Enfilade

Angelika Kauffmann, Clio, Muse of History, detail, ca. 1770–75 (Augsburg: Schaezlerpalais–Deutsche Barockgalerie; photo by Andreas Brücklmair).

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Opening this fall at the the Bucerius Kunst Forum:

Ingenious Women: Women Artists and Their Companions
Geniale Frauen: Künstlerinnen und ihre Weggefährten
Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg, 14 October 2023 — 28 January 2024
Kunstmuseum Basel, 2 March — 30 June 2024

With the exhibition Ingenious Women: Women Artists and Their Companions, the Bucerius Kunst Forum traces the careers of outstanding women artists (Künstlerinnen) from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. For the first time, the family context in which the women artists pursued their careers is addressed and made visible through juxtaposition with works by their fathers, brothers, husbands, and fellow painters. Today often forgotten, female artists of their time were able to achieve extraordinary success in a wide variety of family constellations: they became court painters, teachers, entrepreneurs, and even publishers and were awarded the highest honours.

The exhibition presents around 140 works by 26 women artists, including Sofonisba Anguissola, Judith Leyster, Marietta Robusti (Tintoretto’s daughter), and Angelika Kauffmann. Masterful portraits, still lifes, and historical scenes in painting, along with drawings and prints from across Europe, ranging from the Renaissance and Baroque periods to early Neoclassicism, will be brought together in Hamburg. For the first time, works by women artists will be juxtaposed with those of their male colleagues in such a pointed way that both formal and stylistic similarities and differences will come to the fore.

In the early modern period it was not altogether impossible for women to pursue a career as an artist, but it was definitely outside the norm and therefore always subject to special challenges. Anyone wishing to practice a freelance profession had to join a guild, but some regions denied membership to women, and in others it entailed considerable hurdles and costs. A conspicuous number of women artists of this period came from or married into artistic families. They worked for their fathers, brothers, and husbands, and often in secret. At the royal courts of Europe, the situation was different: with an open mind to artistic achievement—regardless of origin or gender—women were able to work openly as artists at court. Women such as Lavinia Fontana, Anna Dorothea Therbusch, and Rachel Ruysch asserted themselves against social norms, capturing the attention and earned the esteem of their contemporaries. The fact that they fell into oblivion is also due to the history of art scholarship, in which a male gaze dominated until the advanced twentieth century.

The exhibition shows the unique careers of these pioneering women artists and offers new insights into their lives and work, as well as thought-impulses on contemporary issues such as equality and the reconciliation of work and family.

Bodo Brinkmann and Katrin Dyballa, eds., with contributions by Beiträge von B. Brinkmann, K. Dyballa, S. Engel, A. Mensger, R. Müller, S. Salomon, A. Tacke, S. Pisot, I. Wenderholm, and S. Werthemann, Geniale Frauen: Künstlerinnen und ihre Weggefährten (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2023), 300 pages, ISBN: 978-3777442365, €45.