2023-11-03 17:43:38
Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith and her maid (detail), 1618-1619. Uffizi Galleries, Florence
TEACHERS
In response to historical erasure, the exhibition Teachers, curated by Rocío de la Villa, presents for the first time in Spain a feminist journey through the contribution of women artists to the history of art from the end of the 16th century to the first decades of the 20th century. Through eight relevant themes on women’s path to emancipation, this story combines the history of art with the history of ideas and explores ethical, social and political aspects.
The conjunction between historical periods, artistic genres, styles and themes is the plot on which this exhibition is structured, and it shows how these artists addressed burning issues of their time, took a position and contributed new iconography and alternative views.
Inspired by the current notion of sisterhood, the exhibition highlights places and periods in which artists, patrons and gallery owners who share values and are aware of starting new traditions coincide. On occasions, they knew how to take advantage of favorable and exceptional sociocultural and theoretical conditions in the patriarchal system. At certain times, they also had the backing and support of their teachers, colleagues, husbands, brothers, collectors or dealers. But even in the most adverse periods, they opposed misogyny and the norms established for it.
Teachers is an exhibition of women representing women and their interests. Cultured, cosmopolitan and committed women who received the highest symbolic, theoretical and material recognitions, as models of talent, professionalism and independence.
The exhibition is divided into eight sections: «Sorority I. The cause of the done», «Botanical, connoisseurs of wonders», «Illustrated and academic», «Orientalism/Costumbrism», «Work and care», «New motherhoods», « Sorority II. Complicity” and “Emancipated”.
Elisabetta Sirani, Portia injuring her thigh1664.
Art and History Collections of the Cassa di Risparmio Foundation in Bologna, Bolonia
Sororidad I. The cause of women. In the 17th century, in Italy, in the midst of the Counter-Reformation and in parallel to the writings of the authors of the women’s quarrel, such as Modesta dal Pozzo (The merit of women) and Arcangela Tarabotti (paternal tyranny), artists supported by patrons depict mythological figures, biblical heroines, and historical figures such as Judith, Yael, Susanna, and Portia in history paintings. Through them they show the silence imposed and their exclusion by patriarchal discourse, which degrades these heroines in distorted stories and offensive erotic paintings. Lavinia Fontana and Fede Galizia, Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabetta Sirani make up three generations of artists who triumph with their chaste versions and thus inaugurate an alternative tradition.
Giovanna Garzoni, Still life with melon on a plate, grapes and a snail, c. 1650.
National Museum of Still Life of Poggio a Caiano
Botanists, connoisseurs of wonders. During the rationalist era, when the split between man and nature occurred after the scientific revolution and the beginning of colonialism, a period of artistic splendor began for the pioneers of still life and botanical illustration, who were supported by female patrons; precisely at the moment when they began to be expelled from the ancestral knowledge of plants and their benefits, when the so-called witches were persecuted. They are painters and illustrators trained alongside scientists who are beginning to use the microscope, and interested in entomology, such as Fede Galizia and Giovanna Garzoni in Italy and the sisters Rachel and Anna Ruysch in Holland, for whom life exerts the power of fascination on 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 vanity. 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.
Louise-Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, Lady Hamilton as a Bacchantec. 1790 – 1792.
National Museums Liverpool, Lady Lever Art Gallery
Illustrated and academic. 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 They support the artists, establishing them as academics. 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 the Modernity. They all represent cultured women searching for their identity in theatrical settings, such as Lady Hamilton’s archaeological ruins at the foot of Vesuvius.
Henriette Browne, A North African Labrador, 1867.
John H. Josephson and Caroline F. Zapf
Orientalism/Costumbrism. In the midst of the colonial period, female artists undertake journeys and observe non-Western people with respect, in opposition to the degrading sexualization of their models by their orientalist male colleagues. 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. But unlike artists, painters like Henriette Browne and Alejandrina Gessler can enter harems, undoing the erotic clichés established in Parisian salons.
Marie Petiet, The laundresses, 1882.
Petiet Museum, Limoux. © Photographer Philippe Benoist- Images Bleu-sud
Work and care. In contrast to the icon of the peasant woman or the solitary ironer of the painters, during the 19th century the artists represented groups of women working in the fields, such as Alice Havers and Eloísa Garnelo, or during their working day in the city, such as The laundresses by Marie Petiet. When the artists themselves fight for their insertion into the artistic system, 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 they perform various jobs, such as Victoria Malinowska’s fisherwomen. In the modern city, women claim their spaces, also as consumers in department stores, as Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones reflects.
