Ignoring the Obvious

Whilst unpacking my paints order last night, I tuned in to go-to expert Professor Amanda Vickery and her programme on the Suffragettes - Suffragettes Forever - The Story of Women and Power.  Hey, my kind of thing!

Readers of this blog might remember my views on Prof V from her less-than-insightful programmes on the role of women in art - The Story of Women in Art and The Story of Amanda Vickery with Some Art.

Here's Amanda, showing a bit of feminist shoulder.

However, this was the last episode of Suffragettes Forever - The Story of Women and Power, which you can view here on i-Player.  And very interesting it was too, exploring how the Edwardian suffragette movement became a quasi-terrorost organisation.  It examined how women were forced to adopt guerilla tactics to get their point across to the establishment that women should have the vote.  

This establishment old-boys club treated them by first ignoring them, then ridiculing them with vile abuse, sexual and physical degradation, out-and-out misogyny and general male political skulduggery, before finally caving in and granting them suffrage.  In other words, the establishment acted in a formulaic way to protect itself  just as it always does when it, as an institution, is threatened by what it perceives as dangerous outside forces. (A historcal pattern we should all do well to pay attention to, given certain current political situations.)

Anyway, Prof Vickery looked at incidents of protest, including one which involved the then-prime-minister Herbert Asquith, which required Ms Vickery to stride around a golf course.  "A remote Scottish course" declared Amanda, which turned out to be Lossiemouth (thus putting the good people of the north east in their geographical place).

(Mr Asquith was, it turns out,  jumped on by two suffragettes who tried to strip off his clothes, thus giving him nightmares ever afterwards.)

 1911: Annie Kenney (left) and Christabel Pankhurst (right), who both spoke at huge meetings of the Suffragettes at the Royal Albert Hall in London

The series concluded by looking to the UK's first female political leader, Margaret Thatcher. In an interview with Kelvinside corncrake Kirsty Wark, one of the few women allowed to interview Thatcher, Amanda and Kirsty concluded that by keeping herself as the only woman in an all-male cabinet (only one other woman was ever briefly allowed in the cabinet), Thatcher skilfully played the female card to her advantage by maintaining her exclusivity, her USP, and generally acting like Elizabeth the First in her court of admiring men. 

Amanda finished by mournfully looking at a statue of the pioneering suffragette Pankhurst, and intoning "equal rights, equal status and equal power remain elusive."

Now hold on there, Amanda.  Haven't you forgotten something?  Something big and current and really really important that's right under your nose...?

It's all very well looking to the past at Mrs Thatcher, Britain's only UK Prime Minister, and making the projectory of your thesis that this was a blip, a one-off in the past that signals that female equality is still stuck in the starting gate.  Good grief woman, if you're presenting a programme on women and political power, look at the evidence staring you in the face, HAPPENING NOW, for goodness sake!!

If Ms Vickery had only raised her tear-filled eyes to that 'remote' corner of the UK, she might just have found that there is, in fact a whole country there, currently - shock!! - run by a woman.  Here she is.

It's Nicola Sturgeon, my MSP.  And one of her first acts when becoming First Minister for Scotland was to create a gender balanced cabinet.

So why wasn't this acknowledged as part of the programme?  How is that not of any interest or pertinence?  To leave it out was to present a grossly skewed story of what is going on in UK politics, and the progressiveness of Scottish politics.  It's a complete misrepresentation of history in a historical programme, by someone who purports to be a historian.

Also pertinent to the history mapped out in Ms Vickery's programme of reform vs establishment, it would have been extremely valuable to look at the way that Ms Sturgeon is currently being met by views such as this from the English media.  Despite being a calm, polite, well-briefed, professional, hard-working politician, here she is presented in a bizarely sexualised way by the English edition of the Sun (not the Scottish version).

She is a threat to the establishment, ready to shake things to their foundation (the wrecking ball) but is also oddly sexy.  A sexy threat.  What's that all about??

Meanwhile, Sturgeon is constantly belittled and disrespected purely for being a woman in a position of power. For example, Labour dinosaur David Hamilton in a jaw-droppingly shouty misogynistic speech on International Women's Day at the Labour Party Conference.  He referred to her as "that wee lassie with her tin helmet on" (a sentiment received with guffaws and applause). 

So there you have it.  Women breaking through the glass ceiling of politics ended with Mrs Thatcher, according to Professor Vickery.  End of.  Boo hoo.  Once again, Amanda has done a great disservice to the subject matter of her programme, by completely ignoring what's happening right here, right now.  Woman First Minister?   Gender balanced cabinet?  Vibrant grassroots groups such as Women for Independence?  La, la la, never heard of them.

I just don't understand how she can have ignored it.  In fact, it's almost as if Amanda is the establishment, who won't give a voice to the current vibrant, intelligent, committed, forward-thinking progressive women right at the forefront in politics.  

Call that feminism...?

The Story of Amanda Vickery with Some Art

I've just caught episode 3 (the final episode) in the series The Story of Women in Art.  I blogged about episode 1 HERE.

In it, perky Prof Amanda Vickery marches purposefully around various scenic locations, leans doe-eyed against various walls in a curiously lumpy frock, and generally wastes a lot of time smouldering in front of the camera before explaining she now only has enough time left to talk about 6 artists.

BBC

Except they're not all artists.  We do have three  - historical painter and war artist Lady Butler, 

Lady Butler (Elizabeth Thompson), Scotland Forever!

forgotten Impressionist Berthe Morisot 

Berthe Morisot, The Cradle (1872)

and minxy is-that-a-petunia-or-a-vagina painter, Georgia O'Keeffe.  

