As an artist and a woman (and for other reasons) I identify with Celia Paul particularly. There was an article in the NYT prior to this one about her work - "An Artist's Muse Steps Out of the Shadows with Paintings of Her Own," March 5 2018. I'm somewhat baffled by the way the article is being taken, as if, a, it had a single major point of view that infuriated some readers, and b, it was dismissive of female artists. I found it to be complex -and that suits the subject matter- and I also did not find it in any way denigrating to the artists to describe their lives as it did.
5
This piece didn't tell me a lot about Paul's art (though a bit more about Brown's) but instead focused, like a women's magazine feature, on their lives as lovers and mothers. Why?
Perhaps Cusk is projecting. Writers also practise an art and women who write often must deal with social and personal difficulties women in every walk of life have to deal with.
But maybe we need to change the question; maybe we need to why so many accomplished men lead emotionally confused and empty lives in which they fail to put as much value on love as on their work.
What matters is the work, what matters is the love. We should all try to fit both into our lives, men and women.
7
Currently, what it takes for a female artist to thrive in a medium dominated by men, is to be well connected in childhood. The artists featured have unique life stories. What's similar is the devotion of their parents and prominent fathers. Being encouraged and aided to apply to top notch art school is a powerful motivator and confidence builder. With that kind of backing, a woman painter with some talent, has a chance. Freud was a cruel womanizer. What's worse, he got away with it. He was also incredibly talented. Not unlike several male artists that come to mind. I hope future women painters have that kind of talent and unbridled independence (sans cruel persona) to catapult them to equivalent art careers.
10
Very sad article. Sad that a woman could write such a reactionary view of women and artists who are women. It also mutes the voices of the actual artists as this is not a posthumous story.
4
Luckily I can read this in print when the Sunday paper comes because it takes forever for a picture of Celia Paul's work to show up. We're reading about art work so it doesn't seem to much to ask to see it.
7
@West Coast Writing from Maine, I nonetheless accessed the article vis a vis the L.A. Times, to which I subscribe, being a fourth generation Angeleno. I too was frustrated by no images loading. If you subscribe to the NYT, as I do, you can access the full article and images on their website. Good luck!
1
Thank you, Rachel Cusk. Rich, exploratory, hauntingly familiar in so many aspects, your story of these two women's lives and work and the counterpoint you set up between their remarkable biographies speaks volumes about the ways in which women artist's lives and their work is embedded in family, both those of origin, and those they courageously choose to create. Your long piece illuminates my thinking and urges me not to abandon my own interrogations of what it means to be a woman, and an artist. There are young female artists in my family, one the mother of my grandchildren. Everything you write resonates with my experience of the devotion of young women to their children, and their desperate need to get to their work and make it. What you uncover here will inform and inspire me to keep finding ways ways I can encourage and protect them in their lives and their work. Thank you, again.
8
This is beautiful and complicated and unsettling - thank you.
7
Nearly a week later I am still alarmed and disturbed by this article and the anachronistic look at both the lives and temperaments of artists and how women navigate sexism. The stereotypes are almost comical, if not for the fact that Cusk took them seriously. The disservice that she did to Paul's art is shameful. This article is outdated and to quote another reader, a 'Victorian fantasy'.
7
I'm a male artist. Many of my favourite artists inspiring me over the years have been female. Louise Borgeouis, Diane arbus, Cindy Sherman, Frida Kahlo, Susan Rothenberg. Not ever did I look at a piece of art and think, "oh a woman made this? then I dont like it" or "oh the artist was not suffering? then he/she can't be a real artist". The author it seems does not know how to look at art, but instead need all these other layers to tell her whether an artist is good or not. I wonder, is she quietly going through a checklist in her head before she deems an artwork valid? Suffering? check male? check poor? check
This article is so depressing. Who are you people? Unsuccessful talented artists are everywhere. men and women. Stop telling women they're not successful simply because they are female. self doubt is stifling. Go to artrank.com and you see that about half of the most collectable artists today are women. Biennials, grants, awards are dominated by women as well. Cheer up!
12
Yes, and thank you:)
1
@James As someone who works in the art world I can attest that being a mid-career artist who is caucasian and middle aged is the kiss of death.
2
Oh, dear.
Men are less compromised by everything, except making money.
They don't get pregnant or breastfeed or have primary childcare responsibilities. They can shave their heads, throw on crummy clothing, be smelly and unshaven, and don't wear makeup.
It's a wonder women get anything done.
10
@Mary Rivkatot Women can choose to do any of those things, or not.
1
One of the sad things about this article is that Celia Paul couldn't just have an article about her work in the Times instead of this. Americans don't get British art, they don't know or like Auerbach, Kossoff, its a different world and also a fading one. Paul has a whole body of work that is incredible. Look at the ocean paintings. The rooms. I dislike the negative connotation of her aesthetic here. You wouldn't tell Samuel Beckett to change his lifestyle.
9
@Marjorie Summons
I admit that I came to my awareness of them belatedly twenty years ago; but this American knows and loves the work of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossof, which I cherish as much as that of their contemporaries of equal significance on this side of the Atlantic: Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud.
I am sorry that it has taken so long for me to begin becoming familiar with the work of Celia Paul.
May I be enriched by her work as much as I have been by that of another artist on this side of the Atlantic whose work, so different from Paul's, I belatedly came to also: Agnes Martin.
Now, to the ocean paintings and the rooms.
2
This article generated a lot of thoughts for me about creating art and womanhood, and the way these two artists have interpreted this for themselves. The thought that has lingered longest for me is that the juxtaposition of the two male mentors could not have been starker. Their actions toward these two young women - one exploitive and demeaning, the other supportive and loving, one taking inspiration, the other giving valuable time and resources - had a huge impact on how those women each grew as an artist and parent. The contrast is heightened by their relationships with female mentors. One diminishes and abases her mother, the other is given a studio by a female artist and creative license from her own mother. I wonder now about the women in between and what art they are producing. Thanks for such a thought-provoking piece.
12
Lucian Freud looks like exactly what he is - Lecherous old man using his power to take advantage of his student, then repressing a talented artist (and possible competitor)and then abandons his own child. What a guy
23
I know that one's taste in art is completely personal BUT.... all of the art shown or referenced here seems to me to be nothing but ugly, colorless and uncreative. I read somewhere once that with art - what matters is not what the artist feels when he/she creates it, but the feelings it evokes in others when the artist is gone. AND it often seems that being an artist simply requires a great ego that drives you to put your art out there, no matter how pointless it is, as long as you have a story with lots of angst to go along with it.
3
@Elizabeth: In America, "good" art means that which rich people are eager to buy with inherited money and then cram into the museums they support as a tax dodge.
https://emcphd.wordpress.com
3
A very interesting article, and even more interesting and astute comments. I am a nearly 70 year old artist who always put supporting his family before making art and so have had no real career. There are men who do this as well as women. I suppose a part of me always wanted to be made in the Picasso/Giacometti/Freud mold of the selfish artist. But I guess I am not, and am not sure if I'm not just rationalizing a lack of talent. These two women both had a powerful male figure in their life. They both work hard and are gifted and deserve their success, but on some level the article seems to come down to the difference between a successful and unsuccessful artist is simply proximity to power in the tight knit art world. That has nothing to do with gender.
21
@Will Rothfuss Did we just read the same article?
