Unforeseen facts about women in the art business

Paralleling the gender equality and empowerment in art

We are still in a patriarchal society. This is a fact. And if in some countries, where the rights of women and minorities are clearly undermined and patriarchy is more obvious, in other geographical areas such as in Europe, North America and Canada, it might be a little bit trickier to spot. But be aware that patriarchy is there, and tries to fight to keep its places of privileged. This is why even small steps are very welcome to start to walk into a direction of equality and respect.

For instance the project “Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture”, a project about women portrait paintings, is one of these good step that we should be happy they are being implemented nowadays.

Portrait of Virginia Woolf by Ray Strachey, dated late 1920s.

Photograph- National Portrait Gallery London:PA

  
Some unforeseen facts about women in the art business

Women are still today dramatically underrepresented and undervalued in term of visibility, money, prestige in gallery and museums around the world.

According to a data analysis of 18 major museums in the US they found out that their collection are 87% male and 85% white. And when we talk about the art business we don’t refer only to artist, but also to people that work in leadership position: for instance, three of the most visited museums in the world, the British Museums (founded in 1753), the Louvre (founded in 1793) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1876) never had a female person as director.

Women are the majority of art students, but the minority that actually work in the art business: we have been earning 70% of the bachelors in fine arts and between 65 to 75% of masters, but we are only 46% the people who works in art.

All these number give an idea about how has been the trend for so too long: as happens also in other fields of work and professions, women are neglected, the can have more difficulties that man to find a job in the field they have been looking forward and that they studied about and so on.

Today this is not acceptable anymore, and although to change things takes time, something is already happening.

The Art Project: How it can create enlightenment
Increasing portraits of ladies’ number within the existing collection of art 

“Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture” is a three-year project done in a grand collaboration between the National Portrait Art Gallery of London and the Chanel Culture Fund, a venture that aims to offer a new start to culture and in particular to contemporary artists that decreased their work due to the pandemic. The project’s objective is to give a new visibility to women within the artistic field: to increase the number of women portraits including women both as a subject of art and as artist.

This project will increase the proportion of women artists and sitters on display at the Gallery in London when it will opens again in 2023, and it will also includes a complete transformation of the entire Collection and a significant refurbishment of the building.

This is one of the initiative that have been undertaking to start close the gap between male and women in the art business, to give the right visibility, importance accessibility to the work of women as well, like it has been done to the man’s work for too long: this is a tiny step in the right direction, a direction we should start to undertake for us but especially the future generations.

Notes & Tips:

To read more about Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture

  • National Portrait Gallery to feature more women in its collection The Guardian
  • Championing the Role of Women in British History and Culture Art of London
  • How the National Portrait Gallery and Chanel are celebrating women: Tatler
  • Chanel Is Staging A Feminist Coup At The National Portrait Gallery Vouge
go back to articles

Alda Merini: A poet made of love, sorrow, freedom and madness

Alda Merini is the poet of the deepest feelings of the human nature: in her poems, she talks about love, sorrow, freedom and madness. With her words, she shows us the countless aspects a woman can wear and feel.

She is indeed one of the greatest Italian poets of the Twentieth Century: a stubborn woman, fragile and strong, a woman that wanted to be free. A true poet.

Her life has not been an easy one, yet she managed to turn all her incredibly hard experiences into words, into poems: thanks to her extraordinary perception, she created art out of pain, but also out of deep joy.

Alda Merini

Photo: Arte Rivista – Milano

 

Little Poet of Italy

Alda Merini was born in Milan, on March 21st 1931 – as she says, “Born on 21st at Spring”. Her father who was working as an insurance manager and was the son a disowned duke, taught her to read when she was five; she would then read the entire Divina Commedia of Dante Alighieri at the age of eight. She discovered to be a poet very early, and at ten years old she won the price Little Poet of Italy.

In 1943, the British army bombed Milan, and her family lost everything: they then had to move in with some relative in a city nearby, and she would come back to Milan few years after that.

For Alda, poetry and mental institutions were constantly present in her life, since when she was very young.

In 1944 she married her first husband, Ettore Carniti, who owned some bakeries in Milan: she was only 14 years old.

The guy didn’t had any idea about what poetry was nor did he know that Alda was an actual poet: indeed she was writing and she would be published few years later her marriage. Carniti couldn’t understand Alda: she was trying her best to be a good mother and wife, but her mental instability wasn’t easy. Probably, her need of freedom was also very scary for him, quite unacceptable, even if what was making her free were words on paper.

In this marital misunderstand, he was generally coming back home drunk and beating her, until the night when she crashed a chair on his head. He would then call the police and Alda was sent to the medical institution: this was the first of a long story of institutionalization for her.

Sono una piccola ape furibonda.

Mi piace cambiare di colore.

Mi piace di cambiare di misura.

I am a little and furious bee

I like to change my colour.

I like to change my size.

