where are all the women on the gallery wall?

There is no denying that art produced by men is valued much more highly than art produced by women. You don’t need polls and extensive surveys to tell you that, you need only look at the gallery wall. Take London’s National Gallery as just one example. Out of a 2,300-strong collection, female artists are represented by just 1% of those works. With the acquisition of Artemisia Gentileschi’s ‘Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria’ in 2018, this takes the number of works by female artists owned by one of the world’s most renowned galleries to the grand total of 21. The National Gallery alone boasts to hold “one of the greatest collections of paintings in the world,” yet with so little variety on the walls, their collection is only truly ‘great’ for a select few. 

Artemisia Gentileschi’s portrait is an interesting example of this very issue and plays into the limp reasons usually offered up as to why female artists are still such a statistical rarity in gallery spaces. In conversations on this topic, I have found there to be generally two arguments as to why there is this gender gap in the art world — either ‘women weren’t allowed to be artists,’ historically speaking, or ‘men were just the better artists.’ Clearly, the first argument has more merit than the second. 

It is true that throughout history there have been innumerable barriers to women achieving practically anything, let alone a successful art career. At the time of Artemisia’s 17th-century Baroque career, for example, women were all-but barred from artistic training and a professional career. She could not even read and write until she managed to learn as an adult due to the fact that women’s education was deemed so unnecessary as to not even be considered. In order to learn her craft, Artemisia had to learn from her father, the renowned Late Renaissance painter Orazio Gentileschi, as there was no other means for her to do so. Overcoming these enormous hurdles (eventually becoming the first woman to enroll at the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence and having a successful career) was undeniably near impossible for the majority of the women who tried. We will never know how many other talented women have been lost to history simply because they could not overcome the barriers placed in their way. 

However, we should not kid ourselves and pretend that these women did not exist. Sofonisba Anguissola preceded Artemisia Gentileschi in the Renaissance era, as did Catharina van Hemessen and Lavinia Fontana. Have you heard of them? Why not, when you have heard of their male contemporaries Rembrandt, Rubens and Caravaggio? Renaissance and Baroque self-portraiture is almost always displayed on the gallery wall by its male examples, such as these three, and yet Anguissola painted the longest series of self-portraits between Dürer and Rembrandt. Along with Artemisia in the 17th-century were the likes of Mary Beale, Elisabetta Sirani, Judith Leyster, Élisabeth Sophie Chéron, Anne Killigrew, Fede Galizia, Clara Peeters and more. Have you heard of these women? I don’t blame you. Largely neither had I before I read Frances Borzello’s Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self-Portraits. These women, and many more besides, do exist in art history, painting at the very same time as the Rembrandts, Rubens and Caravaggios of the world. 

Yet, consult any list of ‘great historical painters’ and it is these male names that you will see, not Beale or Leyster or Galizia or Artemisia Gentileschi. It is true that female artists were not allowed to exist in the same numbers as their male counterparts, but they were there, and they made their presence known in their time. History, however, has largely forgotten them, and this is evident in art institutions around the world. Do not be fooled by the landmark ‘Artemisia’ exhibition that has just opened at the National Gallery, a show of this kind is still the exception, not the rule. Don’t believe me? This is the very first time that she (an artist with talent to rival any of her male contemporaries) has had a solo exhibition in the UK. 

Why, then, have these women been largely forgotten since the time when they were able to defend their own work? This speaks to the second, and rather nonsensical, argument given that over the course of history men have simply been the better artists, and so it is their work that is celebrated today. Take a look at any one of the women I have listed above, not to mention their modern counterparts like Jenny Saville, Judy Chicago, Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama, and you will see that ‘talent’ is not the issue here. Yet, just as back in the Renaissance, these twentieth-century women find their artwork largely overlooked by their male colleagues. In The Guardian’s round-up of the top ten 20th-century artworks, among Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Magritte and Duchamp, just one lonely female artist can be found in the form of Hannah Höch. Moreover, between 1980 and 2000, the Tate Gallery awarded just twenty-three of its 375 solo exhibitions to female artists and The Royal Academy is still, well into the twenty-first century, yet to host a major female artist-led show in its main space. This is not lack of talent, it is lack of access. 

Unlike in Artemisia’s time, women artists can now pursue formal training and can practice as professional artists. In fact, in the UK alone 64% of undergraduates and 65% of graduates in the creative arts are women. Yet, 68% of the artists represented at top London galleries—such as the RA, the National and the Tates Modern and Britain—are men. The answer to the criticism that female artists don’t have the talent is simple — it’s not the artists but the gatekeepers who are still excluding women from full representation in the artworld. 

Journalists, curators, dealers and collectors — these are the people who dictate what is and what isn’t considered to be ‘good art,’ and, surprise surprise, these are all male-dominated professions. Three of the most visited museums in the world, in fact, London’s the British Museum, Paris’ the Louvre and New York’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art have never had female directors and while women make up a majority of the professional staff in museums, they are hugely underrepresented in leadership positions. That is, while you may be greeted by a woman at the inquiries desk, be served by one in the café or even ask questions to a single curator come to see the public reception of her exhibition, it is unlikely that upon entering the boardroom of that gallery that you would find the same scene. Even now, it is still overwhelmingly men who dictate not only taste but representation in art. Therefore, should we really be surprised when Terence Koh’s literal gold-encrusted feces sells for 100x the average price of a sculpture by a female artist? The short answer: no. While men continue to run the artworld, the percentage of female artists in major galleries will remain in single figures, and the achievements of centuries of women artists will continue to go overlooked and underappreciated. It unfortunately is left to female historians, curators and collectors such as Frances Borzello, Katy Hessell, Wanda M. Corn and Kathleen Gilrain to push women into the spotlight where otherwise they would be left in the dark. 

So, the next time you find yourself in a gallery, take a minute to stop and think about how many women you have seen. It may look like a lot, after all approximately half of the top twenty-five works sold at auction are male artists’ depictions of women and a great deal of especially historical art follows suit, but how many female artists have you seen? Then ask yourself, where are they? It’s not that they’re not there, it’s not that they don’t exist. It’s that they have not yet been given equal membership to an exclusive club still overwhelmingly run by men for men. 

Aspen is a UoE English Literature graduate currently freelance writing and editing. In the summer of 2020 she co-founded the feminist online magazine The Teller for which she is co-Editor and Fashion Columnist. She is also a regular arts and cultures columnist for The Broad.