![](https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Ditte-Ejlerskov-and-EvaMarie-Lindahl_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-IV_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=4096&h=2735&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658786&s=e5dd0d7456a8e3a01fdcbae431e14d19 4096w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Ditte-Ejlerskov-and-EvaMarie-Lindahl_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-IV_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=3072&h=2051&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658786&s=26839d8493866cf96524ce1b3438b95f 3072w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Ditte-Ejlerskov-and-EvaMarie-Lindahl_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-IV_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=2560&h=1709&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658786&s=8633949ccea45ee2f89379070aebdf54 2560w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Ditte-Ejlerskov-and-EvaMarie-Lindahl_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-IV_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=2048&h=1367&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658786&s=7344b728658203c5dd65ba4e33b0c0df 2048w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Ditte-Ejlerskov-and-EvaMarie-Lindahl_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-IV_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=1920&h=1282&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658786&s=301cfa6200f0f44ca8a44ceea0422202 1920w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Ditte-Ejlerskov-and-EvaMarie-Lindahl_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-IV_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=1536&h=1025&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658786&s=2200b9914473218617cf67fea5b9d8d2 1536w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Ditte-Ejlerskov-and-EvaMarie-Lindahl_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-IV_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=1280&h=854&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658786&s=a2797387ba63188e1e5acd81629e2f5c 1280w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Ditte-Ejlerskov-and-EvaMarie-Lindahl_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-IV_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=1024&h=683&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658786&s=867c727cd8444e08ea463b8a104d3384 1024w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Ditte-Ejlerskov-and-EvaMarie-Lindahl_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-IV_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=768&h=512&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658786&s=a0ff19dc87ff818c3ebf39a45b0d5b4a 768w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Ditte-Ejlerskov-and-EvaMarie-Lindahl_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-IV_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=512&h=341&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658786&s=a3b8fb2bff099d60740de21d75189169 512w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Ditte-Ejlerskov-and-EvaMarie-Lindahl_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-IV_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=256&h=170&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658786&s=bdb6992051d9d1d326dc63235ced19b4 256w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Ditte-Ejlerskov-and-EvaMarie-Lindahl_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-IV_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=128&h=85&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658786&s=81e0179aafb21ca2b316f50ef6136e26 128w)
Ditte Ejlerskov & EvaMarie Lindahl, The Blank Pages, 2014/2020 mdf shelves, Taschen Basic Art Series, 100 empty books, 4 shelves, each 240 x 120 cm.
Courtesy the artists and SPECTA
Growing up in a home without art books, my first introduction to 20th-century art was, weirdly, finding Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction catalogues in a box at my local charity shop in a post-industrial working-class town near Birmingham. These books were my entry to the recent greats. I had no idea who they were beyond a name, a title, a price, and an image. If I was lucky there would be a short text on the provenance of the paintings, which read to me like magic spells into a mystical other world. I was shocked years later to discover that Joan Miró and Jules Olitski were men. I had no idea that women weren’t included in the canon.
Throughout art school, I used the library daily. When I moved to London in 1997, I worked at Zwemmer Books, a legendary art book store on Charing Cross Road, opened in 1929. The store got sold and was taken over by new management. They talked about books ‘renting’ their space on the shelves. They asked questions like, Why do we have 5 books on Giotto? They wanted to shift books, flog them, get rid of them. They wanted piles of cheap, new, shiny books on display tables near the door, not expensive, dusty, old out-of-print books on dusty, old shelves. They wanted whizzy spinning cases filled with Taschen books.
The Taschen Basic Art Series was launched in 1985. It is still in print and is described by Taschen as “[a]n introductory who’s who of art history, architecture, and design, this series became the world’s best-selling art book collection ever published.” Most of the books—now counting nearly 200 titles—are monographs: “Each title from the Basic Art Series provides a comprehensive introduction to a significant artist, architect, or designer. The publications offer a detailed chronological summary of the artist’s life and work and analyze their historical importance and cultural legacy.”
If girls and women, non-Western, non-white, never see themselves depicted as geniuses, as groundbreaking, as change-makers, or even— imagine—merely as painters, why would they ever believe that they themselves could be?
10 years ago, Ditte Ejlerskov and EvaMarie Lindahl were looking at a few Taschen books in one of their studios and realised that out of over 90 books on artists, only 4 were on women. They called Taschen and spoke to an editor of the series, who responded that the reason that there were no books on women was basically because women artists of that calibre simply didn’t exist. Ejlerskov and Lindahl took this not as a rejection but as a challenge: “We realised this was going to be a big challenge and take a lot of research. We developed a methodology of finding female equivalents to the male artists in the series, based on success, recognition, geographical location, and time period. We started looking at books, encyclopaedias, auction results, records of museum shows, etc. This took 2 years. We matched women artists to the male artists in the book series, Friedrich, Leonardo Da Vinci, etc.” When they had compiled this list of women artists, they wrote back to the editor, informing her: “You asked if we were able to mention any female artists that we thought were missing. We mentioned a few that you did not acknowledge as potential candidates for Taschen’s version of art history. We hereby hand over our entire compilation of the nearly 100 missing female artists that we consider qualify for the Basic Art Series alongside the 92 men and 5 women already published.”
