From March 8 to June 5, 2011.
Place
Fundación Caja Madrid.
Magas
If the first part of the exhibition at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, dominates the physical power of the heroines, the second part on the rooms of the Fundación Caja Madrid explores the spiritual powers of magicians, heroes and mystical often stigmatized as witches, mad or hysterical. Often the magicians in painting have been reduced to the role of femme fatale , defined in relation to male desire, knowing what is in them Orphic figures , that humanize and civilize beasts and men.
Oil on canvas, 176 x 174 cm
Oil on canvas, 120.7 x 78.7 cm
Martyrs
The holy martyrs are not just victims, but heroes triumph over his persecutors and executioners, affirmative in extremis. Within this section is the figure of a martyr who is not Christian, but pagan, and was canonized by the late Romantic movement: Sappho of Lesbos. Sappho's poetic tributes received Leopardi and Baudelaire and two influential prose writers, the critic Sainte-Beuve and the Hellenistic Émile Deschanel, saw it as the very embodiment of a literary ideal: that of poetry as a confession , as the voice of passion, always true and natural.
Location:
Oil on canvas, 118 x 95 cm
Musee Baron Gerard Collection "Bayeux, inv. P0023
Mystic
the mystical levitation may be an image of the experience of women in times of transition such as adolescence. The most famous of these levitating, St. Teresa of Avila, is the object of the homage of Marina Abramovic in its series Kitchen , a project in the kitchens of La Laboral de Gijón. With the choice of scenario, Abramovic to evoke the kitchen of his grandmother, a very religious person that took her to church every day .
levitation acquires a different hue in the series of photographs by Julia Fullerton-Batten titled In Between whose teenage characters seem to float in the air . Here, as in the previous series Teenage Stories , explores female adolescence as the period transition in which the body becomes strange and unstable emotions, without anchoring.
levitation Ferdinand Hodler represented in one of his most famous compositions, The chosen. Mystical child (the painter was posing as a model for his son, Hector) appears there praying at the center of the scene with a rickety tree of life around him, six angel whose feet are raised above the ground a few inches . So are the female figure studies for his compositions: Women jubilant, singing from a distance Look to infinity . Hodler female figures move like sleepwalkers. They sing a hymn to life with the severity of a liturgy. Seem to reach ecstasy, but carnal pleasure. Raise their arms to embrace the whole of nature or to fly into the cosmos.
Readers
A sediment spiritual powers traditionally attributed to women is in the shape of the reader. The reading contains echoes of the spiritual powers, magical or mystical attributed to women in traditional iconography, which generates a bubble, where women can live your life through other lives. The reader is constructed so that Virginia Woolf called "own room." Reading is an internal activity that escapes the pictorial representation. In painting we ever to read a title, text will always be beyond unreadable, inaccessible. So the representation of reading involves an externalization, a dramatization . Since we can not read the text, read the body of the reader, who staged or somatization reading.
Édouard Vuillard
Private Collection, Paris
Reading, 1994
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
Painters
The last chapter of the exhibition is devoted to images of women created in the mirror: self development of women painters from Sofonisba Anguisciola to Frida Kahlo. The self allowed women to be author or creator (presumably male role) while being a model (the conventional female role). This clever combination of activity and passivity, this become the subject without leaving the beautiful object role was the key to the success of the female self in a patriarchal society. A society that otherwise Vanity personified as a woman who looks in the mirror. Too often, she portrays himself as would a male colleague, work clothes, palette and brushes in hand and looking at viewer. This type of self, that someone could identify as "male" seems to have been cultivated more assiduously for the painters, perhaps because they needed more vindicated as professionals.
The Royal Collection, Windsor, inv. 405551 RCIN
Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird , 1940
