The Narrative
Visual art is tightly intertwined with the landscape of social, cultural and economic events that take place during its making. Social events are what affect how the artworks are made: this includes who the artist is, how they execute it, and how they are delivered to the audience. This is why looking into collections and archives of visual art reveals interesting details about art production in relation to key historical moments. In this digital humanities project, we looked at the Tate Dataset—a collection of artwork in the Tate Museum spanning across four locations in Britain, which includes a vast body of artwork created between 1540 and 2010.
We used a Structuralist approach to analyze the Tate Dataset, according to a Feminist and Marxist theoretical framework. Relating historical events to trends of art production reflected in the dataset, we aimed to answer the following research questions: a) How did representation of female artists change according to economic and historical events including the Feminist Movement and Industrial Revolution?; b) How does the movement of art in the British economy reflect the Marxist notion of base and superstructure? By visualizing the Tate Dataset and juxtaposing key historical dates, we found that there was an increase in female artist representation after the Industrial Revolution and the onset of the Feminist Revolution. Using a Structuralist approach and a Marxist lens, we discovered that art does not conform to the Marxist assumptions of how a commodity moves and is treated in a capitalist economy.
Timeline
Spanning both space and time, artworks in the Tate Museum have lived through the Renaissance period in Europe (1400 to 1600), the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840), the World Wars (1914-1918, 1939-1945), and the Great Depression (1929-1939). Each of these eras reflect varying socioeconomic conditions that encompass cultural emphasis on art, colonialism, labor market evolution, gender norms and access to education. Adopting a marxist framework, we know that these conditions significantly impacted the production of artwork and participation of female artists. For example, the Renaissance, while a period of cultural rebirth that emphasized humanism and art, systematically excluded female artists and confined them to domestic roles. While the Industrial Revolution certainly isn’t known for its enrichment of artistry, the increased economic activity and shifting societal roles began to challenge traditional gender norms. Institutions slowly opened their doors to female students, providing them with formal education for the first time and setting the stage for increased representation of women artists (Gordon, 1978).
World War I & II had a profound impact on the workforce as men went to war and women took on roles traditionally held by men. This period saw women working in factories, driving ambulances, and even serving in military support roles. In the arts, this upheaval led to a greater acceptance of female artists, though their work was still often overshadowed by their male counterparts (Rose, 2018).
The Great Depression severely impacted economies worldwide, leading to widespread unemployment and poverty. Despite overall economic hardship, more women were in the workforce than ever in this period in order to offset family income losses. In particular, young women were added to the labor market at unprecedented rates, and these women were more likely to work into middle age than formerly (Bellou, 2021). The Great Depression was yet another historical event that contributed to shifting gender norms and introduced more women, and by proxy, female artists, to the labor market than ever.
Figure 1
Female and Male Participation in the Labor Force around WWII
Note. There was an increase in female labor force participation with the increase of male inductions into the military. Source link
Inseparable from these economic events are the Waves of the Feminist movement, with which we are better able to understand female artists’ representation in the visual arts. The First Wave of Feminism (1848-1920) focused on women's suffrage and legal rights, leading to greater access to education and professional opportunities in the arts. Institutions began admitting female students, slowly increasing their representation. The Second Wave (1963-1980) broadened to
include workplace rights and family issues, actively integrating female artists. The Third Wave (1990’s) emphasized individuality and diversity, further increasing female artist representation and acknowledging intersectionality. Art by women from diverse backgrounds gained more visibility. The Fourth Wave (Current) focuses on intersectionality and equality in the digital era of art (Mohajan, 2022).
Additionally, we’d like to note that we provided a historical account of events that happened largely in the West. This is due to the fact that the Tate Dataset is overwhelmingly a collection of art from the Western World, and not an attempt to erase the rich history and art of the global East.
Figure 2
Artists’ Birth Locations
Note. Data visualization of birth locations of artists.
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The Feminist Movement and Female Artist Representation
The representation of female artists in galleries and museums is a significant indicator of broader social and economic patterns. This section will explore how the Industrial Revolution and the Feminist Movement have influenced the visibility of female artists. We focus on an analysis of data reflecting changes in the percentage of female and male artists represented per decade, hypothesizing that there was a noticeable increase in female artist representation following these events.
