Conducted and transcribed by Jordan Hansen
In November 2022, I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Mary Garrard, professor emerita at American University and trailblazing feminist art historian. We discussed her recent recognition in Renaissance Quarterly, which selected her revered article “Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist” as one of the most important and influential essays published in the prestigious journal in its 75-year history. In our conversation, Dr. Garrard shared reflections on her past as a feminist working to transform the field of art history, and how she views the discipline now. I left our discussion inspired to continue along the path she, Dr. Broude, and others pioneered, and with renewed aspirations to participate in the ongoing refinements and expansions of art history and feminism.
Jordan Hansen: Thank you Dr. Garrard for interviewing with me virtually. This is a great honor of mine and I look forward to getting to know you and your scholarship more, as well as talk about the honor you’ve received for your article “Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist.” My first question is, what drew you to the field of Italian art history and studying women artists of the era?
Dr. Mary Garrard: Well, when I was in graduate school, back in the 1960s, Renaissance art history was almost a default position, along with nineteenth-century French art, I suppose. From today’s perspective, the field was very narrow and Eurocentric. There were no gender studies, no queer studies; there was no globalism, no intersectionality. In fact, at Harvard, where I began my graduate study, even American art history or contemporary art were not taught or encouraged. So, you see how much has changed. The discipline began to change in a radical way in the early 70s, and feminists were the first to challenge art history’s tenets and assumptions—from the perspective of social justice, actually, so it was opening up the field from the streets, literally. Women were the first of the socially disadvantaged segments of the population to open up the discipline of art history.
JH: Wow, what a contrast from how the field looks now. And it’s due to all those trailblazing efforts back then. Returning to your Anguissola article, I was incredibly impressed by your writing style. In each paragraph, your writing would bring a question to my mind and then it would be answered in the next paragraph. I even started to feel like I didn’t need to take notes or write questions because I felt they would be answered later on. How did you develop this convincing writing strategy?
MG: If that was your experience, you’re an engaged reader. You’re an ideal reader, actually. That’s how I write and that’s how I liked to teach when I was teaching. First, you engage the reader or the student with a question, or the problem, or the issue to be talked about. Get them thinking with you so the reader participates in the interpretive process. So, you’re part of it, you’re part of the thinking process. From the teaching point of view, you’re showing the student how to think art historically. Now, you clearly are already doing that because you can anticipate the questions. Which just shows that you’ve been grounded in, not just feminist art history, but the larger discipline, and you’re thinking art historically as you go along. I’m glad to know that you had that experience at AU.
JH: Well, that is good! I would certainly say I’ve been trained and conditioned through the art history program! Another strategy that I was so impressed by, just to talk about your writing style a little bit further, were your closing and opening sentences which I found so strong.
MG: I don’t remember what they were, tell me!
JH: A favorite page of mine in your article was 579 [in the 1994 version]. Your word choices are so intentional on this page. This is one of the closing sentences of a paragraph from that page, if you don’t mind me reading it, “She who is the painter of this picture, whatever else she may be, is a separate entity from the flat image Campi paints, and it is the artist, triumphantly detached from oppressive metaphor, with whom the spectator must ultimately deal.” And the opening sentence of the next paragraph, “At the same time, the image on Campi’s easel is her own creation, and it is that face that up to the making of this picture she has presented to the world.” So again, these really seamless transitions made your article such a joy to read.
MG: I appreciate your close attention to the writing. That’s really quite sensitive of you to notice the moves that a writer makes. In this particular article, I was responding to the painting itself and how extraordinarily complex it is, and how it sets the viewer thinking just by the nature of what’s being shown there.
JH: It’s been nearly 30 years since your article was initially published. I’m curious what questions about the woman artist were you asking yourself at the time and do you have any new questions about her now?
MG: This article, like my first Artemisia article, didn’t start with a question but with a recognition of what this painting by a woman artist is about, and the feminist issues it engages. In this painting, Sofonisba depicts her own portrait being painted by her teacher, Bernardino Campi. When I first glanced at it, it seemed incredibly self-effacing. I thought, “Why would she do this, present herself as the creation of her teacher? Her whole importance in the world is bestowed by him.” Well, when I began to pull at that thread a little bit, I began to realize that the whole setup was really tongue-in-cheek.
