When people ask you about female painters, how many can you think of? There will probably be few, and you won’t be the only one. Together with the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Arp Museum in Remagen would like to change this. The exhibition “Maestras – Women Painters. 1500-1900”, which is a cooperation between the Remagen museum and the Madrid museum, is now dedicated to the women painters who were once admired but were then forgotten. This view of women artists is not entirely new in art history, as Linda Nochlin published the essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artist?” back in 1971. The essay led to an influential exhibition in 1976, although it was only shown in the USA. The change in the way women’s art was viewed had already taken place at universities and was now also becoming increasingly noticeable in museums.
When people ask you about female painters, how many can you think of? There will probably be few, and you won’t be the only one. Together with the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Arp Museum in Remagen wants to change this. The exhibition “Maestras”, which is well worth seeing and is a collaboration between the Remagen museum and the Madrid museum, is now dedicated to women painters who were once admired but were then forgotten. This view of women artists is not entirely new in art history, as Linda Nochlin published the essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artist?” back in 1971. The essay led to an influential exhibition in 1976, although it was only shown in the USA. The change in the way women’s art was viewed had already taken place at universities and was now also becoming increasingly noticeable in museums.
Unlike the museum in Madrid, the Arp Museum begins its exhibition in the Middle Ages with female monastic painters and spans the Renaissance, the Baroque and the 19th century through to the first half of the 20th century. It becomes clear that women enjoyed recognition in art for a long time, but then had to fight for it again from the 19th century onwards. The comprehensive exhibition introduces visitors to 51 female painters and 69 of their works from eight centuries. In addition to well-known names such as Hildegard von Bingen, Artemisa Gentileschi, Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, Mary Cassatt and Sonia Delaunay-Terk, there are also many female masters who have fallen into oblivion.
The exhibition at the Arp Museum is divided into five sections and begins with the women painters of the Middle Ages, who specialized in book illumination in particular, but also emerged as authors. In addition to the very well-known Hildegard von Bingen, visitors are also introduced to lesser-known but no less impressive women such as Gisela von Kerssenbrock. Under the title “Between light and shadow. 1200-1700”, women artists of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods who benefited from the changing social climate are also presented. Although their status was not always easy, many of them enjoyed a great deal of attention during their lifetime; Giorgio Vasari, for example, wrote about some of these female masters of their craft. In addition to the well-known Artemisia Gentileschi, visitors will also get to know Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana, among others.
This development continued in the Netherlands during the Baroque period and spread to England and Germany. In the 18th century, many female rulers came to power who were quite willing to promote their female counterparts. The chapter “Vive l’esprit – A Breath of Freedom. 1700-1800”. Alongside the aristocratic rulers, the salons, usually headed by a salonnière, dominated social life. They acted as patrons but also as forward thinkers and promoted careers. Women painters such as Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Angelika Kauffmann even opened their own salons and thus built up a network from which young women painters also benefited. This period also saw pioneering discoveries in the exploration of nature. 1600-1800″, the Remagen exhibition is dedicated to female personalities such as Maria Sibylla Merian, the naturalist par excellence, as well as still life painters such as Gesina ter Borch, who came from the famous Dutch family of artists. You will also get to know Rachel Ruysch, to whom the Alte Pinakothek in Munich is dedicating an exhibition this fall.
The achievements and freedoms of the 18th century were forgotten in the 19th century. Towards the end of the 18th century, the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau propagated the nuclear family and believed that women’s responsibilities should be limited to the home and family. The consequences of this for women and artists were drastic. Women could only express their creativity within narrow limits. Traditional and newly invented role stereotypes forced them into a rigid corset. They had to leave the academies and could only attend private art schools. The new world of women’s lives is then also reflected in the paintings of women painters: portraits, domestic scenes, often also women as mothers looking after the (nuclear) family. At the same time, many women aspired to enter the art world, taking part in the Paris Salon exhibitions and attending private art schools, as they had been banned from the academies. They protested and fought for their education, initially with little success, but from the 1860s onwards change began to take place. One of the reasons why women were forgotten by art history is certainly due to the fact that art history grew as a discipline in the 19th century. The first art historians were men, who in turn wrote about men, i.e. artists. Simone de Beauvoir already recognized that “women have no history to look back on” and described the very fact that men write history by and for men. Gradually, women were increasingly heard again in the 19th century and by the end of the century they had regained their position in society. It was also the beginning of modernity. Female artists such as Marie-Victoire Lemoine, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt paved the way for their successors such as Suzanne Valadon, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Elena Luksch-Makowsky and Sonia Delaunay-Terk.
The exhibition, curated and adapted by Dr. Susanne Blöcker for the Arp Museum, takes place from 25 February to 16 June and was realized in cooperation with the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. It is accompanied by an exhibition catalog (German, 231 pages, 42 euros), which contains biographies of the artists as well as an essay by Spanish art historian Rocío de la Villa, who has long focused on art by women in her research.
