{"id":4406,"date":"2026-04-30T20:47:06","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T20:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/4406\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T20:47:06","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T20:47:06","slug":"review-the-woman-question-1550-2025-museum-of-modern-art-in-warsaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/4406\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: \u201cThe Woman Question 1550-2025\u201d Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\"An<\/a>The exhibition is an exercise in dismantling that hierarchy of power, taking a prismatic and expansive view via its intersection of geographies, identities and timelines. Photo: Robert Glowacki Photography<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Woman Question 1550-2025<\/a>,\u201d closing soon at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, is as impactful as it is informative. Part of the urgency of the show, museum director Joana Mytkowska<\/a> writes in the accompanying catalogue, is the \u201cdisbelief at the rising wave of anti-women rhetoric and legal changes around the world\u2014including Europe and the United States, once considered a bastion of civil equality.\u201d The show further debunks the myth that women have only been artists in the recent past, asserting that women have been a continued presence over centuries, finding ways to fulfill an artistic practice despite the systemic structures that sought to hold them back. Mytkowska notes how important it is to demythologize women as \u201chidden behind allegory, afraid to express dissent\u201d and to instead see them as \u201cfully independent, self-aware and shameless.\u201d Art is \u201can emancipatory strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Several contributors to the catalogue texts repeat how the exclusion of women from art history occurred \u201clate,\u201d or rather \u201crecently\u201d\u2014when art historians compiled and anthologized art and chose to spotlight exclusively works by men\u2014a narrativization instated by the likes of Ernst Gombrich<\/a> and H.W. Janson<\/a>. The show is a transhistorical counterpoint that accentuates self-portraiture across 199 potent references that are not \u201cexceptions\u201d but clear \u201cexamples.\u201d \u201cThe Woman Question\u2019s\u201d curator, Alison Gingeras<\/a>, aptly cites art historian Mary Garrard<\/a> in her exhibition text: \u201cfeminism existed before we knew what to call it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Works by Lubaina Himid<\/a> (recasting Poseidon\u2019s wife as an African matriarch) and Alina Szapocznikow<\/a> (a depiction of Polish and Soviet friendship with missing limbs) in the entryway serve as a preamble to the show. Once the entryway is behind the visitor, they hear the first work before anything else. Gina Birch<\/a>\u2019s \u201c3 Minute Scream,\u201d a 1977 Super 8 film, is a cri de coeur of feminist fury and punk ire, setting forth the tone of resistance to the status quo. Therein are nine chapters that examine Baroque women, motherhood and war.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>Lubaina Himid\u2019s Amphitrite. richierobs@mac.com<\/p>\n

Within the opening section, \u201cFemmes Fortes,\u201d is a powerful work by Macena Barton<\/a>, a founding member of Women Artists\u2019 Salon in Chicago. Her oil on canvas interpretation of \u201cSalome\u201d (circa 1929) depicts herself as the titular figure post-decapitation against a bright yellow backdrop, a sensuous body with a pitiless gaze upon the saint\u2019s blueish bearded head at her feet on a bronze platter. The painting was a rebuttal to a misogynistic art critic belittling the ability of female artists as painters of nudes. This abuts a work by Betty Tompkins<\/a>, often censored throughout her career (by galleries and customs agents alike) for depicting sex and reappropriating pornography. Her Women Words (Artemisia Gentileschi<\/a> #2), a 2024 acrylic on digital print on canvas made specifically for the show, remixes Jael and Sisera (1620) by Artemisia Gentileschi. Tompkins\u2019 version is partially overwritten\u2014quite literally\u2014with vituperative phrases in pink lettering. Samples include BANSHEE = WOMAN TALKING IN PUBLIC. Another: IS SHE FUCKABLE? But the best is: AS I WAS GETTING INTO MY UBER SOME DUDE YELLED \u201cDO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE GOING, BITCH?\u201d AND I YELLED \u201cALL THE WAY TO THE TOP, ASSHOLE.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fittingly, an original 1610 Artemisia Gentileschi work, Susanna and the Elders (Susanna e i vecchioni), is hung in the room next door to Tompkins\u2019 wink. Gentileschi\u2019s painting, executed when she was merely 16, is seen as eerily prescient of the rape and trial she would bear at the hands of a \u201cfamily friend.\u201d Her work shares a room with a video of Chiara Fumai<\/a> reading Valerie Solanas<\/a>\u2019 \u201cScum Manifesto,\u201d underscoring how broad yet harmonious the scope of this show is.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>Betty Tompkins, WOMEN WORDS PAINTING (ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI #2). Photo: Alicja Szulc<\/p>\n