3
This article is wildly mis-titled; it should be something like "Male Art Power and two women artists." As an art student, Cecily Paul was abused and exploited by Lucien Freud, whose figure stalks her more than 40 years later. Art student Cecily Brown was given an entree into the international art world by eminent British critic David Sylvester, who turned out to be her father! These skewed cases aren't representative of mid-career or younger artists. The numerous false dichotomies of (female) art vs life in the article would be more at home in a piece about the immediate post-war period.
Several views in the Celia Paul section weren't attributed, so you can't tell whether they come from an interview, from the author Rachel Cusk or from a memoir by Paul glancingly mentioned late in the essay, when in fact it is a recently published book.
A more perceptive take on Celia Paul is found in Zadie Smith's NYRB Nov 21 review of Paul's My Portrait; that article also illustrates a recent work by Paul while the Cusk piece only shows an early work from her victim period.
26
@Dolphin H. Thank you. I had to work hard to try to connect the pieces in this article, and to figure out who had said what. And why these two artists? There are more -- I just need to know why we are focusing on these two. Was this article rushed into print because of the book coming out? Will go read the NYRB review, and it is mystifying that it was not at the centre of this article.
9
I’m an artist, I paint. We’ve raised four children. I paint. I’ve had my ups and downs. I paint. I’m still married. I paint. Why so much angst? We define ourselves, don’t we? Paint.
26
@Megan Lawlor I feel like this feature was more about how women address femininity (or don't) in the context of making artworks, and less about the literal restrictions a feminine existence brings. Both women are prolific painters – they're doing the work.
It's more about how they've contextualized these aspects of themselves in building a career and artistic oeuvre (and how men aren't faced with this complicated strategizing).
8
However, it really isn’t complicated. Everyone has their own method of working, which isn’t defined by being male or female, unless one lets it be.
Whether a woman is outwardly mentioning femininity, inequality, etc. or not — it’s still present in the work. And the decision whether or not to lead with this concept carries a lot of meaning, thus requiring more strategizing/contemplation from women artists.
Men aren’t forced to decide whether they want to address being a masculine man in their work. If they decide to, great, but it’s not inherent in the work.
I don’t mean that this is entirely negative, and it’s actually a sign of progress in my mind that we’re discussing this in a more nuanced way (vs can women do it? do they belong?). I also think this tension tends to make the contemporary work I’ve seen from women (unknowingly) more interesting than their male counterparts.
I write all of this not to be antagonistic, but rather to drive home the point that women artists are getting it done just as well as the men, but there are a lot more subtleties in this conversation that we have yet to work through.
5
“Great men are often best admired at a distance.” I can’t remember the great man who said that, but I’m sure he no longer was young.
7
Interesting companion piece, also in her new collection, Coventry:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/dec/12/rachel-cusk-women-writing-review
1
Both of my parents were working artists that met at the portrait artist shack at Knotts Berry Farm. Both fit the typical artist mold, to some degree - self-centered, emotional, unpredictable. My mother, however, had a modicum more of feeling responsible to me.
The question I have when reading about these artists, or most artists highlighted in NYT, is when did Big Art decide that only pieces devoid of aesthetic warmth, beauty and lyricism and executed without basic craft, become worthy of critical attention? Stuff puts a hurt on my eyeballs.
14
@Hayward P.
I think that would have made a much more interesting exploration, but the institutional entrenchment that art=cold abstraction is so oppressive that people who write about art can only do so after having bought into the belief that the emperor is fully clothed and looks amazing.
It would be great if the NY Times would profile artists who are going off the beaten path, instead of those who are offering only slight variations on worn out themes.
10
@Hayward P.
So it's not just me. The paintings in this piece are so drab, I don't understand how they could be considered visually captivating.
2
Actually she is always just an artist and she is always a woman.
I wish the Benglis/Morris dustup of the 70s had been addressed as another way of women owning space. We could start labeling male artists. I personally like having male art and female art. They would have an interesting conversation.
Madame Curie and her father taking care of the children is a nice model, though not always realistic. Bring the parents in and let them run households (teamwork).
1
Thank you for this thoughtful examination of the 'female' in art. It is a complicated and ever evolving story which seems to be true of females themselves. We are a rich narrative.
8
I found this to be kind of a strange and depressing article (and I had been disposed to like it). Not so much because of the artists themselves - who really don't seem to have much in common with one another, apart from their gender and livelihood - as because of what seems to be Cusk's insistently fatalistic, pessimistic take on them. I much preferred the recent Zadie Smith essay, in the NY Review of Books, on Paul's life, work and recent memoir. Smith's essay, like the Cusk essay, discusses Paul through the filter of sexism and the role of the female artist; unlike the Cusk essay, it finds hope and new ways of seeing in the example of Paul's life and work. No doubt it's the earnest idealistic American in me, but I much preferred this as a "last word."
18
this is as exhausting to read as one of the author's novels. i'm wiped.
6
I have read Cusk, and her observations about the world -- her world -- have generally struck me as positing her solipsism in print.
Apparently there are those readers who reward her for that.
This article confirms my doubts. Shame on you Lucien!
6
"Is there a female equivalent to this image?"
The answer is no. Not in film, not in life.
Well, wait...maybe in film. But does Auntie Mame count? She wasn't horrible, just irreverent and life-loving. Girls just wanna have fun.
In 2020, male characters like that of Giocometti...bore me. They are clichés. They still exist as a big part of life. I know. I've met them. In fact, last night I had dinner with one. A polite version of a spoiled, well-groomed indigestible cookie of a man. I held my fork steady, leveraged by the strongest and longest finger of my right hand and vowed never to repeat such a wasted meal.
You will rarely find a woman chef acting like this in a professional kitchen, nor a female head-of-state insulting another. And you can substitute those two examples to practically every other context.
14
@Lisa Agree and thank you Well expressed.
1
This article is perturbing in so many ways.
9
To answer your headline question: apparently not, as long as the New York Times and other media keep making this a headline question.
Let me ask you a question:
Who has the better chance of having a successful career in the art world today: a young(ish) woman of means with connections and talent who "examines" male dominance and victimhood? Or a white male in his sixties with talent but with no money, no connections, and a "cancel-culture" headwind of ideological indifference (at best) working against him?
The answer is: neither, really.
It is rare for anyone to have a meaningful or profitable career as an artist using traditional materials. It really is not about your talent or your work. It is not about what you know or, as people used to say, "who you know." It is about who knows you and what usefullness you bring to them, and for how long that stays relevent. Nobody cares about your saga--unless, it happens to have the right angles to feed into the narrative that is being marketed, as it does here.
A writer has to find you and use, not your actual work, but your "story," as an illustration of whatever larger point they have been tryimg to make before they were even aware of you.
This week, it appears to be sad, rich daughters of dead, famous, womanizing, male painters, and how crushing and terrible that is, and...
17
For the record, I know many incredible and kind artists of both genders. (And even a few artists transitioning genders.)
If any male (or female) artist behaved the way the author describes male artists: “He is violent and selfish. He neglects or betrays his friends and family. He smokes, drinks, scandalizes, indulges his lusts...” !?! Huh? If this guy exists, he will be bankrupted by legal and medical fees very quickly.
Many male artists I know under 55 had single, feminist moms who did a miraculous job at raising kids. And these kids in turn, are doing a miraculous job at raising their kids and having careers in 2019.
The stereotype of the arrogant male artist was based on truth in past decades. (I’ve also met priests, politicians and writers of this ilk.) The ones I dodged years ago are long dead or have been revealed as creeps.
