Do We Still Need All-Woman Art Shows?

0:01What tools they use, what colors and what order it is on the palette, it's all sort of encoded sort of the knowledge that they carry. So they're not just play-acting artists. They're also really demonstrating how much knowledge and power they have.

0:21I'm Kate Brown, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:33Before the idea of feminism took place, there was what writers once called the woman question. This term stems back to the 14th century, when most women and women artists were excluded from education and public life. The woman question challenged misogyny head-on, laying some of the earliest groundwork for what we now understand as feminist thought. That question, what is a woman's place in culture and history, has echoed ever since. In 1971, the art historian Linda Nochlin famously reframed it by saying, why have there been no great women artists? We have a clear answer. There have been great women artists all along, but their stories have been overlooked, dismissed, and even erased.

1:12A new exhibition called The Woman Question, 1550-2025, at the recently opened Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, hones in on this question. Curated by Alison M. Janjeras, it gathers nearly 500 years of women's creative production. from Renaissance pioneers like La Vignana Fontana to Baroque herons like Elisabetta Serrini and Artemisia Gentileschi as well as contemporary artists including Betty Tompkins and Lisa Bryce. The exhibition focuses on how women saw and depicted themselves in the world and how they represented power, resistance, desire, and sexual violence. It also shows a continuum of feminist thinking that stems back to long before time.

1:51Gingeris joins me to talk about early women art stars, recent rediscoveries, and the origins of feminist art, and why, after all this time, we still need all-women exhibitions. Hello, Alison. Thanks so much for joining me on The Art Angle. I'm so happy to be with you. Thank you for asking me. Where am I finding you today? Are you in Warsaw? I am in Warsaw. I'm in the telephone booth office here at the Museum of Modern Art, taking a break in between the installation of the show that's coming up. Yeah, the museum which recently opened and it's been a huge milestone for the Polish art scene to have this museum finally open.

2:27So I'm excited to crack into this exhibition that you are in the midst of setting up there. I thought maybe we could start with talking about Susanna and the Elders, which, you know, is a very famous, maybe visual foundational painting to sort of enter the show, although I know there's many different portals. Could you speak a bit about the story behind this work and why you included it in the show? Yeah, so the exhibition is called The Woman Question, 1550 to 2025, which obviously is a very broad sweep of five centuries. And it's divided into different chapters. And the painting in question by Artemisia Gentileschi is in the chapter called Thumb Fort, Allegories and Agencies.

3:08And this painting in particular is the poster girl for the strong woman. And Gentileschi herself is really a key protagonist of this genre that emerged at a time in Europe where there were very powerful queens who ruled different regions and who commissioned work. And what they wanted to see were these narratives that were coming mostly from mythology or the Bible showcasing strong women, female protagonists. And this painting has an incredible story because it's the first known painting authored by Artemisia. She was about 17 years old when she made it. It's a famous genre scene from the Bible where you see the young, often nude, Susanna, who is in her bath.

3:56And she's being intruded upon by these lecherous men. And the thing that's really amazing about this painting and the kind of visual narratives that women artists start to develop in this period is we see not just this passive nude female bodies for men to oogle, but she's fighting back. She's using her own power to fight for herself. And many people have projected a lot on this painting because we know from the historical record that Artemisia was a victim of rape and she had to endure a public trial, which at the time, as Mary Gard, the greatest expert on Gentileschi, reminds us that women did not own their own bodies at that time in 1610.

4:47and they were either the property of their fathers or their husbands. So she had to prove that she was actually raped, that onus was on her and she was tortured and there are transcripts of this trial. And while the painting predates the trial by a few years, it's very reasonable to understand that she herself was a victim of constant sexual harassment because she was orphaned, her mother was dead, She was sort of taken care of by her father, but she was left a lot and not really protected. So this whole trial was not even about her own honor. It was about her father's honor. So making this painting around that time when she's starting to have these experiences, I think really is remarkable.

5:33And it begins this genre, which is an important sort of manifestation of women's power starting in the Baroque period. And it's a very famous story. And there are so many other women artists who you include in this exhibition as well, who have had different but similar struggles to make their names known. And some of them disappeared into history and have only been rediscovered more recently. And so it'll be interesting to get into a few of those. But you mentioned the title of the exhibition, which is The Woman Question. I was reading in the catalog, there's a really interesting philosopher that I didn't know about who came up with this concept.

6:12What is the concept of the woman question and why did you want to use it for the show? What does it say about the canon of art and how much of it has just been totally exclusive? Well, in many ways, this exhibition is about the continuity of women, both as thinkers as well as creators. And I would argue that the woman question, which is really the phrase that comes from French, la queue de dame, was coined by Christine de Pisan in 1405 when she wrote a book called The Book of the City of Ladies. It was the first time, let's say, that a woman is creating the category of her gender as a political category because women were so put down and systematically not considered in terms of having any kind of social power or anything outside of the home.

