Crafty Women and the Hierarchy of the Arts
by
Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock
The sex of the artist matters. It conditions the way art is seen and discussed. This is indisputable.
But precisely how does it matter? Art history views the art of the past from certain perspectives and
organizes art into categories and classifications based on a stratified system of values, which leads to
a hierarchy of art forms. In this hierarchy the arts of painting and sculpture enjoy an elevated status
while other arts that adorn people, homes or utensils are relegated to a lesser cultural sphere under
such terms as 'applied', 'decorative' or 'lesser' arts. This hierarchy is maintained by attributing to
the decorative arts a lesser degree of intellectual effort or appeal and a greater concern with manual
skill and utility.
The clear division of art forms into fine arts and decorative arts, or more simply the arts and the crafts,
emerged in the Renaissance and is reflected in changes of art education from craft-based workshops to
academies and in the theories of art produced by those academies. By the mid-nineteenth century the
complete divorce of'high art' and craft was a cause of considerable concern to Jane Morris's husband,
William Morris, who looked back to the Middle Ages when this damaging division was not so absolute. He also
warned of the immediate dangers, to all forms of art, from this hierarchy:
I shall not meddle much with the great art of Architecture, and still less with the great arts commonly called
Sculpture and Painting, yet I cannot in my own mind quite sever them from those lesser, so called
Decorative Arts, which I have to speak about: it is only in latter times and under the most intricate
conditions of life, that they have fallen apart from one another; and I hold that, when they are so parted,
it is ill for the Arts altogether: the lesser ones become trivial, mechanical, unintelligent, incapable of
resisting the changes pressed upon them by fashion or dishonesty; while the greater, however they may be
practised for a while by men of great minds and wonder-working hands ... are sure to lose their dignity of
popular arts, and become nothing but dull adjuncts to unmeaning pomp, or ingenious toys for a few rich or idle
men. (William Morris, Selected Writings and Designs, ed. Asa Briggs, 1962, p. 84)
The art and craft division can undoubtedly be read on class lines, with an economic and social system dictating
new definitions of the artist as opposed to the artisan. However, there is an important connection between the
new hierarchy of the arts and sexual categorization, male-female. An early intimation of both a hierarchy of
values and the sexual division in that hierarchy occurs in a passage of 1713 from a major eighteenth-century
aesthetic theorist, Lord Shaftesbury:
So that whilst we look on paintings with the same eyes as we view commonly the rich stuffis and coloured silks
worn by our Ladys, and admired in Dress, Equipage or Furniture, we must of necessity be effeminate in our Taste
and utterly set wrong as to alljudgement and Knowledge in the kind. (Michael Levey, Rococo to Revolution, 1966, p. 12 1, our italics)
Shaftesbury asked for discrimination between painting and the decorative arts, but why is lack of discrimination
efFeminate? The fact that the vast majority of creative work that covered surfaces of dress, equipage and
furniture in the time of Lord Shaftesbury was embroidery by women suggests that the sex of the maker was as
important a factor in the development of the hierarchy of the arts as the division between art and craft on the
basis of function, material, intellectual content and class.
An example from the development of the stratification in the fine arts themselves, the history of flower painting,
provides the necessary link between sex and status. It shows how the presence of women in large numbers in a
particular kind of art changed its status and the way it was seen. Flower painting originated as a branch of
still-life painting all over Europe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, becoming a major genre in
Holland during the seventeenth century and continuing to attract a substantial number of practitioners well into
the twentieth century. A few women were involved in flower painting from the beginning, for example Fede
Galizia (1578-1630),Clara Peeters (1594 Post 1657)
and Louise Moillon (1610-96).
Flowers were used as metaphors richly resonant with meaning, and were symbolic of morality and mortality,
appearing as allegories of vanity and the cycles of human life, birth, blossom, death and decay.
The still-life by Maria van Oosterwijk
(1630-93) is a most comprehensive example of the genre of
vanitas or 'vanity' painting and contains symbols which, in the language of still-life compositions, express
a moral on the transience of worldly things, the vanity of earthly pleasure, the brevity of life.
Oosterwijk's Vanitas points to the ambivalence of the genre which ostensibly warns against preoccupations with
earthly things while using the illusionism of oil paint to celebrate and reproduce material possessions.
Each object is accurately and sensitively reproduced, as a reminder perhaps that the very strength of
worldly pleasure, possessions and consumption depends upon its evanescence. Oosterwijk included an enormous
range of examples from the three groups of objects commonly used to convey this moral. The professional life is
represented by the pen and ink. Worldly wealth is symbolized by the account book and coins. Frivolous pastimes
are present in the flute lying on the music and a glass of aquavita. All the accompanying flowers, animals and
insects contribute to the theme; the anemone, for example, is associated with sorrow and death and the knapsack
stands for the journey of life.