![](https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-EvaMarie-Lindahl-and-Ditte-Ejlerskov_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-III_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=5120&h=3413&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658760&s=696058771aefe5254401ad00578f2043 5120w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-EvaMarie-Lindahl-and-Ditte-Ejlerskov_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-III_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=4096&h=2730&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658760&s=c9bfc23b0a247b377f29586c634b856e 4096w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-EvaMarie-Lindahl-and-Ditte-Ejlerskov_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-III_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=3072&h=2048&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658760&s=bb4ac664563a4a591b1f6c250387db16 3072w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-EvaMarie-Lindahl-and-Ditte-Ejlerskov_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-III_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=2560&h=1706&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658760&s=daf4dd68ab4ffd9c88dbe6bbc6796431 2560w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-EvaMarie-Lindahl-and-Ditte-Ejlerskov_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-III_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=2048&h=1365&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658760&s=47742ae41573464218fe3e2aa1da8180 2048w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-EvaMarie-Lindahl-and-Ditte-Ejlerskov_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-III_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=1920&h=1280&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658760&s=0feee0031d298c006a546863bc2bc27d 1920w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-EvaMarie-Lindahl-and-Ditte-Ejlerskov_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-III_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=1536&h=1024&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658760&s=c64cae84530ca7f37474b4fd0c42fa62 1536w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-EvaMarie-Lindahl-and-Ditte-Ejlerskov_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-III_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=1280&h=853&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658760&s=178e604dd0dcf0f7569dcff08854d676 1280w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-EvaMarie-Lindahl-and-Ditte-Ejlerskov_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-III_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=1024&h=682&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658760&s=f2d3d83d88209fe07939ae671039cb33 1024w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-EvaMarie-Lindahl-and-Ditte-Ejlerskov_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-III_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=768&h=512&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658760&s=71213e6018ed125665f5dfbcf716e15c 768w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-EvaMarie-Lindahl-and-Ditte-Ejlerskov_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-III_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=512&h=341&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658760&s=baaea2f038797b0c7007e35e6effc64d 512w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-EvaMarie-Lindahl-and-Ditte-Ejlerskov_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-III_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=256&h=170&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658760&s=61ab659d4a8c3442751bdeb5137b6b2e 256w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-EvaMarie-Lindahl-and-Ditte-Ejlerskov_About-the-Blank-Pages_2014-2020_installationview-III_photoDitteEjlerskovandEvaMarieLindahl.jpg?w=128&h=85&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658760&s=ca62cf8d080a5d9313782b0f50ccf06a 128w)
Ditte Ejlerskov and EvaMarie Lindahl, The Blank Pages, 2014/2020, installation view II.
Photo by Ditte Ejlerskov and EvaMarie Lindahl
By following the original Taschen selection process and matching women to the men who already had books made about them, they exposed more gaping holes in the writing of art history. They couldn’t add Chinese women artists, because no male Chinese artists were included in the original series. The same for Africa, most of South America, the Middle East, Asia. A useful trick for painters when assessing how a painting is developing is to look at it in the mirror. See the painting in reverse, and the errors you’d grown comfortable with suddenly jump out.
They designed and printed covers for the unpublished books on the 100 female artists: indistinguishable facsimiles of the Basic Art books. They even made an installation, displaying their new books with the existing, published books. The only difference being that the new ones were filled with blank pages. This history was unwritten. It largely still is.
Why does this matter? Visibility. If you don’t see yourself reflected back by the world, you don’t feel like you belong there. If girls and women, non-Western, non-white, never see themselves depicted as geniuses, as groundbreaking, as change-makers, or even— imagine—merely as painters, why would they ever believe that they themselves could be?
![](https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Kopi-af-IMG_8435.jpg?w=2560&h=3413&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658754&s=f2177f8b365ba94242f32f74afe1abd1 2560w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Kopi-af-IMG_8435.jpg?w=2048&h=2730&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658754&s=5d9a21179e4df79d61959712092b6d22 2048w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Kopi-af-IMG_8435.jpg?w=1920&h=2560&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658754&s=d220add7af5a822c0e2ab93215490895 1920w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Kopi-af-IMG_8435.jpg?w=1536&h=2048&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658754&s=a381a22622ee815822dfb37557fd8665 1536w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Kopi-af-IMG_8435.jpg?w=1280&h=1706&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658754&s=f7bce7faff5945dfc313e9062ca29e10 1280w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Kopi-af-IMG_8435.jpg?w=1024&h=1365&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658754&s=3881ec439c340eabd494ac8d8c9454a5 1024w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Kopi-af-IMG_8435.jpg?w=768&h=1024&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658754&s=666aefaca592bb7306f02c6baa8d3059 768w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Kopi-af-IMG_8435.jpg?w=512&h=682&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658754&s=a6d4189712132ecffcde45aa3b8046b4 512w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Kopi-af-IMG_8435.jpg?w=256&h=341&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658754&s=c5b73a352fbecf9f701fb96a9dcde36d 256w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Kopi-af-Kopi-af-IMG_8435.jpg?w=128&h=170&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1625658754&s=909274136711e6e193248ec7ee974572 128w)
David Risley is an artist. He ran David Risley Gallery, in London (2002-2010) and Copenhagen (2010-2018). He was founding Co-curator of Bloomberg Space, London (2002-2005), Co-founder of Zoo Art Fair, London (2004), and Co-founder and Co-owner of CHART. He continues to write, curate, and develop projects with artists. He is developing a sustainability project for public-facing institutions.