The Women Artists Shows.Salons.Societies project was launched in 2017 as a collaboration between Artl@s and AWARE. Combining AWARE’s ambitions to restore the presence of 20th-century women artists in the history of art, and Artl@s’s desire to provide scholars with the data and tools necessary to question the canonical art historical narratives through quantitative and cartographic analyses, we decided to work on group exhibitions of women artists.
Our first ambition is to build a community of scholars and work together to develop a common terminology and even possibly a common and consistent methodology to study these events, because the ones used in the field of exhibition history are inadequate. None of these exhibitions “made art history” or can be thought as “exemplary,”and the discursive silence that surrounds them require art historians to come-up with new questions, new research strategies, and new discourses.
Through the programs we organized and will organize, and through the tools and resources we are making available to the public, including this issue of the Artl@s Bulletin, we also want to contribute to a global history of all-women exhibitions from the 1870s to the 1970s.
DOWNLOAD AND READ THE FULL-LENGTH INTRODUCTION ON THE ARTL@S BULLETIN WEBSITE.
Between 1888 and 1893, the Circle of the Women painters of Brussels organized four exhibitions that gathered 400 paintings by about 80 women who were deemed mere dilettante in their life-time. However, a scientific analysis shows that some of them reached a professional level that opposite the neglect they are still subject to today. Several parameters demonstrate this level of professionalization: network, visibility in official exhibitions, marks of legitimacy, price of artworks, etc. In the end, the study brings out around 30 women artists that ought to be integrated into the 19th century Belgium canon.
Denis Laoureux est docteur en histoire de l’art de l’Université libre de Bruxelles où il est professeur en charge des matières relatives à l’art moderne et contemporain. Spécialiste de l’histoire de l’art en Belgique, il siège également dans plusieurs comités scientifiques et conseils d’administration de musées, notamment Kanal-Centre Pompidou.