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Is there (still) a need for 100% “women artists” exhibitions?

06/30/2022 01:00 PM

Pioneers, Women painters, They make abstraction, Suzanne Valadon… Temporary exhibitions of groups of “women artists” are in the news in France these last months. Are they the sign of a real progress or simply an institutional alibi? While half a century ago, the art historian Linda Nochlin posed the terms of a founding debate with her text: “Why haven’t there been any great women artists?”, the temptation is strong to echo it by asking: “Do we still need exhibitions of 100% women artists? As the journalists Roxana Azimi, Magali Lesauvage and Marine Vazzoler reminded us in their article of June 11, 2021 in the Hebdo du Quotidien de l’Art, “the presentation of works women only is not new”. How, then, to understand the speeches and the rhetoric of the oblivion which flourish about the “women artists”? Is this argument of the “discovery” particularly selling? And, moreover, why to split the stories, to speak about “women artists” whereas it was never question” of male artists”. Many of the artists in question, moreover, position themselves beyond gender issues. Do temporary group exhibitions dedicated to women artists have, moreover, consequences on the permanent collections of the museums?

Speakers

EVA BELGHERBI

PhD student in Art History – University of Poitiers CRIHAM – École du Louvre

Eva Belgherbi is a PhD student in art history (non-contractual) at the Ecole du Louvre and the University of Poitiers since 2017. Her dissertation topic focuses on the teaching of sculpture to women in France and the United Kingdom in the late nineteenth century. In parallel to her teaching and academic activities, she maintains an online research notebook Hypotheses, “A notebook on gender and art history” on which she publishes reviews of exhibitions of women artists. She is a member of the Jaseuses collective and the ARQ (Queer Arts and Representations collective).

Photo © Ennio Grazioli

JULIE BOTTE

Doctoral student in aesthetics and art sciences at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris

Julie Botte is a doctoral student in museology at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. In 2021, she defended her thesis entitled “Women’s museums: between heritage and social commitment. Empowering women through the museum?”. Her research focuses on the preservation of women’s heritage and the social role of the museum. Along the way, she was awarded a doctoral contract and a Pre-Doctoral Research Fellowship at Vassar College in the United States.

RAPHAËLE MARTIN PIGALLE

Heritage curator, responsible for the Fine and Decorative Arts collections of the Musée Sainte-Croix Poitiers

After ten years at the Montmartre Museum, followed by three years in charge of the rehabilitation of the Saint-Maur-des-Fossés Abbey site, Raphaële Martin-Pigalle is now a Heritage Curator and, for the past seven years, has been in charge of the Fine/Decorative Arts collections for the Museums of the City of Poitiers. In this capacity, she has been (co-)curator of various exhibitions including : Romaine Brooks, cambrioleuse d’âmes, with the support of the Centre Pompidou and the Musée franco-américain de Blérancourt in 2015, Belles de jour: femmes artistes, femmes modèles with the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes and the Palais Lumière d’Evian in 2016 or, more recently, L’Amour fou? Intimacy and Creation (1910-1940) with the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Quimper.

In 2016, she co-organized at the Musée Sainte-Croix in Poitiers, with Aware – Archives of Women Archives and Research (Camille Morineau) and the University of Poitiers (Claire Barbillon), a two-day colloquium Parent’elles, compagne de, soeur de, fille de … women artists at the risk of kinship, thus reinforcing the identity of the Musée Sainte-Croix as a reference entity around the issue of this persistent and now acquired presence of women within the museum sphere.

© Photo Dominique Bordier, NR

LINDA HINNERS

Senior curator at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm

Linda Hinners is senior curator at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, specialized in sculpture. She has curated various exhibitions, for example on Auguste Rodin and the Nordic countries in 2015 (collaboration with the Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki and the Musée Rodin Paris), and currently an exhibition on women sculptors:  “What joy to be a sculptor! Swedish women artists 1880-1920” (Nationalmuseum 17 Mars-11 September 2022). The exhibition is the result of a broader project on Nordic women sculptors and in 2022 a book in the field was published, “Nordic Women Sculptors at the Turn of the 20th Century. Formation, Visibility, Self-Creation”, containing over twenty articles by researches in the field. Hinners was also part of the curatorial team behind the reopening of the Nationalmuseum in 2018,  after five years of renovation.

NATHALIE ERNOULT

Curatorial Attaché at the Centre Pompidou

Nathalie Ernoult joined the Centre Pompidou as a young student in 1977. At the same time she completed a doctoral thesis on “Women in the Platonic city: the Republic and the Laws”. As a curator at the Centre Pompidou since 2008, she has collaborated in the preparation of numerous exhibitions, Robert Delaunay, Alexander Calder, Piet Mondrian, František Kupka etc… and above all she participated in 2009 in the adventure of the exhibition elles@centrepompidou devoted to the women artists of the Centre Pompidou collection. Since then, she devotes part of her work to making women artists visible in the museum. She is a member of the editorial committee of the association Aware, which aims to rehabilitate women artists under-represented in art history, art books, exhibitions and museum collections. She is also a member of the association Mnémosyne, which works for the development of women’s and gender history. She is currently working on the preparation of a retrospective on the work of the sculptor Germaine Richier.

MARINE VAZZOLER

Moderation

Journalist, Le Quotidien de l’Art, l’Hebdo

Journalist at L’Hebdo du Quotidien de l’Art since 2018, Marine Vazzoler studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre and at the Ruprecht-Karls Universität in Heidelberg, where she wrote a master’s thesis on the use of writing in Etel Adnan’s graphic work. Also a graduate of the Master of Franco-German Journalism at the Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, she first wrote for the Journal des Arts and worked for a time in the culture section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in Germany. She then freelanced for Beaux Arts and regularly wrote exhibition texts for various galleries. At L’Hebdo, Marine Vazzoler produces investigations, reports and decipherments on subjects as diverse as ecology and sustainable development, the accessibility of cultural establishments and the art market.

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