Women in Art: Why Biases Still Exist

Women today enjoy a lot more freedom to choose a profession and obtain education. Art professions are now open to both men and women, and women’s art has gained in stature, albeit slowly. For centuries, women were discouraged from becoming artists, and unlike men who studied art, their instruction was restricted until the late 19th century.

Social Barriers

In France, women were banned from receiving free training at the state-sponsored École des Beaux-Arts until 1897. Up until that time, women turned to the studios of established artists or to private academies, often at the cost of inferior instruction at much greater expense.

Women artists were not allowed to attend life drawing classes until the late 1800s. Without access to nude models, female artists could not receive the training necessary for the production of “important” works of art. As a result, women artists were virtually excluded from state commissions and purchases as well as from participation in official competitions such as the coveted Prix de Rome, a prestigious scholarship offered to history painters for continued study at the French Academy in Rome. To make a living as an artist, many women turned to lesser sought subjects including portraiture, genre painting, landscape, and still life.

Furthermore, it was considered degrading to one’s class if a woman aspired to become an artist, with many claiming that the profession detracted from their roles as wives and mothers. In a letter to the mother of Edma and Berthe Morisot, their private art instructor expressed the implications of the two girls’ burgeoning talents: “Considering the characters of your daughters, my teaching will not endow them with minor drawing room accomplishments, they will become painters. Do you realize what this means? In the upper-class milieu to which you belong, this will be revolutionary, I might say almost catastrophic.”

In general, the most successful female artists of the nineteenth century, such as Rosa Bonheur and the Americans Mary Cassatt and Cecilia Beaux, remained unmarried. And, as if staying single weren’t enough, those women artists who became successful were usually associated in some way with male artists as pupils, models or offspring.

The Turning Point

The slow rise of acceptance of women in the art world paralleled the activism of the women’s suffrage movement beginning in the late 1800s, the introduction of women in the traditionally male dominated workplace during WWII, and in the 1970s, the support of the Equal Rights Amendment and the introduction of birth control.

Still, there remains disparities in representation and income. Today only a few works by female artists enjoy representation in major permanent collections in the U.S. and Europe. At major auctions, women’s artworks sell for a significant discount compared with men’s artwork. In fact, only two works by women have ever broken into the top 100 auction sales for paintings, despite women being the subject matter for approximately half of the top 25.

Why this inequality persists today is hard to discern. Differences in gallery representation; the cultural biases of art interpretation; the cliché of the art world “bad boy”; the sexism of aging; the imbalanced weight of parenthood; the proportion of curators, collectors, and gallery representatives who are female; and the lack of assertiveness among female artists have all been proposed as hypothetical causes.

Artists pictured, Top to bottom: Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Augusta Savage, and Frida Kahlo.

“I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way-things I had no words for.”

-Georgia O’Keeffe