Sofonisba is parodying, by way of exaggeration, ideas that were common at the time. First, that only males were capable of artistic creativity. And second, that a beautiful woman painted by a male artist is a metaphor for art itself. He makes art out of her as natural raw material. Now, according to these formulas, women couldn’t be artists at all. And that was the problem of the woman artist, which I allude to in the essay’s title. Sofonisba challenges this axiom by creating an image of herself that subtly trumps the image of Campi. She’s taller than he is, a little larger, she is on the central axis, he’s eccentric to the axis. And, she shows herself in a dark dress with a high collar, thus thwarting the male gaze. You can’t look at her as the object of Campi painting a beautiful female body.
And of course, there is another Sofonisba here—and the passage you quoted brings this into play—the one who painted the whole picture, who is invisible, outside the picture space, and yet holds the controlling view. She thus escapes the topos of feminine beauty by presenting another way that a woman could be present, and, in fact, empowered to control it all. Now, this was incredibly sophisticated of her to do. Yet, as I later learned, it was not unique in the period. Women writers of her time were also turning the masculinist discourse against itself. For example, in a poem called Floridoro by Moderata Fonte, one of the wonderful writers of the sixteenth century in Venice, Fonte describes a statue of a woman that is ostensibly a tribute to that woman, except that the male sculptor did not care that her name be known. She uses self-effacing modesty to expose men’s erasure of actual female achievement.
And that’s exactly what Sofonisba’s doing. There would not have been contact between them. Sofonisba possibly could have known some of the treatises that were being written in Venice, in the mid to late sixteenth century, but I doubt it. It was just something that women in that particular situation did. I talk about that, by the way, in my new book Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe where I describe that passage from Fonte’s wonderful Floridoro.
One thing I would talk about, if I were writing the Sofonisba article again, is that recent conservation of the painting revealed that the black dress she wears, which we see in earlier reproductions, was painted over an allegedly original red dress. Now, I would interrogate this conservation closely because it is deeply problematic. As this figure in the red dress is reconstituted, her proportions are distorted, the relation of the arm to the shoulder is awkward, it is anatomically inaccurate—something Sofonisba never did—and there’s an awkwardly exposed third arm that they can’t explain. I suspect that the red dress was painted over an earlier image, then painted over again with what we see in the old photographs. So, if I were writing it over, I would want to deal with that new question. But I’m not writing this particular one over [laughs].
JH: That’s fascinating to hear about how thoughts and questions develop in response to conservation discoveries.
MG: It’s wonderful to see how questions expand as one learns more. When I was writing my recent Artemisia book, it was exciting to read the feminist writers and see how much ideas resonate between the artists and writers of the period.
JH: The content and subject of your new book actually leads quite nicely into the next question I wanted to ask. What was the field like for you as a feminist art historian at the time you wrote this article? What type of resistance or reception did you and other feminists face?
MG: Well, first of all, there was no such thing as feminist art history until my generation created it. It didn’t exist. I was not a feminist art historian in 1970 because there was no such thing as feminist art history. There was an explosion of writing in the 70s, beginning really with Linda Nochlin’s famous article of 1971 “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” It was a very important article; it broke the ice, as we like to think of it, and it was foundational for all the rest of us. But very soon, that article became just one of many. Other women scholars quickly began to explore deeper and more complicated aspects of the issues that Linda had raised. There was a lot of important work in the early 70s, including essays by Carol Duncan, Lisa Vogel, Pat Mainardi, Cindy Nemser, Alessandra Comini, and others. Norma Broude and I gathered some of these in a book called Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (1982) which was our first collection of essays. We didn’t call it feminist art history, we called it feminism and art history and then at a certain point, we began to speak of feminist art history, which is now in common use.
Now, you asked about resistance. Oh, boy. [laughs] There was incredible resistance at first from the very, very masculinist art history establishment. I’ll give you just two examples from Dr. Broude’s and my own experience. Her now-famous essay, “Degas’s ‘Misogyny,’” published in The Art Bulletin in 1977, was at first rejected by the editor at the time, Howard Hibbard. He didn’t consider it real art history and called it a “women’s lib tract.” It was only because Dr. Broude fought and pushed back that the article was finally published.