In current times, artists who show in museums and art fairs may live anywhere on the globe and keep in touch via social media rather than a bar or a classroom. Many are clean and sober due to doctors’ warnings. They worry about finding a decent middle-school for his or her children. They fret about money. And from my experience, they all put their kids first.
The real lives of artists can be pretty boring but I’m glad I lived long enough to see some serious change. And I hope Celia Paul finds some freedom and change in the coming years.
10
So it's not what you do, it's who you do? Or who made you and which institute you went to?
Sorry, I couldn't finish this. I need pie.
12
@Rc I think you've made a perfect summation of this article and its value relative to pie.
2
@ Rc, very much so. And not just the art world. Talent bolsters but a moneyed, well connected background is undoubtedly better. If the family is quirky and poor, being male and talented is a great advantage. In that case, talent can lead to a successful career. I know a few. Something tells me if the said individual was a female painter, the career would never have materialized. Hurdles are just too great. Painting studios, alone, are very expensive propositions. Sadly, I don't know any talented women painters who exclusively devoted their time to their painting unless they were children from wealthy, supportive families or knew the 'right' men. The women, deservedly, have decent careers because of their talent and devotion. The moral and financial support clinches the deal. On the flip side, I know female artists of mediocre talent who married men of means and have incredible studios and a painting hobby. I hope there are exceptions out there that can be noted in this comment section.
2
"Can a Woman Who Is an Artist Ever Just Be an Artist?"
Yes.
If she wants to be.
If she stops comparing herself to others.
The choice is hers.
Many women I know took care of that when they were quite young.
https://emcphd.wordpress.com
7
I so much rather read a critique of the work and ideas.
14
Next time I see an article with "on a male dominated profession" in it I will stop reading immediately. This topic is so tired. And so tiring.
11
In an article, the moment I come across a photo of an artist posing in front of his oeuvre and a listing of names, supposedly referring to very important people, I know I have to switch off the light.
Did I miss anything?
3
Are we not going to at all consider the fact that this profile about women in art only profiles two white women? Women of color too exist and navigate the art space. I think it is one thing to track the careers of these women through their womanhood (which is fine by me) but to represent their experiences as the overall experience of all women is limiting. Intersectionality exists.
11
Lucian Freud; the irony should not be lost that he was monster of a distinctly Freudian variety, let loose upon various landscapes. He is an example of why many people walk away from the “Art World” and it’s milieu flummoxed and dispirited. Clearly a genius, but after a time, the long trip back home to Cleveland suddenly seems like a no-brainer.
There is a sense that across the Arts, it’s a rigged game. Innocents are preyed upon. Everything is negotiated. At some point you want to see the angry villagers go ransack a studio or two. To see the laws of greater society applied to those buffered by “artistic reverence”. In a way, that seems to be happening now.
6
Artists in 18 Major US Museums Are 85% White and 87% Male, Study Says
In response, artist and data journalist Mona Chalabi offered her version of what the composition of a museum collection should look like if it were to represent the entire population.
https://hyperallergic.com/501999/artists-in-18-major-us-museums-are-85-white-and-87-male-study-says/
What Cusk exposes is a reality that women artists face, the art is secondary to the men that exploit and steal creativity that women possess.
"The show centered on Freud and Bacon; Celia was presented as “influenced by” rather than “influences on.”"
I went to Cooper Union, I had a male teacher that often praised my work. Years later I went to a gallery to see his recent paintings. There were versions of my work up on the gallery walls.
It is very hard to cut a break as a woman artist. Ceila Paul's work is brilliant.
How many brilliant women artists have had to ride the coattails of men who saw them as their muses?
13
What a moving, brilliant portrait of the challenges faced by female artists.
4
I found this article to be stupidly narrow in it's effort to understand the contemporary woman artist. I have a daughter who is ranked among the top 200 contemporary fine arts artists in the world, and she had none of the experiences of being dominated by male artists or concerned about the attitude of male dominance in art. She founded an art school in Chicago and attracted both men and women to her school, but mostly women. The fact is women have just as strong a presence in fine arts than men today; in fact, artistic women today are more prevalent and visible than men, and more women than men become artists. This article is way out of date and might have been more relevant 100 years ago than what occurs now, in the 21st century.
9
@James George
The truth doesn't fit the agenda.
1
Not convincing. I reads like the description of the Giacometti film - fake - overly dramatized. Why are films and writing about artists always so off? This is not what living as a painter is like, not the movies and not this article.
2
Wow. What a read. I've heard of the science of science––this was the art of art. I bought a painting this summer by a female artist whose worked I have long admired. I also made a conscious effort to read more books by women in 2012. It is crazy how many books or art with and from different perspectives is waiting out there to be found.
6
As a woman you want to achieve the same success in art as men?
Do what Taylor Swift did. Use her as a model. She just was announced as the highest paying entertainer beating out all men and women with $250 million dollars a year.
Don't identity/social engineer obsess, bash men, carp, whine, enable, co dependent, demand quotas, demand 50+ percent of everything because you are a woman.
Do what Taylor did, she did it the old fashion way, she earned it.
She had a talent, put in the long hours, didn't bash anybody, didn't demand things, worked incredible hard and made it to the top.
2
Seems like if you frame someone as beng a woman artist, then you are being unfair. But then, if you frame them as an artist and ignore their experience as a woman, you are being unfair.
2
After reading this piece by Rachel Cusk, and the reactions to it, I watched a video interview with Celia Paul by the great critic, Hilton Als. The first image I had of Celia Paul is of a delicate, extremely introverted woman. She is sitting in a room surrounded by her beautiful paintings – many of them self-portraits. I learned from Cusk’s article that Celia Paul comes from a missionary family – a patriarchal, religious family. And that this artist/woman was raped by Lucian Freud when she was 18. She maintained a long relationship with her rapist, and had a son by him. The other artist/woman in Cusk’s piece, Cecily Brown, was raised by her independent single-mother who was a writer. When she was 18 she found out that a man she thought was a friend of the family, was actually her father. He encouraged her abilities as a painter. Celia Paul’s talent, on the other hand, was the portal for her victimhood as a woman. The miracle is that the artist Celia Paul not only survived but prevailed. The work, and the human spirit of these two female human beings are entirely different, but both are artists of recognized achievement. Cusk’s piece is an exploration of their achievements as women living and working in the patriarchy. (Although she doesn’t use this word, which has become a meme, it is, of course, implied, because it is the air we all breathe.) But I wonder if, had she used that word, responses and comments would be less critical.
8
@Kathleen
You're over the line when you call what happened between them "rape". Even Rachel Cusk doesn't go there. Why do you? It's totally irresponsible.
Here are Celia Paul's own words about meeting and starting a relationship with Lucian Freud from a NY Times piece just last year: "“He sensed that I was romantic, and somehow it was the beauty that got me, I think: the beauty of his art and his courtship,” she said. “He was tender, and very, very gentle.”
But I suppose she's just confused.
4
@J.C. I understand what you are saying, it is up to Paul to identify what her experience was. But. I read it as a rape also. It was a description of an older man using his power, self-assurance, dominant personality to aggressively pursue and insist on a physical relationship with an inexperienced girl who had no real understanding of what she was agreeing to. If you think that rape is only accomplished through violence then you have never been raped.
6
If you think seduction is rape, and not that physical force is most clearly rape, you are the one who hasn’t been raped. Moreover, you’re gaslighting all the women who have truly and actually and without ambiguity been raped.
