All intellectual and artistic endeavours, even jokes, ironies, and parodies, fare better in the mind of the crowd when the crowd knows that somewhere behind the great work or the great spoof it can locate a cock and a pair of balls.

The above statement is by far the most quoted passage from Siri Hustvedt's new novel The Blazing World, and it's a statement by the novel's protagonist, Harriet Burden. Goes by Harry. She's an artist in New York: an outspoken, hyper-intellectual, uncompromising, proud, pissed, overweight, excessively tall artist. In a man, this bigness would be heroic, bearlike. In a woman it's social death. Burden's life and career have been misshapen by gender bias, so she creates a misshapen plot of revenge: to adopt three male artists to take credit for her own work, and see how far they get. Their names will be attached to her art, not hers.

Switch to reality. At an epic gathering of Seattle women in art in January (read this), one young artist made a confession: She doesn't always sign her full name to her works because it's far more advantageous to be assumed to be a male painter. Her full name is Crystal Barbre.

Think Barbre's an anomaly? She has many, many ancestors. Take Camille Patha, the painter whose work is pictured above and featured in a gobsmacking solo exhibition of fifty years of her painting now at Tacoma Art Museum.

"Camille Patha (born 1938) signed her work 'D.C. Patha' for many years as a way of concealing her gender and thus increasing her chances of receiving awards and critical attention," writes Alison Maurer, the TAM curatorial fellow who has contributed a long-needed essay on the legacy of institutional bias in the painting department at the University of Washington, where Patha studied. (Do not for a moment believe that UW's painting department was or is an anomaly; this applies to painting departments everywhere.)

Maurer continues: "To [Patha], the disguise offered clear benefits. Artists from generations before and after echo this same experience." A woman did not reach the highest rank of professor in the painting and drawing program at UW until 2012, Maurer reports. The woman is Ann Gale. Layne Goldsmith, an artist who rose through the more traditionally feminine textile area after growing discouraged in UW's macho painting department, remembers a male professor telling her, "To stretch a big canvas you have to have a stiff member."

I read The Blazing World in a day. Yesterday. The book is a great read—admittedly, especially for an overly educated white woman with a history in art, like me. It's layered with delicious references to art and evocations of the everyday blind condescensions of even well-meaning men. It's fast and funny and familiar, yet complicated and awake to a woman's inbred complicity. ("Elusive fathers. How we love them." Well, shit.)

Sometimes The Blazing World is irritating. Burden is a drama queen. But the novel is imperfect in some of the same ways Burden is: The novel makes arcane references and doesn't give a damn about explaining itself. (Some critics have taken it to task for being too smart; would they say this about Roth?) It radiates the discomfiting air of a consciousness that's been pissed for a long time and isn't going to take it anymore. Yet Burden also has stores of self-hatred that can vaporize her powers in an instant. She's strong, fragile, wise, impulsive, mean, loving. She's surrounded by good foils. And the art world is a viper's nest always good for a drubbing.

The Blazing World is Hustvedt's sixth novel. Hustvedt is a prolific author who's also written opinion pieces for the New York Times, and collections of essays on art and psychology, and memoirs, including a study of her own mysterious seizure disorder. She is also, I hate to point out, married to Paul Auster. You probably know Auster's name. You probably do not know Hustvedt's name. Like Hustvedt, her progragonist spent her life attached to a prominent man. Burden's husband was a powerful art dealer (who showed only three female artists in his gallery in all the years they were together, despite sharing his life and creating a family with one).

Again to the nonfiction: The women painters who have risen at UW are forever ascribed male influences—brothers and fathers and grandfathers and godfathers in the Northwest School or among the UW modernists. Matthew Kangas, the critic who has most championed the contribution of regional female painters like Jacqueline Barnett and Merrill Wagner, "nevertheless repeatedly mentions the men who influence them," Maurer writes in her essay for the Camille Patha exhibition. "Publications do occasionally challenge this norm, but many art critics and historians—men and women alike—continue to frame the work of women within the realm of male influence. The reality of these connections is a measure of how difficult it is to succeed as a woman artist, a reminder of the dominance of men in the arts, and these references hinder women from making their mark on the global narrative of art history in equal measure to men."

You really should buy this latest book on Patha and read Maurer's essay. She compares regional museums to one another in terms of how many female artists they've shown recently. Tacoma Art Museum does well, Seattle Art Museum less so. I went to the "Recent Acquisitions" page on Seattle Art Museum's web site. SAM has recently acquired 12 works, 11 by male artists, and one lonely piece by a female artist (Dorothea Lange).

Furthermore, SAM's big to-do this month involves the mayor of Seattle and all the various bigwigs going down to the waterfront to "cut the ribbon on" a new trophy at the Olympic Sculpture Park. It's a monumental sculpture of a white, decapitated, distorted head. It's the head of an unnamed girl, made by a male artist (Jaume Plensa), donated by a male trustee (Barney Ebsworth).

When I drove past the head yesterday, the sight of it made me unpleasantly dizzy. Maybe I'd like it better if it had been made by a woman. I admit that if a man had made Louise Bourgeois's oddly inert fountain of a naked father and son, I'd like it even less than I do.

The Blazing World has great segments of thinking out loud about the unpretty ways art gets its meaning, and our impure desires for it. We see what we want to see, Burden and her best friend, a psychiatrist, agree:

Without the aura of greatness, without the imprimatur of high culture, hipness, or celebrity, what remained? What was taste? Had there ever been a work of art that wasn't laden with the expectations and prejudices of the viewer or reader or listener, however learned and refined? Harry and I had agreed that there had never been such a thing.

^{This one's for you.}