Travel Guide

- 5 min reading time

Got your sanitary pass? Discover the female painters!

August 13, 2021

by

NomadHer

August 13, 2021

The walls of the Parisian metro are covered with posters of new exhibitions that have been patiently waiting for confinement to end. What to choose when there are so many options?  Why not taking advantage of the places that highlight feminine and feminist art?

The whole NomadHer team went to the temporary exhibition (from May 19th to July 25th) at the Musée du Luxembourg (Paris), Peintres Femmes (1780-1830): Naissance d’un combat.

DISCOVER THE VIRTUAL EXHIBITION !

We were very excited to see tourist spots reopening, and an exhibition specifically about female artists was a perfect opportunity to play tourist again: what could be more in the spirit of NomadHer?

Historical and geographical context

Just pretending to be a History teacher…

Jardin du Luxembourg, on the right the Senate building
Jardin du Luxembourg, on the right the Senate building

Before getting into the subject of the exhibition, let me tell you where you are in Paris. The Jardin du Luxembourg, where the museum is located, is one of my favorite places in the capital (and for many Parisians as well). It's in the Quartier Latin, which gathers several famous schools like La Sorbonne, Henri IV, Louis Le Grand. It’s a very lively student district, which is at the same time full of history. It’s home to the Senate, the Pantheon and, just next door, the Notre-Dame Cathedral. Student district necessarily goes hand in hand with culture: the area is full of bookstores (Gibert Joseph, Shakespeare & Co...), and museums like the Luxembourg Museum or the Cluny Museum on the Middle Ages.

The exhibition presents a panel of works exclusively female creations covering the period from 1780 to 1830. That period was a turning point in French history, since it covers the Revolution —with all the political changes it implies—, an era that resulted from the philosophy of the Enlightenment, where the concepts of Human Rights were in full bloom.


What about women?

Instense Mansplaning
Instense Mansplaning

I mention political upheavals because art is influenced by its context, it doesn’t occur in a vacuum, and what is left after this social and political turmoil is the names of men.

Exclusively of men.

At the museum, we learnt that, even after the end of "the Old Regime, we had to wait for the second half of the 19th century to find women painters publicly recognized as remarkable."

We enter in full in the subject of the invisibilization of women in History. That is to say: if we looked at what is studied in school, we would be led to believe that there were no women painters until the contemporary period.

This exhibition shows a different story.

To be honest, this is not my favorite period in painting. From a very subjective point of view, it is not the portraits of noble families that interest me the most (and there were a lot of them), but I must admit that the simple fact of discovering many names of women, unknown until then, filled me with joy. In addition to Elisabeth Vigée-Le-Brun, who is one of the most famous ones, there are for example: Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Rosalie Filleule de Besne, Marie-Geneviève Bouliard, Julie Duvidal de Montferrier, Aimée Brune-Pagès...

You don't know them? Well, one more reason to dig into the subject ;)

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The female gaze

Just pretending to be an Arts teacher

Despite my limited knowledge of painting, I found it fascinating to study (on my own scale - I have no expertise to my credit haha), to what extent the gaze of the artist influences their work: in this case, the female gaze.

Laura Mulvey coined the term “male gaze” in an essay about film theory, and it was later taken up by French author Iris Brey in an essay released in 2020: Le Regard Féminin (it's brilliant, go and read it). So I don't know if it's applicable to painting, but I like to imagine that a woman painter who draws a female model brings another dimension to her art (like in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, if you know the reference).

Autoportrait, Julie Duvidal de Montferrier
Autoportrait, Julie Duvidal de Montferrier
Jeune Fille à Genoux, Aimée Brune-Pagès
Jeune Fille à Genoux, Aimée Brune-Pagès

The birth of a fight

This place that women have built for themselves in painting is admirable, because they were being held back at more or less all levels (this reminds me of the 21st century lol). 1780-1830 was a great period of reform at the institutional level, for example, with the advent of the Academies, which were full of men and deeply sexist.

Finally, art was beginning to organize itself and society was going through a total restructuring… without women!

It is not for nothing that the exhibition bears the subtitle "Birth of a struggle." We can rely on revolutionary texts such as Olympe de Gouge’s Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Citizen (1791), or Mary Wollestonecraft, from the other side of the English Channel, with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) to counterbalance this patriarchal reorganization of society.

All this is to say…

...that I liked this exhibition visually, but that it especially opened a new perspective on this revolutionary period.  The visit is short, a bit expensive, and —an important point— not translated into English, which really is a shame!

The only thing left is the wonderful idea of making exhibitions of badass women!

I hope that my review of this cultural experience will inspire you to either check out the virtual exhibition (unfortunately, the physical one ended on July 25th), or to pay attention at feminine and feminist art in general. In any case, on our side, the next destination will surely be the exhibition Elles font l'abstraction at the Musée Pompidou (Paris), which remains open until August 23rd.

More about NomadHer :

NomadHer is an app for female globetrotters to encourage solo travelling safely. NomadHer has a vision of empowering women through travelling.

To join the community of female globetrotters, you can download NomadHer App on IOS & Android. Follow NomadHer on Instagram: @nomad_her.

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