Yet despite the complicated iconographic programmes of many flower paintings, one twentieth-century commentator
wrote: 'Flower painting demands no genius of a mental or spiritual kind, but only the genius of taking pains and
supreme craftsmanship' (M. H. Grant, Flower Painting Through Four Centuries, 1952, P. 2 1). The explanation for
Grant's blindness can be found within his own text:
In all three hundred known years of their production, the total practitioners of flowers down to 188o is less
than 7oo and of these by no means all are floristspur sang, that is to say unassociated with various forms of
still -life. Whilst only a very small proportion are artists of the highest or even high merit. Actually, more
than 200 of these are of late eighteenth and nineteenth century and at least half of them are women. (P. 2 1)
By the late eighteenth century flower painting had become a common genre for women artists. The characterization
of flower painting as petty, painstaking, pretty, requiring only dedication and dexterity is related to the sex
of a large proportion of its practitioners, for as the following comment by the late nineteenth-century writer
Uon Legrange shows, the social definition of femininity affects the evaluation of what women do to the extent
that the artists and their subjects become virtually synonymous: 'Let women occupy themselves with those kinds
of art they have always preferred ... the paintings of flowers, those prodigies of grace and freshness which
alone can compete with the grace and freshness of women themselves' ('Du rang des femmes dans I'art', Gazette
des Beaux-Arts, i 86o). One can hardly imagine a serious art historian attempting to explain Michelangelo's
David by equating its lithe, athletic vigour with the temperament and physique of the artist himself. The
historical process by which women came to specialize in certain kinds of art and the symbolism of still-life and
flower painting have been obscured by the tendency to identify women with nature. Paintings of flowers and the
women who painted them became mere reflections of each other. Fused into the prevailing notion of femininity, t
he painting becomes solely an extension of womanliness and the artist becomes a woman only fulfilling her nature. This effectively removes the paintings and the artists from the field of fine arts. Descriptions of flower paintings by nineteenth-century critics and modern art historians employ exactly the same terms that are used to justify the secondary status accorded to crafts, which are similarly described as manually dexterous, decorative and intellectually undemanding.
Feminist historians have reacted to the hierarchical classification of art by asserting the value of women's
work in the crafts. Some have hailed embroidery and other forms of needlework as women's'true cultural heritage':
Women have always made art. But for women the arts most highly valued by male society have been closed to them for
just that reason. They have put their creativity instead into needlework arts which exist in a fantastic variety
wherever there are women, and which in fact are a universal female art form transcending race, class and national
borders. Needlework is the one art in which women controlled the education of their daughters and the production
of art, and were also the critics and audience ... it is our cultural heritage. (Patricia Mainardi, 'Quilts: The Great American Art',
Feminist Art journal, Winter 1973, P. 1)
While women can justifiably take pride in these areas, asserting their value in the face of male prejudice does
not displace the hierarchy of values in art history. By simply celebrating a separate heritage we risk losing
sight of one of the most important aspects of the history of women and art, the intersection in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries of the development of an ideology of femininity, that is, a social definition of women
and their role, with the emergence of a clearly defined separation of art and craft.
The history of English embroidery shows how a medieval art became a 'feminine' craft. Embroidery may well be
considered one of women's richest contributions to culture, but simply to glorify its history and to defend its
value as a cultural product, leads us into the sentimental trap which ensnared Victorian historians of needlework.
They were, for very different reasons, equally dedicated to claiming needlework as an art. Numerous nineteenth
century women wrote on embroidery, beginning with Elizabeth Stone, whose Art of Needlework was published in
1840. She insisted that there was an indissoluble, God-glven link between her sex and the craft and provided
needlework with a long, pious history to sanction the hours upper- and middleclass women spent at their 'work'.
Even in the Wilderness, she wrote, the daughters of Israel were never without their needles:
With proud and pleased humility did the fair inmates of these tents, the
most accomplished of Israel's daughters, display to their illustrious visitors
the 'fine needlework' to which their time and talents had been for a long
season devoted. (Elizabeth Stone (ed. Viscountess Wilton), Art oj'
Needlework, 1840, P. 29)
Not all historians of embroidery went so far as to transport the Victorian drawing-room into the desert, but all
effected a complete identification between women and the craft. 'Of one thing we may be sure-that it is inherent
in the nature of English-women to employ their fingers' (Lady Marion Alford, Needlework as Art, 1886). Today
we live with a legacy of Alford's certainty. Some art schools teach embroidery, but the vast majority, if not all,
the students are women, and stitchery is commonly disparaged as 'women's work'.
from Old Mistresses:Women, Art and Ideology by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Pantheon Books, 1981, pp. 50-59.
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