UK Edition
Royal Academy nudes to have 'gender equality' in new post-#metoo exhibition
The Royal Academy is to ensure its next exhibition of nudes has an equal gender split of naked men and women, as it navigates the post-Me Too era.
The Academy, which has just undergone a major restructure to celebrate its 250th anniversary, will have almost exact parity between paintings, sculptures and drawings of male and female nudes in its forthcoming exploration of Renaissance art.
The decision, confirmed by the gallery’s director Tim Marlow at its season launch today, marks the first time the Royal Academy has introduced a makeshift gender quota to its exhibitions as a “very interesting exercise”.
The Renaissance Nude, due to open in March 2019, will include around 85 works created from 1400 to 1530 designed to track the development of the “idea and ideal” of the nude throughout Europe.
The announcement, made as part of the Royal Academy’s 2019 season launch, follows a period of deep crisis in the arts, as television, film, theatre, music and the visual arts all re-examine their treatment of women in the wake of #metoo sex abuse revelations.
Per Rumberg, from the Royal Academy, said curators had been “very keen in the beginning to have an equal balance of men and women”.
While he had not done a precise headcount, he said, “there is almost parity between men and women”, adding that they had also worked to gender balance the scholars working on the exhibition.
The idea for the exhibition was conceived around three years ago, and will be put on in a partnership with the The J. Paul Getty Museum in the United States.
Marlow said he had found it interesting to observe how the exhibition had changed meaning amid the “cultural climate” of 2018.
"On one level you can say, art historically, are there more women than men? Yes,” he said. “But in that period is it considerably more?
"Historically what are the differences in the way the male and female bodies are portrayed?”
Saying that other exhibitions, such as the forthcoming Oceania or Bill Viola shows, would not be subject to gender quotas, he added: "But in a subject exploring the Renaissance nude in a historic period it seems a very interesting exercise to do."
The Renaissance Nude will show masterpieces from Titian, Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Dürer and Cranach, moving from religion art to the secular.
Galleries have long been in the sights of feminist campaigners, with critics noting a drastic lack of number of female artists in major collections and a high proportion of nude women on the walls.
So prevalent was the issue that Tate Modern now holds the 1989 piece by the Guerilla Girls asking: “Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum?”
Referring to the New York gallery, it states that less than five per cent of the work in its modern art section was by women, compared with 85 per cent of its nudes being female.
Earlier this year, the National Gallery in London confirmed that less than one per cent of its works are by women.
The Royal Academy’s plans for next year also include an exhibition of Lucian Freud’s self-portraits, installations from Phyllida Barlow, a show based on the “artistic exchange” between video artist Bill Viola and Michelangelo, and paintings from Felix Vallotton and Helene Schjerfbeck.
Antony Gormley will stage his “most significant” solo exhibition in the UK for more than a decade, flooding one of the Academy’s galleries for his installation ‘Host’.