Perversidad: mujeres fatales en el arte moderno 1880-1950

Abstract

From the eternal feminine to the new woman, this exhibition surveys more than half a century of images featuring women in a period--from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s--when their representation in art underwent a paradigm shift as a reflection of the social situation of the time. The exclusively male and misogynist viewpoint came up against women's questioning of their own identity. Women went from being passive, sexualised subjects to champions of emancipation and freedom. The perverse fin-de-siècle femmes fatales, icons of a destructive sexuality, gave way to modern women whose perversity lay in their opposition to the established order and their demands for a space of their own, which rocked the foundations of a historically patriarchal society in the throes of a transforming revolution. The starting point was the stereotype of the femme fatale, a creation of the late nineteenth-century Decadent and Symbolist movements, which, through biblical, mythological, historical or literary figures, likened the feminine to an accursed beauty, sin or death. In avant-garde art, these treacherous temptresses took the form of flesh and blood women: artists' muses and models, famous actresses, eccentric socialites, languishing bourgeois women and Spanish "majas." Naked or clothed, in suggestive or impassive poses, these women embody the power of desire. Artists such as Suzanne Valadon broke away from these misogynous views of female sexuality with their unprejudiced approach to the female nude as part of everyday life. --Museum website.