Does gender matter? Making Modernism, at the Royal Academy, reviewed

The catalogue to Making Modernism opens with an acknowledgment from the Royal Academy’s first female president, Rebecca Salter, that in the past it has overlooked women artists. To compensate, it has bundled seven – four headliners and three of their lesser-known contemporaries – into this one show.

Excluded from official art schools and reliant on private tuition and ‘ladies’ academies’, these seven women escaped the feminine curse of the three ‘Ks’ – Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen and church) – to forge independent careers in Germany before the first world war. They didn’t constitute an art movement, though Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin – both comfortably off – facilitated one. Every avant-garde movement needs a base, preferably with hospitality provided, and German expressionism was generously supplied with two in Werefkin’s ‘pink salon’ in Munich and Münter’s Bavarian holiday home in Murnau. It was in Murnau, where Münter and Wassily Kandinsky spent pre-war summers with Werefkin and Alexei Jawlensky in what became known as ‘the Russians’ House’, that the seeds of The Blue Rider were sown.