From Eileen Gray to Charlotte Perriand, Aino Aalto or Lilly Reich, there are many women who have made great contributions to the world of modern design, however in history books their names almost never appear highlighted in bold and most do not appear at all. . Let alone the fifty Spanish designers who took a family photo this Wednesday at the Disseny Hub Barcelona in front of a proudly affirmative sign (Som aqui!), but whose existence was ignored even by those responsible for the museum. design when two years ago they set out to undertake the titanic task of rewriting the history that the encyclopedias wanted to erase.
Thanks to this research, carried out by Teresa Bastardes, Isabel Cendoya and Isabel Fernández del Moral, the DHub collections are much richer and more diverse (69 pieces have been incorporated, most donated by their authors), and above all much more consistent with reality. His works, from school chairs by Anna Calvera to the suspended lamp by Mariona Raventós or the toys by Fina Rifà, are now on display halfway through the tour of ¡We are here. Women in design 1900-Today, an exhibition from the Vitra Design Museum that brings together the work of women who in the last 120 years have left their mark from the design of fashionable furniture to the interior of Soviet spaceships (Galina Balashova).
“The question struck us while we were making The Atlas of Furniture Design [an encyclopedic book on the history of modern furniture design]. Why are there so many men in this story? Where were the women? "This is a conversation that has been present in the art world since the seventies, but in the design world it began two or three years ago," says Viviane Stappmans, one of the curators of the exhibition, which not only shows the contributions of women in this field but also sheds light on the social context that has made historical erasure possible.
The exhibition rescues pioneers such as Louise Brigham (1875-1956), mother of DIY who at the beginning of the 20th century published a best seller (several editions were made and it was translated into several languages) with instructions so that anyone could make their own furniture with wooden boxes for packaging. There are also the “shadow couples”, such as Aino Marsio, the Finnish architect who graduated from the University of Helsinki in 1920, before her husband, Alvar Aalto, did, and who despite carrying out all the projects together , have systematically been attributed solely to him. This is what MoMA did when it included it in its collection in 1938, and the same museum would repeat the attack with Ray Eames when in 1946 it titled the exhibition: New Furniture Designed by Charles Eames. Dorothee Becker, author of the Uten.Silo storage wall, was also overshadowed by her husband Ingo Maurer. History repeats itself ad infinitum.
In one of the most surprising chapters of the exhibition, already entering the fifties, we find that while women are incorporated into traditionally masculine fields of design and architecture, the ideal of the housewife is promoted, who was seen much more as consumer of design and not as a producer of the objects that surround us. And in that breeding ground, design “made by women for women” appears, with examples such as the Damsels of Design in the United States, hired to design General Motors automobiles because at the end of the day, just as the directors of General Motors thought, the corporation, they were the ones who chose the models.
We are here. Women in design (until January 7) is at the same time a story of exclusion and celebration and has a valuable contribution from Barcelona that tries to answer the question, what can design do for women?
