Roots, a self portrait by Frida Kahlo, one of the artists Stockholm's modern art museum hopes to use in restoring the gender balance. Image: Richard Lews/EPA
One of world's most prestigious museums of 20th-century art is taking on the battle for gender equality, writes Gwladys Fouché.
Stockholm's Moderna Museet recently asked the government for 50m kronor (£3.7m) to buy new works, exclusively by female artists, to redress the gender imbalance in its collection.
"When it comes to masterpieces," Lars Nittve, the museum's director, argued in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter last week, "a sloppy prioritisation of male artists has been going on for decades so that the Moderna Museet's collection consists of approximately 90% works by men and 10% by women. No one can say that this is a correct mirror of the world's artistic talent - or indeed Sweden's."
So staff tried to pick more work by women among the 250,000 works the Moderna Museet owns, but "it has proved very difficult". "Not only are we missing so many of the female pioneers," said Nittve, "but those that are in our collection are often represented by less important, somewhat peripheral, pieces."
To fix past wrongs, the Moderna Museet now hopes to buy 20 works by female artists such as Frida Kahlo, Dora Maar, Louise Bourgeois or Paula Modersohn-Becker. "The art history which our many visitors would see would be utterly different," reckons Nittve, who is very critical of the museum's past purchasing policy. "The big mistake they made was in the 1960s when they bought 36 fantastic paintings in order to make the museum one of the world's most important collections of modern art. They only bought paintings by male artists."
The Moderna Museet's move transfers to the art world a strong tradition in Sweden of placing gender equality high on the political agenda.
The government has included 50% female ministers for the last decade. It is now considered unthinkable that this number will be less in the future. In parliament, Sweden has the second highest proportion of female MPs in the world (45.3%). And the Swedish government has even been toying with the idea of imposing a 40% quota of women on the boards of companies.
Many in Britain may feel that such positive discrimination-style tactics, however valid in the political sphere, have little place in the arts, and may question Nittve's analysis that his predecessors made a "big mistake" in the 1960s. After all, they can hardly be blamed for having strenghtend the museum's excellent international reputation. But although it takes more than a little proactive curating to right the wrongs of history, perhaps this is a step in the right direction. What do you think?