Georgia O'Keeffe, Blue Flower, pastel 1918

But then the other half of the programme - 50% of the airtime! - is taken up with gardener Gertrude Jekyll, a Swedish woman who made her house lovely with some nice interior design (Karin Larsson), and a dress designer, Madeleine Vionnet.  I mean, what the...?

"All trailblazers!" declares Vickery, marching cheekily from Paris to America to Sweden - boy, can that woman march about.  But for crying out blinking loud woman, trailblazers they may be, but fine artists they are not.  

Daisies, cushions and frocks might all indeed be artistic expressions, and very meaningful, wonderful, life-affirming, life-changing expressions they are too.  In fact, I'd love to see a separate programme about Jekyll, Larsson and Vionnet. It would be fascinating.  I'd watch it.

But - and this is a very important but - they are not FINE art, and this programme is about FINE art - ie. sculptors and painters.  Which, by including these women, is doing a massive disservice to the actual subject matter of the programme, by elbowing out the real thrust and focus of the argument.

Good grief, it's not as if there's a shortage of subject matter.  There are loads of female fine artists out there, crying out for recognition - huge oceans of them, not waving, but drowning in a sea of historical obscurity.  But what does Vickery do?  Hold out a hand and lift them aboard the raft of scholarly acclaim?  Oh no.  It's daisies, cushions and frocks.  No cliches there, eh? 

Which brings us back to basic problem with Amanda Vickery as the presenter.  Because although she can walk down a street, and swagger through the streets of Paris in a mac with her hands in her pockets (but no handbag), and stride across the deserts of America, she doesn't know how to make a decent, scholarly, informed, focussed, pertinent programme about fine art.  And the reason we get daisies, cushions and frocks is because Vickery is a lecturer in in British social, political and cultural history, and so the subject matter is derailed into her area of interest.

So was it too much to ask an actual Art Historian to make an art history programme??   Or are there no pretty lady art historians who can walk attractively and lean up against walls seductively?

Women artists deserve better.

You can see Episode 3 HERE on BBC i-Player.

The Story of Women in Art

I'll be tuning in to this tonight at 9pm on BBC Two...

The Story of Women and Art

It's the story of why there are so few women in the history of art.   It starts with a trip to the Vasari Corridor in the Uffizi in Florence, which is filled with portraits of artists - but only 7% are by women.  Basically there's no Old Mistresses, only Old Masters, not because of a lack of female talent, but because of the obstacles strewn in front of them by... men...!!  .(shakes fist).

The programme discusses why women were confined to subordinate roles of models and muses in art rather than the makers, and it's sad to think of the generations of women who have been unable to fulfill their artistic roles in society because of society.  

Professor Amanda Vickery marches seductively round Europe in a variety of curiously lumpy outfits,

                                                                       (Copyright Matchlight Productions)
 
looking at women who did actually manage to break through the barriers to use their talent, and who painted the soul and crafted the fabric of the world around them through sheer bloody-minded tenacity.  

Here she is again.

BBC

Prof Vickery certainly makes for an engaging narrator, but a curiously unknowledgable one.  For, astonishingly for someone presented as the 'expert' of an art history programme,  Prof V is neither an artist nor an art historian.  Nope, she's a lecturer in British social, political and cultural history. Which is a a bit like having Prof Brian Cox presenting a programme on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

So whilst Amanda makes you empathise with her subject matter, and appreciate the courage of the women who did defy convention, she is a curiously uninformed presenter.  She gets excited over sculptor Properzia di Rossi's clunkily thick-limbed carvings, comparing them to Michaelangelo.  They're not like Michelangelo..  

 Properzia de’ Rossi, Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, Cathedral of San Petronio, Bologna, 1525-1526

Her judgement of what is 'good art' is therefore skewed by the fact that it's done by a female.  Just because a woman has broken the mould to make it in a man's world, doesn't mean all female art is all 100% astonishing.  But unfortunately the Prof doesn't have the art history clout to be able to make an informed decision on this. 

So why have Amanda front the series?  Because (a) she's a professor, and hopefully nobody will notice she's actually just a random professor, (b) she's got just the right amount of informed gravitas, if not the necessary knowledeable depth, and (c) she looks jolly nice in a frock.  

"Amanda’s greatest weakness is a love of clothes," chirps the last line of her website homepage (www.amandavickery.com/) thus undermining any sense that the woman might actually have a brain.  Have a look at her photo above - hand on hip in a minxy frock in a dining room.  No cliches there, eh? 

The fact that a non-expert has been chosen to front a programme on women in art fundamentally undermines the whole 'let's finally take women's art seriously' premise.  Which is a real shame. 

Anyway... the programme covers di Rossi, the first female sculptor, Sofonisba Anguissola, who painted at court and was admitred across her long life by both Michelangelo and van Dyke; Lavinia Fontana (who combined a career with being pregnant 11 times), Clara Peeters, and Judith Leyster who gave it all up at 26 to get married.  Pah.

Judith Leyster, The Jolly Toper

And, of course, the woman whom Germaine Greer called, in her clunkily leaden tome The Obstacle Race,  'the magnificent exception' - radfem heroine, Artemisia Gentileschi.  Read more about her in my blog HERE.  

Artemisia Gentilieschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes (Oil on canvas, 1620) 

Despite being raped by her tutor, Artemisia testified against him during a 7-month long-drawn out trial, during which her reputation was dragged through the mud.  She eventually resorted to offering to be tortured with thumb-screws to prove she was telling the truth - risking ruining the very hands with which she painted to prove her innocence.  

Now that's bravery.

BBC

Read more in the producer's blog HERE.

If you've any interest in art, tune in.  If you've any knowledge of art, shed a small tear.

And Prof V - if your greatest weakness really is your love of clothes (rather than your lack of a degree in Art History), then please, get some decent foundation garments.