Automatically transcribed by Speechnotes on: 27/05/2025, 06:13:32
Total recording length: 00:28:37

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BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts This is Radio 4 where it’s time for Front Row with Katie Popplewell. Hello. The Hallberg Prize is awarded annually by the Norwegian government to a scholar who has made outstanding contributions to research in the arts and humanities, law or theology. The 6,000,000 kroner Prize, which amounts to approximately half, £1,000,000, is considered the Nobel of the social sciences. This year it’s gone to the British Canadian art historian Professor Griselda Pollock for her work in cultural theory and feminist art history, a field of study that she not only leads but helped to create. The prize has gone to philosophers, literary critics and social and cultural theorists before, but this is the first time it’s been awarded to an art historian.

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The judging panel praised her for transforming the art historical Canon and cited her first major scholarly work, Old Mistresses, Women, Art and Ideology, as a classic work of feminist art history that remains fresh today. Born in South Africa, Griselda Pollock lived in Canada before moving to the UK to study at Oxford and then at the Courthold Institute. Early in her career, she took up a post at the University of Leeds, where she’s been teaching and publishing continuously for more than 40 years. From her early reviews in the feminist journal Spare Rib in the 1970s to her many books and essays addressing the erasure of women and marginalised people in art history, her career has been dedicated to challenging the patriarchal, the racist, the homophobic and the Eurocentric in art and culture. Far from confining herself to the ivory tower, she’s committed to making art history more accessible and more inclusive, encouraging everyone, not just art historians, to question the images and artefacts that surround us and the versions of history that they depict. The Holberg Prize award ceremony would have taken place earlier this month in Bergen, but having been deprived of that moment in the spotlight, Griselda joined me from her home in Leeds for a conversation about her work.

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I began by asking her what sparked her interest in the subject of art history. Like many people, I had never heard of art history as a subject you could study. So when I arrived at university, I met a young woman who later became actually a curator at the British Museum, who said she’d been taken to the British Museum when she was 5 and she was going to work there when she grew up. And I thought, well, what do you have to do to work in the British Museum? She said, you study art history. And I was completely perplexed. I was studying history. And then she and I went on a holiday trip to Paris, and she took me to Saint Notre Dame. And Sandini and took me to the Louvre and I saw all these amazing paintings, but I had no idea what to do with that. And I came back and I went to a series of lectures at Oxford. And all the pictures that I’d walked by thinking, oh, I don’t know what’s going on there were illuminated by this amazing artist drawing called Francis Haskell. And he showed me how, you know, the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon and the anguish when he was defeated created this kind of romantic melancholy.

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And I suddenly could see what these paintings were doing as forms through which this great historical events were being delivered to us. And I determined immediately that I wanted to study art history. And I applied to the court. Old defied my father, who said no, no, go off and be a secretary. And I had to keep myself selling shoes on the King’s Road to support myself. And I realised I’d found something that made absolute sense to me and I wanted to carry it on. But when I got to the court, old, I didn’t like the art history they were giving me because it was dull and soulless and formal and who did what when. And this then happened and I was longing for something more substantial. But I also discovered that there were no women in this. This was a completely all male story. And what was I going to do with an art history that had nothing to do with me? So this brings me on to my next question. So Old Mistresses, Women, Art and Ideology was published in 1981, so a decade later.

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So what was it about your experience of studying art in the 70s that led you to write that book The Women’s Movement. But the same time as I’m starting an art history, I’m mixing with the whole number of women who are demanding a transformation of our society. And this included people saying let’s study what women wrote, let’s study what women thought, let’s study what women composed. Because I was an art, I thought let’s study what women made. So I popped off to the National Gallery and found there were no works by women at all on show. There were seven works downstairs in the basement. And that was my very first publication is, you know, the missing women. And I realised that all I needed to do, actually, I’d started looking for women and I found them everywhere. You know, there was no problem to find hundreds and hundreds of women artists in the past, all recorded, all in the archives, Even if you looked in the basements of the museums, you’d find them. But they weren’t being told to us now.

