Seeing Ourselves: Women's Self-portraits by Frances Borzello Thames & Hudson 224pp, £28 in UK
Frida Kahlo's shocking self-portrait, "My Birth", in which she depicts herself giving birth to herself, is metonymically representative of the arrival of the woman artist into the world. Frances Borzello charts the centuries of gestation, given visual form in their self-portraits, as women struggle to give birth to themselves as artists.
We know that, historically, feminity was rigidly circumscribed, womanly behaviour being legitimised by male conventions and institutions, and by concepts of ownership. Men thereby controlled the training of artists and their categorisation, the exhibition of works and their prices, keeping their own interests to the fore.
In this way women insistent enough to persevere with their ambitions were limited to the lower categories of still-life and portraiture. Borzello documents the chinks of opportunity, however, which allowed major talents like that of Elizabeth Vige-Lebrun and Angelica Kauffman to burgeon. Enlivened by Varari's stranger-than-truthisms - Piero di Cosimo's practice of boiling forty eggs at a time for his weekly food, Filippo Lippi running off with a novice nun - Borzello takes on the stereotypes. The equally offensive polarised assertions, that a woman's art was either of lesser quality or that she herself had super giftsthat allowed her to produce work of even an adequate quality, are fundamentally re-examined. While the sin of vanity was traditionally represented by a woman looking in a mirror, Frances Borzello debunks the corollary perception of a woman's self-portrait as the personification of the vice of vanity. Furthermore, many woman painters who show themselves ludricously overdressed for a day in the studio, do so not out of vanity, but because such dressing was probably intended to camouflage the self-assertiveness it took to operate as a female painter.
While, historically, arguments have been posited which suggest that women are more analytical or more introspective than men, and that the outlet of self-portraiture is thus innately suitable as subject matter for women, the reality is more socially and politically constructed. Although women paint self-portraits very often for the same reasons that men do, the results are self-evidently not the same. Nor can differences be exclusively explained by gender, but by a complex interaction of ingredients including gender, class, geography and period. The inference that a woman artist was both a deviant artist and a deviant woman is resoundingly challenged by the likes of Elizabeth Vige-Lebrun. Her portrait of herself and her daughter, painted in 1788, in which she represents herself, as one contemporary source maintained, in "a Greuzian transport of maternity", is counteracted by the knowledge that by this time she had already earned more than a million francs from her work.
Successful women artists such as Vige-Lebrun thus operated at many levels, embodying, in this case, contemporary bourgeois ideals of motherhood but also proclaiming the possibilities of combining motherhood with a professional practice. Representing herself as both subject and object of the picture, she simultaneously proclaims herself as a successful mother and accomplished portraitist.
Borzello characterises the acceptance of women as artists as a game of snakes and ladders, suggesting that in the 19th century the ambiguities of (self-) effacement are gradually tempered by the admittance of women into the art schools of Europe from which they pressed their advantage into the institutional exhibition circuit. However, she reminds us that "A woman painters's reputation, both social and professional, still depended on her respectability as much as her talent". This advancement culminated, perhaps, in the self-confident self-portrait of the Irish artist Helen Mabel Trevor in which, dressed in the garb of a male artist, she proclaims "identity: artist". And indeed, by the turn of the century, some equality had been established with the emergence of the female bohemian artist epitomised by Paula ModersohnBecker or Suzanne Valadon.
This is an enormously interesting topic involving fertile questions of gender, identity and representation. If, as Baudelaire argued in The Salon of 1848, "a portrait is a model complicated by an artist", how much more complex is that portrait when it is of oneself? And it compounds that conundrum when the self-portrait is by a woman artist. From the monasteries of medieval Europe to the present, Frances Borzello simultaneously maintains chronological and thematic coherence in a book which is evidently researched with scholarly rigour but is also engagingly written, with terrific verve.
Niamh O'Sullivan is an art historian and lecturer at the National College of Art and Design