Phantom Thread I – In the Wake of Artists’ Wives: Júlia Vajda

Women, wives, muses. Our new series of concise displays, which are to accompany the exhibition that selects from the Ferenczy Museum Centre’s collection, presents women who supported their partners in a variety of ways: running the household, taking salaried employment or odd jobs, looking after the children, providing emotional security, posing as models, acting as intellectual partners to discuss theoretical problems with, and promoting their husbands’ careers—while often pushing their own artistic ambitions into the background or giving up on them altogether. Phantom Thread presents the lives of women whose influence on the history of art has remained invisible: while they were instrumental in the birth of many an extraordinary artwork, their unwavering support has remained largely unacknowledged—save for the odd portrait.
We first take a look at Júlia Vajda, the different scenes of her life of struggle.