The Woman Question 1550–2025 at MoMA Warsaw: A 500-Year Survey of Feminist Figuration
What does it look like when five centuries of women’s art refuses to behave politely? At the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, “The Woman Question 1550–2025” answers with a sprawling, deliberately unruly survey: almost 200 works by around 140 women artists, assembled by curator Alison M. Gingeras into banner-like thematic chapters that insist feminist gains are never guaranteed.
The exhibition’s emotional temperature is set before you fully enter the main hall. Two paintings, hung as a kind of threshold, establish both the show’s historical reach and its blunt contemporary edge: Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c. 1656)’s “Susanna and the Elders” (1610) and Swiss painter Miriam Cahn (b. 1949)’s “Must Strike Back” (2024).
Gentileschi’s “Susanna” stages the biblical story as a scene of coercion and dread. The elders’ hands press in; Susanna’s body recoils; the stone bench reads as cold and unforgiving against her skin; a sharp shadow under her right foot lands like a threat. The painting’s charge is inseparable from Gentileschi’s biography: she made it at 17, shortly before she was raped by her tutor Agostino Tassi and later forced to prove her innocence under thumbscrew torture. Allegory, here, becomes a map of lived violence.
Cahn’s “Must Strike Back” answers across centuries with a different kind of nakedness: a woman’s body is not offered up to the gaze but mobilized as defiance. One hand is placed in her vagina; the other is clenched into a fist, striking an erect male figure beside her. The image is confrontational, even abrasive, and it clarifies the exhibition’s central proposition: women artists have long made work that pushes back against patriarchal looking.
That refusal is amplified at the entrance by the looping of Gina Birch’s short film “3 Minute Scream” (1977). Birch’s punk, red-lipped scream functions as both a literal soundtrack and a curatorial thesis statement, framing the show as a collective act of insistence rather than a tidy historical correction.
The title nods to “la querelle des femmes”, the long-running European debate about women’s nature and social role, and to Medieval court writer Christine de Pizan, whose “The Book of the City of Ladies” (1405) imagined an allegorical refuge built to preserve women’s histories. In Warsaw, that idea is updated into a demand: “woman” not as a footnote to culture, but as a full citizen of art.
Gingeras’s approach is knowingly in conversation with landmark feminist exhibitions. The show draws inspiration from “Women Artists 1550–1950”, organized by Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris and toured in the US in 1976–77, and it also echoes the ambitions of “Global Feminisms” at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007 (associated with Nochlin and Maura Reilly). Yet “The Woman Question 1550–2025” is more explicitly transhistorical, and it keeps its focus tight on figurative painting and sculpture — a choice that makes the body, and the politics of representing it, unavoidable.
The opening section, “Femmes Fortes: Allegories of Agencies”, sets a tone of agency and counter-mythmaking, pairing works such as Belgian Surrealist Jane Graverol’s “Judith and Holofernes” (1949) with British artist Lubaina Himid (b. 1954)’s “Amphitrite” (2025), an allegorical portrait of the sea goddess as a monumental Black woman. From there, “Education and the Canon” turns to the question of training, self-fashioning, and the strategies women have used to insert themselves into art history’s official story.
One of the exhibition’s most coherent sequences arrives in “Palettes and Power”, where mastery becomes literal. Here, the palette is treated not just as a tool but as a symbol — its womb-like shape recast as an emblem of authority. Across the room, painters appear as protagonists of their own making, brush in hand with the force of a weapon.
Standout works include Italian Renaissance painter Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532–1625)’s “Self-Portrait at the Easel” (1554–56), which punctures the lazy assumption that women only gained access to serious artistic training in the 19th century. Nearby, French painter Marie-Guillemine Benoist (1768–1826)’s Neo-Classical “Self-Portrait” (1786) stages a pointed duality: a sensual bare shoulder paired with a steady, professional grip on the brush.
Gingeras also makes a locally resonant intervention by including Polish artist Felicja Curyło (1903–1986)’s tempera “Self-Portrait” (1950–59). Known for folk “painted cottage” art, Curyło represents the kinds of women’s practices that institutions have often sidelined as decorative or minor. In this context, the work reads as a corrective: a claim for seriousness on terms that do not require assimilation.
In The Art Newspaper’s review, the exhibition earns an overall rating of four and a half stars, with five stars for the show and four for the works. The distinction is telling. “The Woman Question 1550–2025” is not simply a parade of masterpieces; it is an argument built through accumulation, friction, and historical echo. Its most persuasive achievement may be the way it makes continuity visible — not only of women’s artistic ambition, but of the pressures that have repeatedly tried to contain it.
“The Woman Question 1550–2025” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. (Dates were not provided in the source text.)
