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Centre Pompidou - Paris - Exhibitions:

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elles@centrepompidou, Women Artists in the Collections of the National Modern Art Museum

For the first time in the world, a museum will be displaying the feminine side of its own collections. This new presentation of the Centre Pompidou's collections will be entirely given over to the women artists from the 20th century to the present day.

elles@centrepompidou is the third thematic exhibition of the National Modern Art Museum's collections, following Big Bang in 2005 and the Mouvement des Images (Image Movements) in 2006-2007.

This will be the occasion for the institution, which has built up the very first collection of modern and contemporary art, to show its commitment to women artists, nationality and discipline taken together, and place them at the core of modern and contemporary art of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Key figures such as Sonia Delaunay, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, Joan Mitchell and Maria-Elena Vieira da Silva rub shoulders with today's great female creators some of whom, including Sophie Calle, Annette Messager and Louise Bourgeois have been featured recently in monographic exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou.

The programming cuts across disciplines to take a deeper look at the place occupied by women in the culture of the last century, from literature to history of thought, from dance to cinema.

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Women's Feature Service

http://wfsnews.org/

India - New Delhi

FRAia06f: Marie Laurencin, Apollinaire et ses amis, 1909 [Une Réunion à la campagne]. Oil on canvas, 130 x 194 cm. (Credit: Jean-Claude Planchet, Centre Pompidou\WFS)

France: A Massive Manifesto For Female Art

By Barbara Lewis

Paris (Women's Feature Service) - With more than 200 artists and 500 works of art spread over 8,000 square metres, elles@centrepompidou is a vast, overwhelming showcase of art that happens to be by women. In the first event of its kind, France's National Museum of Modern Art, le Centre Pompidou in Paris, devotes more than half of its current display to women artists. All the works displayed are from its own collection rather than borrowed from other galleries.

The ultimate aim is to overcome the need for such feminist statements, as women acquire the same universal status as men. France, in particular, is far from achieving that. Head curator Camille Morineau said the French context was "politically very different from other countries". Drawing a contrast with Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries, she said France had shied away from positive discrimination and from adopting quotas to promote women.

One criticism in the French press of elles@centrepompidou has been to accuse the museum of ghettoising women. Morineau had anticipated that, she said, and her answer is that it is a necessary counterblast to years of under-representation. "Paradoxically," to use her word, this massive manifesto for female art is a step towards not having to think about the gender of the artist, only of the quality of his or her work. "The goal is neither to show that female art exists nor to produce a feminist event, but to present the public with a hanging that appears to offer a good history of twentieth-century art," Morineau writes in an essay in the exhibition catalogue. "The goal is to show that representation of women versus men is ultimately no longer important."

The "ghettoising" criticism aside, there has been a positive response. The Pompidou press office did not give precise figures, but said visitor numbers had "increased considerably" since elles@centrepompidou opened in May. It is to run for a whole year until May 2010.

Not so surprisingly, the artists on display have also been supportive. "I don't like ghettoes, but it seems important to show the Pompidou Centre has actually bought quite a lot of women artists' work. It's an example to other museums," French artist Annette Messager was quoted as saying by Britain's 'Guardian' newspaper.

The 'Guardian' argued the pressure was on for London's Tate Modern to follow the Pompidou's lead, but Britain's Tate galleries (Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives) are already at the vanguard. "There is a significant increase in the statistics of the percentage of women artists to men over the last 50 years and this gap is narrowing," said Ruth Findlay, senior press officer for the Tate. "Of those artists in the collection who were born after 1960, 178 are male and 94 are female. Three hundred and ninety nine (399) female artists are represented in the Tate Collection and there are 2,138 works by female artists."

The Tate Modern, opened as part of the events to mark the Millennium, caused a stir with its non-chronological hangs, also a feature of elles@centrepompidou, which opts for seven themes to group its work.

"Fire At Will", a reference to art that is engaged and militant, and "The Body Slogan", in which women treat their bodies as subject-matter, are overtly feminist. The first includes Israeli artist Sigalit Landau's "Barbed Hula", a video of the artist spinning a hoop of barbed wire around her naked belly against the backdrop of the sea - Israel's only peaceful and natural border. Depressing, but not merely so, it yields on careful examination the realisation the barbs face outwards and so are virtually harmless.

Equally thought-provoking, "The Body Slogan" juxtaposes French artist Valérie Belin's untitled 1964 photograph of a mannequin who is unsettlingly life-like with a 1961 photograph by New York artist Zoe Leonard of the "Preserved Head of a Bearded Woman". It's hard to believe anyone could have decapitated a woman and put her head in a jar; but apparently someone did.

"A Room, of One's Own" takes its title from novelist Virginia Woolf and the need to establish space to create. It is an artistic portrayal of rooms, not necessarily with any feminist agenda. Among them are French artist Sophie Calle's 1981 photographs of the rooms and guests' belongings she captured after managing to get temporarily hired as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel. In theory, also gender-neutral, "Eccentric Abstraction", "Words at Work" and "Immaterials" demonstrate how women artists played just as great a role as men in pushing at the boundaries of artistic genres.

All of the above is on the Pompidou's fourth floor. "Pioneering Women", the first section - or last, depending on where the visitor begins - is on the fifth floor and is surrounded, as the pioneering women were by male artistic giants, such as Georges Braque and Henri Matisse. In pride of place at the front of the "Pioneering Women" is Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's 1938 self-portrait "The Frame". Compared with many of the vast, confident statements of the fourth floor, it is a small, anxious work. Kahlo's enduring face peers out of a frame of birds and flowers, based on folk art that almost overwhelms the portrait.

Since Kahlo's painful struggle for self-expression, women artists have travelled a very long way, even if it's not yet far enough.

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