The last face that meets visitors to the Prado’s first post-lockdown exhibition is one of the very few that appears to look the spectator squarely in the eye.
The cool gaze of the Portuguese-Spanish artist María Roësset – free of guilt, shame, saccharine virtue or predatory intent – comes as something of a relief after the sanctimonious, salacious and often sad series of pictures that precede it.
To reach Roësset, a gauntlet must be run: of women depicted in art variously as fallen, proud, mad, naked, and one even presented as femme fatale, her face partially bathed in red light and a cigarette clasped in a holder between her fingers.
The exhibition, whose English title is Uninvited Guests, explores how artworks bought and celebrated by the Spanish state between 1833 and 1931 treated women as people and artists.
The show is divided into 17 self-explanatory sections such as “the patriarchal mould”, “the art of indoctrination”, “guidance for the wayward”, “mothers under judgment”, and “nudes”.
One of the aims, according to the curator, Carlos G Navarro, is to explain “how the state – and the middle classes – came to fix on and publicly value certain images, prototypes and cliches that eventually became a collective imagination in which women were always represented in certain ways”.
Hence the depiction of a beautiful, but apparently excessively proud, woman next to a peacock, the picture of girls learning how to sew, the image of a crone-like clairvoyant and the many, many nudes.
Luis García Sampedro’s 1895 work, God Orders Us to Forgive, shows a priest interceding on behalf of a young woman as she begs her father’s forgiveness for running off with a more well-to-do suitor.
The second part of the exhibition chronicles how women finally managed to invite themselves to the party by working in the less threatening roles of miniaturists, copyists, and painters of still lifes and flowers.
But efforts to progress further than that and to paint whatever they wanted were sometimes thwarted.
Aurelia Navarro’s 1908 Female Nude, which strongly echoes Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, won much admiration and an award at that year’s national exhibition. But the attendant publicity and family pressure eventually led Navarro to abandon art and secular life and enter a convent in Córdoba.
Although Roësset, whose pensive, full-length self-portrait is the last exhibit, was born into a more progressive and cosmopolitan family, her career as an artist only began in earnest after she was widowed while still in her 20s. The picture, however, signposts the beginning of a somewhat more enlightened age.
The exhibition has not been without its ironies nor its controversies. Last Wednesday, the Prado had to pull one of the paintings from the show after it emerged that it had been misattributed and was the work of a male, rather than female, artist.
It has also faced criticism from some female artists and academics, who have accused the museum of echoing the very misogyny it has sought to expose by focusing on many works by men rather than celebrating those by women.
“It’s meant to be the first time that the Prado has considered the question of female artists in the 19th century, but it’s also been done from a misogynistic point of view and still projects the misogyny of that century,” the art historian and critic Rocío de la Villa told the Guardian.
She described the exhibition as a “missed opportunity”, adding: “It should have been about recovering and rediscovering female artists and giving them their due.”
In an open letter to Spain’s culture ministry, De la Villa and seven other female experts said the Prado had failed “in its fundamental role as a bastion of the symbolic values of a democratic and equal society”.
Navarro, however, argues that Uninvited Guests is partly an act of self-criticism by the Prado over its complicity in ignoring so many female artists in the 19th century. He points out that the exhibition is intended to provide social, historical and artistic context and is not a standalone showcase for female artists.
“For me as a curator, the biggest problem female artists had in the 19th century was how they were treated by a state that protected, promoted and indulged male artists and left them totally passed over,” he said.
“It reduced them to decorative elements like still-life painters and flower painters. I think contemporary criticism doesn’t get that because it can’t contextualise the process of a historical exhibition.”
Of the 130 works on show, 60 are signed by women and 70 by men. But Navarro believes it’s “not a question of numbers but of arguments and reasoning. Visitors aren’t going to be counting the works as they go around; it’s about them understanding what happened, and going home and thinking about which pictures the Prado has and which ones it doesn’t have.”
The show, he added, was always meant to provoke discussion about the museum’s past – and its future.
“I’d like there to be a debate about the second part and about how we represent the profile of 19th-century female artists in the museum,” he said.
“Both are necessary debates. But we need them to be constructive: what do we do with the pictures of the girls, or the ones of the slaves? Our stores are full of these kinds of images so what should we do with them? Which of the pictures in this exhibition should be on permanent show? That’s what I’d like people to debate because that’s the feedback museums need.”
• Uninvited Guests is at the Prado until 14 March 2021
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