2023-05-09 10:59:28
Kcult place of the most dignified male brilliance – the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden. The deceased collector from the lineage of powerful media men. The architect of the house from the top league of illustrious master builders. The collection is (estimated to) be 90 percent of xx-chromosomal parentage. The right place for an interim appearance of well-known artists. Exactly 31 in number.
31 is odd, prime number. A number, if you will, without justification. But she has one. Because the curator Udo Kittelmann – always well-read and historically curious – wants to commemorate with his 31 favorites an exhibition that has long since disappeared in the eventful undergrowth of history. Around 80 years ago, the collector and art dealer Peggy Guggenheim assembled 31 artists in her New York gallery “Art of this Century” who were not worth much attention to contemporary critics. One wrote at the time that there had never been a high-ranking artist. The fact that such a judgment can still be heard today only shows that, despite all gender sensitivity, the masculine artistic arrogance has remained in the best of spirits.
Men decide over women
Now, to be fair, it should be added that Peggy Guggenheim wasn’t exactly one of the feminist combatants either. The millionaire heiress, who, as she readily admitted, had no idea about art, let Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst put her on the art-mercantile road to success. With Braque, Picasso, Klee, Chagall, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Brancusi, Giacometti and Miró, pretty much all the fixed stars crowded their collectors’ sky. In her gallery it looked little different. The “Exhibition by 31 Women” is not a contradiction to this, at best an expression of the quiet intuition that not everything could be said yet.
The fact that the project was not really trusted is shown by the jury, which is completely unusual for New York gallery practice and included Duchamp, Breton and Max Ernst, who chose Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington and Louise Nevelson or Xenia Cage agreed. Georgia O’Keeffe didn’t want to participate. She very emphatically declined to participate. It’s actually a pity that Baden-Baden didn’t reconstruct the exhibition. One would like to know more – also about those who were judged and about all those in the line-up who, together with their works, were soon forgotten again.
Peggy Guggenheim, around 1942 at her New York gallery Art of This Century
Quelle: © picture alliance / ASSOCIATED PRESS / Tom Fitzsimmons
The reputation of purely male art history has long since been refuted. Science has convincingly demonstrated that from the early modern period onwards, female painters have always been among the clientele of gentlemen from the church and nobility who needed pictures. The fact that they were then sorted out by chroniclers such as Giorgio Vasari, Leon Battista Alberti and Jacob Burckhardt only proves the male dominance, which has not fundamentally changed to this day.
Burda would collect differently today
Nonetheless, the story is beyond the point where any presentation of female art was under justification compulsion. As if artists had yet to prove that they can do it too, that they paint as loudly as Daniel Richter or Georg Baselitz and soar majestically above the ridiculous world things like Markus Lüpertz. For generations, Paula Becker’s work has always been discussed against the background of her marriage to the painter Modersohn. The pictures of the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint obviously only gain their nobility when viewed together with abstract heroes such as Mondrian or Kandinsky.
