Museums are showing more art by women, but they aren't buying it. Hettie Judah considers whether the tide might turn towards valuing women artists in 2020.
Compiling Vogue’s global exhibition highlights for the year ahead, I noticed my list was almost entirely shows by women artists. This is not the norm: usually there are a few, usually diligently hunted for. There was no agenda, no conscious bias to my selection: these had simply looked the most exciting shows of 2020. The artists are hardly new, undiscovered and overlooked. Among them are Alice Neel, portraitist supreme of mid-century Harlem and New York bohemia; the wild sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle; Artemisia Gentileschi, the greatest female artist of the Italian baroque; Serbian-born performance artist, Marina Abramović; and Zanele Muholi, whose photographic reimagining of the self dominated the recent Venice Biennale.
It is not odd that major museums should be showing work by these artists, but it feels noteworthy that they are doing so in such numbers and with such commitment. Studies over the last five years have shown women received only about a quarter of the big solo shows in Europe and the US. Of the 20 most popular exhibitions around the world in 2017, only one was by a female artist: Yayoi Kusama.
Kusama is also responsible for a whopping 14 per cent of the market for art by women at auction. To rephrase: Kusama dominates that two per cent of global sales of art at auction that is by women. Two per cent of the global auction market for art. We write about art by women being undervalued, but that’s the bald figure: when the hammer falls, women are worth two per cent.' ... Keep reading on Vogue
Compiling Vogue’s global exhibition highlights for the year ahead, I noticed my list was almost entirely shows by women artists. This is not the norm: usually there are a few, usually diligently hunted for. There was no agenda, no conscious bias to my selection: these had simply looked the most exciting shows of 2020. The artists are hardly new, undiscovered and overlooked. Among them are Alice Neel, portraitist supreme of mid-century Harlem and New York bohemia; the wild sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle; Artemisia Gentileschi, the greatest female artist of the Italian baroque; Serbian-born performance artist, Marina Abramović; and Zanele Muholi, whose photographic reimagining of the self dominated the recent Venice Biennale.
It is not odd that major museums should be showing work by these artists, but it feels noteworthy that they are doing so in such numbers and with such commitment. Studies over the last five years have shown women received only about a quarter of the big solo shows in Europe and the US. Of the 20 most popular exhibitions around the world in 2017, only one was by a female artist: Yayoi Kusama.
Kusama is also responsible for a whopping 14 per cent of the market for art by women at auction. To rephrase: Kusama dominates that two per cent of global sales of art at auction that is by women. Two per cent of the global auction market for art. We write about art by women being undervalued, but that’s the bald figure: when the hammer falls, women are worth two per cent.' ... Keep reading on Vogue