My own first Artemisia article “Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting” published in The Art Bulletin in 1980, was first rejected by the male editor. As it happened, he was going out of office soon and he was followed by Kathleen Weil-Garris Posner, who became editor—she was one of the first, if not the first, female editors of The Art Bulletin. She wasn’t particularly feminist herself, but she was even-handed, and she sent it to a female reader she believed would be sympathetic, at least, to what I was doing. And indeed, it was published.
I give these examples to show you how we all met resistance. It was impossible to get things published for many people, not because it wasn’t art history, but because it was challenging what we now call masculinist viewpoints about what art history should be doing. When Norma and I created our first volume of essays on feminist art history, we approached some 18 publishers before it was published by Harper and Row in 1982. We found a sympathetic editor, Cass Canfield Jr. a wonderful, wonderful man, who saw the value of what we were doing. Norma and I both tell this story to aspiring writers who can’t seem to find a publisher, “Don’t give up. There will be somebody out there like this, who finally takes it up and makes it go.”
JH: I’m glad you both share that object lesson because it is inspiring people to keep going. It shows that there could be transformative things in what we’re trying to get published. And that’s so evident in your collections of essays that are now part of classrooms. It’s so interesting to hear of that initial resistance, especially thinking about how your and Dr. Broude’s other volume of essays Reclaiming Female Agency was the textbook for my undergraduate Women and Art course.
MG: Now, where was that?
JH: I was at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and that class was taught by Dr. Heather Belnap.
MG: It’s amazing to me, from the perspective of the 1970s, with no publisher in sight, to imagine that an undergraduate in a college in Utah would read this book as a text on the feminist dimension of art history. That’s quite a wonderful story, really.
JH: I thought the same thing! It’s a nice little arc of your story. I am so inspired by the experiences you recalled, and it makes me wonder what the field would look like without all that work done in the 70s and 80s. I am curious, how did that initial resistance impact you as a scholar, if you don’t mind me asking. Did that impact your work or your energy at all.
MG: Well, I think the resistance was something that we anticipated. I mean, we weren’t surprised because, after all, we were challenging the very foundation of art history, which was almost like, you know, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy—this is the canon and there’s nothing outside it. So, we were prepared for resistance. But, if anything, the resistance challenged us to push on, and also to realize that what we were doing was also an incredible opportunity, to question so many things that you previously thought were true, and bring something new to art history. You know, it was really quite exciting to be in that position.
JH: You mentioned some names earlier, but can you share what other scholars from the time you were writing this article that you were inspired by? How did they impact your work?
MG: I think it’s easier to clarify the difference between then and now if I share from the pre-1970 period. When I was in graduate school, and during my first years of teaching and writing, there were very few women scholars who were prominent in that field, certainly none we were assigned to read. Like many women in graduate school in that time, I was inspired by male teachers and writers. For me, it was Erwin Panofsky, Millard Meiss, Meyer Schapiro, Leo Steinberg, and Adolf Katzenellenbogen, who was my mentor at Johns Hopkins. I loved their work, and I was brought up on it. I admired them for their art-historical rigor, their depth of formal or iconographic analysis, but also the imagination and the intuitive insights that they brought to the field. Steinberg, in particular, was brilliant at that and Meyer Schapiro as well. What I did, and I’m speaking for myself but I think it was other people’s experience too, I simply turned the tools of analysis I had learned from men to the new subject of women in art. It was a little like what Sofonisba did with her own patriarchal culture. And I’m here going to quote Audre Lorde’s line, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” to disagree with her. Unlike Lorde, who said it can’t be done, I think you can. In fact, it is very effective, because they taught you how to do it so well. So, you turn it against the patriarchal conclusions, to dismantle that whole establishment. And once the feminist revolution began, Linda Nochlin inspired us all. And we all began to work from her inspiration to go in our own directions. And then we women began to inspire each other with the new questions and reinterpretations that we offered. Carol Duncan was an extraordinarily important writer in the early feminist years, and we included several of her essays in our volumes. And, of course, Norma and I always inspire each other, which is our continuing stimulus. But it’s important to understand that the training of my generation was necessarily created by men, and they did a good job of it.
JH: I love that parallel between you and Sofonisba… It’s inspiring to think of finding likeness with the women artists, or figures, we study because our experiences may be similar to theirs.
