Isn’t it funny how even in anatomical drawings and models, dudes just can’t resist stuffing a foetus into any available womb. As if a woman who doesn’t contain a life is as empty as an unfurnished room. As if her body is not complete without this addition. No wonder, then, that they see the rejection of this obligation as a strange perversity, a fundamental fault, like a hen that won’t lay, a cup that won’t hold water.
(All images from “The Anatomical Venus” by Joanna Ebenstein, Thames & Hudson 2016.)
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
