Female artists are still often overshadowed by their male colleagues, with many unknown or forgotten to history. But a French nonprofit wants to change that with a new archive to "bring visibility to women artists."
Image: awarewomenartists.com
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Back in 2009, Camille Morineau, then a curator at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, felt it was time to stage an art exhibition devoted solely to women — a first for the modern art museum.
But the show, titled "elles@centrepompidou," was anything but easy to put together. Morineau was hard-pressed to find information on the female artists whose works were owned by the museum — biographical information, details about their works or even the art movements these women belonged to.
Preparing for the show, Morineau realized how much women have been underestimated by art historians. "There was a lot even I didn't know, although I am an expert in 20th century art," she told DW. "I thought to myself, that is scandalous."
'There is no reason why women should have a weaker artistic bent than men': Morineau Image: Christophe Beauregard
That realization would eventually give birth to a tool that would allow anyone to access information about female artists — "AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibition," founded in 2014.
Along with six other women, Morineau started the Paris-based international non-profit organization to "bring visibility to women artists," as the group puts it on their website.
Morineau is convinced that having information about the existence of female artists, about their lives and works, will finally get them out of the shadow of their male colleagues. "Historians work with archives, and when they find new archives, that changes the narrative," she said.
No lack of female artists
The documentation center on Boulevard Saint-Germain has about 1,600 monographs, exhibition catalogs and essays on female artists. Online archives offer more than 400 entries on visual artists around the world, with the plan to add 150-200 more each year.
That number could be multiplied by the hundreds, said AWARE's Hanna Alkema — it's hard to say how many female artists remain undiscovered. Research, she said, comes up with new names every time.
There are two conditions for acceptance into the online catalog: the woman must have been born between 1860 and 1972, and must have been recognized as an artist by an institution during her lifetime.
Famous feminists and the struggle for equality
Olympe de Gouges, Sojourner Truth and Judith Butler: A look at women who've fought for equality.
Image: Rowohlt Verlag
Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793)
The French revolutionary was a pioneer in the struggle for women's rights. In 1791, Olympe de Gouges wrote a "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen" in response to the 1789 declaration of human and civil rights, which didn't take women into account. In her text, she wrote that women are born free and are equal to men in all of their rights.
Image: picture-alliance/akg-images
Sojourner Truth (1797-1883)
Activist Sojourner Truth made a connection between the rights of slaves in the United States and those of women. She campaigned for both the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage. Her speech "And ain't I a woman?" which she held at a women's rights convention in Ohio in 1851, went down in the history books.
Image: picture-alliance/Everett Collection
Louise Otto-Peters (1819-1895)
Louise Otto-Peters is considered the founder of the German women's rights movement. In 1843, she became famous for saying, "The participation of women in the interests of the state is not a right, but a duty." Otto-Peters co-founded Germany's first feminist organization, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein, in 1865.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Hedwig Dohm (1831-1919)
In 1874, she wrote "The Scientific Emancipation of Women." Hedwig Dohm called for women's suffrage and unrestricted access to universities, making her a radical pioneer of the German feminist movement. According to her motto "Human rights know no gender," Dohm demanded equality across the board.
Image: picture-alliance/akg-images
Emily Davison (1872-1913)
British sufragette Emily Davison was arrested eight times. The activist sometimes resorted to violent protests in her campaign for women's rights. She was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union, which was founded in 1903. Its motto was, "Deeds, not words." Ultimately, Davison died a martyr. In an effort to draw attention to her cause during a horse race, she was trampled to death.
Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 work "The Second Sex" is a milestone of feminist literature. In it, she famously wrote, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Well ahead of her time, she was among the first to assert the thesis that gender is not a biological fact.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Betty Friedan (1921-2006)
In her work "The Feminine Mystique," Betty Friedan criticized the reduction of women to mothers and housewives. It was published in 1963 and she became an activist in the American feminist movement. In 1966, she and 27 other women founded the National Organization for Women. She would go on to spend her life fighting for gender equality.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/AP Photo
Alice Schwarzer (*1942)
In fall 1975, Alice Schwarzer released her book "The Little Difference and Its Huge Consequences," in which she analyzes sex as a power play between men and women. It became a bestseller, making Schwarzer the best-known and most divisive feminist in Germany. She has been publishing "Emma" since 1977.
Image: picture-alliance/rtn - radio tele nord
Judith Butler (*1956)
The deconstruction of gender is the central theme of Judith Butler's work "Gender Trouble" from 1990. Her thesis is that both our learned gender and our biological sex are socially construed and our gender identity is a performance. The American philosopher became a pioneer of feminist theory in the 1990s.
Image: European Graduate School
Mozn Hassan (*1979)
Mozn Hassan and her organization Nazra for Feminist Studies have fought for women's rights in Egypt since 2007. During the Arab Spring, Nazra made sure that sexual harassment became a statutory offense. In 2016, the feminist activist Hassan received the Right Livelihood Award — also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize — for her work.
Image: Right Livelihood Award/M. Mohie
Laurie Penny (*1986)
Laurie Penny of Britain is considered one of the most significant feminists of our time. Her works "Meat Market" and "Unspeakable Things" criticize the sexualization and sexual suppression of women and the idea of romantic love. Penny works as a columnist and journalist for "The Guardian," "the Independent," "New Statesman" and others.
Image: picture-alliance/Photoshot
Margarete Stokowski (*1986)
She is also known as the "German Laurie Penny." Margarete Stokowski's debut book "Untenrum frei" ("Free down below") discusses power, mechanisms of sexual suppression, gender roles assigned be society and how small freedoms relate to larger liberties. The "Spiegel" columnist's main thesis is that we can't be free at the top if we're not free down below — and vice versa.
Image: Rowohlt Verlag
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AWARE has made exceptions, however. Alkema pointed out that some female artists were able to have a career, but were never officially recognized in their lifetime.
More diversity
Besides well-known artists including Cindy Sherman, Agnes Varda and Sonia Delaunay — it took half a century for the latter to finally be recognized as an artist in her own right, and not just as the wife of famous Robert Delauney — the catalog lists many unknown or forgotten female artists: Vera Pagava, Egypt's Gazbia Sirry and Marion Baruch, of Romania.
Delaunay, known for her abstract paintings, was a major figure in the Art Deco movementImage: picture-alliance/dpa
With about 71 percent of the artists in the archives currently representing Western countries, the organization is keen on creating more diversity. That takes time, and it's not always an easy task from France.
AWARE is planning to build a worldwide correspondent network to help find female artists in Asia, Africa, the Mideast and Latin America — a particular focus in 2019 — and provide the public with information on their lives and works, Alkema said.
Apart from its online presence and the documentation center, AWARE offers museum tours pointing out female artists, panel discussions in cooperation with universities, its own publications and an annual award recognizing two artists. Funding comes from, among others, the French Culture Ministry and Fondation Chanel.
"For centuries, art exhibitions were exhibitions of art by men — and no one noticed," Morineau said. She noted, however, that in recent years that has begun to change, as awareness of that discrimination has increased.
People become artists because they are driven, she said. "There is no reason why women should have a weaker artistic bent than men; they have the same brains, the same neurons and more or less the same biology.
"It's like a mathematical formula, on that now needs to be proven again," she added. With AWARE, she is intent on contributing to that process.
