Gemäldegalerie Berlin

Irony is alive.. Katy Hessel's book about women in art, selling in a gallery with barely any women artists.

This weekend I made it back to Berlin. I love that city so much, and being back (this time without kids) gave me another chance to explore

it, to visit some old haunts and just remember a very magical year. I managed to see some contemporary galleries but not as many as I originally intended (so little time!), so me and my friend made sure to visit the Gemäldegalerie on Sunday morning. 

It was wonderful wondering around so much beautiful art and you really get a sense of the age of the collection. So much gilt from the religious works, so much darkness from the Dutch. I definitely think I react to paintings differently now compared with how I used to, there’s a lot more “how did they do it” and a few “I wonder if they had to do that to fix a mistake”. But what I couldn’t get out of my head as I was walking through was how much this represented a very select group of artists, the same that have dominated for centuries. There was definitely one woman artist (maybe a second) and very very little coloured representation. Both in the art and behind the easel. 

Reading Katy Hessel’s “The Story of Art without men” helped me understand that this isn’t necessarily that there weren’t women painters around in Europe at the time, but their work just wasn’t valued at the time the collections were being built (mostly late 1700’s - 1800’s) and that’s why they’re missed. Today there are more women artists than ever and they’re trickling into the galleries and collections, but there’s still so much to do. 

I still got to enjoy many of the paintings on Sunday, and will post about my favourites in Instagram stories, but it’s a reminder that there’s still a long way to go. And many, many lost artworks to be mourned. Hopefully they’ll be found over the coming years locked away in storage or attributed to someone else and we’ll get to see a little more what the market really was, maybe find a few more heroes. In the meantime I’ll keep painting myself, inspired to provide my voice when so many lost theirs.