A Conversation with Art Herstory's Erika Gaffney

Anyone who has studied art history can attest that much of the work included in major textbooks and courses is still dominated by men. The project to bring stories of women artists to light has been going on in earnest since the mid twentieth century and there are many scholars and organizations contributing to this important work. One such endeavor is Art Herstory, the brainchild of Erika Gaffney. She brings to light work by women artists on multiple platforms - from stationary dedicated to historical makers, to social media posts that buoy contemporary women artists. Erika earned a BA from St. John’s College and pairs her work on Art Herstory with a career in publishing. I had a conversation with her about the work she is doing.

Can you share some of your personal and educational background? How do you come to the work you are doing?

Art Herstory Founder Erika Gaffney

My BA is in Liberal Arts, and I am an acquisitions editor in scholarly publishing, working mostly on books to do with early modern studies and/or art history. Art Herstory has flowed naturally from my job: there are many scholars in my network who work on early modern women, including some who study women artists, specifically. And my work in art history publishing ensures that I am comfortable navigating permissions issues.

How did Art Herstory get started and what is the goal of the project?

In Fall 2017, I was inspired to send a “real” (paper) birthday card to a feminist art historian friend. I wanted to send a card featuring a painting by a Renaissance woman; but it took a long time to find one. The lack of availability of cards reproducing works by historic women artists really bothered me. Art Herstory began with the goal of supplying such cards. But it grew organically—the project does seem to have a mind of its own!—to support the movement to recover the names, works and stories of history’s women artists accessible to today’s art-loving public.

How do you think sharing stories of these women artists shifts perceptions or changes the history of art?

My favorite answer to this question must be credited to historian Merry Wiesner-Hanks, the author of the very first Art Herstory guest post. In Why Do Old Mistresses Matter Today?, she writes, “… a failure to take female Old Masters into account leaves us with a short view, which impoverishes the question and limits our understanding.” It is important to remember that many of the women who almost vanished from art history were not only talented, they were famous in their time. Their work was sought after by kings and popes! How can we gain a full and balanced understanding of our art historical heritage, when whole segments are erased, and on completely arbitrary grounds?

Can you talk about the role of note cards in the work you are doing?

One idea behind the note cards was to invest historic women artists with the trappings of success, in a sense. Another was to use note cards to expose historic women artists to an audience of art-lovers who, if only they had the chance, would love to learn about women artists who have been hidden in the shadows of history. Unfortunately, historic women artists as a theme doesn’t seem compelling enough for museum shops to carry such cards year round. But happily, these days more and more museums are hosting temporary exhibitions about female makers, and some museum shops have at least sold Art Herstory cards in support of such shows.

Art Herstory stationery on display

Does the work of Art Herstory go beyond Old Masters?

Oh yes! While Art Herstory note cards are limited to Old Masters, at least for now, Art Herstory holiday cards reproduce art by women from later periods. For blog post topics, the only restriction is that the artist be deceased—admittedly it is an arbitrary limitation, but Art Herstory is a one-person, volunteer operation and I had to draw the line somewhere. And women of all periods feature in Art Herstory social media posts; in the quarterly “new books about women artists” round ups; and in most segments of the monthly newsletter.

What is something you have learned in the process of coordinating Art Herstory?

I’ve learned so much—about women artists and art history, but also about more practical matters. Managing the blog on the website, I’ve learned (to an extent from my college-age daughter) about search engine optimization and readability scores. I’ve learned how to post new products, run an Etsy store, generate a presence on social media, and ship orders from my home. I’m still trying to get up to speed on the best way to work with museum- and bookstore buyers. To give just three examples of things I’ve learned in an art history context: I’ve discovered that a much larger percentage than I would have imagined of botanical artists are—and were—female. I know more now about saints’ attributes than I would ever have imagined. And very specifically: I learned that in their time, flower painter Rachel Ruysch enjoyed far more commercial success than Rembrandt!

