LONDON – When the Pompidou Center in Paris was putting together a special display called “Elles,” of works by women in its permanent collection in 2009, Camille Morineau, the contemporary-collections curator who spearheaded the effort, noticed colossal gaps in the documentation.
“There were so many, it’s hard to list them,” said Ms. Morineau. “In the case of 80 percent of the names, there was barely a book about them: just a few pages.” That’s even though two-thirds of these women had been renowned during their own lifetimes. Some of the available documentation was partial or outright wrong, Ms. Morineau added: Female artists who had attended prestigious schools were described as “self-taught” and as lone operators, when they were in fact part of important contemporary avant-garde artistic movements.
So scant was the information on female artists that Ms. Morineau decided to leave her job at the museum and take action. In 2014, she co-founded an association called AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions) in Paris to spotlight the lives and careers of female artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.
At Frieze Masters this year, Ms. Morineau and AWARE are very much in focus. They have been entrusted with curating the Spotlight section of the fair, which, every year, highlights artists deserving of greater attention.
An entire aisle running the full length of the fair will be taken up by 26 gallery stands dedicated to women artists who were born from 1900 to 1951. Selected by Ms. Morineau and her AWARE colleagues, these artists include the Surrealist pioneer Leonor Fini, but also Orlan, Nike Davies-Okundaye, Sylvia Snowden, Wook-kyung Choi and Sonia Balassanian.
As part of the AWARE Spotlight section, the Pace Gallery will recreate Mary Corse’s “The Cold Room” (an experiential installation initially conceived in 1968 and first realized in 2017), which will consist of exactly that: a cubelike chamber with a temperature kept just above freezing — potentially inspiring some visitors to think about the very topical subject of temperature fluctuations and climate change.
AWARE’s participation in Frieze Masters is part of a new effort by the art and museum world to reverse the erasure of generations of female artists whose careers and artistic contributions have all but disappeared from the art-historical canon. At this year’s Venice Biennale, for example, Artistic Director Cecilia Alemani put on a central exhibition that was composed of roughly 90 percent women artists. (In 1995, the equivalent Venice Biennale show had approximately 90 percent men.)
“There is a desire to grow and diversify collections, precisely because they haven’t had enough representation of women artists or diverse artists and artists of color,” said Frieze Masters Director Nathan Clements-Gillespie. “A fair is such a melting pot and a meeting place that it’s important to champion these themes, so that all the attention and press attention that surrounds a fair can then help spread that message.”
The dialogue between Frieze Masters and AWARE began two years ago, when the French association offered to provide information and documentation on the female artists exhibited at the fair, said Mr. Clements-Gillespie.
When it came time to begin organizing this year’s Frieze Masters, which marks the fair’s 10th anniversary, Mr. Clements-Gillespie reached out to AWARE. He visited the group’s Paris headquarters at the Villa Vassilieff — a former artists’ studio with an extensive library and archive located in the Montparnasse district on the Left Bank.
“I really wanted to do something different, something meaningful for the 10th anniversary,” Mr. Clements-Gillespie said. He described the AWARE team as “very careful, articulate researchers who really deep-dive into an artist’s practice and career.” He noted that they gathered lots of information and made it available for free.
He said Ms. Morineau and her fellow curators who worked on the Frieze Masters project had waived their curatorial fees and asked that the money be donated instead to support AWARE’s ongoing research program.
In the eight years since it was set up, AWARE has compiled 940 biographies in French and English of female artists of the 19th and 20th centuries. These biographies can be accessed free of charge on the organization’s website. There are also 170 published articles available for consultation on the site.
Some 450 art historians contribute to the material found on the AWARE website, and each month, the site sees more than 75,000 page views — 40 percent from France, and 30 percent from English-speaking countries, such as the United States, Britain and Canada.
It seems somewhat odd that so many women who were celebrated and recognized in their own lifetimes should disappear into oblivion after passing on. The question is, why?
“Who is writing history?” Ms. Morineau replied. “Who is running museums? Our view of the world is shaped by who? Mostly men,” she said. “This is also true for women in science, or women in medicine.”
She drew parallels with the “super-amazing scientist” Marie Curie, and recalled that it wasn’t until the 1980s that Ms. Curie — whose husband Pierre’s contributions had been celebrated for decades — was finally acknowledged for her work.
“It’s a long, long story of history being written by men about men,” she said. “Art history is not an exception.” She noted that people were often surprised, because they expected culture and art to be “gender-equal,” but they were not.
Ms. Morineau also pointed out that AWARE’s work got sudden attention from the media and the general public in the aftermath of the 2017 Harvey Weinstein revelations, which brought the #MeToo movement into the international public consciousness.
#MeToo, she explained, was a collection of individual narratives of women who had been forced into silence about their experiences of rape and harassment. The movement involved “a narrative that had been lost getting public exposure and being recognized by so many people,” she said. Female artists had similarly been silenced and rendered invisible in terms of the stories of their lives and their work. So, she explained, #MeToo allowed them to emerge from the shadows.
Ms. Morineau was surprised to be contacted, out of the blue, by multiple media outlets to talk about AWARE. She recalled that she was busy working on a collective show about domestic spaces when “suddenly I was invited on television shows, which never happened before.” The situation “truly changed,” she added. The work of AWARE was no longer an art-historical niche, “but suddenly something public.”
Catherine Grenier — who was the deputy director of the Pompidou Center’s National Museum of Modern Art at the time when Ms. Morineau put on the all-woman “Elles” display there — confirmed the importance of #MeToo in the world of art and museums.
“#MeToo spotlighted the violence experienced by women, but it also revealed the mechanisms leading to the marginalization of women,” she said. It raised awareness of artists who had been “expelled from the great narrative of art history.”
Beyond that, she identified AWARE itself as a major and lasting contributor to art history.
“AWARE has lived up to the challenge inherent in its name: As an association, it has substantially highlighted the importance in France of reconsidering the place of female artists,” Ms. Grenier said. “By offering a digital platform, AWARE has expanded its audience and put together extremely rich content that is accessible by all.”
