Hidden women: Madrid show puts forgotten artists in the picture
Wild festivals, exquisite fruit-bowls and unusually realistic renderings of motherhood and female friendship – not to mention a glimpse of Lady Hamilton as an enthusiastic follower of Bacchus – will go on show in Madrid on Tuesday as one of the country’s most famous galleries seeks to spike the patriarchal canon of art history with a new, and avowedly feminist, exhibition.
The show at the Thyssen-Bornemisza – called simply Maestras (Women Masters) – uses almost 100 paintings, lithographs and sculptures to show how female artists from the late 16th to the early 20th centuries won recognition in their own lifetimes, only to find their works forgotten, erased or consigned to dusty storerooms.
Organised into eight chronological sections that reflect artistic and social changes, Maestras also explores how female artists, gallerists and patrons worked together to create and celebrate art while living and working in the grip and gaze of sexist, and often misogynistic, societies.
Seventeenth-century works by Artemisia Gentileschi, Fede Galizia and Elisabetta Sirani give way to still lifes of fruit and flowers before the exhibition moves to portraits – including Élisabeth Louise Vigeé Le Brun’s Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante – and then to Orientalism, depictions of working women, images of maternity, sisterhood and, finally, to images of female emancipation.
Among the show’s early exhibits is one of Gentileschi’s anguished studies of Susanna and the Elders, while the later pieces include Mary Cassatt’s bleary-eyed Breakfast in Bed and Maruja Mallo’s playful Fair pictures.
“This exhibition speaks positively of that other half of art history,” said the exhibition’s curator, the art historian and critic Rocío de la Villa.
“For a long time, the feminist history of art has been beset by all the handicaps and obstacles that had been put in the path of female creators. For example, they couldn’t access the same artistic training that their male colleagues could. They generally lived in an extremely patriarchal system that denied them their rights and in which their signatures had no legal value.”
There were, however, “certain moments and certain places” in which conditions were more favourable to female artists, and the show aims to offer “a series of windows through which we can see a mutual understanding and a camaraderie between artists, gallery owners and patrons”.
It also reminds visitors that some talented women caught the eye of European royal courts, and that some had husbands who helped them in the studio – or even looked after their children – because they knew that their wives’ gifts far exceeded their own.
Guillermo Solana, the artistic director of the Thyssen-Bornemisza, said Maestras was another example of the museum’s continuing commitment to feminism, education and addressing the prejudices of the past.
“I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t do any mansplaining today but I can’t help it when it comes to explaining what I’ve learned from the process of doing this exhibition, because I’ve learned a lot,” he told journalists on Monday morning.
“The first thing I learned from this exhibition – and which I think the public will also learn – was so many new names; so many fantastic artists I’d had no idea about and had never heard of. Of course, we knew about Artemisia Gentileschi and Frida Kahlo or Paula Modersohn-Becker, but how many important artists have got away – or been taken from us?”
De la Villa agreed. “The public is going to ask, ‘How can it be that we didn’t know about these female artists?’” she said.
“How is it that their works were in storerooms until recently? Maestras is a feminist exhibition that seeks to emphatically correct the prejudices that have come about as a result of the patriarchy – prejudices that have meant that works by female artists have remained in museum storerooms during the 20th century.”
She said the male-dominated artistic system had always sought to defend itself by denigrating female artists. Equally damaging, she added, was how historians had played down the achievements of women until their voices were silenced and their creations overlooked and then hidden from view.
“When women are hidden, or robbed of their past, they are robbed of their identity,” said De la Villa. “The power of culture is very important. It just can’t be separated from the social conditions we enjoy, or which we suffer.”
• Maestras is at the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum from 31 October to 4 February 2024
and poems. He agrees that there are production benefits to the genre, in the way games can be compact and focus on details rather than huge open worlds. “I’ve always loved how purposeful the design of classic survival horror games is,” he says. “Every second of games like Resident Evil 2 or Silent Hill 2 is handcrafted with minimal filler content. Every camera angle, enemy design, puzzle, etc serves a larger purpose within the story and narrative. Instead of traversing a 100km squared open world, you’re usually exploring a much denser and more atmosphererich environment. There’s a tangible focus that I find is lacking in many larger titles of different genres.”
Horror is a space in which bizarre ideas are embraced, and that’s an attractive proposition for experimental studios. “I think many indie devs are here because they want to make something personal and outside the mainstream,’ says Barlow. “When you make mainstream games you are told ‘It has to be fun’ and ‘you can’t alienate any of the audience’. Horror is a genre that deliberately tries to make its audience uncomfortable and explicitly says ‘This doesn’t need to be fun’. I want to tell stories that are about what happens inside our heads; our subjective experience of reality. The beauty of horror is that you can take these abstract, intellectual ideas and make them flesh.”
