, there has been from time immemorial, a fair field and no favour. Always women have had access to the pen, the chisel and the instrument of music. Yet not only have they produced no Shakespeare, no Michelangelo and no Beethoven, but in the civilization of today, where women artists abound, there is still scarcely any distinctive feminine art. The art of women is still on the whole either mediocre or derivative.

There is, of course, at the moment, Kathe Kollwitz, Mother and Hausfrau to begin with, and, in the estimation of many worthy critics, not only the first painter in Europe today but a feminine painter—one that is to say whose work could not have been produced by a man. She it may be is the Answer to Everything. For though it is true that one swallow does not make a summer, the production by the female sex of even one supreme painter brings the whole fine arts argument to the ground and we must henceforth seek the cause of woman’s general lack of achievement in art elsewhere than in the idea that first-class artistic expression is incarnate in man alone.

Let us, however, suppose that there is no Kathe Kollwitz, assume art to be the highest human achievement, accept the great arraignment and in the interest of the many who are driven to cynicism by the apparent impossibility of roping women into the scheme of salvation, set up the problem in its simplest terms. Cancel out all the variable factors: the pull of the home on the daughter, celibacy, the economic factor and the factor of motherhood, each of which taken alone may be said by weighting the balance to settle the matter out of court and taken all together make us rub our eyes at the achievements of women to date—cancel out all these and imagine for a moment a man and a woman artist side by side with equal chances and account it we can for the man’s overwhelming superiority.

There is, before we can examine our case, one more factor to rule out—isolated here because it grows, in the light of modern psychological investigation, increasingly difficult to state, and also because as a rule it is dither omitted from the balance or set down as a good mark to the credit of one party. This elusive and enormously potent factor is called ambition. And its definition, like most others, can never be more or less than a statement of the definer’s philosophy of life. But it may at least be agreed that ambition is rich or poor. Childishly self-ended or selflessly mature. And a personal ambition is perhaps not ill-defined as the subtlest form of despair—though a man may pass in a lifetime from the desire for personal excellence, the longing to be sure that either now or in the future he shall be recognized as excellent, to the reckless love of excellence for its own sake, leaving the credit to the devil—and so on to becoming, as it were behind his own back, one with his desire. And though the ambition of the artist need not of necessity be personal, he is peculiarly apt to suffer in the absence of recognition—and here at once we fall upon the strongest argument against fine art as the highest human achievement. These are altitudes. But we are discussing high matters. And though the quality of a man’s ambition takes naught from the intrinsic value of his work, an ambition to the extent that it remains a thirst to be recognized as personally great, is a form of despair. And it is a form of despair to which men are notoriously more liable than arc women. A fact that ceases to surprise when one reflects that, short of sainthood, a man must do rather than be, that he is potent not so much in person as in relation to the things he makes.

And so, with ambition ruled out and our case thus brought down to the bare bones of undebatable actuality, back to our artists of whom immediately we must enquire what it is that they most urgently need for the development of their talents, the channels through which their special genius is to operate. The question has been answered by genius—on its bad days and always to the same effect. Da Vinci, called simultaneously by almost everything that can attract the mind of man, has answered it. Goethe, the court official, answered it. And by way of casting a broad net we will quote here the testimonies of an eleventh century Chinese painter and a modern writer, a South African:

Unless I dwell in a quiet house, seat myself in a retired room with the window open, the table dusted, incense burning and the thousand trivial thoughts crushed out and sunk, I cannot have good feeling for painting or beautiful taste and cannot create the you” — The mysterious and wonderful Kakki, Fennelosa’s translation [Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art Volume 2 by Ernest F. Fenollosa]

It’s a very wise curious instinct that makes all people who have imaginative work (whether it’s scientific or philosophic thinking, or poetry, or story-making, of course it doesn’t matter so it’s original work, and has to be spun out of the texture of the mind itself) try to creep away into some sort of solitude…. It’s worry, tension, painful emotion, anxiety that kills imagination out as surely as a bird is killed by a gun. — Olive Schreiner [Letter to her husband, 26 May 1898]

Quiet, and solitude in the sense of freedom from preoccupations, are the absolute conditions of artistic achievement. Exactly, it may be answered, and your male artist will pay for these things any price that may be asked. Will pay health, respectability, honour, family claims and what not. And keep fine. And there are in the world of art women who make the same payments and yet do not achieve supremacy and, indefinably, do not remain fine. What is the difference? Where is it that the woman breaks down? She should with a fair field and her fascinating burdensome gift of sight, her gift for expansive vicarious living, be at least his equal? She should. But there are, when we come down to the terms of daily experience, just two things that queer the pitch. One abroad and one at home. For the woman, and particularly the woman painter, going into the world of art is immediately surrounded by masculine traditions. Traditions based on assumptions that are largely unconscious and whose power of suggestion is unlimited. Imagine the case reversed. Imagine the traditions that held during a great period of Egyptian art, when women painters were the rule— the nude male serving as model, as the “artist’s model” that in our own day is the synonym for nude femininity.

But even the lifting away from our present gropings after civility in the world at large of the diminishing shadow of that which, for want of a more elegant term, is being called men-state mentality, would do nothing towards the removal of the obstruction in the path of the woman artist at home. She would still be left in an environment such as has surrounded no male artist since the world began. For the male artist, though with bad luck he may be tormented by his womankind, or burdened by wife and family, with good luck may be cherished by a devoted wife or mistress, or neglectful char, by someone, that is to say, who will either reverently or contemptuously let him be. And with the worst of luck, living in the midst of debt and worry and pressure, still somehow he will lie tended and will live serenely innocent of the swarming detail that is the basis of daily life.

It is not only that there exists for the woman no equivalent for the devoted wife or mistress. There is also no equivalent for the most neglectful char known to man. For the service given by women to women is as different from that given by women to men as is chalk from cheese. If hostile, it will specialize in manufacturing difficulties. If friendly, it will demand unfaltering response. For it knows that living sympathy is there. And in either case service is given on the assumption that the woman at work is in the plot for providing life’s daily necessities. And even vicarious expansion towards a multitude of details, though it may bring wisdom, is fatal to sustained creative effort.

Art demands what, to women, current civilization won’t give. There is for a Dostoyevsky writing against time on the corner of a crowded kitchen table a greater possibility of detachment than for a woman artist no matter how placed. Neither motherhood nor the more continuously exacting and indefinitely expansive responsibilities of even the simplest housekeeping can so effectively hamper her as the human demand, besieging her wherever she is, for an inclusive awareness, from which men, for good or ill, are exempt.