Guggenheim Bilbao illuminates the invisible women of abstraction

 BILBAO - Guggenheim Bilbao sheds light on the invisibles of abstract art. The history written by men has focused attention on how in the twentieth century the protagonists of creative production in Europe and the United States gave shape to a vision of modernity detached from figurative and objective representation but behind the scenes - with the exception of a few cases - an army of female artists has produced at the same time works of the highest quality and topicality that have remained in the shadows. Until February 27, the spotlight on the other gaze on reality is turned on by the fascinating exhibition `` Women of Abstraction '', conceived by Christine Macel, chief curator of the Pompidou Center, with Karolina Leewandowska, director of the Warsaw museum, and Lekha Hileman Waitoller, curator of the Spanish museum.In the spaces of the extraordinary container designed by Frank Owen Gehry, five hundred works by 112 artists flow, an imposing complex and choral story up to the Eighties, chronological and thematic that goes beyond painting and includes dance, photography, fabrics and decorative arts, going beyond the point of Western view to embrace South America, Asia, Africa and Australia. Women, is the starting point, already from the second half of the nineteenth century anticipated the times. This is the case of Giorgiana Houghton, born in the Canary Islands and established herself in London, with spiritualism expressed in paintings such as '' The spirit of peace '' (1865), points, sinuous and circular lines in a symbolic abstraction that aims to represent the transcendent.

    '' The artists underwent a process of invisibility - explains Christine Macel - because men were at the center of the scene. Even for women who have managed to establish themselves, such as Sonia Delaunay Terk, the quality of the works has not been sufficiently recognized. We talk more about her husband Robert Delaunay than about her. Other women have struggled in vain to find space. My idea is to give light to these artists who co-created the abstract modernism of the twentieth century and to balance the history of art with a different approach ''. One of the first chapters with theFrench artist Valentine de Saint-Point (author of the Futurist Woman Manifesto in 1912) and the performance of Loie Fuller in an 1897 video in which the hypnotic whirling of her stage dress makes the protagonist almost disappear. The three paintings - all from 1913 but very different from each other - by Natalia Gongharova speak for the Russian Avant-garde; the Non-Objective Compositions by Olga Rozanova, and the constructivist still life by Alexandra Exter.

    The Bauhaus page is dominated by Gertrud Arndt and her carpet, considered the culmination of the work on Klee's theories, which Walter Gropius wanted in his studio. The evocative stone sculptures by Lebanese Saloua Raouda Choucair and the pyrotechnics '' Arena del sole '' by Turkish Fahreinissa Zeid belong to the Parisian scene of the 1950s. A particular focus concerns the New York school. The photo of the 'Irascibles' group in which Hedda Sterne stands out as the only woman, is flanked by the surprising canvases of Lee Krasner, wife of Jackson Pollock, with the illusion of a jet painting that is instead the result of a well-studied work . Or Elaine Fried De Kooning's Back Mountain # 16 who married the most famous Willem in 1943, up to the splashes of color in `` Cool Summer ''by Helen Frankenthaler. For the Italian women, here are the plastic photos of the dancer Giannina Censi, the solitary queen of futurist aerodance in the Thirties. Futurist was also the sculptor Regina Casolo Bracchi, whose 'Structure' (1954) of iron and Plexiglas, the result of her subsequent abstract research, is exhibited. The Milanese '' Dadamaino '' - Edoarda Emilia Maino -, friend of Piero Manzoni and a great experimenter, is exhibited 'Optical-dynamic object' (1962), an aluminum sheet on nylon that creates circular optical effects. Carla Accardi, exponent of the post-war Roman abstract avant-garde, is mentioned with her multicolored Sicofoil scrolls. And finally, the work `` White + Purple ''of 1963 by the Venetian Bice Lazzari who collaborated in the thirties with architects and designers in the field of decoration and for his works starting from the fifties represents "one of the most precious examples of Italian informal painting".

    The aim of the exhibition, which arrives at the Guggenheim Bilbao after being presented at the Center Pompidou and is the result of a co-production between the two museums, is not to propose an art of women but to illustrate the sociological difficulties that have hindered them and the different attitudes of the artists , between the choice not to insist on gender and the feminist will to mark the difference. '' There is no feminine sensibility or women's art '', Christine Macel observes, underlining that until the postwar period the scene was marked by male prejudice. The rewriting of art following the point of view of women began in the Eighties and expanded up to ten years ago also thanks to globalization that opened the gaze for a more polyphonic story. ''However, exhibitions on women should not continue - he acknowledges -. It is necessary to do it now to open a new path. It would be better to think of monographs by artists that we do not see in museums as a basis for reconsidering the art of the future ''. A next step, he agrees, could be to show the works without conditioning of genre and names, letting the works speak.

    (HANDLE).