A nonsense show from a museum that should know better

The news that the Centre Pompidou purged its collection galleries of male-made work for a near-year-long, women-only show was bad news. Women-only shows tend to ghettoizes women and there’s been enough of that. Even if an historical corrective were needed, it’s not good to isolate art by gender. The separation only reinforces the divide.

But those days of denying women their place in art history have been gone for quite a while. The beginning of the end may have come back in the '40s when O'Keeffe was invited to participate in a women's art exhibit. Rather than simply decline that invitation, she walked into the gallery to tell the gallery director she wasn't a "woman painter.''

So, when the Pompidou empties out two floors for ladies rooms only, the question goes pleading: Why is a stronghold of 20th and 21st century artrectifying a record already rectified? The question takes on extra weight when you realize that the French never showed the bias against women artists that the Americans did. (Note all the all–women shows in the U.S, not to mention an entire institution devoted to female-made art – The National Museum of Women in the Arts in D.C. Besides ghettoizing women, it shift focus away from art to advocacy of women's rights, and they don't need to do that.

How did women prevail? If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em would seem to have been their marching order. Berthe Morisot, for example, braved the disdain of Renoir and Degas for women artists and joined the Impressionists. Had she created her own group, she might not have been taken so seriously.

Morison managed to convey her female complaint in her work. You can see it in “Reading." (La Lecture) at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, which looks like a simple picture of a young woman reading. But look again.

The space where she sits is tightly wrapped in foliage and balcony rails. That she included a bird cage may also speak of confinement. At the same time, the figure is self-contained as an egg, likely because she has escaped into the book she's reading.

In a way, Morisot escaped, too, with spontaneous and fleeting brushwork, which must have been very freeing to her. And drenching the image with light may also have been her way of conveying her sense of escape. As well, the focus on the females' face absorbed in her book rather than on idle play seems to complete the story of a woman bent on being taken seriously.

Morisot said it herself: "I don't think there's ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal. And that's all I would have asked, for I know I'm worth as much as they."

But that was all then and this is now. When Pompidou Center, Paris’ citadel of contemporary and modern art, seeks to replace its collection of male art with that of females, it seems nothing more than a look back in anger.