As an activity intended to complement the exhibition Women Masters, the museum is organising a seminar led by Marian López Fernández Cao. It will reflect on and reassess some particularly significant women in the world of Spanish art. These are figures whom the patriarchal canon of art history, moulded by gender privileges and social prejudices, was unable to appreciate or locate in their rightful place. They are: Alejandrina Gessler, known as Madame Anselma (Cádiz, 1831-Paris, 1907), María Luisa Puiggener (Jerez de la Frontera, 1875-Sevilla, 1921), Lluïsa Vidal (Barcelona, 1876-1918), María Blanchard (Santander, 1881-Paris, 1932) and Maruja Mallo (Lugo, 1902-Madrid, 1995).

Led by five women experts in art history, art education and aesthetics and within the context of the reassessment and reappraisal of women artists proposed in the exhibition itself and in the other associated activities, this lecture cycle provides an opportunity to analyse not only the significant contribution made by these artists’ respective works, some of which are on display in the galleries, but also the issue of being a professional female artist in the complex context of Spain and how history included or excluded them from a paradigm now seen as outdated.

Director: Marian Lopez Fdez. Cao. Professor of Artistic Education of the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. Expert in art, feminist theory and psychosocial inclusion.

8 November

From Madame to Master: the herstory of how Anselma became a painter, by Laura Triviño Cabrera, professor at the University of Malaga.

15 November

Lluïsa Vidal, the star painter of “Feminal”, by María Ángeles Cabré, a writer specialising in women and feminisms, director of the Cultural Gender Observatory.

22 November

An outstanding artist who surpassed many male masters: María Luisa Puiggener (1875-1921) and her social and feminist causes, by Magdalena Illán, professor of art history at the University of Seville, director of the department of art history and coordinator of the Permanent Observatory of Art and Gender.

29 November

María Blanchard. A woman outside her time, by Pilar V. de Foronda, sculptor, activist and feminist.

13 December

Maruja Mallo: transgression and avant-garde, by Mercedes Gómez-Blesa, secondary school philosophy teacher, essayist, art critic and poet.

With the collaboration of:

Spanish Women Masters. Constructing a genealogy of Spanish art

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