'Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920' (Tate Britain until October 13 2024): Maybe Seeing is Believing

Elizabeth Butler, Calling the Roll After An Engagement, Crimea (The Roll Call), 1874, Royal Collection

'Now You See Us' is a statement of intent. It has to deliver. And I'll be perfectly honest: I had my doubts. Despite thorough research by a number of art historians I respect, there is something depressing about a single sex exhibition which offers up a narrative of trail blazers and discoveries. We've been here before, even before Linda Nochlin's celebrated 1971 essay. Women artists might have been patronised and denigrated, thwarted, ignored and forgotten but they always been there to be seen. Equally, there has recently been a spate of similar shows, both abroad (Making Her Mark in USA, Maestras in Spain) and at home, with last year's excellent Fleming Collection survey of Scottish women artists. The Tate exhibition is part of a sizeable bandwagon.

Then there is that decision to include 'women artists in Britain'. This allows the exhibiton of Rosa Bonheur - very popular here, but no more than a holiday-er herself, Edmonia Lewis who might have died in London but whose career was not centred in the UK and Harriet Hosmer who had even fewer connections here. We have long claimed Angelica Kauffman as an honorary Brit, given her status a s a founder member of the Royal Academy, and the exhibition starts with Invention, one of her ceiling panels for their Council Chamber. Equally, the Tate might have pulled off a coup by getting Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting and the recently re-discovered Susannah and the Elders from the Royal Collection, but Artemisia Gentileschi only briefly worked here. She is also one of the most popular artists around, and one can't help wondering whether the 'in Britain' criteria is partly based on a desire to increase the ratio of familiar names and/ or interesting stories.

Mary Beale, Jane Fox, Lady Leigh as a Shepherdess, c.1675, Moyse’s Hall Museum

However, quibbles aside, and despite the title, the exhibition provides a very solid, very thorough retrospective of ‘women artists in Britain'. It lets the art speak for itself - not something which often happens at Tate Britain. It sticks generally to chronology with the odd jump into thematic displays - flowers, photography, watercolour. The labelling is substantial (usefully so as many of these artists will be unfamiliar to most visitors) but avoids the usual pitfalls of describing women's work solely in the context of the men in their lives, and the equal crime of hyperbole about pioneers and feminists. If anything it is all too prosaic. The chronological approach means that the first rooms are dominated by portraiture, initially in the form of miniatures, and there is just too much. Eight works by Mary Beale swamp more interesting examples, like Anne Killigrew's Venus Attired by the Three Graces, and with Three other portraits by Joan Carlile, the inclusion of her copy of William Dobson's Charles I seems unnecessary.

There is the same imbalance in the 18th century room. Too many Kauffman's (especially given the concurrent exhibition at the RA) and eight portraits by Katherine Read, due in part to the decision to split her oil and pastel production. There are also issues of quality control: surely there is little justification for including Frances Reynolds' portrait of Elizabeth Montagu other than to point up the distinction between her career and that of her brother, Sir Joshua. The curators seem unsure how to deal with 'craft' and strike an uneasy balance between highlighting increasing prejudice about 'what ladies do' and sidelining it themselves. The stories behind producers of needlework and watercolour are some of the most compelling in the exhibition but they deserve their own space. There is the same dilemma with the photography section later: it's inclusion here feels tokenist and simply extends an already over-sized exhibition.

The whole room devoted flowers demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of the show. Yes, they are discovering artists, but there are simply too many to fully appreciate, and there are ongoing issues of defining 'professional' artists, and indeed what constitutes an artist at all. It seems perverse to include botanical drawings but ignore book illustration which provided an income for many women artists in the later 19th century. And although it is always possible to complain about omissions in this type of exhibition, the exclusion of Marianne North seems inexplicable. However, this is an exhibition which gathers pace in the second half. The 19th and early 20th century rooms dazzle with the sheer number of names, the variety of works. No artist seems to have more than a couple of examples, with the exception of Laura Knight whose wall of richly assertive Cornish coastal scenes epitomise devil-may-care confidence.

There is such joy in discovery here. So many loans from private collections, including a large number coming from the King, mean that alongside the familiar - Rebecca Solomon's Young Teacher recently saved for the nation and regularly on show at Tate Britain - there is the new: I had never seen her Sherry, Sir? Similarly, Henrietta Rae's Psyche Before the Throne of Venus has been just about visible high on the wall at the Tate for some time but her Bacchante is a revelation: the sugary academicism of the first, already so much livelier at eye eye level, replaced by sketchy, flattened patterning in the second. Whilst Elizabeth Butler's Roll Call seems slightly diminished in the flesh (I had always imagined a more Courbet-esque realism to it), Lucy Kemp Welch's horses audibly pound out of the canvas. And for those not familiar with the new galleries at the Imperial War Museum, the First World War paintings, particularly Anna Airy's, are devastating in their strength and evocative observation.