MG: Of course, we are drawn to the people we write about, I suppose because it speaks to something in ourselves… The key parallel here, I think, is that Sofonisba was, like myself and women of my generation, well-educated within a particular kind of humanist culture. She was able to both challenge that culture and use it at the same time. And that’s what I think we did.
JH: I appreciate that you are saying that you were given these tools by the discipline and primed to be able to flip it onto itself. Thank you so much. Now in the current field, what roles do you think your groundbreaking essay and others play? How do you think they should be approached by current and emerging scholars.
MG: Well, the foundational value of this particular essay is demonstrated in the many footnote references to it that appear in other publications. And, of course, by the recognition it was given in being singled out as one of the twelve most significant essays in Renaissance Quarterly’s history. I’m very gratified by that recognition, and I’m glad to see that the essay has been useful to current scholars to build on its ideas and extend them. But because I’ve wondered, why in the world has this essay been singled out? I think its groundbreaking value may lie in my identification of a woman artist’s creative agency. Much of the early feminist writing, including Nochlin’s essay, understandably focuses on the constraints and limitations that women artists experienced. But here, as in my article “Artemisia and Susanna” (1982), I presumed that the woman artist possessed an aesthetic and intellectual sophistication that was equivalent to men’s. I didn’t think she had to apologize for being a poor thing who couldn’t study the male nude so understandably couldn’t become a very good artist, which was the kind of conclusion that was sometimes drawn in the early days of feminism. But, through her art, Sofonisba staked out a particular claim for the intellect and creative ability of women that should be acknowledged, so that’s what I did. I hope to have encouraged younger scholars to build on that, and to take it into their own work on women artists, or whatever their pursuits might be.
JH: That goes into my last question: How do you hope or anticipate feminist art historians to expand on women artists?
MG: I hope this essay might encourage feminist scholars to look closely at images, and to trust female artists the way you trust somebody like Michelangelo or Monet, to have serious intention and complex ideas. We applaud all kinds of creative agency in the superstars of the masculine pantheon, and there’s no reason why women too shouldn’t be acknowledged for what they have brought to the table of art history.
JH: As an emerging art historian, it’s a really exciting time for me to be part of, and it’s been great to think about the state of the field. Sometimes it’s easy to get bogged down in my own little project, and thinking of these developments, and everything that’s led up to this moment in our history, is exciting and humbling.
MG: Well, you asked earlier how I hoped or anticipated feminist art history would expand. And I want to say, that’s for your generation to show us. Because it’s your turn now and you’ve got some tools, and other tools of course. Since the 70s, feminist scholars have filled in our knowledge of many, many women artists. We are incredibly grateful to the scholars who have begun to do that, and especially the tough archival work, the really hard work of digging up concrete information that is, in turn, something else to build on. And at the same time, there have been needed corrections of some interpretive excesses of my generation. But, you know, it was never just about women artists. The early feminists took big, imaginative leaps, to recognize how patriarchal structures and biases have produced a completely distorted art history. Those big leaps took feminist art history a long way and they changed the discipline itself. So, as I look to see your work develop, from your generation of emerging scholars, I’m hoping to see major new insights that will be necessarily different from the ones we had. I hope to see big thinking, as well as “fill-in-the-gaps” sort of thinking.
JH: It’s very inspiring to think of the possibilities and where we could go. Just even with this interview and thinking of the cross-generations of scholarship, especially how they can build upon each other, is exciting. I am thinking also of the Feminist Art History conference that AU hosts and the collaborative effort that I think is crucial to feminism and feminist theory. It is good for the discipline, and for our own scholarship and thinking processes.
MG: I’m glad to hear that. And we look forward to seeing what you’re going to be doing!
JH: I am too, and it’s great to be part of it. Especially being part of the cohort and seeing how feminism impacts nearly every project. I am so grateful for all that groundbreaking work that is continuing to happen.
MG: Well, it’s your legacy. You will have the opportunity to disprove the common belief that feminism never lasts more than one generation. It literally never has, you know. The movements never last, but much goes on in terms of continuity and development from one generation to the next. And now that there is something called feminist art history, or rather the feminist perspective that has corrected art history, then one hopes it can never be set aside again or put to rest. So, you keep it alive by your own work.
Art History at American University 