7:09This book really starts feminism before we knew what to call it. And I was interested in these sort of two parallel tracks where oftentimes feminist thinkers and writers from Christine de Pizan forward were asking these difficult questions about what is the role of women in society? Why are we always subjective to certain strictures? And women artists were also doing that just by virtue of serving their agency as artists. despite all of the barriers that were piled up against them up until, let's say, the mid to late 19th century. I was really interested in like feminism before feminism and how that tracked as a visual story as well as an intellectual history question.

7:58Right. So, you know, the exhibition argues against women's absence from art history. You call it like a historical myth and then creating a thread to find these sort of foundations of feminism, which are strikingly, by some arguments, back to 1405, which is quite amazing. And, you know, there's so many revelations that I had looking through the material of the show. And one of which was, you know, you have a whole chapter of the exhibition dedicated to the self-portrait, which is really fascinating because, you know, the way it's been described, it's like a professional proof of self. and that has a very charged and political aspect to it when you're thinking about marginal parts of society depicting themselves in positions of professionalism.

8:42So could you speak a bit about this section? And I understand also that maybe one of the first portraits of this genre was also made by a woman, which I didn't know. Yes. So that was sort of my obsession that started this project many years ago was the genre of the palette portrait where you see an artist, and we all know these paintings. We've seen them in many different periods, mostly, you know, you think of Rembrandt holding a palace, depicting himself in the act of painting in front of an easel with all the accoutrements of the studio. And I was astonished to learn that the very first one ever made was made by a Flemish woman called Catherine van Hemensen in 1548.

9:21And to me, this was a very significant fact and the fact that it was also then taken up by Sofenisva Angusola just a few years after. And Angusola herself is also an incredible part of this history because she is the exception to the rule in that she was not from a father who was an artist. Her father actually had her educated out of the home at a time when that was never done. And she also took up the genre of the palette portrait. So I called the chapter Palettes and Power, The Self-Portrait as Manifesto. And it's just fascinating when you try to put together this visual essay, really, of different women artists taking up the genre from that very first one up until today.

10:10The persistence of the genre, the fact that it's not only the calling card or the self-advertisement of a woman saying, here I am, I'm a professional. I am as grand as anyone else practicing this art. But there's so much coded knowledge in those paintings. Like if you look at what tools they use, what colors and what order it is on the palette, it's all sort of encoded sort of emblems of the knowledge that they carry. So they're not just play acting artists. They're also really demonstrating how much knowledge and power they have in those skills and in that position they've claimed for themselves.

10:50So that's kind of at the very heart of the show, this question of self-representation. And then I was sort of interested to go beyond the palette portrait and look at how starting, let's say, at the turn of the 20th century, that genre gives way to other forms of self-portraiture where a lot of women take themselves as their own views. So that's like another kind of very gendered question that is a big part of what we're trying to explore in this exhibition. Right, of course, because women often appeared in galleries as muses only. Like that's the famous sedage from the Girl of Girls is like, do women have to be naked to get into the Met?

11:30Right. You know, you mentioned the contemporary interpretations of this. And I think another really interesting work is this work by Lisa Bryce. It's interesting to think about self-portrait as something that was originally painted by a woman, the palette portrait, and then that it became taken up by sort of patriarchal figures of art history, such that this work by Lisa Bryce, which I was hoping you could describe and mention why you include it, is subverting that kind of middle chapter. Of course. I mean, I do want to just add one interesting thing that an art historian who's very well known, he wrote a book about the palette portrait called Philippe Song.

12:06It's a fascinating book. When you read his book, because you talked about these patriarchal figures, he never mentions any of the women I've spoken of. He mentions in a footnote Elisabeth de Sirianni, but he doesn't mention that Van Hemmensen started the genre. He doesn't take it up. So it is so interesting how women, again, are being erased, not just in the past, but also in the present. And then to the point about Lisa Price, she also plays an art historical game because she creates this scene based on a painting by Vallotton, which is very famous. It's sort of also a play on Manet's Olympia, where you have a white woman and a Black woman together in this sort of nudity and this display of the female body.

12:53And Lisa sort of turns it all on her head and turns the Black woman into the artist who is depicting this passive white woman who is laying on a bed. And her coming from South Africa and sort of having that lived experience of these charged and systemic racism built into society, this is a really powerful kind of allegorical self-portrait in which she is giving agency to a woman of color and also kind of correcting, if you will, some of these antecedent paintings, which as we know, painting is painting's favorite food. like artists love to cannibalize art history. It's a great, great work. And it's actually going to be on the cover of our book.