Anna Airy, Shop for Machining 15-inch Shells: Singer Manufacturing Company, Clydebank, Glasgow, 1918, Imperial War Museum

'Now You See Us' (and us, and us) is arguably too big, too ambitious, too amorphous to succeed. It takes four hundred years of artists who have nothing in common beyond their gender and tries to meld them together. No one would attempt a comparable show of male producers and it feels wrong that anyone felt the need to do it with women. The one thing it does very successfully if debunk the myth of a feminine aesthetic, for these artists tackled every subject in every possible way. And there is no sense that these are 'second-rate' painters: critics who have complained about variable quality seem to have conveniently forgotten that that is always the case. Now let's move on. Forget the trailblazer, 'gosh, there's a woman!' narrative and start to treat these artists like they always wanted to be treated. As equals.

'In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s' (Royal Academy until October 13 2024): Bright Colours, New Names

Oleksandr Bohomazov, Sharpening the Saws, 1927, National Art Museum of Ukraine

Defiance is in air at the RA. It's there in the title of the exhibition: 'The Eye of the Storm'; in the bright wall colours; in the introductory explanation about the spelling of artist names. It is hard not to get caught up in the emotion when you hear that many of the works themselves are effectively refugees from the Russian invasion, smuggled to safety in the early days of the war. But when you start looking at the art, you see a different story. And when you start to unravel the history you wonder if the nationalist, self-determinist subtext is really what these works are about. The start of the twentieth century was geo-politically messy and Modernism went out of its way to be deliberately transgressive, including of state boundaries. 

Thankfully, this is the RA where wall texts tend to be minimal and unpreachy and the focus is on aesthetics rather than politics. It can be frustrating, in an exhibition where most names are unfamiliar, to search round the room for the one label which gives you some basic biographical information. But ultimately the curators let the art speak for itself - and it does so, loudly and clearly.  The song is one of modernism rather than nationalism but that does not make it any less compelling. These artists are a very international bunch. Sonia Delaunay is included in the show, by dint of her birth, although she was brought up in St Petersburg and was Paris-based throughout her adult career. Alexander Archipenko similarly left Ukraine for good at the age of nineteen. Many of the others travelled widely - Exter's landscapes reference Genoa and Sevres - and most spent time living, training and working in Russian territory.

The exhibition keeps trying to bring things back to nationalism and identity. There is a lot of text about folk art and traditional craft but it is not overtly reflected in the works on display. The importance of embroidery in Exter's art and her practical promotion of Ukrainian handicrafts  surely deserve more attention. The section on the Kultur Lige talks about 'synthesising Jewish cultural tradition' but it is difficult to see the evidence in the swirling abstractions of El Lissitzky and Sarah Shor. And then there is the complex issue of rural life, an early twentieth century identity trope in any number of countries. Works like Oleksandr Bohomazov's Sharpening the Saws see it co-opted by the Soviet Union, bright coloured labour albeit subversively ambiguous and modernist, but the display gives little sense of earlier iterations, and consequently little context.

Alexandra Exter, Composition (Genova), 1912

If you ignore the labelling, however, and focus on the visuals, this is a feast of artistic experimentation, cross-pollination and individual idiosyncrasy. The first section loosely explores different interpretations of Cubo-Futurism, from Exter's Cezanne-esque landscapes, to Bohomazov's futurist Landscape, Train and Delaunay's more familiar dreamily prismatic abstractions. Yet you also have the Burliuk brothers, Davyd's strong, chunky, expressionistic Carousel and Volodymyr's almost Munch-like Ukrainian Peasant Woman. There is a fine selection on theatre design, including Anatol Petrytskyi's witty collages of costumes for Turandot. 

The second room is a mass of contradictions. Do Shor's darkly swirling abstractions  - evoking the 'eye of the storm' of the title - drag us towards an abyss or evoke excitement? Either way they make me desperate to see more of an artist I have not come across. Tymofii Boichuk looks back to the future with his tempera apple pickers, all clear colours, flat lines and deceptive fairy-tale sweetness. Yasyl Yermilov's seedy relief self portrait presents the artist as a corrupt and ailing Tin Man. From there on, the inexorable slide to inevitable Soviet control and Stalinist purges hangs heavy. Petryskyi's Invalids is all grey gloom. Oleksandr Syrotenko's Rest seems like a lurid contradiction, gaudy colours no substitute for a decent meal. Semen Yoffe's In the Shooting Gallery has sinister decadence. 

This is ultimately too small an exhibition, perhaps too narrowly drawn (largely from two collections) to do justice to the theme. Kazymyr Malevych seems particularly poorly represented. His sole oil painting, from 1927, showing a rural winter landscape, is contextualised well in the accompanying text, but you really want some of his earlier woodcutters and harvesters as comparison. Suprematism itself barely gets a mention. But it a sense you don't need Malevych at all - the real strength here is the showcasing of little known artists who deserve their moment in the sun. The RA deserve credit for picking up a touring exhibition about a fairly unknown bunch of painters. I suspect many people might go out of a sense of empathy or solidarity with Ukraine. But in the end, for all the quibbles about spelling, and nit-picking about geography, it is early twentieth century modernism which is on show here in all its kaleidoscopic complexity. Nationalism is not the eye of this storm.