According to the theories of the uncanny explored by Freud, Lacan and Julia Kristeva, we experience fear and abjection when the familiar is rendered unfamiliar; when we are subjected to repetitive sounds and visual phenomena; when objects (dolls, robots, mannequins) appear to be alive or when living things appear to be objects. Consequently the slightly awkward character animations, glitches and low visibility we often experience in indie horror games enhance rather than detract from the experience, because weird movements, glassy faces and suffocating darkness are instinctively unsettling.
The purveyors of the original survival horrors cleverly exploited the limitations of the 3D graphics hardware of the 90s. A technique known as “fogging”, in which games deliberately limited the view distance of the player to cut down on processing costs, became a staple element of the Silent Hill titles, with mists covering every location and obscuring the monsters lurking there. In the modern era, titles such as Slender, Phasmophobia and SOMA use darkness and fog to obscure the game world and limit the player’s understanding of the horrors around them.
“Good horror is often achieved by not showing stuff, which is a good fit for low-budget productions,” says Jaroslav Švelch, an assistant of media studies at Charles University, Prague, and author of Player vs Monster: The Making and Breaking of Video Game Monstrosity. “As Lovecraft famously suggested, the greatest fear is the fear of the unknown. More visual detail and realism might actually lead to what I call the ‘containment’ of the unknown – it becomes more defined and less dreadful. A monster in a photorealistic video game can be seen from all angles and thoroughly examined. A vaguely defined monster such as Grue in Zork can be much more mysterious.”
The uncanny is also there when we re-encounter childhood beliefs, possessions or experiences as adults and find them eerie and degraded. An old family home that’s now derelict and rotten; a favourite china doll now tattered and oddly staring – these are familiar staples of horror novels, movies and games which turn nostalgia into something fearful. “The rise of PlayStation-esque visuals in a lot of indie horror titles is a testament to how undefined visuals can increase the fear factor,” says Joe Henson, co-creator of forthcoming Unreal Engine 5 found-footage horror game Don’t Scream. “The loss of detail plays into our imagination. It also adds to the feeling of nostalgia to a degree: the found footage and VHS visuals invoke similar feelings.”
The warping of our nostalgia for old games and platforms has become a staple of horror titles. Games use pixel visuals and old-school themes to lure in the unsuspecting, and a whole community of indie devs named Haunted PS1 specialise in games designed to resemble titles from the PlayStation era. “Retro genres and aesthetics often feel cozy, but indie horrors tend to twist and subvert them in a way that is uncanny and disorienting,” says Švelch. “One of the best examples is Doki Doki Literature Club, which starts out as a run-of-the-mill visual novel until it dissolves into glitch-ridden existential horror.”
Game developer Nina Freeman sees retro horror as a pervasive influence on modern game-makers. “Many developers in my age group of 90s kids grew up playing the classics of video game horror when they were coming out during very formative periods of their lives. Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, Resident Evil … these games shaped many people who are now working as developers in both indie and AAA.”
Freeman is also a streamer, and her entertaining and informative playthroughs of classic horror titles exhibit another valuable facet of horror games: they are fun to watch. Sharing the experience, seeing someone else jump or scream, is enjoyable and cathartic, so horror titles have become a popular choice for streamers and “let’s play” video makers. As a consequence, independent titles such as Five Nights at Freddy’s and Phasmophobia have gained huge viral success. Horror game makers now have streamers in mind at the outset of projects. Forthcoming title Don’t Scream requires the player to wear a microphone as they explore a haunted forest – if they scream or gasp in shock, it’s game over. It’s a concept effectively designed for streamers.
But there are deeper relationships between horror and small-scale development. Horror is essentially about vulnerability and helplessness, and indie is the obvious space to explore this dynamic. “Larger games tend to default towards power fantasies,” says developer and writer Jim Rossignol. “Dead Space has you stomping on the horrors, for example, while indies tend to be much more comfortable with disempowerment and vulnerability. The best horror experiences are often about feeling extremely vulnerable, and building systems that get that across is an interesting and exploratory sort of challenge that indies are best positioned to take on.”
In the indie space, highly personal, subjective game-making is common. It’s where people tell stories about themselves, and those stories can be dark. “I personally have been drawn to horror because it’s a useful genre for exploring difficult topics and social issues,” says Freeman, who is currently working on a game entitled Size Zero about her own formative experiences of clothes shopping and body shaming in the early 2000s. “I think that, as the industry becomes more accessible and diverse, we will see more and more people like myself wanting to explore these difficult stories.
“It can be scary or exhausting to make art about your trauma that is explicitly personal and real, so horror offers some tropes and devices that allow us to add a layer between our real selves and the horrors of the real story being told. I think it can be a really healthy and interesting way to explore a topic that one might otherwise shy away from.”
