In Ancient Corinth, a young woman had a pretty good idea: she drew the shadow profile of her lover, which she had cast on the wall with the help of a light source; as a memento of the departing beloved one, who, like most men in mythological narratives, was probably a hero travelling on a mission. Called Dibutade or Kore/Kora/Kallirhoe depending on the source, the protagonist and her story are often stylised as the origin myth of painting or drawing. What has remained of Kore are romanticised depictions of a young woman painting her lover (often in the presence of a Cupid guiding her hand) – a motif that has been depicted by numerous painters¹ throughout art history. Instead of entering the history of the Western notion of art as an inventive maker, Kore herself was reduced to being a muse.

In her solo exhibition All Muses are Dead Donna Volta Newmen focuses on the complex characters and hidden histories of the artists, inventors, political wire-pullers, and patrons hidden behind the countless, often anonymous portraits of women in Western art history and its institutions. Her portraits insist on the authorship, autonomy, (self-)representation, and subjectivity of the depicted persons. Newmen’s historical, personally known or sometimes fictional figures are stubborn, defying the male gaze’s ideals of beauty and grace; they are rebellious or vulnerable, at times marked by age or exhaustion, at times demonstratively self-assured in their appearance. Respecting the individuality of her subjects, the artist abandons the serial language characteristic of printmaking – line etching, aquatint, mezzotint, and drypoint – by employing painterly elements of monotype. The results are not editions, but individual works.

The traditional craft of printmaking has been listed as Intangible Cultural Heritage since 2018. The fact that it is a historically male-dominated practice has been readily justified in the past on the grounds that it is a physically demanding craft as well as requiring a chemical knowledge of acids. In her artistic research, Newmen observed that the few women who found a place in the art historical canon as the originators of print works were often daughters of master printers. A detail akin to both Newmen’s own biography and that of Dibutade/Kore – whose attributed name was derived either from that of her father, the artist Butades, or from the (ancient) Greek word Κόρη which simply means “girl” or “daughter.”

By declaring death to the muses, Donna Volta Newmen’s new works not only create critical references to (art) historically female-attributed roles, but also point out that the exclusion mechanisms established for centuries in relation to the intersectional categories of gender, race, sexuality, and social class are still reflected in monetary and representational realities today; female identifying artists remain underpaid and institutionally underrepresented in gender-specific comparisons.² All Muses are Dead celebrates such figures who have been structurally excluded from art history or reduced to being a muse, while also honouring their inventive strategies: from Kore’s shadow drawing on the wall to the characteristic side-eye in female portraits – a pose that may be read as a submissive posture, but in truth often stems from the fact that women were long prohibited from drawing from live models and instead directed their gaze diagonally downward into a mirror to portray themselves.³ This bombastic side eye⁴ can be found in Newmen’s portraits alongside other more or less subtly defiant poses, standing in as subversive and emancipatory gestures for social and political processes of change in historical as well as contemporary contexts of self-representation.

Text: Linnéa Bake

^{1) Wikipedia compiles an (incomplete) list of these works, often under variations of the title The Invention of Painting. Of the 30 works listed (1676-2008), 6 were painted by women, 4 of which are contemporary artists.
2) Women make up the majority of students at art academies (70%), but are affected by the gender pay gap (30% in 2021 (German Federal Statistical Office, 2022) – in comparison, the cross-sector gender pay gap was 18% in 2021 in Germany) as well as the so-called gender show gap, which assesses the gallery representation of women and their presence in exhibitions or at fairs. In the context of historical collections, the gender-specific comparative numbers are even more extreme. The Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, for example, has a maximum of 2% female artists in its collection. In its recently opened exhibition Secessions: Klimt, Liebermann, Stuck, 220 works by men and 15 by women are featured, as the organisation fair share! recently published on Instagram.
3) see Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021)
4) The term bombastic side eye refers to a TikTok trend in which users stage a sideways glance to express disdain or disapproval of others’ statements.}