From Celia Paul to Dora Maar to the abstract expressionists in postwar New York, Annalena McAfee on the female artists finding their way into the limelight

“Why are there no great women artists?” asked the American art historian Linda Nochlin in a landmark essay in 1971.

Her essay was a provocative response to the art history canon, which gave women a couple of passing sentences in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and one nod (to Käthe Kollwitz) in Gombrich’s magisterial Story of Art. “There existed not a single reliable general study to which one could turn,” Nochlin later wrote.

Nine years after Nochlin posed her question, Germaine Greer attempted to answer it with The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and their Work, a brilliant scholarly exhumation in which she championed such artists as Artemisia Gentileschi and Sofonisba Anguissola, but argued that there was no female equivalent of Titian or Leonardo da Vinci because “the neurosis of the artist is of a very different kind from the carefully cultured self-destructiveness of women”.

In another reading, perhaps women were too nice – too attentive to the needs of others – to summon the focus required to produce a masterpiece (the word itself enshrining the problem). The creative monstre sacré was always male, and women were happier in the role of muse and helpmeet, it seemed. From Millais’s subaqueous Lizzie Siddall to Picasso’s Weeping Woman, they were silent martyrs to genius, shivering naked in whichever pose the artist required.

The recent memoir by the painter Celia Paul, Self-Portrait, was a sobering complement – a delicate ink and wash study – to the livid impasto of The Lives of Lucian Freud, William Weaver’s biography of Paul’s former lover. Freud’s rackety personal life, numerous children and the cruelty evident in his paintings did not stop young women scrambling to sit for, and love, the saturnine, towering figure of modern British portraiture. As a young art student, Paul sat for Freud, sometimes weeping at the humiliating postures he asked her to assume. She became his lover but, to Freud’s displeasure, she never lost sight of her own ambitions to be a painter. With a single-mindedness that would be unremarkable in most male artists, three weeks after she gave birth to Freud’s son, Paul returned to work in her London studio, leaving their baby to be raised by her mother in Cambridge.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dora Maar at Tate Modern brings together surrealist photographs and photomontages alongside painting. Photograph: Guy Bell/Rex/Shutterstock

Since Nochlin’s essay and Greer’s response, art and art history have moved on. Gratifying to see, for example, Dora Maar, Picasso’s weeping woman, finally recognised in a retrospective of her own at Tate Modern. In Ninth Street Women, an engrossing group biography, Mary Gabriel portrays abstract expressionists in postwar New York, focusing not on the famous boozy male behemoths of the circle but on the women – then seen as mere wives, girlfriends or female extras – who were considerable artists in their own right, as Lee Krasner’s Barbican exhibition last year so vividly demonstrated. It’s interesting to note that of the five artists featured in the book, only one – Grace Hartigan – had a child, though she abandoned him to concentrate on her work. Interesting, too, that all of them jibbed at the gender-specific categorisation, ‘women artists’.

In fiction, Tom Rachman’s novel The Italian Teacher is a splendid portrayal of the omnivorous demands of (male) artistic “genius”,. Rachman’s rambunctious American painter, Bear Bavinsky, storms through life, heedless of anything or anyone but his work. Family and friends are collateral damage and Bear systematically crushes the artistic ambitions of his muse and their son until a delicious, posthumous revenge is exacted.

John Updike trained as an artist and turned his observational gifts to fiction, using words with the gorgeous precision of the finest sable brush. In Seek My Face, his meta-subject is American art since the 1940s, but the focus is a female painter, Hope Chafetz, unfairly but predictably known less for her work than for the men she married (two celebrated artists). There is a roman-à-clef element, summoning echoes of Lee Krasner impatiently batting away questions about Jackson Pollock, as Updike’s elderly painter is interviewed by a thrusting young female art historian. It’s hard to detect in Updike’s extraordinary portrayal of both women the die-hard misogynist depicted by recent critics. He’s as good on female ageing as he is on art, and behind the unsparing observations of humanity, with all its flaws and vulnerabilities, lies a rueful compassion.

“All a woman does for a man ...” Hope reflects, “is secondary, inessential. Art was what these men had loved – that is, themselves.”

• This article was amended on 25 March 2020. An earlier version referred to “Rossetti’s subaqueous Lizzie Siddall”. It was John Everett Millais who painted Siddall as Ophelia. Siddall later married Millais’s friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

• Nightshade by Annalena McAfee is published by Penguin Random House on 19 March.