Curatorial statement

Responding to current issues on the place of women in society, Women & Arms interrogates the artistic association of femininity with violence and power.

Women with gems, men with blades, such is the traditional gendered imagery. Yet, some painters focused on the female empowerment through the use of weapons.

Seduction is, in arts, the most common representation of female power. Women & Arms brings into light the ambivalence of seduction, which can bring war as well as peace. One can find women represented with actual weapons as part of the tradition of milites Christi (“Christ’s soldiers”). The virtue of courage, usually associated with men, can actually be seen in a more gender-neutral way within a Christian context. The spiritual fight against sin is for all. The final work, the state portrait of Catherine II of Russia, focuses on the assertion of power through the use of martial iconography, demonstrating that armed women are not limited to allegorical images. Indeed, some decided to express their political ambitions through art, maybe the most efficient arm of all.

Putting together European artworks from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Women & Arms aims to explore different representations of women in a seemingly unexpected context. Following the artists’ palette in this exhibition, we discover the many facets of armed women in paintings: red, rose and gold resonate with images of violence, seduction, and power. Whether saints, sovereigns or seductresses, the women featured in this exhibition all express the same spirit. Being weak yet victorious, armed women serve as an inspiring image of salvation and emancipation from any kind of dominance. These representations question, in the end, the term of “weak sex”.