The gallery predictably frames its new exhibition about modern art around Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. But there were women painting at the time – so where are their contributions?
For a 1936 exhibition at MoMA in New York, Alfred H Bar Jr created a flow chart depicting the evolution of modern art in Europe from impressionism through a series of other “-isms”, culminating in abstraction. The chart has become widely derided for its easy-to-follow depiction of art movements evolving in a fixed progression, with no consideration of any artists working outside the Parisian avant garde. The National Gallery’s new exhibition, After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art, feels like walking through this defunct diagram.
When the gallery announced the exhibition last year, Twitter users criticised its framing around the three “pivotal figures” of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh, and its lack of work by women. The gallery responded with a claim that more “major” works by women would be announced in due course. In the final exhibition, there are a total of five works made by women: paintings by Paula Modersohn-Becker, Sonia Delaunay, and Broncia Koller-Pinell, and sculptures by Camille Claudel and Käthe Kollwitz. The show includes a total of 94 paintings and sculptures, meaning that 5% of the exhibition is by women – actually a five-fold improvement on the National Gallery’s permanent collection, of which 1% of the objects are made by women.
