How Historical Depiction of Women in Art Affects Our View of Women
M ichaelangelo, Da Vinci, Caravaggio, Botticelli, Titian, Nelli. All were once greats of the Renaissance, though if the concluding name on the list doesn't band a bell with you, yous could be forgiven. Like those of her male person contemporaries, Plautilla Nelli'due south Biblical paintings were masterful works of beauty, but, in a tale as former as patriarchy itself, she was written out of every Renaissance history book, dismissed as only some other nun with a paintbrush.
Withal, in March, almost 500 years afterward Nelli was born, the Uffizi in Florence is to stage its commencement exhibition of her piece of work; an attempt, says the Uffizi, to begin to correct the gender imbalance that still skews every major drove in the world. As one of the world's most influential galleries, it is making an important, if overdue, statement.
The picture in the U.k. is equally dispiriting: female artists business relationship for just iv% of the National Gallery of Scotland'south collection; xx% of the Whitworth Manchester'due south and 35% of Tate Modern'due south collections. Only 33% of the artists representing Great britain at the Venice Biennale over the past decade have been women.
The imbalance is systemic, and exists not just in the enormous gaps that are axiomatic in the collections of publicly funded institutions. It is also perpetuated by some of biggest commercial galleries that operate in the UK and internationally. Figures compiled by the Guardian show that, over the past decade, 83% of Lisson Gallery'southward solo shows, 71% of Hauser and Wirth's solo shows, 88% of Gagosian's shows, 76% of White Cube's shows and 59% of Victoria Miro's shows were by male person artists.
It is important to sympathize the impact this bias has had on the art world. These galleries, with outposts across America and Asia, are global tastemakers; championing artists, funding their work and introducing them to the earth'due south wealthiest collectors. Information technology is still the instance that the fine art that we consider to be the most valuable, in budgetary but too cultural terms, is nearly all by men. It is the reason that the museums in the world considered to have the greatest and strongest collections are the ones that boast works by Turner, Matisse, Van Gogh and Picasso, Pollock, Rothko, Koons, Hirst and Hockney. That a female equivalent for each of these artists doesn't whorl off the tongue says information technology all. It is also telling that the auction record for piece of work by a deceased female person creative person is held by Georgia O'Keefe, for Jimson Weed/White Flower No1, which sold in 2014 for $44.4m; just 25% of the tape-breaking $179m paid for Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger the following twelvemonth.
Yet, according to Artfinder, an online marketplace for 9,000 independent artists (a bit like a posher Etsy), women consistently outsell their male counterparts, and are the well-nigh popular picks for buyers. For every £1m worth of art made by men that is sold by the site, women sell £1.16m. In a bid to stoke debate, the company has published a study on gender equality in the art world, taking aim at the sexism of institutions in a higher place the pecking order.
Still in the Britain, and the international art world beyond, a shift may be occurring, driven by women who have taken the captain of some of the biggest fine art institutions. This year, Maria Balshaw will get the first female director of Tate Galleries, while Frances Morris, managing director of Tate Modern, has been consistently vocal about championing female artists since she was appointed in 2015. According to Morris, Tate Modern's permanent collection representing 335 female artists compared with 959 male artists is "just not adept enough".
In a powerful move, she chose to devote one-half of the solo-artist rooms in the Tate Mod extension, Switch Firm, to female artists such as Louise Bourgeouis, Ana Lupas and Suzanne Lacy when it opened last summertime.
"Very simply, we accept made a delivery to rethinking our collection, how we build it and the choices we make," says Morris. "And I retrieve what we did with Switch House was in a way very simple. We didn't dress it up every bit a strategy or positive discrimination – it was just bang-up work by women and an attempt to redress the gender balance. Simple as that. And a lot of my peers said: 'What a relief.'"
As a curator and then gallery director, Morris has been responsible for the ever-growing number of solo female shows at Tate Modern including Marlene Dumas, Sonia Delauney, Mona Hatoum and Agnes Martin. To her, the key for Tate Modernistic to progress towards gender parity is to untangle itself from the money-driven monster that is the fine art marketplace. After all, if the major institutions continue to buy and exhibit only the blockbuster artists that currently fetch the biggest price tags at sale, and then women will never go a await-in.
