To not be or to vanish?
For centuries the majority of female artists have been confronted with this absurd version of the Shakespearean dilemma: to not be – for the lack of recognition and visibility during their lifetime; or to vanish – for the lack of visual traces or critical reflections? For the past month, this has been the fate of almost all artists, no matter their gender, whose work has disappeared from “in person” in permanent museum collections, in solo and group exhibitions, galleries, fairs and auction houses; whose working conditions have been weakened as a result of the almost global quarantine. At times cut off from their studios, limited to working from home, deprived of the means to sell their work and lacking a proper audience, are all artists in 2020 experiencing the conditions experienced by women for centuries?
Not exactly, if we consider the increase of online exhibitions and the development of virtual permanent collections, where it can be hoped, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a fairer place for women artists can be found. Whether these online resources – brought to us thanks to current technologies, the acceleration of developing and exchanging data, and the globalization of research – are more gender sensitive than the constitution of permanent collections and the planning of exhibitions remains to be seen.
It is difficult to revolutionise more than a century of acquisitions: the statistics of the Observatory on Gender Equality in Culture and Communication, realised annually by the Ministry of Culture, can be seen in major collections around the world, offset by the self-critical approaches of some of the most prestigious anglophone institutions. The significant presence of female artists at the heart of the newly revamped MoMA is echoed in the efforts in making online resources available, particularly through thematic approaches. The Tate, recognised for the unprecedented proportion of female artists in the galleries after its reopening in 2016, has now unsurprisingly dedicated a page to women on their website. In France putting collections online could be a step-by-step process if each major collections did not make efforts to highlight the few works by female artists present in their inventories. The Ministry of Culture’s database lists 50 women in 608 artists cited in relation to twentieth-century painting, photography and sculpture. These 50 names can, however, be accessed by theme from the database’s home page and a dedicated article on the Ministry’s website. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France has a bibliography devoted to women artists, while the Cnap (Centre national des arts plastiques) now offers a search filter by gender on the database of its online collection. However, the process of going digital seems too often like the exposing of inequalities that we had hoped had gone out of fashion. On the pedagogical website “Panorama de l’art” developed by the Réunion des musées nationaux-Grand Palais and the Ministry of Culture and Communication’s general secretary, the twentieth century page only features 2 female artists out of 27; in the virtual exhibitions of the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine there is only 1 woman for every 12 men.
To be (virtually) present because they are not (really) exhibited: a challenge that remains difficult for women artists in institutions.
