On Being a Woman in the Arts

I love the silhouette of her body. I love the things she surrounds herself with. I love the passions and responsibilities that come with her being. I love motherhood, the voice of integrity that emanates from her artistic work, and even the hardships she bears – and often overcomes – in solitude: her pent-up sense of guilt and insecurity, an inadequacy that chases in gusts across her fields like a chasing wind.

‘What is a woman?’ Virginia Woolf wondered in 1931: ‘I assure you, I don’t know… I don’t believe anyone can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.’ ‘What is a woman?’ I ask myself. To ask the question is to define her being – and that which is defined is bounded. But ut is not ultimately about what a woman is, but who and what she can become: a goddess. Here. Now. With this issue about goddesses, we want to celebrate her divine qualities and her exceptional, artistic voice.

In 2018, we made our first issue dedicated to women in the arts, on the occasion of the centenary of women’s suffrage in the Netherlands in 2019. I spoke bold words to the editorial team: ‘With this issue, we will celebrate the fact that there will never again be a need to make an issue about women.’ I was sure of it. We had seen so many remarkable women artists around us – but I was blind, and hopelessly naive.

Research showed that we, editors, had been living in a sweet bubble, because the story of women artists is a chronicle of exclusion: no women in E.H. Gombrich’s acclaimed The Story of Art (1950), no women in H.W. Janson’s classic History of Art (1962). Things were not much better in the reprints – let alone in museum galleries, where women artists were rarely on display.

Art historians like me had been trained with half the knowledge and half the truth – an art history without the creative power of women is a kind of ‘fake news’, carried unquestioned all the way into the lecture halls. We had spent all this time looking at art with one eye closed. How was this possible? What would we see if we opened both eyes? We knew what to do: we would make whole what had long been half with Pretty Brilliant: Women in the Arts (2020-2025), a three-part series, of which the last volume lies before you now. Conceived as a counterpart to Janson: 750 pages, 583 artists, 80,000 hours of research. What began as rebellion would end in devotion.

Through the guidance of guest curator Catherine de Zegher, we entered the gates of a universe beyond the confines of the white art world. It was the shadow realm of creative goddesses – makers who kept on making, regardless of whether there was anyone to look after their work. She taught us that emancipation comes in waves of thirty years, pushed forward by each generation. And what the present era shows, is that this emancipation is indeed like ebb and flow, like the sea: it surges in like a roaring surf, only to retreat again as freedoms gained fade from view.

Almost all the biographies of women artists we have written for Pretty Brilliant tell stories of an inner quest and an external impasse – of creating art at the kitchen table, unseen by anyone. Camille Claudel’s work was credited to Auguste Rodin’s in the late nineteenth century. Ya­yoi Kusama’s work was destroyed by her mother. No museum wanted to include Hilma Af Klint’s oeuvre in its collection in the 1990s. Jay DeFeo’s monumental work The Rose was hidden behind a wall in a conference room of the San Francisco Art Institute for 25 years. And Louise Bourgeois was seventy when, in 1982, she had her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art – the very first solo exhibition the museum ever devoted to a woman artist. A body of work so magnificent, it is simply impossible to imagine art history without it.

I can spend hours looking at the studio portraits we have collected over the past five years. The way she stands there, at the centre of her own universe, surrounded by the quiet beauty of her studio, absorbed in something that utterly consumes her. She has made the choice. She is doing something she cannot resist. She is forging a lasting friendship with marble, clay, textiles, or paint.

I believe there is no greater moment than finding a form for what the soul whispers – no deeper sense of belonging – and it’s this ineffable joy that radiates from these photographs. But those who linger, may also sense a field of tension. For as she merges there into her own experience, she may also leave something behind. She is absent somewhere. And where she is not – is home.

Where she is not, is at home: hearth, husband, mother, father, child – in the garden, at the washing line, beside the sickbed, at the schoolyard. And as I write this, I feel your hand on my shoulder. I know how your toes curl. I expect you to lash out at me in a moment – because to name and acknowledge the mystery of being a woman – the insoluble dilemma, the dazzling conundrum – where to be, for whom, what and when – is something we have collectively agreed to keep quiet about, at least in the world I inhabit. We act as though pregnancy and motherhood are nothing more than a temporary break from work. Motherhood, as a theme, is frowned upon even in art schools; it’s not something you build a career on. You wouldn’t take yourself seriously as an artist – because no one else would. It shows how far we have drifted from, and denied, the most essential thing: having a mother, being a mother.

I remember my quest as a young mother. I remember, with my first baby in my arms, how it felt as though I had veered off a motorway onto a bumpy dirt track — expecting to keep accelerating on the A2. How lonely motherhood could feel, and at the same time how full and rich. And how work could offer liberation, yet gnawed at me because I longed to be at home. No, my curriculum vitae is not a career ladder. Not a gleaming pyramid to the top. My life line meanders, has gaps and silences – periods in which I took on other (unpaid) roles, and was feeling bored, lying on the rug with my two sons on a grey, rainy day.

If everything in this world is intelligent – animal, plant, sea, stone, star, human – and born out of necessity (and it is), then a woman too is, with reason, exactly right as she is: a force of nature, a creative being, a giver, a sustainer, a bridge-builder, a mother – even if she has no children. And above all, if we rise above the misogyny within and outside ourselves: a radiant goddess.

In the impressive TV series The Power of Myth (1988), mythologist and literary scholar Joseph Campbell says: ‘When you have a goddess as the creator, it is her own body that is the universe, she is identical with the universe… When you move to a philosophical point of view: the female represents time and space itself. She is time and space. And the mystery beyond her is beyond pairs of opposites – so it isn’t male or female. It neither is nor isn’t. But everything is within her. So the gods are her children, everything you can think of, everything you can see is the production of the Goddesses.’

But even within the transmission of mythology, the goddess’s position has suffered over the centuries. In The Shrinking Goddess: Power, Myth and the Female Body (2024), Mineke Schipper gathers myths about the female body and traces patriarchal attempts to tame her being. In Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths (2020), Natalie Haynes also shows how poorly women fare. When they are mentioned at all, they are increasingly depicted as vengeful or wicked.

In this issue, we travel across all continents. For each one, an author from that region explores an indigenous goddess, accompanied by selected artworks by artists from the same continent. We encounter the Greek goddess Artemis, the Yoruba goddess Osun, the Hindu goddess Kali, the Andean Pachamama, the Māori goddess Hine-nui-te-pō, and in the Arctic, we absorb the wise lessons of the melting ice queen: ‘Her ocean is a huge carbon sink. Her ice acts as a shield, reflecting sunlight and heat back into outer space… She owes you nothing, not even a smile. Instead, she demands reciprocity.’

Radical reciprocity. Radical equality. Radical togetherness. In the end, there is only one way forward: radical love and radical compassion – whatever the last of the Mohicans may scoff about it. Is the future female? I hope not. We do not need ‘power women’ competing for seats of power in rivalry. It would simply be a reversal of roles – and what would it gain us? Sister Miriam James Heidland writes: ‘The future is not female. The future is masculinity and femininity healed and restored into the glory of God. That’s the future.’

Leaving aside whether or not you want to believe in God, in Buddha, Allah, myths, quantum fields, or in ‘something’ that has not yet taken shape or status for you – ultimately, all our spiritual aspirations stem from one source: the indescribable miracle called life, which we mortals, men and women, you and I, navigate in pursuit of self-realisation and freedom. As politician and activist Nelson Mandela once said: ‘I am the master of my destiny. I am the captain of my soul.’

– Nicole Ex,
founding editor