Morris refuses to accept that a price tag should have whatever bearing on what Tate Modern collects and displays. "Nosotros really have to end celebrating creativity depending on how it's monetised by the art market," she says. "My heart sinks when I read things saying the Tate Mod's collection is weak because they're using the standards of the last auction sales or Moma in New York. That's not what we're near. It'south not nearly constructing a collection based on shopping and taste in the private sector. We're interested in art whose value lies in excellence and provocation and fascination for the public. And, more oft than non, that fine art is made by women."
In the public sphere, Morris is certainly not acting alone. Iwona Blazwick, the director of Whitechapel Gallery, has staged more than solo shows by women than men in recent years, including a current exhibition past Guerilla Girls, the artist-activist group set up in the 1980s to challenge the dismal representation of women in the art globe.
"It is all the same the case that very few women can make a living out of being a full-time artist," says Blazwick. "They are increasing in number, in that location are some very prominent female person artists, merely information technology has been a long, hard struggle. But I would also say that things are changing, and this craven-or-egg cycle is being broken at final."
The issue has also been championed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, the manager of the Serpentine Gallery who was last year named the virtually powerful figure in the fine art earth. "I ever inquire if there is a pioneering or exciting female artist who needs rediscovering," he says of his curating methodology. "That'southward how I constitute out about the work of not bad Brazilian artist, Lygia Pape, about Phyllida Barlow and, in the Middle East, Etel Adnan." All have since had solo shows at some of the about important galleries around the world.
Whether commercial galleries are having a moment of reckoning is up for debate. Susan May, the artistic director of White Cube, admits that "gender imbalance beyond the art world is an effect that nosotros are witting of and acknowledge that we should all find means to exercise improve"; the gallery will exist announcing forthcoming solo shows with four female artists and a grouping bear witness of 30 female surrealists.
Elsewhere, Hauser and Wirth chose to open their new LA gallery last year with an exhibition of female abstract sculpture, while Lisson Gallery opened its first New York gallery in May with a evidence by female Cuban artist Carmen Herrera, who for years had worked in relative obscurity. "Carmen is the perfect example of an artist who was part of that abstract motility, along with Ellsworth Kelly and Barnett Newman, but was completely overlooked," says Gifford-Mead. "So the run a risk to work with her, peculiarly while she'due south still alive, and right some of those wrongs, has been really good for the states."
In 2017, just over half of the artists Lisson is showing will be female. "We knew the disparity was there – we merely didn't know information technology was quite so stark. Within the gallery over the last year, it's something we've taken note of and something that we're working really difficult to correct properly and quickly."
The big auction houses, which equal commercial galleries in terms of influence, also appear to be making an effort. This month, Sotheby'due south will open up a joint show past Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama, two 20th-century female artists whose works command millions at sale, making them rarities in the field.
For the few galleries that have been defiantly fighting the corner for female artists for years, the fact that the art world is finally communicable upwardly is leap to be a relief. Jane Hamlyn, who runs Frith Street Gallery, for case, has spent decades ruthlessly championing artists such as Marlene Dumas, Cornelia Parker and Fiona Banner.
How fast irreversible change will come is hard to predict. UK public galleries face up difficult financial straits ahead, and the increasing reliance on private and commercial funding could ensure gender parity is less of a priority in the future. Contend, besides, continues to rage around how best to become back and fill in the gaps in our celebrated art collections currently lacking women – can female artists simply be "reinserted" into art history?
For the time existence, however, the real, seismic changes are happening not in the big global institutions only the smaller contained and commercial galleries. Here a new generation of female person artists – many of whom work across online, video and virtual spheres that are very difficult for the traditional "concrete" art market to grasp – finally have a platform where they aren't considered to be a risky investment.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/feb/06/how-the-art-world-airbrushed-female-artists-from-history
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