If warning were needed that progress towards equality between men and women is at best slow and uneven, and at worst sliding backwards, the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report for 2023 provided it. But on the face of it, the art world would seem to be bucking the trend, with a cascade of challenges to the status quo. In London alone, these include a rehang at the National Portrait Gallery, bringing more women into focus, and the first solo takeover of the main galleries of the Royal Academy by a female artist.
Internationally, the year was topped off by ArtReview handing the top slot in its Power 100 list of art’s most influential people to the American photographer Nan Goldin. Her most conspicuous achievement has been her campaign against the billionaire Sackler dynasty, whose company, Purdue Pharma, fuelled the opioid epidemic in America. But her activism, which has resulted in a slew of institutions cutting ties with the family, and striking their name from buildings, is rooted in her work as a pioneering photographic observer. Her 50-year focus on the intimate lives of people pushed to the margins of society by sexuality, addiction, or a simple refusal to fit in, has documented alternative histories, and inspired younger generations of artists to do likewise.
The rich and various history of confrontational feminist art is currently on show in Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt! – a show billed as the first to survey the activist art made by women between 1970 and 1990. It is fascinating to see footage of the bewilderment on shoppers’ faces as second-wave feminism took to the streets; it is chastening to see the ferocity of the challenge that punk posed to gender expectations, and to wonder where all that snarling, devil-may-care energy went.
ArtReview’s Power 100 doesn’t only include artists but gallerists and collectors. And rightly so. Women In Revolt! was curated by five women. But those who rebalance the picture are not necessarily either art-world insiders or women. The attention paid to the pop artist Pauline Boty, who is currently enjoying one of her periodic rediscoveries, has been attributed by the Scottish novelist Ali Smith to four people: alongside the two curators/art historians who tracked down and rescued her paintings were her dairy farming sister-in-law, who kept them in a barn for years after Boty’s untimely death from cancer aged 28, and Ken Russell, who included her in his enduringly influential 1962 film Pop Goes the Easel.
To these can be added Smith herself, who made Boty one of the guiding spirits of her Seasons quartet of novels, thus bringing her to the notice of a readership beyond the art world. For Smith, in Autumn, she represents all those women who are “Ignored. Lost. Rediscovered years later. Then ignored. Lost. Rediscovered ad infinitum.”
For centuries, the history of art has been haunted by its forgotten women. “Things seem to come in cycles and waves, and I wish they didn’t,” said Sonia Boyce, one of the artists included in a section of Women in Revolt! devoted to the 1980s British black arts movement. Nearly four decades passed before Boyce and another of the featured artists, Lubaina Himid, became the first British women of colour to win, respectively, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale and the Turner prize. While these achievements are cause for celebration, the work of remembering them starts now.
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