Summer is here and soon my summer vacation will kick in. Besides fighting off mosquitos, reading a lot of novels and watching my sweetheart barbecuing our dinner I will visit some art exhibitions, and I really look forward to whats on at Havremagasinet in Boden (Norrbotten county). Havremagasinet is one of my must do:s of the summer because they always have fantastic exhibitions of international, national and local artists. Find out more here: http://english.havremagasinet.se

Have a great summer (if you are on the northern hemisphere)!

During the weekend a new exhibition opened at Kvinnohistoriskt Museum in Umeå - or more precisely - an art installation. It is called About: Blank Pages, made by EvaMarie Lindahl and Ditte Ejlerskov, and it all began when they realised that women artist were almost totally absent from the well known Taschen's Basic Art Series. Currently the series covers 92 men and 5 women, missing out world famous artists such as Cindy Sherman, Yoko Ono, Jenny Holtzer, and Louise Bourgeois. They contacted Taschen and adressed the problem and gave them a list of 100 names for future issues, but from what I understand they are still waiting for an answer. You can find more information here: http://www.kvinnohistoriskt.se/4.1ba1eb9814afeb38cc9c733.html

So why is this important in 2015 when everybody knows there are famous women artists in Western art history? Because we always tend to find it necessary to rediscover women artists. Why? Because they never make it into the general surveys, the history books or the great exhibitions — oh, sometimes they do, I know, especially when presented in solo exhibitions that illustrates a lifetime achievement (like the Louise Bourgeois-exhibiton I mentioned in an earlier post). But still these events do not seem enough to make women artists part of the canon of art history. When National Gallery in London had a big exhibition on the Impressionists earlier this spring, they kind of forgot to include the women — oops! — and this was brilliantly commented by art historian Griselda Pollock. You can find her article here: https://theconversation.com/the-national-gallery-is-erasing-women-from-the-history-of-art-42505

Another example of continuing rediscovering and rewriting is Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c.1656) who's Allegory of Painting (1638-39) you can see below. One of the first publications presenting her for a wider audience is art historian Anna Banti's novel Artemisia (1947). Then, more that 30 years later, art historian Mary D. Garrard started publishing studies presenting the artist in late 1980s before the biography Artemisia Gentileschi, with a catalogue of all her known works, was published in 1991. A touring exhibition including works of her father Orazio Gentileschi made ground for new publications discovering Gentileschi during 2001-2004 (often comparing her with her father), and this was also when Susan Vreeland wrote her novel, The Passion of Artemisia (however, I suggest you read Banti). And so it continues with new discoveries and new editions of former publications. I do think Gentileschi is quite well known today even if  there is a tendency to invent her story again and again. She is still often excluded in books and exhibitions on Italian Baroque art — and, of course, Taschen have not included her in their Basic Art Series.