1
My mother, my sister, and I, were and are all artists. My mother was born in 1934, in a time when Disney studios felt perfectly comfortable rejecting artists simply because they were female. My mother never felt at ease with her talent. She was told time and again by many people that it took away from her focus on being a "proper woman". She never pursued a serious career.
I was told all time time to "study something practical" by the same people who's knowledge of the professional art world began and ended with the typical tortured stereotype of male artist starving in an attic. My sister's dreams and mine were seen as silly,as a stop before marriage and children, but at least we were sent to a good art school. It was seen as a phase we were to work through.
Now, years later, I look back on the profession I simply could not give up. I can look at the wall next to me and see the awards I've won for my art. I can go into many large retail stores and see the toys and packaging my sister has designed. I can buy books we've illustrated online. I can see how horribly wrong people were about my sister and I. I see progress.
I'm really, really tired of the gloom and doom approach to women's rights. Let's CELEBRATE the fact that women artists are here to stay.
12
Women will probably always struggle, in the art world as in the wider patriarchal world. We are the gentler and more compassionate sex, and will be taken advantage of more often because it’s easy. However, inside women there is a hidden strength that is honed through the very abuse and control we suffer. As artists we can eventually profit from this, as Nietzsche wrote, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” I salute women artists, famous or unknown. I love women’s art; the world needs women’s art.
3
Genius is a construct created by untalented cowardly males with no character or integrity and by those who want to profit from drama. Art is a dialogue, not an isolated event. And it is a dialogue between humans not limited by gender, race, ethnic or cultural boundaries.
4
Anyone can be an artist. If you need monetary affirmation of your art the be a businessman or woman.
2
In the professional setting of the art world, the assumption that a woman’s talent is not so much inferior to men but that they do not receive equal notoriety is more or less a function of the person making a living as a critic.
Should the dysfunctional attitude and life style of many male artists be the acid test for women artists to achieve genius status perhaps is once again contingent on the critics and their attitude in conveying the artistry of any artist to the general public.
1
As a young artist myself at one time I found other people's expectations of what I should be, do and so on so far from what I wanted to do or felt that I finally just gave up and stopped doing art altogether .. What a ridiculous occupation to pursue. Not the art itself, but all the garbage associated with being an artist and I suspect it runs both ways for men and women alike.
I remember my first introduction to the people who could afford to buy the art I was working on, the fancy suits and gowns, the martini's and glasses of champagne and so on. I had about as much in common with them as I did with space aliens invading the earth and would have rather burn every bit of my art than leave it hanging in their mega fancy homes they wouldn't dream of letting me personally enter. After all, the middlemen and galleries make all the money. Most artists themselves get almost nothing for their labor of love.
The talent was definitely there, but I had zero desire to spend half my days hobnobbing with people who would no sooner see me as an equal as they would fly to the moon. Instead, in the end I painted and drew people from poor neighborhoods and gave those paintings and drawings to them. Several years later I ran into a kid I had drawn. He was just a young boy full of ideas and no money. He still had that same drawing 30 years later hanging in his extremely modest home. I got more satisfaction from that than anything I ever sold.
11
Re: "Can a woman who is an artist ever just be an artist?" Sounds to me as if the one who wants to prevent her is the one who concocted this lovely title.
4
"On their own merits" is awfully optimistic for any artist. Cecily's father is a well known British art historian. And she wasn't the most reserved sexual being; It helps to have backing or a give and take to help establish yourself.
Oh, let me lament about those established artists and critics who offered a quid pro quo for my young raising stardom back in the day.
2
The only way forward and to answer the headline's question is to stop this (melodramatic) emphasis on biography when writing about artists who are women.
It's well and truly time to junk this redundant emphasis on relationships, especially relationships with (famous, mad/bad/dangerous to know) men - in articles such as this.
Focus on the art. Only. Put it in context. Describe how the artist, who happens to be a woman, thinks - not feels, thinks - about her work. Who she is influenced by. Who is influenced by her.
In other words: write about an artist, or writer, or musician who happens to be a woman the exact same way we write about men (who write, paint, or play/compose music).
I have zero interest in Lucian Freud, seriously. Zero interest in how he had sex with his 18-year-old student, or how he is seen by his family members etc.
I wanted to read about these two painters who I don't know anything about and still know very little, unfortunately even after reading this very long piece.
Finally there were plenty of women artists in Paris the same time as Giacometti. Why not write about them instead?
5
Not if she’s also Keanu Reeves’ date, it seems..
"Can a Woman Who Is an Artist Ever Just Be an Artist?"
The answer is a resounding NO.
And the reason is because today's liberal media cannot allow such a single, large, generalized group to exist by itself. It must break such a large group down into as many subgroups as possible. First subgroup is gender, or lack thereof. After that we divide into race. Then we divide by wealth and social status. After that, then we divide by any apparent social issues, like descendants of slavery, or of some form of abuse, i.e. sexual, mental, physical, health, etc...
So when we ask these questions like, "Can a Woman Who Is an Artist Ever Just Be an Artist?", we need to look at ourselves and realize it's because we say things like, we need to elect a woman president because it's time we had a woman. Or we need more women in top management now, regardless of what the corporate pipeline of women looks like. Or when we rave about the achievements of the 1st all women astronaut crew, because they are women, not because they did something so much more outstanding than men have ever done.
When we break a larger group into smaller and smaller groups to suit our social agenda and then try to reverse that to say why cant we just consider her an "artist only"? Its because we have set up this scenario ourselves. You cant have your cake and eat it too. If you want to break down a group into its smallest possible components, then that subgroup will always and forever be a subgroup.
4
My head ached reading this article filled with the self-absorption of shallow people who believe they are actors in some cosmic activity while actually engaged in the production of an alternative currency used to store the wealth of the wealthy.
Lucian Freud, one of the market's participants, is now beyond the contempt that he truly deserved.
2
Seems like Cecily Brown is secretly being exactly who she wants to be now and before. Lucian Freud was guilty of being a pig, however, Cecily was already a bundle of artistic energy and make an independent decision to join into the destractions of lust without loosing her own eye and hand. I'd say that she needs to take her own pulse and journey on with her art her way. Motherhood, and hence grand children, will only serve as elements of new nerve endings and brush strokes. Maybe Ms. Brown will live another fifty years and her work will endure forever.
3
Both women have been successful as painters, albeit with sterling connections to start, they worked hard, were determined, overcame obstacles and made it. That's far better than most artists - male or female. While the influence of men (and women) in their lives is important, successful people tend to be driven enough to suceed regardless of their career paths. At least it used to be that way.....
5
When I paint, I don't think about being female at all. In fact, I feel completely free of gender, which is the opposite of the way I feel in many other circumstances (marriage, work, etc.) When I have made embroidery, I do think about femininity and subverting it using a typically "female" art form. But, honestly, I don't see embroidery or any other medium as essentially female or male, it's just a vehicle for communicating. Most of the time, femininity just doesn't figure into the act of making art for me. Does this "compromise the expressive act" for me? I don't think so.
Also, I think for many people, the gender binary is breaking down as we recognize a spectrum of possible orientations and identities. That's freeing for everyone.
9
@Heather Kerley
Most artists can't make a decent living with their art, whatever medium it is. People don't want to pay for it. And there are plenty of "agents" out there who willingly take advantage, of the artist's need, for their own personal gain.
3
Since I live in a rural environment far from London and New York I find the urban context contributes to the problem of self image in both women and men in the arts; it is one dimensional and does not connect well with the rest of what the universe has to offer our imaginative creative minds. This article is very perceptive and powerful look into this limited artistic world. But then I compare these women to a rural/urban artist like Georgia O'Keeffe and by comparing the content of her work along side these two women I wonder if the urban context is what holds them hostage, not the men alone?
