„Your body is a battleground“

At a time when works by female artists were presented in well-known publications such as Anton Hirsch’s “Die Bildenden Künstlerinnen der Neuzeit” (1905) and Karl Scheffler’s “Die Frau und die Kunst” (1908) yet their achievements simultaneously relativized, Paula Modersohn-Becker’s painting “Selbstbildnis am 6. Hochzeitstag” from 1906 was not only the world’s first self-painted female nude, but also a statement calling for a new female self-awareness in art. Female artists started revealing their bodies on canvas and/or in front of the camera, overhauling long-established conventions of representation and reinventing themselves. Women artists made key contributions to the formation of genres such as Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Suprematism and Constructivism. In Germany the art critic, publisher, gallerist and composer Herwarth Walden helped a group of women artists achieve a hitherto unusually large degree of public attention. In the context of the STURM movement, which began in 1910 as a magazine promoting Expressionist art, encompassed a gallery and other forms of expression as of 1912 and sought to unite the international avant-garde, he specifically supported female painters and sculptors from the very beginning alongside their male counterparts like Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Franz Marc and Paul Klee. He exhibited works by over 30 women artists in his gallery; around a quarter of the art presented at the STURM Gallery was produced by women – still a small proportion, but far more than in the galleries of Herwarth Walden’s competitors put together. It was women artists like Gabriele Münter, Sonia Delaunay, Else Lasker-Schüler, Marianne von Werefkin and Natalia Goncharova who helped shape the transition into 20th-century art. As a champion of Abstraction and Modern art, Herwarth Walden paved the way for them through the genres, dominated by men for centuries, of painting and sculpture. The SCHIRN is now devoting the exhibition “STORM WOMEN” to 18 of them. 

A new generation of women artists formed in the second half of the 20th-century under the influence of the civil rights, anti-war and 1968 student and resulting feminist movements. The woman as mother, wife and housewife and/or as sexual, “beautiful” object – questioning these stereotyped roles was at the center of the works of the “feminist avant-garde”, first launched as such by art critic, commentator and director of Sammlung Verbund Gabriele Schor in the context of the eponymous exhibition and publication (published 2015). Works by such artists as Lynda Benglis, Suzy Lake, Eleanor Antin, Hannah Wilke, Martha Rosler, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodann, Birgit Jürgenssen and VALIE EXPORT share similar thematic foci and formal strategies, not as a conscious formation, but as cross-generational kindred spirits. 

In light of the fact that inequality persists in the (art) world in the 21st century, a new generation of women artists has updated the tools of its predecessors – from externalized introspection to the ironic undertone. Alongside abovementioned contemporaries, with her performances Marina Abramović for instance found new forms for the instrumentalization of her own body and Addie Wagenknecht imbued the classic artistic repertoire with technology, wit and poetic meaning. Among others, multimedia artist Miranda July places herself among her predecessors who based their art on their own perspectives, while Peaches negotiates what it is to be a woman in the 21st century at the interface between music and art.

Barbara Kruger’s words “Your body is a battleground” (the title of a piece from 1989) still endure today, yet it has long since become a tradition for women artists to conduct the battles on and for their bodies with a certain humor. For Cindy Sherman and Cady Noland they paid off in 2015: For the first time both artists featured in the list of the top ten most expensive living American artists.