In the shadow of

Women modernists from a gender-oriented art history perspective, in connection with Moderna Museet’s project The Second Museum of our Wishes.

In the winter of 1963, Moderna Museet opened its exhibition Önskemuseet (the Museum of our Wishes), on the initiative of the Friends of Moderna Museet, with Ulf Linde and Pontus Hultén as the main proponents. The exhibition featured works that were available on the market, with a few exceptions, and which these men claimed should be in the Moderna Museet collection in order to be able to show a representative selection of modernist artists. Out of the 176 works that were exhibited, however, only three were by women artists - Marie Laurencin’s Jeune Femmes (1910), owned by Rolf de Maré and donated to Moderna Museet in 1966, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Composition Circles and Half-Circles (1935). Works by Germaine Richier were also shown, but she had been represented in the collection since 1955, with a sculpture, L’hydre from 1954. Out of the thirty-odd works acquired with the public funding that was mustered, not one was by a woman artist. Instead, the works were by male “icons”, including Schwitters, Rauschenberg, Picasso, Giacometti, Dalí and de Chirico, artists who are highlighted today as the core of Moderna Museet and are normally on display in the rooms showing the permanent collection.

This gender imbalance was to be addressed by the project The Second Museum of our Wishes, publicly launched in 2006. The goal was to acquire works by women artists, to make the collection more complete and give a varied and different perspective on art history. The project has been successful, and 24 works by 13 artists have been incorporated in the collection.

The purpose of the In the Shadow of project is to perform a gender-oriented and art historical study of the works of art that were acquired for the collection within the framework of The Second Museum of our Wishes. Women modernists have previously been overlooked, and Moderna Museet intends to fill in the gaps in the collection. This internationally acknowledged and pressing commitment has generated several purchases and donations of key international modernist works. The dissemination of knowledge about these oeuvres and gender-related issues in museum history requires not only that the works are exhibited and seen in the context of the collection, but also that they are incorporated in the day-to-day operations. Being commissioned with a special responsibility by the Swedish government, we consider it a key task to demonstrate, nationally and internationally, possible ways of relating to our museum history heritage.

With articles, workshops, seminars and exhibitions targeting museum visitors, the museum sector and academia, new knowledge will be disseminated to form the basis for future efforts to raise gender issues in art history and society. The research will also be related to the museum’s exhibition activities. We will collaborate nationally and internationally with universities and other museums to actively build a network that can form a broad base for our learning activities.

The first phase of the project deals with Dorothea Tanning and Louise Bourgeois, who have been in the shadow of the surrealists.

In connection with this project, we have also initiated the seminar series “Highlighting”, where individual artistic oeuvres are highlighted by external scholars. In autumn 2008, for instance, Dorothea Tanning was discussed by Cecilia Sjöholm, lecturer at Södertörn University.