Why a Long-Awaited Artemisia Gentileschi Exhibition Is So Significant (Smithsonian) [View all]

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By Isis Davis-Marks
smithsonianmag.com
an hour ago



For the first time in its 196-year history, London’s National Gallery is set to dedicate a major exhibition to a female artist, reports Joanna Moorhead for the Art Newspaper. The show—which runs from October 3 to January 24, 2021—centers on Artemisia Gentileschi, a Baroque painter described by BBC News as “the Beyoncé of art history.”

Postponed for six months due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the long-awaited “Artemisia” has already earned rave reviews: The Telegraph’s Alastair Sooke deemed the exhibition a brilliant showcase of “the queen bee of female empowerment,” while the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones characterized it as a “blood-spattered thrill ride into vengeance.”

Per a press release, the National Gallery’s December 2018 acquisition of Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1615–17)—the first Gentileschi work to enter a public collection in the United Kingdom, as well as only the 21st painting by a woman to join the museum’s holdings—inspired its Baroque blockbuster. In addition to Saint Catherine, the show features such works as Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (c. 1638–9), Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy (1620–25) and two versions of Judith Beheading Holofernes.

At a virtual press conference held earlier this week, the gallery’s director, Gabriele Finaldi, said the challenges curators faced when organizing the exhibition in some ways reflected Gentileschi’s own life story.

She “overc[ame] difficult situations through sheer willpower and talent … and I think there’s some element of that in the way we worked on the exhibition,” Finaldi said, as quoted by the Art Newspaper. “I hope people will come and see the exhibition and use it as an opportunity to sense that we can get through the Covid crisis.”
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more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/national-gallery-exhibits-work-artemisia-gentileschi-180975971/