Woman And The Paint Pot

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Title:     Woman And The Paint Pot
Author: W. L. George [More Titles by George]

It is in a shrinking spirit that I venture to suggest that woman has so far entirely failed to affirm her capacity in the pictorial arts, for I address myself to an audience which contains many sculptors and pictorial artists, an audience of serious and enthusiastic people to whom art matters as much and perhaps more than life. But it is of no use maintaining illusions; woman has exhibited, and is exhibiting, very great artistic capacities in the histrionic art, in dancing, in executive music, and in literature. There is, therefore, no case for those who argue that woman has no artistic capacity. She has. I select but a few out of the many when I quote the actresses, Siddons, Rachel, La Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry; the dancers, La Duncan, Pavlova, Genee; the literary women, the Brontes, Madame de Stael, George Eliot, Sappho, Christina Rossetti; among the more modern, May Sinclair and Lucas Malet.

At first sight, however, it is curious that I should be able to quote no composers and no dramatists; it is impossible to take Guy d'Hardelot and Theresa del Riego seriously. And the women dramatists, taken as a whole, hardly exist. This would go to show that there is some strength in the contention that woman is purely executive and uncreative; but this cannot be true, for the list of writers I have given, which is very far from being exhaustive, and which is being augmented every day by promising girl writers, shows that woman has creative capacity, creative in the sense that she can evolve character and scene, and treat relations in that way which can be described as art. If, therefore, there have been no women painters of note, it cannot be because woman has no creative capacity. It may be suggested that those women who have creative capacity turn to literature, but that is a very rash assumption. For creative men turn to any one of the half-dozen forms of art, and are not monopolized by literature; there is no reason, mental or physical, why the female genius should be capable of traveling only along one line. The problem is a problem of direction, a problem of medium.

My potential opponents will probably deny that there have been, and are, no women painters. They will quote the names of Angelica Kaufmann, of Vigee-Lebrun, of Rosa Bonheur, of Berthe Morisot, of Elizabeth Butler; the more modern will mention Ella Bedford, Lucy Kemp-Welch; the most modern will put forward Anne Estelle Rice; and one or two may shyly whisper Maude Goodman. But, honestly, does this amount to anything? I do not suppose that Lady Elizabeth Butler's "Inkermann" or "Floreat Etona" will outlive the works of Detaille or of Meissonier, however doubtful be the value of these men; the fame of Angelica Kaufmann, though enhanced by the patronage of kings, has not been perpetuated by Bartolozzi, in spite of that etcher's inflated reputation. Rosa Bonheur's "Horse Fair" hangs in the National Gallery, and another of her works in the Luxembourg, but merits which balance those of Landseer are not enough; and Berthe Morisot walked, it is true, in the footprints of Manet, but did her feet fill them? The truth of the matter is that there has not been a woman Velasquez, a woman Rembrandt.

Now, as some of my readers may know, I do not make a habit of belittling woman and her work. My writings show that I am one of the most extreme feminists of the day, and I am well aware that woman must not be judged upon her past, that it is perhaps not enough to judge her on her present position, and that imagination, the only spirit with which criticism should be informed if it is to have any creative value, should take note of the potentialities of woman. But still, though we may write off much of the past and flout the record of insult and outrage which is the history of woman under the government of man, we cannot entirely ignore the present: the present may not be the father of the future, but it is certainly one of its ancestors. We have to-day a number of women who paint--the great majority, such as Mrs. Von Glehn, Ella Bedford, Lucy Kemp-Welch, and others who are hung a little higher over the line, are rendering Nature and persons with inspired and photographic zeal; others, such as Anne Estelle Rice, Jessie Dismorr, Georges Banks, are inclined to "fling their paint pot into the faces of the public." Some do not abhor Herkomer, others are banded with Matisse; but though to be Herkomer may not be supreme, and though to be Matisse may perhaps be insane, it must regretfully be conceded that the heights of the Royal Academy and of Parnassus (or whatever the painter's mountain may be) are not haunted by the woman painter. Without being carried away by the author of "Bubbles", I am not inclined to be carried away by Maude Goodman and the splendours of "Taller Than Mother." Lucy Kemp-Welch's New Forest ponies are ponies, but I do not suppose that they will be trotting in the next century; they do not balance even the work of Furse.

Let me not be reproached because I use the low standard of the Royal Academy, for if woman has a case at all she must prove herself on all planes; it is as important that she should equal the second-rate people as that she should shine among the first-rate. I do not look for a time to come when woman will be superior to man, but to a time, quite remote enough for my speculations, when she will be his equal, when she will be able to keep up with all his activities. Curiously enough, the advanced female painters are not so inferior to the advanced men painters as are the stereotyped women to their masculine rivals. There is excellence in the work of Anne Estelle Rice and Georges Banks, though they perhaps do not equal Fergusson; but they are less remote from him in spirit and realization than are the lesser women from the lesser men. That is a fact of immense importance, for it is evident that nothing is so hopeful as this reduction in the inferiority of female painting. It may be that masculine painting is decaying, which would facilitate woman's victory, but I do not think so; modern masculine painting has never been so vigorous, so inspired by an idea since the great religious uprush of the Primitives.

