Curatorial misogyny displayed
Klimt show’s sign demeans women, misuses authority of the museum
Seventeen words. That’s all it took to derail my enjoyment of “Klimt & Rodin: An Artistic Encounter,” an exhibit on display at the San Francisco Legion of Honor until Jan. 28.:
“Klimt’s allegorical depictions of women covered the entirety of the female experience — birth, youth, sensuality and decay.”
As an artist, an arts author, a museum visitor, a San Franciscan and a woman with my own share of “the female experience,” I am deeply offended by the words chosen by the show’s curators, Tobias Natter and Martin Chapman, and presumably approved by the museum’s director, Max Hollein.
Can the director of the museum, the show’s curators, and everyone else involved in mounting and reviewing this exhibition possibly believe that:
Any single painter, let alone a male one, can have depicted the entirety of female experience?
The entirety of female experience consists of birth, youth, sensuality and decay?
Even the most simple-minded view of the female experience generally acknowledges childbirth and death, and even Shakespeare acknowledged fury, which I’ve been experiencing ever since visiting the show.
Misogyny is another experience missing from the list; I was hoping not to experience it at the museum.
Creativity, analytic thought, grief and love are also missing, but there are far more missing female experiences than there’s room to mention here. However, all the things missing are not the worst part of the museum’s list. The worst part is that this list reduces female experience to a few things primarily of interest to the males who are observing them, not to their own full experience of life.
Perhaps substituting “human” for “female” would make it clearer. Historically, females have not been considered fully human, but in the 21st century, in the United States, we are usually granted that status. Has Gustav Klimt painted everything humans (you) have experienced? Does everything humans (you) have experienced fall into the four categories of birth, youth, sensuality and decay?
It would have been different if this was stated as “this was Klimt’s view” or “these are some of the things that are part of the female experience,” but it was not. And this was not a beginner’s first curatorial attempt; Natter and Chapman are both highly experienced curators. If they intended to attribute these ideas to Klimt, they would have done so. If they intended a list of some things that some women may experience, they would have said so. They did not. They made it a statement of fact in the authoritative voice of the museum.
This text is inexcusable, and the museum should take it down. I suggest that the museum review its process for vetting text before it goes on the wall.