Synopsis
Women have always witten art history and worked on eye-level with their male contemporaries. Together they claimed new paths and caused sensations – but despite this neither their names nor their works are known today. Up to this day women play minor roles in art history and are rarely mentioned as trailblazers of new art styles. LOST WOMEN ART explores the mechanisms of this systematic omission of highly talented artists. In two parts the documentary takes a look at the forgotten artists, tells the story of the suppressed female avant-garde and by doing so re-tells art history.Women have always written art history and worked on eye-level with their male contemporaries. But despite the fact that female artists‘ works have always sold well and they always shaped artists’ circles, up to this day women play only minor roles in the canon of art and if they are remembered at all, it is as 'exceptions'.
The consequences are far-reaching: On the art market women get paid significantly less and in the collections of our museums, just five percent of the works are by female artists. How is this possible? Why did female artists and their oeuvres fall into oblivion in the first place?
Together with art historians, museum curators and pioneering institutions that are all fighting for more recognition of female artists, the documentary tells their ground-breaking and moving life stories. LOST WOMEN ART is an homage to great female art and visionary female artists – such as impressionist Berthe Morisot, front woman of the Russian avant-garde Natalja Gontscharowa or pioneer of abstraction Hilma af Klint. Unknown names like that of Germaine Krull, photographer of the new vision, or pop artist Kiki Kogelnik, stand alongside those of nowadays recognized artists, such as painter Lotte Laserstein or the radically feminist artist VALIE EXPORT.