ABSTRACT
In terms of decoration, early twentieth-century international exhibitions appear, decades later, to have excessively ornate buildings and over-elaborate; congested displays but these forms of exuberant and luxurious display were part of audience expectations. This chapter focuses on two exhibitions held in Amsterdam, May to October 1913, in which the installations engaged with a politics of space which required diverse negotiations of sexual politics, artistic production and consumption: De Vrouw 1813–1913 and the first exhibition of De Onafhankelijken. Links between the constitutional and militant suffrage campaigns in Britain and the Netherlands were cemented in June 1908 with the openings of the Palace of Women’s Work at the Franco-British Exhibition in London and the third international Women’s Suffrage Conference in Amsterdam. The subject of the mural, the role of women in the modern state, condensed the themes of the exhibition – differences of class, historical conditions of work, health, women as family members, as mothers, and the importance of modern leisure activities.
