"Gentileschi portrays the biblical tale of Susanna being preyed on by lecherous elders as she bathes, her panic and discomfort emphasised by the drama of all the gesturing hands, the coldness of the stone bench under her nude flesh, and the dagger-like shadow under her right foot. Painted at the age of 17-shortly before she was raped by her art tutor Agostino Tassi and had to prove her innocence by undergoing torture by thumbscrew-it maps the personal and the political through allegory."
"Centuries later, the Swiss painter Cahn's Must Strike Back also defies male aggression in an image of a naked woman-but now she has one hand in her vagina, the other in a fist, punching an erect male to her side."
"The exhibition title references "la querelle des femmes", a phrase used by the Medieval court writer Christine de Pizan who authored The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) about an allegorical space that would protect and conserve the histories of important women. The book called for "woman" as a new, prized category of citizen, and this show at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw calls for her rightful status as citizen artist."
The Woman Question 1550-2025 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw showcases approximately 200 works by 140 women artists spanning five centuries. The exhibition opens with Artemisia Gentileschi's Susanna and the Elders (1610) and Miriam Cahn's Must Strike Back (2024), establishing a thematic dialogue about women resisting male aggression and the male gaze. Curator Alison M. Gingeras frames the exhibition around la querelle des femmes, referencing Christine de Pizan's 15th-century Book of the City of Ladies, which advocated for women as a valued category of citizen. The exhibition similarly demands recognition of women artists as legitimate citizens and creators, presenting a powerful, unruly survey that connects personal experiences of violation with political resistance across centuries of artistic practice.
#feminist-art-history #women-artists-exhibition #patriarchal-resistance #500-year-survey #gender-and-representation
Read at The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]