{"id":60291,"date":"2023-09-30T16:58:59","date_gmt":"2023-09-30T16:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/this-is-what-happens-when-female-artists-are-highlighted-speech\/"},"modified":"2023-09-30T16:59:01","modified_gmt":"2023-09-30T16:59:01","slug":"this-is-what-happens-when-female-artists-are-highlighted-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/this-is-what-happens-when-female-artists-are-highlighted-speech\/","title":{"rendered":"This is what happens when female artists are highlighted. – Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Remember how angry people were? It is not more than half a year ago. Suddenly it became known that the National Museum had taken down Christian Krohg’s “Leiv Eiriksson discovers America”, a magnificent picture of brave men on a voyage of discovery. DRAMA: The then museum director Karin Hindsbo quickly got Christian Krohg’s picture of Leiv Eiriksson back up on the wall when the storm broke out. Photo: Annika Byrde \/ NTB At the same time, department director Stina H\u00f6gkvist said that it was a goal to show more pictures of women and non-white artists than had been usual. The debate immediately grew to the strength of a hurricane. Some thought it was high time for a fresh look at the national artistic heritage. Others felt exposed to a censorious woke tyranny. This weekend the National Museum opened its doors to a large exhibition of Harriet Backer’s work. It appears to be precisely a move to bring forgotten female artists to light. There are many indications that they have chosen the right time. Because there are many museums that are now also looking for the forgotten or half-forgotten women in art history. The gifted Backer (1845-1932) is exactly what they are looking for. The exhibition at the National Museum will later go to both Stockholm and Bergen, and to the palace of French Impressionism, the fabled Mus\u00e9e d’Orsay in Paris. FAMOUS: “Blue interior” is one of Harriet Backer’s most famous pictures. Typically enough, it shows an interior and a woman doing her thing. Photo: The National Museum. Now Backer has strictly speaking been neither hidden nor forgotten. She was recognized in her time, and was an important figure for the artists who came after her. But the public may not be as fond of her as of names such as Christian Krohg, Nikolai Astrup or Harald Sohlberg. Now the National Museum will give us the same familiarity with Backer. And the images they give us precisely evoke a feeling of intimacy, of familiarity. They are distinctive and beautiful and, I think when I look at them, very feminine. Many of the paintings depict rooms, interiors. They can almost be said to be the opposite of Krohg’s image of Leiv Eiriksson. The Viking is out there at sea, where continents are discovered and world history is rewritten. Backer is in the lounges and in the kitchen. It is where everyday life is lived. And it is the haunt of the women. AT THE PIANO: Like many of Harriet Backer’s paintings, “Chez Moi” shows a woman at home. Photo: The National Museum. Especially in the bourgeois family in the 19th century, the man and the woman were seen as fundamentally different, two different beings who should complement each other, and who belonged in very different places. The man’s place was out there, on the ships, in the government offices, in the banks. The woman’s was in the home. There has been a long struggle throughout the history of art to gain respect for the fact that this place is also worthy of the artist’s scrutinizing gaze: The family’s hearth, the places for feminine pursuits such as embroidery and playing the piano. It must be said that it was by no means only women who were responsible for the new, modern look at salons and living rooms. Many of the Impressionists made their mark precisely by capturing everyday moments, in the family or circle of friends. Backer’s work nevertheless differs from other images from the same period, with similar content. The more I look at them, the more I notice the distance and control in them. GRAND HALL: Harriet Backer’s paintings will also be exhibited at the famous Mus\u00e9e d’Orsay in Paris. Photo: AFP Yes, it is usually women who populate her paintings. But it is as if it is not the individuals, but the room itself, that interests her. Here she differs from Mary Cassatt, who was presumably a role model for her. Cassatt takes the audience close to what happens in such rooms, allowing us to scrutinize mothers bathing their children, holding the milk mug for them. Backer, for his part, keeps this more hidden. We, we who watch, stand at a good distance from these women who sew and play. Often they turn their faces away from us. Elsewhere they are faceless. The paintings are somehow not about them. EXAMPLE: Harriet Backer could see Mary Cassatt’s pictures at exhibitions in Paris. Cassatt also paints women, but preferably up close, and together with children and girlfriends. Photo: BRIDGEMAN IMAGES What are they about then? Perhaps about the feeling of being in a certain place, in a certain room. By shifting the attention away from the women themselves, Backer can make the spectators themselves feel that they themselves are standing there. They are the ones who feel the creaking of the floorboards underfoot, see the clear, natural light that floods in from the window. It fits well with what we know about Backer’s deep interest in architecture. Perhaps the pictures are mostly about the feeling of being in the same place as the women. To sense what they sense, where they sit, deeply engrossed in a book or a piece of sewing. FACELESS: In several of Backer’s pictures, such as “Clothes drying”, the faces of the women are almost demonstratively indistinct. Photo: The National Museum. Those who create art from women’s lives have often been underestimated. Where the man on a journey of discovery has been seen as a universal hero figure, one that everyone should know and admire, the woman in her home has often been seen as interesting primarily to other women. The process of appreciating this art is by no means finished. OCCUPIED BY LIGHT: “In lamplight” shows how attentive Harriet Backer was to the play of light in a room. At the same time, it is worth remembering, in the eagerness to bring out this art, that this is not a zero-sum game. The new attention to women’s art should not mean that the male is pushed to the side, just because it is masculine, or based on a hierarchy where men were at the top. Both the woman at the piano and the man on the Viking ship fight their battles. Both deserve that we stand for a while in front of their image and, for a brief moment, can imagine what it is like to be where they are.
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Remember how angry people were? It is not more than half a year ago. Suddenly it became known that the National Museum had taken down Christian Krohg’s “Leiv Eiriksson discovers America”, a magnificent picture of brave men on a voyage of discovery. DRAMA: The then museum director Karin Hindsbo quickly got Christian Krohg’s picture of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60292,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[11020,4404,17979,271],"class_list":["post-60291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-artists","tag-female","tag-highlighted","tag-speech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60291\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}