Botticelli, Rubens, Raphael: "The Three Graces" and the SI cover

[KitSileya]

28. Women couldn't buy paint.

You should read about Shakespeare's sister, as Virginia Woolf put it.

According to the National Museum of Women in the Arts:

51% of visual artists today are women.

Only 5% of the art currently on display in U.S. museums is made by women.

“The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I’m one of the best painters.”—Georgia O’Keeffe

In the Renaissance and Baroque eras, women could not purchase their own paints. They had to rely on a male relative or instructor.

Only 27 women are represented in current edition of H.W. Janson's survey, History of Art—up from zero in the 1980s.
Though women earn more than 1/2 of the MFAs granted in the US, only 1/3 of gallery representation is women.

“This is so good you wouldn’t know it was done by a woman.”—artist-instructor Hans Hofmann's “compliment” to Lee Krasner.

- See more at: http://www.nmwa.org/advocate/get-facts#sthash.5BExLTpD.dpuf

Not only that, but in the modern art section, the percentage has risen from 4% in 1976 to 5% today. 1 percentage point in the last 38 years. Yay, progress...not.