Artists brought together at the Hamburger Kunsthalle to re-examine the stereotype’s origins and new takes

A SUMMARY OF THE MOST EXCITING ART NEWS FROM AROUND THE GLOBE

While we focus on Indian art, we can’t obviously function in a vacuum. It’s a small world and everything is connected, especially on the web. So, let’s train our spotlight across the world map to see what’s going on — from art trends to socio-political issues to everything that affects the great aesthetic global consciousness. Or, let’s just travel the world and have some fun!

Naples exhibition reveals how the city was the perfect foil for Artrmisia Gentileschi

In recent years, art historians have clamoured to elevate Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654 or later)—arguably Europe’s greatest female Old Master—into the art historical canon, in large part to readdress the underrepresentation of women painters in museums. In 2020, London’s National Gallery hosted the first major Gentileschi exhibition in the UK, shortly after buying her Self-portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (around 1615-17) for £3.6m. This famous image goes on show for the first time in Italy in the exhibition Artemisia Gentileschi a Napoli at the Gallerie d’Italia in Naples. Twenty-one works will reflect the artist’s Neapolitan trajectory, charting the time she spent in the southern Italian city from 1630 to 1654 (these formative years were only interrupted by a brief interlude in London between 1638 and 1640). “Rather than modifying Artemisia’s vision, Naples offered a receptive terrain for the painter’s Caravaggio-esque realism, encouraging her to continue in this figurative [way] while at the same time directing her towards achieving greater formal elegance,” says the exhibition’s co-curator Giuseppe Porzio. Read more on The Art Newspaper.

\’Problematic\’ femme fatale trope gets feminist reappraisal in Hamburg exhibition

The Femme Fatale exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle,  brings together a wide variety of artists—from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Nan Goldin—to investigate the context and myths surrounding this curiously pervasive stereotype. Subtitled Gaze, Power, Gender, the show puts itself at the heart of contemporary discussion of feminism, particularly as it pertains to the art world. Aware that the “femme fatale” is a problematic concept, to say the least, Markus Bertsch, the exhibition curator, calls it “a myth, a projection, a fiction. This is an image of a specific, firmly encoded female stereotype: a sensual and erotic, desirable woman whose demonic nature is revealed when men fall under her spell—often with a fatal outcome.” Most of us would casually associate the term with the slinky, blonde-capped characters in 1940s American film noir—think Barbara Stanwyck or Rita Hayworth—or perhaps further back with the sultry “vamps” of the silent-movie era. But this exhibition reaches back to the early 19th century, seeing its roots in the romanticism of Julius Hübner’s The Fisherman and the Mermaid (1828) and the Nazarene artist Carl Joseph Begas’s The Lorelei (1835), both paintings taking their cue from German
myth-reprocessing romantic poets, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine respectively. Read the full story at The Art Newspaper.

Brazilian concretist, Judith Lauand dies at 100

Judith Lauand, a key figure of the Brazilian Concretist movement, has died at the age of 100, according to the Museo de Arte de São Paulo, which is currently hosting a retrospective devoted to her. Lauand, the only woman in the pioneering Grupo Ruptura, made sparse compositions where geometric rigor worked in service of celebrating straight lines. Born in Pontal in 1922, Lauand began her career during a period of economic prosperity in Brazil. The administration of President Juscelino Kubitschek initiated a massive urbanization project, including the construction of the new capital, Brasília. As expected, artists responded to the sudden societal shift with avant-garde forms of expression, embracing geometric abstraction that experimented in nontraditional materials and forwent the self-seriousness of their North American contemporaries. Details on Art News.

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