Gingeras noted during a tour of the exhibition, \u201cI didn\u2019t want to have just the greatest hits\u2026 I wanted to weave artists who are untrained, without a diploma, next to trained artists, without any distinction, because to me, it\u2019s a big feminist gesture of this kind of radical horizontality.\u201d Such references include Polish artists Maria Korsak<\/a>, Genowefa Magiera<\/a> and Anna Sacha<\/a>. Moreover, Gingeras wanted to show the breadth of women\u2019s work across centuries, \u201cto pick things that were not necessarily the most famous examples, because the subtext of the show is really paying homage to all the scholars and all the work that\u2019s been done since Linda Nochlin<\/a> and Griselda Pollock<\/a>.\u201d She emphasized that \u201cthere is no essential female trait or subject. Like, this is exactly not what the show is about.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the section \u201cEducation & the Canon,\u201d a work by Marie Bashkirtseff<\/a> serves as a compelling counter-narrative to the notion that women weren\u2019t artists until recently. Born in Russian-controlled Ukraine, she moved to France and studied at the Acad\u00e9mie Julian in Paris. She wrote in feminist papers and protested against art schools that refused to train women. Her oil on canvas from 1881 depicts the women\u2019s atelier, a room teeming with female artists and their easels, clustered around a young boy modeling for them. Simply encountering this image of a room full of women serves as proof of longevity.<\/p>\n

But the evidence of women artists goes much further back. In the section \u201cPalettes & Power\u201d is Lavinia Fontana<\/a>\u2019s oil on canvas Self Portrait at the Spinet (Autoritratto con spinetta), completed in 1577. Elegantly coiffed and ornately dressed, she is likely the first professional woman artist in Western history (as in, a woman who earned income through art). She inherited her father Prospero Fontana<\/a>\u2019s studio, and for her marriage, she negotiated that she would earn money as a painter instead of bestowing a dowry. Within her painting here, an easel is visible in the back. Although sheet music is offered to her as she sits at her instrument, her obvious confidence renders the playbook superfluous.<\/p>\n

In a more contemporary light, Lisa Brice<\/a>\u2019s 2023 Untitled (after Vallotton), in pigment and oil on canvas, takes the ugliness of the South African artist\u2019s apartheid experience and fully inverts the racial positioning of Vallotton\u2019s La Blanche et La Noire from 1913 (itself a callout to Manet\u2019s infamous Olympia from 1863<\/a>). Instead of being a passive secondary figure, the Black woman is the painting\u2019s pillar, an artist in a red beret and blue dress, smoking, as the white odalisque is subject to her gaze and depiction, nude and vulnerable.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>Lisa Brice\u2019s 2023 Untitled (after Vallotton). Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw<\/p>\n

Mobilizing a different medium, the artist Puppies Puppies\u2019 2022 bronze cast (with an engraved base spelling WOMAN) brings contemporary gender identity discourse into the exhibition. Categorized within the sector \u201cA Muse of Her Own,\u201d A Sculpture for Trans Women\u2026 is a life-sized nude self-portrait rendered from a body scan of the Japanese-Puerto Rican artist. She celebrates the right to self-determination, and Gingeras said during the exhibition tour: \u201cI think it\u2019s important that the coalition around women includes people whose identities fall outside of the biological truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other so-called transgressive depictions, Finnish artist Ilu Susiraja<\/a>\u2019s 2025 photograph High Cheek Bones highlights the absurdity of hostility towards non-conforming bodies. Using self-portraiture, the strings of floating red balloons are taped to her cheeks as she, in a floral dress, sits against a patterned backdrop in her wooden kitchen, gaze deadpan. The balloons won\u2019t give her cheekbones any more of a lift than any beauty delusion could. The futility of trying to fit a particular prototype of womanhood is rendered with wit and malaise both, whether the focus is body silhouette or face shape.<\/p>\n

The exhibition\u2019s deep-dive into motherhood\u2014\u201dOf Woman Born\u201d\u2014is wonderfully unsparing. A painting from Clarity Haines<\/a>\u2019 new series, Crowning, is shown here\u2014a baby\u2019s head emerging from a bloodied vulva, painterly but medically accurate and gushing with life. Haines is known for her 20-year Breast Portrait Project, in which she painted just the torsos of women and non-binary people, most of them queer or on the spectrum.<\/p>\n

Another startling work in this section is by Evelyn Nicodemus<\/a>, who grew up in Tanzania. She depicts a Black woman in stirrups in the dreaded gynecological chair. Nicodemus herself was among the first generation to experience Western medicine coming into the country. When she was a teenager, she suspected she was pregnant and had to go to the gynecologist; it was such a traumatic experience for her that it was only years later, when she made the painting, that she was able to excise that memory. Gingeras notes that the painting is meant to transcend her personal story: \u201cit also emblematizes this painful history for women of color, knowing that enslaved women were experimented upon.\u201d<\/p>\n

