Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, and Cosimo de Medici were among her admirers. Poets compared her art to Michelangelo’s. Seventeenth-century Dutch textile and paper cutting artist Joanna Koerten was one of the most celebrated artists of her age, even if today she’s fallen into near total obscurity

“She was incredibly famous during her lifetime,” said Virginia Treanor, senior curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), in Washington, D.C. “She was so famous that people who came on a Grand Tour of Europe made sure to stop in and see her. They would leave notes of praise in her guest book.”

Koerten worked across media, from watercolor to wax, but it was her paper cuttings—with intricate and precise incisions that rendered dazzlingly complex visions—that brought her celebrity.  Despite the heights of her success, today, Koerten’s legacy is little-known, even in curatorial circles. Only 15 of her works are still known to exist, and they very rarely travel.

Johanna Koerten, Portrait of William III (ca. 1700). Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, on long-term loan from Ars Aemula Naturae. Photo: Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden.

It is all the more remarkable then that three of Koerten’s paper cuttings are currently on view in the new exhibition “Women Artists From Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750” on view at NMWA, co-curated by Treanor and Frederica van Dam, curator of old masters at the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent (the exhibition will travel to Ghent next spring). The insightful show brings together nearly 150 works by 40 women artists from the 17th-century Low Countries. Many of these works, including all three of Koerten’s works, are on view in the U.S. for the first time.

“It’s really an extraordinary moment to be able to see not one, but three by this artist,” said Treanor. The exhibition—which also includes works by more well-known artists, including Judith Leyster, Clara Peeters, and Rachel Ruysch—asks questions about some ingrained beliefs about the history of women in the arts. Historic women artists are often treated as exceptional cases, one-offs, if you will, but in this exhibition, the sheer bounty of women’s work across visual culture offers a surprising alternative framework for thinking about women’s contributions.

Nicolaes Maes, The Lacemaker (ca. 1656). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Friedsam Collection.

The show includes painters, yes, but also the work of women lacemakers, whose highly coveted textiles fetched enormous sums, along with the creations of marquetry sculptors, botanical artists, and much more. Even against a wealth of fascinating women, Koerten feels exceptional, a legacy marked by both the extreme heights of her success and subsequent fall into near oblivion.

The ‘Scissors Minerva’  

Born in Amsterdam to Mennonite parents, Koerten’s life centered around her artwork. Even as a child, she showed an introspective interest in rendering the world all around her. She married late, at the age of 41; her husband, Adrian Blok, a few years her junior, was tirelessly supportive of her career. After her death, he published the Stamboek, a collection of poems written in her honor, a copy of which is on view in the exhibition.

Another testament to her fame was her inclusion in Dutch painter and writer Arnold Houbraken’s influential compendium of artist biographies, The Great Theatre of Netherlandish Painters and Paintresses (1718–1721). Her biography included a portrait and lauded her with praise. “[P]otentates, rulers, and other great men, would come to Amsterdam to see her cuttings and would leave astonished by their amazing quality… Queen Mary of England and other female rulers are listed as patrons of her art,” summarized art historian Martha Moffitt Peacock of the biography, noting that, “Houbraken also asserts the Koerten could have become a great painter but that instead, due to her great intellect, she was led to paper-cutting and thereby created an eternal name for herself.”

Johanna Koerten, Portrait of Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia (1697–1715). Collection of the Rijksmuseum.

Paper cutting, textile arts, and glass works were highly prized in the Low Countries during the 17th century, and collectors were willing to shell out lavish sums for such creations. In a crystallizing comparison, Koerten sold a now-lost “thread painting” to the wife of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I for an incredible 4,000 guilders. The sum was more than twice what her contemporary, Rembrandt van Rijn, earned for his 1642 The Night Watch, a massive work, star of the Rijksmuseum, and today one of the most famous paintings in the world.

For her paper cuttings, she was called “Scissors Minerva,” a sobriquet linking her to the ancient goddess of wisdom, weaving, embroidery, and craft. Her subject matter in paper cutting was elevated, too. The exhibition includes a paper cutting of an allegory of Roman Freedom (1697). A woman, personifying the virtue, appears enthroned in a classical apse. Portraits of figures from the early Roman Empire flank her in a column on both sides. The work is hefty, sculptural, and in dialogue with the loftiest of art historical traditions and tropes.  One poet aligned her with none other than Michelangelo, writing, “When Michelangelo and Apelles wanted to make a painting. They made use of paint. But J. Koerten makes a blow with the chisel. In cutting paper, she paints everything according to nature.”

She displayed her works in a house museum in Amsterdam known as “The Blok,” and there she greeted dignitaries. She sometimes turned down purchases, preferring to hang on to her works. Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, visited her in 1697. Her papercutting portrait of the Tsar is on view in the exhibition, a loan from the Rijksmuseum.  Also on view is a portrait of William III, the Dutch-born King of England, another visitor to her studio, which she rendered with exquisite, lacey delicacy.

Many such works, including this one, were often lit from behind, so that the paper cuttings glowed, explained curator Frederica Van Dam. “On the back of the work, there is a little door, so you could put a lap light behind it, almost like a lampshade,” she said. Both Treanor and Van Dam acknowledged that there are certain effects that they’re simply unable to recreate today. Koerten, like other paper cutters of her era, also worked in three dimensions, creating hanging works. While the Rijksmuseum includes more dimensional examples, those works are too fragile to travel. Nevertheless, two paintings in the exhibition by artist Nicolaas Juweel (ca. 1639–1704), Portrait of a Paper Cutter, possibly Alijda Juweel, in Rotterdam (1696), and Watching at Paper-Cut Wind Toy ( ca. 1697), offer insights into their possible spherical forms.

Nicolaas Juweel, Portrait of a Paper Cutter, possibly Alijda Juweel, in Rotterdam (1696). Photo courtesy of Rotterdam Museum.

Gender still makes itself known even in Koerten’s case of extreme success. “[Paper cutting] was not an exclusively female art form, but the most famous people who practiced it in the 17th century were women, Johanna Koerten, and Elizabeth Rijberg, is another name that we know of,” said Treanor. The curators are careful to skirt distinctions of “fine art” and “craft.”  “These hierarchies are very gendered,” Treanor acknowledged. “This question of value—what was valued at the time, how we value it today, and how does gender intersect—these are all questions that we try to tease out in this exhibition.”

Koerten’s brilliance was understood in relationship to the men of her era in her own time, too. In the essay. “How Materials Make Meaning” art historian Sophie-Anne Lehmann surmised, “not only paper but also the process of cutting is connoted as feminine… however, these categories appear to be very flexible as long as they operate within the dualism of male versus female: through the likening of white paper cutting to carving, contemporary critics could install Koerten as a ‘sculptor of paper’ and therefore an artist equal to her male contemporaries.”

Such frameworks contributed to her falling into obscurity, too. Her chosen mediums certainly had paradoxical implications; while these art forms granted her fame in her lifetime, paper cuttings are delicate. Many of her works have been lost to time. Those still extant are tricky to display.

However, there’s no doubt that her diminishment is also partly due to male historians who purposefully blotted out her successes. Just 25 years ago, historian Hendrik Horn wrote that Koerten’s inclusion in Houbraken’s biography showed an error of judgment. “Houbraken would not have accepted scissor art from a man. Instead, he would have firmly dismissed it as beuzelingen or trivialities,” he surmised. In the decades since, such ideological hierarchies as these have begun to seem old-fashioned in their own right. If anything, “Women Artists From Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750″ suggests that snipping Joanna Koerten out of history might be harder than some thought.