Women do paint very well

By George Pendle

At the cutting-edge Maccarone gallery in New York last week, a packed, largely female audience gathered to hear a powerhouse of women artists discuss feminism and painting. Moderated by Alison Gingeras, a former curator at the Centre Pompidou and the Guggenheim Museum, the panel featured the much-lauded British painter, Cecily Brown, who is famous for her abstracted erotic imagery (detail, above); the emerging American artist Rosy Keyser, whose decimated lace-draped paintings billow with an unsettling power; and Joan Semmel, who has been demanding gender equality in the art world since the 1970s, and who, at 82 years old, is still painting naked self-portraits with remarkable candour. “It’s great to have such a large turnout,” remarked Semmel, “considering I was told long ago that feminism was over and painting was dead.”

Despite the gains made by Semmel and her feminist colleagues, examples of gender bias were still easy to point out. The concept of the “male gaze”, the way that visual arts have traditionally been structured around a male viewer, appears to be as strong as ever. Brown described her frustration at painting full-frontal male nudes: “people kept saying ‘they’re so gay’ even though [a woman] was painting them.” Much of the conversation surrounded the 1971 feminist essay by Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” “There always have been great women artists,” said Semmel, to whoops from the crowd. “There just haven’t been great celebrated women artists because the powers-that-be haven’t been celebrating them.” However, when the conversation turned to efforts by museums to right this balance, such as targeting acquisitions of works by women artists through programmes like MoMA’s “Women’s Project”, there was less concord. Brown and Keyser thought it, on the whole, a positive development. Semmel decried it as mere “tokenism”.