Increasing the canon. As an idea and observe, it has been the dominant pressure of artwork historic exercise in Western museums this century. It has gathered explicit tempo previously decade with the exhibition and assortment of way more numerous artists by museums in Europe and the US.
However one curious facet of this mainstreaming of canon enlargement has been the relative sidelining of a key aspect of the discourse across the topic in earlier many years: that the construction of the canon was itself an issue. A key, and nonetheless important, textual content on this dialogue is the feminist artwork historian Griselda Pollock’s Differencing the Canon: Feminist Need and the Writing of Artwork’s Histories (1999), the place she argued that “there can… be no manner, and no level in ‘including ladies to the canon’”, and that feminism required a brand new type of discourse so as to not “affirm the construction of the canon and by doing so corroborate masculine mastery and energy, nonetheless many ladies’s names it tries so as to add, or fuller historic accounts it manages to supply”. Pollock argued that feminist thought and practices allowed us “to think about different methods of seeing and studying visible practices than these locked into the canonical formation”.
Principle into observe
Two exhibitions opening in Europe within the coming weeks characterize an opportunity to see how extensively these and different progressive “methods of seeing” have been adopted and to what extent the canon has certainly been not simply expanded however “differenced” and exploded. They pair a canonical male artist, Edvard Munch, with ladies artists: the German Modernist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker on the Albertinum in Dresden from February; and the late Austrian painter Maria Lassnig on the Hamburger Kunsthalle from March (and from October on the Kunsthaus Zürich).
Each ladies might be seen as artists who’ve gained lengthy overdue widespread recognition as establishments have sought to diversify their programming. Modersohn-Becker, whose work is among the many most distinctive contributions to early Expressionist portray in Germany, acquired scant recognition in her brief life and was principally ignored for many years earlier than gaining latest prominence, as an illustration within the Royal Academy of Arts (London) present Making Modernism in 2022 and the Artwork Institute of Chicago’s survey in 2024, the primary within the US.
In the meantime, Lassnig—whose uncompromising work now appear so clearly one of many singular contributions to figurative artwork within the late twentieth century—solely gained her first UK public present at London’s Serpentine in 2008 and her first New York museum presentation at MoMA PS1 in 2014.
The Munch pairings replicate the inseparability of life and artwork within the three artists’ work. The Albertinum’s present, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Edvard Munch: The Massive Questions of Life, frames the artists’ work within the profound mental shifts of their time, the place their work embodied a brand new directness in confronting rites of passage, sexuality and gender roles. Although Munch was the senior artist, and Modersohn-Becker knew his work from exhibitions, this isn’t a presentation of affect however of two artists’ engagement with the elemental experiences of existence.
It’s important that the Lassnig-Munch face-off is titled after—and thus framed by—a piece by Lassnig, Movement of Paint = Movement of Life. And whereas Lassnig listed Munch, together with Titian and Vermeer, as “among the many three painters most essential to me, and whom I revere”, the curators insist this isn’t only a examine of affect, however an opportunity, by means of Lassnig, “to find new elements within the work of her predecessor”. Even seeing reproductions of the works alongside one another within the photos accompanying the present, the potential for a visceral shock is obvious.
What I hope these reveals will show is that the prominence of artists as soon as excluded from the canon doesn’t merely readmit them to a longtime order however permits them to subvert and complicate it. They enrich our understanding of Modersohn-Becker and Lassnig, however they need to additionally permit us to see Munch afresh. By way of the prism of artwork made by ladies, his legacy might be deepened and even modified.
Paula Modersohn-Becker and Edvard Munch: The Massive Questions of Life, Albertinum, Dresden, till 31 MayMaria Lassnig and Edvard Munch: Movement of Paint = Movement of Life, Hamburger Kunsthalle, 27 March-30 August
