Women as Muse at Herakleidon Museum
The eternal mystery of femininity has always been a search for artists and they showcased these searches through their works of art. If they found the real essence of what women are or not, I do not know; what I know however is that they tried to bring on canvases or to materialize in different stones the woman. Artists across centuries made portraits of women, as real as possible or as fantastic as their minds could be trying to discover what is hidden behind glazes and smiles. Therefore, women were muses for artists in every field of art: literature, painting, music or dance.
However, paintings are some of the works of art that try to make viewers wonder in front of a woman. Either using just black crayon or colors they intent to bring upfront the woman in her essence. But no matter how much they try they do not succeed but to illustrate the woman in fragments. Maybe this is the reason behind the exhibition displayed at Herakleidon Museum. The exhibition opened on September 3rd and will be open until November 21st, 2010. It gathers works of great painters that were given to the museum by the Greek National Gallery, the Alpha Bank Collection, as well as from the private collections of Mr. George Economou and Mr. Charalambos Leontiadis. The ninety works exhibited belong to European artists, including artists from Greece and they try to view the woman as she was at the beginning of the 20th century.
“Woman as Muse, 1900-1950″ displays portraits in crayon, watercolors, prints and drawings of artists such as: Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonard, Pablo Picasso, Emmanuel Zeppos, Gustav Klimt, George Economidis, Dimitrios Galanis, Costas Grammatopoulos, Franz von Stuck, Lev Tchistovsky and Alfons Walde, among many others.
Their works will certainly show that women are complex and they are never going to be completely understood, as some of them will present the woman as mother, lover, spy, while others are going to present her as powerful, weak, or sensual. Regarded as a whole, the exhibition might reveal a woman’s mystery, but every piece of work taken separately will just make the viewers understand the way women were perceived in the first fifty years of the 20th century.11