Alda Merini signature
Photo: Signature of Alda Merini
Notes & Tips:
go back to articles

Mary Shelley: Yes, the writer of Frankenstein was a woman!

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

As the daughter of William Godwin (radical philosopher) and Mary Wollstonecraft (women rights activist and author), Mary Shelley, has been the youngest author of the Romanticism literature.

She was strong, rebel, intelligent and a writer, a mother, a person who suffered many losses in her entire life. Her personal story has been entangled with the idea of death since her very first days: her own mother died few days after giving birth to Mary. Later on, Mary herself lost many of her children, and she experienced the loss of the love of her life.

 
Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus

Thanks to Mary Shelley’s talent and vocation, she was the creator of the archetype of doctor Victor Frankenstein and of his creature, the powerful and flexible images that talks about what life really is and what death really is. Indeed, more than two hundred years after its publication, her most known work “Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus” still speaks to us directly as a myth about contemporary life.

The metaphor of Frankenstein can be still used in our modern world, as an images that very well pictures many aspects of our own life today, the imbroglio between life, science, technologies that we are all experiencing on our own skin, and in our very daily life. For this, her book “Frankenstein” is a wonder, a miracle, a piece of literature that must be read with wide opened eyes also to understand and question the modern world we are living in.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

by Richard Rothwell © National Portrait Gallery, London

Free love

As she was a girl, she received a very little formal education, but at the same time she had the privilege of coming from a literate family who dealt with literature all the time. She grew up idealizing her death mother, who was already a strong opinionated lady and a writer herself, and who for all her life had fought for women rights as an ante litteram feminist.

Following the ideas of her parents, a sixteen years old Mary run away with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was at that time a married man with a child: they were in love, and she knew that socially she would have been ruined by that, but she did it anyway because she was strongly believing in her father philosophy of free love and in the concept of an open marriage, even thought later on in their relationship this would be very difficult for her to accept.

Born as a literature game between friends, in the 1818 her book Frankenstein was published: some people considered the novel to be the creation of Percy; Mary was quick to refute this and she would fight to be accepted as the writer of it.

Mary Shelley is still today an inspiring woman who made her life a piece of art, and her art a powerful gift for all the human kind.

Notes & Tips:
go back to articles

Alba de Céspedes The monumental collection of memories

Alba Carla Lauritai de Céspedes y Bertini is an eclectic figure of Italian and international literary world. She was a poet, a writer, a journalist, a publisher and author for radio, television and movies scripts. She explains women and their world: she is a woman that talks deeply about women in a patriarchal society. She was one of the pioneering figures in the feminist movement.

Born in 1911 in Rome, she was the daughter of the Cuban ambassador there; she was bilingual – knowing perfectly Spanish and Italian; she spent her earlier years between Rome and Paris.

Alba de Céspedes

Italian magazine Epoca, Vol. VII, n. 86, 31 May 1952

Life itself

She spent all her life writing. Writing was for Alba “life itself”, she confessed it to her father once, a man that she loved very much and who always supported her in what she wanted to do with her life.

 

Women are the main protagonists of her books: they are people of various personalities and social status but they are indeed united by insecurities, doubts, frustrations of their lives deriving from being women in her contemporary world. At the same time her characters are also always courageous and determined in moving forward: they are ready to do the next step to start dismantling the same status quo that is blocking them and their evolution as persons.

 

De Céspedes is an attentive observer of the female universe and she describes it within thousand nuances and with a deep eye: she enters in each of her characters to give them life and voice.

 

De Céspedes finds herself writing in a decidedly difficult period for culture, especially for a woman, yet in her novels she manages to deal with any topic, even the most intimate ones of the female world, with delicacy and grace, without ever falling into the vulgar.

 

In each of the protagonists of her books relive what have always been her guiding ideas, those ideals of justice and freedom that are the common thread to her novels.

Mercurio

One life, many projects

Beside writing books and articles for various magazine of the time, she also had different projects: in 1943, within a radio program that was called “Italia Combatte” (Italy fights) she was having her own space with the nickname of Clorinda and she was encouraging women to deliberately be opposed to the fascists.

 

In 1948, she founded Mercurio, a magazine about art, politics and sciences, where many important people of the time, wrote and took part in it.

 

Alba spent her entire life by writing, editing, working on different projects. She died in Paris in 1997, eight days after donating all her papers and documents to the ‘Archivi Riuniti delle Donne’ in Milan. The rich and very well organized archive covers all the stages of her life, starts even before her birth and arrives to her death. Alba’s collection is, for sure, exceptional because unfortunately most of women don’t feel that important or interesting enough to prepare such a monumental collection of memories.

 

In her books and in her entire works, it is visible that she had a very clear vision of the situation of women of her contemporary society, and with her work, she stands for them and she denounce their position of inferiority in comparison to the one of men. Although she has been quite neglected also because her work was too often and wrongly associated with romance novel, Alba de Céspedes has a powerful voice that can still speak very much to the women of our generation.

Notes & Tips:
go back to articles