Stacked Against Them – Why Women are Still Marginalised in the Art World
It took decades for the art world to appreciate and understand the psychologically penetrative and provocative artwork of Louise Bourgeois – we take a look at gender imbalances in the art world and why women artists are often marginalized for so much of their working careers.
Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, Installation view, Gropius Bau (2022). © The Easton Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022. Image: Luca Girardini
Veering between the violent and brutal with the vulnerable and deeply resonant, the first ever retrospective dedicated to the textile work of Louise Bourgeois at Berlin's Gropius Bau, demonstrates the extraordinary inventiveness of the French-born artist. Bourgeois, who moved to New York in the late 1930s, was ignored for much of her working life and only achieved late-career success in the 1990s – already well into her seventies. Now, ten years after her death in 2010, her significance and popularity has continued to grow and she is considered to be among the world’s most beloved female artists.
But what accounts for that delay in recognition? Can it put down to the shift in her art practice in the 90s, when her turn to body-centered art put greater emphasis on sexuality, vulnerability and mortality? The truth is that many female artists only become famous much later in life, often decades after their male counterparts. In 1988, the feminist art collective, Guerilla Girls, put together an ironic list of the benefits of being a women in the art world compared to being a man. Number 4 on the list was “Knowing your career might pick up after you're eighty.” It perfectly encapsulated the bias, whilst emphasizing the career disparity between female and male artists.
Are men better at painting than women? Georg Baselitz, one of the most celebrated German painters of his generation certainly believes so. He once stated that female artists simply “don’t paint very well”, which is why they so often go unrecognized. That attitude is worryingly pervasive and the writer, Helen Gorrill, the author of the book, “Women Can’t Paint” has even found a way to prove it. In her recent study, she researched the prices of 5,000 paintings sold all over the world and found that on average for every $1 a male artist earns for their work, a woman earns just 10 cents. This astounding study of gender and value goes some to prove way that although there are few aesthetic differences in men and women's painting, men's art is valued at up to 80 percent more than women's.
Institutions, galleries and collectors are all part of this problem of valuation. A study in 2010, discovered that of the 2,052 exhibitions held at MoMA, New York since 1929, only 102 were focused on women artists. In the case of Lee Krasner – the wife of the revered American postwar painter, Jackson Pollock – most of her working life existed in his shadow. It was only in 1984, then aged 75, that she was finally offered a solo show at MoMA. She died just a few months before the show was supposed to open, having been largely written off by critics for making smaller, reduced-sized paintings in comparison to her husband. Krasner’s story is a shocking indication of how women artists have so often been written out of the story of modern art.
Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, Installation view, Gropius Bau (2022). © The Easton Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022. Image: Luca Girardini
It is as though the art world – that prides itself on being liberal and progressive – has been set up to diminish the value of women artists. For instance, not one of the 100 most expensive paintings in the world was made by a woman. The most expensive painting ever sold – Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci – fetched $450 million while Georgia O’Keeffe, the world record holder for a female artist, made just $44.4 million. For living artists the difference is roughly the same, Jeff Koons holds the record, at $91 million, while the female record held by Jenny Saville is just $12.5 million.
In terms of artists and how they are valued by the art world, a number of ideas have been put forward to explain gender bias: idolization of the genius male artist: preferences in gallery representation: the sexism of ageing, the imbalance of parenthood. But perhaps it is a persistent hangover left over by the fact that up until the 1870s, women were still barred from participating in artistic professions and training.
Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, Installation view, Gropius Bau (2022). © The Easton Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022. Image: Luca Girardini
Going forward, artists need to continue to challenge the systems responsible for inequality, and galleries, museums and institutions need to address the gender inequality in a proactive manner. Bourgeois was never an explicitly feminist artist: “Some of my works are, or try to be feminist, and others are not feminist,” she once said. She was more interested in taking an alternate position to critics who wanted to categorise her on those terms. She made it in spite of the fact that so much in the art world was stacked against her. Now, over a decade since her death, the art world has finally caught up to her singular vision as one of the most eminent and provocative artists of all time. Many younger female artists won't get that same chance.