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And of course that meant that any women that I was amongst the artists now would also be disappeared. And part of feminist art history is about highlighting and championing those women artists that have been overlooked. And you have done a lot of that work, as you say. But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? There’s a great deal more to it. So Old Mistresses is an analysis of how it has come about that women were disappeared from the history of art. And one of the things we discovered when we researched it that women disappear from the history of art only in the 20th century. The minute you go beyond 1900, you find huge books about women artists. They’re all in the dictionaries of art history, which were compiled in the 19th century. They’re all in the archives. Some of them had state funerals. Many of them were commissioned by some of the great figures of kings and Queens and and patrons. So it wasn’t that they were lacking, but it was the 20th century art history, and particularly the art history of the 20th century of modern art consistently disappeared women.

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So what was the system? And this is where we touch on what we think now, we call, you know, systemic racism or systemic sexism, that art history is creating a story of the great white male artist, even in the face of the fact that art is made by people of all minorities, all ethnicities, all genders, all sexualities. So that was the great thing. You had to study what artistry said in order to critique and expand it because it’s not enough to simply say here is a great woman artist, because the term great artist is occupied. It’s already colonised by what is considered masculine and virile and rigorous and trusting and all these words you find in the criticism and women were always being discussed in terms of being soft and unoriginal and derivative and dependent and really not quite so good. So they really didn’t make the case.

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And so the term old mistress is precisely the one that reveals that the reverential term old master, which makes us think of the great Rembrandts and Titian and Reubens. You say, oh, mistress, you’re talking about a sexual being. And so there is nothing in language that allows us to say women are artists. And if you talk about an artist, the first thing comes into most people said is a white man. And the minute you have to say I’m talking about a black artist or a woman artist, they’re in a sub category. What’s the role then of the art historian in changing this? If it’s about the language that we use and the stories that we tell about art? Well, it’s why my title of my professorship is Social and Critical Histories of Art. So first of all, you’re critical of the story as we’ve given it in the museums and in art history, and you’re trying to deliver other stories.

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You’re expanding through engaging with the social world because we live worlds of race, class, gender, colonialism, empire, the origins of capitalism, feudalism. We live the dramas in 16th, 17th century art over theology, where Catholics and Protestants and Christian world fought each other, killed each other over the meaning of images. And once you give back that sense that art is not a history of great artists laid out in chronology with great masterpieces, but a deeply complex way of thinking with and thinking about and reflecting on the world’s that people live in these great dramas, then you have a very rich and interesting history of art, which can of course include questions of gender and sexuality. And how do you feel when you go to major gallery shows then? Do you feel that they contribute to the problem? If you’re an art historian, you thank the curators for having assembled works that are scattered all over the world and make it possible for you to be in their presence. Because the fundamental thing in art history is you have to see the material object. You have to see how big it is.

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You have to feel the scale of the work that went into it, the scale of the imagination. You know, when you look at something like Vermeer, the sort of the sense that this painting might have taken 8 years to make you, you need to be with them to see. So I thank them for that, but I really despair of the fact that they are constantly delivering to a public images to consume, which are shown of everything that made them come into existence, and they are consistently telling the story of the great white masculine Canon. I’ll give you one example. There was an exhibition recently at the National Gallery about the dealer Durant Guel, who supported the Impressionists, who made that group of artists able to survive because he bought the work, he financed them and he supported them. Now the Impressionists is the first egalitarian art movement we have. Men and women founded the Impressionist group, exhibited side by side.

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Mary Cassatt, Bette Morrisseau, Mary Brackmond, Eva Gonzalez, all were part of this. And Mary Cassatt particularly even supported and financed some of it, like Doug added. And there was an exhibition which presented the whole of the Impressionists. There was 1 Bette Morrisseau. There was 1 Mary Cassatt right at the end. Now, this has real effects because everybody going round an exhibition who never sees the brilliance of Mary Cassatt and Bette Morrisseau does not run to the bookshop and say, oh, I want to read more about this amazing artist. So if I write a book on Mary Cassatt, nobody’s going to kind of start looking for it. And the bookshop says we don’t need it. And the publisher says, oh, it didn’t sell and the knowledge, or shall we say the ignorance, is perpetuated. Is there something which prompted your virtual Feminist Museum project? Yes indeed.

