Women Artists in the Modern Collection
New exhibition itinerary
Event Slider
Date
31 May – 31 Dec 2019
- Closed on Tuesday
Location
Modern Collection R. Dr. Nicolau Bettencourt, Lisbon
This thematic itinerary in the Modern Collection highlights the artworks of female artists, displaying paintings, drawings, illustrations, textiles, photographs, videos, sculptures and installations.
This proposal, which includes over 100 works, is organised chronologically, from 1916 to 2018, and by typology, through the three floors of the exhibition.
2019 marks 50 years since the 1969 legislative elections in Portugal, which for the first time gave women the unrestricted right to vote, and this itinerary draws attention to the periods before and after the 1974 Carnation Revolution, through artists who fought in some way against the conservative politics of the Estado Novo regime. Paula Rego, Clara Menéres and Ana Hatherly, for example, extol this intention in their works.
On the other hand, this proposal is one of the annual changes made to the Modern Collection with the intention of inviting the visitor to consider a new perspective on the collection. There are over 400 works on display from the 20th and 21st centuries, including recently acquired works by Ângela Ferreira and Grada Kilomba, as well as works by Mily Possoz and Ofélia Marques, who are largely unknown to the public. In a room dedicated entirely to her drawings and embroidery, the prematurely departed artist Maria Antónia Siza is represented for the first time in Lisbon in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
Illustrations for books and magazines belonging to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Art Library, most of them produced in the 1920s and 30s by women artists, are on display in the large cabinet on the ground floor. We also draw attention to a series of artist’s books belonging to the Library, which were produced recently and cover a wide range of themes, from photo and exhibition books to more material and serigraphed ones.
Indeed, validating an urgent demand driven by the national art scene itself, the acquisition of a growing number of works by women artists for the Modern Collection of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in recent years has sought to highlight women artists in the collection, including young artists like Sara Bichão, Mariana Gomes, Ana Cardoso and Luísa Jacinto, among others.
Finally, this itinerary also explores diverse avenues and proposes encounters with themes that range from self-representation and the representation of women and children to the explosion of colour, visual poetry, the body and absence.
Topics
Estado Novo, 1933-1974
Pós-1974
Pós-2000
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The First Republic, 1910–33
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979). Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979). Self-Portrait (detail), 1916 
Ofélia Marques, Untitled, undated Ofélia Marques, Untitled, undated The early 20th century was characterised by an environment of unrest and aesthetic rupture, embodied in Portugal by the work of Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, the artist from this period most represented in the Modern Collection, with works produced until 1917. In 1915, Sonia and Robert Delaunay arrived in Portugal, fleeing from the First World War, and settled in the north of the country. They were joined by Eduardo Viana, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and Almada Negreiros, the group of artists at the centre of what could be considered the beginning of modernism in Portugal, after the proclamation of the First Republic in 1910. Sonia Delaunay(1885–1979), for the year and a half that she lived in Portugal, developed her studies on colour and orphic circles in a prolific context of artistic creation.
In the 1920s, artists began to dedicate themselves to caricature and illustration. Women artists also generally consolidated themselves in illustration, either for contemporary magazines such as Panorama, Ilustraçãoand Civilização, or for books, which were usually children's literature. Among these, we specifically draw attention to Mily Possoz (1888–1968) and Ofélia Marques (1902–1952).
Mily Possoz,who in 1905 went to study in Paris, continued her education in Germany. She also spent time in Holland and Belgium, returning to Portugal several years later. Her contact with the international art scene enabled her to establish a visual relationship with Foujita, the Japanese printmaker with whom she shared a friendship and clear artistic affinities.
Mily Possoz's works, which have urban and cosmopolitan influences, were created using a range of techniques, revealing a perfectionist draughtswoman and specialist in the art of engraving, namelythe drypoint technique. Of all the modern artists in the collection, she is probably the one who exhibited most in the international sphere. She also spoke various languages and managed the promotion and commercialisation of her work.
Self-taught, Ofélia Marques worked as an illustrator for magazines, concentrating on the private and intimate sphere. However, artists such as Almada Negreiros, Bernardo Marques and António Soares portrayed her as an urban woman, who often visited cafés, which at the time was very unusual. The group of caricatures of famous personalities imagined as children – people who she knew from different fields of the arts, literature, science and even politics – reveal the artist’s sense of humour. In 1952, Ofélia committed suicide and her work was only rediscovered decades later.
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Estado Novo, 1933-1974
Maria Antónia Siza (1940-1973) Maria Antónia Siza (1940-1973). Untitled (detail), 1960s 
Paula Rego (1935). Paula Rego (1935). Portrait of Grimau (detail), c. 1964-1965 Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo regime lasted 41 years.
Known as the ‘decade of silence’ or ‘the lead years’, the 1950s are the reflection of a time that was still closed and linked to the dictatorship. Neorealist works explored the social and political conditions experienced during this period. The Gravura – Sociedade Cooperativa de Gravadores Portugueses [Gravura – Portuguese Printmakers’ Cooperative], established in 1956, promoted the art of printing and initially engaged with the neorealism popular at the time.
