I’ve recently read a number of feminist critiques of the art world accusing it of being an all-male patriarchy which women can’t enter, of having a glass ceiling which prevents women from reaching the top, and of systematically underplaying or denying the achievement of women artists.

• Women artists in the 20th and 21st century
• 50 Women artists you should know
• Women, Art and Society

While I’m not really qualified to tackle all these issues in their entirety, the books did make me start paying closer attention to the gender of the artists featured in the London art exhibitions I visit, to the gender of the exhibition curators, and to the gender of the people running the main London art galleries which I frequent – with the following results:

Recent art exhibitions and their curators

1. Oceania – Peter Brunt, Nicholas Thomas
2. Heath Robinson’s War Effort – Geoffrey Beare
3. Peter Pan and Other Lost Children – Geoffrey Beare
4. Liberty / Diaspora by Omar Victor Diop – Curatorial Project Manager: Karin Bareman, Curatorial Assistant: Leanne Petersen ♀
5. Learn the Rules Like a Pro, So You Can Break Them Like an Artist! – Cliff Lauson and Tarini Malik ♀
6. Edward Burne-Jones – Alison Smith ♀
7. Space Shifters – Dr Cliff Lauson
8. Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde – Jane Alison ♀
9. Frida Kahlo – Making Herself Up – Claire Wilcox and Circe Henestrosa ♀
10. Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Barrels and The Mastaba – Melissa Blanchflower ♀
11. Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War One – Emma Chambers and Rachel Rose Smith ♀
12. Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy – Achim Borchardt-Hume and Nancy Ireson ♀
13. Vanessa Winship: And Time Folds – Alona Pardo ♀
14. Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing – Alona Pardo and Jilke Golbach ♀
15. I Am Now You – Mother by Marcia Michael – Renée Mussai ♀
16. Devotion: A Portrait of Loretta by Franklyn Rodgers – Mark Sealy, Renée Mussai ♀
17. Shirley Baker –
18. Alex Prager: Silver Lake Drive – Nathalie Herschdorfer ♀
19. Tish Murtha: Works 1976–1991 – Val Williams, Gordon MacDonald, Karen McQuaid ♀
20. Monet and Architecture – Rosalind McKever ♀
21. Print! Tearing It Up – Paul Gorman, Claire Catterall ♀
22. World Illustration Awards 2018 – committee
23. Killed Negatives – Nayia Yiakoumaki ♀
24. ISelf Collection: Bumped Bodies – Emily Butler ♀
25. The London Open 2018 – Emily Butler ♀
26. Ed Ruscha: Course of Empire – Christopher Riopelle
27. Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire – Tim Barringer, Christopher Riopelle and Rosalind McKever ♀
28. Quentin Blake: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun – Olivia Ahmad ♀
29. Tomma Abts – Lizzie Carey-Thomas (assistant curator Natalia Grabowska) ♀
30. Enid Marx – Alan Powers, Olivia Ahmad ♀
31. Edward Bawden – James Russell
32. Under Cover – Karen McQuaid ♀
33. Lee Bul – Stephanie Rosenthal (Eimear Martin, Bindi Vora) ♀
34. Adapt to Survive – Dr Cliff Lauson
35. AOP50 – Zelda Cheatle ♀
36. Andreas Gursky – Ralph Rugoff
37. Age of Terror – Sanna Moore ♀
38. Neo-Romantic Book Illustration in Britain 1943-55 – Geoffrey Beare
39. Charmed lives in Greece – Evita Arapoglou, Ian Collins, Sir Michael Llewellyn-Smith ♀
40. Post-Soviet Visions – Ekow Eshun
41. Made in North Korea – Olivia Ahmad, Nicholas Bonner ♀
42. Ocean Liners: Speed and Style – Ghislaine Wood ♀
43. All Too Human – Elena Crippa (Laura Castagnini, Zuzana Flaskova) ♀
44. Lucinda Rogers – Olivia Ahmed ♀
45. David Milne: Modern Painting – Ian Dejardin, Sarah Milroy ♀
46. Living with gods – Jill Cook ♀
47. Illuminating India – Shasti Lowton ♀
48. Rhythm and Reaction – Catherine Tackley ♀
49. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov – Juliet Bingham, Katy Wan ♀
50. Women with Vision: Elisabeth Frink, Sandra Blow, Sonia Lawson – Nathalie Levi ♀
51. Women of the Royal West of England Academy – Nathalie Levi ♀
52. Cornelia Parker: One day this glass will break – Antonia Shaw ♀
53. Opera: Passion, Power and Politics – Kate Bailey ♀
54. Scythians – St John Simpson
55. War Paint – Emma Mawdsley ♀
56. Modigliani – Nancy Ireson, Simonetta Fraquelli, Emma Lewis, Marian Couijn ♀
57. Soutine – Barnaby Wright, Karen Serres ♀
58. Cézanne Portraits – John Elderfield, Mary Morton, Xavier Rey
59. Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites – Susan Foister, Alison Smith ♀
60. Burrell Degas – Julien Domercq
61. Lake Keitele: Akseli Gallen-Kallela – Anne Robbins ♀
62. Monochrome – Lelia Packer, Jennifer Sliwka ♀
63. Rachel Whiteread – Ann Gallagher, Linsey Young, Helen Delaney & Hattie Spires ♀
64. Dali/Duchamp – Dawn Ades, William Jeffett, with Sarah Lea and Desiree de Chair ♀
65. Jasper Johns – Roberta Bernstein & Edith Devaney ♀
66. Impressionists in London – Caroline Corbeau-Parsons & Elizabeth Jacklin ♀
67. Matisse in the studio – Ann Dumas & Ellen McBreen ♀
68. Jean Arp – Frances Guy & Eric Robertson ♀
69. Tracey Emin / Turner – Tracey Emin ♀
70. Tove Jansson – Sointu Fritze ♀
71. Basquiat – Dieter Buchhart & Eleanor Nairne ♀

