How has women’s visual expression evolved over the past 500 years? From symbolic representations of heroic power and self-portraits, to structural barriers, questions of identity, and social roles – women have always used art to speak about the world and themselves. The Woman Question 1550-2025 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw challenges the myth of their absence from art history.
Divided into nine thematic sections, the exhibition is also the first such broad presentation of feminist art in Poland. With more than 200 works, from the Renaissance to the present day, it all forms a multi-layered narrative that is more than just a showcase and summary of artistic achievements. Above all, it is a call to develop new historical frameworks that fully acknowledge a feminist perspective.
Curator and art historian Alison M. Gingeras collaborates with leading art institutions, including the Guggenheim Museum and the Centre Pompidou. In conversation with Contemporary Lynx, she explains the exhibition’s main aims and vision.
Julia Gorlewska: The debate over women being written out of art history began in the 1970s, when Linda Nochlin published her landmark essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? during the early years of second-wave feminism. More than fifty years later, progress has been slow. Until recently. Also, Katy Hessel’s bestselling The Story of Art Without Men and her plans for a museum dedicated to women’s art have amplified this conversation. Do you see the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw [MSN] as part of this shift? What are its core assumptions?
Alison Gingeras: Linda Nochlin is important for the academic discipline of feminist art history. And in many ways, this exhibition builds on her work as a curator, not just as an art historian, because she made Women Artists 1550-1950 in 1976, which is an important reference. Yet there are also so many serious scholars between Linda Nochlin and Katy Hessel, particularly Griselda Pollock, who is much closer to my own understanding of the problems of feminist art history, because she doesn’t ask about “greatness”. Pollock basically says that there’s a big lie we all learned that women artists didn’t really appear in art history before the nineteenth century, and it’s simply not true. Her methodologies are also much closer to my own way of working.
One of the reasons why I chose the title and the reference to Christine de Pizan is that this idea of a “city of women” or a “city of ladies” is a perfect allegory for the project of feminist art history itself, because cities are always changing; they’re never static. They’re always being built brick by brick. So I feel many different voices, approaches, and strands of research went into this show, but I also think of it as a constant process. Feminist art history is never over; it’s never a final project.
Katy contributes accessible material; her podcast and Instagram reach many who wouldn’t read, for instance, Griselda Pollock’s dense work. In a traditionally exclusive and snobby art world, her focus on accessibility is vital to broadening the conversation.
J.G.: Continuing with Christine de Pizan, how has her phrase “La querelle des femmes” [“The woman question”] influenced the overall concept of the exhibition?
A.G.: When first sketching the exhibition for MSN, I learned about certain Polish scholars’ focus on socialist feminism, which differs from Western perspectives. This led me to explore feminism’s earliest texts from the Middle Ages, offering multiple viewpoints rather than just Western second-wave feminism.
J.G.: Let’s talk a bit more about the preparations for the exhibition. During the [curatorial] tour, you mentioned that when planning a show, you always imagine how you would describe it to your mum. Why is it important to you?
A.G.: When you see a really great Hollywood or “mainstream” film, almost everyone can connect with the narrative and be affected by it. Of course, there are “film studies” and high discourse that can analyse the film’s editing and formal structure. Film is a good analogy because we can conduct an academic analysis of cinema while also simply connecting with the story and feeling its emotional impact. My curatorial goal is always to do all those things at once. To speak to my colleagues or to an academic or a political audience, but at the same time to everybody’s mum (and dad)!
J.G.: Speaking of curatorial goals. The Woman Question 1550–2025 brings together nearly 150 artists organised into nine thematic sections. What guided you in making this classification? Is it based on chronology, or does it follow a different logic? What was the underlying concept?
A.G.: It’s not chronological. Of course, there are historical anchor points for some of the chapters or specific historical genres of representation, such as allegorical depiction or the self-portrait or looking at the toolbox of symbolism and surrealism. Those are rooted in art-historical terminology and understanding. But then some themes are broader and related to experience – the experience of motherhood, the experience of war, erotic desire. These are human experiences, and different women artists have had interesting points of view on them, which became compelling when putting it all together as one exhibition.
“These are human experiences, and different women artists have had interesting points of view on them, which became compelling when putting it all together as one exhibition.”
J.G.: So to highlight the universality of these experiences, are works by artists from different periods, backgrounds, and artistic circles intentionally juxtaposed in a chronologically contrasting way?
