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As a curator Annemartine van Kesteren is involved with Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection every day. But what are her favourite works by female artists?
Annemartine van Kesteren has been curator of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s Design and City Collection since 2005. She is currently working on the Project Rotterdam exhibition being staged this summer. ‘Boijmans has a magnificent collection of work by female artists, from Elsa Schiaparelli to Wieki Somers.’
‘These are all works of art in Boijmans’s collection, made for or by women. Every one of them is a favourite of mine. Works that show the emancipation of women. For me it starts with the little girl lovingly painted by her father Hippolyte Daeye. Uninhibited, unaware of the viewer, she stands in the room. Tender and free, she represents the promise of the future. It shows us a female presence that seems subtle but is at the same time powerful and unyielding.’
‘Dalí’s iconic portrait of Mae West. He portrayed her in an interior, where the furniture forms her face. It means that you can recline on her lips. In the 1930s Mae West was a famous film star and one of the first successful female scriptwriters and directors in the American movie industry. An unconventional woman, she resisted the bourgeois morality of her time. Faced with her use of innuendo, charged with erotic overtones, the establishment did not know how to react to her. She embodied the undermining of the bourgeois system, which made her the muse of the Surrealists, particularly Dalí.’
‘The position of women has also inspired many female artists to create their own fantastic works. In ´The Car’ the artist Marisol portrays herself. Introverted, locked-in or antagonistic to all convention? The work has something playful about it; it makes me smile every time I see it. But at the same time it is oppressive, because everything in it is constrained. Nancy Grossman’s work, ‘Smith’, made in the 1970s, conveys so much aggression as it looks at us threateningly.’
But female pragmatism also inspires an individual quality and beauty. In ‘Black Gold’, Ineke Hans makes items of plumbing equipment from porcelain and amalgamates them into a tea service: practical, sensual and charged with a surprising beauty.
What each and every one of these works show is the individuality of women and their position in society. A position that has been developed over the last 150 years and cannot be ignored. Long live their strength and ingenuity.
