To mark the publication of her book Les Refusées – Les artistes femmes n’existent pas [The Rejected – Female Artists Do not Exist], the Centre de la photographie Genève invites art critic and curator Anne Bourrassé to share her research on the place of women in the contemporary art world.
According to the French Ministry of Culture, it will take another 120 years to achieve parity between female and male artists. Anne Bourrassé has crunched the figures, and the statistics are bleak: 70 per cent of art school students are women, yet they account for only 23 per cent of artists represented in galleries and 6 per cent of works in museum collections, whilst 85 per cent of the highest earners in contemporary art are men. Drawing on these findings and her own experience, the author has investigated the hierarchies of gender, class and race in art history and their repercussions today. Who knows that behind Caravaggio’s signature lay that of Artemisia Gentileschi? That Augusta Savage paved the way for Jean-Michel Basquiat? That Janet Sobel invented dripping before Jackson Pollock? By juxtaposing pairs of artists, personal accounts and experiences of activism, Anne Bourrassé demonstrates the systemic mechanisms of male domination.