5
Young artists (or any one) face choices concerning how their emotional lives evolve as their years of training pass by and their cultural and social aims evolve. They/we find in the process that all these elements of the self (and others) don't evolve at the same rate or depth. If there isn't avoidance of any default to masochistic alliances, a situation like Paul's develops. How this relates to Brown's life is totally misplaced. However, some in the English art world of decades past certainly placed a high value on fantasies of inspired asceticism and illusions about what an artist might be and lacked charity to one's self! There is so much ballast for this condition considering the nation's fate in two terrible cataclysmic wars and the aftermath of both. I wish Paul a speedy recovery to reveries.
I think these are good, but also typical examples, that definitely represent the majority of a privileged class of women who have the chance to pursue their art form, painting, writing or dance.
But there are now multitudes of examples of women 50 who can be lightposts of elevating from their own brilliance and talents.
Angela Dufresne is one.
It’s your job to find others as an art critic. Promote the ones acting outside of male approval as a launching platform.
8
What is made clear in this piece is that in order to make a career in the modern art world you have to go to the right schools, be taught by the right people, be taken under the wing of influential people, be related to the right people, and make the "right" kind of art. You don't make it on talent alone. You have sell yourself in some way to those who matter.
A highly sensitive artist, like Celia Paul, can be broken down just by wading through the briar patch of the art world. It's not much different from throwing them into a cut-throat corporate environment and expecting them to thrive. Those who usually come out on top are those same types who come out on top in the business world. And they are known to use and abuse the sensitive ones.
25
This really hit home. As a working artist raising two children mostly alone, the struggle between artistic and domestic demands is the central issue of my life. They are two states of mind that don’t easily mix. There aren’t very many successful single parent artists for a reason. Unless there’s family money or other help. I do think it’s harder for women to navigate. Men, especially creative men, are forgiven for parental failures that mothers could never get away with. I feel lucky to have great kids and work I love, but the constant feelings of failure and guilt are very wearing.
31
The article offered an account of two artist's lives so foreign to mine in circumstance, yet familiar in pattern of events.
My interest is science. My success, working for global corporate companies over my entire working career; soon to end after 3 decades. All paths in the experience dominated by men's reasoning, judgement and some personal overtures.
My frame of reference: Midwestern upbringing by widowed, christian, working mom.
Even in science, where gender neutral logic could result, the execution relies on a predominately male population.
My sentiment is this is a natural phenomenon that results from biology, forces of nature and entropic human interactions.
Can a journalist, today, pursue this topic and find a like for like comparison to any profession independent of a male dominated institution and personal influence.
Awareness is the key. This article was of value to me.
Thank you.
14
I was gripped as I read this, identifying with several aspects of both women's biographies and the questions they continue to grapple with. Rachel, your writing articulated here many paradoxical truths that I've struggled to wrap my head around for years as a woman striving to make art. I don't know that there are easy answers to the questions posed... but I hope, in time, for another generation of creative women, they may emerge.
9
I was hoping this article (by its title) would help answer the question, can a woman just be an artist in her own right, by delving into their work on their own merits. I had hoped to read how women artists act independently within a male dominated art world and find their creativity despite the pressures women experience in the arts. But instead here is a rather salacious, morose description of two different women artists' lives in the context of the men who surrounded them, and in the context of a society that has trouble allowing women to be creative or recognizes women as geniuses. It is so sad. The stereotype of such women only focuses on their eccentricities and abuse by men and how they look and what they're wearing, etc etc, rather than their talent, their vision, their use of Color and light, where their inspiration comes from, etc.
The writer over psychoanalyzes these women and fails to properly appreciate them as women who ARE artists, who have persevered despite the ongoing challenges inherent in being women doing anything traditionally male (ie choosing to devote their lives to their work vs being wives/mothers/caretakers/muses).
Perhaps a reflection of the writer's own struggles with these issues as a woman writer?
44
@Ellen S. I think she's writing brilliantly about these 2 women artists. There are thousands of other stories someone else might write. My own story doesn't reflect these women but I've seen these women over and over in the art world...being used and abused by men older or more well known then themselves..
6
I found this piece incredibly sad. After I read it, my reaction was to immediately take Paul away from that studio, and move her to a happy place. I know many artists feel they have to be connected to pain to create, but this is an artist myth.
When I see her art I see lack of hope, solitude, depression, dampness.
I would hope she breaks free.
11
@Oh My
Yes, I went and looked at more work by both artists and the muted color palette Paul uses is kind of dreary. Her nature paintings are less "brown" than the self portraits and portraits but still very muted. Beautiful work but somehow sad.
1
More interesting, more necessary, to discuss female artists who built their practices without the help of sugar daddies or well connected family milieus.
As to the reader who hoped for a discussion of the art work, perhaps the author is not visually oriented - she’s writing about the cliches and mythologies of the creative life, not visual art. I am reminded of an essay by Donald Kuspit, which considered the jealousies of some early psychoanalysts and their condescension toward visual artists’ creative lives. The analysis of the artists’ lived are constructed and performed through the psychoanalysts (this author’s) own limitations.
42
@Mimette This story is similar to Joyce Maynard and Salinger. I found this piece more about the manipulation of female artists, than about the artists.
2
Could we please have profiles of women artists that focused on their art instead of on what they look like and with whom they slept? I also don't care who their children are. But I do care that they are so vulnerable to predators and that the predators still get to define what our image of the "great" artist is.
129
@kate yes, and for almost every profession this is a reoccurring issue!
1
@S K She went back. Multiple times. Predator implies flight. She was clearly not fleeing.
1
Artists once existed so writers could tell stories about them.
Artists now exist to enact the stories writers once wrote about them.
The bodies may change, but the stories remain.
7
@Observer By and large writers don't have a clue about visual arts. It always seemed to me that they were always trying to create a narrative for a work that, to an artist, needed none.
5
In a word, colonialism.
So many words--and such categorical ones--about pictures and artists seem wrong to me. But then I'm not particularly sympathetic to many academic trends because they tend to use a single "lens" to understand people when it takes many. In the interest of illuminating real discrimination, they draw in blacks-and-whites when the world is usually full of grays (colors) and ambiguity. Nevertheless, I will be reading a book I have about Lucien Freud with new eyes. What a sexual predator. He should have been locked up!
27
"Celia became pregnant with Freud’s child"
Why is this not "Paul became pregnant with Lucien's child"?
145
And why is this not "Paul became pregnant with her and Lucien's child? "
Cusk writes as though Freud has ownership.
9
“was impregnated by”
3
@Judeb
Um, because the name Paul is masculine, and, out of context, it sounds like a physiological impossibility.
2
Georgia O’keeffe only had her more youthful ranch hand. Ho hum.
13
“Dominated by man” really, please move on, talent is talent no matter what gender you are.
24
@Huub Valkenburg
In addition, talent isn't arbitrarily equivalent to keeping up with a critic's necessity to be in vogue, but the gift to be ever lasting over centuries.
3
@MDCooks8 Art is subjective. These ladies are old enough to understand that their art is mostly pointless in today's world, when compared to the bigger picture of life. This is the age of visual artists having their own Instagram's and connecting with other artists for exposure, and hopefully getting commissioned for a job. If the artists in this piece want to "make it" in the art world, it goes much deeper than just "big bad man is holding me back again!".