What has the feedback been from people who have interacted with Art Herstory?

The people I’ve heard from—by email, or on social media—are grateful to have access, in some cases at long last, to information about women’s artistic achievements throughout history. Some people—of all genders, from multiple cultures and backgrounds—are sad, sometimes even outraged, that women were largely absent from their high school and college textbooks and lectures. And in terms of products, overwhelmingly customers have expressed appreciation for the quality of the cards, as well as for the idea behind them.

How can people support the work you are doing?

Here are some ideas:

• Buy cards! They truly are high quality stationery products, and they make a unique gift. Revenues help to offset the project’s considerable expenses. Readers can shop online at the shop on the Art Herstory website and/or from the Etsy store.

• Follow along on social media: Art Herstory is on Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, and (at least for now) X.

• Subscribe to the (free) monthly newsletter: go to the landing page, scroll all the way down, and enter your name and email address into the short form at the bottom of the page.

• Propose new products: what kinds of items do you purchase regularly, on which you’d like to see art by historic women?

• Read Art Herstory blog posts, contribute guest posts, and/or write comments on posts by other writers.

• Spread the word about Art Herstory – on social media, among friends, or (for teachers at all levels) within the classroom!

What is next for Art Herstory and for you?

For me, I will continue to publish books about women artists, as well as blog posts—my Art Herstory work integrates seamlessly into my work on the book series Illuminating Women Artists. For Art Herstory, I’d like to produce more in the way of non-card products. I’m contemplating a monthly wall calendar, themed around one or more historic female artists. But, not in a position to fund such a project on spec, I might launch a Kickstarter campaign.

A collection of images by women artists used for holiday cards by Art Herstory

Looking at Morisot and Renoir’s Women

It is important to know art in its context. That is to say, to fully appreciate a work of art, it helps to see artworks of the same moment - to view another vision from the same time. In the case of a pair of paintings made by two different artists in the same year, in the same country, now held in the collection of the same museum, we can find divergent visions of women in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Bather Arranging Her Hair and Berthe Morisot’s The Bath were both products of the same revolutionary moment, both were painted in 1885, and both now reside not far from one another at The Clark Art Institute in Western Massachusetts. But for all they have in common, they share two opposing views of women as subject that couldn’t be more different.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Bather Arranging Her Hair, 1885, Oil on canvas. The Clark Art Institute, 1955.589.

Renoir’s painting, like so much of his work, is as dully anesthetic and as psychically alleviating now as it was when it was made. An art to be a balm from the hustle and bustle. It is something pretty to look at, and with its cotton candy tonality and its imagined and idealized beauty, it gets the job done.

Renoir depicts an unknown woman, a purposefully unidentified individual, in nature. He draws on the trope of the bath in the woods that occurs so much throughout Western art that by the time he hit upon it, it would have been clichéd. Renoir’s lady looks away from us and toward an incongruous sea that itself melds with puffy clouds far away. She is dividing her ample and shiny brown hair into two parts. Her chemise falls away to reveal the curvaceous silhouette of her nude body: a breast, a belly, a buttock, a thigh. But Renoir’s is an unreal and sensualized figure. A body in space, surely, but a body nonetheless. To classify this painting as a masterclass in the Impressionist vision of landscape is to deny the fact that there’s a woman sitting in the middle of it. A woman with no identity, and no clothes.

A product of, and leader in, the Impressionist moment which would prove one of the agitating seedbeds of Modernism, Renoir is also a character whose own reputation is constantly being re-examined. Of the first generation of Impressionist painters, he is today one of the most, and perhaps most surprisingly, controversial. The #RenoirSucksatPainting movement, for instance, winkingly asks museums to “end the treacle”.

In spite of his Impressionist bona fides, Renoir’s nudes could almost be Rococco. They are unreal to the point of surreal, and sickeningly sweet. The kind of art that makes the rattle of the guillotine sound like a reasonable solution to political differences.