A.G.: Exactly! It’s always about this trans-historical iconography. So Artemisia Gentileschi speaks directly to Miriam Cahn, and vice versa; Angelika Kauffmann speaks directly to Yoko Ono, and so on. This was my intention. I felt transhistorical juxtaposition would also make the Old Mistress painting come alive. Because when you’re not an art historian, and you are looking at works from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, it can be very intimidating; it’s not the visual language of our present time. But when you put Lavinia Fontana next to a modern or contemporary artist, suddenly there’s an energy that I hope makes the visitor feel more at ease and open to seeing and learning more.
J.G.: One of the most moving and historically significant sections is Anonymous was a Woman, where you draw on Virginia Woolf’s words. What was the idea behind this section?
A.G.: This chapter demonstrates how feminist art history urges us to revisit the archive and question attributions. A number of scholars had considered that unknown artists, like the Monogrammist of Brunswick, could be women. We present a case study that argues that Mayken Verhulst was the author of a work that this specific work was by her hand. I regret that we were not able to include a work by Michaelina Wautier, who was only rediscovered in 2018, even though she was a major artist of the Baroque period. Anonymous was a Woman suggests that there is a real possibility that there are other artists still out there, and maybe not even in the Western canon. It’s a compelling example.
J.G.: But then there’s also the final chapter, which looks at women’s roles in armed conflict, focusing on Eastern and Central Europe. It includes both wartime works from the Second World War and contemporary pieces from Ukraine. Do you also see parallels between past and present narratives of war?
A.G.: Well, this part of the exhibition is the narrowest in terms of chronology and geography, because all the other sections are much more wide-ranging in time and also include people coming from very different parts of the world. Whereas here the focus is on Eastern Europe, and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It comes from my observations about how the Second World War and the Shoah are still lived realities in Poland that shape collective identity and shared memory. It’s part of every day of life. Walking around Warsaw, you see traces of this history everywhere.
And that’s why I thought it was much more interesting to create that dialogue with contemporary Ukraine, and also to contradict received ideas that war is gendered – men go to fight, and women stay home. We know that’s not true. The First Lady of Ukraine famously said that this war has “a female face”. And in the exhibition, for example, we are showing the work of an artist who died on the front in Ukraine earlier this year. We have women who partook in the Warsaw Uprising and the Ghetto Uprisings. We have witnesses; we have people who survived the camps and used that experience to create important public memory.
I read a quote from Susan Sontag, where she said that “every war is local”. And that gave me, in a way, a green light to really explore this question from Poland and Ukraine. While it was tempting to address other conflicts, such as Palestine or Sudan, it would have become a scattered and somewhat arbitrary chapter; it had to be a grounded conversation, especially given that [in Warsaw] we’re about 400 kilometres from this horrible war.
J.G.: I’m glad you mentioned Susan Sontag, because in the exhibition text, you write that “images are power”. What do you mean by this, and how does it shape the exhibition’s message?
A.G.: There’s a reason why, for instance, someone like Madame Du Coudray created a book of images to teach and transmit knowledge about birth and women’s bodies, especially to address women and men who couldn’t read. Images don’t require literacy. They have a visual power that can transcend language. When you talk about figurative art, there is something profoundly humanist about images of other humans. Of course, there’s political power. Representation, whether in words or pictures, is power.
“When you talk about figurative art, there is something profoundly humanist about images of other humans. Of course, there’s political power. Representation, whether in words or pictures, is power.”
J.G.: I’m wondering whether this place – this museum – played a role in your concept for the exhibition. Because our political situation here is both complicated and very specific, and I think such an exhibition is what we really need at a time when ultra-conservative sentiments are rising.
A.G.: Even before opening this new building, MSN has had a long history of using art to address some of the most crucial social and political issues in Poland and in Europe. When Joanna Mytkowska invited me to propose a project three years ago, she didn’t say: “Can you make a show of 500 years of women artists?”. She simply asked for a proposal on women artists. And that invitation had a lot to do with the newly found agency of women in political life in Poland: the fact that the Women’s Strike and the mobilisation of women voters really helped to change the far-right government. It was important to continue this awakening and resonate with the ascendancy of women’s agency.
