Art | Women's stories

There’s an exhibition of painting painted by women at the Museum of Art… I didn’t quite know what to expect of it…

One of the coollest things about the exhibit is that they managed to get a lot of cool paintings. I became acquainted with the work of Solfenisba anguisola and Artemisia Gentileschi earlier this year, and I was hoping I might find their paintings there. Indeed, there were three of them… The one by Artemisia was this huge portrayal of  Cleopatra…  It was impressive… I learnt a long time ago that when it comes to paintings, size matters…

I do have some criticism though… For once, there were many textiles mixed with the paintings, and none of those really spoke to me… I wish they didn’t occupy such a large portion of the exhibit.

Another thing I really didn’t like were the texts placed next to the paintings… Rather than adding to the experience of the exhibition and providing information about the life of the artists or the context in which those paintings were made, most of them ended with some variation of “see, women also produced art back then” or “she’s clearly making art about how difficult society was for women”… That got boring quickly… I mean, there I was, admiring art produced by women before the 20th century, and a lot of those women were really impressive at their time. They were the first women at prestigious Art Academies, they painted for kings and queens, and yet, the exhibition try to tell me the same old story of disenfranchisement again and again and again.

Don’t get me wrong, I am aware that women faced a lot of difficulties in the past. I am aware there are still difficulties today. But stating that things were unequal for women repeatedly doesn’t add anything… It’s like striking the same note on the keyboard again and again, instead of playing a song. I was enjoying the exhibition, learning from those women, even feeling a little bit a part of their tradition of excellence, and it felt like the exhibition was trying to dictate what I should think, by drilling it into my mind. In a way it diminished those women. They were artists, but the texts next to the paintings brought them down to the level of simple social commentators.

Be that as it may, I still enjoyed the chance to get know a lot of artists that I had never heard of before… And some of the paintings really made me stop to appreciate what I was looking at. I’ll post a top 5 of my favourite paintings in the exhibit soon…