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I realised that the kind of way I wanted to put art together in order to explore this richer, more social, complex relationship between art and history did not accord with the ways in which museum curators and collectors want it. Because they want you to see great work free of the mess and dirt of history. So every time I suggest you for instance, let’s have an exhibition which had Mary Cassatt’s portrait of her mother reading with Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein AS2 images of intellectual women. Now you can imagine they say, no, no, we could not put a Picasso in the same book as this minor artist. People will get confused because you can’t put those together because Picasso is a Cubist, you know, and she’s an Impressionist and she’s a minor Impressionist.

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Anyway, she’s a woman, so I realised that no one would ever allow me to create exhibitions to produce the conversations between works of art that I wanted to kind of unfold for people to begin to think about art in terms of meaning and relations to experience that we all have or might be interested to find how they’ve been figured. So I decided I would create the Virtual Feminist Museum in a book form. And in that form I collect works together and as the reader encounters them, all the images are in a certain kind of conversation with each other. And then I write my reading of what that conversation might mean. But it’s not an exclusive one. It’s not the answer. So one of my virtual feminist museums is about images of age. How is age imaged across the work of the great artists that we do know about, and of many of the great women artists that many people haven’t encountered? How is the female body represented by men as opposed to women? How is it experienced by lesbian women, by black artists, by black lesbian artists, by disabled artists? How do you challenge the issue of the beautiful nude by looking at this much more complex sense of embodiment?

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Do you think art history has a bit of an image problem? I think art history has a terrible reputation because it is largely practised by very upper middle class, highly educated, largely white and predominantly women. So it’s perceived to be a soft subject for women to study because they’ll go on and be those nice girls who are going to be nice to you. When you go to a commercial gallery. It is a huge number. The percentage of art history degree holders is something like 85 to 90% women, isn’t it? Now, I realised this very early when I went to the Courthold. The Courthold had relatively few men and lots of women, and I was told not to take a scholarship for my PhD because it would be a waste of time because I’d go off and get married and have children. I had to leave it for the few men and I realised we were what’s called staffage.

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We women were kind of the padding that justified the existence of the degree so that the one or two men would be trained up. And all the people I studied with, Nick Sirota, Neil McGregor, various others, all became and were being prepared to be the directors of the British Museum or the National Gallery or whatever. And that’s how it is. So you, you don’t need very many men to rise up and become the major figures, but you need to sort of, as it were, stuff the courses with women who will never contest for those jobs because they will have learnt their place to be adoring admirers and supporters and curators of the great white Canon. And they’re not ever been troubled by the notion. Why is this so white, so masculine? What is it doing to me in the constitution of my sense of myself, if we as women or as black people think we’ve never done anything in the world, in the history of the world worth remembering?

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So the inverse of that is, for instance, I bought a painting by Lubena Hymid very many years ago in the 1990s, and I put it on the walls of the City Art Gallery in Leeds precisely because I wanted young black women to come into that gallery and say, oh, look, there’s somebody like me. Oh, and she’s the artist. I too could speak about my world through art if I knew that there were artists like me. And Lubena Himmid, Turner Prize winner, has been really integral part of that story and the way that it’s changed over recent years, hasn’t she? Absolutely. When you think how much she had to struggle when we launched Old Mistresses at the National Gallery in a new form in 2013, She was in conversation with Francis Morris, who’s now the director of the Tate Modern, and Lubena spoke with such deep anguish about the years of, she said, crashing up against the rocks of institutional indifference. She started curating in the 1980s. She has practised consistently. She set up art galleries to support.

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She worked in art galleries, she has supported all the black women artists around her, constantly creating spaces for it. And the institution’s doors were closed, they were just indifferent. And even when she was finally taken up by a very brilliant dealers who enabled the sort of development of her career right in the last sort of 10 years. It was only because several of us, about 5 or 6 of us, have consistently written about her as art historians that these collectors suddenly said, well, here is all this art history that says she’s an absolutely major British artist, major artist of contemporary history, that then the collectors began to think and then they have bought paintings which have been given to the national museums. And now we begin to see her true place in history of British art.

