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Women can’t paint says German artist

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georgebasselitzArtist claims women lack the basic character to become great painters.

German artist Georg Baselitz is lauded as one of Europe’s most successful living artists.

His works have graced the walls of some of the most hallowed art institutes in the world – the Tate, the Royal Academy, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art… you get the picture, if you’ll pardon the pun.

But according to this bastion of artistic genius, women painters are rubbish.

In an interview last month with German publication Der Spiegel, Baselitz said that women lack the basic character to become great painters.

He said ‘Women don’t paint very well.  It’s a fact.’

It is?

Yes, according to Baselitz, because ‘women simply don’t pass the test. The market test, the value test.’

Fast forward a week or two to 6 February when, in a protracted bidding war at Christie’s auction rooms, a Berthe Morisot painting, her 1881 Après le déjeuner, sold for £6.9 million.

Berthe Morisot, Georg, is a woman.

A woman whose work has sold for more than twice the value of the most expensive Georg Baselitz, no less.

It would be easy to point out countless other examples.

Georg himself mentions Agnes Martin, Cecily Brown and Rosemarie Trockel.

There is also Lee Krasner, Mary Cassatt – whose work has sold for several million dollars, Mary Beale, one of the 17th century’s most celebrated portrait artists, Frida Cahlo, again a million-dollar selling artist, Georgia O’Keefe, Marina Abramovic, Marlene Dumas…

Tate Britain is currently holding a Vija Celmins exhibition, Ellen Gallagher has one at the Tate Modern, Jenny Saville is exhibiting at the Saatchi Gallery and Tate Liverpool plays host to the work of Sylvia Sleigh, a British realist painter who became an important part of New York’s feminist art scene in the 1960s…

I could go on.

And on and on.

The list of successful women artists throughout history is enormous.

But probably none of this would make any difference to Baselitz, whose misogyny seems too deeply entrenched to allow facts to get in the way.

Hardly surprising, then, that Baselitz was expelled from art school in East Germany for ‘sociopolitical immaturity’.

Jude Kelly, artistic director of London’s Southbank, had this to say; “If culture is the expression of who we are, and if women’s stories are tiny on that landscape, you’re continuing the idea that women don’t really play a role in the world. And that’s bad for everybody.”

And therein lies the crux.

Women have consistently been pushed to the background and denied the platform that is afforded to men.

And it is tragic that, in a sector which claims to embrace all forms of creativity and freedom, there is still an inherent sexism at play.

There are a depressingly small handful of women conductors on the international concert circuit, and likewise, women composers have never really been given an opportunity to have their work mainstreamed into the concert repertoire.

The majority of students at art colleges and schools are female, and yet still their work is not taken seriously or given the same platform that their male equivalents take for granted.

Griselda Pollock, professor of the social and critical history of art at the University of Leeds, says that art historians have consistently edited out significant contributions of women painters.

“Women have also been put down, when they are good, as having talent and taste, but being too nice and not taking enough risks. It’s a sexist hierarchy.”

According to the National Gallery: ‘Before the19th century most women painters who enjoyed anything like professional status were the daughters, and often the wives, of male artists.

‘The rise of the academies of art placed women at a disadvantage; the most prized academic category, history painting, depended on drawing after the male nude, which women were debarred from doing in public.

‘Many women, therefore, specialised in the ‘lesser’ categories: portraiture, genre, still life and animal painting.

‘Rachel Ruysch, Rosa Bonheur, Rosalba Carriera, and Vigee Le Brun, were among the most successful and highly paid painters of their day.’

So what of George Baselitz then?

Why make such a ridiculous, sweeping generalisation?

The Independent’s art critic Michael Glover has described Baselitz as ‘self- aggrandising and publicity-seeking’.

So perhaps in the end, his statements were simply manifestations of his controversy-courting personality.

He did, after all, come to artistic prominence when criminal proceedings were instigated against him in Berlin in the 1960s for producing a work that was said to be morally and sexually offensive.

His painting of a young male with a giant protruding penis was done, he said, ‘as an aggressive act or shock’.

But when artists like Georg Baselitz, who seem to have real influence in the art world, make such ludicrous and irresponsible statements, they are cementing an archaic and sexist worldview that simply is not acceptable anymore.

So in short, Mr Baselitz, I think the message here is clear.  (Van) go and stick your brushes where the paint don’t dry.

Postscript: The Chicago Reader ran an article in response to Baselitz’ comments which compared some of his work with those of female artists.

Have a look – and tell me you didn’t think ‘the emperor’s new clothes…’

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