The women of the Prado: "There are paintings in this exhibition that it hurts to look at"

• 'Reunion'.The Prado in a capsule

• Eleven Rods Miguel Falomir

Whoever arrives today at the Prado Museum will have two perfectly complementary options to direct their visit.

You can choose

, the exhibition that brings together the most dazzling paintings in its collection and that, in short, seeks victory by overwhelming.

Or you can choose Guests

the museum's new sample, which, on the contrary, draws

and does not aim to celebrate the beauty of art, but rather to create an academic work and generate a debate.

A debate about, of course, the role of women in history and in art. "We cannot change history. There are few female painters. What we can do is retell history in such a way that women who exist are made visible and understood in their circumstances, "said the director of El Prado, Miguel Falomir in 2017, in an interview published by EL MUNDO.

Three years later,

seems the consequence of those words.

The show, "a thesis exposition," according to Falomir, has two halves.

In the first, the male painters of the 19th century, the

of that world, show the women of their time according to their biases: the saint, the lady, the whore, the lost woman, the girl, the girl whore. .. In the second half, the Prado rescues the paintings of the Spanish painters of the 19th and 20th centuries that it has kept, almost always away from the spectators.

The thesis to which Falomir refers is to show that the first half (the patriarchal canon) conditioned the value of the second half (the work of women), either through the norm, the ninguneo or the

.

Let's start with the first half: Carlos García Navarro, the

curator

, has collected in eight rooms the representations of women in Spanish painting from a century and a half ago.

There are almost funny stories in that selection:

, by Salvador Viniegra was the

(and very

) of a couple in the history of Spanish art.

The image of that muscular, innocent and rather passive Adam with his defiant Eve was so scandalous for that Spain that the painting disappeared from public light.

The pressure also conditioned the political vision of women.

When José de Madrazo commissioned a collection of royal portraits for El Prado, two women, in addition to the

, appeared in the selection:

.

But, according to the commissioner García Navarro, the State (the client)

so that their painters, Isidoro Santos Lozano and Josquín Gutiérrez de la Vega, had to correct the paintings and subtract the dignity of monarchs.

"There are paintings in this exhibition that

" explains García Navarro.

Portrait of sexualized girls, of witches and mad women, of crying naked models, of debutant prostitutes who face their first client, of gypsy girls expelled by their families, of dying sinners, of repentant abortionists, of flappers with very sad expressions in the middle of the party ... In the images dedicated to the education of girls, the teachers teach sewing and minor tasks while the men appear with the dignity of the great teachers.

Sometimes, the meaning of the paintings is moralizing: other times a desire for rebellion and denunciation is sensed.

Regoyos, Benlliure, Gutiérrez Solana ... The best painters from that Spain appear in the selection.

Even Raimundo de Madrazo contributes a portrait of

The idea was clear: a true lady was not in the egalitarian fights of her time.

The great challenge of

is to convert the male gaze on women in a conditioning explaining the work of the Spanish painters of the nineteenth century and early twentieth.

What are the ways that communicate these two realities?

García Navarro begins by talking about conformism: the Spanish painters were

, like Francisca Ifigenia Meléndez and Durazzo, later they were

like Emilia Carmena de Prota or Queen Elizabeth II herself.

Then they devoted themselves to

made landscapes and still lifes ... Or, rather, they resigned themselves to the fact that only their landscapes and still lifes were their only pieces on display.

His most audacious compositions were withdrawn from circulation by black hands: husbands, teachers, colleagues, academies ...

Only at the end of the 19th century did women begin to represent themselves.

First, with apparently conservative images that claimed them as ladies.

Little by little, with some attributes of independence.

as seen in Lluïsa Vidal's self-portrait that can be seen in El Prado.

At that time, the German psychiatrist

still wrote that "the majority of painters lack creative imagination and do not come from a mediocre technique: flowers, genre paintings and portraits. It is very rare that a true talent breaks this almost general rule and if it occurs it always has traits that show an intellectual hermaphroditism. "

García Navarro, includes these words to explain the way in which the male gaze conditioned the work of women and to defend her approach from criticism from sectors that, she says, judge with militant criteria what an academic work is.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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