Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Twitter and Instagram: @dsgreenwald
Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? Artistic Labor and Time Constraint in Nineteenth-Century America
Guided by theory from labor economics and using data about works by nineteenth-century women artists, this talk would examine the ways in which women artists’ domestic responsibilities forced them to be active in certain genres and media—particularly still-life paintings and watercolors—that are faster to finish and can be completed on a more flexible schedule. This insight about how artistic form and content change in response to demands on women’s time highlights structural barriers that continue to hamper nineteenth-century women artists’ posthumous reputations and continue to limit women artists’ attainment today.
Diana Greenwald is an art historian and economic historian. Her work uses both statistical and qualitative analyses to explore the relationship between art and broader social and economic change during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the United States and France. Diana’s first book, Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art, was published by Princeton University Press in February 2021.
She is currently the Assistant Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Prior to joining the Gardner, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., working in the departments of American and British Paintings and Modern Prints and Drawings.
She received a D.Phil. in History from the University of Oxford. She was co-supervised by Professor Kevin O’Rourke and Professor Michael Hatt (University of Warwick). Before doctoral study, Diana earned an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History from Oxford and a Bachelor’s degree in Art History from Columbia University.
Check out Dr. Greenwald’s new book: Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art here.