We created the below line graphs based on the Tate dataset, visualizing the percentage of female and male artists from the 1600s through the early 2000s. Key historical markers—the start and end of the Industrial Revolution (in green dotted lines) and the start of the Feminist Movement (in black dashed line)—are indicated.
Figure 3
Percentage of Female and Male Artists per Decade
Note. Two line graphs indicate the percentage of female and male artists reflected in the Tate Dataset. Dates of Industrial Revolution and Feminist Movement indicated.
As observed in the above visualization, the representation of female artists has varied significantly over the centuries, experiencing a steady upward trend only in the past century. Before the Industrial Revolution, female artist representation was minimal, hovering around the low single digits (excluding the outlier around 1660s, most likely due to the overall small amount of data available then). However, during the Industrial Revolution, there was a noticeable increase, peaking briefly around the mid-18th century. This peak correlates with broader social changes, including increased economic opportunities for women and shifts in societal roles due to industrialization, suggesting that economic empowerment may have provided women with more opportunities to engage in the arts.
This shift was reinforced by the onset of the First Wave of Feminism in 1848 which kicked off in the US then spread to Europe. From this point on, we see a steady increase in female artist representation. This upward trend can be attributed to several factors driven by the Second Wave, including increased access to art education for women (which the Industrial Revolution aided through economic enrichment), the establishment of women’s art organizations, and the critical re-evaluation of art history to include female contributions.
We see sharper increases in the late 20th century, supported by significant milestones such as the Guerrilla Girls' activism. The Third Wave brought a further increase in the representation of female artists, with a growing acknowledgment of intersectionality within the feminist movement. In the 2010s, during the fourth and current wave of feminism, characterized by its focus on digital activism and intersectionality, female artist representation reached levels close to 40%, seemingly higher than ever. This wave continues to advocate for gender equality across all sectors, including the arts, and has seen significant advancements in the recognition and support of female artists.
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Marxist Analysis of Art’s Movement in the Economy
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Assuming a Marxist view of the economy while looking at the Tate dataset, we found that art is exempt from the normal behavior of commodities and services within the economy. Inspecting how the Tate Museum, who we take as the primary “buyer” of art from 1540-2010 in the United Kingdom, accumulated art, we see that the Marxist notion of base and superstructure can influence one another through the movement of art in the economy. This movement has taken place by donation, presenting, purchasing, accepting, transferring, or bequeathing from a third party or artist to the Tate Museum. As we can see below, the vast majority of art pieces were either presented or purchased.
Figure 4
Counts of Verbs Describing How the Tate Museum Obtained Art
Note. From 1540 to 2010 the counts of verbs used in the metadata.credit column.
The notion that the art was presented, bequeathed, donated by a person or accepted by the Tate Museum describes an exchange that does not require any sort of compensation or economic value to be placed on the art piece. With no monetary compensation assigned to an art work, these types of exchanges show that these pieces of art are either priceless or worthless. In other words, that they have such a high value that they can’t be assigned a price or that are not even able to be sold for pennies. Since the Tate Museum states that they refuse the
vast majority of donations, we can only assume that most donated, gifted, or bequeathed art pieces of these art pieces are worthless (Tate Museum). Unlike capital and other products in a capitalist economy, more is not better when it comes to art. The Marxist assumption that a capitalist economy continues to accumulate goods, does not hold true when it comes to art.
Of the 1596 art pieces that were presented to the Tate Museum, only 201 were presented by the artist or artist’s spouse. In all other cases, there was a third party that acted between the artist and the Tate Museum. Many of these third parties were art collections or collectors themselves: foundations, art societies, and friends of the Tate Gallery. Looking through a Marxist lens, largely the labor that went into making the art contributed to the larger public good. Since there was a third party, it is unclear if the art was obtained by the third party ethically, with permission from the artist.
Presenting an art piece is similar in process to bequeathing an art piece; both processes have a third party between the artist and the art museum. Bequeathed is the act of someone leaving a piece of art to the Museum upon their death, as described in their will, trust, or estate. It is implied that the holder of the artwork is rich enough to buy and own an original piece of art made by an artist whose art goes on to be placed in a prestigious museum. The concept of inheritance, that the wealth of your descendents is transferred or given to you upon death, is a bourgeois, capitalist tendency that only benefits the upper class and allows for class inequality to continue, according to Marx and Engels (Record of Marx's speech on the right of inheritance). However, this application of inheritance does not pass wealth on within a family. The bequeathing of artwork is inline with Marxist ideology that the state of public owns art, not the buyer, or even necessarily the creator of the art. Notably, so is donating or gifting an artwork.
