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Modern Scottish Women 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage Many observers of the art world have remarked at how male-dominated it seems. No named artists survive from pre-antiquity, and few, all male, from classical times. When Vasari published his Lives of the Artists in 1550, recognised as the first work of art history, women were left unnoticed.
In the modern period, we have new measures of visibility: inclusions in collections and exhibitions and statistics about popularity in an era when we consume art like any other commodity. In the last hundred years, as impediments were removed, many social pressures persisted and we have to congratulate many of the great women artists of the last century on their dedication and perseverance as well as their genius. In the generally strong area of Modern British art sculptors like Barbara Hepworth still lags behind Henry Moore. In the second rank however Elisabeth Frink competes well with Lynn Chadwick, Anthony Caro and Michael Ayrton. The painters are even further behind however – or, in the logic of a potential investor, the women have more potential. While Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon occupy an international stratosphere, permanently in the top ten, painters like Prunella Clough, Joan Eardley and Anne Redpath are well adrift of the values achieved by William Scott,
Patrick Caulfield or Ivon Hitchens. While the marketplace is one measure the museum sector is another and in Edinburgh, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has gone some way to addressing the historic deficit, with Alice Strang’s exhibition Modern Scottish Women: Painters and Sculptors 1885–1965 (2015–2016). The Scottish Gallery has been a champion of women artists consistently for decades, not to fulfil any quota or gender equality ‘policy’ – we have championed women because the work was valid. The journey for women has not been easy and The Gallery has championed exceptional women artists who in turn paved the way for future generations. In the first half of the last century, art education was in effect only available to the upper classes, and a career as an artist was routinely curtailed for women, by marriage and children. By the mid to late 19th century, more women from the middle classes were entering art schools; needlework, pottery, still life drawing and painting, in particular