Katy Hessel

Katy Hessel is an art historian, broadcaster, writer and curator, living in London, whose work is concerned with women artists.

Quotes[edit]

So much of the time, when I read a short, 150-word bio of a female artist, male artists are referenced in relation to them. To be honest, I got a bit sick of it. Dora Maar is always being referred to as Picasso's lover, and actually what I want to do is scream and say Dora Maar was an incredible street photographer and Surrealist, and she was amazing. But how often does her name come up in telling his story?

New York is such an instrumental city for art, and it’s extraordinary the impact that America’s had in art history, especially in the 20th century.

Women have been artists for millennia, since the cave paintings. And yet Gombrich and Janson, their first editions didn't include a single woman artist. So it's actually down to who has been able to tell the story of art history. And of course, there are so many sexist barriers that the women had to jump over. Women artists in Europe weren't even allowed to be admitted to the life drawing studio until the 1890s. The fact that they even became professional artists despite these boundaries and everything being against them is so remarkable.

I walked into the art fair, and I suddenly realized that none of the works were by women. It just was this epiphany moment. I had just finished a B.A. in art history, and I had to ask myself—could I name 20 women artists? The answer was no. I challenged myself to write an article about female Baroque and Renaissance artists, and suddenly I was learning about Elisabetta Sirani and Artemisia Gentileschi and Sofonisba Anguissola. I was unearthing all these stories—but they’re all there, and we shouldn’t have to hunt for them.

[About the Guerilla Girls] Essentially, what they unveiled was the fact that museums are celebrating the history of patriarchy, as opposed to the history of art. And if we're not seeing art by a wide range of people and subjects of a wide range of people, then we’re not seeing society as a whole.

[About The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich] It's the introductory bible to our history. And I love it because it is for everyone. The fact that he writes in such beautiful prose that anyone can understand, you want to — you have heard of a term such as the Renaissance or the Baroque, and you can look that up in Gombrich. But he doesn't include any woman artist. He only includes one in his 16th edition, which is crazy. And the fact that I loved this book growing up, I wanted to write — if he was going to leave that women, I thought I'd leave out men.

[T]his is the ultimate question that I want to ask my predecessors from 100 years ago: What happened to these women artists? It's almost as though they were consciously written out of art history. I don't really know. Was it ignorance or was it purposeful?

I don't agree that we should dismiss certain art forms and we should create a hierarchy. That's what the academies in the 18th century really did. They said painting and sculpture is at the top, and embroidery and craft like decorative arts is at the bottom. And what did women have access to? Decorative arts and craft.

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Katy Hessel