English
Deutsch
Repressed, forgotten, celebrated: the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna is presenting the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the Flemish Baroque painter Michaelina Wautier (c.1614–1689) – one of the most important rediscoveries in recent art history. Following in the tradition of Rubens and Van Dyck, she is rightly celebrated for her brilliant brushwork, her versatility, her wide range of pictorial themes, and the self-assurance with which she depicted male bodies and their anatomy, which was extraordinary for a female painter of her time. Almost all of Wautier’s surviving works are now being presented in Vienna for the first time, including paintings that have never before been shown in public.
An unusual case in art history
Michaelina Wautier was an exceptional artist of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, her work was underestimated, forgotten, or attributed to male colleagues for centuries. At a time when women artists were mainly engaged in still life or genre painting, Wautier confidently excelled in the demanding field of history painting. Her monumental The Triumph of Bacchus, for example, was mistakenly attributed to Rubens’s pupils or even Luca Giordano until the 1960s – too …
Continue reading the article on DEEDS.NEWS.
Abb. oben: Image above: The Triumph of Bacchus, Michaelina Wautier, c. 1655–59, Oil on canvas, 271.5 × 355.5 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Picture Gallery, © KHM-Museumsverband.