A non-fine-art piece acts as a telling totem all the same: namely, Madame du Coudray\u2019s Machine, an 18th-century textile sculpture, or rather a replica by the Mus\u00e9um national de l\u2019histoire naturel in Paris. The anatomical reproduction was designed by a midwife, Ang\u00e9lique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray<\/a>, alongside an illustrated obstetrical handbook she published. She used these tools while traveling around France, educating women on how to give birth and how to take care of themselves\u2014in defiance of male doctors who didn\u2019t want her to transmit this information. \u201cI think having this historical object obviously gives this different frame for all of these discussions around reproductive justice,\u201d Gingeras explained during the exhibition tour.<\/p>\n

The final section, \u201cWartime Women,\u201d is a harrowing note to end on, but an unfortunately topical one. It\u2019s the most \u201cfocused\u201d: dealing with the Second World War and the Shoah through mostly Polish artists on the one hand and contemporary Ukrainian artists on the other. Wrestling with the reality of the full-scale invasion, Vlada Ralko<\/a>\u2019s sprawling and suitably disturbing work from 2022 is an unraveled scroll made from acrylic paint and oil paint stick on canvas. It commingles letters from the Ukrainian alphabet and lone limbs, as though blown apart from bodies. Gingeras describes it as \u201cthis kind of Guernica that she started when the Russian invasion began.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nearby are appliqu\u00e9d textile banners by Zuzanna Hertzberg<\/a> from her series Jewish Shmates [Rags], representing the repressed histories of anti-fascist Polish Jewish women. Of the four depicted\u2014all anarchists, leftists and communists, who were organizing in the ghetto and challenging fascist repression\u2014three were murdered. One was Eve Adams<\/a> (n\u00e9e Chawa Z\u0142oczower<\/a>), a queer woman who went to America and founded the first lesbian bar in New York. At the end of the 1930s, she was deported back to Poland and killed in the camps.<\/p>\n

As Griselda Pollock wrote in the exhibition catalogue, ultimately: \u201cThere is no more a women\u2019s art than there is a men\u2019s art. Yet there are areas of experience that have not been presented by men, or by Western European people, or by heterosexual people or by able-bodied people. Feminist thought is an international project, interrogating itself and its own inevitable blind spots because there is a hierarchy of power.\u201d \u201cThe Woman Question\u201d is an exercise in dismantling that hierarchy of power, taking a prismatic and expansive view via its intersection of geographies, identities and timelines. If only such an exercise could ripple beyond museum walls.<\/p>\n

More exhibition reviews<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\"In<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The exhibition is an exercise in dismantling that hierarchy of power, taking a prismatic and expansive view via…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4407,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[3638,3635,3659,3647,3630,3642,3152,3641,3663,3643,3657,3632,3662,3658,249,3654,3646,3639,3649,3633,3634,3656,3664,3651,3648,3653,3637,3640,3645,3650,3636,243,3631,3652,3655,3644,3660,45,3629,3661],"class_list":{"0":"post-4406","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-warsaw","8":"tag-alina-szapocznikow","9":"tag-alison-gingeras","10":"tag-angu00e9lique-marguerite-le-boursier-du-coudray","11":"tag-anna-sacha","12":"tag-art-reviews","13":"tag-artemisia-gentileschi","14":"tag-arts","15":"tag-betty-tompkins","16":"tag-chawa-zu0142oczower","17":"tag-chiara-fumai","18":"tag-clarity-haines","19":"tag-ernst-gombrich","20":"tag-eve-adams","21":"tag-evelyn-nicodemus","22":"tag-exhibitions","23":"tag-fu00e9lix-vallotton","24":"tag-genowefa-magiera","25":"tag-gina-birch","26":"tag-griselda-pollock","27":"tag-h-joana-mytkowska","28":"tag-h-w-janson","29":"tag-ilu-susiraja","30":"tag-joana-mytkowska","31":"tag-lavinia-fontana","32":"tag-linda-nochlin","33":"tag-lisa-brice","34":"tag-lubaina-himid","35":"tag-macena-barton","36":"tag-maria-korsak","37":"tag-marie-bashkirtseff","38":"tag-mary-garrard","39":"tag-museum-of-modern-art-in-warsaw","40":"tag-museums","41":"tag-prospero-fontana","42":"tag-u00c9douard-manet","43":"tag-valerie-solanas","44":"tag-vlada-ralko","45":"tag-warsaw","46":"tag-women-artists","47":"tag-zuzanna-hertzberg"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4406\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}