Women artists in the Historical Vanguards

This conference analyzes the strategies deployed by women artists in the first decades of the 20th century to position themselves within a symbolic space, that of modernity, which had been defined in masculine terms. Trying to establish themselves as modern artists meant, for women, a double challenge: a challenge to the academic tradition and the bourgeois order, but also to the patriarchal logic of the Vanguard itself. Far from passively assuming the clichés associated with “feminine art” or “femininity”, many of these artists managed to give new meaning to these categories, turning them into a field for avant-garde experimentation and a tool for transgressing established gender models.

PATRICIA MAYAYO

Master of Arts from Case Western Reserve University (USA) and PhD in Art History from the Autonomous University of Madrid, Patricia Mayayo is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Theory and Theory of Art at the Autonomous University of Madrid.

Her lines of research focus on the history of women artists, historiography and feminist artistic practices, and contemporary Spanish art. She is the author, among many other publications, of the books Art in Spain, 1939-2015. Ideas, practices, policies (Cátedra, 2015, together with Jorge Luis Marzo), Sexed Bodies, (re)production bodies (UOC, 2011), Frida Kahlo. Against the myth (Cátedra, 2008), Stories of women, histories of art (Cátedra, 2003) and Louise Bourgeois (Nerea, 2002). She has co-edited the books Territories that matter. Gender, art and ecology (Brumaria, 2022, together with Juan Guardiola) and Making Art History in Europe after 1945 (Routledge, 2020, together with Noemí de Haro and Jesús Carillo). She has been curator of the exhibitions Territories that matter. Gender, art and ecology, Huesca, Center for Art and Nature (CDAN), October 18, 2018-January 20, 2019 (together with Juan Guardiola) and Feminist genealogies in Spanish art: 1960-2010. León, MUSAC, June 23- January 6, 2012 (together with Juan Vicente Aliaga).