Germaine Greer observes how women’s contribution is winnowed out of art history

 

 

 

At the Guardian, Germaine Greer reports that the Fitzwilliam’s “Sargent, Sikert & Spencer” exhibition offers a pretty good lesson in how women’s contribution is winnowed out of art history.

“The museum has just hung a show of paintings by John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert and Stanley Spencer from its collection, and I find myself wishing they hadn’t. For the first time, the museum seems to me �provincial rather than perfect. Many of the �works are unapologetically minor; but even the ones that are not are less �significant than they should be, if they are to dwell on the same plane as the rest of the collection. Sargent was �grotesquely successful in his own time, as portrait painters tend to be once they have established a popular formula � but he is not a painter we need to see much of now. He may have fancied himself as a great landscape painter seduced from his true bent by filthy �lucre. If he did, the examples shown here prove he was wrong….

“By way of justifying the �yoking together of these three artists, rather too much is made of the slender �connections between them � which boils down to little more than that they occasionally treated similar themes. Sargent had no more �acrimonious critic than Sickert, and Spencer learned nothing from either of them. Of the women who were �Sickert’s faithful allies, only Th�r�se �Lessore makes the grade. The portrait of �Sickert in coloured chalks and �watercolour that Lessore made in 1919, eight years before she became the painter’s third wife, is included as a curiosity. �Sylvia Gosse was the most important of the dozen or so women who worked on Sickert’s prints, �copying on to his �canvases the details of the photographs he used later in his career. Gosse also lent him money, bought his pictures, nursed his first wife in her terminal illness and raised a fund for him in old age. The �Fitzwilliam was left a still life by Gosse in 1991 (the �museum has 13 of her prints, but she was allowed no space in this exhibition).
It takes a sharp eye to detect �Spencer’s faithful wife Hilda �Carline as the diminutive grey statue in his �repulsive pseudo-allegory, ‘Love on the Moor,’ completed after her death. �Carline was a serious artist, who worked as �steadily as she could, �alongside raising two daughters, the misery and turmoil of being married to Spencer, a mental breakdown and failed treatment for breast cancer. The Fitzwilliam exhibition offers a pretty good object lesson in how women’s contribution is winnowed out of art history.

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“Sargent, Sickert & Spencer,” curated by Jane Munro. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK. Through April 5, 2010.

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