#art, International Women’s Day» and Kudos to the Tate Britain!

GOOD TO SEE MORE WOMEN ARTISTS AT THE TATE BRITAIN

According to the Tate’s director, Alex Farquharson, this spring (2023) the museum’s permanent collections will contain more paintings by women artists. This is the result of a complete rehanging. Female artists from the 17th through the 19th Centuries will be included in the collections, some of them have never been exhibited at the Tate before.

Mr. Farquarson told The Guardian newspaper that, “Half the contemporary artists on display will be women, from Bridget Riley and Tracey Emin to Kudzanai-Violet Hwami and Lydia Ourahmane…”

Important within the structure of the new re-hanging of the collections will be works by Rachel Jones, like “Lick your Teeth” from 2021 and as well by the 19th Century Austrian painter Marianne Stokes (1899-1927) represented by her painting “A Fisher Girl’s Light, A Pilgrim of Volendam returning from Kevelaer”, painted in 1899.

There are also new commissioned works to include two climbable sculptures by Sarah Lucas, to be placed on the front lawn and a ceiling painting by France-Lise McGurn which will be in the Djanogly Cafe.

I think this is an important step taken by this very well known and respected institute of Art and an example for other museums to follow because parity is needed and needed badly. The reason, according to the New York Times, is that over the past decade, just 29,247 works by female artists were acquired by 26 top museums in the United States, out of 260,470 total works.

If we look at how many women artists are exhibited at Le Louvre (Paris), we find that there are only 21, to include: Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Élise Bruyère, Élisabeth Sophie Chéron, Eugénie Dalton, Madeleine Goblot, Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot, Joséphine Houssaye, Angelica Kauffmann, Adèle de Kercado, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Judith Leyster, Catherine Lusurier.

At Museo del Prado (Madrid) there are only five women artists represented: Sofonisba Anguissola, Clara Peeters, Angelica Kauffmann, Artemisia Gentileschi y Rosa Bonheur. From these five, only eleven paintings in an exhibition of more than 1,150.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, only 7,3% of the artists represented are women. At the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York), it is 11%; the MOCA (Los Angeles) it goes up to 25% and the Whitney Museum of American Art has 22%. All in all, in the United States 87% of the artists exhibited are men and 85% of them are white men, leaving space for only 13% of women.

Although I would love to see this situation resolved and an option for parity taken by all museums, I do not support a government mandated law for parity in the public sphere and much less in private industry. Parity should be reached through education and through the participation of artists, writers, museum directors and gallery owners/curators from all over the world. And perhaps bloggers, YouTubers an Instagramers too. I strongly disagree with the president of the government of Spain (the Socialist Pedro Sanchez) who seeks to pass a parity law in the country. I do not like government interference in the free exercise of commerce or politicians sticking their nose and meddling into the people’s rights.