Contrary to what art-world activists Guerrilla Girls tell you, a lady doesn’t necessarily need to take off her clothes to get into the Met’s art collection.
A new tour, “Nasty Women of the Metropolitan,” highlights several millennia of feisty femmes, from Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt in 15th century BC, to surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, who ran away from a mental institution, started Mexico’s Women’s Liberation Movement and once said of her tumultuous life, “I didn’t have the time to be anyone’s muse.”
“The truth is there are lots of women at the Met,” says “Nasty” guide Andrew Lear, a classics scholar who also conducts the salacious “Shady Ladies” and “Gay Secrets” tours at the museum. “From artists to subjects to donors — one of its big donors was a suffragette!”
The two-hour walking tour starts in Ancient Egypt and weaves through the Amazonian warriors and empresses of Greece and Rome before heading to 18th-century France. The journey ends in the American wing, with John Singer Sargent’s late-19th-century portraits of rebellious socialites like Edith Minturn Stokes, whom he depicted hand on hip, in a bicycling outfit.
“She was supposed to be painted with her dog, and the dog was sick, so she brought her husband instead,” says Lear, adding that Stokes ran a sewing school for immigrant women and advocated for universal preschool long before Mayor de Blasio did. “She completely overpowers the portrait — and she’s looking right at you.”
Other highlights include a double portrait of 18th-century scientist Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze with her chemist husband, and Adelaide Labille-Guiard’s 1785 “Self-Portrait with Two Pupils,” which served as a rallying cry to let women into France’s Royal Academy of Art. (It worked.) Also empowering are Mary Cassatt’s impressionist paintings of mothers and children and Alice Neel’s psychologically probing naked portraits.
“With Cassatt and Neel, you see women being portrayed not as nudes or objects, but women,” says Lear.
And then there Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein, art patron and writer, unapologetic in her brown monk’s robes and imperious stare. “She donated her portrait to the Met in a bid to achieve immortality,” Lear says. “She would have been immortal anyway, but what a move!”
“Nasty Women of the Metropolitan Museum” will take place at April 1, 8, 14 and 22. Check ShadyLadiesTours.com for times. $59 ($49 for seniors, $35 for students and Met members).
