Thyssen-Bornemisza museum and Caja Madrid Foundation join forces again in a combined offer that match the taste of their mutual regular public located in their exhibition halls of Paseo del Prado and Saint Martin square for this spring (it will remain open from march 5th till juin 8th ).
I´m talking about Heroines, an exhibition about the feminine representations of the XIX and XX centuries curated by the Thyssen art director, Guillermo Solana, who is heading the credits but he has been fair enough to acknowledge the contribution – no doubt fundamental – of Rocío de la Villa. This lecturer of Aesthetics and Arts Theory from Autonoma University of Madrid contribute to the catalogue with the more substancial text about the topic from the research point of view. De la Villa also leads the monograh course homonymus that Thyssen Museum offers in collaboration with Autonoma and Complutense Madrid universities that is going to be held from 2011, 9th march till 4th may.
Getting back to the exhibit, it is structured in ten sections named respectively Solitude, Caryatids, Maenads, Athletes, Armoured and Amazons in the Thyssen and Sorceresses, Martyrs, Mystics, Readers and Woman Painters in the Alhajas exhibition hall.
In spite of what these titles may suggest, the division doesnt betrays neither the spirit more conservative of the museum not the more progressive nature of the exhibition hall, in such a way it is possible to talk about two different shows mixed under the same name.
Thyssen exhibition matched this “illustrator” criterion that it is common to ascribe to curators from history of art (prejudice that may be revised). Although the gathering effort of works is impressive by the origin diversity of providers (from the historic museum to the trend gallegy), we attend again to an old-fashioned collection of stamps: women seen by men (even if it placed on a pedestal or godess altar).
So to speak, in round numbers, we can oppose eighty masculine authors to thirty six women artists, although the total number of works made by men remained “only” the double of their feminine counterparts.
If they intend to transmit an up-lifting message, a step forward of this feminist agenda of empowerment they reffer so much, intention underlined by the inclusion of this exhibit in the annual festival Ellas Crean, they finally stayed halfway through between the attempt and the achievement. A real advance would have been to include in percentage terms a majority of feminine production about the women subject and not only a ghest work instead in a court of eminent masculine contemporary. To include, for once and all, the look of woman about herself.
Nevertheless, for the historian of art the exhibitions contains a commendable access to works of distants art galleries and minor works of big names - Herminia and the shepherds (1859) of Eugène Delacroix, from Stockholm Nationalmuseum o The reader (1895) of Matisse from the Pompidou are paradigmatic – that rarely left the deposit of their institutions. Furthermore, the exhition make possible to see works from pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism (the english version of French symbolism and Decadence movements) whose extreme technical requirement are always pleasant to contemplate. Madrid are not plentiful in such occasions, even though the Thyssen itself presented some inside From Cranach to Monet exhibit that shows in summer 2006 the Pérez Simon collection that provides now some works to this exhibition. We can recall too the Pre-Raphaelitism: The vision of nature exhibition that La Caixa Foundation held the 2004 autumn and more recently, the Prado Museum exhibit in 2009 spring, The Sleeping Beauty, that use collection of Ponce Art Museum.
The Sala de las Alhajas exhibition, in spite of the “latency” state of feminine power that may indicate most of the titles, contains the more determined option to give visibility to the vision of the women herself as holder of a real power of action.
On this matter it is noteworthy the last floor that contains the self-portraits of the Woman Painters where the use of the mythical of antiquity in the service of their own recognition or the professional vision they transfer of their activity and the one of their feminine counterparts.
It´s hardy surprising this section to be the one that arouses a more extensive contemplation by the groups consisted of a majority of women that come with or without a tourist guide. Precisely the kind of group pretended to be pleased and inspired. In Solitude the work of Sarah Jones (Londres, 1959) Camilla III have a conversation with the work of Edward Hopper, it counter the engrossed image of the woman as a part of the devastated hotel room with the one of a women in wich all the energy of the room is gathered in her own withdrawal as appears also in the work of Anni Leppälä (Helsinki, 1981) present in Readers.