Get over yourselves.
1
Come on! This author's perspective is medieval; and for our time, the toxic and bitter cynicism which permeates this article belongs more to this the author, than to these wonderful painters who are women.
That Celia Paul was tortured emotionally by Lucian Freud, the son of Sigmund Freud might be worse than ironic.
Cusk's cynical approach to both artists, Paul and Brown, who happen to be women, is almost as horrible as Donald Trump's attempted abortion of our democracy and the office of the US presidency.
The author's attitude reminds me of the ignorant emphasis on Van Gogh's supposed psychosis, overshadowing the inspiration and immortal, joyous ebullience of his paintings, enchanting millions for more than a century.
Just as Sigmund Freud's inferior constructs of psychology forever overshadow his truly great earlier discoveries about the effect of rape on women and girls, these were the papers he couldn't get published as a young man in the late nineteenth century academic world in Europe.
Painters Celia Paul and Cecilia Brown, and women of achievement deserve better than this. And so does Sigmund Freud.
31
@Julie You're joking right? Lucian was the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Did you not know that?
Lucian Freud was Sigmund Freud’s grandson, not his son.
1
Celia Paul mentioned to the author that she wonders why her father the Bishop bothered to have five daughters, since he paid little attention to them. Perhaps the greatest mistake he made was not intervening when 55 year old Lucien Freud appropriated his 18 year old daughter's life. But the Bishop was probably on target when he described Freud as "the most selfish man he ever met." I wonder how Paul's life and art would have evolved if she never laid eyes on Freud. She seems stuck in a perpetual adolescence.
24
from Zadie Smith's @NYRB review of Celia Paul's memoir:
With his own sitters, Freud liked to talk and be listened to. Paul records some of this conversation in a letter she wrote home: “He said much more, like how the Greek sun seems to preserve the colour in cloth and furniture so that a regency chair is startling but that women start to go downhill at an avalanche pace from the age of sixteen etc. etc.”
16
“Can a Woman Who Is an Artist Ever Just Be an Artist?” Perhaps if she is written about by someone who doesn’t describe her only through the lens of her relationships with men.
161
@Debbie I think that was her point. All artists have prior influences that they build upon, break away or consolidate, as their own experience moves them. But most of those recognized traditions are male, making it even more difficult to achieve your own reference point.
7
Rachel Cusk: you are a brilliant writer. But on what planet do you live? To take this brilliant vulnerable woman and put her up against a younger more aggressive woman who has layers of confidence to shield her is unforgivable. What are we playing against: comparison contrast? No, these are human lives. You do Cecily Brown a disservice by reducing her to her "success" and aplomb. The possibility here is that Paul is really harmed: she is too fragile, too private, too honest. You know how the world will come knocking because of this piece. What defense does she have? How will she be shielded? What attempts have you made to protect her?
This piece is just not right. Besides which the premise is hopelessly muddled: male tantrum throwing by Giacometti who died just 9 years after Paul was born is somehow commensurate to Paul's lack of what? Are we supposed to fill in the blank? the experiences of Paul are now fodder for this jejeune rendering of her experience as a roller coaster of Lucian Freud's making?
Does she have no agency?
This piece is reductive and does a real disservice to Paul both as person and artist. Where are the images of her great art?
141
@Patricia Waters
Wow. Exactly. Completely agree. Perfectly said.
"This piece is just not right. Besides which the premise is hopelessly muddled: male tantrum throwing by Giacometti who died just 9 years after Paul was born is somehow commensurate to Paul's lack of what? Are we supposed to fill in the blank?"
1
Maybe if there were men working as curators in American museums, female artists wouldn't need to feel so insecure.
As the Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2018 (Mellon Report) showed, "In 2018, museum staff were 61 percent female, 39 percent male, whereas in 2015
they were 59 percent female and 41 percent male,"
5
@Simon Taylor Do you mean if there where MORE men working as curators? Because if the statistic you quote 59/41 is true, certainly there are quite a lot of men curating. How this it relevant im not sure, but in my opinion more women, in every role, from private gallery, to public museum, is still what is needed to repair the imbalance we know of as the art world today.
8
The statistics are for staff - not curators. Most staff at an art museum do not get to select what to exhibit. A lot of businesses and institutions that have a high percentage of women employees have men at the top in the decision and managerial roles. Consider education, teachers compared to school district superintendents or even state and federal secretaries of education. Even the office in Mad Men had about half women employees, but not in positions of power.
12
How many if these jobs involve budgetary decisions, and what breakdown do we then find male v female?
There is a truism to art which is politically incorrect but here it is: all Art is an expression of sexual desire and in general, men - gay and straight and in between - are more incessant in that desire than women - gay or straight. It’s simple biology. As a result, men require muses for stimulation. This creates drama. There are great women artists - geniuses - who have tapped into sexual force and recognized for it. But to expect Equality in Art ignores what Art is.
7
@Saint Leslie Ann Of Geddes
All art is an expression of sexual desire? Really? Wherever did you get that idea?
A painting of a dog is an expression of sexual desire? A landscape? A city street? Children at play?
Your premise and therefore your conclusion is unfounded.
6
Georgia O'Keeffe did alright, even without Steiglitz. Rock on, female artists!
11
Especially without stieglitz
1
“Can a woman artist ever be free of her own womanhood?” The answer lies in the very question. Of course not: until pieces of writing like these stop treating the artist’s gender as a philosophical crisis, audiences and critics will continue to feel legitimated in perpetuating the idea that a woman, by her very biology, is apart, othered, in shadow. Far more interesting would have been two separate articles, on Paul and on Brown, discussing their art and it’s inspirations and merits. This well researched, in-depth article, like so many of its kind, is something I wanted to love, was eager to read. But it legitimates the very sexism it seeks to interrogate, a shame.
100
@ASnell Why is it sexist to characterize the difficulty, the nuanced truth of the struggles of two artists who have heroically found acclaim for their work amidst the male-dominated art world? This was their experience, and both women are quoted, characterizing what it was like for them. Do we have to mythologize every female story and never speak of the shadow-side? How is that not sexist?
2
@ASnell I highly recommend a review of Celia Paul's book by Zadie Smith in the NY Review of Books, which does just what you ask for. What a different, respectful, approach.
2
" ... he is a chain-smoking wild beast ... "
My experience with artists was that those habits are created long before the artist is famous ... their very intensity often a function of NOT being famous.
6
Where's the art? The article shows one painting of Paul's--from 1980. Yet several of Brown's from the last decade. Everything's apples and oranges except the stereotypes. No one's identity ever made him or her a great artist. If their art can't carry them, it won't carry them, and no amount of wretchedness will change this.
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@Muddlerminnow
Dude (forgive me for assuming you are one):
Did you not read this gorgeously written article? Every sentence is stunning.
8
@AK Did you look at their art? Paul painted herself backwards into the 1950s. Brown painted herself forward into the 21st century. Big difference. Art careers are about your art, not you life.
Great article by the brilliant Rachel Cusk - it has the tension and heartbreak of a novel.
Celia Paul's work is beautiful. Much more of it can be seen by googling her on artnet. Yes, she should sell that flat and get out of England.
I met Cecily Brown when she gave a lecture at the National Gallery several years ago. The lecture was very wise for its description of her work and her process. Cecily Brown is a sophisticated, beautiful and chic woman.