Horror isn’t just about ghosts, gore or jump scares and has always provided a means of investigating societal anxieties. The giant-monster movies of the 1950s were about nuclear fear; the slasher movies of the 70s and 80s explored gender politics; now our fears of spiralling technological advance and artificial intelligence are being voiced through games such as Signalis, Soma and Observer. These are themes that development teams with 500 people and multi-million-pound budgets might shy away from – or just turn into rollicking shoot-’em-ups. In the independent sector they can truly terrify. As Conscript developer Mochi puts it: “Indie developers are the ones taking the risks. I can’t imagine many AAA companies greenlighting an experimental first world war-themed survival horror game. You only really see this sort of stuff in the indie space.”
It takes about five minutes to load up Unity or Unreal, add fog, and drop in a player with a flashlight. Instant atmosphere!
was the only episode to receive a viewer discretion warning, and Fox dropped it from syndication deals. It opens with a disturbing birth scene and only gets more gruesome, as the monstrously disfigured Peacock family slaughter anyone who approaches their dilapidated Pennsylvania farmstead. Mixing brutality with black humour, it’s a skin-crawling, stomach-turning homage to Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven and David Lynch. The truth is out there – but it’s safer to leave it where it is.
Watch it on: Disney+.
Black Mirror – Playtest (2016)
Game over. There are plenty of nightmarish episodes of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian anthology to pick from – Loch Henry, Black Museum and White Bear are pretty petrifying – but this is the most viscerally unsettling. Down-on-his-luck Cooper (Wyatt Russell) lands a job testing an implantenabled video game which uses neural data to target the player’s biggest fears. He insists he can stay emotionally detached from its virtual horrors but soon realises it’s bleeding into reality. Directed by Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane, Prey), it not only nods to various video games but also horror classics such as The Thing and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven.
Watch it on: Netflix.
Twin Peaks – Lonely Souls (1990)
“It is happening again.” This key season two episode of David Lynch’s seminal weird-fest finally unmasked the killer of homecoming queen Laura Palmer. When her father, Leland, smiled at himself in the mirror and his reflection was that of the demonic spirit Killer BOB, viewers realised with a sickening jolt that he was possessed. Jump-cutting between Leland and BOB’s faces, he proceeded to savagely murder Laura’s lookalike cousin Maddy, while locals at the Roadhouse bar sensed something was awry and became visibly distressed. The fourminute murder scene is one of the most disturbing moments in Lynch’s entire canon.
Watch it on: Paramount+.
Mindhunter – season one, episode two (2017)
Still bereft that we’ll never get a third season of Joe Penhall and David Fincher’s serial killer thriller? Remind yourself of its brilliance by revisiting its creepiest episode. As maverick agents established the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, they interviewed a rogue’s gallery of scene-stealing psychos. Never was this more chilling than when Ed Kemper (Cameron Britton), the 6ft 9in “Co-Ed Killer”, calmly described decapitating his abusive mother and exactly what he did with her head.
Watch it on: Netflix.
American Horror Story: Asylum – I Am Anne Frank (2012)
After the haunted house delights of its debut season, Ryan Murphy’s anthology demonstrated its ambition with this wild two-parter. A new inmate at Briarcliff mental institution claimed to be the titular Holocaust victim, previously presumed dead, and revealed the identity of serial killer Bloody Face. Meanwhile, the full extent of the doctors’ cruel experiments was laid bare.
The all-star cast list – Zachary Quinto, Sarah Paulson, Jessica Lange, James Cromwell, Franka Potente and Chloë Sevigny – is worth the price of admission alone. That lampshade made of human skin was just a diabolical bonus.
Watch it on: Disney+.
Stranger Things – The Weirdo on Maple Street (2016)
The Duffer Brothers’ blockbuster gradually grew more epic in scale but its early episodes laid the groundwork with Stephen King-style small-town creepiness. It truly took off as a pop cultural phenomenon with the #JusticeForBarb campaign that followed this surprise twist. Having the demogorgon attack not rebellious Nancy (upstairs snogging Steve) but her well-behaved best pal Barbara (sitting quietly poolside) was a neat subversion of slasher tropes. As Barb was dragged into the Upside Down, you could hear howls of outrage from instantly converted fans.
Watch it on: Netflix.
The Walking Dead – Seed (2012)
Zombies in riot gear, anyone? The undead shuffled across our screens for 177 episodes and multiple spin-offs but this season three opener was the postapocalyptic saga at its most terrifying. When deputy sheriff Rick Grimes and his motley crew took refuge in a prison complex, they systematically cleared it of walkers. Yet as they ventured deeper into the facility’s dark corridors, surprises lay in store. Full of urgent George Romero-style action and spattered with generous amounts of gore, it was watched by 10.9 million US viewers, a series record at the time.
Watch it on: Disney+.
Fringe – Marionette (2010)
JJ Abrams’ underrated supernatural drama often blended sci-fi with horror, not least in this Frankenstein-esque season three episode. A compassionate killer conducts makeshift surgery on transplant recipients around New York, injecting them with life-prolonging serums and calling 911 in a bid to save them afterwards. It’s then revealed exactly why he was stealing their organs. Like a puppet on a string …
Watch it on: Sky Sci-Fi/Now.