Since 2016, the US-based National Museum of Women in the Arts has been asking this question on social media each March during Women’s History Month using the hashtag #5WomenArtists. Nowadays, most young people can name Frida Kahlo but after her it gets more difficult.
Author of a great book ‘The Bigger Picture’ on Women in Art, Sophia Bennett: I’ve written several books for girls and I give talks in schools about girls’ confidence. What they need more than anything is a variety of role models for who they want to become. We have lawyers like Michelle Obama and Lady Hale, the best sort of girly swot. We have film directors like Greta Gerwig (although if you look at the Oscar nominations this year you would never know). I think artists are the best role models of all, because nobody ever asks you to be one: you have to fight for the right to express yourself and find your own way to share your unique vision of the world.
I’m inspired by Yayoi Kusama, a 90-year-old artist living in Japan, who is known as the ‘princess of polka dots’. She battles mental illness every day of her life, and the result is art that resonates with joy and love. Five years ago, more people were queueing to get into her exhibitions of ‘infinity mirror rooms’ than for any other artist in the world. Yet when she was a teenager her mother tore up her drawings and confiscated all her art materials, because she wanted young Yayoi to ‘be good’ and marry well. Yayoi resorted to painting with mud on old garden sacks.
For thousands of years, women have been kept ‘in their place’ in the history of art: as models and muses, seen and not heard. As artists they have known every form of refusal, deprivation, anonymity, disappointment, invisibility and anxiety. And yet, women like Yayoi have persisted, extemporised, explored, expressed, resisted and created. Look through history and you’ll find them, from Sofonisba Anguissola in the Renaissance to Artemisia Gentileschi in the Baroque, to Berthe Morisot, who was a leading Impressionist painter in her early twenties, to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, a Londoner who is painting in oils today and Tracey Emin with My Bed.
I discovered these women when I was asked to write a book for the Tate, whose Director is Maria Balshaw, a woman dedicated to putting women in their real place: in galleries, as artists. The result was The Bigger Picture: Women Who Changed the Art World. With illustrations by Manjit Thapp, it highlights the lives and works of over thirty artists and features interviews with several of them, including Yayoi Kusama.I’m not sure how many highly illustrated non-fiction books there are out there for teens, but I’d love to see more of them.
The teens I write for are besieged by images of perfection and it is creating levels of anxiety they don’t know how to manage, at an age when they should be loving the chance to explore who they want to become. Thinking like an artist is about looking, not looking perfect. That is what artists like Frida Kahlo and Yayoi Kusama know. That’s what I hope the readers of The Bigger Picture can discover for themselves.
The Tate Modern will be sharing two of Kusama’s Infinity Rooms at a new exhibition starting in May. This will be so exciting and tickets will sell out fast! For details go to https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/yayoi-kusama-infinity-rooms.
Buy her The Bigger Picture book through the Tate shop. www.shop.tate.org.uk
