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.
TÉLÉCHARGER ET LIRE L’INTRODUCTION EN INTÉGRALITÉ SUR LE SITE DE L’ARTL@S BULLETIN.
Les quelques éléments visuels et documentaires qui subsistent à propos de l’exposition Women Artists to Victims of War, organisée par l’Union moscovite des femmes peintres à l’automne 1914, représentent une source primaire de documentation utile pour reconstituer les fragments de l’histoire de ce groupe artistique féminin éphémère. L’Union atteste les changements importants concernant les questions de genre au sein des sphères professionnelles et académiques de l’art russe. Cependant, elle a échoué à susciter une forte adhésion et fut dissoute quelques années seulement après son institution. En analysant les témoignages disponibles, cet essai s’attache à mettre au jour et à évaluer les causes de l’échec de l’Union à établir sa légitimité auprès du public.
Dr Natalia Budanova, MA (Cambs), MA (Courtauld), PhD (Courtauld) is a UK-based independent art historian and a member of CCRAC (Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre) advisory board. Her research and publications engage in investigating the role of women in Russian art of the late Imperial and early Soviet periods, patterns of artistic exchange between Russia and the West, and the art of the Great War.