Where to did women artists disappear? Women painters, women sculptors, and women musicians from a gender perspective.

Dr. Edith Zack

Why were women artists discriminated? And how is it that their voice was silenced for hundreds and thousands of years? Why were they excluded from history books in general? And from art history books in particular? How did gender codes shape a different collective consciousness, one for men, another for women? A consciousness in which it was clear that men were professional authorities in every filed (thus, they were poets, writers, composers, painters, explorers, inventors, philosophers and historians). Women’s art, in comparison, was considered their ‘hobby’ as well as an ornament to their femininity. It was presented in salons and morning visits, in sewing and embroidering, in arranging flowers and playing the piano.

In this course we’ll try to answer the questions raised above while getting acquainted with painters, sculptors, and musicians from the Renaissance on to the end of the 20^th century. The relation between regime systems and gender ones will be examined while following each of the artists, starting from the home she was born into, her education, and up to her personal and professional maturity. We’ll get to know her art, stressing its specific  characteristics, personal and socially contextualized. It is in this context that we’ll discuss public space vis-à-vis private space (the studio, the renaissance academia, and the salon), trade unions at her time, the topics and genres she chose to deal with, as well as her commercial skills (negotiating, selling works, arranging concerts, public relation and so on and so forth).

To complete the picture we’ll also examine the different strategies these artists used in order for their voice to be heard, in spite of the limitations, and in spite of “anxiety of authorship.”