Page 6 - The 70s - ABC of the material

for her drawings at the Stedelijk, she that if the museum keeps showing her
entered frankly into her role as an work as applied art she prefers her work
artist. It is something “that is of vital not to be shown at all by the museum.
importance to yourself and that in the
first place you yourself have to accept The discussion is indicative for the
for 100%”. At the same time she takes critical attitude against ingrained views.
note of the fact that as an artist and as a At the same time she conceived many
woman and mother and art teacher she unique works in the seventies that about
has to combine and balance many roles. fifty years later have lost none of their
original freshness. Focussing on the
When we look back from the present visual qualities of the material opened
to these seventies then it emerges to her, as she herself says, “ a world
that Maria van Elk was one of the few of freedom, timelessness and new
female artist who was involved in this possibilities”.
type of fundamental investigation. Most
minimalistic and fundamental artist, that Leontine Coelewij
were showing their work in galleries and September 2022
museums, were men. Abstract working
female artist were overlooked, neglected.
Also by female critics and art historians,
who often preferred to write about work
with a clear female or feministic theme.
Around 1975 the angle of the “female
gaze” and the female subjectivity
was represented everywhere in visual
art. In recent years that has changed
among other things by the reevaluation
of “women in abstraction” as the
eponymous retrospective exhibition of
abstract art by female artist in 2021 in
Centre Pompidou shows. Gradually also
other histories are written.

In the seventies Maria van Elk was
confronted with the old fashioned
hierarchical distinction between the
“free” visual art as compared to applied
art. Her work was classified as textile
art and considered as feminine and
inferior to “autonomous” art, especially
by the director of the Stedelijk Museum
Edy de Wilde. In 1975 she has with
him a discussion in the magazine
Museumjournaal in which she set forth
why her work can not be understood
as applied art, since it does not serve a
practical purpose. In her letter she states

2