Women artists have been ignored for far too long

At first glance, Clara Peeters’s ‘Still Life with a Vase of Flowers, Goblets and Shells’ (1612) appears to be just that. Carefully arranged on a wooden tabletop, the collected objects are in conversation, the nubby curves of the shells echoing the ribbed neck of the stone vase, their dusky and rosy hues matching the open and squeezed shut buds. But look closer at the gleaming gilt goblet on the right and you’ll notice that the Flemish artist has smuggled tiny self-portraits into the polished roundels – a clever bid to avoid the misattribution of her painting to a man, perhaps, and a form of self-assertion in the male-dominated art world.

Peeters is one of very many women celebrated in the art historian and presenter Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men, a rallying cry that borrows its title from a regular feature on the reading list of undergraduate art history students: E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art. ‘It’s a wonderful book, but for one flaw,’ writes Hessel. ‘His first edition (1950) included zero women artists, and even the 16th edition includes only one.’ Other mind-boggling statistics reeled off in the early pages of her vital companion piece include the percentage of women artists who currently make up the collection of the National Gallery in London: also only one.

Hessel’s aim is both to ‘create a new guide’ and to ‘supplement what we already know’. Her take on the story of art stretches from the 1500s to the present and is divided into five parts that focus on major moments. She isn’t the first to demand a revision of the male-ordered narrative, as she acknowledged in 2015 when she founded her popular Instagram account @thegreatwomenartists and named it after the ground breaking art historian Linda Nochlin’s passionate and provocative essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, published in 1971.