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That’s a really wonderful concrete example actually, of how the critical world and the world of museums and galleries and the world of practising artists do interact with each other in order to effect real change. I think that’s really, really interesting, coming back to the idea of wanting to make art history more inclusive rather than exclusive. You do a lot of outreach work with sixth form students, don’t you, who might not have ever thought about going on to study art history. How do you approach drawing in a group of 16 year olds who’ve never thought about this stuff before? What I do is that, and I’ll give you a classic example, we did something recently with a group of very gifted young students, some of whom will know about The Handmaid’s Tale from television, some of whom might be reading it as part of their school. And I went in through something that was based in their experience, which is a the story in a way, of this ghastly image of the world of Gilead, which is an absolutely sexist, absolutely racist, absolutist society. And we went in by introducing them to the story.

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And then I asked them just to look at all the covers of all the issues of Margaret Atwood’s book and asked what these covers have in common. And of course it was the colour red. So what I wanted them is to pay attention to the fact that it was telling them something by means of the colour red in all sorts of different ways. So I wanted them to understand that they’re surrounded by images. An art isn’t just what’s in the museum in a gold frame is a language of images that impacts on you. So if we begin to analyse colour, then I analysed what kind of image was there and what they, the association. Now they didn’t know about the scarlet woman necessarily, but they did understand the meaning of red. And then we looked at grey and green and black. And then we looked at the TV programme and realised that all the servants were played by African American or black British artists. You know, all the high-ranking women were blonde and blue eyed.

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So I was trying to get them to decode their world and we asked them, do you think Gilead could happen in Britain? And of course they said no, no, no, it would happen in some repressive country elsewhere. And I said no. The danger is you not watching the signs of your own society for intolerance and anguish and racism. It’s happening in your schools. So I could link between something which seemed remote, like art history and their own experience of their daily lives and then say this is a tool. This is a tool for analysing. That actually leads me on very nicely to something I was going to say, which was that does seem that that context of studying visual culture, it’s quite a leap to talking about art history for students, though it’s not necessarily the same thing, is it?

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It links up with your earlier question if the museums and art history as a discipline and as a way of speaking about art consistently speaks in polished accents of high class English and speaks in the kind of language that we have on television about kind of an inner world of people who know the terms and know the story. It excludes people from understanding that. Image culture has always been part of it. So I mean, in the 16th and 17th century in Rome, you didn’t go to an art gallery, you went to a church. And you spent hours looking up at Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin or Caravaggio’s Saint Paul having Damascus, having his moment of revelation. And that the greatness of this art is that it was compelling people to feel you are right there. And why? Because the Catholic Church, to catch people, draw them back to Catholicism, because Protestantism was saying you don’t need images, you know, So if you’re going to, you know, Protestant church, you don’t have images, you have architecture, OK. And that’s another story. That’s another thing you have to learn to be able to read.

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So it’s not that visual culture is like this popular culture and then there’s art. Going back to what I said at the beginning, what fascinated me and what Francis Haskell showed to me was art is made out of the necessity to make sense of the world you live in with the tools you have. And you need to learn to decode the language in which they have represented the world in order also to decode the language that you’re in. So I’ll give you an example. I’m also interested in introducing people who’ve never been to opera to opera, because they think of that as a kind of high elite art. So I took some students to Madam Butterfly. In the 1st 20 minutes of the opera, you discover that the woman who is being married off to a 24 year old man is 15. Now the whole tragedy of this week. I think it’s beautiful, the music is beautiful. But she’s underage, right? We live in a world in which we’re very anxious about that.

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There’s a whole scandal out there about the abuse of young women, the trading and trafficking in young women, the scandals that we’ve had at Rotherham and and other parts of the northern cities about the sexual abuse of young women, the grooming of young women. Now I don’t want to simply collapse art into everyday life, but these are issues of violence and the violation and dehumanisation. They matter and you can bring people to think about it by interrupting the kind of aesthetic gloss of the story of high art, which is completely freed from the the mess of life. And you bring it down. You’re not going to condemn that opera, but you’re going to say how is it that it’s accommodating me to witnessing a 15 year old killing herself because she feels abused and abandoned? What is the morality of this? But also, what is the morality of art that makes us unable to recognise what we’ve just witnessed? The same as Goga, he married a 13 year old inspired by the same book.

