The Sunday Times April 10, 2022 2GN 9NEWS
From Rubenesque nudes to the Mona
Lisa’s smile, women have always been
displayed in art galleries — but mostly as
the subject, not the artist. Research has
now shown the full extent of the gender
inequality, with works by women making
up only 7 per cent of the art in the collec-
tions of top public museums.
Twenty-five pieces in the National
Gallery’s collection of 2,391 artworks are
by women, a little more than 1 per cent.
At the National Galleries of Scotland, the
figure is 2.8 per cent. At the National
Portrait Gallery, it is 11.1 per cent, and at
Tate’s four galleries across the UK it is
13.1 per cent.
The research was carried out by the all-
female Murray Edwards College, Cam-
bridge, which is home to the New Hall
art collection of more than 600 contem-
porary works by women artists, includ-
ing Dame Paula Rego, Maggi Hambling
and Judy Chicago. The college claims it is
the largest of its kind in Europe.
Dorothy Byrne, president of Murray
Edwards, said she was “shocked” by the
findings because it meant women and
girls visiting big galleries were seeing
either works by men or representations
of women seen through the male gaze.
She said: “An art gallery isn’t just a
depiction of the work of an individual art-
ist, it is a depiction of society. If you walk
into the National Gallery and the depic-
tion of society is of a male-controlled
world in which women are only valued
for the beauty of their young body, what
does it say to you as a young woman?”
The Tate director, Maria Balshaw, said
that an “entrenched historic bias was
written into the art history we all grew up
with” but that the “incredible achieve-
ments of women artists were always clear
to anyone who cared to look for them”.
The issue is not uniquely British. In
America, about 87 per cent of works in
the collections of 18 major art museums,
including the Museum of Modern Art, the
Detroit Institute of Arts and New York’s
Metropolitan Museum, are by men,
according to a 2018 study.
For institutions such as the National
Gallery, which holds paintings by Elisa-
beth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Berthe Mori-
sot and Judith Leyster, boosting the num-ber of female artists in its collection is
easier said than done, because its remit
covers western European paintings from
1250 to 1900. For much of that period,
women were denied the chance to paint
on the same terms as men, and the few
female-made paintings that do survive
can be prohibitively expensive for public
museums to acquire.
The National Gallery last bought a
work by a female artist in 2018: the self-
portrait by Artemisia Gentileschi, the
17th-century Italian painter, cost
£3.6 million. It often displays work by
women in temporary exhibitions, such as
Maggi Hambling, Rachel Maclean and
Bridget Riley.
Other galleries are working to redress
the balance. This year the National Por-
trait Gallery acquired five new self-
portraits from the likes of Celia Paul and
Chila Burman as part of a three-year
effort to increase the representation of
female artists and subjects before it
reopens after a refurbishment next year.
Half of the 109 new works acquired by
the National Galleries of Scotland, which
runs three museums, were by women.
Byrne, a former head of news and cur-
rent affairs at Channel 4, also said that the
college’s collection is to be renamed the
Women’s Art Collection, to encourage
more female artists. She has offered to
loan its works to galleries where art by
men far outstrips that of women.
“I was taken to a lot of art galleries as a
child, and decades of looking at certain
images of women defined by men dama-ges you,” Byrne said. “Each work is won-
derful, I’m sure, but you’re soaking it up
without realising they are very, very
limited images of what a woman can be.”
Sir Charles Saumarez Smith, former
director of the National Gallery and
National Portrait Gallery, said that while
“a huge amount of work has been done” in
boosting gender equality in collections,
solutions are “far from straightforward”.
Balshaw added that percentages are
not “a very useful way” to measure the
change of gender make-up in collections
because a single landmark acquisition by
a woman artist “might have a far bigger
impact than any number of other
acquisitions”.
The appetite for women’s art is
increasing across the board. For the first
time, organisers of the London Art Fair,
which starts on April 20, are tracking the
number of works that are done by
women and men in an attempt to reach
parity between the sexes in the next two
years. At present, male artists make up
about two thirds of the almost 1,
pieces which will be on display.
Art dealers have seen a surge in inter-
est for women artists as galleries seek to
diversify. Philip Mould, who runs an
eponymous gallery on London’s Pall Mall
and is a presenter on the BBC series Fake
or Fortune?, said: “We are noticing a man-
ifest need and desire, almost a stampede,
to try and right a chauvinist lean that a lot
of institutions have realised they may
have unwittingly endorsed.”
That is being reflected in auction pri-
ces. Sotheby’s held its first female old
masters sale in 2019 and beat expecta-
tions when the sales of works by Fede
Galizia and Angelica Kauffmann made
$14.6 million. Last month five works by
contemporary female artists, including
Rachel Jones, Shara Hughes and Flora
Yukhnovich, fetched £6.7 million at auc-
tion, far outstripping the £880,000 guide
prices. Christie’s set 66 female artist
records last year, including for works by
Barbara Hepworth and Barbara Kruger.
Despite the frenzy, just four of the top
100 lots sold at auction in London last
year were by women, according to the
data provider Artnet.
@IAmLiamKelly
Waldemar Januszczak, page 25Liam Kelly Arts CorrespondentSelf-portrait in a
Straw Hat by
Elisabeth Louise
Vigée Le Brun,
right, and the
£3.6 milion
Self-portrait as
Saint Catherine
of Alexandria by
Artemisia
Gentileschi,
below, at the
National GalleryGender equality gets brush-off
Works by women make up just 7 per cent of art in top galleries,
despite pieces recently fetching millions above the guide price25
Pieces by women
in 2,391 works at
National GalleryNATIONAL GALLERYALAMY