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the number of women artists who did achieve fame and success in their time,
only to be later excluded from the canon and from the museums. This even
meant that some works of art by women were assumed to be by men, and
re-attributed to male artists. They examined the hierarchical relationship
between genres of art and between high art and decorative (or ‘applied’) arts,
and argued that the exclusion of women is systematic and intrinsic to the
project of art history and of the museum, a project that depends on and
reproduces notions of femininity. They showed how the category of ‘genius’
was gendered, and how aesthetic theory repeatedly associated masculinity with
spirituality and women with the material and the bodily. Femininity is associ-
ated with the ornamental and decorative, with those art forms placed low on
the hierarchy of the arts (e.g. embroidery and quilting as opposed to painting).
Ideologies of femininity limit and circumscribe women’s participation in cul-
tural production. But they are not simply a means to exclude women; instead,
Parker and Pollock suggest, an ideology of gender structures art history and the
museum (Parker and Pollock 1981: 169–70).
In the nineteenth century the distinctions set up between the ‘high’ and the
‘feminine’ arts corresponded to the establishing of a more rigid division
between private and public social realms, which limited women’s access to
public art forms. In Chapter 1, we saw how the luxury debates of the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth century attributed opulence and overcon-
sumption to women, as a specific response to political absolutism, economic
crisis and the role of women in the French court. In the nineteenth century a
sharp division between private and public practices of consumption and dis-
play is established along gender lines. These developments became rigid and
naturalized: women ‘by nature’ seem to belong to the domestic sphere; ‘by
nature’ their taste tends toward the decorative, the opulent, the superficial.
Reciprocally, a taste for the decorative and the ornamental comes to be seen as
feminine.
The art historian E. H. Gombrich sees this negative association of women
and ornament as dating back to classical antiquity (Schor 1987). However, the
baroque culture of curiosity attached a good deal of value to ornament. Highly
ornate, detailed ornaments and artefacts featured heavily in curiosity collec-
tions, as did ‘monsters’ and natural anomalies. The eighteenth-century classical
revival rejected the ornamental and the detail in art, aligning them with the
monstrous, and opposing them to the sublime and to genius in the arts. For
instance, Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his Discourses on Art, delivered to the Royal
Academy in London between 1769 and 1790, argued that the painter ought to
‘correct nature’, and abstract from ‘her’ forms – leaving out the ‘accidental
deficiencies, excrescences and deformities of things’ – to produce a representa-
tion of the ‘perfect state of nature’ (Reynolds cited in Schor 1987: 15; emphasis