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And Van Gogh paints a very sexual image of a 15 year old, also inspired by the same book that inspired Puccini. Now I find that interesting because it generates discussion about these issues and in terms of improving things for women artists. Coming back to museums and galleries, there was a pretty damning piece of research published last year that found that from 2008 to 2018, only 11% of all acquisitions and 14% of exhibitions at 26 major American museums were by female artists. And that in that last decade, just 2% of global art auction spending was on work by women. So how do these figures make you feel about how things really are improving for women artists? Despondent. Outraged, furious, and yet completely. It’s not to me, unexpected. If I wrote Old Mistresses to say the problem is systemic.

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It’s in the culture, it’s in the language, it’s in the institutions of art that are producing this over and over again. They produce the selective Canon. One of my books was called Differencing the Canon, which was written 20 years after I wrote Old Mistresses. In order to say you don’t understand, we’ve given you all the evidence and it hasn’t changed one bit. So you have to understand what does the Canon do for men? And it’s just like James Baldwin that I watched him on television the other night in that wonderful arena, and he says it’s not his problem as a black man to get this right. He has to say to the white society, why do you need me to be your lesser subject? Why do you need this caricature of another human being because they’re black? What does your society need that produces and maintains me in this position that you do not recognise my humanity? And until we put the question in those terms, your optimism, Oh God, it hasn’t got any better.

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Why not? Well, it’s all there, you know, Missus, because it’s serving this purpose. And now we have the financialization of art, particularly contemporary art, which means the bankers of 2007 who didn’t get sent to prison but still have vast amounts of money to invest, invested in the art market. And these works are traded and invested and calculated. And because there’s no symbolic value in the work of women in our culture, because art history has not given them any place in the history of humanity, there is no financial value attached to the work that is made by an artist who’s a woman. You yourself, Griselda, you were born in South Africa, you grew up in Canada and you came to the UK to study at Oxford before going to the court hold, and you’ve been based at Leeds University since 1977. Why did you want to make that city your base?

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I wanted to come to Leeds because Tim Clark, TJ Clark, the social historian of art, had arrived as the professor and that was my ambition was to work with the only art historian I had come across so far who was thrilling me intellectually, challenging me to read much more widely and really did understand and could articulate how we would do the social history of art. What are the conditions of artistic production? How does ideology work? How do we link art to history? So I wanted to work with him and when I went to Leeds somebody said to me, well that’s the end of you. Nobody will ever hear of you because it’s a back. It wasn’t a famous art history, it was a small, tiny fine art department. But around Tim Clark, he, he built a little group of us and we created the first MA in the social history of art. And then I created the first MA in feminism and the visual arts.

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So we became a magnet for all the other people who felt discontented with what they were getting elsewhere, either in art school or art history, but who knew that art and it’s expanded social, historical and critical force was the interesting thing they wanted to study. So we created leads as a hub and we now sit in a very interesting hub with the Henry Moore Institute, Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The Hepworth and the Holberg Prize gives the winner 6,000,000 krona to further their research, which is about half 1,000,000 lbs. So how are you planning on using this? Well, when I got the prize, my sister said are you rich now? And I said no, unfortunately not. I’ve been given this money to do something.

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So I am going to fund some lectureships, some scholarships, support various archives in order to ensure that feminism and art history and its expanded way that I’ve been doing it is going to be supported in the next generation and younger scholars are going to have the chance to carry on their work and take it in wonderfully new directions. Thank you to Professor Griselda Pollock in tomorrow’s programme, Stuart Evers on his new novel The Blind Light, the story of two families from across the class divide living with the fear of nuclear threat and political turmoil. Join Samira live at 7:15. Thanks for listening to this special edition of Front ROW. I’m Katie Popplewell and the producer in Salford was Ekanea Kolawu, the studio managers were Mike Smith and Phil Booth, and the production coordinator was Helen Surtees. And if you enjoyed this episode, you can discover more radio, music and podcasts on BBC Sounds.

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