Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, with Griselda Pollock

Summary

Griselda Pollock discusses the origins, argument, and continuing relevance of Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, written with Rozsika Parker and first published in 1981. She emphasizes that the book was a feminist collaboration and that Parker was an equal intellectual force.

The book’s central argument

Old Mistresses is not primarily a catalogue of forgotten women artists. It asks how art history has systematically written women out, despite documented artists, artworks, and careers.

Pollock argues that this exclusion is structural. Art history helps create and preserve the ideal of the “great white male artist.” Women’s achievements are then treated as exceptions, lesser work, or evidence that women lack originality. Ideas about femininity—such as women being decorative, sentimental, weak, or derivative—are not merely prejudices outside art history; they also help organize the discipline’s standards and stories.

Women artists did not simply overcome restrictions or work despite them. They negotiated the conditions of their lives, and those conditions shaped the work they made.

The book’s framework

Pollock outlines several linked subjects addressed in the book:

• Femininity and artistic value: How stereotypes of femininity have been used to explain women’s supposed inadequacy as artists, while supporting art history’s account of male genius.
• The hierarchy of art and craft: How painting and sculpture have been privileged over textiles, needlework, and other media. Pollock connects this hierarchy to gender and to Western art’s tendency to devalue practices associated with other cultures.
• Representations of women: How art has often presented women as objects of fantasy or visual display rather than as creative, intellectual subjects.
• Women’s self-representation: How women artists have had to depict or assert themselves as makers and thinkers.
• The legacy for contemporary artists: How historical exclusion affects women making art in the present, and why feminist criticism must challenge both art history and the conditions artists face.

Covers, collections, and visibility

Pollock describes the changing covers of the book as examples of how representation carries political meaning. The original cover used Marisol Escobar’s White Dreams, which Pollock says addressed both sexism and racism. The American publisher replaced it, arguing that American readers would not understand the image. Later editions featured artists including Meret Oppenheim, Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz, and Artemisia Gentileschi.

Pollock also recounts looking for women artists in the National Gallery’s collection and finding very few. She presents this as evidence that women artists have not simply been “forgotten”: institutions continue to shape what the public sees and learns. She cites the later acquisition of a work by Artemisia Gentileschi as a rare addition in the Gallery’s long history.

Pollock links institutional absence to the art market. She cites figures stating that women made up only a small proportion of art sales in 2019, with much of that value concentrated in a handful of highly visible women artists. She argues that low visibility and low financial value reinforce one another.

Language and the “old mistress”

Pollock stresses that language can quietly reproduce hierarchy. “Old master” carries prestige, while its feminine counterpart, “old mistress,” has very different connotations. She also challenges the habit of referring to women artists by their first names, while men are more often identified by surnames. In her view, such conventions make the male artist seem universal and mark women as a special category.

Reading artworks rather than reducing artists to biography

Pollock argues against reducing women’s art to stories about their private lives. Biography can matter, but it should not substitute for analysing how experience is transformed through artistic choices.

As an example, she compares paintings of the Madonna and Child by Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi. Rather than treating Artemisia’s work as inherently “more feminine,” she points to differences in gesture and psychological relation between mother and child. She also challenges the familiar interpretation of Artemisia’s Judith and Holofernes as simple revenge for sexual violence. Pollock proposes reading the paintings through their composition, artistic influences, and political possibilities—not just through sensationalized biography.

Discussion and audience questions

• Has art history changed? Pollock acknowledges new scholarship and courses, but says feminist analysis is still too often treated as an optional specialism. She argues that it should reshape how art history is taught and practised as a whole.
• Have art and craft hierarchies shifted? She sees greater acceptance of varied materials and practices, including textiles, installation, video, and performance. However, associations between textiles, women, and supposedly lesser art continue to affect how work is valued.
• Should biography be used? Pollock rejects biographical reductionism, not biography itself. Artists’ lived conditions can inform interpretation, but art historians should examine how those conditions are expressed through artistic form and language.
• What about women artists in other cultures? Pollock cautions that art history developed differently across societies. Ideas about who counts as an artist, and the roles of women in artistic production, vary by cultural and historical context. She points to feminist scholarship examining these different histories.
• Are publishers doing enough? Pollock calls the publishing record inadequate. Books and exhibitions depend on sustained research, institutional support, and a willingness to invest in work that publishers may not expect to sell widely. The absence of books, collections, and exhibitions also limits public knowledge.
• What can be done? Pollock urges continued attention, study, publishing, collecting, and teaching. She warns against assuming that progress is automatic and argues that including diverse artists changes what people can imagine and recognize in art history.

Speakers and sources featured

Speakers and audience questioners

• Griselda Pollock — speaker and co-author of Old Mistresses.
• Event host — introduced Pollock and moderated the questions; not named in the subtitles.
• Audience questioners — A Sphinx, Amy McTurk, Ronnie Randall, and Harriet Olsen.

Key works, people, and institutions discussed

• Rozsika Parker — Pollock’s co-author and author of The Subversive Stitch.
• Marisol Escobar — artist of White Dreams.
• Other artists referenced: Meret Oppenheim; Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz; Artemisia Gentileschi; Orazio Gentileschi; Lubaina Himid; Maud Sulter; Claudette Johnson; Sonia Boyce; Ingrid Pollard; Amrita Sher-Gil; Pan Yuliang; Rosa Bonheur; Nathalie Micas; Anna Klumpke; Berthe Morisot; Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun; Sofonisba Anguissola; Elisabetta Sirani; Fede Galizia; and Hildegard von Bingen.
• Elizabeth Brown and Ann Gabhart — curators of the 1972 exhibition Old Mistresses: Women Artists of the Past.
• Other artists, writers, and scholars mentioned: the Guerrilla Girls; Judy Chicago; Mary Kelly; Susan Hiller; Carrie Mae Weems; Nanette Solomon; Janis Jefferies; Penina Barnett; Whitney Chadwick; Mary Garrard; and Charlotte Salomon.
• Institutions and examples: the National Gallery; the Tate; the Museum of Modern Art; the Guerrilla Girls’ art-market poster; Hogarth’s Marriage à-la-mode; and Pollock’s follow-up book Differencing the Canon.