I have no doubt that women art critics existed, but where was their platform on a par with their male counterparts? Who would give them the chance to counter the dominance of the white male narrative – and the sexism with which it was expressed?

But as Voss says, women have lacked “powerful supporters”. It’s a question I ask myself daily: was it a conscious decision to remove women from the story of art? Women have been making art for millennia, so it’s not as if they didn’t exist. Yet I can’t help but notice how they speak to the way sexism is still ingrained – and seemingly acceptable – within the narratives of art history. Though the O’Keeffe reviews date from a mere 30 years ago (as opposed to the 19th century, when women weren’t even allowed the vote) one might argue that they are products of their time. Guggenheim record-breaker … Hilma af Klint in her studio in 1895. Af Klint is simply not an artist in their class and – dare one say it? – would never have been given this inflated treatment if she had not been a woman.” A comment that, to me, appears more flippant than it is factual. To accord them a place of honour alongside the work of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich … is absurd. Kramer wrote: “Hilma af Klint’s paintings are essentially coloured diagrams. Her paintings were first seen in 1987 at the exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 at LACMA in the US, and were scathingly received by critics. Voss is the biographer of Hilma af Klint – an artist whose oeuvre has shifted ideas about the beginnings of “abstraction” in the western canon more than any other in the last decade. Women have been easy targets for the longest time, not only in the art world.” “Female artists often didn’t have a lobby or any powerful supporters. Why did women like O’Keeffe get such bad reviews? “Everything critics – often male – didn’t dare to say about Picasso or Matisse was thrown at women,” the writer Julia Voss told me.

However, most commented that the lack of representation of non-male artists had made art history feel irrelevant to them. Some comments said that Gombrich had a “blind spot”, others stated that my gesture was “no cancellation” but “added information”. His first version in 1950 included no female artists at all, and the most recent edition includes just one (Käthe Kollwitz), so I scribbled on my copy, “without women”. Last week on social media I shared the title page of EH Gombrich’s The Story of Art. This made me think about how so much art criticism is written from a male point of view, and the exceedingly wide gender imbalance that still exists within it. Campbell argued for a more intellectual reading of O’Keeffe – complaining that “national newspaper art critics do not think it necessary to explain or empathise with … or to locate her in the history of American modernism”. Many of these comments are quoted in an article by Beatrix Campbell, published in the Independent in 1993, with the headline: A Woman’s Art That Men Refuse to See. William Feaver of the Observer proclaimed that her paintings “made good monthly images on calendars”, while Hilton Kramer’s review in the Sunday Telegraph called her “grossly overrated”, adding that “her great personal beauty played a major role in the myth that now attaches to her name”. The Evening Standard’s Brian Sewell said her works were “irredeemably amateur”.

In the Independent, Andrew Graham-Dixon likened the American artist to a “commercial illustrator” who had “limited talents … but the ambition to be remembered as a Rembrandt”. I n 1993, the reviews for Georgia O’Keeffe’s exhibition at London’s Hayward gallery came in.

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