Female Painters of the Avant-Garde

Time for New Perspectives: The evening is dedicated to the female positions in the exhibition Avantgarde. Max Liebermann and Impressionism in Germany. The focus is on the women who played a decisive role in shaping modern art in Germany—yet received only a fraction of the visibility granted to their male contemporaries.

Maria Slavona, Emilie von Hallavanya, Dora Hitz, Sabine Lepsius, and Charlotte Berend-Corinth had already established themselves as artists in the conservative German Empire. Their work, networks and life paths tell the story of artistic independence, strategic alliances and structural obstacles, as well as the systematic erasure of women's contributions from public view. They represent countless women across disciplines whose achievements were rendered invisible and whose names have been forgotten.

The evening will be moderated by Julia Voss, an author, curator, historian of science, and journalist dedicated to making forgotten modernist women artists visible. She has played a pivotal role in the rediscovery of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint.

Short keynote presentations by:

• Anna Grosskopf is an art historian and Deputy Director of the Bröhan Museum in Berlin. Among other projects, she curated the exhibition “Look! Art and Design by Women 1880–1940” (2022), which for the first time focused specifically on the women artists in the museum’s collection.
• Rahel Schrohe is an art historian and curator based in Berlin. For the Liebermann Villa at Wannsee, she curated an exhibition on Dora Hitz (2024/25). Since September 2024, she has been working as an exhibitions officer at the Stiftung Brandenburger Tor.
• Daniel Zamani is the artistic director at the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden and the curator of the Liebermann exhibition. Previously, he served as curator and head of collections at the Museum Barberini and as a research associate at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. Strengthening the position of women is a recurring focus of his exhibitions—not only in the current Liebermann exhibition (2026), but also in exhibition projects such as Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity (2022) and The Shape of Freedom: International Abstraction after 1945 (2022).

After the keynote presentations, the participants and Julia Voss will discuss why women are often absent from the art canon and how the art world can help ensure equal visibility for female positions.