13:38Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and I think when we talk about the gaze, often people think of the white male gaze, but I think this painting really addresses the white female gaze, which is just as complicit in many ways, especially from this perspective. So yeah, you mentioned, you know, Elisabetta di Sorani. And again, this is a show that spans 500 years of history. So I hope people can bear with us. We're really jumping through the centuries here. Going back to the Baroque period, Elisabetta de Sirani was one of these women who was very successful in her time. And I think that that's something that, you know, this is an important case that is made in this show as well against this kind of myth of invisibility.

14:16I was really interested to learn about this massive baptism of Christ altar piece that she was commissioned to make. It was the biggest commission in Bologna at the time. You know, because you touched on it a little bit that some women had fathers who were artists and that's how they were successful. What was sort of the ingredients to these women's success at the time? And how does Elisabetta speak to that or, you know, contradict it? Right. So I would say that Sirianni is emblematic of this paradigm where most women artists that we know of from before the mid-19th century were only able to be trained if they were born into an artist family, because there were extreme strictures about education in general, like even speaking about literacy, let alone painting or sculpting.

15:02And all of these prohibitions were based on the hypocrisy that women could be nude in a painting, as you had alluded to earlier, but they could not sit in a class and see the nude body. So these women artists emerge against all odds. And oftentimes it's so interesting that their own fame eclipsed that of their father. And Sirianni is definitely the case here. And another really interesting thing about Sirianni, she died very young, but she was quite prolific in the time that she lived. And she took up many genres, religious devotional paintings, history paintings, like what you're referring to as a biblical history painting.

15:45And people could not believe that a woman could do this. So she actually performatively painted in public. She had a studio that was open to the public to show that in fact it was her hand that made these works. So I think in many ways she embodies this very typical tale of the woman artist that as Griselda Pollack writes in the book and in other studies that she's published Art history is founded on the big lie, the big lie that there were no women. What we see is that when art history is starting to become an academic university discipline and is being encoded into textbooks, this is happening at the same time that women are starting to win the right to vote and to have political agency in the real world.

16:35So this almost symbolic backlash where the men who wrote these canonical texts like like Jamsons, like all the textbooks we had when we were starting out to study art history, they systematically left all the women out, even though they were there. This is, again, like the challenge is how do we undo the big lie?

17:04You know, I think it's important also to acknowledge, and as you go through the catalog essays, that a lot of this work that you're speaking about was done by female conservators and female art historians that are digging up these histories and, you know, reintroducing them to the canon. The case of Elisabetta de Cerani may be a little bit easier to pull out, but there's also some that were very difficult that really were lost to time. And some of those are touched on in this show to go after the famous adage, Anonymous was a woman. Is there a particular story you want to share of a woman who was completely forgotten to time that was rediscovered more recently?

17:41Yeah, I mean, there's two I could speak about. One is one that I regret we couldn't get alone for because she has a solo exhibition in Vienna right now. It's Michalina Votier, who was a Flemish painter born to a family of artists. Her work was basically erased completely until 2018 when a Flemish art historian who stumbled upon her work in the basement of the Kunsthistorisch Museum in Vienna in a section that was called like minor Flemish painting found this giant history painting of a nude bonkers. Also, Michalina happened to be the first woman in art history to paint a male nude in the 17th century.

18:25Basically, Van Stegen, who is the the name of the art historian who discovered her, was able to put back together her entire oeuvre over many years, basically going through works that were either attributed to her brothers, her father, or to anonymous artists. So she has since reconstituted her oeuvre and reinserted her into art history, which is quite remarkable. And in our own way, in Poland, we found a work very similar, which we are reviewing for the first time publicly should be attributed to a woman. So this is a story that's quite incredible. There is a painting that has been sitting in the storage of the National Museum in Gdansk since the early 1950s.

19:13It's a work that was attributed to the Monogrammist of Brunswick, which was a moniker for an unknown artist, but who there are multiple paintings attributed to the same hand. and the curator that I met in Gdansk presented me with her research over 15 years, which by the way the museum never thought relevant to let her publish or show, so this is the first time that we are making this public, that she discovered a signature in the painting and the signature leads to Megan Verholst, actually her name was Megan Bessemer Verholst. She was the matriarch of the Bruegel family. And she was married herself to an artist.

19:59She was known as an artist in the literature. So if you are a Northern Renaissance scholar, you would know of her name because she published her husband's work. The Met Museum has prints that are signed by her as the publisher. She was known as a miniaturist, but nothing survives attributed to her anywhere in the world. And finding the signature and doing a very detailed iconographic analysis, she makes the case that this work is actually by Megan Verhulst. It's amazing because there's in parallel been a lot of studies about the Bruegel family, which is a really multi-generational dynasty of artists in which all the women were practicing artists, but again, erased.

