Who’s Afraid of Katy Hessel?

Earlier this year, I received an email suggesting that I commission a well-known critic to write a takedown of British art historian Katy Hessel’s latest book, How to Live an Artful Life (2025). This is not necessarily surprising: within the art world, there is a great deal of hostility towards Hessel. Her first book, The Story of Art Without Men (2022), was a commercial success, but almost every colleague I have spoken to about it – be they an academic, a critic or a gallerist – has voiced haughty judgements of Hessel’s accessible and necessarily surface-level primer on the work of hundreds of women artists. Her new book is targeted even more towards a general readership: bearing the subtitle ‘366 Inspirations from Artists on How to Bring Creativity to Your Everyday’, it is clearly not intended as a work of rigorous art criticism or history. To treat it as such by inviting a critic to take it apart would be unfair, making sport of the gratuitous Hessel-bashing which seems so rife within today’s art world.

According to Hessel’s own account in The Story of Art Without Men, her interest in spotlighting the work of women artists began after visiting an art fair in 2015, where she realized that none of the artworks on display were by women. ‘This’, she writes, ‘sparked a series of questions: could I name twenty women artists off the top of my head? Ten pre-1950? Any pre-1850? The answer was no.’ The book is Hessel’s response to her own lack of knowledge, providing short introductions – most only a couple of paragraphs long – to women artists ranging from the 17th-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi to those working today, such as Tracey Emin, Lubaina Himid and Jadé Fadojutimi. However, in a critical write-up of the book on her blog, The Penitent Review, artist and writer Crystal Bennes complains that, in Hessel’s bibliography, she cites only one book dedicated to the 18th-century artist Rosalba Carriera. ‘Where is Bernardina Sani’s 2007 catalogue raisonné (published in Italian)?’, Bennes asks. ‘Why not mention the early-twentieth-century monograph by Emilie von Hoerschelmann (written in German)?’

The Story of Art Without Men discusses the work of over 300 artists. Is it not perhaps a little much to expect Hessel to be familiar with the full published literature on each – including works in languages other than English, in editions difficult to source? Although Hessel is a trained art historian, The Story of Art Without Men is not – and never pretends to be – an academic textbook. Hessel acknowledges that her book has ‘merely skimmed the surface’ of each featured artist’s work. If you already recognize many of the names in The Story of Art Without Men, it probably won’t be of much interest. This is an encyclopaedic crash course for those unfamiliar with many women artists: a readable book released by a commercial publishing house and aimed at the general, not the specialist, reader. To treat it as anything else is a simple category error.

If Hessel’s first book was not aimed at an art world audience, her second moves even further into the mainstream: How to Live an Artful Life is, essentially, a self-help book, with words of wisdom for all 366 days of the year. This calendar of sorts contains, to quote the book’s blurb, ‘thoughts, reflections and encouragements from artists’, with each day bringing a new quotation from a leading artist or writer, alongside Hessel’s own suggestions on ‘how to live an artful life’. In the month of April, readers are advised to ‘Choose hope’, ‘Be open to multiple points of view’, ‘Dream’ and ‘Let people in’. You get the idea: this is ‘Insta inspo’ par excellence. Although men are not wholly excluded, How to Live an Artful Life is also a continuation, albeit less explicitly framed, of Hessel’s project to introduce readers to women creatives with whom they might be unfamiliar – featuring quotations from Bharti Kher and Leonor Fini, Ramie Targoff and Ghada Amer.

I did not, it must be said, particularly enjoy reading How to Live an Artful Life. One reason is that the book is written to be consumed at the rate of one page per day, rather than in one sitting; another is that, as someone who works within the art world, I didn’t gain much from the book’s condensed introductions to the work of, say, Judy Chicago or Christine Sun Kim. But that, surely, is the point: it’s snobbish for people who have spent most of our working lives in the art world to act as if Hessel’s writing is in any conceivable way for ‘us’, when our jobs frequently rely on a knowledge of the history of art – often gained through multiple university degrees in the subject. This is not to say that we might not find some pleasure in Hessel’s books, but we are not her primary audience, and any criticism of her which acts as if we are – and most criticism of Hessel does – ends up seeming biased and unfair.

Too often, attempts to make the art world more accessible are treated with hostility, as if only those who have put in the thankless and often underpaid hours deserve access to this kind of knowledge. What Hessel has done across her two books ­is impressive, introducing the work of hundreds of women artists to a wide audience of readers: her first was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, and How to Live an Artful Life is sure to expand her readership. Hessel’s critics may not always agree with how she has presented the history of art made by women, but, thanks to her books, many more readers will now be able to ‘name twenty women artists off the top of [their] head[s]’. That has to count for something.

Katy Hessel’s How to Live an Artful Life is published by Hutchinson Heinemann

_{Main image: Katy Hessel photographed by Lily Bertrand Webb}