23 May 2022

Pioneers. Women Artists in the Paris of the Roaring Twenties.

From 2 March 2022 at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris

with Anne Catherine Abecassis

This exhibition highlights the crucial role played by women painters, sculptors, photographers, film, textile and literary creators in the development of the great artistic movements of modernity in the 1920s.

These pioneers, born at the end of the nineteenth or the very beginning of the twentieth century, finally gained access to the great schools of art, which until then had been reserved for men. Many of them stayed in Paris for a few weeks or a few years. These "new women" were the first to be recognized as artists, to own a studio, a gallery or a publishing house, to lead workshops in art schools, to represent nude bodies, whether male or female. They were the first to dress as they wished, to live out their sexual life freely with the men of their choice, other women or both.

Tamara de Lempicka, Sonia Delaunay, Tarsila do Amaral, Chana Orloff, Suzanne Valadon, Marie Laurencin, Romaine Brooks, Anton Prinner & Gerda Wegener are a few of the famous or lesser known figures covered in the exhibition.

This lecture will give us the opportunity to focus on the life of these incredible women, most of whom were artists with remarkable destinies and brilliant careers before falling into oblivion after World War II.

Pioneers. Women Artists in the Paris of the Roaring Twenties. An exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris. 2 March - 10 July 2022