Hamburg, Warburg Haus
5-6 de octubre de 2022
Carmen Gaitán Salinas
“¿Tienen que ser invitadas las mujeres para estar en el museo?”1 – «Do women have to be invited in order to get into a museum?” A journalistic debate reacted with this harsh reply to the exhibition Invitadas (English: The Invited, The Visitors) dealing with the role of women in the Spanish art system in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century that was recently shown in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The discussion that was sparked by the exhibition shows that we cannot do justice to the urgency of addressing the position of women in art history without also looking at the structural and methodological frameworks. When aesthetics, art criticism and academic art history – as we differentiate them today – began to establish themselves in the European sciences at the end of the 18th century, it was men who determined theories, practices and discourses. Patriarchal structures arose within which women artists were assigned specific, mostly minor areas both institutionally – for example, by being denied an academic education–and with regard to art practice and artistic representations. The effects of these structural limitations of women as creators of art are reflected even today in their marginalization in different areas in the study and writing of art history. As Griselda Pollock, among others, emphasizes, it is not enough to simply incorporate women artists subsequently into the existing narratives, as this does not fundamentally challenge the patriarchal structures themselves (Pollock 2020 [1988], 17).