Janine Antoni (Freeport, 1964), in Caryatids, literally turns over the backbones of the nineteenth-century agricultural economy that represents the Jules Breton countrywomen. Breton work, as Millet´s, have already brought about another contemporary feminine responses as Les glaneurs et le glaneuse (2000) of Agnès Varda. But Maruja Mallo (1902-1995) have already arranged in 1938 their peasants of Beluso from her Work Religion serie in a frieze with egiptian hieratic and physical strength, with a dignity disspossed of sensualism excess.
The Bacchus follower of 1872 from Mary Cassat (1844-1926) in Maenads section appears as a stranger among their lustful companions devised by male painters, but it is the video Ever is Over all (1997) from the swiss artist Pipilotti Rist (Grabs, 1962), already seen in the monograph exhibit dedicated to her in the MNCARS in 2002, the piece that better symbolizes women in the Thyssem exhibition.
Women that knows how to revert to the delicate symbols traditionally associated to hers as flowers turned into aggressive battering rams and they rely on the complicity of another women symbol of authority.
Another work that stands out in the museum, inside Acorazadas section is the piece by Tanya Marcuse from the serie “Undergarments and Armor”.
In Caja Madrid Foundation groundfloor it is worthy to stop by the interpretation of Medea that provides Evelyn de Morgan, far from the irrational matricide. And the suggestion of the sketched and tense gesture of The Dame of Shalott of the very represented Waterhouse. But it is the Kiki Smith (Nuremberg, 1954) monument that demands tribute. The number of works displayed and quality of her more fortunate work La Cocina I (2009), included in Mystics, set apart from the rest the veteran performer MarinaAbramovic (Belgrado, 1946). La Cocina pretends to be an hommage to her granmother and to the religious reformer in ectasy par excellence, Saint Therese. The location chosed to this hanging action – half crucifixion, half homo universalis from Leonardo – to be taken was the kitchen of the ancient convent of nuns of the Order of Saint Claire of the Laboral University of Gijón that nowadays house in the opposite end LABoral Centre of Art and Industrial Creation. Though is Julia Fullerton-Batten (Bremen, 1970) who achieve the best reflection of this teenage climbing impulse.
But as we have rundown it is the second floor that house the heart of the exhibition. It excelled the Anguissola (Lucía and Sofonisba) sisters, so different from temper and brush stroke, the conceited Barbara Longhi with acidic mannerist palette, the much claimed painters by gender studies Artemisia Gentilleschi and Frida Kahlo, a large representation form Angelica Kauffman and the self-portrait of the companion of Kandinsky in the early abstract adverture, the likable Gabriele Münter.
But if there is three women artists that can measure wich should be a representation of the feminine power that are Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Lebrun, whose portrait artist talent outdone every eighteen-century barrier, she had the chance to rely on a deserving partner that support her worth, she symbolize the joyful professional achievement; the feminist Marie Bashkirtseff whose life excessively shorten by tuberculosis, left a stared look of naked intensity that hardly could capture a male portrait artist.
And finally the greater joy of this exhibition is the self-portrait taken out the Marmottan-Monet of París of Berthe Morisot (1885) in wich the sister in law of Edward Manet not only make the most of her person, more effectively than the bourgeois images taken by him, with a non-hatted three-quarter figure with undone scarf, but she produced a defence of the own impressionist plein air way, of vitalistic colours like Renoir´s, a statement of her way of understanding art.
We are therefore faced with an event of predictable approach but of enough quantitative substance to put together a look around that quare more the theoretical spirit it is been searched to advertise.
For the insatiabler ones it is advisable to complete with the museum sabbatical cicle of lectures and the Prado triangle with the collection itineraries “Women and power in the Prado Museum” and “Feminism: a look into the avant-garde” of MNCARS.
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