HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A KITCHEN AT THE TATE MODERN?

By Fleur Butler

Walking around Tate Modern endless signs proclaim that there are not enough female artists on display but ironically the Tate often chooses female art in terms of its own oppression at being unheard. Unlike the Tate, prime space is given to the work of the anonymous New York female artists Guerrilla Girls and their appalling statistics on how few women artists make it. But curators misunderstand the problem if they think that this is the solution!

It isn’t just that women are oppressed in the world; it is that their very interests are seen as “uninteresting” to the curators, who have been trained by male-led academies for centuries. The Tate needs to start to listen to women and their interests if they are to overcome this gender imbalance. It’s not that women are not artists; it’s just that the Tate does not notice them. They do not hear the language of the domestic, caring, nurturing; or of love, private space, interior pain, the home and family that so many people experience. Being female is not all about oppression as left-wing feminists would have you believe, being female is being proud of female distinctions, and creating a world in which both men and women can explore their feminine natures.  If art isn’t the best medium to explore these issues than what is? Where is the feminine in art?

There are many artists, male and female, who are not on show because they have refused to produce work within the masculine definitions of “good” art. It is these artists who are the true feminists of the art world, not the ranting left wing with their pictures of rape, violence and oppression. Is this all the Tate think women are about? Can’t they see these artists speak a different female truth, on the sidelines of a monolingual male art world?

Such mistakes are everywhere: Leonora Carrington died only a few years ago as Britain’s most successful female artist but the Tate has only one picture on display. Carrington is known for her weird and mystical animal world, her powerful female figures, giantesses standing over the world, and witches concocting spells together on a cheery domestic hearth. The Tate never bought her or saw her as important. Even today they have not allowed Leonora Carrington through their hallowed doors into London. Her retrospective was at Tate Liverpool, an apologia for one of Britain’s greatest 20th Century artists, female or otherwise.  

The explorations of female pain against a hurtful world of love gone wrong is another ignored experience. Isobel Brigham paints her naked women in their private domestic space as a retreat from the male world.  The very softness and detail of cushion on which female forms can lie naked explores the strength and peacefulness of a world absent of men. So different from the voyeuristic work of Walter Sickert and the Camden Hill School, who peered at women in their private settings and painted weird and imprisoned images. Prisons or refuges? The domestic can be seen in many ways. And what about those artists who paint kitchens, why do we never see kitchens at Tate Modern? Or pots and pans.  If we can have a urinal, surely a frying pan is allowed.

Dame Laura Knight,

Artist, circa 1910

An alternative Tate Modern show would not have Modigliani being hailed as a feminist just because he liked pubic hair, but would show the longing innocence of the Windrush painter, Enid Richardson. Her art was chosen by the Caribbean female community in the Pepperpot Club in Nottinghill. They would show not Augustus John, and his dubious female images, all about to be ravished in real life by him, but Gwen John and her painful introspective female figures, often silenced by male society. Laura Knight would be welcomed, not because she is “safe” and didn’t shock the men at the Royal Academy, but for her depictions of women and nature. The interior stillness of the girl on the cliff of “dark pools” is an experience of many women who don’t rage in pain, but stand still and absorb shock. Or Winifred Nicholson, who was allowed to be Ben Nicholson’s muse until he ran off with the brilliant Barbara Hepworth. Her art explored children, kitchen tables, lights, simple beauty in flowers, her life is the real experience of deserted mothers, but an experience dismissed by Tate Modern as irrelevant.   Only the subtle tactile sculptures of Hepworth got past the anti-feminine, merely alluding to the female desire to caress and touch not as a sexual act but as an act of love of landscape, people and things.

And central would be Leonora Carrington’s witches stirring their cauldron of power, nurturing sustenance for the home dwellers and creating power as safety and peace for childlike beings to grow and change and develop under the strength of the female mother form. A real feminist vision of art.