The superb portrait shows an unknown woman, face closed, comfortably seated in her armchair, her arm raised exposing her hair under the armpit. This woman is the Marxist artist Irene Peslikis, a key figure in American feminism in the 1960s. It is she whom Parisians can see on the posters announcing the first major French exhibition devoted to the painter Alice Neel, at the Center Pompidou . Two women, both activists, both artists and unknown to the general public in France. A Guerrilla Girls dream.
Long considered radical, this group of feminist artists, whose members wish to remain anonymous, has been campaigning since 1985 against all forms of discrimination in the art world. One of his most famous posters, which shows the naked body of The Great Odalisque, d’Ingres, his head covered with a gorilla mask, addressed the Metropolitan Museum in New York, whose collection then included 95% of male artists: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met? »
Today, if gender equality is still not appropriate in the collections of museums, women artists are nevertheless more and more numerous to be exhibited. In France as in the United States, over the past two years, it is impossible to escape the profusion of exhibitions devoted to them. After “Women Painters 1780-1830” and “Pioneers” at the Luxembourg Museum in Paris, after “Elles do abstraction” and “Georgia O’Keeffe” at the Center Pompidou, after “Valadon and her contemporaries” at the Royal Monastery of Brou in Bourg-en-Bresse, after “Toyen, the absolute gap” at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris (MAM), the public can discover this fall, in the capital, Alice Neel at the Center Pompidou, Zoe Leonard at the Museum of modern art, Rosa Bonheur at the Musée d’Orsay and Joan Mitchell at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.
A “natural” rebalancing
The phenomenon is everywhere, in both large and small institutions. It is of such magnitude, with regard to the very masculine history of art, that one can only wonder: is it a question of a logic of rebalancing or of a good conscience to little of charges ? Or even a fad or a marketing strategy? “Having exhibitions of women artists and recounting their journeys upsets the history of art and our representations”, defends the curator Camille Morineau, whose last exhibition, “Pioneers, artists in the Paris of the Roaring Twenties”, was presented at the Luxembourg Museum in the spring.
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