Give Women Painters a Chance!

You know Rembrandt, Watteau and Monet, reads the introduction at the start of Maestras: Women Masters 1500-1900 at the Arp Museum on the River Rhine. But, it asks, do you also know Fede Galizia, Anne Vallayer-Coster or Marie Bracquemond? 

You'll see a few of their paintings in this show. As well as work by Giovanna Garzoni, Rachel Ruysch and Helene Funke too. And they're fantastic pictures, some of them, works that make you go "wow". But will you have learned any more about the artists by the time you've been round, will you know much about them? Perhaps a little bit. But the presentation here is really rather strange.

The wall captions only give the picture title, the artist and dates, and the detail of where it's on loan from. There's no discussion of subject matter, context, technique, style or the artist's background at all. An audio guide does provide further information on some pictures and their creators, but the English commentary is delivered in an agonisingly dreary voice that seems to stumble on names and words in foreign languages, sounding as if might be computer-generated. We're keen on art history, so we were able to work a few things out for ourselves; the casual visitor might find it a bit frustrating. 

However, let's make the most of that quote from Artemisia Gentileschi, inscribed high upon one of the walls: "I will show you what a woman can do." Below hang two self-portraits from the start of the 17th century by Galizia and by Lavinia Fontana, Italian artists showing themselves as strong, confident women. They have both adopted the guise of the Biblical heroine Judith, who seduced and then decapitated the Assyrian general Holofernes in his camp with his own sword to end the siege of her city. And they're both dressed to kill. 

This is the Galizia version; Fontana's appears rather more triumphant, her gaze directed straight at the viewer, the sword raised and the severed head held up by the hair in her left hand. One thing we did particularly like in this exhibition was the way the curators had hung together pictures in pairs to complement each other.  

From around half a century earlier comes the exquisite self-portrait of Sofonisba Anguissola, scarcely larger than a miniature, and as so often with such tiny paintings, the rendering of the detail is astonishing. 

Anguissola lived into her 90s, and the audioguide tells us that she was portrayed in her very old age by an admiring artist apparently called Anthonis von Deck. 

Gentileschi herself is represented by a Penitent Mary Magdalene; that 18th-century female art superstar Angelica Kauffman by three pictures, none of them very exciting; the best ones will be in the Kauffman show now on at the Royal Academy in London. One of the star pieces there is a portrait of one of the great celebrities of the age, Emma Hamilton. And you can't keep a good celebrity down, because here's Emma again, doing her performance art in front of a smoking Mount Vesuvius for Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun. Emma is described on the audioguide as "later a friend of Lord Nelson". That's what we Brits call German understatement. 

These historical paintings really did need some explanation, as the constant voices of tour guides as we went around illustrated. For us, the exhibition took off with the room of still lifes, the third of the five sections in the show. There's Gesina ter Borch (sister of the more famous Gerard), Ruysch and Judith Leyster from the Dutch Golden Age, succulent French plums from Louise Moillon and Vallayer-Coster, but perhaps most stunning of all is the work by Garzoni.  

If Garzoni's gorgeous plates and dishes of fruit and vegetables remind us of any other artist, it's probably the Dutchman Adriaen Coorte, but Coorte was born more than half a century after the Italian. It's not so much the style of painting, but the precision and relative minimalism of the presentation. You feel you could dip in and eat one of those cherries. 

The exhibition really moves to another level, though, when we get to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are paintings here by artists we've never heard of, invoking stories of women in new situations and engaging your imagination in unexpected ways. This is The Laundresses by Marie-Louise Petiet, and there's a hell of a lot going on. 

This is one of the largest paintings in the show, and your eye is drawn all over the canvas by the shapes and the patterns of the textiles, both on the women at work and hanging up on the lines behind. There's a stovepipe off-centre, just to the left of that striking red-and-gold fabric, and you're intrigued by the one character you see from behind. Is she in charge? Is it close to the end of the day? The second woman from the left certainly looks relaxed and ready to head home. But the question you really want to know the answer to is: What confidence has the girl on the right in the blue striped dress just revealed to her colleague in the spotted blouse to make her eyes open wide and apparently to interrupt her ironing? 

Women at work, then, but also women at play, or to be more precise, at the play. Marie Petiet, from Limoux in south-west France, gets six very short paragraphs on the English-language Wikipedia; the German-Austrian painter Helene Funke gets seven slightly longer ones. 

Yet Funke's work is incredibly eye-catching, with those blues and turquoises and that rounded form. Who are these three women? The two at the front of the box have similar hairstyles and features; could they even be the same person? The woman in the patterned dress looks out at us with a very frank, self-assured gaze. And what about the woman at the back, scanning the theatre with her opera glasses for whom? A celebrity? An acquaintance? A lover? This is the 20th century, after all.  

Women experimenting with new forms of art; this is the Swiss painter Alice Bailly with a Cubist-cum-Futurist tea party. Don't you just love the movement of that tea cup right in the centre? 

There's a lot of captivating art in the final room: We were particularly taken by Sonia Delaunay's Simultaneous Dresses, with its forms and patterns moving towards abstraction, and by the saturated colours of a tiny early Gabriele Münter, showing three women in white and one in black, with a rather incongruous red parasol, seen from behind taking a Promenade along the Seine. And very much in your face: Marie Blanchard's Standing Female Nude, also known as Eva, showing you precisely what a woman can do. 

While you're in the Arp Museum 

Allow yourself perhaps 75 minutes to see the Maestras show, but a lot of the interest in visiting this gallery is in the building itself and the spectacular location. You enter through Rolandseck's old railway station building and then find yourself walking under the tracks to a bright, modern stairwell decorated with Michael Craig-Martin's work Constellations. A tunnel lit by Barbara Trautmann's Kaa, the Snake takes you deep into the hillside, where you travel by lift (or climb more than 200 steps) to the exhibition space. There's a wonderful if somewhat dizzying view over the River Rhine and the Siebengebirge hills on the opposite bank, and the top floor is taken up by a display about Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, the pioneering early 20th-century abstract artists after whom the museum is named. 

Practicalities 

Maestras: Women Masters 1500-1900 is on at the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Remagen until June 16. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday, as well as on Mondays that are public holidays, from 1100 to 1800. Full-price tickets cost 12 euros. The entrance to the museum is the old station building of Rolandseck, on the rail line down the west bank of the Rhine from Cologne and Bonn to Koblenz. Remagen town centre is two stops up the Rhine. There's an hourly direct train from Cologne's main station, taking just over 40 minutes; other connections are also available. A passenger and car ferry takes you across the Rhine to the east bank from just below the museum.  

Images

Fede Galizia (1578-1630), Judith and Holofernes (Self-Portrait), 1601-10. © Palacio Real de la Granja de San Ildefonso, Segovia, Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid. Photo: Mick Vincenz

Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625), Self-Portrait, 1556, © Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris. Photo: Mick Vincenz
Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842), Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante, 1790-92. © National Museums Liverpool, Lady Lever Art Gallery. Photo: Mick Vincenz
Giovanna Garzoni (1600-1670), Still Life with Cherries on a Plate, Bean Pods and a Wood Bee, 1642-51. © Gallerie degli Uffizi, Gabinetto Fotografico, Florence 
Marie-Louise Petiet (1854-1893), The Laundresses, 1882, Musée Petiet, Limoux

Helene Funke (1869-1957), In the Box, 1904-07, Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz. © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn 2024. Photo: Mick Vincenz
Alice Bailly (1872-1938), The Tea, 1913-14, Collection d'art de la Ville de Lausanne