Paris Spies-Gans is rewriting the history of artistic representation.

The Getty Center hosted a free lecture at the Harold M. Williams Auditorium on Sunday featuring Spies-Gans’ commentary about her current work on the politics of artistic expression in 18th and 19th century European art. The talk introduced her research on the gaps in historical representation of female artists and their imprint on cultural and artistic landscapes. Spies-Gans, an art historian who has maintained a working relationship with the Getty since high school, covered the prominent Louvre Salon in Paris and the Royal Academy of Arts in London and their connection to female artists of the time.

“London and Paris were the most powerful places to do it (for women to study on their own terms). They had the most consistent exhibitions, all the catalogs survived – the material was there, and the importance was there,” Spies-Gans said. “What I found is, whenever you look, women are there. Maybe in different ways, maybe in different numbers, maybe painting different works, but that’s also part of the point, right?”

Spies-Gans – who completed her bachelor’s degree at Harvard University and obtained her doctorate from Princeton University – studies how women historically overcome sociopolitical barriers to contribute to artistic circles in the creative hubs of Paris and London. When she began research for her first book, 2022’s “A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830,” Spies-Gans said she did not intend to focus her attention on data.

After looking through countless exhibition catalogs, Spies-Gans said she has found evidence of more involvement of women artists than had been previously known. For instance, she said 606 named women and 227 anonymous female artists displayed works of art over the course of the London Academy’s first 62 exhibitions from 1769 to 1830.

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Beginning her talk at 2 p.m., Spies-Gans discussed popular genres in women’s art of the time, ways in which female artists received training and the reasons why female artists’ stories have remained largely untold. In her lecture, she said a common assumption about women artists is that they were usually the daughters or wives of male artists. However, her research found about 300 of the female artists who exhibited in London and about 250 who exhibited in Paris were educated for the profession.

During her presentation, Spies-Gans also discussed the first decade of the Parisian open salon, which turned previously aristocratic social gatherings into hubs for political and intellectual discussion. At this time, female artists defined how they were perceived as artists by depicting male artists, self portraits, portraits of peers or images of women partaking in artistic activities, she said. This shift in the discourse toward highlighting female artists’ abilities and practices occurred during the years in which new concepts of political citizenship were developing and being gendered male, Spies-Gans said.

For example, Spies-Gans said the 1793 piece, “The Author at Her Occupations,” exemplifies a visualization of the artist’s roles as wife, mother, citizen and artist – speaking on the revolutionary state of redefining women’s presence in public and private spheres. She said this painting suggests a “calcifying visual language” by presenting the female painter as the subject.

“Importantly, they (female artists) exhibited in most genres in roughly the same proportions as their British male peers,” Spies-Gans said. “This suggests that their visual choices didn’t necessarily reflect collective or transnational gender prescriptions.”

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Scott Allan is an associate curator in the Getty Museum’s paintings department who specializes in 19th century European paintings. He said work like Spies-Gans’, which finds biographical details of female artists whose careers were misconstrued in public accounts of art, is a fascinating yet challenging undertaking. He said many exhibitions and lectures at the Getty feature historians’ long-term projects, which require immersion into a topic to the point of becoming an expert.

“These women artists, they leave a real material trace and a real public trace – a lot of Paris’ (Spies-Gans’) evidence, it’s sitting right there in the exhibition catalogs,” Allan said. “She’s the first one who actually kind of went through and just systematically gleaned it and then made important analysis on the basis of it.”

Following the Getty Center’s acquisition of the 1818 painting “Portrait of a Woman” by Sophie Frémiet, Spies-Gans said she was invited to speak about the piece and its relevance to her studies. The lecture, originally intended to take place in January, had to be rescheduled to May because of the wildfires across Los Angeles County, she said. The fires reminded her that material objects – including artwork – may not always survive, but their stories persist through people and community structures. Spies-Gans added that because these women were willing to vulnerably situate themselves in the art world, historians today can rebuild their careers and impact based on their past relationships and public activity.

Spies-Gans concluded her lecture reflecting on the ways art historians must reconcile with the discrepancy between the historical notion of restrictions on female artists versus the clear success many of them achieved. She asked the audience to consider what makes legacies last when they are seemingly lost, as well as how historians can go about recovering them. While the rhetoric of the past presents men as the dominators of the European art world in the 18th and 19th centuries, Spies-Gans said her research has revealed that women were actively involved in artistic practices and deserve clearer representation of their widespread impact.

“I do feel very inspired by them and what they did, and when things are hard in the difficult world that we live in right now, to think back to what people have done and how they’ve navigated very difficult situations and risen above them is a very powerful thing,” Spies-Gans said. “So I do feel like they are a big part of how I engage with the world, not necessarily that I know them, but that I want to do right by them.”