The dawning of the 'elles époque'

The work of female artists has long been ignored by the major galleries, but a new exhibition in the Pompidou Centre in Paris changes that in spectacular fashion. SYMA TARIQreports

IN 1989, A GROUP of women plastered posters across New York. “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met?” the slogan asked. The Guerrilla Girls, as the activists were known, were outraged that while only 5 per cent of the artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art were women, 85 per cent of the nudes were female. Twenty years on, these posters are not just being exhibited inside a national museum – they are part of the largest all-female showcase in contemporary art to date, one that might finally show the art world what it has been missing.

It is the first time the Pompidou Centre in Paris has displayed its new permanent collection of female painters, photographers, designers, architects, sculptors, performance artists and film-makers. After decades of excluding women from its major shows, elles@pompidouis an enormous visual manifesto for the institution, proving its commitment to putting female artists at the core of modern and contemporary art. Among the 200 artists taking part are heavyweights such as role-playing photographer Cindy Sherman; Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, who last year filled Tate Modern's vast turbine hall with 200 bunk beds; and Roni Horn, whose series of photographs of a pale-faced woman ( You Are the Weather) were the stars of her solo show in London earlier this year.

This exhibition would have been impossible to mount even five years ago, according to curator Camille Morineau – the museum simply did not have enough work by women. This, she admits, was partly due to a lack of interest by former curators. But thanks to an attitude change at the Pompidou, 40 per cent of its art by women was bought within the past four years and none of it has been borrowed from other galleries.

“We’ve been buying more female artists,” she says. “There hasn’t been an open discussion about it, but my associate curators and I have a similar and particular vision of the world – more so than people in the art world from an older generation.”

Only a short walk away, another Parisian landmark offers a reminder of how unusual Morineau’s attitude is. The Louvre holds 35,000 artworks, and is the most visited museum in the world, but currently has no female artists in its collection. As a museum that deals with older art this is perhaps unsurprising, but the museum has held short exhibitions that included female painters such as early 20th-century artist Marie D’Orleans.

In the UK, the National Gallery has just four paintings by two female artists among its 2,300 works on show. The trustees of the the Tate Modern, which deals with contemporary and modern art, admit that women make up only 12 per cent of its entire collection. By contrast, the sheer scale of the Pompidou’s collection of art by women is impressive – it has 500 pieces. There is also a dedicated website, lecture programmes and catalogue. However, Morineau says that getting an all-female show off the ground wasn’t easy: “There is a fear over isolating a group – women – but to me that creates a barrier.” The Pompidou collection’s pamphlet insists the art “is neither female nor feminist in its point of view”.

The collection solidly covers artistic movements that would be included in any major contemporary survey – minimalism, surrealism and abstraction – seeking to redress the gender imbalance in the art world. Morineau thinks the collection has already made its point. “Nobody thought about [the lack of women in] the Louvre, and now they are starting to talk about it.”

THE SHOW'S DIVERSITYis staggering: seven themes track individually titled rooms across two floors. In "Family and Relationships", there are simple, diary-style drawings by Louise Bourgeois, whose gigantic sculpture, Spider, has travelled the world, and cartoon-like creations by Anne-Marie Schneider.

Close by is Semiotics of the Kitchen, a dry video by artist Martha Rosler, featuring her standing and speaking in her kitchen. Elsewhere, photographs taken in New York by Diane Arbus and Lisette Model (who taught Arbus) are placed side by side, their familiarity not detracting from the originality of the shots. Frida Kahlo's The Frame, the much reproduced, and in real life relatively small, self-portrait is one of the star exhibits and hangs alone on a red partition wall.

The rooms that house these artists are on the upper floor of the exhibition and are separated from the rest of the modern collection by entrances painted in fluorescent orange. This allows male artists such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Man Ray to be shown close to female collections.

Valérie Belin, whose hyper-real portraits of mannequins are on display, says the collection proves it is unimportant whether an artist is male or female. “The real value of this show is that the gender difference is not perceived at all.”

As artist Annette Messager notes: “I don’t like ‘ghettoes’, but it seems important to show that the Pompidou Centre has actually bought quite a lot of women artists’ work. It’s an example to other museums.”

NOT ALL THEartists agree that there is no such thing as female art, and the show has critics within its ranks. Sigalit Landau's uncomfortable video Barbed Hula, which shows her amassing scars as she hula-hoops with barbed wire on a Tel Aviv beach, shares a room with Messager's Les Piques, a collection of more than 100 pikes on which are impaled soft toys, photographs and drawings. Landau says, "There is such a thing as woman art. And I'm not sure having it all together in one place is right for today. It is a touch artificial, and maybe creates an imbalanced experience."

But Morineau argues that a more explosive statement was necessary: "We needed a violent gesture, something a little dramatic." The gesture, it seems, has already inspired the Museum of Modern Art. Morineau says the New York institution was initially sceptical of elles@pompidou, but it is now working on a new publication, Individuals: Women Artists in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art. After its release next year, it will also focus on some of its own women artists, with each curatorial department devoting a significant portion, and in some cases all, of its collection galleries to them.

As for the Guerrilla Girls, whose poster has a prominent position in the Pompidou exhibition, they say more must be done by the art world. Käthe Kollwitz (who, like all the activists, takes her pseudonym from a dead female artist) says it is time for other institutions to take up the challenge. “The Pompidou, like many other museums, is known for its under-representation of women artists. Now, for one year, they are representing them. Does this make up for all those years of discrimination? No. The pressure is on for the Tate Modern.”

– Guardianservice

Elles@pompidou runs until May 24 2010 at the Pompidou Centre, Paris. See elles.centrepompidou.fr for further details