It’s a large canvas which, in the string of rooms at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire (Museum of Art and History, MAH) in Geneva, Switzerland, wouldn’t necessarily have caught our eye. The Death of Lucretia, painted around 1788 by Geneva artist Gabriel-Constant Vaucher, evokes the warm hues and chiaroscuro typical of neoclassical painting. Plus, a recurring theme: the suicide of Lucretia, that figure of virtue who, according to Gabriel-Constant Vaucher’s writings, took her own life after having been raped by Sextus, the son of the King of Rome. She appears unconscious, breast uncovered and surrounded by four belligerent Romans, including her husband Collatinus. “This is a fairly common structure in art history: living men, standing and clothed, bent over the body of a dead woman, lying naked. Here she’s got her boob out because…why not!”
This half-amused, half-exasperated tone is that of Julie Beauzac, the creator of Venus s’épilait la chatte? [ Did Venus shave her pussy?], an award-winning podcast in which, since 2019, she revisits art history from a feminist perspective. A process born of the realization, for this École du Louvre graduate, that gender bias was never part of the analytical framework — neither in the classroom nor in the museum.
And yet, the picture rails of major institutions are covered with “nonsensical” representations of women, as she puts it. “The idea is to provide an overview of the mechanisms of domination at work in the history of art, whether in terms of voyeurism, rape culture, or the objectification of the body”, Julie Beauzac explains. She chooses to illuminate this blind spot with humor, kindness, and pedagogy.
Swimming fantasies
A vision shared by the MAH. As part of the Les Créatives festival last November, it gave Julie Beauzac carte blanche to design a slightly atypical audio guide. Cultural Mediator Loyse Graf raves, “It’s a way of putting the museum and its collection right in the middle of the questions we ask ourselves every day and deconstruct certain art codes that have been raised on a pedestal as absolute truths!” There’s no question here of burning the classics, but instead contextualizing them. It’s about shifting and enriching viewpoints, whether seasoned or inexperienced.
At the entrance, you receive a QR code leading to a playlist: six 3-minute capsules that analyze as many paintings from the Beaux-Arts collection. You have to locate them in the rooms on the second floor, headphones on as if equipped with a new pair of glasses to see them differently.
Not far from Lucretia, the eroticized martyr, is Cleopatra (1550-1560). In this portrait, attributed to the painter Michele Tosini, she is holding a snake close to her chest. An example, among many others, of a woman who, despite having been a political leader for twenty years, was portrayed as half-naked and at the moment of her death — caused by the bite of an asp, according to some versions. A reflection of the art market at the time, when female nudes were prized and women were mere decorative objects, Julie Beauzac points out. She explains, “It all goes back to the Renaissance painting academies in Italy. It was in these ‘boys’ clubs’ that what would henceforth be ‘high art’ was decreed: subjects inspired by mythology or ancient history with a recurrence of scenes of sexual violence, abduction, and predation. At the time, some of these paintings were even placed in bedrooms to inspire these gentlemen to fulfill their marital duties!” As for the famous motif of ‘women in the bath’, painted at a time when ladies were far from basking in public in their simplest attire, we’re dealing with “a fantasy created by and for men”.
See Pierre Bonnard’s Nude Against the Light, in which a completely nude young girl appears to be observed without her knowledge as she puts on perfume. Or German Artist Carlos Schwabe’s The Wave (1907), a great black mass engulfing lamenting women in the foreground. The painting evokes hysteria, the ‘disease’ that has long stigmatized the female psyche”, Julie Beauzac analyzes.
The need for introspection
Far from being pompously exhaustive, this audio tour aims to be a pathfinder by offering the public keys with which to decode other works, including contemporary ones, since the last few centuries of visual culture have left their mark. The podcaster emphasizes, “You can see the direct impact between these 19th-century paintings, where guys look at women undressing, and a film like The Women on the 6th Floor starring Fabrice Luchini. It’s the same composition!”
Since the end of the festival, the audio guide continues to enlighten MAH visitors with a new web app and will soon be enhanced by six new tracks that will tackle other blind spots in art, such as classism or orientalism. “We’re still a long way from collectively exhausting these subjects”, says Julie Beauzac. If things have evolved since the launch of her podcast five years ago, and initiatives to decipher art through a feminist lens have flourished, they still depend largely on individual will. “There’s still a lot of pushback, particularly in the world of research and museum institutions. Art history teaching, too, has changed little even if today’s students are more aware of these issues than we used to be. Once this generation takes up curating and communications posts, it’s going to be a game changer!”
It’s high time that art museums, as places of culture and encounter, took a closer look at themselves, says Loyse Graf. “Unlike ethnographic museums, which have largely taken the question of provenance into their own hands, history and art museums have been slow to ask themselves these questions, to take art off its pedestal”. Some have launched campaigns to rewrite the plates that accompany works featuring problematic terms, such as at the Prado Museum in Madrid. The mediator stresses, “Of course, it’s not just a question of changing the vocabulary, but also of questioning the way we tell the story. It’s about opening up debate, including and representing the audiences of tomorrow.”