RustyBertrandPicasso almost ended Dora Maar's career, convincing her, when they were a couple, to quit photography because he was intimidated by her talent.
There is a long list of artists suppressed by the petty hacks of European modernist movements, and a longer list of female innovators erased from public memory. Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning met similar resistance; Andre Breton and Dalí both also being misogynistic megalomaniacs who vanguarded surrealism from women; Henry Miller writing to Anaïs Nin that her stories were garbage and should be disregarded, only for her to discover whole sections copied word for word in his novels years later, all while she financed his existence.
Francoise Gilot finally gets an exhibition after this hack successfully ruined her chances of success as an artist while she lived, and her name is still omitted.
Rebecca Solnit suggests that the fact that the question "what is your mother's maiden name?" is often used for security measures is a meaningful indicator of the extent of women's erasure. What's in a name? A lot. If one's claim of one's own name meant nothing then colonisers wouldn't need to strip them from the colonised, and men wouldn't need to erase them in marriage, from history books and from reportage.
via Freyja Howls
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