Kaiser Caimo

I stumbled across this in a second hand bookshop – Glasgow Girls: Women in Art and Design 1880-1920

As I read, I felt a familiar sense of confusion and anger – why I had I never known any of this before? Why did I not recognise these women? I’ve studied art since I was thirteen years old, I spent three years in art college, I knew about the Arts and Crafts movement, I knew about Art Nouveau, Art Deco, the Glasgow School. I knew about Charles Rennie Mackintosh, but I knew nothing about Margaret MacDonald or Frances MacDonald or Ann Macbeth. I knew of virtually no women artists I could look up to when I was a student. It seemed that being a woman must be an insurmountable handicap and it made me want to shed my own skin. Why was I never told about these artists? Why was this representation denied me? How did it happen?

And then I came across this – a letter from a critic to the executor of the Mackintosh estate, objecting to the inclusion of Margaret MacDonald’s work in an exhibition commemorating her husband and long-time collaborator Charles.

This is how it happens. This is what erasure looks like. And I cannot put into words how frustrating it is, how utterly infuriating, to come face to face, again and again, with the realisation that your cultural heritage has been stolen from you by men.

Poster design by Margaret MacDonald & Frances MacDonald

The Heart of the Rose by Margaret MacDonald

The Long Wandering Path to Desire by Frances MacDonald

The Opera of the Sea by Margaret MacDonald

The Sleeping Beauty by Ann Macbeth