An exhibition of women-only art from 1870 to the present is coming to Switzerland

From Sept. 19, 2021 to Jan. 2, 2022, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, is organizing the exhibition Close-up, an exhibition documenting women-onlyart from 1870 to the present: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Lotte Laserstein, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, Marlene Dumas, Cindy Sherman, and Elizabeth Peyton.

These are nine women artists whose works occupy prominent positions in the history of modern art from the 1870s to the present day. This is, in fact, the period at the beginning of which in Europe and the states women artists were for the first time recognized as professionals in their own right.

The exhibition focuses on women artists who share a predilection for the human figure represented in portraits or self-portraits: France’s Berthe Morisot and America’s Mary Cassatt, both of whom were active in the 1870s and 1880s in Paris, then the mecca of artistic production; Germany’s Paula Modersohn-Becker, who gravitated between the Parisian metropolis and the locality from about 1900 until 1907 of Worpswede in northern Germany; and the German Lotte Laserstein, who was present from about 1925 until 1933 on the great Berlin scene during the Weimar Republic; the Mexican Frida Kahlo, active from the late 1920s until 1950 in Mexico City; the American Alice Neel, who from the late 1920s to the early 1980s worked first in Cuba and then in Manhattan, moving between Greenwich Village, Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side; Marlene Dumas, born in South Africa, raised in the dark years of apartheid and living since 1976 in Amsterdam; the American Cindy Sherman, who at the same time moved to New York, that hotbed of Western contemporary art nurtured by a new generation of artists; and finally the American Elizabeth Peyton, who since the 1990s has divided her time between New York and Western Europe.

The exhibition focuses on these artists’ particular gaze at their surroundings, which finds expression in portraits and images of themselves and others. In the group show, one can grasp how the artists’ view of the outside world has changed from 1870 to the present and what distinguishes them individually. The exhibition is supported by Beyeler-Stiftung and Hansjörg Wyss, Wyss Foundation.

Pictured: Lotte Laserstein, Selbstporträt mit weissem Kragen / Self-portrait with white collar (c. 1923; oil on cardboard, 32 x 24 cm; Germany, Private Collection © 2021, ProLitteris, Zurich; Photo: © Lotte-Laserstein-Archiv Krausse, Berlin/Dietmar Katz, Berlin); Frida Kahlo, Autorretrato con traje de terciopelo / Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress / Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress (1926; oil on canvas, 79.7 x 60 cm; private collection; © Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México D.F. / 2021, ProLitteris, Zurich; Photo: © akg-images / Erich Lessing); Marlene Dumas, Teeth (2018; oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm; private collection, Madrid; © Marlene Dumas. Courtesy the Artist and David Zwirner; Photo: Kerry McFate)

An exhibition of women-only art from 1870 to the present is coming to Switzerland

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