Madrid,
Djuna Barnes, , Aline Meyer Liebman, Louise Nevelson, Meret Oppenheim, Milena Pavlovic-Barilli, Barbara Poe-Levee Reis, Irene Rice Pereira, Kay Sage, Gretchen Schoeninger, Sonja Sekula, Esphyr Slobokidna, Hedda Sterne, Sophie Taueber-Arp, Dorothea Tanning, Julia Thecla, Pegeen Vail Guggenheim and María Helena Viera da Silva. They are the thirty-one female artists, barely a third of them well known and valued today, who in 1943 took part in the exhibition “Exhibition by 31 Women” that Peggy Guggenheim organized in her New York gallery Art of This Century, where she maintained her activity. collector and promoter of creators who had previously started in Paris and London; in the British capital she had opened her first gallery in 1938.
Some of them were veterans and others were just starting out. Their creations could be grouped into two currents: surrealism and abstraction. Both because of the relevance of the pieces and their original installation, with curved walls that made the works appear to float, this exhibition received a lot of media coverage. It highlighted that, although in practice (though not in theory) surrealism had used women more as artistic objects than as creative subjects, they were part of the movement’s general task of expressing the real functioning of thought, as well as the first impulses and developments of an abstraction that, in the following decades, would only become consolidated in the United States.
This was one of the first exhibitions in that country to include only works by women artists, but its organization, apart from Peggy Guggenheim, involved some male totems: the jury that selected the list of participants was made up of, among others, Duchamp, Max Ernst and André Breton. The patron wanted, in any case, to give a particular and feminine perspective to the project, and she herself, in the informative note that accompanied it, wrote that “Exhibition by 31 Women” had to be testimony that the creative capacity of women is not at all limited to the decorative vein, as might be deduced from the history of art created by women throughout the ages.
Peggy’s intention was, in short, to reclaim the weight of these authors – among whom was her daughter, with a career close to surrealism – as independent artists and not as muses and models, and with the desire to remember the strategies that these thirty creators used to affirm their worth and question the gender conventions of the moment, the MAPFRE Foundation presents, starting next September 19, an exhibition also called “31 Women” curated by Patricia Mayayo.
Since the list of the exhibition published in 1943 lacked photos and only offered titles, it is sometimes difficult to know which specific works were hung, especially when they were named Composition either Still lifea; The route that we will see in Recoletos, therefore, is not a recreation of the one that could be seen in New York, but a reinterpretation and is based on the collection that the American collector and businesswoman Jenna Segal has been collecting for four years, who has investigated the production of the artists who were gathered at that time and has acquired some of their productions. In addition, in contrast to the old tendency to focus on the relationships that these artists maintained with their male counterparts, here a conceptual map puts the emphasis on the bonds of friendship and collaboration, both personal and creative, between these thirty-one protagonists who questioned, if not reinterpreted, the surrealist and abstract codes that had been established by their male creators.
There are nearly forty works on display, along with a wealth of documentation on the American art scene in which their authors worked, but before contemplating them we will have the opportunity to learn, from a portrait of Peggy attributed to Berenice Abbott and from an original piece of furniture that appears in the same image, what the Art of This Century gallery looked like, which was located on the top floor of a building on West 57th Street in New York. Its design was entrusted to the Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, who sought to stimulate the public’s relationship with the pieces through curved walls, which encourage closeness, and seats that invite slow contemplation.
Key figures of the European and American avant-garde movements (men and women) passed through here, but it is worth highlighting the support given to them by Guggenheim, which was more difficult for them at the time: in addition to the “Exhibition by 31 Women”, in 1945 she organised the exhibition “The Women” and gave individual presentations to some of the artists mentioned, such as Irene Rice Pereira and Sonja Sekula. Many of the authors whom the lover of Venice sponsored have referred to her as a friend, confidante, nurse and even a mother figure; it is said that, in addition to art, she collected human relationships, and Pierre Cabanne went even further: he explained that her collecting was not only related to her love of art, but also to her love of life.
The exhibition then leads us to self-representations: never literal portraits that these artists used to affirm their identity in the face of traditional historiography that turned them into wives, muses or collaborators. In these compositions they appealed to their biographies, to performance, to disguise (Leonor Fini) or to references to the hidden and the revealed (Dorothea Tanning), various means to escape gender roles.
A second section refers to the term explored by Freud and loved by surrealism unheimlich: the sinister, translated into French as disturbing strangeness. In his hands, an aesthetic category emerged in which beauty looked over the edge and the familiar could generate questioning and rejection. This can be evoked by the dunes of Aline Meyer Liebman, the hairy still lifes of Meret Oppenheim (who remade, from humor and exhaustion, his Breakfast with skins in flatness), or the Kay Sage stairs by which mysterious figures covered in cloth could ascend to heaven.
The bestiary section can be interpreted as a variant of the first section of self-portraits: several of these artists, especially the surrealists (the famous case of Carrington and her horses), identified with animals that they took as alter egos when alluding to their search for freedom, or for alternative mythical worlds in which they could fully develop. In Poe-Levee, Pavlovic-Barilli, Thecla and Kahlo, it is quite common for eagles, crows or deer to symbolize their authors.
Finally, the MAPFRE Foundation has a place for artists who opted for abstraction when it was not dominant in the United States, which was still leaning towards social realism and regional trends during the Great Depression. To promote non-figurative art, the American Abstract Artist Association (AAA) was founded, which was joined by some of those represented in this exhibition, such as Louise Nevelson, Rice Pereira, Frelinghuysen and Slobodkina. In contrast to the dominance of Pollock and his dripping compositions as a reflection of a new society, Buffie Johnson titled one of her large-format oil paintings on canvas, The Middle Way/ The Great Mother Rules the Sky.
Perhaps one of the common links between these authors is the personal nature of their creations and their resistance to fitting into overly defined interpretative frameworks; they neither avoided the domestic nor immersed themselves in that sphere.
“31 Women. An exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim”
MAPFRE FOUNDATION
Recoletos Walk, 23
Madrid
From September 19, 2024 to January 5, 2025
