"How many important artists have been stolen from us?" says the director of the Thyssen Museum, Guillermo Solana. "How is it possible that we didn't know these artists, that their works were in warehouses until recently?" asks excitedly Rocío de la Villa, curator of the Madrid museum's major exhibition of the season: Maestras. A hundred works that have been difficult to obtain, because now they are in great demand throughout the world, and that until February 4 will allow you to contemplate the creations of many women who were famous in their time, who painted aristocrats and queens and who They appeared in the art manuals of their time. Women whose names in many cases, especially in the 20th century, were erased from books and their works kept in the dungeons of museums. And they are not just an addition to the canon of art history, says Solana, but his contributions transform it, genre by genre.
The visit to the exhibition does not deny him. Not only do Artemisia Gentileschi and Maruja Mallo, Ángeles Santos and Louise-Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, Frida Kahlo and Natalia Goncharova shine, and how. The still lifes of Giovanna Garzoni and especially Clara Peeters are dazzling, with a fountain of nuts still alive. The flowers - and the insects, sometimes an impossible Eden - by the sisters Anna and Rachel Ruysch. The portraits of Angelica Kauffmann and Henriette Browne, capable of capturing both the determination and melancholy of the sitters. The orientalist scenes of Alejandrina Gessler, in which the male fantasies of the seraglio change into women who lively share life with their children.
And Anna Archer's silent motherhoods are surprising. And the playful cubism of the Swiss Alice Bailly in Tea (1913-14), capturing modern acceleration through a multitude of arms and cups in different positions. And the splendor, a true discovery, of The Laundresses (1882) by Marie-Louise Petiet, in which everything from the texture of the fabrics to the intentions of the women who iron come to life, frozen in a radiant instant.
And everything opened by the magnificent Judith and her maid (1618-19) by Artemisia Gentilleschi, a daring composition, with the two protagonists looking back, in case someone comes, and with the recently severed head of Holofernes - the patriarchy - in a basket case. A journey that closes the happiness of La verbena (1928) by Maruja Mallo, a colorful explosion of characters and attractions in a dazzling composition.
Solana says that the exhibition "culminates a great process of transformation, of feminist awareness, in which this museum has been committing itself for more than a decade," and admits that she has been surprised "to discover so many fantastic artists that I was unaware of because complete and whose names didn't even ring a bell". And she explains that the curator has articulated her story by corresponding each century to an artistic genre. "In the first room we have heroic painting, in the second, still lifes, still lifes of flowers and fruits. In the third we enter the portrait of the 18th century and in each of these moments our vision of an artistic genre is seen. modified, altered, by these artists who in many cases we ignored.
For Rocio de la Villa, the exhibition "puts the other half of art history in a positive light", showing artists who master the main genres at their appropriate moment and, at the same time, articulating room by room "milestones of a history of ideas Women's". Thus, it opens with the debate that has taken place throughout Europe since the end of the 14th century, the so-called querelle des femmes, about the capacity of women and their right to access knowledge and politics.
"Then the first generation of women appears who write complaining about patriarchal domination and in the visual world the artists join the writers," says the curator, who has included biblical paintings painted by women in which Judith kills Holofernes without any remorse, empowered women despite the silence imposed on them. From there the exhibition covers, despite the difficulties that the women had in training, "certain moments, certain places where the conditions were somewhat more favorable for the artists, a series of windows where we can also verify the complicity, the camaraderie between them.
Artists who were famous, who painted in European courts, but from whom the artistic system, dominated by men, tried to defend itself. "When female artists are pioneers and stand out in a very outstanding way in the new genre of still life - recalls De la Villa -, people begin to say, who better than women are going to paint flowers?", undervaluing them, he recalls.
And he says that another strategy on the part of historians was to forget them in the mentions of artistic literature, "shorter and shorter, the names were disappearing. At the end of the 19th century, José Pardo even wrote a history of the art of the artists, seeing that their I remember, his memory and his works are disappearing. It was especially in the first decades of the 20th century, when modern art museums appeared, publishers began to publish many art books and art studies grew in universities, when "The works of women artists are completely buried. It is no coincidence that it was the time when women were emancipating themselves and accessing universities."
"In this way, during the 20th century, generations and generations of men and women have ignored those leading artists who offered new perspectives. How does this affect the artists of the 20th century and even living artists? When it is not counted with a tradition of first-rate predecessors, it seems that, since you have just arrived, you have to settle for 20% and 30% presence in institutions, in exhibitions and in the market. When a gender, a sex, As women are, their past is stolen, their identity is stolen. And it is easier for the other sex to believe that they can exercise dominance or even that they can attack them, either psychologically or even physically to the point of death," concludes the Police station.