But the timing of the show feels quite ironic on a personal level. I’ve been coming to Poland for over twenty years and working with Polish subjects, but I’ve never been at a time in my own career when a project I’ve created in Poland would be impossible to think of in the United States, where I am from. No museum in the US would take this exhibition today, because of fear of the Trump administration, which has officially erased the words “women”, “diversity”, and “gender” from the US government. Trump wrote an executive order declaring that biological sex (male/female) is the only legal characterisation of people, thus erasing so many people and endangering their lives. The Woman Questions would be too transgressive in the current American landscape. The administration has become openly vindictive, taking away funding and personally attacking people who speak against their far-right ideology. It has caused a lot of self-censorship in the American cultural landscape.
J.G.: I was at the press conference here, and I found your speech genuinely moving. When I looked at the audience, there were so many women present that it struck me as a project created by women, in a way, and addressed to women as well.
A.G.: Well, I have a daughter, and I have a son. They are growing up in a world where it’s not unusual that their mum or friends are strong, autonomous, and have the status of creators or thinkers. There is a profound generational change. They aren’t worried about mom being “weird because she’s a feminist”, and that’s why I like to insist on the fact that the feminist project is a humanist project. Feminism can also generate productive discourses about men, and not exclusively critical or negative things. So I think this is another chapter still to be written.
J.G.: Returning for a moment to Katy Hessel, who was recently your guest here at MSN during the conference accompanying the exhibition – she often portrays her subjects as trailblazers who used their marginalised position to push artistic boundaries, as in Black Revolutionaries. Did you observe similar patterns among the artists featured in your exhibition?
A.G.: One story I particularly liked learning about was Inji Aflatoun, an Egyptian woman who was born into the upper classes but became a Marxist. She said she traded her class allegiance for the poor, and she was also a feminist, jailed in Egypt for her beliefs. She was trained by Egyptian artists connected to a surrealist movement before the war, called Art et Liberte; her teachers came from that avant-garde group.
Her story runs parallel to European history. Showing her with canonical artists, with her blue worker’s jacket, was meaningful. MSN supported the project by bringing work from Doha to highlight her history.
And that’s just one example, but I think this is a thread that runs throughout the show: many women artists had very progressive politics and were often persecuted for their affiliations. For example, Erna Rosenstein was arrested before the war for being a communist. All the women whom Zuzanna Hertzberg’s works address were leftists, whether anarchists, communists, or socialists, and many of them gave their lives for their beliefs. This is one of the most powerful aspects of their histories.
J.G.: Let’s talk about your collaboration with modern Polish artists. I’d like to ask about your experience: how do you see them compared with artists in other countries? Is there something different?
A.G.: Over the course of this project, I have a much bigger appreciation now of Polish artists from different periods and walks of life. Having worked in France for many years, I was already trying to dismantle some of the Anglo-American prejudices that were part of my initial education. For instance, when learning about the nineteenth century in Poland, I already knew about artists like Olga Boznańska, who was a wonderful image-maker, but then, in doing deeper research, I was profoundly impressed by her organisation of this new emergent generation of professionally trained women, creating this circle of women artists. What she was doing in Kraków and Paris mirrors what Rosa Bonheur called The Sisterhood of the Brush with the Union of Women Painters and Sculptors in Paris. This also connects to a figure such as Mela Muter, who went to Paris to find both an artistic and political community and became very involved in left-wing politics.
I also enjoyed discovering overlooked figures such as the Surrealist Anna Güntner, who isn’t even well known in Poland, and it was a pleasure to present her work next to Leonor Fini. These are two artists who use the toolbox of surrealism, and they should be on equal footing.
Another major part of this research was considering artists who came from ethnographic or folk collections through my collaboration with Ewa Klekot. We felt it was crucial to suggest a radical equality or horizontality of reading all of these artists in the same “pluriverse” (to quote Ewa). This attitude is also part of a feminist ethos about class and education. It was urgent to include as wide a range of artists and show them on equal footing, including those artists who are not European or not white, not putting them in a separate category or corner.
J.G.: Art history needs revisiting, not just for women artists but also for women curators, gallerists, and cultural figures who shaped the market and enabled major careers. Did this come up in your research for the exhibition? Were there women whose stories you felt urgently needed to be told?
A.G.: There has long been an irony that art history was written by men, but for the last century, many curators have been women. Women have always been protagonists in the art world: as gallerists, as curators, as artists. This exhibition is not just the result of my research; it’s built on this big collective project and through the work of so many women over many decades.
“Women have always been protagonists in the art world: as gallerists, as curators, as artists.”
The Woman Question 1550–2025
November 21, 2025 – May 3, 2026
Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw
