More and more museums have done their best in recent years to add new perspectives to (art) history, such as the perspective of minority groups and women. Museum Arnhem is a pioneer in this area: since 1982 the museum has pursued the policy of reserving at least half of its purchases and presentations for female artists. This pioneering role is due to Liesbeth Brandt Corstius (82), director of the museum from 1982 to 2000. From the start of her appointment she was way ahead of the pack with her ambition to show and collect female artists.
When did you start looking at the art world from a feminist point of view?
That was in the mid-seventies, during a visit to Paris with my good friend Josine de Bruyn Kops (from 1976 to 1986 director of Stedelijk Museum Gouda, red.† I had worked for several years as a curator of modern art at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and had only made exhibitions with male artists, but I had never noticed that. After a visit to the international Biennale des Jeunes de Paris, we noticed that we had not seen any female artists among all those young artists. Did we actually know female artists ourselves, we wondered. New. We had studied art history and worked in the art world, but couldn’t name just one.’
Shortly afterwards, Brandt Corstius would become one of the main drivers of the debate about women in art. In 1976, together with De Bruyn Kops and writer Ella Reitsma (now Ella Snoep), she wrote an appeal in feminist magazine aside: ‘Are there female artists in the Netherlands?’ About two thousand women came forward by letter: ‘We didn’t know what happened to us!’ In response to these letters, the Women in the Visual Arts Foundation (SVBK) was established in 1978, which organized meetings and set up national working groups. Brandt Corstius made the exhibitions under the SVBK flag Feminist Art International (1979) and The art of motherhood (1981). In 1982 she became director of the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, now Museum Arnhem.
You became known as a museum director because, way before this was the case in other museums, you introduced a quota for the collection and display of women’s art. Was this already mentioned during your application?
‘I wasn’t quite the only one. Josine de Bruyn Kops did something similar in Stedelijk Museum Gouda, but she died young. I don’t remember it being mentioned in the application. Once I was director, I wrote in the policy memorandum that we would practice positive discrimination against female artists. 50 percent of new purchases had to be made by women, and at least half of the art in exhibitions also had to be by women. An artist angrily stepped out of the museum’s advisory board, and many people also read about it. †
Do women make different art than men?
“Some women, certainly not all. Museum Arnhem has a large collection of realists, which was in line with my intention to show and collect more art by women. Many female artists in the seventies and eighties were concerned with their position as women and with the body, there is also a realistic element to it. Of course, there were also women who chose other subjects and made abstract art. Some female artists accused me of only finding it interesting when women made art about feminist subjects.’
’50 percent art and 50 percent women’ was sometimes said condescendingly about your museum. Yet you have always held to that line. You said about the word feminism in 1982: ‘I use the word deliberately because it has such a bad sound that it provokes an insane amount of reactions from opponents.’
‘That’s right, I did that full of energy for years and in the eighties it was still fun. But for the female artists at a certain point it evoked too much negativity. For example, they heard from their environment: the fact that you are allowed to exhibit in Arnhem is only because you are a woman. In the 1990s I continued the policy, but I stopped shouting it from the rooftops. Feminism had a dirty connotation.’
In terms of diversity, the emphasis today is also on the representation of artists of color. Was that a theme for you at the time?
‘I had a blind spot for that. A few years ago I was very shocked when I saw an exhibition in New York about the history of black female artists in America. Correspondences were shown there from heresies, a feminist art magazine that I subscribed to at the time. In those letters, black female artists wrote that their work was being ignored. That discussion has completely passed me by and there are more examples. It’s weird, and I’m ashamed of it afterwards.’
Do you feel that the conversation about feminism and about inclusion in the art world is now going further than when you were a museum director?
‘Absolute. Look at the #MeToo discussion and the visibility of artists of color. The fact that I now see my own blind spots is partly due to the fact that different accents are being placed. It is much more accepted to look at the art world and art history through a social lens.’
Quotas for female artists
In 2019, research by de Volkskrant that three Dutch museums have set a quota for the purchase and presentation of art by female artists. These are the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Museum Arnhem and – with regard to the contemporary collection – the Fries Museum. Seventeen museums said they were striving for more balance, without specifying this.