The Hidden Ones
So many of us have to tuck away parts of ourselves, maybe even most of ourselves, when we go home to our families.
Like me, every queer and/or trans person I've ever known has — at some point in their lives — been forced to hide at least part of themselves from the people they love most. Our sexuality, maybe. Our gender. Our relationships, our names, our pronouns, our hopes and dreams, our real feelings about politics or religion. Some of us have had to do it because we know we won't be safe or accepted if we tell our families who we really are. Some of us have had to do it because other people have begged us to stay hidden ("for your own sake," they always say). People who've never had to be closeted can never truly understand the emotional, psychological, and sometimes even physical damage it does to a person to have to hide who they are, the way the shame twists like a sickness in your guts, whispering lies that you're unlikable, unlovable, unworthy. That the only place you belong is in the Dark.
I always think about LGBTQ people who have to hide at this time of year, around the holidays, because so many of us have to tuck away parts of ourselves, maybe even most of ourselves, when we go home to our families. Or even if we can be essentially who we are these days, we still have vivid memories and pain that resurface because of times we did have to stay hidden.
This year, though, instead of dwelling on memories of my childhood best friend begging me not to tell her parents I'm gay, or my own well-meaning family firmly suggesting I never tell my grandparents I was in a lesbian relationship, or my step-mom groaning and grumbling before I came out but started floating the idea that I wanted to become an activist for marriage equality, I've been thinking about the long legacy of women hiding, powerfully.
Clara Peeters was a Flemish-born painter who, like most aspiring women artists in the early 17th century, was relegated to only doing still-life paintings. Men weren't threatened by women exploring that particular genre because painting items found around a home, especially food and dishes on a table — a woman's domain! — wasn't prestigious like painting Jesus or Paul or various witchy bitches burning alive in hell. Neither did it require male artists to let women into their sacred institutions. Clara Peeters mastered the still life painting. In her brilliant book, The Story of Art Without Men, Katy Hessel describes Peeters' work as featuring "delectable-looking wines, fruits, vegetables, and fish spread out invitingly on a platter, with glowing utensils and flowers leaping from their stems." Hessel invites us to look at Peeters' iconic Vase of Flowers, Goblets and Shells, 1612. Here:
Now, look closer at the goblet and the pewter jug. Worked into the baubles are ten miniscule self-portraits of Clara Peeters! She hid her own self inside her still life paintings! She did it as an act of great defiance to show that she was not only capable of painting the female form, but a master at doing so as a reflection, one of the most challenging ways to paint a person. She also did it to immortalize the fact that she's the one who painted these masterful creations. "By painting herself she emphasizes the illusionism of the painting; we have a sense that we actually see her as she paints," Museo del Prado explains. Art history is absolutely saturated with men stealing credit for women's ideas, techniques, and even their literal works of art. No one was going to do that to Clara Peeters; she hid herself inside her art to make sure of it.
Peeters wasn't the only woman to claim agency over her own work while showcasing superior artistic skills and vision with acts of self-portraiture rebellion. One of my personal favorites is Angelica Kauffman's Zeuxis Selecting Models for Helen of Troy. In 1766, Kauffman was one of only two women who helped found London's Royal Academy of the Arts. Mary Moser was the other. Yet, despite being founders, both Kauffman and Moser were prohibited from receiving the full and proper training provided by the Academy, including, most importantly, access to the life room. In fact, in Johann Zoffany's 1772 painting of all the Academy's founders, Kauffman and Moser aren't even included as living, breathing artists. No, the dozens male founders are gathered around a nude model, debating, creating — while Kauffman and Moser are simply lifeless portraits on the wall. Just a couple of objects in a room full of the men who create them.
So in Zeuxis Selecting Models for Helen of Troy, Kauffman took that concept into her own hands and pushed it even further. She depicts Greek painter Zeuxis "attempting to reconfigure Helen of Troy (his idea of 'perfection') by borrowing attributes from five idealized women." But as your gaze moves from left to right, you'll finally see Kauffman herself, standing in front of an easel holding her paintbrushes. She is showing us, according to Katy Hessel, "that it is not Zeuxis who is directing this scene, but rather she [Kauffman] who is in charge." She painted herself painting the painting we're seeing so there'd be no question about her skill, her power, or her agency. She's inserted herself behind the scene's main characters, slightly hidden, but still fully in charge.
This is a theme throughout history, and not just in the world of art. When the Church came for women healers during the Witch Trials, they hid their medical knowledge inside fairy tales. When Saint Hildegard of Bingen cracked the code on preserving beer with hops, she hid the knowledge in a recipe book because she knew no man would go looking for it there (and would not, therefore, be able to exploit her discovery for profit, so her and her Sisters could benefit from it to continue to fund all the not-religious work they did inside her convent). Some of Emily Dickinson’s most exciting work was hidden on scraps of paper stashed around her bedroom.
Having to hide parts of yourself — your knowledge, your accomplishments, the very you-ness of you — is a terrible thing, but I find great comfort in knowing that I was never really alone in cloaking myself because of my queerness. That I'm not alone, even now, when I have to obscure parts of myself in certain spaces. I've always been part of a long lineage of women who've found ways to express and be seen for exactly who they are. When I remember sitting quietly, timidly, lonely at a holiday table, my gayness and my girlfriend known only to me, I like to imagine catching my reflection in a glass of sweet tea or the back of a soup spoon. I like to think of Clara Peeters doing the same, her own loneliness replaced by epiphany. I like to think she winked at herself, the way she winks at us now through her enduring art. I always smile back at her reflection — seeing myself in the way she hid, but refused to disappear.
One of your best ever.
Judith Leyster's self portrait is one of my favorite paintings from the region... And it was misattributed to a male painter for years because they thought a woman couldn't have done it.