Web Musings: Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou, Paris

Dora Maar, Portrait of Nusch Eluard, 1935

Hello! Before I share my recap of my AWESOME trip to the West Coast, I wanted to give you an overview of my sister’s EXCELLENT Elles exhibit that she curated at the Seattle Art Museum. She’s been working with the Centre Pompidou in Paris since the Summer of 2010 to bring this exhibition to the Seattle Art Museum and let me tell you…it’s an incredible exhibit! This exhibit was intended to showcase female artists in an unprecedented way. According to the foreword in the exhibition catalogue, which was written by Alain Seban, President of the Centre Pompidou, “Through the works of women artists from the collection, the entire history of twentieth and twenty-first century art is rewritten from a female perspective, tracing an alternate image of a period during which women acquired the full status of artist.” Wow. This exhibit is essentially a rewriting of history. Too awesome!

I loved the exhibition and I was able to see it over the course of two days which was perfect! I was able to see the first several rooms of the exhibition, then process all that I had seen, and then return to the exhibition and finish viewing the final rooms less than a week later. It was absolutely incredible!

I must say that what struck me most about the exhibit was the layout. I LOVED that the pieces were not arranged in chronological order. Sometimes, my impression is that curators enjoy displaying in the way of “this is what was happening one hundred years ago, and through the exhibition, I’ll trace the history of art in this style up until present day.” Occasionally, that style of presentation is effective. However, Marisa curated the exhibit in such a way that themes, rather than chronology, were the main methods of presentation throughout this exhibit. Basically, the curator was saying “these are the themes that these women artists dealt with through their careers. Although they might have been working during different decades, even different centuries, their works touch upon certain themes that we recognize and that can be seen even in the works of female artists today.” It’s interesting because I can remember being in highschool and writing term papers and my most favorite term papers to write were those that addressed the thematic elements that were used during a novel. I loved to finish reading a novel and then address different themes that were used to tell the story. Thus, I really enjoyed the way Marisa used themes to dissect the works of female artists on display in Elles. Some of the themes included “Early Avant-Garde: Vision and Influence, Opinions on Sexuality and Gender and Challenging Existing Attitudes Related to the Female Body, Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, Paris and New York, Women and the Bauhaus, Surrealism, Eccentric Abstraction, Push and Pull, Infinite Expanses, Genital Panic, and the Activist Body, among others. I think that my favorite pieces were those that were almost painful to view. So much of art is beautiful and pleasing to the eye, but I found that the images that spoke to me the most were those that were challenging to look at. Of course, I loved the beautiful photographs of women that were present in the exhibit, but I also loved the unflattering depictions of certain women that were also on display in this exhibit.

Overall, I thought this was a life-changing experience. I know that might sound sappy, but it was absolutely life-changing to see what all of these women were working on in the twenieth and twenty-first centuries and to see the type of adversity that they faced throughout the process. I think it’s very ingenious of these artists to use their works and bodies to speak about social and political and economic issues. Their voices came through in paint, video, photography, and other materials that stated their cases and opinions. In some instances, voice was nowhere near as loud as words on a billboard (ie. the guerilla girls and Barbara Kruger) or physical movement through space. I loved this exhibition so much and it made me so proud to be a woman! Here are some of my favorite pieces from the exhibit. If you’re in Seattle…PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE check it out! It’s open until January 13, 2013. Go see it! J xoxo

P.S. Due to the graphic nature of some of the works in this exhibition, I have refrained from posting certain pieces. The works below represent a small sampling of my favorite pieces. Happy viewing!