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In Warsaw, “The Woman Question” Dismantles Art History’s Greatest Myth

The show is a transhistorical counterpoint to exclusionary narratives, positioning its potent references not as exceptions but as proof of a continuous, vital female presence across the centuries.

“The Woman Question 1550-2025,” closing soon at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, is as impactful as it is informative. Part of the urgency of the show, museum director Joana Mytkowska writes in the accompanying catalogue, is the “disbelief at the rising wave of anti-women rhetoric and legal changes around the world—including Europe and the United States, once considered a bastion of civil equality.” The show further debunks the myth that women have only been artists in the recent past, asserting that women have been a continued presence over centuries, finding ways to fulfill an artistic practice despite the systemic structures that sought to hold them back. Mytkowska notes how important it is to demythologize women as “hidden behind allegory, afraid to express dissent” and to instead see them as “fully independent, self-aware and shameless.” Art is “an emancipatory strategy.”

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Several contributors to the catalogue texts repeat how the exclusion of women from art history occurred “late,” or rather “recently”—when art historians compiled and anthologized art and chose to spotlight exclusively works by men—a narrativization instated by the likes of Ernst Gombrich and H.W. Janson. The show is a transhistorical counterpoint that accentuates self-portraiture across 199 potent references that are not “exceptions” but clear “examples.” “The Woman Question’s” curator, Alison Gingeras, aptly cites art historian Mary Garrard in her exhibition text: “feminism existed before we knew what to call it.”

Works by Lubaina Himid (recasting Poseidon’s wife as an African matriarch) and Alina Szapocznikow (a depiction of Polish and Soviet friendship with missing limbs) in the entryway serve as a preamble to the show. Once the entryway is behind the visitor, they hear the first work before anything else. Gina Birch’s “3 Minute Scream,” a 1977 Super 8 film, is a cri de coeur of feminist fury and punk ire, setting forth the tone of resistance to the status quo. Therein are nine chapters that examine Baroque women, motherhood and war.

Within the opening section, “Femmes Fortes,” is a powerful work by Macena Barton, a founding member of Women Artists’ Salon in Chicago. Her oil on canvas interpretation of “Salome” (circa 1929) depicts herself as the titular figure post-decapitation against a bright yellow backdrop, a sensuous body with a pitiless gaze upon the saint’s blueish bearded head at her feet on a bronze platter. The painting was a rebuttal to a........

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