Madrid’s Prado Museum has opened its first post-lockdown exhibition, a major exploration of how misogyny and art worked together to control the lives and status of women in the 19th-century—and it’s already drawing complaints that it has downplayed the roles of women artists.
The exhibit, which runs through next spring (assuming new lockdowns don’t change the schedule) examines how the mainly male art world of 1833-1931 both characterized women in powerless or evil roles—slave, witch, prostitute, mother, in one counting—and gave society’s judgment on how they should behave and be treated. The exhibit title is “Uninvited Guests.”
A group called Women in the Visual Arts, with over 500 members, has called the exhibition a “missed opportunity,” pointing out the limited number of works by women artists selected in the main section; only Rosa Bonheur and Maria Antonia Banuelos are in the section making the main point of the exhibit; there is another section showing the work of women artists at the time, painting mainly decorative subjects that were considered suitable for them.
Title image: Phalaena by Carlos Verger Fioretti (Photo: Prado Museum)
