31: Women

About

›31: Women‹, the Daimler Art Collection’s new Berlin show, references two groundbreaking presentations held at Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery Art of This Century, the Exhibition by 31 Women, 1943, and The Women, 1945.Initiator and co-curator was Guggenheim’s friend and advisor, the artist Marcel Duchamp. These were the first exhibitions in the United States that focused, to this extent, exclusively on women artists. The women represented a young generation, from eleven different countries. In terms of content, representatives of Surrealism found themselves alongside abstract painters, Dada-influenced artists and previously unknown new trends.

Taking its lead from these important founding documents of feminist art history, the exhibition ›31: Women‹, with some sixty works from the Daimler Art Collection, brings two longstanding emphases of the collection into sharper focus. The concentration on leading female figures in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and the research and projects conducted since 2016 on Duchamp, curatorial practice, and the readymade. Our ›31: Women‹ show begins, in historical terms, with works from the Bauhaus and concrete art traditions, moves on to European and American movements such as Zero and Minimalism, and then broadens the horizon with younger artists from India, South Africa, Nigeria, Chile, Israel, the United States, and other countries. The exhibition brings together early feminist trends and global perspectives of contemporary art in surprising constellations and thematic stagings. 

Curator: Renate Wiehager

Assistant curators: Nadine Isabelle Henrich, Sarah Maske

Exhibition organization: Kathrin Hatesaul, Maria Radke

Two new publications accompany the exhibition.

Marcel Duchamp: The curatorial work (Renate Wiehager)

They are legendary in speech and image: Marcel Duchamp’s disguises and countless photographic self-stagings, his ironic, sarcastic, humorous comments on art, the art industry, art criticism and art history. Less well known is a Marcel Duchamp who, with great empathy and strategic awareness, embraced the cause of the artists in his contemporary cultural environment: as curator of exhibitions from the early 1910s to his death in 1968, as juror and as consultant for some of the most important collections, museums and galleries of modern art. The volume outlines nearly forty exhibitions, supplemented by recent research results, and illustrates Duchamp’s close cooperation with protagonists of his time: Louise and Walter Conrad Arensberg, Katherine S. Dreier, Francis Picabia, Sidney and Harriet Janis as well as André Breton, Julien Levy, or Peggy Guggenheim.

Marcel Duchamp. The Women. Les Femmes. Die Frauen. Las Mucheres

(Renate Wiehager und Katharina Neuburger)

The publication Duchamp and the Women offers an unusual perspective on the ›artist of the Century‹ Marcel Duchamp. Consisting of essays and biographical portraits of more than a hundred female leading figures reaching from early 20th century Modernism to the 1960s, who shaped the life and work of Marcel Duchamp, the publication traces the initiatives and collaborations which accompanied and inspired Duchamp’s artistic practice. Furthermore, important texts by women are made accessible and are translated into English or German, which previously could be found available in rare sources or published in French only. The book unfolds the social and cultural work of female collectors, gallery owners, artist colleagues and authors, revealing the featured women’s formative influence for their time in Europe and the United States.

Essays on e.g.: Louise Arensberg / Djuna Barnes / Katherine S. Dreier / Suzanne Duchamp / Peggy Guggenheim / Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven / Mina Loy / Maria Martin / Louise Norton / Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia / Mary Reynolds / Carrie, Ettie and Florine Stettheimer / Beatrice Wood.

The publications will be published in February 2020 and can be acquired at the Exhibition space Daimler Contemporary at a Special Price.

As part of the Exhibition commissioned Artist Portraits by painter Marcus Neufanger will be on view.