They reexamine the collection of the National Museum of San Carlos from gender

The National Museum of San Carlos (MNSC) has a collection of more than 2 thousand works by 637 male artists and only 12 by women, plus 711 anonymous pieces.

In the last room (Un)order the collection from genre The work of this minority is shown, coming from various places and different historical periods, from the 15th century to the mid-20th century.

For the first time, the work of Johanna Vergouwen (1630-1714), Elisabeth Cousinet Lempereur (1726-?); Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744-1818); Maria Catharina Prestel (1747-1794); Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun (1755-1842), portrait painter of Queen Marie Antoinette; Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899); Florennce Arquin (1900-1974), and the Mexicans María Guadalupe de Moncada y Berrio (1776-1856), Pilar de la Hidalga (1816-1891), Carmen Duarte (1862-1932), Carlotta Camacho Hall (1876-1956) and Pilar Calvo (1913-1986). Of the latter, the MNSC presents an individual exhibition on the ground floor of the venue.

It is a “mini-exhibition” within (Un)order the collection from genre to the extent that “it follows another logic,” said curator Raquel Fundia. That is to say, the painters receive more attention than the themes of their works, which, in fact, come out of the exhibition script. It is a section that invites us to rethink the work of women in different historical periods who, in the end, “also represented the world and were active as artists.”

In this one, “we try to contextualize these women and rethink our own prejudices from the time in which they worked.” Fundia referred to the case of Pilar Calvo, who “has almost not been remembered, although she was a professional painter, she had exhibitions in Mexico and abroad.” And he questioned: “why, after that, do we not remember her as much?” In addition to offering profiles of the 12 artists, a quote from them is included, when possible, or a comment on their work.

The general intention of (Un)order the collection from genre It is “to leave the classic chronology and see the vast collection of the MNSC, not with different eyes, although with new questions,” said Fundia. Beyond the traditional sequence of Gothic, Renaissance, Mannerism and Baroque, “we began to look at the motifs present in the works, the themes that are repeated, to extract certain themes that are reflected in the sections of the exhibition.”

“We did not want to insert the themes into preconceived notions regarding the 19th century; for example, about gender, but rather into those that we see repeated in these works and that allow us to always talk about them from the collection, respecting the work that we already have, although accommodating it in a different way. Try to see what they represented in their own moments, what they tried to normalize, perpetuate, even criticize.”

The exhibition is divided into five cores: Portraits of women, Rereading the images of women in religious painting, The naked body and gender imaginaries, Affections, power and violence, and The artists of the collection. In Rereading the Images… archetypes are presented such as the “good” women – the Immaculate Conception, Madonnas with the Child and the Holy Family –, the “bad” women – Bethzabe, Mary Magdalene and Eve – and the wise transgressors – Judith, Salomé and Delilah.

Regarding the section The naked body…, when reviewing the collection this theme and how it is represented prevailed. However, “male bodies when naked are almost always related to religious passages, saints and penitents, and are closer to vulnerability, suffering and spirituality. Female nudes are more linked to mythological motifs,” observed the curator.

Jorge Reynosa Pohlenz, director of the MNSC, emphasized the “periodic and critical review” of the museum’s collection, something that is not exclusive to the museum: “It is a global trend for these art collections to seek new readings also based on contemporary situations and problems.”

(Dis)order the collection through genre It will remain until September 2026 at the National Museum of San Carlos (Avenida México-Tenochtitlán 50, Colonia Tabacalera).