Women are striving to conform not to a lower but to a higher standard, a standard where the sensuality of art is informed by intellect. If, therefore, they conform more closely to the standard which men are establishing, they are more than holding their own; they are gaining ground.

Yet they are still, in numbers and in quality, much inferior to the men. Anne Estelle Rice alone cannot tilt in the ring against Fergusson, Gaugin, Matisse, Picasso. And it is not true that they have been entirely deprived of opportunity. Up to the 'seventies or 'eighties, woman was certainly very much hampered by public opinion. For some centuries it had been held that she should paint flowers, but not bodies; nowadays, dizzily soaring, she has begun to paint cranes and gasometers. The result of the old attitude was that the work of women was mainly futile because it was expected to be futile; though painters were not always gentlemen, female painters seemed to have to be ladies, but times changed. There came the djibbah, Bernard Shaw, and the cigarette; women began to flock into Colarossi's and the Slade, into the minor schools where, I regret to say, the new spirit has yet to blow and to do away with the interesting practice of the life class where the male model wears bathing drawers. Woman has had her opportunity, and any morning on the Boulevard Montparnasse you can see her carrying her paraphernalia towards the Grande Chaumiere and the other studios. She is suffering a good deal from the effects of past neglect, but much of that neglect is so far away that we must ask ourselves why woman has not yet responded to the more tender attitude of modern days. For she has not entirely responded; she is still either a little afraid of novelty or inclined to hug it, to affront the notorious perils of love at first sight.

I believe that the causes of women's failure in painting are twofold--manual and mental. Though disinclined to generalize upon the female temperament, because such generalizations generally lead to the discovery of a paradox, I am conscious in woman of a quality of impatience.

While woman will exhibit infinite patience, infinite obstinacy, in the pursuit of an end, she is often inclined to leap too quickly towards that end. To use a metaphor, she may spend her whole life in trying to cut down a tree without taking the preliminary trouble to have her ax sharpened; she does unwillingly the immense labor on the antique, she neglects her anatomy, she sacrifices line to color.

This is natural enough, for she has a keen sense of color. As witness her clothes. When clothes are the work of woman they are generally beautiful in color; when they are beautiful in line they are generally by Poiret. For line tends to be pure and cold, and I hope I will shock nobody when I suggest that purity and coldness are masculine rather than feminine. Color is the expression of passion, line is the expression of intellect, or rather of that curious combination of intellect and passion, of intellect directing passion, and of passion inflaming intellect, which is art as understood by man. It is to this second group of causes, those I have called mental, that the inferiority of the woman painter is traceable. There is a lack of intellect in her work. It is true that the male painter is often just a painter, and that I can think of no case to-day which reproduces the engineering capacities of Leonardo da Vinci, but I refer rather to a general intellectual sweep than to a specialized capacity. Men do not hold themselves so far aloof from politics, business and philosophy as do women; too many of the latter read nothing whatever. For some painters a novel is too much, while their selection among the contents of the newspaper might be improved upon by a domestic servant. There is a lack of depth, a lack of intellectual quality, of that "general" quality which, directed into other channels, produces the engineer, the business man and the politician. I do not believe in "artistic capacity", "scientific capacity", "business capacity"; there is nothing but "capacity" which takes varying forms, just as there is red hair and black hair, but always hair. In male painting intellect sometimes stands behind passion; in female painting the attitude is purely sensuous, and that is not to be wondered at: from the days of the anthropoid ape to this one we have developed nothing in woman but the passionate quality; we have taught her to charm, to smile, and to lie until she thinks she can do nothing but charm, and believes in her own lies. We have refused her education, we have made her into a slave. Thus, while many of the male painters are not intellectuals, they have been able to draw upon the higher average quality of the male mind, while woman to-day, desirous of so doing, will find very little to the credit of the account of her sex.

What is the conclusion to be drawn? It is to my mind obvious enough. If woman is producing inferior work it is because she is still an inferior creature, but I do not think she will remain one. Her progress during the last thirty years has been staggering; she has forced herself into the trades, into professions, into politics; she has produced standard works; in one or two cases she has been creative in science; and I believe, therefore, that her intellect is on the up grade, and that her sex is accumulating those resources which will serve as a background to the artistic development of her passionate faculty. Woman is about to gain political power. She will use it to improve the education of her sex, to broaden its opportunities. She is coming out into the world in cooeperation and in conflict with man; she will become more self-conscious, and gain a solidarity of sex upon which will follow mutual mental stimulation and specialized sex development. For that reason I believe woman's progress will not be less in the pictorial arts than in other fields if she develops in herself the fullness of life and its implications. She will inevitably wage the sex war: she will gain her artistic deserts after the sex peace.

[The end]
W. L. George's essay: Woman And The Paint Pot

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