The Guerrilla Girls Get Me Thinking About Women in Art

When I told my mum recently that I thought I was becoming quite a feminist, she replied that I can’t be, because I have a boyfriend! While this is quite an extreme case, misconceptions about what feminism means are incredibly common (see Feminist Frequency's wonderful video on the trope of the straw feminist). In class recently we discussed how feminists certainly aren’t one hegemonic group and that feminism is more difficult to define than I had thought. Different groups of feminists have different agendas ranging from thinking gender differences should be celebrated to thinking they should be ignored with women and men treated equally. However, all feminists would agree that women should not be denied the same privileges as men just because of their gender.

And that’s where Guerrilla Girls come in. Guerrilla Girls highlight the gender disparities in the art world and fight to rectify them. They publish books, protest at museums and galleries and give talks about female artists and their subordination. I saw their posters for the first time in the Tate Modern the other day and was struck by the statistics they presented. Oddly, my friend and I had just been discussing how many female nudes there still are in modern art, compared to just one male nude that we had seen in the gallery (Barkley Hendricks’ 1974 Family Jules: NNN (No Naked Niggahs), portraying a naked Afro-American to challenge the fear of black male sexuality prevalent in the States at the time).

I hadn’t ever really thought before about whether the pictures on the postcards and in the books I buy are produced by men or women (I’m usually just sucked in by the pretty colours!), but I was disappointed with what I found. In my postcard collection there are just three paintings by women out of about 50. That’s slightly better than the museum average, but not great. They are:

Bridget Riley – Nataraja 1993

Lyubov Popova – Portrait 1914-15

Alexandra Exter – City at Night 1913

Interestingly two of the three are Russian. Was Russia more excepting of women artists in the early 20^th century than other countries?

There are thirteen female nudes, mainly because I have a lot of Picasso cards (seven nudes) as well as one creature that is evidently a naked female from Miró, and five in Patrick Caulfield’s response to Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon vues de derrière (1999). 

As for males, there are just two, another Picasso, this time Seated man resting on elbow (after Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass) (1962) [I can't find this picture on the internet so will take a photograph and upload it once I'm reunited with my camera] and another disturbing Miró creature in the charmingly named Man and Woman in front of a pile of excrement (1935).

 I assume museum shops stock significantly less postcards of art by women, and more of female nudes, as (even allowing for my Picasso fixation) I can’t imagine I recreated the Guerrilla Girls’ statistics on purpose.

Man Ray's 1933 portrait of Oppenheim,
 in the role of muse rather than creator

As for books, my Taschen Surrealism, incidentally written and edited by women, is a particularly good/bad example. It has just two pages dedicated to Meret Oppenheim, stating that she was accepted by the Surrealists “largely because of a brief love affair with Max Ernst in 1934”. Given that Ernst was a serial womaniser, by that logic half the female artists in Europe should have become Surrealists! In fact David Hopkins notes that, as well as Oppenheim, “Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini and Dorothea Tanning had romantic attachments to Max Ernst”. Yet she was one of the most innovative and influential creators of art using found objects, one of the Surrealist’s key aesthetic aims. She was also one of the few artists of the time who explored the possibility of female fetishism and erotic experiences, rather than just being the playthings of men. She deserves today to be more widely known and given more recognition in studies of Surrealism. But her contemporaries also deserved to be accepted by the Surrealists at the time and allowed to create works rather than just playing the muse. This is the double aim for which the Guerrilla Girls fight – for the recognition of women 

Oppenheim's My Nurse, 1936             

as artistic creators, against the subordination of women as artistic subjects.

Fur Breakfast, 1936, Oppenheim's most famous piece

Feeling somewhat ashamed by the results of my postcard test, I need to research more female artists. Off the top of my head, apart from those mentioned above, I can only name recent headline grabbers like Tracy Emin, Sarah Lucas, Yoko Ono and Louise Bourgeois; Frida Kahlo, who's familiar to anyone learning Spanish; Georgia O’Keeffe; futurist Sonia Delauny (and that’s only from having studied futurism in depth); and my beloved Sophie Calle (more on her later). That’s more than I thought I had in my head when I started writing this but still ludicrously few. I will have to buy the Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art and educate myself!