The big debate about abstraction and figuration took place during these years. It was in this context that, at the end of the 1950s,Maria Antónia Siza(1940–1973) came into contact with artists like Ângelo de Sousa and Jorge Pinheiro, who worked with abstraction. This itinerary reveals the unique world of Siza’s work in a room dedicated to the artist, featuring embroidery of a more abstract inclination and a series of drawings produced during the 1960s which oscillate between expressionism and surrealism.
From 1961 onwards, the Colonial War drove artists to emigrate to Paris and London, most of them as scholarship holders of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (CGF). This was the case for Paula Rego (1935), who went to London to study at Slade School of Fine Art, between 1952 and 1956, and settled there after 1963. At the time, the artist combined mixed painting and collage techniques with scathing political messages directed at the Portuguese and Spanish dictatorships, like in Retrato de Grimau[Portrait of Grimau]
Thus, in the 1960s, Portuguese artistic production began to integrate more with international art. While London was the main artistic centre at the time, Paris maintained a clear influence in Portugal with regards to both artistic creation and art criticism. Also around this time, the CGF acquired a selection of British artworks through the British Council, including pop art and works of a more constructivist nature, like the reliefs of Mary Martin(1907–1969) and Gillian Wise(1936), or even works of gestural vigour, such as the painting Unvisitedby Gillian Ayres(1930–2018), an artist who belonged to the new generation of English abstract painters of the 1960s.
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Pós-1974
Ana Hatherly (1929-2015). Ana Hatherly (1929-2015). The Streets of Lisbon (detail), 1977 
Emília Nadal (1938). Emília Nadal (1938). Slogan's, 1978 The 1960s and 70s were marked by different forms of experimentalism. In artistic production, interdisciplinarity gained strength, with names such as Maria José Oliveira (1943), Ana Vieira (1940–2016), Túlia Saldanha(1930–1988) and Helena Almeida(1934–2018), who developed the theme of the body, whose presence or absence attributed a new dimension to the creative space.
Helena Almeida quickly gained national and international recognition, beginning with painting, but also developing works that ranged from minimalism to conceptualism and performance to photography, transposing the big artistic movements that marked the second half of the 20th century.
Pintura Habitada [Inhabited Painting], composed of fourteen intervened photographs, and Corte Secreto[Secret Cut] combine self-representation with a mixture of techniques, like photography, painting, cinema, performance and even architecture.
Portuguese poetic experimentalism, influenced by the discovery of international visual and concrete poetry, led a group of authors to choose the term ‘Poesia Experimental’ [Experimental Poetry] to describe their work.Salette Tavares(1922–1994) and Ana Hatherly(1929–2015) in particular stand out due to the originality of their works. Salette combined literary production and artistic practice, forming a doubly contaminated territory that extended to visual poetry and the spatialisation of this poetry through the creation of mobiles (or poem-installations) like Bailia, which allow for three-dimensional exploration.
Ana Hatherly's work is very connected to the aftermath of the 1974 Carnation Revolution, but still in the context of visual poetry. The collage on display here is part of a set of nine panels, entitled As Ruas de Lisboa[The Streets of Lisbon], carried out by the artist in 1977: made up of fragments of posters taken from the streets of Lisbon, with an important historical purpose and not just an artistic one, it fixates the life of the city, like in the proposals of the artists of French Nouveau réalisme.
Emília Nadal(1938) also created her own very unique interpretation of pop-style works in the post-revolutionary period in Portugal. Slogan'sis made up of a collection of over one hundred and twenty aluminium cans that evoke the new society of consumerism, slogans and accumulation.
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Pós-2000
Grada Kilomba (1968). Grada Kilomba (1968). Illusions Vol. I, Narcissus and Echo, 2017 
Ana Cardoso (1978). Ana Cardoso (1978). Perfect World (Lines), 2015 In the first two decades of the 21st century, a generation of young artists appeared on the scene who differed from previous ones due to their academic education – carried out or supplemented at foreign institutions – which clearly positioned their practices and works in international exhibition contexts and circuits. On the other hand, artists who had established themselves in the previous two decades maintained stimulating creative production.
Mariana Gomes (1983)reflects on painting itself, its layers, colours and composition. In this site-specific panel, which occupies a wall in the last room on the top floor, the composition made by the artist withcoloured and graphically formed fragments takes the medium of painting apart, in what Mariana Gomes describes as a eulogy. In this room, we find works by a series of artists such as Luísa Correia Pereira (1945–2009),Sara Bichão(1986) and Ana Cardoso (1978).
The video Nostalgia, by Maria Lusitano(1971), is a mixture of documentary and fiction, the product of a lengthy investigation which uses archive images representing Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique, as well as interviews with Portuguese people who were born there but returned to Portugal when the old colony gained independence. The work recycles amateur films on super 8, aerograms, photographs, postcards and telegrams, using subtitles as narrative recourse, and tells the story of a woman who gets married and leaves for Africa with her husband, a soldier in the Colonial War.
The itinerary ends with a piece by Ângela Ferreira (1958), which is part of a series of drawings, some of them produced last year. The artist looks at the theme of diamonds in South Africa, more specifically the mine where the Cullinan diamond was discovered in 1905, considered until 1985 to be the biggest diamond on record.
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