A new look at the artist –
“L’altra metà dell’avanguardia 1910–1940”

With her erotic watercolors, as long ago as the 1930s, Turin-based artist Carol Rama (1918–2015) laid the foundations for her highly diverse oeuvre that, in the following seven decades, was to undergo radical and innovative change almost every ten years. Yet it was a long and difficult path she had to tread before garnering international recognition: Not until an advanced age did Rama see appropriate public appreciation of her work – and this was despite the fact that, in intellectual and art circles, she had long been known as a reputed artist who regularly participated in exhibitions and eventually won the Golden Lion for her life’s work at the 2003 Venice Biennale.

“If I’m really so good, then I don’t understand why I had to go hungry for so long, even if I am a woman” – with these words, spoken when she was 86, Rama made it clear how angry she was and also told of something that most women artists experience in the course of their careers.

In the 1970s and 1980s, there were three key exhibitions in countries in the Global North which drew attention to female artists who had been overlooked, whereby they were almost exclusively white: “Künstlerinnen International 1877–1977,” organized in 1977 by the “Frauen in der Kunst” group and held at Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin; “Women Artists 1550–1950”, which Anne Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin curated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976; and the 1980 show “L’altra metà dell’avanguardia 1910–1940” (The other half of the avant-garde), initiated by Lea Vergine and hosted by the Palazzo Reale in Milan. Carol Rama was among those who was accorded space to present her work.

These group shows were trailblazing in that they granted recognition to female artists, who were now considered central players in the art world. From this time onwards, the number of such exhibitions grew – and they gradually also set out to break with the one-sided nature of the Global North’s perspective on art. Alongside extensive retrospectives on older or already deceased female artists, today they comprise a widespread program format which the exhibition discourse in Europe and the United States has for some years now upheld.

This is by no means an exceptional case, as art by women is, in general, too often designated as “different” and at odds with the categories that apply to and were established by the art of white Cis artists. A retrospective classification in terms of currents and themes in art history, such as was undertaken in “L’altra metà dell’avanguardia 1910–1940”, thus very strongly attached labels to female artists who were – in some cases for the first time – being included in an institutional exhibition in terms of their respective art-historical contextualization. That was not always to their benefit and remains a complex challenge today. Such an exhibition format almost always fails to tackle the question of the extent to which the works could be accorded a universal legibility in order to avoid embedding them solely in an already articulated patriarchally defined system. The simple idea of ensuring the works/artists were assigned a place in the exhibition discourse does not suffice in this regard.

Nevertheless, the exhibition Vergine curated was helpful to many female artists, among them Carol Rama, in gaining greater visibility and more regular representation. It thus comes as no surprise that in 1985 Vergine also curated the first major Rama retrospective – at Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Castello di Rivoli, for which she again collaborated with Castiglioni on the exhibition design. Her strong effort distinctly influenced the feminist exhibition discourse of the day. Extensive retrospectives, such as that on Carol Rama currently running at the SCHIRN, to a certain extent tread in her footsteps. Indeed, they enable us to discern from a contemporary perspective the truly multifaceted nature of these works and reflect on them over and above their position in history.