Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum
The history of Western art abounds in images of seductive women, complacent, submissive, beaten, enslaved. But the object of our discussion are the strong women figures : active, independent, challenging, inspirational, creative, domineering, triumphant. Or, to use a keyword of the feminist agenda in recent decades, this exhibition is concerned with images that can be sources of "empowerment" ( empowerment) for women themselves.
Solas
The first condition of the heroine is loneliness and the first chapter of exhibition presents single women, beginning with modern images of ancient heroines as Penelope and Iphigenia. In their hopes and nostalgia, apparently passive attitude, there is a germ of autonomy and even resistance. The loneliness of modern heroines, moreover, no longer identify with Penelope, but Ulysses, do not expect the hero is absent, but travelers who become like him.
Cariátides
A tradition of nineteenth-century painting focuses on the epic of the peasant. The second chapter is dedicated to lawn mowers and gleaners, water carriers and laundresses, women who hold strong and monumental architecture as caryatids family and society. The rhetoric of these images has an ambiguous value: first place for working women, but while praising his service as a natural and eternal destiny. Daughters of Earth and tied to her forever, peasant-caryatids are strung heroines.
Maenads
The Bacchante sometimes appears in the painting as a sex toy-decorative set to the delight of voyeur. But lurking behind this paper the terrible violence of the maenads mythological equipped with superpowers : able to pull with your hands a large tree or break a bull (or man). The maenad angry, destructive of men and rebel against patriarchal order, which fascinated nineteenth century some artists, is a typical example of image retrieved by contemporary artists as a source of empowerment.
Athletes
As Artemis and nymphs, the deadly Atalanta rejects the worship of Aphrodite and excelled in exercises male supposedly means game, the melee, the race. The figure of Atalanta holds a potential threat to gender roles has been cleared over and over again, from Ovid to own pictorial interpretations of the myth. In painting Victorian, however, the iconography of ancient hunters and athletes will be rescued to imagine the emancipation of the female body and the right to sport as a pioneer in the conquest of other social and political rights.
Armoured and Amazons
First part of The exhibition culminates in the image of the woman warrior. First, the virgin warriors, maidens armored as the prototype of Joan of Arc. The armor allows a woman to dress as to exert a typically male activity, but at the same time is an effective metaphor for virginity. In art the end of the nineteenth century, artists as diverse as Edgar Degas and Franz von Stuck, the warriors shed the shell, returning to the original image of the ancient Amazons and approaching at the same time, feminist claims hatch at the time.
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