Aristotle is to blame. It was he who first put about the rumour that women were incapable of artistic creativity, and his slander stuck. You only have to flip through Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art to discover that. This 1950 classic has been hailed as the art student’s bible. Yet not one single woman gets mentioned until, with the 1989 publication of a 15th edition, the German expressionist Käthe Kollwitz creeps in.
In his final chapter, however, Gombrich concedes that “our knowledge of history is always incomplete”. There are always “new facts to be discovered” and these, he says, “may change our image of the past”.
This is precisely the change that the broadcaster and curator Katy Hessel sets out to effect. For the
