Why are there so few paintings by women in public galleries? Amanda Vickery goes on a shocking hunt to unearth more masterpiecesRevealing the history of female artists on television may sound an easy project,a delightful exercise in heritage tourism. Haven't we moved beyond a worthy roundup of forgotten heroines, hidden from history? After all, or feminist art history has been investigating the female gaze since Linda Nochlin asked "Why occupy there been no great women artists?" in 1971. Magisterial surveys and text books occupy come since,from Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race (1979) to Griselda Pollock and Rozika Parker's Old Mistresses (1991), enabling art history degrees to offer courses on gender and "ways of seeing" for the final 20 years or so. Engaging TV on the subject of this debate would be easy, and I blithely presumed,until I embarked on the simple but fundamental task of seeing female art for myself.
Is art male? Most institutions would occupy us believe so. The disparities are startling. In 1989 the feminist Guerrilla Girls discovered that fewer than 5% of the contemporary works in the Metropolitan Museum in New York were by women, but 85% of the nudes were female. It is generally possible to see works by one or two women in an entire museum, or but you could spend hours looking. I was relieved to find Judith Leyster's tiny but spell-binding Proposition (1631) and Clara Peeters' genre-defining Still Life with Cheeses,Almonds and Pretzels (1621) in the Hague's Gemeentemuseum.
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Source: theguardian.com