03/06/2026
Albertina Pride Month 2026
A guided tour that ask visitors to look at the exhibited work differently. The museum offers a new way of deconstructing selected artworks and viewing them outside heteronormative assumptions.
The Albertina was founded by Duke Albert and Maria Christina - "Mimi," Empress Maria Theresa's favorite daughter. But before she married Albert, she was the muse of another woman. Her sister-in-law Isabella of Parma wrote her 200 letters confessing that she is madly in love with her. Mimi's letters were destroyed after her death. But she kept Isabella's - and later shared them with her husband Albert. So this love survived: incomplete, preserved by the person who outlived it.
Picasso: Françoise Gilot was 21, Picasso 61. He wanted her perpetually pregnant. In Life with Picasso, Gilot would later describe his logic: constant pregnancy meant constant weakness, constant dependence. In Woman in a Green Hat, her body becomes a womb, a fertile object. But Françoise did what the others didn't: she left him in 1953.
The tour also led us to the "Care Matters" exhibition - care work, housework, unpaid labour, the art history of women since the 1970s. And it asks the same question: who is supposed to perform which roles, and why do we take that as natural?
For me, it broke open artwork I'd already dismissed - suddenly there was something new to see in the familiar. Refreshing!
