When I am reading about art, I ask myself the question, ‘what is great art?’
In her YouTube video, American Art Curator, Sarah Urist Green tells us the idea of a ‘great artist’ came about during the Renaissance from artist, Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) in his foundational text in art history and published book: Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550). Vasari described great artists as genius. In his view, Leonardi da Vinci was a genius in painting, sculpture and science while Michelangelo was a genius in painting, sculpture and architecture. Vasari believed that genius was something that an artist was born with, a gift, apart from their training and experience.
In Old Mistresses, Women, Art and Ideology, (Bloomsbury, New York, 1981,) Historians Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker criticized Vasari’s text for excluding many women artists who could have been included in his book while featuring many men artists, thereby marginalizing women artists and their contributions to art history, perpetuating a patriarchal view of art history, one example of the systemic bias within art history narratives. Vassari only included four women artists in his text: Properzia de Rossi; Sofonisba Anguissola; Sister Plantilla Nelli and Madonna Lucrezia.
There have certainly been great women artists who have achieved artistic and creative excellence with a unique visionin the past and present. The Female Gaze in Art and Photography, volumes 1 and 2) provide examples in both, some you may have heard of and others most likely not. Both books discuss the obstacles women faced in becoming professional artists -women were not privileged on the grounds of their sex to be able to follow a career in art like the men could. Their sex did not impede them. Learning about the barriers women faced is a very significant lesson in art history. And women artists are still not given the same opportunities as men artists today, particularly when comparing the sales of the two at auction.
Art historian Lina Nochlin in her seminal essay, Why Have there been No Great Women Artists? (1971, in Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays, Thames and Hudson, London, 1989) highlighted the social and institutional structures that acted as barriers to women succeeding in art and their exclusion from opportunities that men were given to develop their potential. These are discussed in The Female Gaze in Art and Photography, volumes 1 and 2)
In her YouTube video, Sarah Urist Green cites Artemisia Gentileschi and Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun as great women artists of the past. And they both feature in The Female Gaze in Art and Photography, volumes 1 and 2)
I am currently reading and learning about British contemporary artist Jenny Saville (1970-) I think that
she is a genius and a great artist in her unique creative vision; exceptional creative skill and conceptual ideas, her underscoring intellect and capacity to draw inspiration from a variety of sources. Google her and see her gigantic canvasses, her paintings of human flesh and bodies, as she challenges the historical male gaze of objectifying and sexualizing women as objects.
I think great art involves technical skill, wonderful use of colour, the ability to elicit a connection, a response from the viewer, whether it be emotional or cognitive. Great art can also document (in visual or audio/silent form) some commentary on socio-political, economic, historical or contemporary issues.
See SARAH URIST GREEN:
What Makes an Artist “Great”?
Crash Course Art History #4