Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morisot, Suzanne Valadon, Niki de Saint Phalle… 300 works by women artists brought together exceptionally in Poitiers

The exhibition is called “The Museum” after the name of its collection, built up over a period of around twenty years. Art historian, art critic, visual artist and former plastic arts teacher, Eugénie Dubreuil (born in 1937) has also been a collector since the end of the 1990s. Since her first purchase, made in 1999 in Drouot, retirement came. It is a graceful drawing by Marie Laurencin, Half-length naked woman, combing herself (around 1909), which marked his entry into the world of these Parisian auction houses. To the point of owning, in 2024, more than 500 works. All female artists out of a desire to “repair” the invisibility and marginalization from which they have always suffered. And this, despite the rebuffs of her acquaintances and friends finding “ stupid to put women back in a ghetto, when we are precisely trying to get out of it ».

A pioneering museum for the promotion of women artists

After having produced numerous exhibitions of this collection in her own studio, she wanted to transfer her collection to a museum in order to give it more visibility. It was the Sainte-Croix Museum, whose inclination towards female artists she knew, which benefited from this donation. The choice of this institution, known to have played a pioneering role in this area, seems obvious. It was here, in the 1980s, that Bruno Gaudichon and Blandine Chavanne, both curators at the Poitiers museum, began to implement an approach to promote neglected or hidden female talents.

Here, in 1984, the first retrospective devoted to Camille Claudel (1864-1943) was held. Here, in 1986, the first retrospective dedicated to Odette Pauvert (1903-1966), the first woman painter to win the Grand Prix de Rome for painting took place in 1925. In Poitiers, in 1987, the first retrospective Romaine Brooks (1874-1970). It was in the same year, 1987, that the Sainte-Croix museum organized, twenty-two years before the Parisian exhibition “elles@centrepompidou”, an exhibition exclusively devoted to women artists.

At the same time, works by artists, known or little-known, such as Alice Springs (1923-2021) (whose striking portrait of Isabelle Adjani, produced in 1979, illustrates the poster and catalog of the exhibition) or Sarah Lipska ( 1882-1973), have entered Poitevin collections since the 1950s. The merit of the exhibition “The Museum” is to offer a counter-proposal to the dominant discourse which obscures the role and place of women in the history of art. To completely reverse the situation by devoting, in the first part of the exhibition, a long chronological section to a panorama of feminine creation between the 17th and 21st centuries.

Sociological biases

The exhibition also has the merit of explaining the biases which have led to women being confined to the so-called minor arts. In Eugénie Dubreuil's collection, we find many more prints (28%) and photographs (16%) than paintings (11%). The importance covered, in this whole, of these “ mediums which find their origin in the function of reproduction » is not neutral. It is not only due to the greater financial value of the paintings, but also to “ the sociological reality of a particularly developed female practice in these areas », writes Camille Belvèze in a text in the catalogue.

« Reproduction – in both the artistic and biological sense of the term – is traditionally considered the prerogative of women. These are perceived as natural imitators, according to a biodeterminist conception attributing to the female sex qualities conducive to copying, such as meticulousness », continues the curator at the Sainte-Croix Museum and co-curator of the exhibition.

This is another sociological bias which has – too often – confined women photographers to portraiture, a genre more easily accessible when one finds oneself confined, physically and economically, to the domestic sphere. This is evidenced by the pictorialist compositions of Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) and Katherine Sheward Stanbery (1870-1928) or the ethnographic photos of Sophia Hoare (1836-1915), a British photographer active in Tahiti from the mid-1870s until 'in 1904.

Will we one day see in France a museum entirely dedicated to women artists? “ In Washington, in the United States, a large museum is dedicated to female artists. Why not an initiative of this type on the scale of France? » asks Eugénie Dubreuil.

“The Museum. A collection of women artists »
Holy Cross Museum, Poitiers
Until May 18