HISTORY HAS SHOWN that women have often had to fight hard within the artistic sphere, as in many other areas, to gain both credibility and a visible platform to fully express their voices.
Tate Britain’s new exhibition, Now You See Us: Women traces this convoluted arc of women’s passage towards professional validation. It encompasses four centuries of work, beginning with Tudor miniatures (which mark the first record of women working professionally) and ending just after the First World War, when huge societal shifts were beginning to offer women fresh possibilities, edging towards those comparable to male contemporaries. As 20th-century American painter Isabel Bishop once expounded, “I didn’t want to be a woman artist. I just wanted to be an artist.”
