“ The last face that meets visitors to the Prado’s first post-lockdown exhibition is one of the very few that appears to look the spectator squarely in the eye.
The cool gaze of the Portuguese-Spanish artist María Roësset – free of guilt, shame, saccharine virtue or predatory intent – comes as something of a relief after the sanctimonious, salacious and often sad series of pictures that precede it.
To reach Roësset, a gauntlet must be run: of women depicted in art variously as fallen, proud, mad, naked, and one even presented as femme fatale, her face partially bathed in red light and a cigarette clasped in a holder between her fingers.
The exhibition, whose English title is Uninvited Guests, explores how artworks bought and celebrated by the Spanish state between 1833 and 1931 treated women as people and artists.
The show is divided into 17 self-explanatory sections such as “the patriarchal mould”, “the art of indoctrination”, “guidance for the wayward”, “mothers under judgment”, and “nudes”.
One of the aims, according to the curator, Carlos G Navarro, is to explain “how the state – and the middle classes – came to fix on and publicly value certain images, prototypes and cliches that eventually became a collective imagination in which women were always represented in certain ways”.”
Prado's first post-lockdown show reignites debate over misogyny | World news | The Guardian
