Guerrilla Girls, Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?
Getty Conversations

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0:00:06.8 Beth Harris: We’re standing in a conference room at the Getty Research Institute and the Institute is fortunate to have the archives of the Guerrilla Girls. And we’re looking at one of their most famous works, Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?

0:00:22.8 Megan Sallabedra: The original version of this was intended as a billboard with the Public Art Fund. But they were told that the message wasn’t clear enough. The Guerrilla Girls saw that as a form of censorship. They decided, “We’re gonna do it anyways.” And then they put it on a bus ad. They self funded it to get it out in the world. It’s one of their earliest pieces that uses color. So it just has such a bold, eye catching look to it that the Guerrilla Girls then called it the poster that changed it all. It’s a piece that they’ve repeated over time, which is really interesting because you see how the statistics have changed.

0:01:00.1 Beth Harris: This is in some ways a difficult image: this bright yellow color, the way that Ingres’ nude Odalisque is cut out and put against this very stark yellow background, but still retaining all the softness of the female nude as Ingres painted her, reclining the curves of her back of her hips, available to us.

0:01:23.6 Megan Sallabedra: The combination of the soft curves and the femininity of the body with this very angry looking gorilla mask, I think combine to make an image that is much more jarring than just encountering a nude on its own. And in fact, although the Guerrilla Girls did pay to have this produced as a bus ad for the New York City transit system, it only ran for a month because there were complaints about the image looking too obscene. People didn’t complain about the naked body being obscene in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but once you put an angry gorilla mask on it and slap it on the side of a bus, people have a lot more to say about it.

0:01:58.9 Beth Harris: What’s really fun about the archive is that we have photographs that the Guerrilla Girls made that give us a sense of how they saw themselves.

0:02:08.4 Megan Sallabedra: They’ve suited up in trench coats and they’re taking notes. And that really speaks to the actual work that they did. Pouring over figures and numbers or going through Art in America Annual, where they compiled a lot of their statistics from. I think really early on when they were starting to call attention to the numbers, people would say, “You’re just being hysterical. Of course women are included in museum shows.” But when they really started to count things up and put forth the actual numbers, that really got people’s attention. You could also say there’s a ton of women depicted, but so many of them are nude. And what does that say about how we perceive women and the subjectivity of women in the art world? And then, when they combine this into a single statement, to think about the fact that in order to get into the museum as a woman, you most likely had to be naked and the subject of a male artist, that really got their point across.

0:03:04.1 Beth Harris: I’m thinking back to the feminist movement of the 1970s, the Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay, “Why Are There no Great Women Artists? , ” and the beginnings of thinking about the female nude as a major subject in art history, about the male gaze as the view that the work of art is speaking to.

0:03:25.8 Megan Sallabedra: The Guerrilla Girls were very aware of the history of feminism, but they were very frustrated with the fact that things hadn’t moved forward quite as quickly and especially as practicing artists, that they still couldn’t get a show at the gallery. They still weren’t being included in these major museum shows. And so they wanted to do something a little different. They wanted to grab people’s attention. They wanted to rely on the tactics of advertising.

0:03:49.2 Beth Harris: We can see that the poster says Guerrilla Girls in the lower right corner and defines what they saw as their mission to be the conscience of the art world, using these kinds of statistics that we see on the poster to make people aware of the stark reality of that discrimination.

0:04:08.2 Megan Sallabedra: It’s the first time we see the gorilla mask on one of their posters. So up until this point, it was only text. But this poster actually shows the gorilla masks as a stamp of who they are.

0:04:21.8 Beth Harris: So you have this loud black text on the loud yellow and then this pink in the lower left corner. Pink being this color that’s associated with femininity.

0:04:32.5 Megan Sallabedra: Initially they wanted to use the black and white for a couple of reasons. One, it was really legible. It replicated the newsprint authoritative image. But it was also really practical because they were self funding everything and it was a lot cheaper to print in black and white. And so, when we start to see them use color, we know that they’ve become a little bit more established.

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This work at the Getty Research Institute

Guerrilla Girls records, 1979–2003, at the Getty Research Institute

Exhibition “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl” at the Getty Center

View the Getty Conversations series

The Guerrilla Girls’ website

Guerrilla Girls, Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2020).

Contemporary art, an introduction

Read a Reframing Art History textbook chapter, Popular, transient, expendable: print culture and propaganda in the 20th century