How much was foreordained by their parentage and difficult years as struggling young women artists? Brown seems to have been lucky that her father was a sophisticated person, knowledgeable about the art world, who encouraged her work, versus Paul's relationship with Freud in which her work seems to have been, sadly, entirely beside the point.
I graduated from art college decades ago. All the women artists I've ever met have been less secure and confident about their work than their male counterparts - with two exceptions: Louise Nevelson and Sally Mann.
31
" . . . successful, beautiful and chic . . . Would anyone dare to assign those attributes to a male artist? No, their success would be assumed and go unmentioned, their appearance would not be remarked upon and "chic?" Never used to describe men, only women and then only in regard to their appearance.
Why can't she be remarkable, ingenious and innovative? Talented, fierce and driven? Intellectual, informed and individual? Pick any three adjectives usually used to describe male artists and use them for the women who dare to invade the sacred spaces so long inhabited by only the males of the species.
44
@Country Girl
There's no doubt Cecily Brown is talented, fierce and driven. I remarked on her beauty and style because this piece is at least partially about how women's opportunities are still hugely influenced by their relationships - including their sexuality, youth and beauty - with powerful men. Including being judged, promoted or abused by them. I'm in the unique position of having met and talked with Cecily Brown. Her work is brilliant. It's not a detriment that she's a striking person. In an article about the ways women artists are still vetted or held back because they're women, it's a point worth making.
Ms. Paul is a fine artist. I looked up her work on artnet and was very impressed. Anyone who found this article interesting should look further at Ms. Paul's work.
9
Can a male that is a model ever just be a model?
Can a nurse that is a male ever just be a nurse?.................
24
@dan
That will be a very short list if you try and keep going.
For women....it’s volumes long.
15
Can a chicken sandwich just be a chicken sandwich?
5
What’s the matter, @dan? Does this article about talented women struggling to be viewed without the weight of the male gaze make you feel left out?
2
Famous older men exploit young, vulnerable women. Stop the presses.
29
@theresa
And women throw themselves at famous men. Also not news.
9
A woman accountant, a woman gardener, a woman parent? Ug, it starts with labels.
21
What I find difficult is the fact that so many female artists took care of their male artist's husbands before themselves. This does not happen for female artists- believe me.
If the artist is a drunk, a mess, a womanizer- this is a part of his persona - his genius- his recklessness that is also a part of his incredible work. For a woman, what is it? how is she seen in our world? Across genres and mediums you can see this. Look at the film of Judy Garland destroying her life versus Jackson Pollock. But we all know Jackson had Lee Krasner to pick up all of the pieces he shattered and destroyed, making sure his work endured. Still how different we see them. These supposed art shaman men who had women caring for the mundane and often difficult aspects of life.
32
@Lulu
Lee Krasner was a great painter.
11
@Lulu We need to retire the myth of "the male artistic genius" whose "reicklessness is a part of his 'incredible' work". Men -white men in Western culture - have had 1000X more opportunity and power and so far more latitude to get away with recklessnes, cruelty, insensitivity and abuse of women. Doesn't matter if they are artists or dogcatchers. Doesn't have anything to do with genius.
Fantastic photo of Celia Paul by Alice Mann.
17
It’s not they these women were/are less by giving time to their child, it’s that these men were being worse parents by not giving time to their children. Art must be made, but it is enriched by enriching life. I know, though, that if I had pursued art full time in my twenties, I would have been like Celia. Now, I have found my own strength and have no worries about the men consuming any of my artistic energy. So, hopeful Celia can free herself. So Glad Cecily is free.
14
I am an admirer of Rachel Cusk's novels, but I found her writing here often portentous and confused, especially in regards to Celia Paul's life and work. Here is an artist who has both just published a memoir and is about to have a significant exhibit, and Cusk seems to carp at "life style" choices and Paul's painful history as a young woman. (Zadie Smith's piece in the NYRB currently is far more sympathetic and acute, as is Hilton Al's earlier work on Paul.) I also found disturbing the "compare and contrast" with Cecily Brown, as if to suggest Brown has found a more balanced path as a significant artist. Mostly, though, I found Cusk's writing riddled with the very same sexist mindset that she endeavors to critique.
122
Thanks for recommending Zadie Smith's piece. It is terrific!
19
@Mary Clarke Yes Zadie's article cracks open so many avenues of thought. Too many in fact, I couldn't keep track. Funny how I glossed over Lucian Freud's pecularity, probably not wanting to think about it. I remember seeing Woody Allen and his young wife and thinking "Don't judge, I don't know all the facts..."
1
Zadie Smith's NYRB piece on Paul is well worth a read.
4
I have always wondered about the attention given to the appallingly bad behavior of male artists, comparing them to Agnes Martin, Alice Neal and so many others who’s genius didn’t require drama, their internal conflicts saved for their work. Maira Kalman summed it up in her painting of of The Met with the tag line
“The Art is oblivious to the fuss.”
13
@Oren Funny you should mention Agnes. She had an internal drama of refusal, withdrawal, etc. She said she couldn't be in a relationship and be an artist. Quite the opposite of Freud. I've been thinking of Sigmund recently and what a topic the two of them, Lucian and Sigmund, would make in a book. I'm not interested in reading it.
3
@Oren Their work does not justify their sick behavior.
This is one of a few rare articles that I will probably remember for life. I don't think I have ever seen a piece that goes so straight to the heart of this subject with such compassion and fearlessness. Paul and Brown are two of the greatest painters of our time, in my opinion. When I look at their work, I don't think "male" or "female", I think "human" and "painter" and "master". Because of cultural, biological, social and historical limitations associated with gender, women have always had several layers of stuff to deal with miles ahead of sitting down to their creative work. The terrible choices that Paul and many others have been forced to make for their creative work make me want to weep. At the same time, I am inspired and moved by what they had to go through, and continue to go through as older women, while continuing to create the work of the ages.
53
@Sarah I look at their work and i see paintings from a female perspective of life- reacting to it and expressing our experiences. I celebrate that this point of view is being told. Their work examines being female in this world. Let us continue to tell our stories, they are different than the visual stories we are so used to hearing. I do not think Paula Rego or any other woman artist who learns the techniques of the past is not mimicking men it is learning visual language, we can decide how to use it and they have.
10
I would have like to hear more about their art, what it means to them, rather than their love affairs and family issues.
104
@FS you can find that information in plenty of places, this is something not discussed.
6
Thank you for this article. My breathing became so shallow and I felt somewhat frozen as I read it. My own ptsd acting up. I had no idea that Freud was such a predator. But should not be surprised. It used to be part of the instructor qualifications required by so many art schools. Tell me why do you refer to the women artists by their first names and the men by their last names? If she is Cecily or Celia please call him Lucian. Better yet - call him Freud and honor them with Brown and Paul.
166
@ML yes, i was prey as a young attractive female art student, and artist's model, it was so common not that long ago, now i think they actually have employee handbooks. When I teach 18 year old males, the last thing I could ever think to do is to seduce them bc i have some power over them as their teacher. I cannot fathom how these men navigate the world not aware of their own selfish arrogance.
49
@ML If you read about Lucian Freud over a period of time you will realize that his painting was almost a mechanism for his predation. The man was a total misogynist.
31
@Jeffrey Gillespie as is often in many industries with many men over the years. its complicated, it's unfair too and i'm sure has derailed so much talent and ambition. mine is a simplistic comment but this can apply anywhere. amazing writing and article. bravo
9
Headline: "Can a Woman Who Is an Artist Ever Just Be an Artist?"
Was the irony deliberate or just a unintended byproduct?