Käthe Kollwitz, Mother with two children1932-1936.
Private collection, Cologne, Germany
New maternities. Motherhood is one of the oldest themes in the history of art. In the 19th century, the archetype of women as the “angel of the home” emerged to stop their emancipation, a theme that was opposed by painters and sculptors of different generations, marital statuses and artistic styles, innovating and reversing old models. Faced with the mystification of motherhood and the mother’s self-denial towards the male child, 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. But also the tedious care, the domestic burdens, in short, the emotional and material hardness of upbringing are reflected by Suzanne Valadon, the Finnish Helene Schjerfbeck and Elin Danielson-Gambogi, the Danish Anna Ancher and the Sevillian María Luisa Puiggener. The mother even appears as an animal protector, connected to Mother Earth, as represented by Käthe Kollwitz in her splendid sculpture. Mother with two children.
Berthe Morisot, The sisters, 1869.
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Sorority II. Complicities. 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 create new iconographies of complicity, trust and friendship between women, expressed in a melancholic key by the symbolist sculptor Marie Cazin. A private world outside the male gaze in which the desire for freedom germinates.
Maruja Mallo, The festival1927.
Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum, Madrid
Emancipated. In the 20th century, following 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 the box by Helene Funke, with a nod to Mary Cassatt, 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. The modern artists Sonia Delaunay and Alice Bailly, among others, propose through painting-fabric-fashion a new conception of art and its insertion into everyday life. And popular scenes, such as Verbenas by Maruja Mallo, reflect the joy of the citizens after the conquest of public space.
Rocío de la Villa, the curator of the exhibition, has also prepared a list of 34 songs created by the composers that the teachers present at the exhibition met and listened to: from Francesca Caccini, friend of Artemisia Gentileschi, to the avant-garde composers who were the protagonists of the Vienna at the end of the century and the Paris of the Belle Epoque.
Compositoras: Harriett Abrams, Ethel Barns, Margrave Wilhelmine von Bayreuth, Francesca Caccini, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Yvonne Desportes, Gunild Keetman, Luise Adolpha Le Beau, Isabella Leonarda, Helena Łopuska, Pauline Hall, Frida Kern, Alma Mahler, Fanny Mendelssohn, Sophie Menter, Alicia Adélaide Needham, Margarida Orfila, María de Pablos, Maria Xaveria Perucona, Catharina van Rennes, Gilda Ruta, Anna Amalia von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, Corona Elisabeth Wihelmine Schroter, Clara Schumann, Blanche Selva, Ethel Smyth, Charlotte Sohy, Barbara Strozzi, Pauline Viardot, Jane Vignery, Maria Antonia Walpurgis of Bavarian, Vally Weigl.
Interpreters: Ye’ela Avital, Cecilia Bartoli, Maria Bergmann, Alicia Borges, Libby Burgess, Alicia Calabuig, Barbara Chapman, Rosa Dominguez, Amanda Favier, Isabel Felix, Adriana Fernandez, Laura Gaya, Raphaela Gromes, Pauline Hall, Barbara Hannig, Eiddwen Harrhy, Marta Hernando Jimenez, Marlen Herzog, Lisa Houben, Clare Howick, Mihi Kim, Sonja Korkeala, Magdalena Lisak, Clare McCaldin, Patrice Michaels, Sandra Mogensen, Ikuko Odai, Christa Pfeiler, Sophia Rahman, Ilse Sass, Candace Smith, Debra Wendells Cross, Caroline Wildman.
The exhibition is accompanied by the film series “Master Lives: footprint and witness of women artists (17th-20th centuries)” coordinated by Ana Quiroga, the conference program “Spanish Masters. Building the genealogy of Spanish art” directed by Marián López Fdz. Cao and the international symposium “Crossroads of cultures. Transmissions and alliances between modern artists” directed by Maite Méndez Baiges, as well as a complete program of guided and educational visits (for the general public and for teachers) and a practical workshop for children and families.
This is the first major exhibition framed in the process of feminist redefinition that the Thyssen Museum has been carrying out in recent years, and has the collaboration of the Community of Madrid and the sponsorship of Carolina Herrera. After its presentation in Madrid, a reduced version of the exhibition can be seen at the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Remagen (Germany).
Teachers, Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Paseo del Prado 8, Madrid. From October 31, 2023 to February 4, 2024.
Commissioner: Rocío de la Villa.
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