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In countless ways, women have been erased from the history of art. Their exhibited works have been reattributed to their male peers; their once-collected paintings have been left to deteriorate in museum storerooms; and many art historical accounts have questioned their very ability to create “great” art. We can even track the gradual removal of women’s names from the historical record in moments of deliberate, posthumous eradication. However, a growing mountain of evidence demands we recognize that women artists may have always existed—and were often quite prominent in their own places and times.
In her lecture, Paris Spies-Gans will share this troubling history and present a series of recent discoveries to challenge the powerful, gendered assumptions that continue to inflect our views of the past. By recovering the traces of women artists—the imprints they left behind—we can update essential parts of art history’s most enduring narratives.
Paris A. Spies-Gans is a historian of art with a focus on women and the politics of artistic expression. She holds a PhD in History from Princeton University, an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and an AB in History and Literature from Harvard University. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Yale Center for British Art, among other institutions. Her first book, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830, was published by Yale University Press in 2022. It has won several prizes in the fields of British art history and eighteenth-century studies, and was named one of the top art books of 2022 by The Art Newspaper and The Conversation. She is currently working on her second book, A New Story of Art (Doubleday/Penguin Random House).
