Catherine Millet critiques 'propaganda' cartels at Centre Pompidou abstraction show

In an opinion piece for Artpress, critic Catherine Millet challenges the curatorial framing of the exhibition 'Elles font l’abstraction' at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (through August 23, 2021). Millet praises discoveries like Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884) and Janet Sobel (1894–1968), whose mid-1940s drip paintings were seen by Jackson Pollock, but notes that Houghton was primarily a spiritualist and Sobel an outsider artist. She takes issue with a wall text in the Russian avant-garde section claiming that artists like Natalia Gontcharova, Alexandra Exter, and Lyubov Popova suffered 'durable invisibilization.' Millet argues that these artists were well-known in their time and in France, where two ended their lives, and that the cartel's reliance on Linda Nochlin's 1971 essay 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?' is misguided. She recommends the 1979 'Paris-Moscou' exhibition catalogue as a corrective. Millet calls for accurate information rather than propaganda in museum displays.