Beware of the Woman Artist

“should be considered as a great, unit-driven classroom text for young people as it offers inroads to a variety of artists across numerous mediums from around the world.”

Reading the promotional text for Beware of the Woman Artist might lead one to believe that this is a companion, or, shall we say, sister-text, to Katy Hessel’s brilliant The Story of Art Without Men (2022). Indeed, the last five years has seen a groundswell of compendia on the many known and lesser-known women artists in history and their myriad contributions to the field—so why not one more?

This volume promises to “traverse decades and continents” (so yay; it’s global), “celebrate pioneering women” (who doesn’t love that?), and highlight those who “fought against and transformed the male-dominated artistic establishment” (break that glass ceiling!). Expectations versus reality could also lead one to be a bit disappointed in what arrives in the mail.

Unpacking Beware of the Woman Artist is a bit like ordering a novel and receiving a Little Golden Book. Although similarly proportioned, the book is indeed less weighty than Vogue’s September issue. Are there really so few women artists? Perhaps just very few images or very, very small text? Alas, no.

The book is laid out similarly to a children’s encyclopedia, with a single topic for every spread. The reader is presented with fifty profiles, organized chronologically by date of birth, on a variety of women artists ranging from Hilma af Klint to Kubra Khademi. Each spread consists of one to two images, typically a notable work by the artist but sometimes also a photographic portrait of them, accompanied by a brief biography.

Clearly written for an audience that has no prior knowledge of general art history, these biographies are shorter than the most rudimentary Wikipedia entry and typically follow the format of where the woman studied art, what aesthetic school she belonged to, what her advancement in the field was, and brief summary of her later period. There is no additional insight or analysis, and the extensive amount of available white space on each page indicates that the author certainly could have added a bit more information.

While the profiles are lacking, the introduction could not be more heavy-handed. The author effusively declares that “every morning [these artists] are called upon to be at once mothers, lovers and labourers, shouldering the mental burden necessitated by this triple personality and enduring the physical and psychological strain caused by the tasks assigned to them.” Not that the life of women artists throughout history hasn’t been challenging, but defining the job as no less than martyrdom reduces their lives and accomplishments. In many cases, these women came from privileged backgrounds or were married to men who supported them; others never had children or did not conform to a heteronormative lifestyle. The idea of all creative women being a variant of Sylvia Plath is neither helpful nor interesting.

All of these critiques are not to say that the book is unworthy (although perhaps the introduction is), just that its audience is not the one to which it is advertising. This would be a marvelous book to give to a ten-year-old who is just discovering a love of art—in fact, it should be considered as a great, unit-driven classroom text for young people as it offers inroads to a variety of artists across numerous mediums from around the world. If, however, you are looking for another woman-focused take on art history for more than an eighth-grade audience, there are far better books in this space.