18
@SteveRR It is so sad to me that you read this beautiful article and dismissed it so blithely. There is so much richness here.
9
@Robin Rogers Re: "There is so much richness here." "Richness" is the last refuge of the linguistically destitute. Unless you're talking about wealth or cake, the term means absolutely nothing--and that's precisely its intended function: to obscure meaning, to pretend to say something important without actually bothering to say anything at all.
1
Amazing piece by the brilliant Rachel Cusk!
22
Such a provocative essay! There's lots to say about it, but this message is Celia Paul. I could feel the author's frustration with her, and I, too, wanted to shake her! Celia Paul, your life isn't over. You don't have to be a cautionary tale. If not for yourself, model empowerment for your granddaughter -- YOU have the opportunity to have the last laugh. Please take it.
19
Well, as Patti Smith once famously declared, "I am an American artist, and I have NO guilt!", I guess you can. She did.
13
"Is there a female equivalent to this image? Does the woman artist feel herself to be interchangeable with the film character, with his lusts and his genius and his rage?"
Why would we want to have these characteristics? As a female artist, I reject all the stereotypes in this article.
118
@Altoon I am sure some do and many do not. You do not hear about those female artists, unless in a tragedy story like Camille Claudel.
1
@Lulu Really? you never heard of Vigee le Brun, Gentileschi, Morisot, Cassatt, Bonheur, Garzoni, never mind all the 20th century artists? Never heard of Georgia O'Keefe?
13
@Altoon
Thanks Altoon!!!
6
What kind of Victorian, melodramatic mythologizing verbiage is this? Lordy.
Matisse said the first thing an artist should do is cut out his tongue. How much clearer the air would be if many writers would heed the same advice ..
94
@Chuffy
I love Matisse's work but to bring him up as an example of "how to be an artist" in an article about female artists and the complete difference in their experience and treatment. Do you know how many of us have been the "muse" as well as the artist? Matisse had lovers and women all around him boasting him up, of course he would never want to discuss the male gaze and objectifying women. This was his mode, as was it the mode of many, many "great" artists (male).
18
And yet this article is mostly about Lucien Freud and David Sylvester...
128
Checkmate
7
@Janet Borden
I may be insensitive as an older, heterosexual man, but I think your comment is unfair to Rachel Cusk.
I agree that more about the female artists and their art would be better than so much about the older sexual predators who preyed upon young women or the men who were their fathers. I think Ms. Cusk was trying to write complete word-pictures of Celia Paul and Cecily Brown, and her palette got somewhat out of balance.
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@sdw
It's no accident she chose these two women to write about. She used them to make a point that isn't really about them. She's trying to globalize the personal experiences of two women in order to "paint a picture" about men.
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It is also art to be a mother or a person in a relationship. It is ironic that this reality is so often underlooked or misunderstood. Some life experiences are expansive and challenging to the soul, do not assume the breadth of female experience is merely limiting.
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@glorybe
Some of us are successful at both
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"Motherhood is an inextricable aspect of female being; it is one thing to choose not to have a child at all, but if you can do both, be both, then surely the possibility of formulating a grander female vision and voice becomes graspable."
In one paragraph, the article advances the limiting idea it purports to be upending. Let alone that the damage arrives in the form of the author dismissing the artist's thoughts about...her own feelings. I admire Cusk's stark writing, but ultimately it's the same backward thinking. I guess the answer to whether a female artist can just be an artist is no.
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@Marie-Helene
Can a female _____________ (fill in the blank) just be a ___________?
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Perfect. I’ll buy that tee shirt!
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@Marie-Helene sounds like the author should read Rebecca Solnit's- The Mother of All Questions.
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"It may even be that each time the synthesizing of art with masculine behaviors is casually reinforced, we know less about the woman artist than we did before."
Of course. How true that seems to me.
What a sensitive and thought-provoking essay. I loved the contrasting of the two contemporary artists, showing that while some things have changed for women artists, particularly those who are also mothers, others have not. The portrait of Celia Paul is especially revealing, and heart-breaking, of how a woman's personal and professional trajectory can be overtaken, sublimated, practically erased even - and by no accident - by a man.
It's fascinating to see what art emerges from privations like the ones endured by Paul. The work is what we have. But it's hard not to imagine a different outcome, where the freedoms that men have traditionally taken advantage of are made available, at no social cost, to women. That possibility has clearly scared men for centuries. Is the last laugh Cusk hears at the end of her essay last, as in, the end of a status quo? I prefer to hope so.
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@sunandrain I think it also shows the freedom success and money can buy. I am glad Cecily Brown realizes this and is still very honest with herself and her work. I think Celia Paul had so many wounds from childhood, from being a female in a Christian male hierarchy that denied her ownership of her sensuality. Lucien Freud stepped in to take the new role of dominant male who had the power. I hope, for all of us out there, we can let go of these power brokers in our past.
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Amazing; deep and non-obvious insight into art, gender, all of it
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In the film "Impromptu," the Alfred de Musset character roars "Art does not apologize!" Maybe it should start. Artists were once not so distinct from artisans, at pains to please their patrons and appreciative of the custom of the bourgeois. The artist as temperamental brat was invented in relatively more recent times, as art came to involve less and less artifice, and more and more pretense, and had more reason to feel defensive.
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@Peter Aretin: We have no idea whether artists throughout history were or weren't "temperamental brats". Some, many, might well have been, even when art was dominated by the church, the aristocracy, or the bourgeoisie. The personalities of people weren't written about much until recently.
Take, for example, this account of JS Bach and his dispute with the Duke of Weimar. Bach was denied leave to move on to a new position in Koethen. "Finally the conversation got that nasty, that Duke Ernst had Bach arrested und put him behind bars for full four weeks. The justification: for stubberness."
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@Peter Aretin Kant and the idea of the individual genius was born.
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Actually you could build an anecdotal portrait of Joan Mitchell that was as monstrous as the one here of Giacometti. Grace Hartigan and Lee Krasner were also in their ways fairly tough customers.
For completeness you might bring in Stanley Spencer's work, to which Lucian Freud's (and subsequently Cecily Paul's) shows a great unacknowledged debt.
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It's ironic that the main obstacle to people just being known for what they do, instead of for what groups they were born into, is articles like this one, constantly reminding everyone of which group they were born into.
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@polymath The article does a good job of demonstrating that thoughtful, in-depth profiles of women artists are not, in fact, the main obstacle to those artists' reputations or advancement.
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@polymath Ha! Articles that talk about sexism are the main obstacle, not the sexism itself? Try again.
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@Kristen
Isn't a bit sexist to ask if women artists can just be artists, and then write a piece that can't accept the premise?
Hello
First, sorry for my bad english cause I am french.
Thanks to Rachel Cusk for her text which concentrates all the questions a woman has to resolve in her life to become an artist or a scientist or just a woman by her own.
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"The male artist, in our image of him, does everything we are told not to do: He is violent and selfish."
as a male artist I find this offensive. stop perpetuating these stereotypical generalizations please.
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@amir as a female I too hate those generalizations, stereotyping, rewriting of histor(ies) - for the convenience of creating a female lore.
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@amir
The key words are, I believe, "in our image of him." And you can't deny, that image exists for a reason. Because it has been for a very long time, and probably still is for some, true.
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@amir she is saying that this is acceptable in the image of the male artist, certainly not of the female. You cannot deny that the judgement of women and men is completely different when it comes to abandoning your children and alcoholism. Look at how Judy Garland is seen in contrast to understand.
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