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An extremely quirky, highly curious show called “Musée Imaginaire” opened earlier this month in an equally curious place for an artist’s solo debut: Sag Harbor, Long Island. It’s a museum-like exhibition of 15 portraits by Elisabetta Zangrandi, a little-known, self-taught artist who lives in a tiny village just outside Verona, that passionate Italian town that Shakespeare chose as the setting for Romeo and Juliet. (To put Zangrandi in another context, she and Maurizio Cattelan were born the same year, 1960, in Italy, less than 45 minutes away from each other.)
Zangrandi’s portraits playfully take on a big swath of art history, reinterpreting famous self-portraits by women artists of the past—nearly 1,000 years’ worth. There’s the nun Guda’s early 12th-century self-portrait from her Book of Homilies (it’s thought to be the earliest signed self-portrait by a woman in Western Europe), and a 1548 self-portrait by Catharina van Hemessen, believed to be the first image of an artist holding a palette and working at an easel as she paints. The 17th-century ladies Artemisia Gentileschi and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun are present, and so is Paula Modersohn-Becker, in her 1907 Self Portrait with Two Flowers in her Raised Left Hand. The show wouldn’t be complete without 20th-century pioneers Frida Kahlo and Alice Neel.
Zangrandi, who began painting on rocks when she was a child, gives us her own take on these historic, iconic women artists—and puts herself right there with them—transforming Keyes Art gallery into an alternative feminist museum. It’s no surprise that the show’s curator is Alison M. Gingeras, whose art historically cheeky and mind-stretching book Pictures Girls Make is out this summer. Zangrandi and Gingeras have been corresponding via Instagram for a few years, and the “Musée Imaginaire” was born out of this. My own conversation with Gingeras follows:
Vogue: How did the idea take shape?
Alison Gingeras: When I was doing research for “Pictures Girls Make,” Elisabetta sent me a work in progress that was a reprisal of [Diego Velázquez’s] Las Meninas, and it really struck a chord with me. It felt like she was taking up a famous art historical painting and inserting her own authorship into her appropriation of the image, turning it into a veiled self-portrait.
I love the idea of a “veiled” self-portrait. That’s a show in itself.
On the spot, I invited her to my “Pictures Girls Make” show in Los Angeles.
The show at Blum last summer, that launched the book.
Yes. And after she came to LA and listened to me talk about my research for the show, and the deeper research I’m doing on women artists going back centuries, the idea emerged that she would paint self-portraits of other women artists, starting with Guda the nun in the 12th century. I have a Dropbox where I collect “Palette Portraits” by artist women. I shared images with Elisabetta, and every couple of days she would send me a portrait she would make based on the this collection. And our “Musée Imaginaire” came to pass!
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As an aside, how did you come up with the title “Pictures Girls Make”?
From a disparaging quip by Willem de Kooning, who referred to his wife Elaine’s portraiture practice as “pictures girls make,” which to me was a rallying cry, not only to assert the primacy of artist-women through the centuries who practiced portraiture, but who actually pioneered some of the most powerful and enduring genres within portraiture. Why had I never learned in my years of formal training that it was a woman who created the first “palette portrait”? Every Old Master worth their salt made one over the centuries, but it is crucial to me that it was a 16th-century European woman who invented this genre!
You’ve had a focus on women artists for a number of years, long before it became fashionable—and not only acceptable, but required, really. When did that start and how did it develop?
I became a born-again feminist art historian about 10 years ago. I had this ambition to publish a collection of my essays around 2014 and I was looking at my bibliography, and it struck me how gender-skewed my curatorial and writing work was! I had hardly written on any women artists—and in fact, so much of my earlier work had focused on “bad boys.” I had to ask myself, where were the bad girls?
I think my generation was the spoiled inheritors of Second Wave feminism. So, after Judy Chicago and the strong women of the ’80s, like Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, et al., I never felt that “the women question” was ours to take up. How wrong I was!
What is the big, historical woman artist show you’re working on for a museum in Poland?
It’s called “The Woman Question: Artist and Agency (1550-2025),” and it’s due to open in November 2025 at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
How did your 2019 John Currin show at Dallas Contemporary fit in with your thinking? You included him in your 2002 “Dear Painter” show that to this day is one of my all-time favorite museum shows. But I don’t think a lot of people would ID John as a feminist sympathizer.
I was always bothered that there were many knee-jerk dismissals of his work as being misogynist because he painted women with big boobs or very erotic portrayals of his wife and muse. I had tried to write in numerous essays a more nuanced understanding of how John used the vessel of “women” as an allegory for a host of issues, most often probing the foibles of his own masculinity. Then, after doing so much deep reading on feminist art history and political theory, I thought, Why not look at the men in John’s paintings, which in fact are so revelatory in their critique of masculinity and, more often than not, make hysterical yet politically relevant send-ups of male desire, fragile masculinities, and other topics that were being debated? I started to see his men as poster boys for the #MeToo movement. When I talked with John, he agreed with my readings of his male subjects. It turns out, he is a die-hard feminist through the back door, after all.
“Elisabetta Zangrandi: Musée Imaginaire” is on view at Keyes Art in Sag Harbor through June 26.