Proceedings of the Art Museum of Estonia 4 [9]. A Woman Artist and Her Time

The current special edition of the Proceedings of the Art Museum of Estonia is devoted to women’s art history in Estonia and is, thematically, an outgrowth and a continuation of the series of exhibitions Estonia’s First Female Artists, organised in the Adamson-Eric Museum from 1995 onward, and the series of seminars A Woman Artist and Her Time, first held in 2002. This is one of the long-lasting continuing projects of the Art Museum of Estonia, which aims to thoroughly research and explore the first generation of Estonian women artists, whose studies, professional choices and careers were begun in the early 20th century, as well as to present their work to the wider public and record their presence in the history of Estonian art. While studying this marginalised, and sometimes partly hidden, area of art history, the curators and organisers of the series of exhibitions and seminars dedicated to women’s art have explored the self-realisation of the modern, emancipated woman, or the “new woman”, in the late 19th and beginning decades of the 20th century and the opportunities of female artists to launch their professional careers in a society with strong gender stereotyping.