When looking at them and taking them at face value it is indeed often hard to tell if Renoir himself was in on the joke, or if he was making the type of paintings the market wanted, or if he genuinely believed they were any good.

Berthe Morisot (French, 1841–1895), The Bath, 1885–86. Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 28 7/8 in. Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, 1955.926

In Morisot’s image of the same subject, the figure comes inside and puts her clothes on. We see a clearly bourgeois woman in a defined domestic space: France in 1885, a woman getting ready for the day. Morisot’s subject is an upwardly mobile denizen of the new middle class of the nineteenth century; both urban and urbane.

She looks out at us piercingly and unwaveringly while arranging her own hair not dissimilarly to her counterpart in Renoir’s picture. Her chemise is firmly on, however, while a brush sits in her lap and a ribbon rounds her neck. A gold bracelet and a wedding ring glitter on her delicate wrist and finger. Her clothing hides her body. She is a woman with both identity and agency. A thoroughly modern woman - at odds with Renoir’s mythological forest lady.

It is also noteworthy that Morisot’s painterly treatment of her own scene dovetails nicely with the technical elements of Renoir’s painting. These were, after all, two artists of a similar ilk, working within the same milieu. Where Renoir’s sitter is absorbed in ethereal atmosphere of light and clouds, Morisot’s is dissolved into a residential interior, with only a chair and a table to divide her from the wall. Both paintings are brashly Impressionist but their depictions of women still differ.

It is conceivable when looking at Morisot’s painting that her subject might have a life, a job, and even a purpose. She is decidedly unnymphlike and completely unsensual. She is dignified. A real woman in a real world. Renoir’s is not.

The bath as subject is an inherently voyeuristic enterprise. As the viewer of one of these paintings, we are always walking in on a woman, and typically a woman alone. We are either stumbling unwittingly, or perhaps sauntering provocatively, into a private reserve. In Renoir’s painting he allows and encourages the voyeuristic sensibilities of his audience. We become the proverbial elders to his own biblical Susanna. In Morisot’s however, the subject is aware of us and her unflinching gaze makes us aware of ourselves and of our trespass. We are seen, and the interaction is disconcerting.

Bath paintings were also often, even if subliminally, created for a male audience. Under the guise of such accepted subject matter a gentleman collector could also acquire a titillating nude. It is a kind of softcore mythology. Morisot’s painting undermines that too. Her painting defies expectations of a bath scene and could as easily be a painting for a female consumer, to whom her sitter would undoubtedly say “je suis tois”.

All of this is not to say that Renoir is somehow evil. It is not an attack on his painting(s), or, as some back door Freudian interpretation might read it, an attack on male painters more generally. To draw a comparison between these two pictures is merely to elevate our understanding of them both, and our appreciation for the societal changes occurring at breakneck speeds as the nineteenth century drew to a close.

Renoir’s nude is no doubt a product of history and of its time. But Morisot’s signals a future that she herself didn’t live to see - that of women who were not mere objects in painting, but who were makers of their own destiny. A world in which women climbed down from the pedestal in order to live in the real world. A world, for instance, in which women could vote. In Morisot’s native France, as an example, women were not enfranchised until 1944, over a century after the artist was born.

A woman in the boys club of Impressionism, Morisot was all too aware of the inequalities which faced her both within her movement and in society at large. In an incisive, telling, and heartbreaking quote from her diary, she wrote “I don’t think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal, and that’s all I would have asked for – I know I am worth as much as they are.”

In The Bath Morisot turns the idea of her titular subject on its head and makes it a moment of engagement rather than of objectification. She depicts the new type of woman who populated Parisian streets as the world inched toward the turn of the century. Renoir’s Bather Arranging Her Hair, on the other hand, shows a type of female archetype who was herself already receding from art even as the paint was drying.

While Renoir’s bather looks backwards, Morisot’s looks forwards. Renoir paints an already fading history while Morisot paints a thrilling reality and a promising future. Indeed, Morisot’s bather incapsulates Modernity itself.