"In front of everyone". Reading and talk with Martina Clavadetscher

Wednesday, 7. Dezember 2022, 18.15 pm–19.45 pm, Kunstmuseum Basel | Hauptbau, Foyer 1st floor

"Without these women, there would be no wondering, no looking - even more, without these women, art history as we know it today would be unthinkable." In her book "Before Everyone's Eyes," Martina Clavadetscher gives voice to the Girl with the Pearl Earring, the Lady with the Ermine, and 17 other women in world-famous paintings by da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Munch, showing that they were much more than their bodies, their looks, and their clothes. Based on extensive research in correspondence, diaries and specialist literature, Martina Clavadetscher reconstructs the lives of these women, giving them back their names and their history. And she leads us "with great narrative power before our eyes the coarse and the subtle mechanisms of misogyny and opposes them just as impressively with the most diverse forms of rebellion." (REPUBLIK) The book got its start at the Kunstmuseum Basel, with a text on Egon Schiele's copperplate engraving "Auf dem Rücken liegende Frau." Martina Clavadetscher was also one of the 25 authors who contributed a new text to the cooperation project "Theater der Bilder" (2019) of the Kunstmuseum Basel with the Theater Basel.





























Martina Clavadetscher (*1979 in Zug) is a writer and playwright. She has worked for various German-language theaters, won the Essen Authors' Prize, and was nominated for the Heidelberg Stückemarkt. For her novel "The Invention of Disobedience" she received the Swiss Book Prize in 2021.

Esther Schneider headed the literary editorial department of Swiss Radio SRF and is now an independent podcaster, cultural journalist and presenter.