Women artists still largely underrepresented in museums

(Paris) “Muse” or “woman of”: long reduced to the enigmatic silence of Mona Lisawomen artists, still very much in the minority in museums, are gradually taking their revenge on the past.

For an exhibition dedicated to Frida Kahlo or Louise Bourgeois, how many forgotten? “We must put an end to this refrain which would like them to be represented fairly today”, denounces the American historian Maura Reilly, in the specialized journal ArtNews.

The proof: “87% of the works housed in the 18 largest museums in the United States were made by men, 85% of them white”, underlines Katy Hessel, citing a study carried out in 2019 by the Public Library of Science, a open access scientific publication.

This 28-year-old British art historian has just published in French a History of art without men (Michel Lafon editions; Hutchinson Heinemann in English), a dense work devoted to female artists since the Renaissance.

“Today, all museums pay attention to equality, solo exhibitions by women artists are on the rise, the Tate [à Londres] devotes its annual programming to women, but in reality, they are largely under-represented in auction houses”, analyzes an observer of the market and contemporary art fairs.

“In the historic sales of Christie’s or Sotheby’s, the records remain mainly held by men”, he adds, even if women under 40 are gaining in power, as revealed in October the Artprice 2022 report.

1%

In the United Kingdom, the Tate has “long been committed to improving the representation of women artists in its programming and in its permanent collections”, assures Polly Staple, director of the “British Art” collection.

For its part, the Royal Academy of Arts will offer, in 2023 and for the first time, all of its walls to a female artist: the star performer Marina Abramović.

“Overturning the masculine canons that dominate art history is a daunting task, but I think museums are rising to the challenge,” adds the British curator, acknowledging that “a lot of work remains to be done.”

In 2020, the Prado Museum in Madrid took up the subject with an exhibition on the figures of women in art, revealing an “ideology” and “state propaganda on the female figure”, witness of a “historical misogyny”, confided to AFP the curator of this exhibition, Carlos Navarro.

Still, the question of the place of female artists in the museum is not resolved. Of the 35,572 works in the institution, 335 – or 1% – are by women. Even more surprising, of this figure, only 84 of them are on public display, the rest dormant in the reserves.

Same observation in the great Parisian museums: in the Louvre, only 25 women are referenced out of 3600 painters. A very low proportion which is explained “by the historical period covered from Antiquity until 1848”, explains the museum.

At the Musée d’Orsay, which in 2019 devoted a large exhibition to the impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, only 76 of the works on display are those of women, against 2,311 for their male counterparts, indicates the museum.

” Erasure ”

Convinced that “one can only make a fair history with fair archives”, the French art historian Camille Morineau founded the Aware association to gather as much information as possible on female artists in the world. .

Because, recalls Katy Hessel – who used the Aware database – these artists, such as the Italian Artemisia Gentileschi, Renaissance painter celebrated in London in 2020, were for the most part “known by their alive, but have been erased over the centuries”.

Erased or reduced to the rank of muses, like the sculptor Camille Claudel, whose work remained, for decades, in the shadow of that of Auguste Rodin.

A taboo that she shattered in 2009: then curator at the Center Pompidou, she bet on exhibiting exclusively female artists for two years and on two floors, attracting more than 2 million visitors.

The proof that there were “enough” works made by women “in the museum’s reserves to tell the whole story of the art of the XX^e and XXI^e centuries”.

A work that Katy Hessel continues, in her own way, with her podcast which gives voice to the great female stars of contemporary art, including those from the South.

Because, she underlines, if women artists have been sidelined by history, those from other cultures, such as the Algerian Baya or the Singaporean Georgette Chen, have “never really been part of the story “.