Only 68 art pieces are in the Tate Museum because of a transfer. Between nonprofits, libraries, archives, and museums from Scotland, Ireland, and in other parts of Britain, art works were transferred. Similar to presenting or bequeathing art, a transfer of art has no obvious benefit to the giver. While Tate is not part of the United Kingdom’s government, it is a nonprofit that was funded in large part by a grant from the United Kingdom (Tate Museum). Donating or bequeathing a piece of art comes with a tax benefit for the donor or giver, but a transfer or presentation comes with no tax benefit. In a capitalist economy, this transfer does not help or hurt the parties involved, but essentially leaves the economy untouched. What it does is spread art and culture from one place to another.
Moving from how art was obtained to looking at the physical characteristics of the art pieces, we can see that the vast majority of art would fall under the category of painting. Looking at the graph below, the oldest art pieces from 1540 that the Tate museum has obtained only consist of paintings with this changing in 1810 to include sculptures. They chose not to or could not obtain any sculptures before 1910, where the technology that is part of multimedia art was not invented yet.
Figure 5
Trend of Each Medium Category
Note. Aggregating the metadata.medium column into the three categories: painting, sculpture, and multimedia. The red vertical line, farthest to the left, marks the start of the Industrial Revolution and the black vertical line to the right marks the end of the Industrial Revolution.
For all categories there is a continuous trend upwards, with a decrease in 2010. Generally, this shows that the Tate Museum has grown since its inception. While there is a continuous trend upwards, until about 1970-1980, the steepest increase is from 1800-1900. The Industrial Revolution, occurring most heavily between 1760-1840, exchanged specialized, artisan labor for mass manufacturing in large factories (Wilkinson, 2023). This came with the need, and the opportunity, for lots of people to work in factories for wage labor. The fact that we see more art from this time period is surprising in some respects, and wholly predictable in another. First, we would expect less people to create art if more people had to work in a factory to earn a wage, or to contribute to World War I and II (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2024). On the other hand, the increase in technology and wealth would indicate that there is more time and money to invest in art and culture (st-Art, 2023). Looking at the upward trend on the graph, it looks like the latter has outweighed the former. We can hypothesize that with the increase in production and technology, there was more wealth in the country and government and therefore a greater investment in art. A hallmark of a communist society is the appreciation of art, literature, and culture. To a large extent, we can see this investment in art in the British capitalist economy. To summarize, we see that art is not exchanged in the same way other goods of value are exchanged in a capitalist economy.
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Why This Matters
While there are many digital humanities projects that use natural language processing to analyze literature or computer vision to analyze visual art, there are very few that analyze the metadata that art creates. Just as any product in an economy, we can examine art’s buyer and seller, and the time and place of this exchange. Using metadata of art instead of the visual or auditory art provided by the Tate Museum, we can use more accessible and interpretable tools that allow us to compare art and other products. While there are many economic studies, with few focused on art, none offer a humanistic lens toward whether art works the same, contradicts, or operates entirely differently from other products in the economy.
Besides looking at the landscape of digital humanities research, we also looked at the research that the Tate Museum is conducting on its own and in partnership with universities. The Decolonising Arts Institute within the University of the Arts London is working with the Tate Museum to use machine learning to detect bias in their own museum collection. Comparing our project and the Decolonising Arts Institute's project, we have taken a more qualitative approach. We also did not use any machine learning, predictive, or causal inference in our project, whereas they used one or more of these techniques to detect racial bias. Our project specifically uses a Marxist and Feminist lens, through a structuralist approach, to look at the same data that this research project also looks at. We do look at bias, similar to the Decolonising Arts Institute's project, but we focus on gender bias instead of racial bias.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the combined impact of feminist activism and economic changes has impacted art production significantly, in particular leading to a significant and sustained increase in female artist representation. We saw that art contributes to cultural capital, which includes knowledge, education, and intellectual development. This form of capital is distinct from economic capital. These combined insights reveal the importance of examining art under a Structuralist framework: by analyzing the metadata alongside Feminist and Marxist lenses, we were able to unveil new insights about how broader social, cultural, and economic contexts shape artistic production and representation. The Tate Dataset provided a valuable resource for exploring these dynamics and highlights the critical role of historical events and social movements in shaping the art world.
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