Artists by gender and race

71 shows
43 about specific artists (i.e. not about general themes)
52 named artists, of whom –
22 (42% of 52) were women
Black or Asian artists 4 (6%)

Curators by gender and race

71 shows
110 curators and assistant curators
81 women curators (74% of 110)
29 men curators (26%)
5 Black or Asian curators (5%)

London gallery directors by gender

1. Army Museum Director – Janice Murray ♀
2. Autograph ABP – Dr Mark Sealy MBE 
3. Barbican Director of Arts –  Louise Jeffreys ♀
4. British Museum – Hartwig Fischer 
5. Calvert22 – Nonna Materkova ♀
6. Courtauld Gallery Director – Deborah Swallow ♀
7. Dulwich Picture Gallery Sackler Director –  Jennifer Scott ♀
8. Guildhall Art Gallery & London’s Roman Amphitheatre – Sonia Solicari ♀
9. Hayward Gallery Chief curator – Ralph Rugoff 
10. Heath Robinson Museum Manager – Lucy Smith ♀
11. House of Illustration – Colin McKenzie 
12. Imperial War Museum – Diane Lees ♀
13. National Army Museum – Janice Murray ♀
14. National Gallery – Gabriele Finaldi 
15. National Portrait Gallery –  Nicholas Cullinan 
16. The Photographers’ Gallery – Brett Rogers ♀
17. Royal Academy of Arts President – Christopher Le Brun 
18. Saatchi Gallery – Rebecca Wilson ♀
19. Serpentine Gallery Co-Directors – Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Yana Peel ♀
20. Tate Britain Director –  Alex Farquharson 
21. Tate Modern Director – Frances Morris ♀
22. Victoria and Albert Museum Director –  Tristram Hunt 
23. Whitechapel Gallery – Iwona Blazwick ♀

Bristol & Margate gallery directors by gender

Recently I was in Bristol and visited the main art gallery and the Royal West of England Academy:

Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery Director – Laura Pye ♀
Royal West of England Academy Director – Alison Bevan ♀

And popped down to Turner Contemporary in Margate:

Turner Contemporary, Margate Director – Victoria Pomery ♀

Grand total of gallery directors

27 galleries/museums
27 directors
17 women directors (63% of 27)
10 men directors (37%)
1 Black or Asian director (Mark Sealy) (4%)

Conclusions

I accept that the selection of exhibitions I happen to have gone to is subjective (although it does tend to reflect the major exhibitions at the major London galleries).

The gender of curators similarly reflects my subjective choices of venue – but it has in fact remained pretty steady at around 75% women, even as I’ve doubled the number of exhibitions visited over the past couple of months.

The genders of the heads of the main public London galleries are objective facts.

Anyway, from all this very shaky data, I provisionally conclude that:

1. Of exhibitions devoted to named artists (not about themes or groups) about 40% are about female artists.
2. About two-thirds of the London & Bristol art galleries I’ve visited are headed by women.
3. Significantly more art exhibitions are curated by women than by men (about 75%).
4. It is common to hear talk about ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’ in the art world, but not a single major London gallery is run by someone of black or Asian ethnicity, and none of the major art exhibitions I’ve visited were curated by blacks or Asians.

Visitors Also, hardly any visitors to exhibitions are black or Asian. At the Monochrome exhibition, there were no non-white visitors, but no fewer than five of the ‘security assistants’ were black. There were no black or Asian people in the one-room Lake Keitele show. There were no black or Asian visitors at the Degas, though all the women serving in the shop were Asian. Of the 170 people I counted in the Cézanne exhibition, there was one black man, and two Chinese or Japanese. In the Modigliani show, no black people – and so on…

From all of which I conclude that if there is an ‘absence’ or repression going on here, it is not – pace Whitney Chadwick and other feminist art critics – of women, who are in fact over-represented as heads of galleries and as exhibition curators: it is of people of colour, who are almost completely absent from this (admittedly very subjective) slice of the art world, whether as artists, administrators, curators or visitors.

Only the Basquiat show was about a black artist (and it attracted a noticeably large number of black visitors) but even this was curated (astonishingly) by two white people.

All of which confirms my ongoing sense that art is a predominantly white, bourgeois pastime.

Age And old. Every exhibition I go to is packed with grey-haired old men and women. It would be interesting to have some kind of objective figures for sex and age of gallery-goers (I wonder if Tate, the National and so on publish annual visitor figures, broken down into categories).

When I began to try and count age at the Cézanne show I very quickly gave up because it is, in practice, impossible to guess the age of every single person you look at, and the easiest visual clue – just counting grey-haired people – seemed ludicrous.

So I know that these stats are flawed in all kinds of ways — but, on the other hand, some kind of attempt at establishing facts is better than nothing, better than relying on purely personal, subjective opinions.

Now I’ve started, I’ll update the figures with each new exhibition I visit. I might as well try to record it as accurately as I can and see what patterns or trends emerge…