After excluding women from its major shows for decades, the Pompidou Centre in Paris has opened its new permanent collection of works by exclusively female painters, photographers, designers, sculptors, film-makers, architects and performance artists. “Elles@pompidou” takes up seven rooms across two floors.

Curator Camille Morineau admits that the exhibition would have been impossible to put on even a few years ago. Due to lack of interest from former curators, the musuem’s collection of female art made up a pathetic percentage of the overall collection. But, due to an attitude change, the museum has begun to widen its range. 40% of its art by women was bought within the past four years. “We’ve been buying more female artists,” Morineau says. “There hasn’t been an open discussion about it, but my associate curators and I have a similar and particular vision of the world – more so than people from an older generation.”

Amongst the 200 artists taking place are photographers Cindy Sherman and Roni Horn, the installation artist Dominque Gonzalez-Foerster, Louise Bourgeois and Anne Marie Schneider. Frida Kahlo’s famous painting The Frame provides centrepiece, hanging alone on a red partition wall. Although separated from the gallery’s male artists by fluorescent orange entrances, the artist Valerie Belin insists the collection proves that gender is unimportant to art. “The real value of this show is that the gender difference is not perceived at all.”

Elles@pompidou brings into sharp relief the sharp gender imbalances still present in the art world. The last all female exhibition shown at a gallery in the UK was in 1994. The National Gallery has just four paintings by female artists on show amongst its 2,300 paintings. The Louvre, which holds 35,000 works, has a variety of female nudes, but no artwork by women. In contrast, the Pompidou exhibition showcases 500 pieces. Morineau hopes that the collection has already made an impact. “Nobody thought about [the lack of female artists] in the Louvre, and now they’re talking about it,” she says.

The pressure is now on for other museums to step up to the mark.

Elles@pompidou will run until at least May 2010

For more information, check out the Centre Pompidou’s website.