They were creators who addressed burning issues of their time, who took a position and contributed new iconography and alternative views. They suffered erasure in art history and broke molds with works of undoubted excellence. Today, these famous artists are once again recognized as Masters, the title of the temporary exhibition with which the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum recognizes and honors them from October 31, 2023 to February 4, 2024.
The exhibition is based on the current notion of sisterhood to focus on groups of artists, patrons and gallery owners who shared values and favorable sociocultural and theoretical conditions, despite the patriarchal system. For this reason, the conjunction of historical periods, artistic genres and themes is the main axis on which the exhibition is structured.
Paintings, sculptures, works on paper and textiles make up a repertoire born from the feminist perspective of its curator, Rocío de la Villa, who, through eight relevant scenes on the path of women towards their emancipation, organizes a tour that begins end of the 16th century and reaches the first decades of the 20th century. This is the first major exhibition framed in the process of feminist redefinition that the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum began a few years ago.
Lavinia Fontana and Fede Galizia, Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabetta Sirani make up three generations of artists who, supported by patrons, represent mythological figures, biblical heroines and historical figures such as Judith, Yael, Susanna and Portia in their history paintings. Through them, they demonstrate the silence imposed and their exclusion by patriarchal discourse, which degrades these heroines in distorted stories and offensive erotic paintings. It is in the 17th century, in Italy, in the midst of the Counter-Reformation, when these artists work in parallel to the writings of the authors of the women's quarrel, such as Modesta dal Pozzo (Il merito delle donne) and Arcangela Tarabotti (Paternal Tyranny).
Around the patron Agnes Block, in her garden in Vijverhof, southwest of Amsterdam, the leading botanical artists gather: Maria Moninckx, Maria Sibylla Merian and her daughter Johanna Helena Herolt. Those in this scene are painters and illustrators trained alongside scientists who are beginning to use the microscope, who are interested in entomology, such as Fede Galizia and Giovanna Garzoni in Italy and the sisters Rachel and Anna Ruysch in Holland. For them, life exerts the power of fascination at any scale and they represent it holistically, as an ecosystem where butterflies, flies and other small creatures live, refuting the religious symbolism of still life as vanitas.
It occurs during the rationalist era, when the split between man and nature occurs after the scientific revolution and the beginning of colonialism, when a period of artistic splendor begins for the pioneers of still life and botanical illustration, who were supported by female patrons. . Precisely, at the time when women began to be expelled from the ancestral knowledge of plants and their benefits, when the so-called witches were persecuted.
Painters such as Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Angelica Kauffmann, and sculptors such as Marie-Anne Collot and Anne Seymour Damer stand out in the genre of portraiture, an expression of the affirmation of the subject and of individuality at the origin of Modernity . All of them represent cultured women searching for their identity in theatrical settings, such as Lady Hamilton's archaeological ruins at the foot of Vesuvius.
The Enlightenment is the time of women's awakening as citizens in feminist history. Already before the fall of absolutism in France, queens, nobles and salonnières supported artists, establishing them as academics.
On the way to North Africa, Spanish culture exerts a special fascination due to its exoticism. Based on the scenes of the crossing of the Pyrenees made by Rosa Bonheur, shepherds, gypsies and peasants common in Spanish costumbrista painting will be reinterpreted in an orientalist key in Paris. Furthermore, unlike artists, painters like Henriette Browne and Alejandrina Gessler can enter harems, undoing the erotic clichés established in Parisian salons.
We are in the middle of the colonial period, when female artists undertake journeys and respectfully observe non-Western people, in opposition to the degrading sexualization of their models by their orientalist male colleagues.
During the 19th century, artists represented groups of women working in the fields, as Alice Havers and Eloísa Garnelo do, or during their workday in the city, as shown in Las Laundresses by Marie Petiet. They do it in front of the icon of the peasant woman or the painters' solitary ironer.
The creators fight for their own insertion in the artistic system and, at the same time, their repertoire ranges from women in the role of housewives by Lluïsa Vidal and caregivers of the sick by Henriette Browne, to other scenes in which women They carry out various jobs, such as the fisherwomen of Victoria Malinowska. In the modern city, women claim their spaces, also as consumers in department stores, as Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones reflects.
When, in the 19th century, the archetype of women as the “angel of the home” emerged to stop their emancipation, painters and sculptors of different generations, marital statuses and artistic styles opposed the issue by innovating and inverting old models.
The painters Mary Cassatt, Elizabeth Nourse, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Tamara de Lempicka create new iconography that tenderly shows the absolute dependence of the baby, in the face of the mystification of motherhood and the mother's self-denial towards the male child. For their part, Suzanne Valadon, the Finnish Helene Schjerfbeck and Elin Danielson-Gambogi, the Danish Anna Ancher and the Sevillian María Luisa Puiggener reflect in their works the emotional and material hardness of upbringing.
What do you think? What are you talking about? What do young bourgeois women share when they are together? The impressionists Berthe Morisot, Marie Bracquemond, Louise Breslau and Cecilia Beaux want to answer these questions, who create new iconographies of complicity, trust and friendship between women, expressed in a melancholic key by the symbolist sculptor Marie Cazin. They are artists who build a private world outside the male gaze in which the desire for freedom germinates.
It is the 20th century and, on the occasion of the successive achievement of women's suffrage in Western countries, avant-garde artists weave networks and continue to show sisterhood with new artistic languages. In Helene Funke's box, with a nod to Mary Cassatt, she confirms the awareness of a feminine artistic tradition, which continues to show sisterhood in versions by Jacqueline Marval, Camille Claudel, Marie Laurencin, María Blanchard and Natalia Goncharova. Also the modern Sonia Delaunay and Alice Bailly, among others, propose, through painting-fabric-fashion, a new conception of art and its insertion into everyday life. There is no shortage of popular scenes such as Maruja Mallo's La verbena, which reflects the joy of the citizens after the conquest of public space.
