Overlooked female modernist artist Marthe Donas dazzles in Belgium
A new exhibition at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp brings attention to Belgian modernist Marthe Donas, an artist whose contributions to early 20th-century abstraction were long overshadowed by her male contemporaries. Titled “Donas, Archipenko & La Section d’Or: Enchanting Modernism“, the exhibition runs from October 4th 2025 to January 11th 2026 and presents 55 works that trace Donas’s artistic evolution and situate her within the wider European avant-garde.
Working under the gender-neutral pseudonym “Tour Donas” Marthe Donas achieved early recognition in the years following the First World War. Critics at the time praised the “charm” and “kind of gentle timidity that seems to reveal a feminine sensitivity” of her paintings, unaware that the artist was a woman navigating the male-dominated circles of Cubism and abstraction.
Donas’s biography reveals both persistence and disruption. After early studies cut short by family disapproval, she resumed her artistic training following a serious accident and the upheavals of World War I. Her encounters with Archipenko in Nice in 1917 marked a turning point; their professional and personal relationship led to a period of intense creativity and mutual influence. Curator Adriaan Gonnissen and art Co-Curator Peter Pauwels emphasize Donas’s independent contributions during this period, arguing that “she wasn’t ‘a young pupil’ when she met Archipenko, but a 32-year-old artist in her own right”.
Despite early acclaim, Donas withdrew from public artistic life by the late 1920s after becoming a mother unexpectedly at the age of 45. Only recently has her work been reexamined within the broader narrative of modernism. The exhibition forms part of a wider curatorial effort to recover the histories of overlooked women artists.
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Redaktion (16. Oktober 2025). TIPP! Literature. Women in the Art Market. Abgerufen am 20. Januar 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/14yv2