The Woman Question 1550–2025

The Eranos Foundation pleased to highlight the exhibition “The Woman Question 1550–2025” (November 21, 2025–May 3, 2026) at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, curated by Alison M. Gingeras, which also includes some images collected by the founder of Eranos, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881-1962), for the Eranos Archive for Research in Symbolism.

The growing interest in the world of modern and contemporary art and academia for the works created or collected by Eranos founder Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881-1975) is documented by a relevant series of world-class exhibitions promoted in recent times, under the auspices of the Eranos Foundation, by the Trussardi Foundation in Milan in 2015 (“The Great Mother”), the New Museum in New York in 2016 (“The Keeper”), the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2021 (“Elles font l'abstraction”), the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 2021-2022 (“Mujeres de la abstracción”), the Kunsthalle in Mainz in 2023 (“Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn. Tiefes Wissen”), the Museo Casa Rusca in Locarno in 2024-2025 ("Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn: artist - researcher“), the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht in 2025 (”Tussen hemel en oorlog. Kunst en religie in het interbellum“), the Landesmuseum in Zurich in 2025-2026 (”Landscapes of the Soul. C.G. Jung and the exploration of the human psyche in Switzerland“), and again by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in 2025 (”Morgan le Fay. Memories from the invisible"). The organization of these important exhibitions went hand in hand with the publication of the relative catalogues, which also documented a gradual diffusion of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn's works, in anticipation of a future critical edition of these materials, the so-called "Blue Book," by the Eranos Foundation.

The exhibition “The Woman Question 1550–2025” challenges the notion that women were largely absent from art before the late 1800s. The nine-part visual narrative is a testament to the enduring and dynamic creativity of women artists over the last 500 years. The result is a collection of nearly 200 works, including paintings by Renaissance, Baroque and 19th-century women artists through more contemporary works, offering a centuries-long visual history of women’s “emancipation.”

It’s a fallacy that women artists were rare exceptions before the 20th century. "The Woman Question" demonstrates that women have consistently pursued their creative missions despite being often underappreciated and operating against various social restrictions. Women have asserted their artistic presence while simultaneously using their art to represent and validate their individual experiences. In addition to showcasing a diverse range of artistic practices, the exhibition aims to show the power inherent in a feminist approach to art history—one that demands justice, restores the voices of the “erased,” and leads to a revision of the so-called canon.

Before the advent of modern feminism, there was “the woman question.” La querelle des femmes was the phrase used by writers such as Christine de Pizan (1364–c.1430), who authored Le Livre de la cité des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405). Her allegorical city was imagined to offer protection and to conserve the histories of important women. Pizan’s writing was among the first to articulate challenges to the systemic misogyny that was the norm in European society. Asking “the woman question” (as the querelle became known in English) radically identified a previously unrecognized social and political category: women. Pizan and her cohort of early modern feminist philosophers articulated the link between gender and power, laying the foundation for movements that have come to be known as feminism. “The woman question” emerged as a coded refrain for intellectual and political interrogation of women’s subjugation and became a rallying cry for revolutionary and suffragist movements. The exhibition borrows this phrase to encapsulate almost five hundred years of women’s creativity.

The open-endedness of the “question” of the exhibition’s title reflects how the very category “woman” has itself emerged as a question to be explored by a range of artists—in particular those who identify as trans-women, gender non-conforming or as non-binary. By adopting an all-inclusive definition of womanhood, this exhibition hopes to prolong the legacy of this early feminist querelle into our present day.