20:45So this grandmother taught not only her son-in-law, Peter Borigel the Elder, but all of the grandchildren how to paint. And there is a real miniaturist, stylistic consistency across all of their works. So we're really excited to basically showcase this research done by Beate Ports, who's the name of the curator, for the first time. It's really great. Wow, that's fantastic. Yeah. You know, there's such a rush right now to rediscover these female old masters, so to speak, there's also this sort of market push to do it. I wonder, do you meet that with any sort of skepticism at all? Because it seems to me that what I would worry about is that so many of these works just disappear into private collections, right?

21:30Because there's so few of them and they're so inherently valuable. There's really like a need to have these in the public galleries of museums so that they can sort of balance the scales a little bit. I think what's great is that the few works that have gone to private collections, like I'm thinking about a Gentileschi Mary Magdalene that was at auction somewhat recently. It was bought by a private person, but it's on long term loan to the Museo Correre, I believe, in Venice. So you're right. And I think like certain institutions that have the means, such as the Getty Institute, have been very active in trying to fill in their collections and really support this new research.

22:11You know, I'm not a market person, but I observe how even the surge in interest has benefits on the public side because it does fund shows like this and it legitimizes a large degree because we know that we live in a capitalist society. And when you see auction prices of women rising, somehow that validates it in the mind of the general public. So it's part of a process. Yeah, interesting. So coming up towards the 20th century again, in your research, you spoke about how women, by and large, sort of disappeared from art in the 20th century after this period of time where there was a lot of all-women exhibitions that, again, you know, return in the late 20th century and up until the 21st century, such as this exhibition.

23:00What happened? Why did they disappear all of a sudden? What kind of economic and political pressures were at play there? Well, I think it's very interesting because also the history of the all-women exhibition is something that is not taught. I was actually quite shocked to realize, I thought, wow, this is a great dissertation topic, is to really chart the history of the all-women show, which begins around 1850 with the formation of these societies of women artists in different European cities. And even in the U.S., there was the Pallet Club in Chicago. There was different societies in Philadelphia around the World's Fair.

23:39And the emergence of the all-woman salon, which was devoted to living artists at the time, was in parallel with the fact that women were starting to be accepted at art academies, mostly private ones and then later institutions like the Royal Academy and things like that. I think that the all-women genre sort of fizzles out at the moment in the early 20th century when women start to win the right to vote. And it's as if the society sees women making real strides in real life. And symbolically, the gatekeepers who are writing these histories or who are creating these exhibitions or even these institutions like MoMA, right, they're being founded at the same time.

24:26there's a conscious effort to not let the women into the club because, you know, they should simmer down over there because they're agitating for their rights. And then we see it reemerge in the 70s with the publication of Naughton's essay, with the publication of Griselda Pollack and Ruzika Parker's work, and the kind of emergence of women's studies as a field, as an academic field and as a political field. And the urgency of creating these all-women exhibitions comes to the fore when, even before Linda Naaklin's show, Women Artists, 1550 to 1950, the two curators go to the basement of the Baltimore Museum of Art and they have a look and they're like, holy cow, there's 50 paintings here by women that we didn't even know we had.

25:19So it was as if the snowball began to roll down the hill again, starting in the mid-70s. And the genre continues today, and it expands because it's not just about the sort of Anglo-European canon. It starts to, as we see in the 90s and in the early 2000s, to other regions, to other disciplines, and to a more, I would say, intersectional kind of point of view, which is absolutely vital. The job is not done. And again, we see the need for this genre of all women exhibition at a time where mainstream governments, you know, superpowers of the world are starting to create strictures again around language, around gender, around sexual identities.

26:12And this backlash, it's like the pendulum swinging back and forth. And the all women exhibition becomes a tool of resistance in those cases. You know, when you speak about these salons, it reminds me that, of course, a lot of the women who were able to have time to make art were probably in members of households where there was laborers. So there's a sort of class issue that emerges. And this maybe brings us to another, you know, you mentioned intersectionalism. This exhibition isn't just about cis women or white women. This is an exhibition that really tries to bring in a broad definition of womanhood, but also throughout the centuries.

26:52Could you speak a bit about what kind of inclusive perspectives of womanhood are in the show? Also, especially maybe in the pre-modern area in particular. Yeah, there's two things. One that was really important, especially given our audience here, in Warsaw. I think the class question is a very important one. And I felt very strongly that we had to include women artists who are self-taught or considered folk artists, outsider artists, because there has been a big tradition of that in Eastern Europe. And yet they've always been held at arm's length. Like you belong in the ethnographic museum, not in the Museum of Modern an art or not in the National Gallery.

27:36So to me, to show those artists in a non-hierarchical way is really important and should be done systematically, in my opinion, in many survey shows and in many regions. And then to speak more broadly about, you know, the very definition of woman, the woman question is being asked even in terms of how do we define a woman? How do we account for people who are gender non-conforming, non-binary, trans women. And I've tried to include not only contemporary examples of artists who might fall into those categories and embrace them as part of this history and the story, but even to speak about people who in history were non-conforming.