Marina Abramović has broken a 255-year-old glass ceiling. Why did it take so long?
At the Royal Academy, from Saturday until New Year’s Day, the artist Marina Abramović will be present. Or rather, her work will be, as part of a retrospective taking in her half-century career. Abramović is a worthy subject for a major solo show at such a prestigious institution. Through the likes of Rhythm 0 (1974), during which she laid out 72 objects (including a gun and a bullet) and put herself at the mercy of her audience, to the intensely moving and intimate The Artist Is Present (2010) at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, she has redefined the parameters of performance art. But here is the ludicrous and infuriating thing: hers will be the first solo showby a woman at the academy’s main galleries.
“The fact that in 255 years there has been no woman showing solo in this big space makes it a huge responsibility,” she told an interviewer last month. A couple of years ago she described the pressure she felt as a prominent artist in a male-dominated scene: “I have to make work that’s so good that it opens the road for all the young and incredibly talented female artists coming after me. If my show is not good then it will reflect badly on everybody else, so I have to be incredible.”
When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, the membership, unusually for the times, included two female academicians: Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser. Both women, however, were mentored by their fathers, which speaks to the difficulties women faced in securing formal training. It took 168 years for another woman to be voted a full RA member: Dame Laura Knight, in 1936 (previously Annie Swynnerton had been accepted as a “retired associate”). In 1965 Knight was the first woman to have a retrospective at the RA, although it was not in the main galleries.
It would be unfair to single out the academy, given the oppression of female artists globally, throughout history. And things are, mercifully, shifting – at the RA and elsewhere. As of 2020, the RA had 40 women academicians, including Tracey Emin, Jenny Saville and Gillian Wearing. Almost half of elected members in the past decade have been female, and in 2019 the celebrated painter and printmaker Rebecca Salter was elected the first female president.
Still, things are not perfect. The Burns Halperin Report, which tracks diversity in the arts, found that just 11% of acquisitions between 2008 and 2020 in US institutions were by female-identifying artists, and their work accounted for only 3.3% of global auction sales from 2008 to mid-2022. Many leading institutions, including the British Museum and the Met, have never had a female director (in 2021, the Louvre appointed Laurence des Cars, the first in its 228-year history). Just 29 women have won Britain’s foremost arts prize, the Turner, although this has rapidly improved in the past decade. Representation of artists of colour and other minorities is even more lacking.
When certain demographics or minorities are rejected or oppressed by traditional gatekeepers, it isn’t just
those artists and creators who suffer; it’s all of us who miss out on the work. Imagine, say, having never been able to experience the majestic and terrifying twisted steel of Louise Bourgeois’ Maman; Frida Kahlo’s raw, honest chronicles of physical pain; the swagger of Amélie Beaury-Saurel.
At the Royal Academy, it is fitting that Abramović, whose physicality and body are such integral elements of her work, is the woman to have achieved this milestone. She grew up in the shadow of a tyrannical father and, early in her career, was mocked and dismissed as mentally unhinged – a charge levelled against pioneering women for centuries.
Happily, Abramović isn’t the only prominent female artist showing solo this autumn. Sarah Lucas’s Happy Gas opens at Tate Britain on 28 September; the day after, Claudette Johnson’s Presence arrives at the Courtauld; and next month Nicole Eisenman is at the Whitechapel. It will surely not be another 255 years until Abramović’s successor at the RA.
• Marina Abramović is at the Royal Academy, London, 23 September-1 January